He shook his head, throwing me an easy smile. “Not a thing. I just remembered the name when I saw you at the Krampuslauf. We don’t have names, not like you do. Isidore and Griselda have been called many things before and will be called many things again. Names, they just don’t stick to us. But I like Joachim, and I knew you liked it as well.”
I tried to imagine a name sliding off of me, as though not quite attached. It felt wrong, like losing one’s shadow. I’d always been Hanna, and I couldn’t imagine not being her. “Why were you even at that thing?”
“The Krampuslauf?” He had a rich throaty laugh. “I wanted to be among people without any disguise. It’s a great prank, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” I took a swig from my cup. It tasted like someone had melted those cinnamon hearts into a thick syrup. I wondered who’d brought it. I wondered why I’d decided to drink it and then took another swig.
“I owe you a gift,” he said, into the silence. “Griselda brought something and Isidore brought something. Now it’s my turn. Only name your desire, and I will do my best to give you its pale approximation.”
That made me laugh. “I’m glad you came. And turning Roth into a donkey was way more than enough.”
“My people are often beseeched for favors, but seldom invited to share in feasts,” he spoke with a sly humor, as though he was talking formally half in jest—but only half. “Let me give you a gift for being made so much welcome.”
“Okay,” I said, relenting, looking back at the trailer. Faint music had started up inside, and I could see people moving around. They’d gotten a second wind. Soon someone would come outside and drag us back into the dregs of the after-after-party. Soon after that, I’d collapse in Grandma’s bed along with as many people as would fit. Soon it would be morning and for all I knew, Joachim and Griselda and Isidore would be gone at first light, like dew burned up in the sun. “Okay. What I want is to never forget there’s magic in the world. I get to keep my memories of tonight. I get to keep them always.”
His smile went crooked. Leaning over, he mashed his cigarette in Grandma’s heavy glass ashtray and pressed his lips to my forehead. He smelled like burning grass.
“I promise,” he whispered, mouth hot against my skin.
And, although I was, admittedly, not even a little bit sober, that was the moment I decided that since magic was real, since I conjured up Joachim by the sheer power of wanting him to happen, since I’d made this party out of two hundred bucks and sheer determination, then maybe I was wrong about the things I thought I couldn’t have, that weren’t for me. Maybe it was okay to imagine greater things. Maybe it was all for me, if I wanted it.
With dawn of the new year on the horizon, I resolved to exert my will on the world.
In the fifteen weeks since starting her freshman year at the University of Bumfuckville, Sophie had counted at least a dozen What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? moments. The first was when Sophie’s mother dropped her off at the dorms, which were covered in brick and ivy, just like the catalog promised. The rental car’s engine had not yet stopped ticking when Sophie understood that the idea of a college in the country, in the middle of the country—pastoral was how’d she’d been describing it to friends back in Brooklyn—wasn’t so much pastoral as it was foreign, as if she’d decided to enroll at the University of Beirut. Attendant sinking feelings in the stomach soon followed the revelation that really shouldn’t have been a revelation—it was so obvious. It had been obvious to all her friends, who were perplexed by her choice to go here, and to her mother, who wasn’t.
As she and her mother hauled her suitcases into the dorm, Sophie didn’t dare let her feelings show. It would only make her mother feel guilty. The University of Bumfuckville being pastoral wasn’t the real reason Sophie had enrolled.
The second What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? moment had come later that weekend when she’d met her roommates. Nice girls, pretty girls, welcoming girls, but that first night together—beer and pizza with crusts thick as the length of Sophie’s thumb—Sophie had had to say I’m kidding at least a half dozen times, a trend that continued well into the term until Sophie finally realized that sarcasm was like a separate dialect, one not universally understood. “You’re so big city,” one of the Kaitlynns (there were three on her hall) would say. Sophie was never quite sure if this was an insult.
Sophie had imagined she would be the mysterious one on campus—she was from the big city, after all—but it was the girls from the small Midwestern towns who had dreamed of going to college here all their lives, whose parents had gone here, who were inscrutable.
The guys were no better. Strapping and big-toothed specimens, with names like Kyle and Connor. At the start of term, one such guy had asked Sophie out on what she’d thought was a date, but what had turned out to be a group outing to play ultimate Frisbee. Sophie had been grouchy about it, but then to her surprise had gotten into the game, catching a scoring pass, talking smack against the other team. On the walk back to the dorms, Kyle/Connor had said, “You’re really competitive, aren’t you?” Sophie had no doubt as to whether that was an insult.
That was What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? moment number four—or maybe it was five. There’d been several with the boys here. She was starting to lose count. She’d long since lost hope.
* * *
She had no one to blame for tonight’s What the Hell Have You Done moment except herself. Finals had ended two days ago and most of the students had decamped for winter break. Flight prices back to New York halved if Sophie left the following week, so she had to stick around and twiddle thumbs. Earlier that day, Sophie had been selling her books back to the bookstore—getting a pittance in return, because two editions were about to be updated, the clerk explained, causing Sophie to get into an argument with the poor sap about why all textbooks should be digital and updated automatically, only it wasn’t really an argument because the clerk wanted nothing to do with the debate. On the way out she’d seen a flier for caroling on the quad that night. And for some reason, she’d thought: This seems like a good idea.
Sophie wondered when was she going to learn that lots of things seem like a good idea but a small amount of analysis might uncover that such seemingly good ideas are, in fact, intrinsically faulty. Take communism. Seemed like a good idea: Everyone shares, no one goes hungry. But maybe give it a good think and you’d come away understanding for it to work you’d need an inhuman capacity for cooperation, or a much more human capacity for totalitarianism. Anyways, she’d heard Luba describe breadlines and bugged phones and Siberian gulags enough to know which way that went.