11.6

The funny part of rooming with Rosalyn is that she has fits of clean. Most of the time, her side of the room is trashed (she is spread mostly everywhere [and not just clothing, sometimes it's actual garbage. She ate the remains of three pizzas one day (she must have gotten them from a friend) and left the boxes on the ground] and I try to contain it to one side [not mine]). Every once in a while, though, the piles mysteriously disappear like a magical cleaning genie visited the room and granted Ros one wish: a floor to walk on. The fits of clean mysteriously coincided with the sporadic dates with Enrique. They weren't every week, so I couldn't guarantee any kind of regularity, but once in a while he would call and the room would be clean when I got back after lunch and I would know to text before I came back to the room. If I got a reply, it was an all-clear. No reply meant no entry.
I started carrying a heavy coat on days when the room was clean. I stuffed big knit mittens down in the pockets and when I felt the urge strike me, I wandered outside into the night.

It never snowed. It was supremely annoying. I wanted it to snow if it was going to be cold, because cold without snow is like brainfreeze without ice cream, like a plot without an ending, like nausea without a theme park. Totally not worth it. Since it never snowed, I had no need of snow boots. It was a big disappointment.
I did wander around the campus and learn it at night, however. That was a bonus. I didn't know before that the big clock on the ad building was illuminated from within. It appeared to be a tremendously old lightbulb, the kind that have a big swirly shape on the top because they were blown, not molded, because they were so tremendously old. I could not see the bulb, of course, but I assumed from the acid paper yellow of the light that it must have been incandescent. Every other bulb on campus was energy efficient halogen white. Impersonal. Cosmetic. Clean. Hateful. But that one bulb, way up high on the edifice of the grand old building--now that was home. It was safe. It was warm. If Ros didn't respond to my desperation texts, I sat and stared at that warmth so far away and imagined what it must be like to live in the clock (with the ticking regularity and the measurable pace of time, nothing out of place, nothing unexpected, ten, then eleven, every night as it had been and as it would be and nothing to displace you out of your home with an impromptu makeout session with a boy who certainly wasn't nobody and a girl who exploded too much for her own good and I just don't know why life can't follow the pattern I gave it when I was smaller and when life was easier to control) in the tower of the ad building.

And then I got the text and everything was alright and I could go home again to Ros and we could fall asleep on my bed for no reason other than it was warmer and it reminded us of high school.
"Ros?"
"Cath."
"Have you seen the clock tower in the ad building?"
"Cath, you know I don't like analog clocks."
"Oh, yeah. Good night."
Good night, me. Good night us. Again and again with the disquieting irregularity of broken faucet.