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ROTC boy makes a sport out of jumping through traffic and not getting killed. It's a game called traffic dodging, he tells me, and he's been playing it since high school. A week before, I would've thought him an imbecile; now I find him exhilarating. Watching him so close to the cars, them honking, I decide he's a hero. When he comes back to the sidewalk, where I'm waiting, he's panting heavily and smiling with satisfaction. I let him hold me for a minute. Then I let him take me home with him in a cab. Cruising up the FDR, we chew Bazooka bubble gum and read each other our fortunes.

    Back at his campus-housing apartment, most of the couch cushions are off and nowhere to be seen. The plant in the corner has been dead so long I can't make out what it once was. On the table, next to the DVD of Slapshot , is a brown leather pouch with a drawstring, and a cluster of marbles. When I try to pick up a marble—a green one with white swirls—I find it's glued to the table.

    "Ha-ha," he says. "Sucker."

    I pick up the pouch and dump out its contents—what look like white stones with strange engravings on them.

    "What are these?" I ask, stroking a stone the size of a domino. "Runes," he says. "They're Norse. They're magical."

    The red light of the answering machine blinks. He throws a sweatshirt over the machine. A black refrigerator stands and hums in the middle of the living room. Inside, on each shelf, beer bottles stand like bowling pins. He offers me one.

    "So what'd you recite?" he asks.

    "Philip Larkin, some Frost. I don't know." "What about Dante? You didn't recite Dante?"
    "No." I sit down on the sole cushion on the couch, holding one of the runes in my left hand and the bottle in my right.

    "Dante's the fucking king," he says. "Yeah," I say.
    I hear an ambulance siren in the distance.

    And then he does it: he stands on a plastic-covered card-table chair and belts out the first few lines of the Inferno .

    I clap to stop him and get him down from the chair. He's too big a guy to be standing on a chair like that.

    "You know the girl I wrote about in that story?" he says. "Yeah," I say.
    Twice he came to my drop-in sessions at the Learning Center for help with his writing. I had him pegged as a thick-necked jock who I'd help distinguish between "it's" and "its," between colons and semicolons. But after he showed me a story he'd written, a story I had to verify he'd written, I told the ROTC boy he didn't need any tutoring, none that I could provide. Besides, I was being paid by the university to help undergrads with art history papers.

    "You know, the girl with the lips and the skin?" he says.

    "Yeah," I say, recalling the love interest in the story. "I remember." "That was you."
    He burps. Then we go into his bedroom.

    I take off my sweater. I'm wearing a camisole underneath.

    "Hey," he says. "Why didn't you just wear that when it was so hot in there tonight?"

    "Because I can't wear just this." I look down at what I'm wearing. The straps are so long, the top barely covers my nipples. "I can see down my own shirt."

    He's so tall that his bed is extra long—"You have to get extra-long sheets to fit the mattress," he tells me—and I'm almost scared to get into it. I'm afraid of what I might find. And sure enough, there are rough areas where liquid has dried.

    "This is disgusting," I say.

    He takes a retainer out of his mouth. It has two fake teeth on it.

    "From hockey," he says, and drops it on the floor. Then he kisses me. He doesn't try much else, and for this I like him. For this and for Dante and for the fact that he will kill a man for me, I like this ridiculous tooth-missing brother of six who has stains on his extra-long sheets that I can feel with my bare feet.

    He puts his hand on my stomach and I resist the impulse to suck in. We talk about the woman's belly. "It was the fucking coolest, most womanly thing in the world," he says.

    I wish I had a bigger belly.

    When I get home I find a note from my