The Circle

pushed his face into the room and held the door.
    “You sure?” he said.
    “I invited you,” Mae said.
    He slipped in and closed the door, as if narrowly escaping from a pursuer in the hallway.
     He looked around the room. “Like what you’ve done with the place.”
    Mae laughed.
    “Let’s go to mine instead,” he said.
    She thought of protesting but wanted to see what his room looked like. All the dorm
     rooms varied in subtle ways, and now, because they’d become so popular and practical
     that many Circlers were livingin them more or less permanently, they could be customized by their occupants. When
     they arrived, she saw that his room was a mirror of her own, though with a few Francis
     touches, most notably a papier-mâché mask he’d made as a child. Yellow and with enormous
     bespectacled eyes, it looked out from over the bed. He saw her staring at it.
    “What?” he said.
    “That’s odd, don’t you think? A mask over the bed?”
    “I don’t see it when I sleep,” he said. “You want something to drink?” He looked in
     the fridge, finding juices and a new kind of sake in a round glass container tinted
     pink.
    “That looks good,” she said. “I don’t have that in my room. Mine’s in a more standard
     bottle. Maybe a different brand.”
    Francis mixed drinks for them both, overfilling each glass.
    “I have a few shots every night,” he said. “It’s the only way to slow my head down
     so I can crash. You have that problem?”
    “It takes me an hour to get to sleep,” Mae said.
    “Well,” Francis said, “this reduces that come-down from an hour to fifteen minutes.”
    He handed her the glass. Mae looked into it, thinking it very sad at first, the sake
     every night, then knew she would try it herself, tomorrow.
    He was looking at something between her stomach and her elbow.
    “What?”
    “I can never get over your waist,” he said.
    “Excuse me?” Mae said, thinking it was not worth it, it couldn’t be worth it, to be
     with this man who said things like this.
    “No, no!” he said, “I mean it’s so extraordinary. The line of it, how it bends in
     like some kind of bow.”
    And then his hands were tracing the contour of her waist, drawing a long C in the
     air. “I love that you have hips and shoulders. And with that waist.” He smiled, staring
     straight into Mae, as if he had no idea of the strange directness of what he’d said,
     or didn’t care.
    “I guess thank you,” she said.
    “That’s really a compliment,” he said. “It’s like these curves were created for someone
     to put their hands there.” He mimed the resting of his own palms upon her waist.
    She stood, took a sip of her drink, and wondered if she should flee. But it was a
     compliment. He’d given her an inappropriate, clumsy, but very direct compliment that
     she knew she would never forget and that had already set her heart to a new and erratic
     pounding.
    “You want to watch something?” Francis asked.
    Mae shrugged, still struck dumb.
    Francis scrolled through the options. They had access to virtually every movie and
     television show extant, and spent five minutes noting different things they could
     see, then thinking of something else that was like it but better.
    “Have you heard this new stuff by Hans Willis?” Francis asked.
    Mae had decided to stay, and had decided that she felt good about herself around Francis.
     That she had power here, and she liked that power. “No. Who’s he?”
    “He’s one of the musicians-in-residence? He recorded a whole concert last week.”
    “Is it out?”
    “No, but if it gets good ratings from Circlers they might try to release it. Let me
     see if I can find it.”
    He played it, a delicate piano piece, sounding like the beginning of rain. Mae got
     up to turn off the lights, allowing the grey luminescence of the monitor to remain,
     casting Francis in a ghostly light.
    She noticed a thick leathery book and picked it up. “What’s this? I don’t have one
     of these in my room.”
    “Oh that’s mine. It’s an album. Just pictures.”
    “Like family pictures?” Mae asked, and then remembered his complicated history. “Sorry.
     I know that’s probably not the best way to put it.”
    “It’s okay,” he said. “They’re sort of family pictures. My siblings are in some of
     them. But they’re mostly just me and the foster families. You want to look?”
    “You keep it here at the Circle?”
    He took it from Mae and sat on