“Well, you were wrong. And I have looked for you, a few times. But after you didn’t answer my messages during the summer, and then during the school year you never seemed to be where I could find you. I got the feeling you just didn’t want to be bothered. At least, not by me.”
Will found that he was smiling for the first time since they’d taken their seats on the bench. “So I’m not the only one who doesn’t always understand other people.”
“People are hard to understand if they don’t communicate,” she said. “But yes, apparently I misjudged you as well. Will you forgive me?”
“I think there’s going to have to be some mutual forgiving,” Will suggested.
“Maybe we should just start over from the beginning,” Felicia said. She offered her hand. “Hello, Cadet. I’m Felicia Mendoza, from El Salvador, Earth.”
“William T. Riker,” he said with a smile. “Valdez, Alaska, Earth.”
“Can we be friends, Cadet Riker?”
“I think I’d like that, Cadet Mendoza.” He felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders that had been there since the end of school last year. The awfulness of the summer had been compounded, he knew, by his confusion over Felicia’s feelings—or, as he understood now, his misjudgment of Felicia’s feelings. He still didn’t quite know what had happened, but he thought that it might be better just to let the details slip away, rather than dredging them up and having to undergo the discomfort of facing them specifically. For now, the softness of her hand in his, her warm smile and the light that danced in her brown eyes and the way a strand of her dark hair rested against her olive cheek, where it had escaped her ponytail, all conspired to make him believe that he had come out of a long tunnel into a glorious day.
When Felicia had dismissed him—and he’d been a little hurt by then, because, after all, who wouldn’t want to be the otherperson in that triangle, the one that Felicia sent somebody away in favor of?—Dennis had taken the opportunity to go back to his room and start searching for a soldier he could research. But his eyes kept glazing over as he tried to focus on his computer screen, his attention kept being drawn to the city beyond the window. The occasional shuttlecraft flashed by, lights blinking in the darkness, and the nighttime illumination of the city spoke of thousands of lives being lived out there.
Felicia was a beauty, there was no doubt of that. But it was to Will, not Felicia, that his thoughts kept wandering. William Riker had something, some quality, that Dennis couldn’t put his finger on.
It wasn’t just that Felicia obviously preferred Will to him, though they’d both known her for about the same length of time. Certainly Will was a handsome guy, and Dennis was a little surprised he didn’t have girlfriends all over the place. But what got to Dennis was that, although Will struggled, he always seemed to come out fine in the end. He had turned his grades around, and now seemed to be on course to finish this year near the top of their class. His other, nonacademic pursuits—athletics and extracurricular activities—were career builders that could take Will far in Starfleet. He was popular, and had made contacts among faculty, staff, and fellow students that would help him immensely in the years to come. He had never made it look effortless, but he made it look possible.
Dennis, on the other hand, felt as if he were drowning, like the water got deeper every day and he could barely see the sky above its surface anymore.
He had just turned back to the computer screen, intent now on finding someone he could study up on, of turning at least this one assignment into a success instead of adding it to the pile of work not-quite-done that threatened to swamp him and drown his career before it started, when there was a knock on his door. “Come in,” he called.
Estresor Fil opened his door and walked in. He waved her toward his couch, and she sat down, her feet no longer touching the floor when she eased her bottom all the way back into it. “Hello, Dennis,” she said as she made herself comfortable.
“Hi, Estresor Fil. What are you up to?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “Visiting,” she pointed out.
“Of course,” he said. “I meant ... never mind.” He was, in fact, a little surprised by her appearance. They were friends, certainly, but rarely saw one another outside their group.
“Am I disturbing your work?”
He sighed. “If I had been actually working, you might be. But so far, not.”
“You would let me know if I were, right?” she asked.
“Yes, Estresor Fil. Don’t worry about that. Is there some particular reason for your visit, or is it just a social call?”
She considered the question for a moment, causing Dennis to believe there was something more to it than a simple drop-in. Maybe she was uncomfortable talking about it, though. Which, given her ordinarily blunt nature, probably narrowed down the likely topics considerably.
“Social call,” she finally said. “Or possibly not ... I do, in fact, find myself in need of some assistance. Dennis, how much do you know about love and romance? Earth-style, I mean.”
Dennis had had a few casual girlfriends over the years, but hardly considered himself an expert on such things. And then there was the question of why she had come to himwith such a thing. Did Estresor Fil have a crush on him? He wasn’t quite sure how he would feel about that. Complimented, certainly, but she looked just a bit too much like a praying mantis for him to be able to return the compliment. “Not really that much, I guess. I mean, I know the basics, in principle, but when it comes to putting them into practice I’m as useless as the next guy. Why do you ask?”
“It’s just all so confusing to me. I try to figure these things out by myself when I can. And there’s an episode of Squirrely Squidthat is really quite helpful, I think.” Dennis wasn’t sure what a primitive holotoon series for children would really have to say about adult love and romance, but he knew Estresor Fil too well to point that out and he kept his doubts to himself. “But even with that, there are some things I just don’t understand.”
“Like what?” Dennis asked. He didn’t have high hopes, but he’d be helpful if he could.
Estresor Fil crossed her ankles and broke eye contact, another indicator that she was oddly uncomfortable. “How do you tell? If someone likes you, I mean?”
Dennis had struggled with that one his whole life. Who didn’t? After third or fourth grade when there was a lot of arm-punching going on—although at the time, he remembered, he had not correctly interpreted the punching either, he had been pretty much lost unless a girl actually came to him and more or less confessed her attraction. “I guess you just sort of have to know it. By the way they talk to you, the way they look at you. If they touch you a lot, you know, just casually. Or sometimes you have to come right out and ask them, I think. And always be prepared to get turned down.”
“That’s just so silly,” Estresor Fil said. “It’s so much easier for Zimonians. If we’re interested in someone, that way, we simply display ourselves. If they are interested in us, they will come over and say so. If not, they pretend they didn’t see the display and there’s no more discussion of it. But there is no ambiguity, no wondering or trying to guess.”
“By ‘display,’ you mean ... ?”
“Of reproductive organs,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. I don’t think that would go over well here,” Dennis warned her. “Especially at the Academy.”
“Oh, I know that,” Estresor Fil reassured him. “I wasn’t suggesting it, just pointing out that our way is vastly preferable to yours. When you leave it all up to guesswork, mind reading, and so on, I think you are just creating barriers to happiness. Particularly since there are so few genuine mind readers among you.”