Love is painfully sweet

Everyone on campus talked about the Rooftop. Seniors mentioned it the way people mention a restaurant they love and refuse to give directions to. A coursemate of mine swore he had passed his hardest paper because of one evening up there. Another said the wind alone cleared your head better than any amount of coffee. For two years I heard all this and never went. My hostel had a reading room, I told myself, and the library had desks, and I was not the kind of person who climbed to the top of a building to study. Then came the Tuesday of the test. It was a course I had been avoiding all semester, the kind with a lecturer who set questions nobody could guess. The test was at eight the next morning. My hostel was loud that evening, with someone's speaker thumping through the wall, an argument over a stolen charger in the corridor, and the smell of fried onions drifting up from the kitchen. The library was shut for a power cut. I stood in the corridor with my notes pressed against my chest and thought, *fine*. The stairs to the Rooftop were narrow and smelled of old paint. Four flights, then a metal door with a handle gone dull from years of hands. It stuck. I leaned my shoulder into it and it gave all at once, and the evening poured in: wind, a wide orange sky, and the whole school laid out below. I could see the football field, the lecture halls with their rusted roofs, the line of keke riders waiting at the gate, and the road snaking off toward town. The noise of the campus came up thin and far away, like a radio in another room. I took two steps onto the roof and stopped. She was sitting near the water tank, with her back against its concrete base and a book open on her knees. A pale green scarf had slipped halfway off her hair and she had not bothered to fix it. She wasn't turning pages. She was looking at one spot, and her lips were moving very slightly, as though she were repeating something to herself. I should have turned and gone back down. I had come for quiet, and she had it already. Instead I walked to a spot a few metres off, sat down on the warm concrete, and opened my notes. I read the first line. I read it again. Then a third time, because it still had not entered my head, and then a fourth. The wind flipped my page and I flipped it back. I looked at her. "Just a glance", I told myself. Then I looked again. She had a small crease between her eyebrows when she concentrated, and she tucked a loose strand behind her ear every time the wind pulled it free, a quick, practiced motion, as if she had done it a thousand times. Once she shut her eyes and tilted her head back against the tank, and I forgot that I was holding a pen. I told myself I would give it five more minutes and then study. Five minutes became ten. Ten became most of an hour. Somewhere in that hour I stopped pretending to read my notes and simply read her instead, the way you read something you want to remember word for word. The test I had come to prepare for slid out of my head. If this was some other kind of test, one that measured courage, I was failing it as well. I did not have a single sentence ready. More than anything, I kept wishing she would look up. Just once. I wanted our eyes to meet for one second, enough for her to know somebody else was on the roof. But she never lifted her head. Her gaze stayed on her page, or on the sky, or inside her own head, wherever it was she went. *Go and say hi,* I told myself. *Say hi and ask what she's reading. People do that every day.* My legs did not move. My mouth stayed shut. I kept rehearsing lines (*Excuse me, is this seat taken?* when there were a hundred empty spots; *Sorry, do you know what time it is?* when my phone was in my hand) and throwing them out one after another because every one of them sounded false. The sun sank lower. The sky went from orange to a deep rust, and the lights on campus began to flicker on one by one. Down below, the drummers were practising early for the carnival, and the beat rose up thinly, steady as a heartbeat. She shut her book. My stomach dropped. She slid it into her bag, zipped it, pulled her scarf back over her hair, and stood up. I pretended to study my notes. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as she crossed the roof, past me, close enough that I smelled something faint and sweet, like shea butter and some Oud perfume. She didn't look at me. She reached the stairwell and set her hand on the door handle. Then she stopped and turned her head. Whether she looked at me, or at the sky behind me, I could not tell. It lasted maybe two seconds. Her face was in shadow and the light had gone strange. Then the heavy door swung shut behind her with a long, hollow clang that I felt in my teeth. I stayed there on the Rooftop long after she had gone, until the sky was dark and my notebook was a blur. I had not learned one thing for the test. I did not know what department she belonged to, what year she was in, or what she was reading. I did not even know her name. All I knew was that I would be back tomorrow.