Stavros noticed me sleeping under my coat in the winter of my fourth year. I had taken to napping in the hallway of the Arts Building before the arduous bus ride back to the apartment I regrettably rented with two girls from my program. We’d moved in together amidst promises we’d be stemless wine glass-toting besties with pampas grass vases in our living room — promises that dissolved as soon as we signed the lease. My roommates didn’t care about me unless I left dishes in the sink or walked through the kitchen in a sports bra while their skeevy boyfriends were over. They weren’t my besties. I wasn’t the type to have besties. I didn’t hate them, but I did hate how I wished I was them. Hated how I didn’t like drinking chardonnay in bandage dresses. Hated how I couldn’t force myself to smile wide and fake and learn to like the things they liked. Maybe I just wasn’t the type.

I was the type to sleep on salt-stained linoleum with my scarf piled around my face to keep out the light. I was the type to have my fingers trotted on by freshmen with noses stuck too deep into copies of Beowulf to realize they were hurting me. I grew used to the throb, the oops-sorry-didn’t-see-you-there prods, and the shoulder tap apologies.

That’s why I didn’t notice Stavros kicking at my foot until he cleared his throat. I thought it was another accident.

He mumbled an introduction. Sunlight glinted off the old protest button (“War is not good for children and other living things”) pinned to the collar of his janitor’s uniform. “You’re sleeping here?” he asked.

“Mmhm,” I said.

“Come to my office.”

“Don’t be a creep.” I crossed my arms across my chest.

He turned red. “Apologies,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything. Anything like that.”

I said sorry, sorry for assuming, but that I could never be too careful. I usually surmised men were creeps until they proved otherwise. I inspected Stavros’s face for illicit intent. He was so embarrassed to be accused of unpleasantries. Like he’d never imagined someone could think he wasn’t nice.

He said he meant I could sleep on his couch — really sleep there — and I had been stomped on enough times to say sure. He stuck his mop into its dedicated hinge and led me down the service elevator to the basement.

He unlocked the door to the janitor’s office and gestured me inside. I shut the door behind me. I walked the perimeter of the room, over the packed-down pink carpets. His desk was littered with Indian takeout boxes, blades for his beard trimmer, and back issues of Puppetry International. There was a puppet hanging on the door, with a flopping fabric body and wooden head. I poked at it, paranoid about cameras or fleas, but its skull was hollow. It looked like Stavros, with the same red nose and stringy black hair. Its mouth was open and toothless.

I laid on the couch and peeled its pleather. The boiler room was next door, and its engine rattled the wall. A low rumble, like humming. It swayed me sideways. Not like a ship, but a boat — a dinky algae-covered vessel with a stinking lifejacket and dock spiders nestling beneath the seats. Water dripped from a leak in the ceiling Stavros hadn’t fixed. The room smelled like dusty felt. I drifted to sleep.

+

I came to Stavros’s room every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. I’d knock and he’d whistle, letting me know I could push open the door. I waited in the hall as he dropped his dog-eared paperwork or half-sewn puppet legs, pulled on his overcoat, flicked on his white noise machine, and left me alone.

All day I bit my nails in anxious anticipation of my naps. The couch started to feel plush. The yellowed foam remembered my shape and closed softly around my arms. I set my phone alarm for forty-five minutes and slept in peace, dreaming of nothing. If I stayed for longer than an hour, Stavros would knock to wake me so I wouldn’t miss my bus.

I slugged away, awake but mourning. I came home refreshed and quiet. My roommates said I was brighter, less pallid and green. They’d never told me I was pale, only mentioning I seemed sickly when the onus wasn’t on them to fix it.

I tossed and turned in my real bed as my roommates cackled good-naturedly together in the kitchen. I opened my window to let the wind rush in, hoping to hear something drip or rumble, but I only heard dogs barking, yapping, yowling.

In the moments after Stavros and I intersected, I imagined what he did without me, when he was alone. I divined details from artifacts in his office. I learned his last name from paystubs. His age from a graduation photo. I spied his home address on an overdue credit card bill but flipped the envelope over before I could memorize it.

I offered to run his errands, but he refused. I did some anyway, buying new rags when I noticed his were dingy. Dusting his room because he didn’t. I started to leave little gifts, like Dunkin coffees and cucumber face masks, on his desk.

Stavros and I were symbiotic. A crocodile and a plover. He’d opened a warm cavern for me. I’d hopped in, tidied up, and trusted he would never bite down. I ached to know him and offer him care, like he offered me.

I asked Stavros if we were friends and he said yes. We were friends. Not besties — God, no — but better friends than I’d known for four academic years. I started to linger in his room longer, watching him paint or sew. He let me.

One day I decided to pry a conversation out of him as he worked on a marionette. I hovered over his shoulder. “You like puppets?” I asked stupidly. A Punch and Judy poster stared at me from the wall.

“Yes,” Stavros said, leaning closer to his desk.

“That’s cool,” I said. I bit dry skin off my lips. “You like to make puppets?”

“Yes.”

“Cool.” I watched for a minute as he dipped a brush into a small jar of blue paint. The bristles swirled in the pigment. “You’re good at it, Stavros.”

He dotted irises onto the unbuilt puppet’s blank face. “Thank you,” he said. He didn’t say my name.

I realized I’d never told it to him.

+

I assumed my classmates had caught on to my sleeping arrangement. They started whispering when I walked into lectures and clearing their throats too loud when I came near. I ignored them. I didn’t like to talk, anyways. Didn’t even want to. Especially not to them.

I came home later and later, walking laps around the block to delay my return. Home was nothing compared to Stavros’s room. Home was cold and so were my roommates. I didn’t bring them coffees. I didn’t bring them gifts. They wouldn’t have appreciated them anyway, I told myself. The walking tired me and made it easier to slip immediately back to sleep in my bed. I came in around nine one night, yawning, to find my roommates waiting in the living room.

They smiled and I smiled back, the skin around my mouth straining. They asked me to accompany them to the faculty wine and cheese, asking with such honey in their voices that I had to say yes.

I returned day after day to Stavros’s room. I didn’t care about the stares shot my way while I waited for the service elevator, but I did begin to worry Stavros was sick of me. Maybe he hadn’t meant I could sleep forever. Maybe he didn’t like me — maybe he pitied me, but pity trickles away when it’s too appreciated by its recipient. Stavros was of few words, so when he did speak, I picked each syllable apart. He started saying “hi,” instead of “hello,” which felt stonier.

I brought flowers for the porthole windowsill. I lit candles while I slept. I needed him to need me because I thought I needed him.

I considered shaving my head with his beard trimmer, to leave something behind in case he really did want me gone. I wanted to scatter strands behind his bookshelf and in the cracks in the walls where he’d never clean. Then I realized I couldn’t, I shouldn’t, but I did it anyway. I shaved just my sideburn, a bit no one would notice was missing. A bit of a forgettable, dozing no-one.

I told Stavros about the stupid wine and cheese I was being forced to attend. He nodded back and forth, considering something, then told me I should go. I listened.

The event was at a bar that had gum stuck under the tables and dead flies in the lightbulbs. I arrived with my roommates then sat alone in the corner, shoving hunks of complimentary brie into my mouth.

Eventually my roommates got drunk off wine they paid for in drink tickets and approached me. They were worried, they said. They’d heard I was hooking up with a janitor — with the campus janitor. They were worried I was getting torn up by the janitor’s teeth.

“All I do is take naps in his room,” I said. There was cheese stuck to my lips. I licked it off.

They didn’t believe me. “We want you to be happy. You’re never home.” Their eyes went wide and droopy. “We’re your friends,” they said. “Trust us. Talk to us.”

“No.” I stood up too fast and spilled red wine across my legs, stumbling away. I looked like I was bleeding. I took a taxi home and didn’t speak to them the next morning. I left extra plates in the sink to spite them, grumbling as I coated dishes with ketchup and sticky barbeque sauce.

They blabbed to the dean. They tweeted about it. They whispered to whisperers until all my classmates were convinced I was the unwilling live-in love slave of the arts faculty janitor. They were so worried. Gorging themselves on goopy, gooey sympathy that I didn’t need and didn’t want.

+

I went to see Stavros the next Monday with two extra-large, extra-sweet coffees in hand. I knocked on his door. He didn’t answer. I knocked again, hard enough that my knuckles turned crimson. Nothing. I called his name, and only then did I get my reply:

“No, no,” he said. “No more. It’s not allowed.”

I leaned against the door, pressing my forehead to its paint, trying not to cry. “Please.”

“I’m sorry.” He was barely audible. “You can’t sleep here anymore.”

“But I’m tired,” I said. I swallowed.

His voice echoed into the hall, louder. “I know. I’m sorry.” He was too nice.

So I left. I drank both coffees on the bus but fell asleep anyway, my head against the window and my brain rattling in my skull.

I went back to napping in the hall and jolted awake every time someone stepped on my hand, glaring at them, asking why they hadn’t noticed me. I tried to watch The Bachelor and Selling Sunset with my roommates, passing through episode after episode until I drifted off on the couch. When that happened, they’d pull a blanket around me and mute the TV, watching with captions on instead. They were nice. I couldn’t remember if they’d always been that way. I couldn’t remember much. I slept mostly-full nights in my own bed, swallowing Trazodone and melatonin and chamomile tea to lull myself to dreamland. I slept fine, sure.

But I never slept as well as I did in that basement, with the Stavros-shaped puppet on the door and the smell of takeout curry wafting and the white noise machine going “shh, shh, shh, shh, shh.”

+++