Free First Meetings by Orson Scott Card Page A

your family as devoted to you as we might have been if we had actually known you. And see? I don’t want this conversation, we’ve been through it all before, and when I hang up on you, which I’m about to do, please don’t keep calling me back and leaving pathetic messages on my desk. And yes, I love you and I’m really fine about this so it’s over, period, good-bye.”
    She hung up.
    Only then was she able to cry.
    Tears of frustration, that’s all they were. Nothing. She needed the release. It wouldn’t even matter if other people knew she was crying—as long as her research was dispassionate, she didn’t have to live that way.
    When she stopped crying she laid her head down on her arms on the desk and maybe she even dozed for a while. Must have done. It was late afternoon. She was hungry and she needed to pee. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast and she always got lightheaded about four if she skipped lunch.
    The student records were still on her desk. She wiped them and got up and straightened her sweaty clothing andthought, It really is too warm for a sweater, especially a sloppy thick bulky one like this. But she didn’t have a shirt on underneath so there was no solution for it, she’d just have to go home as a ball of sweat.
    If she ever went home during daylight hours she might have learned to dress in a way that would be adaptable to afternoon temperatures. But right now she had no interest at all in working late. Somebody else’s name would be on anything she did, right? Screw them all and the grants they rode in on.
    She opened the door…
    And there was the Wiggin boy, sitting with his back to the door, laying out plastic silverware on paper napkins. The smell of hot food nearly made her step back into the office.
    He looked up at her but did not smile. “Spring rolls from Hunan,” he said, “chicken satay from My Thai, salads from Garden Green, and if you want to wait a few more minutes, we’ve got stuffed mushrooms from Trompe L’Oeuf.”
    “All I want,” she said, “is to pee. I don’t want to do it on insane students camped at my door, so if you’d move to one side…”
    He moved.
    When she had washed up she thought of not going back to her office. The office door had locked behind her. She had her purse. She owed nothing to this boy.
    But curiosity got the better of her. She wasn’t going to eat any of the food, but she had to find out the answer to one question.
    “How did you know when I was coming out?” she demanded, as she stood over the picnic he had prepared.
    “I didn’t,” he said. “The pizza and the burritos hit the garbage half an hour ago and fifteen minutes ago, respectively.”
    “You mean you’ve been ordering food at intervals so that—”
    “So that whenever you came out, there’d be something hot and/or fresh.”
    “And/or?”
    He shrugged. “If you don’t like it, that’s fine. Of course, I’m on a budget because what I live on is whatever they pay me for custodial work in the physical sciences building, so this is half my week’s wages down the toilet if you don’t like it.”
    “You really are a liar,” she said. “I know what they pay part-time custodians and it would take you two weeks to pay for all this.”
    “So I guess pity won’t get you to sit down and eat with me.”
    “Yes it will,” she said. “But not pity for you.”
    “For whom, then?” he asked.
    “For myself, of course,” she said, sitting down. “I wouldn’t touch the mushrooms—I’m allergic to shiitake and Oeuf seems to think they’re the only true mushroom. And the satay is bound to be cold because they never serve it hot even in the restaurant.”
    He wafted a paper napkin over her crossed legs and handed her a knife and fork. “So do you want to know which part of my records are a lie?” he asked.
    “I don’t care,” she said, “and I didn’t look up your records.”
    He pointed to his own desk. “I long since installed myown monitoring software in