Zoe was studying marketing. She could walk into a room where she knew nobody and leave with three phone numbers, two invitations, and a plan for next weekend. She wore brightly colored scarves even when everyone else had given up and dressed in gray winter coats. She was funny in a way that made you feel she'd noticed something ridiculous about the world and decided to share it with you before you missed it. I noticed her long before I had any reason to believe she'd notice me.
The printer incident happened shortly before finals. She had a presentation to deliver the next morning and the campus library printer had swallowed her file three times without producing a single page. I was there trying to finish a programming assignment when she asked the room, with the exhausted confidence of someone about to lose an argument with technology, whether anyone knew how to negotiate with a printer. I went over, cleared the stuck queue, and showed her how to export the file in a format the ancient machine could understand. She watched the first page slide out and gave me a look usually reserved for people who have performed a miracle.
"You just saved my grade," she said.
"It was mostly the printer's fault," I told her.
"Then you're the first person who's made me feel sorry for a printer. What's your name?"
"Alex."
"Alex, I owe you coffee. Don't argue. I can tell you're the type who'd argue about whether a cup of coffee counts as repayment."
She was right, which annoyed and impressed me at the same time. We got coffee the next afternoon in a place where the tables wobbled and the windows fogged so badly you couldn't see the street. What should have been twenty minutes became three hours. She told me she wanted to see Tokyo, Lisbon, New York, and the coast of California; I told her I'd be happy to visit any city where someone could explain how the public transportation system worked. She laughed at that, and then asked questions about my classes as though the answers mattered.
It took me a while to understand why I felt so comfortable around her. Zoe was everything I wasn't, at least on the surface. She took photographs of strange shop signs and collected stories from strangers, while I kept a running list of the software problems I meant to solve before graduation. Yet when she listened, she listened completely. If I talked about something difficult at work, she didn't look at her phone or make fun of my seriousness. She'd ask what the problem meant to the person affected, which was often a question I hadn't considered.
I fell for her gradually and then, all at once. We took walks through campus after the library closed, bought cheap slices of pizza when we were too broke for dates, and argued affectionately about whose hometown had the worse winter weather. She would borrow my oversized sweatshirt and pretend not to