Robin and Marian knew each other only slightly as undergraduates. He was two years older than her, and they ran in different circles: she worked at the library and the writing center and edited the literary magazine; he was engrossed (athletically and socially) with the varsity cross country and track teams. No one was ever quite sure how and when he did his work, let alone how he managed to make dean's list every semester.
She had heard friends and professors talk about him here and there. To her, other than that ever-present hoodie, he was just another of those interchangeable, vaguely jockish older boys that stumble in and out of class in a haze of sweatpants and unearned self-assurance.
Then, one day, during the Later Plays of Shakespeare, they disagreed about how to interpret Ophelia's death, and everything changed.
Marian was vaguely aware, as they sniped back and forth at each other, of the ripples of amusement among her classmates at her expense. And yet she could not stop her voice and her ire from rising. Two rows in front of her, hood up as always, Robin would not look at her. He faced forward. He shouted his ripostes at the chalkboard. She wanted to jump out of her seat, push aside the desks, rip that stupid hood from his head, force him to look her in the face.
Finally, he made a mistake-a foolish error of citation of evidence, but it was enough to take down his argument-and after she had triumphantly pointed out the flaw, she snapped, "But perhaps you might not have missed that, if you would pull that ridiculous hood away from your eyes and look your evidence, and your interlocutor, in the face." She crossed her arms and sat back triumphantly in her chair.
Robin twisted around in his seat to look at her. He pulled down his hood. "You are right."
Marian raised an eyebrow. "About the hood or about Hamlet?"
He flashed her a grin. "Both, obviously." Then he winked and turned back around.
After that, his hood was always down during class. Marian stared at the swirl of hair at the top of his head and tried to disagree with him as often as possible. She became quite adept at arguing positions that she did not really hold. She told herself, it is a useful exercise in building intellectual flexibility. Obviously it had nothing to do with the way his forehead crinkled when she said something he was about to disagree with.
She took an extra late-night shift when the library was open 24 hours for finals week. She realized then how Robin got his work done: in all-night binges, fueled by 5-Hour Energy and that bottomless well of enthusiasm that seemed to fill the core of his being.
Robin wandered past the circulation desk at about 9:30 and started with surprise when he recognized her. He smiled at her and pushed down his hood.
"Writing your paper on the job, then?" He leaned over the desk, trying to look at her laptop screen.
She tipped the screen away. "The Shakespeare paper? It's due at 8AM."
"Yeah. So, how's it going?"
"I'm proofreading it. Since it's due at 8AM." She gave him a skeptical look. "You're pulling an all-nighter, aren't you?" Robin laughed. "Had you even started it before tonight?" she persisted. "Is that a good idea, Robin? I mean, I understand senioritis and all, but Dr. Edwards is a stickler-"
"Don't you worry about me, Marian," Robin interrupted, pulling his hood back over his head. "This is how I've always done it, and it's never backfired on me yet. I'm more creative under the gun." He winked and grinned and was gone.
At 11:15, he wandered by again, hood down, grin on, wanting to know if she had finished next semester's paper yet. She rolled her eyes at him.
At 12:20, he came to see if she happened to have a book that he needed. He lingered, asking about her paper and her thoughts on Caliban. She expected him to start a debate. He just nodded and looked at her.
"How's the paper coming?" she finally asked.
He shrugged. "It always gets done," he replied, and walked away from the desk.
At 1:30, he jogged through the lobby to meet his best friend Much, who had arrived with a thermos and an expression of sleepy annoyance on his face. She watched across the room as Robin bounced on the balls of his feet and clapped Much on the shoulder enthusiastically. Much looked less than mollified.
Robin trotted to her desk, grabbed her empty mug, and filled it up with steaming, and by the smell of it, strong coffee. "To keep you going," he said. "Can't talk, gotta keep at it."
She sipped and wondered if he did this favor for all the late-night clerks.
At 2:45, she circled the basement doing the floor-check prior to the end of her shift. Her mind was muzzy with sleep-deprivation, edged with the fluttery jitters of too much caffeine. She turned a corner and there was Robin-hunkered down in a small carrel, surrounded by a messy mound of books and drafts empty paper cups, chewing nervously on this thumb. His normally boundless energy seemed bounded to his left foot, which tapped rapidly on the carpet.
Marian walked up behind him. She pulled off his hood and asked softly, "Stuck?"
Robin twisted to look at her, then scowled and turned back to his screen. "Not stuck. Just-debating." He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. "You going home, then?"
"I was." She hesitated. "Sometimes … it helps to have the debate with someone else. Makes your argument sharper."
He gestured impatiently to the stacks of books around him. "I have plenty of sources."
"I meant with me." She leaned against the desk, tilted her head to look at his face. "I'm pretty good at telling you all the ways that you are wrong."
He tipped his chair back on two legs and looked her up and down thoughtfully. "All right, then," he finally said, putting his hands behind his head. "Bring it on."
She sat on the floor next to his desk until 7:53 AM, needling him with counterarguments and editing pages as he drafted more.
"I've just gotta run this over to Dr. Edwards's box before 8," he said as he stuffed his computer and books into his bag. "If you wait here, I'll come back and buy you breakfast?"
"It's 7:55. Are you going to make it?"
"Track star, remember?" Robin grinned cockily and threw out his hands.
Marian smiled and shook her head. "I need sleep more than food."
"Raincheck, then," Robin replied, then disappeared into the stacks.
It wasn't until she drifted out of the front doors of the library five minutes later, blinking in the sharp morning sunlight, that she realized she had forgotten to turn in her own paper.
They never did get that raincheck before Robin graduated and left to teach English in Korea for a year. Marian laughed off the incident to her friends: how lucky she was, to escape breakfast with The Hoodie.
She always wrote her papers at that carrel in the basement.
When she went to grad school two years later, Robin was just starting his second year in the program. He was assigned to be her peer mentor, and the old pattern re-established itself: they bickered and debated in class (and at parties and over coffee); they nitpicked and edited and praised each other's work.
But when Robin showed up at Marian's apartment late one night during finals to borrow a book, the evening didn't end with a raincheck.