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"I can't believe you didn't get Hunan wontons."
"Didn't know if you'd like them. They're an acquired taste. I wanted to play it safe."
"By spreading a picnic on the floor in front of my office door, and throwing away whatever food got cold before I came out? How safe can you get?"
"Let's see," said Wiggin. "Other lies. Oh, my name isn't Wiggin, it's Wieczorek. And I have way more than one sib."
"Valedictorian?" she said.
"I would have been, except I persuaded the administration to skip over me."
"Why is that?"
"Don't want any pictures. Don't want any
resentment from other students."
"Ah, a recluse. Well, that explains everything."
"It doesn't explain why you were crying in your office," said the Wiggin boy.
She reached into her mouth and took out the last bite of spring roll, which she had only just put in. "Sorry I can't return any of the other used food," she said. "But you can't buy my personal life for the price of a few takeout items." She set the morsel of saliva-covered spring roll on her napkin.
"You think I didn't notice what they did to your project?" asked the Wiggin boy. "Firing you from it when it's your own idea. I'd've cried, too."
"I'm not fired," she said.
"Scuzi, bella dona, but the records don't lie."
"That's the most ridiculous..." Then she realized that he was grinning.
"Ha ha," she said.
"I don't want to buy your personal life," said the Wiggin boy. "I want to learn everything you know about Human Community."
"Then come to class. And next time bring the treats there, to share."
"The treats," said the Wiggin boy, "aren't for sharing. They're for you."
"Why? What do you want from me?"
"I want to be the one who, when I telephone you, I never make you cry."
"At the moment," she said, "you're only making me want to scream."
"That will pass," said the Wiggin boy. "Oh, and another lie is my age. I'm really two years older than the records say. They started me in American schools late, because I had to learn English and...there were certain complications about a contract that they asserted I had no intention of fulfilling. But after they gave up, they changed my age so nobody would see how chronologically misplaced I was.
"They?"
"The Hegemony," said the Wiggin boy.
Only he wasn't a mere boy, she supposed. A man. John Paul Wiggin. It was wrenching to start thinking of him with a name. Unprofessional. Perilous. "You actually got the Hegemony to give up?"
"I don't know that they gave up completely. I think they merely changed goals."
"All right, now I'm actually curious."
"Instead of being irritated and hungry?"
