The Summer I Left novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Quiet Hours

Nate's first Thursday in Portland, the dorm floor was loud.

Somebody had a speaker.

Somebody else was playing a different song on a different speaker.

Every door on the floor was open, and the noise bounced off the cinderblock walls.

Nate stood in the doorway of our room with his headphones on and his palms flat against the frame.

"I can do this," he said. "I read about noise tolerance."

"You don't have to do it in the hall," I said.

"I would like to."

Eddie got up off his bed.

He was holding a roll of masking tape and a marker.

He had the look he'd had the night he made chili for forty people.

"Give me five minutes," he said.

He went out into the noise.

I heard him knock on a door, then another. I heard him say, "Hi, it's Eddie, from 214, I have a thing."

I heard someone laugh.

Then the speakers died, one at a time, until the hall was so quiet I could hear the vending machine.

Eddie came back in.

"Sign goes on the door," he said, and held up a piece of cardboard.

It had eleven signatures along the bottom, in eleven different colors of marker.

"The whole hall signed it," he said. "I told them it was a petition for hockey."

It said, in careful marker: *NATE LIVES HERE. QUIET HOURS: ALWAYS, EXCEPT FOR HOCKEY.*

"Why hockey?" I said.

"Because it's the right thing to say about hockey."

Nate took off his headphones.

He read the sign twice, which was how he read everything.

"I do not understand the hockey exception," he said.

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