She was by then over thirty, but she passed for eighteen. Small frame, smooth skin, nervous round eyes. She followed the rhythms of each day and each season, drifted on rivers of people flowing to the Student Union Building at eleven in the morning, to the bus loop in the late afternoon. She walked Main Mall with her backpack looped over one shoulder. When classes hummed and the Mall was nearly empty, when she should have looked weird walking slow and alone with no umbrella, the men speeding by in Building Operations carts did not stop. No one ever asked who she was or what she wanted or why she was there.  

Her name was Olwen, and she had been a real student once, with two roommates who loathed each other and, just on the other side of Pacific Spirit Park, a mother who believed Olwen was possessed by Satan. She had enrolled at the University of British Columbia thinking she would study business, make a great deal of money, live in a big house in North Van, with big dogs to make sure no one bothered her. It was never her plan to haunt campus, and it hadn’t even really been a decision. It happened day by day, that she stopped going to class, didn’t graduate, didn’t leave. 

*

There was a new girl working the soup counter, nearly as blond as Olwen but with feathers in her hair and wearing elaborate beadwork. Every person in line seemed to be her best friend, maybe even her long-lost love, and she gazed into their eyes and said, “You have a beautiful day.” Students ahead of Olwen gushed back: “Oh hey you too!” “Oh gosh you’re so sweet!” But Olwen was not impressed. She was judgmental, had a lot of thoughts in her head, a lot of words for someone who almost never said anything out loud except “Soup” and “Thank you.” 

The girl handed her a thick stew of white beans, delicata squash, and quinoa in a painted clay bowl. “You have a beautiful day,” she said, and she even squeezed Olwen’s hand when she gave her change. Olwen couldn’t decide if she was a poseur or just a moron. 

The soup place was run by undergraduates, tucked into a far corner of the basement of the SUB and open for only six hours at a time and only on weekdays. The mismatched tables and chairs were nearly all occupied, and Olwen squeezed onto one end of a bench that looked out a window to the hall. The occupant of the other end of the bench frowned over an e-reader, shifted her body just a little, set a hand on the shoulder bag that took up most of the bench but couldn’t be bothered to move it to the floor. Pre-med, Olwen thought. From Penticton, not as committed to appropriation as today’s soup girl but can find an indigenous ancestor several generations back and thinks that makes her special. 

“Hola profe!” the soup girl cried, and a man in a dumb newsboy hat answered, “Hola flaca, como estai?” The girl said a bunch of things in flat and presumably terrible Spanish, and the newsie smiled and nodded. Indulgent and polite but still looking for his exit, you could see it in the fingers working the umbrella handle, in the gaze tilted slightly toward the door. The conversation lasted, probably, no more than thirty seconds, but enough time for the café to shift and a seat to open on the bench just opposite. 

He was oddly dressed, fleece vest with a running horse and Ecofamilia Turs embroidered above the heart, a T-shirt underneath it. Compensation, Olwen thought. Even on a cold day, a short man must always show off his muscular arms. Under the hat, he had cherubic curls, and his eyes were a deep, almost freakish blue. She didn’t mean to look at him so long. She didn’t mean for him to look back. 

*

She slept each night in the library, had been still officially a student when she started keeping a pillow and blanket on top of the stacks in the southeast corner of the third floor. Once upon a time, when her dad was alive and before she was possessed, there had been gymnastics lessons for kids in the Student Recreation Center. Olwen could still do backflips and occasionally still did, when the days were long and her heart light, when she strolled in thin summer foot traffic and for a moment wanted people to look, to laugh, to clap. 

She could scurry up the library shelves like a monkey, though in the beginning she’d stayed on the ground. One roommate used to infuriate the other in the evenings by playing “Freebird” on repeat at high volume; the other clamped hands over ears and screamed, “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” Even when they were quiet, their hate was an undertow, and Olwen didn’t want to drown. She often stayed in the library until closing, slipped back to the room well after dark, and if she was lucky the roommates had worn themselves out by then. In the library, she set up camp in places that were meant for passing through, between ends of shelves and big windows, and one clear afternoon she rested her chin on her knees and watched night fall. It came fast, and by five o’clock stars shone weakly over the Math Annex. By six thirty she was dreaming. Hours later she awoke to closing tones and dimming lights, but she ignored them, and all night no one bothered her and no one came.  

Years rolled in, rolled out. She was a ghost, invisible to cameras and motion sensors, and the library was hers as much as anybody’s. Her dad had been a facilities engineer, and in her mind he’d built it, all on his own and all for her. He had lifted her onto his shoulders, up to a tear in the paper covering a chain-link fence. She saw rebar and poured concrete, men working by floodlight, the earth blown open. She was four. Her dad was god and king. He placed the pipes and manifolds. He gave the water and the light. He called her his princess and drove to campus with her perched on his lap. She crawled over clean gray linoleum, around metal table legs and wheeled chairs, and laughing men gave her rubber bands to shoot and graph paper to scribble on. Her dad held her hand to walk through falling blossoms, pick apples, look at roses in the rain. 

Her childhood was good. It was sweet and it was safe and it was ordinary. The house where they had lived, where her mother probably lived still, was on 24^th and Dunbar. Olwen’s bedroom was on the second floor, with a slanted ceiling and a cushioned seat under a window facing east. Her dad called her room the dollhouse. The basement suite that they rented to graduate students, he called the madhouse, but that was all in fun. The students were always kind and quiet and helped in the vegetable garden. 

Olwen was six when she woke up to a dollhouse full of moonlight, and to her mother screaming. 

Her father had died of a heart attack. It was sudden and it was painless and it was no one’s fault, but Olwen felt the house shake as the graduate students pounded up the stairs. There was a threat, she thought, and it was inside. She climbed out her window and down the nearest tree. It was the first time the police brought her home. 

*

She was seventeen when she promised herself she would never again need anything from her mother. North of thirty, haunting campus, she liked to believe she didn’t need anything at all from anyone, though she knew that was a lie. She needed students to follow into buildings. She needed poorly guarded bags to steal toonies and granola bars from. She needed showers in the first-year residences and machines to wash her few clothes. Threadbare underwear, skinny jeans, chunky sweater. Shirts in jewel tones with three-quarter sleeves. Everything at least a decade out of style, but she did not need to look cool.  

She did not need a job, an apartment, a pet. She didn’t need a doctor. She didn’t need a degree or friends or distractions.  

She didn’t need a boyfriend. She was not supposed to lie awake, shifting to one side and the other and thinking of that man and his stupid hat and his warm hand. It was the girl’s hand that had touched her, not his, and she knew that, but she kept feeling his hand in hers whenever sleep crept close. She looked at him. He looked back, then down, almost shy, and a smile began at one corner of his mouth. She smiled—she woke up. 

*

Her mom came from Wales, her dad from Prince George, and until he died they were infrequent congregants at St. Philip’s Anglican Church. After he died, her mom started dragging her to worship every single Sunday. She hated it, tried to escape with tantrums and feigned illnesses. She went out the window, but her mom got it bolted shut and the tree chopped down. Her mom asked her if she wanted to burn in hell, and she was only eight when she said yes, maybe she did, and then it all got worse. 

Her mom loaded her into the Corolla for long drives to White Rock, where church was a big empty house, and services lasted all day. Writhing and weeping. Rending of garments. No snakes that Olwen ever saw, but there were exorcisms. She was ten the first time they tied her to a table and screamed over her and slapped her thighs with branches. 

She was twelve the first time she drank vodka. Thirteen the first time she had sex. Still thirteen when her mom grew afraid that feeding her meant feeding the Prince of Darkness. She would weep bitterly over roast chicken, look at Olwen as if Olwen had the answer, and say, “I just don’t know what to do. You still look like my child.” 

Olwen learned to live on little. She learned to steal.

* 

She saw him walking among the roses. She saw him through the window of Great Dane Coffee. He sipped something with a lot of whipped cream, and he was still wearing that hat. Her dad used to say there was something wrong with people who wore hats inside. There had to be something wrong with him, she told herself, maybe a lot of things, yet nearly every day she snuck into her old residence for a shower, because he seemed to be everywhere, because she looked at him and he looked back. You are looking too long, too hard, she told herself. You know better than this. He looks because you look, not because your clean hair goes wavy in the salt air. 

She found him on Lower Mall, smoking a cigarette in the mottled light. Keep walking, she told herself, but she stopped. He glanced at her, raised the last bit of his cigarette to his lips, tossed it down. “I know,” he said. “It’s a lovely day, and I’m messing it up with my disgusting habit.” 

“Everyone is messing it up.” 

And there it was, the half-smile from her half-dreams. “We are all blights on the landscape.” 

“We’re ocean trash.” 

He crouched down, sifted through blades of grass. “Well, now I feel bad. Today I’ll pick up my trash.” He retrieved the butt, she asked if she could have it, and he laughed aloud. “Art major? You make sculptures or something out of garbage? Let me get you a coffee and tell me what you’re about and you can have it.” 

They walked in no great hurry. He asked if she was skipping class but didn’t press for an answer. He told her came from the end of the world, from the far south of Chile, and his family led tourists on horseback through Patagonia. He was getting a PhD in math, and he was also an instructor for a first-year class that he called Math for Idiots. He spoke with only a trace of an accent. He seemed lonely, which she had not expected. 

She hadn’t ordered anything but soup in years, and the menu board in the coffee shop overwhelmed her. She pointed to it at random and said, “That one.” 

“What size?” 

“It doesn’t matter.” 

The barista held up two cups, and Olwen pointed to the larger. 

“What name?” 

“Put it with mine,” he said. “Greg.” 

They sat at the window, and he told her his name was Gonzalo, which he didn’t think should be challenging but apparently it was. “I get tired of being Gonzo in coffee shops. Or Gorgon or Graybeard, or once they just put Goon. So in here I’m Greg. Do you ever laugh?” 

“I don’t know.” 

He blinked twice. He lifted the fingers on his right hand and dropped them down one by one. “Okay. Well. You should. It’s nice.” 

“Olwen.” 

“What?” 

“My name is Olwen. I’m not a student.” 

“Olwen. I can only imagine what they’d make out of that.” 

She did laugh then; it crept up on her like a kitten, and she didn’t even know what was funny really, but he said, “There you go,” and squeezed her shoulder. 

“For Greg?” 

He got up and retrieved the drinks. A sprig of lavender floated on a maple leaf drawn in foam. She leaned close and breathed through parted lips, and a warm shiver began in her toes and spread to the crown of her head. 

“I like you, Olwen. You’re different.” 

For the first time in her life, a man asked for her phone number. She told him she had no phone, and he nearly fell backward off his stool and asked how that was possible. Not a student, so what was she? Was she even a person? Was she some kind of spirit, some kind of mischievous fairy? Was he the only one who could see her at all? He looked frantically around the shop, then said, “Right, right. You ordered your drink. She saw you there.” 

He was teasing. Playing a game, and she could play too. “You’re smart,” she said. “You can figure out what I am.” 

She wanted the coffee to last forever, and she wanted to take in all of it all at once, but in the end it was what it was. It was not magic. She drank it and loved it and then it was gone, and all she could do was hold up the lavender and catch the last flecks of foam with the tip of her tongue. He set the cigarette butt on the table and said, “Trade you,” and he took the wet lavender from her hand and put it right in his pocket. 

“I’m late,” he said. “I’m going to leave with no number and no plan, but I will see you again.” He put his arm around her shoulders, lowered his lips to the top of her head, and murmured, “Chao bella.” 

*

He called her mi cosita and mi ada. My little thing, my fairy. 

He was younger than she was. Twenty-seven. In life before, in life such as it had been, the boys had always been young. Young and scared, and of course it made sense, that outside church she had wanted to stoke fear. 

In his room in Green College, on a night of brilliant stars and cutting cold, he moaned her name and pulled her hair and bit her neck. He picked her up like a doll and threw her onto his bed. He wanted her. He ached for her, he said, she had taken over his mind, but they continued to meet by chance, and less and less often as the semester progressed. His schedule was grinding, and it worked out well enough. When they were together he wanted only to hold her, kiss her.  

He loved to talk about the place he came from, the dappled mountain river, the rambling house and the happy family. People came from all the world over to eat asado on the back deck, and his dad was funny and his mom sweet. Maybe it should have been enough. Maybe he shouldn’t have spun the globe and imagined a far northern country, shouldn’t have taught himself English from watching British procedurals. Sung songs in English and imagined riding his favorite horse all the way to Santiago, to the airport. Maybe he should, like his brothers, have learned the business and planned to spend his life shaking pisco sours and flirting for tips.  

“But then I wouldn’t have met you,” he said. 

He wanted to be alone with her, no pressure to meet his friends, no interest in knowing if she had any. Where she lived didn’t matter; he had no time and no energy to visit. He teased her, asked if she was a spy, a fugitive, an alien, but it all stayed cute and mysterious and fun. 

She called him her Prince of Darkness, and he laughed low and asked what that was supposed to mean. 

*

Snow fell one night in December, and in the clear bright dawn she wondered if she had died and gone to the heaven she did not believe in. Finals were over, most students gone, and only a single chain of footprints disturbed pure white in every direction. She knelt at the edge of the stacks and stared until she was nearly blind. 

In the afternoon, she walked, and he met her laughing and scooped a snowball with his bare hands. He lobbed it neatly past her shoulder, and she felt the chill on her face. 

He was leaving the next day. Vancouver, Toronto, Atlanta, Lima, Santiago, Puerto Montt. It was summer there, the grasses high and the days long. Fat bees might land unthreatening and curious on the tip of your finger, and every branch bent low with fruit. He wanted to take her with him, and, barring that, he wanted to carry a memory of her and a pint glass and a basket of fries. He wanted to take her out. 

They could get a beer in the SUB, she said. Or pizza at the sit-down place, or Indian to bring back to his room—anywhere on campus—anywhere bounded by the water and Westbrook Mall. There was plenty here, more than enough here, she said, even as he said, “I finally have a little time to breathe. Let’s go to Kitsilano. It’ll be fun.” 

He tried to urge her toward the bus loop, come on, come on, come on, and she stood still with her jaw clenched and her arms wrapped, as if to hold all her organs inside. “I can’t.” 

“What do you mean, you can’t?” 

“I just can’t.” 

He lit a cigarette, and she hated him a little, him and his airplanes and his summer country. “Are you sick?” he asked. 

He reached for her arm, and she thrashed out as if he’d pushed her. He stumbled back, and she ran. 

*

Once in the recent years, the ones that all ran together, Olwen had filched a wallet that far exceeded her expectations. A student ID that worked for a solid week. One hundred and five dollars cash, and a three-zone bus pass.  

She remembered how every once in a while the hateful roommates had gotten along, gone out to Kits and come back giggling, telling her about how one of them had found a dress in this cute little shop and oh it’s just so perfect it looks like it was made for her oh my God Olwen you have to see. The roommate would scurry off, come back lifting her arms to show details of the waistline, spinning twice for a full view. 

Rain could clear, sunlight could stream through the window and fill the room with color. 

She wanted to use the bus pass. Find perfect food and a perfect dress. Ride all the way to Coquitlam just because she could. She got on the 44, but as it passed Acadia Road she felt weights on her feet and a noose around her neck. An invisible fence shocked her joints and cut her skin. She yanked ropes and pushed buttons, and the driver yelled, “Express! Not until 4^th!” She stumbled to the front and choked that she had to get off, now, she was sick, and finally the driver heaved a disgusted sigh, stopped the bus, opened the door. She ran back along the wooded road, and with every step the pain eased and her breath returned. 

She had tried again on foot on different roads, and once she even swam out from Wreck Beach.  

She wished she could believe in spirits. That her father was still on campus, wanting to stay close to the structures he’d built and maintained. Wanting to hold tight to his daughter. Or even that unknown entities had taken an interest in her. 

But it was, in the end, a simpler story. She had been on campus a long time, and she was terrified of leaving. 

*

The snow washed away, and for days and days she didn’t see the sun. She was usually too cold, too tired, too sad to take anything from the few lonely figures who lingered on campus through the holidays. She lay on her stacks in the dark and didn’t know what she was. 

She was her mother, in a big bed alone, and she heard the demons moving. She felt their breath. Like men but not men, crawling across the floor. They would find her if she so much as moved an arm to cross herself. They were waiting. They were there.

* 

It was spring. Spring was, at least, peering around the corner, and Gonzalo had been back on campus for weeks. She saw him, or thought she did, but always at a great distance, and he was gone by the time she reached the stone steps, the window, the cherry tree just beginning to bud. She couldn’t find him even at Green College, even at dusk when he should have been heading home for dinner, and she began to worry she’d dreamed him.  

She began to wonder if she was the one who was lost. She had always assumed no one had ever looked, and no one missed her. Mediocre student, forgettable roommate, possessed child. But maybe they did look, and maybe, if she’d stayed still, she would have been found long ago. 

“You have a beautiful day,” the soup girl said, and kept saying it as if every day were new. As if they had not seen each other before, and she had no curiosity at all about the long-haired, wide-eyed figure who often sat in the café for hours.  

Once Olwen stayed until late afternoon, when the last few customers drifted out, and soup girl loaded stray bowls into a busing tray. She had her hair in a tight knot and wore a silver cuff bracelet with some kind of animal cast into it. She sang softly to herself, trying to pretend it was not awkward, and she was not afraid. She was very young, Olwen thought, and it wasn’t her fault if she was happy. Maybe she really was Métis. Maybe she told no lies. 

She wiped down tables. She carried a lock box to the back. Soon it would be time to turn out the lights, close the door, go meet friends for dinner and evening classes. Please leave, Olwen could hear her thinking. Please don’t make me break character and confront you. 

“Have you seen Gonzalo?” Olwen asked, and the girl turned around and blinked fast. “I’m sorry?” 

“He teaches math. You called him profe.” 

The girl frowned, small and confused. “I don’t have math this semester.” 

Olwen left. The soup girl must have been magic, because Gonzalo was passing by just outside. He glanced at her and offered a shallow nod, and she walked beside him. West, and down many flights of stairs to the beach. Rain had fallen all morning and threatened again. He draped his raincoat over a log to give them a dry place to sit. Hairs stood up on his arms, and the beach was quiet but not empty. People sat alone, shoulders hunched, or stood at the waterline watching distant ships. 

“I miss you,” she whispered. 

“I miss you too.” 

Smoking wasn’t allowed, but he did it anyway. He had left Green College, he told her, moved with some buddies to a house in East Van where he had the whole third floor to himself. He was looking forward to summer, when he hoped to relax for a few months, tutoring kids and drinking too much and enjoying long days in the city. He spoke quietly, cautiously, holding out a treat to a dog that had bitten him. 

“My dad died,” she said, shuddering in the chill and trying to keep her teeth from rattling. “And my mom went crazy, and it’s not like anything all that great ever happened on campus but nothing terrible did either. The dumb girls I lived with my first year were the worst it ever was.” 

Her voice thinned and frayed. She told him she slept in the library, and she was a ghost or an unopened book. She told him she was just there, a half-shell in the waves or an acorn kicked down a path. 

He sighed smoke to the gray unbroken sky. He frowned and pulled his hat off and jammed the cigarette out into it. For an instant she smelled melted lining, burning wool. “So that’s it? You’re a squatter? You aren’t even doing anything?” 

“I guess I’m a bug. I just live off all the leaves. I’m not—” 

“You know what I thought? I thought you actually were a student. I thought you were just, I don’t know, non-traditional. I thought you were a little embarrassed to be finishing your undergrad late, and maybe you’d end up in my class and I’d have to say I hoped you understood that I wasn’t being serious when I said it was for idiots.” 

She shivered. Tears stung the corners of her eyes. “I’m not hurting anybody.” 

Not all that much, she wanted to add, but he shook his head like he had water in his ears. “That’s not life, Olwen,” he mumbled, and he left his coat with her and headed for the stairs. 

She stayed until the tide rolled nearly to her log, to her feet. Rain fell, but she didn’t put the coat on, only carried it like a baby up one step, another, another. 

In the evenings, the first floor of the SUB was busy. The pub did a brisk business, the rooms held study groups and play read-throughs and yoga classes. The basement was empty and quiet except for occasional voices that cut through from above. Olwen walked dripping through the dim halls, past closed offices and to what was probably the only pay phone left on campus. She dialed the number that had once been hers, and her mother answered.  

“It’s Olwen,” she said, and she added, “your daughter,” just in case. Her mother began to sob. 

She cried still, when she arrived twenty minutes later in the Corolla to a parking lot on Westbrook Mall, where Olwen stood alone and with nothing. Her mother looked the same, exhausted and empty. Her eyes behind the tears had gone dull. 

Olwen climbed into the back and told her mom to turn on the child locks. Do not stop, do not let her out, no matter how much she screamed. She curled up in the seat and closed her eyes. Traffic flowed; the old car lurched through green lights. The city pulled her open.