The Bermudez Triangle Read Free

students lived in Stanford dorms and used Stanford classrooms and the Stanford library, but the program’s organizers constantly made it clear that Stanford was merely the host—as if the EWSPFHSL (pronounced “Oohspuffhisill”) was some kind of parasite living in the belly of this great center of learning.
    There was an unceasing cycle of orientation activities—lectures, a library tour, a mass trip to the bookstore for textbooks, well-organized games of Twister in the dorm lounge. Every morning the students took statistics and microeconomics, the mandatory college-credit classes. Every afternoon was spent in a rotating series of seminars and discussions on government, multicultural issues, leadership techniques, current events, and effective writing skills.
    In fact, Nina barely had time to get homesick. Soon the red-roofed, mission-style buildings, the palm trees, and the breezes off San Francisco Bay were all pleasantly familiar. The only thing she couldn’t get used to was her roommate, Ashley. Ashley came fromGeorgia and supposedly ran six different organizations at her school. She spent her time in incredibly odd ways, like practicing back bends for half an hour at a stretch or nibbling at the corks that she kept in a bag on her desk. She’d down a few caffeine pills with a can of Red Bull and then spend strung-out hours talking on her cell phone, chomping away on a cork, wearing only the tiniest pair of lingerie shorts and a low-cut tank top. This was her minor concession to wearing some clothing while she was in the room—she always slept naked.
    At this moment, late on a Tuesday night of the second week, Ashley was sitting on her bed, considering a large, deeply ripe avocado. Nina didn’t know where she’d gotten it; it was just the kind of thing that Ashley turned up with when she had enough stimulants in her system. She focused her clip lamp on it and stared at it as if it contained the secrets of the universe. Her foot tapped furiously on the metal bed frame and she scratched compulsively at her neck. Nina was sure ribbons of skin were about to come streaming down on the mattress.
    “Hey, Nina?”
    Nina didn’t look up from her microeconomics textbook.
    “Yeah?”
    “What are you?”
Tap, tap, tap, tap. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
    “What?” Nina asked.
    “What’s your … heritage?”
    Since her mother was black and her father was Cuban (and white), no one ever knew where to place Nina on the spectrum.
    “Swedish,” Nina said.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    “On both sides?”
    “Yeah.”
    Ashley thought this over for a moment, then jumped off her bed and took off running down the hall. Nina could hear her bare feet smacking the linoleum. Since she was sitting cross-legged, the backs of her knees were getting too warm and the heavy book was growing uncomfortable. Nina shoved it off her lap and stretched out her legs. Then she flopped down on her back and threw her legs up against the wall and stared at her toes. It took her a minute to realize that someone was standing in her doorway staring at her. She tilted her head back to get an upside-down view.
    The guy in the doorway was Steve Carson, a hard-core environmentalist from Oregon. His room was down the hall from Nina’s, and from a few glances through the open door, she saw that he lived with all the flamboyance of a monk. He’d brought only a bike, books and music, some special environmentally safe detergent and lightbulbs, and a small bag of clothes. He generally kept to himself and could usually be found sitting on his bed, reading, or working on his laptop. Even when the whole hall would go together for meals, he often sat at the end of a table and read the little laminated menu tents over and over.
    “Sorry,” he said.
    “For what?” Nina slid her legs down and went back to her cross-legged position. “Come on in.”
    “Nina?” he said. “It’s Nina, right?”
    Nina nodded.
    “My computer is going crazy,” he said. “The