By the age of twenty-three, Shelby had slept with nine guys and was feeling self-conscious about the number until she found out, on an overnight trip with the Ambassadors, that her roommate Cate had slept with over twenty guys, and two girls. Between sips of Dirty Shirleys, Shelby and Cate listed off the people they’d been with, each claiming not to remember the exact number. But Shelby was sharply aware of how she was beyond a handful. And with nine guys come and gone, she was almost out of fingers, almost out of hands to fill.

***

Shelby met Petter her first year of grad school. He was an international student from Norway. She was his assigned Ambassador: pick him up from the airport, drive him to the grocery store, help him perfect his English. One time, Petter asked if Shelby could borrow him a dollar. At the lake, Petter called Spanish moss that spooky stuff in the trees. He teased her for parallel parking so wide from the curb.

So Shelby retaliated, made fun of the tattoo on his shoulder, a Chinese symbol, which she had peeped for the first time on a trip to St. Augustine Beach. American and international students disrobed in the sun. Shelby thought Petter’s tattoo was tacky. She was too embarrassed to ask what it meant.

***

Shelby took Petter and his roommate Magnus to the grocery store, and they bought her a Toblerone as a thank you. In the warm car, they shared the chocolate and listened to their favorite indie bands. Magnus, in the back seat, asked if it was normal, the heat, his face close to the air vent, his shirt darkening with sweat.

“It’s the humidity that will get ya,” Shelby said, sounding like her father.

“But it’s not summer still.” Magnus rolled down the window and stuck his head out in the wind.

Petter’s phone dinged with messages from his girlfriend back in Oslo, her strange-vowel words flashing across the screen in his lap. Shelby noticed that he did not respond, his fingers messy with melting chocolate.

***

At the thrift store, Shelby and Petter met a woman with a bird on her head. Petter was looking for a small bookshelf for his bareboned apartment when he grabbed Shelby by the wrist and tugged, nodding toward the woman and the bird.

“Oh,” Shelby said.

First the bird’s head turned in their direction then the woman’s followed. The bird’s name was Mango, the woman explained. He was her fifth Mango.

“A tree full of Mangos,” Petter said.

“No,” the woman asserted, “the others are dead.”

Petter reached for Shelby’s hand again and squeezed to keep from laughing. As the woman walked away, they noticed her short hair flecked with bird poop, the avalanche down the back of her neck. Petter took this to be an American cultural experience: a bird on a head in a store. But Shelby promised it was not, though perhaps it was a Florida thing. They looked through the used books and Petter bought three: Frankenstein, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and one about Norse folklore which he gifted Shelby. They did not find a bookshelf.

“If I make the books tall enough, it is like a bookshelf.” Petter mimed stacking books higher and higher.

That night in bed, hoping to discover something, Shelby flipped through her new book and read about elves and trolls and Kraken. She wanted to tell her roommate Cate about Petter grabbing her hand twice in the store, but of course, Cate was not home. Cate probably would have said she was reading too much into a simple gesture. A basic touch of connection, human to human. The internationals, they’re more affectionate, Cate would have said. Don’t be such a Puritan.

Shelby fell asleep with the book open to an image of a long-haired woman, bare breasted by a waterfall in a white dress. The Huldra, the text read, is a forest spirit and seductress. She is beautiful, but under her long dress she hides a tail, usually that of a cow, but sometimes a fox. The Huldra can also have a hollow back like a rotted-out tree. She is so striking, from the front, that a man can forget his whole life—his past, his present, his self. Totally consumed by his desire to be with her, he follows her deeper and deeper into the forest, from which he does not return.

***

Petter and Shelby ate lunch in the shade in front of the library. Petter and Shelby rode bikes down the greenway. Magnus joined them for pizza and beer, for trivia and guest lecturers. The Ambassadors took a trip to Epcot, but Shelby could not afford to go. Petter and Magnus brought her back a plastic Viking helmet from the Norway pavilion. They threw a party, Shelby shoving a keg into her compact car. Americans and international students passed around the Viking helmet, posing for pictures, their arms flexed, their faces brave and wasted, until a guy from Brazil turned the helmet into a chalice. Shelby could not drive home. She called Cate, but of course she did not answer.

Shelby awoke on the couch, Magnus frying eggs. Petter’s door was open, and she could see him sprawled across the end of the bed. His red boxer briefs. His limbs long and stirring.

***

International students drank free until ten at Techno Tuesday. Cate bailed, like always, and Shelby sipped Petter’s and Magnus’ free martinis until she was drunk. By eleven, Petter and Shelby were dancing. A mocking too-cool-for-Techno-Tuesday sort of move they both understood.

 “I’ll teach you the Norwegian wedding dance.” Petter took her hand and counted in her ear over the pounding electronic music.

On the balls of their feet, they stepped front and back, side to side. Shelby laid her head on Petter’s shoulder and thought of his girlfriend, back in Oslo. Tall and white like an iceberg, with ninety percent of her and Petter’s relationship sunk below the surface.

Petter, drunk and detached, said something to Shelby in Norwegian.

“I don’t understand,” Shelby shouted, shaking her head.

Petter placed both hands on her lower back, slid them up like he was looking for something. A drop of sweat fell from his brow and landed on her cheek.

Tell me about the Huldra, Shelby wanted to say, but Magnus came over and threw his arm around Petter, breaking them apart like chickens startled by thunder.

They took shots, danced and jumped with the others, sweaty and wanting, and when Petter could no longer string a sentence together Shelby sent him and Magnus home in a cab. She walked down University alone, growing angrier at Cate with each man who emerged from the shadows.

“Where you heading, beautiful?”

“Hey! Girl!”

“Yeah, you better go.”

Shelby picked up her pace. If only they could see my tail. Feel my hollow back, she thought, her apartment complex coming into view.

***

 The following weekend the Norwegians hosted a pool volleyball tournament. Cate was seeing a new guy from Argentina and said she would bring him by to meet everyone. Shelby drank white wine out of a red Solo cup and kept missing the ball.

“Too short.” Petter laughed. He grabbed Shelby under her knees and lifted her up until they collapsed in the water, tangled and splashing.

He showed her how to spike the ball, putting his fingers around her wrist. He teased her about American gold medals. She teased him about the pink sneaking up on his shoulders, his long nose. Although, by then, she had learned about his internship in Beijing the previous year, she was still too embarrassed to ask what his tattoo meant.

Sundown. The volleyball players dried off and drifted home. Shelby checked her phone for Cate’s excuse, but there was none, so she cannonballed back into the pool with Petter. They clung to the wall of the deep end, philosophizing, their arms folded on the tiled edge, their wrinkled toes paddling in the water.

“Some people use religion as a crutch,” Shelby said.

“Some people drink too much milk,” Petter added.

“Some people never leave their hometowns.”

“Some people never floss.” Petter pointed his finger in the air like a fervent orator, and then he booped Shelby on the nose.

Shelby had a vision of a waterfall, of mossy stones and long white hair. Tell me about the Huldra, she wanted to say but didn’t. Instead, she complained that Cate wouldn’t go see the new del Toro movie with her. “No one will,” she pouted.

“Are you saying I am no one?” Petter smiled, light lines like parentheses around his mouth.

She smiled back, stuck her head underwater, put her feet against the wall and pushed off, gliding toward the shallow end. She remembered being a kid. Remembered hours in the pool alone, plastic sea creatures in place of siblings, enjoying how effortless it was to be underwater, barely moving, but going so fast. She would wear goggles and flip upside down, her fingers pinching her nose closed, and watch the sunlight glimmer on the surface of the water.

Petter grabbed her foot and Shelby pretended to fight, to resist. “Let go!” she laughed, twisting around. She splashed him in the face. He splashed her back. Then Shelby kissed Petter, or Petter kissed Shelby—impossible to say. They pressed their slick bodies together, two stars gravitationally bound, orbiting each other, appearing as one to the naked eye. Then the pool gate squeaked open and clanged shut. They separated, floated away, only their heads above the surface like the alligators the Ambassadors had spotted in Lake Tuskawilla.

“I forgot my phone.” Magnus paced toward a lounge chair, his eyes on the pool deck, his slouched shoulders saying: I didn’t see anything.

***

Shelby drove home. Her damp bathing suit seeped through her sundress, her hair perfumed with chlorine. A text chimed from Cate: Sorry! Went to a movie with Javi! Shelby didn’t turn on her music, and in the silence she wondered how many more men she would be with. Wondered when she would get the nerve to go to a movie by herself. Nearly alone on the road, Shelby wondered if she would ever live in another country or read Chinese. Climb a volcano. Eat a fried seahorse. See the aura borealis from the frozen crown of the Earth. Both hands on the steering wheel, watching her speed, Shelby wondered why she couldn’t just hold her breath, glide underwater, for no other reason than to admire summer sun.

Up ahead, under a yellow streetlight, stood a hoary-haired animal. It must be a fox. A gray fox. Shelby thought. Of course. She slowed down, came to a stop. But it wasn’t a fox; it was a coyote, tearing apart some small, dead animal in the road. The coyote lifted its gaze in the headlights, its snout darkened with blood, its tail fluffed and twitching, the forest not far.