The creaking of the door wasn't reassuring. It was the kind of sound you'd expect to hear before a man in a latex mask popped out from under the mattress with a machete.

I stuck my head into our room while keeping my feet in the hallway. There was a bed pushed against one wall, and a second bed pushed against the other. There was about ten centimeters between the two. I craned my head past the door and saw a single wardrobe, one of those cheap plastic ones.

"It's a bit small," I remarked.

"It'll do," Nicola replied with a hint of enthusiasm. "We won't be spending much time in here anyway."

He entered first, dragging the black suitcase behind him.

"You seem happy," a half-question, half-statement.

"Yeah," he dropped his backpack on the right bed. So, that was his. I hadn't really had time to assess which one would be better. Oh well. One less thing to worry about. I finally stepped into the small room and left the suitcase in the single square meter of free space, the one separating the beds from the wardrobe.

"Are you happy with the room?" I asked uncertainly.

"I'm happy that we'll already be in the kitchen tonight!" He flopped onto the bed and petted the plasticky duvet as if it were the soft fur of a bunny.

I followed suit, resting my bee-themed duffel bag on the edge of the bed and sitting on the duvet. I couldn't sit straight across from Nicola because there wasn't enough legroom for both of us. I nudged my knee towards him to make it bounce.

Nicola smiled even more.

"You're really obsessed with cooking, aren't you? Are you really so excited because you're working tonight?"

"I think it'll be fun. Aren't you excited?"

I shrugged. I could ignore the question or I could be honest and tell him I was terrified. It would go badly. It would go worse than badly.

I opted for the first option. I pulled my bag towards me and finally unzipped it, letting my poor plushies breathe.

I only brought Grass Pokémon. I pulled out Oddish first, a kind of blue radish with legs, and placed it in Nicola's arms. Then I laid Chikorita, a tiny green brontosaurus, Treecko, a bipedal frog with a huge tail, and Bulbasaur on my bed.

"How many did you bring?"

"Four."

Once the bag was freed from plushies, I could pull out the cookies.

Knowing I'd go through a box in two days, and that I had to stay there for a month, I decided to stock up on a few extras, just in case, so I brought eighteen boxes.

I started stacking the long, thin bars that housed my favorite cookies next to the pillow.

"That's... quite a lot of chocolates."

"Chocolates?" Yes, well, they were about five centimeters long sticks covered in chocolate, they might look like chocolates, but I was pretty sure they counted as cookies.

"Why did you bring them?" he asked, still holding Oddish in his arms.

"Because they're my favorite cookies. To be more precise, there are seven reasons why they're my favorite cookies. First of all, they make a nice sound when you shake them."

I took the first pack from the stack and shook it (not too hard or the cookies would break), letting him hear the nice sound it made.

"Secondly, the package is divided into a row of fifteen semicircular cells that perfectly fit fifteen cookies each. So you can line them up, each in its cell, with the smooth side up, and you can eat them in sequence. You can choose the sequence each time, maybe once you want to eat the ends first and then skip every other cell. Or you can eat them in sequences of three, or four. The important thing is to always remain symmetrical." I took a breath. "The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth reasons why they're my favorite cookies are that, being long, thin, and with one curved side and one smooth side, they can be eaten in four different ways, that is, reasons three, four, five, and six. You can eat them with the smooth side touching your tongue and trying to take the smallest bites possible (I can make twenty bites with a single cookie). And then the smooth side isn't really smooth because there's a pattern of tiny diamonds on the chocolate that's pleasant to feel with your tongue. The second way you can eat them is with the curved side on your tongue, which is very pleasant to the touch. The third way is my absolute favorite. You have to hold the cookie like an accordion and bite slowly the long part to cut it in half along the vertical axis. If you do it right, you should have the other half of the cookie left, then the same length as a normal cookie. And then you eat what's left in tiny bites. And the fourth way isn't very good because the cookies end too quickly. Essentially, you have to join two cookies along the smooth side and eat them together. It's fun, but you don't really realize how many you're eating." I took another breath. "And then, the seventh reason why they're my favorite cookies is that they taste very good."

Nicola kept looking at me with his dark eyes and Puppy ears. Maybe now he wanted to taste one of my cookies. It would be the right thing to do, to offer him one.

"Actually... I brought the right amount for the internship month, and you can only buy them at this specific store, and I don't know where it is here in Turin, so if I need more, then I don't know what to do. Uh..."

I grabbed Chikorita from its tic-tac head and put it in Nicola's arms, to keep Oddish company. "Here, you can keep them." He looked down at the plushies. "I mean, on loan! Not as a gift. Just for this month." I hurried to add.

It didn't sound very nice, the way I said it. How could I make it sound nice?

"Here." I passed Treecko to him. "I only need Bulbasaur, you can keep all three."

"Thanks," said Nicola, and hearing his voice, I realized he hadn't spoken for a long time. "But... what do I do with them?"

"Oh, you can hug them when you sleep. Or if you feel like petting something cute."

Nicola looked at the plushies, then at me. His face became imperceptibly darker. I leaned forward to get a better look.

"Are you blushing?"

"What?"

"It's not clear. When a person blushes, it's because the blood concentrates on the face and shows through the skin. But it doesn't show on you."

There was no way for me to figure it out by looking at him. I shifted my gaze from his cheeks to his eyes. "Are you blushing?"

"Um..." Nicola opened his eyelids a bit wider. "No."

"Ah, okay." I stood up, sliding my legs into the tiny gap between the two beds to place Bulbasaur on my pillow and move the cookies into some niche in the wardrobe.

"Are you really going to eat them all? Those are a lot of cookies for just one month."

"They're not that many. Years ago, I used to eat a pack a day, but now I only eat half."

"Years ago? How long have you been eating these chocolates?"

"From eleven to thirteen years old, and from fifteen to seventeen." I opened the wardrobe doors and found it smaller than I had imagined. Fortunately, there were also two drawers. I stuffed the first stack of cookies into the top drawer and went back to get another group. "There was a one-year break because the company that makes them changed the box. It used to be blue. When I saw it had become brown, I freaked out. It took me a year to convince myself to try a cookie from the new box. I was afraid that, since they had changed the box, the taste would change too. But no, they remained the same, and even the plastic packaging to do the sequences with is the same. So I started eating them again."

"You don't... seem like someone who ingested 2000 calories of chocolate every day for six years," Nicola said, probably referring to the fact that I was as thin as a rake.

"I don't eat much else."

And then our conversation stopped, because he didn't say anything else and I didn't say anything else, so I figured we were done socializing for the moment.

After finishing putting away the cookies, I lay down on the bed to recharge my brain batteries. I stared at the white ceiling and took a stroll on Avalon. I didn't follow anyone in particular, just a group of wolves here and there, frolicking happily. There had been a nice snowfall the night before. The fields were still soft with white. Every paw, even the smallest, left a deep imprint. The cubs were playing, chasing the flakes still falling from the sky.

"Gio," Nicola called me softly. He had a low, calm voice, like a big gray wolf. I opened my eyes on our little room, noticing only then how bare it was. No black sky illuminated by a million stars, no majestic trees bending in the gentle wind.

"Mh."

"You should change. We have to go down soon."

I stopped looking at the ceiling and looked at him. He had already put on the uniform, which was the same as mine, only it looked good on him. Some people find uniforms fascinating, like those of soldiers or pilots. I never understood why.

I understood in that moment. In that double-breasted uniform, Nicola had a different air. I can't say different how, but it was something that attracted me.

"You've dressed." I hadn't even noticed he had gone to the bathroom to change.

"We have to go down for dinner already in uniform."

"Oh." I had to get up, get dressed, and work. I didn't want to do any of those three things. "You called me Gio." My brain informed me about a minute late.

Nicola made some kind of expression. "Don't you want to?"

"It's fine as long as it's Gio with a G and not Joe with a J."

"But... when you say it, it's the same thing."

"Yes, but in your head, you have to think of it with a G and not with a J."

"Okay. But usually, I don't think about how I spell words when I say them."

That seemed very strange to me. Two words that are pronounced the same have a very different taste depending on how they are written.

"Do people call you Nico?" I found myself asking that question before I knew I was going to ask it.

"No... not really. Teachers call me Demir, and my classmates... well, they usually don't call me. I keep to myself a lot in class."

I nodded again with my head on the pillow. "And your parents? Do they call you Nicola in full?"

"No, they call me Serse. My grandparents insisted I had at least one Persian middle name, and everyone in the family calls me that."

Serse was a beautiful name. Between Nicola and Serse, he had decided to introduce himself as Nicola? There was no comparison. I wanted to ask if I could call him Serse, but he had said he was only called that by family. And then he had introduced himself as Nicola, so I didn't think I had the right to call him by another name.

"I'm getting up now and getting ready." I announced, but without making any effort to actually put that intention into practice.

"You can call me Nico if you want."

I was still staring at the white ceiling so I didn't know what face he was making. I made a happy face because it made me happy.

I had a sudden idea that I felt the need to put into practice instantly.

I jumped up like lightning. "How much time do we have?" I threw myself on my abandoned suitcase on the square meter cleared and turned it upside down to dig into it.

"Um... Ten, fifteen minutes."

I pulled out my pencil case, which was shaped like a long duck. Then I pulled out my notebook that made that nice sound when you tore the pages from it.

There wasn't a table, so I crouched on the floor. I opened my pencil case and pulled out my special markers: the golden one, the silver one, the rainbow one, and the glitter one. I tore a sheet, saying "RRRRR" along with the notebook.

I wrote in big thick letters with the rainbow marker. Then I outlined it with the silver and gold ones and decorated the edges with the glitter one.

I tore off a piece of tape from my pencil case and jumped up again. I stuck the sheet with NICO written on it above his bed, on the white wall that was no longer just white.

"Is it a little better now?" I turned to look at him. "Do you like it?"

Nico made a face that looked confused at first, then happy.

"Yes. Yes, it's much better now."