The Mathematician Cannot Create Things at Will, part 1

Selina recognized the onset of sleep as the intermittent deafness she was experiencing. For example, she could no longer hear the guy playing his excessively loud electric guitar in the dorm suite across the hall, but she could still feel the vibration of it. She could see her room turn to fuzzy pixels of gray light and then to nothing.
Sometime later she woke up, and the sound of the guitar penetrated her foggy head again. The only light in the room was that of a street lamp that had come on outside her window while she was asleep. She picked up the telephone and untangled its extra-long cord until she could reach the hallway with it because she intended to use it as a prop.
She rapped hard on his door with her knuckles which stung them badly, but she didn’t want to announce herself with the usual pounding of fists. She wanted to be kinder than the time she’d complained about the stereo because since she’d complained the guys were playing it louder than ever. The guitar stopped abruptly, and she heard three quick steps before the door opened into the other room with such force that a little of her hair was sucked forward onto her face.
"Yes?" he said. He was not the one she had expected. She knew three of the guys who lived there by sight, although she had only met the one who consistently played the stereo at top volume at 2:15 every afternoon, one of her favorite nap times. But she had never seen this one before. His face was soft and pale, framed by dark straight hair trimmed bluntly below the shoulders. Looking into the poorly lit hallway made his eyes large. That is a wonderful face, she thought, and I’m standing here in the fluorescent light with creases on my cheek from the couch cushions.
Selina had the base of the phone in one hand and the receiver in the other. "I’m really sorry to bother you," she said, sounding politely rehearsed, "But I’ve got to call my mother, and with you playing so loud, I can’t even hear the dial tone."
That was how they met. That was how Selina, in the middle of what should have been her pre-professional senior year panic, was able to carry herself serenely for a few months above the ocean of dread that would have otherwise drowned her. For that brief, sweet time, she kept herself in purposeful denial of the corporate recruiters who were already raiding the campus, of what her roommates wore to their job interviews, of flyers and table tents announcing career seminars. During that time, she never once considered typing her resume. All because she met a guy. That and the fact that she could sleep through almost anything, even the most oppressive anxiety.