The Raising

37

Josie was wearing flip-flops even though the temperature outside could not have been over forty-five degrees. It was one of those deep-pewter late October days during which morning lasted until it finally bled without a whimper into twilight. Shelly had, herself, pulled her suede boots out of the back of her closet for the first time that year. Not only was it too cold for flip-flops, but flip-flops had been the one item of clothing Shelly had asked Josie, when she’d first hired her, not to wear to the office.

And she was over an hour late.

“Hey,” Josie said breathlessly, pushing open the door to Shelly’s office with her hip. “Sorry I’m late!”

Shelly tried to look away as nonchalantly as possible, returning to her computer on which she’d managed to call up a blank Word document as soon as she heard what she’d assumed was Josie coming up the stairs.

“You’re not mad, are you?” Josie asked, but she was out of the door’s threshold before Shelly could turn around and say anything, her flip-flops making a husky whisper as they slapped against the heels of her small white feet as she sauntered down the hallway toward the restroom.

It had been two weeks since they’d first slept together, and there’d been two dinners (both at Shelly’s house, cooked by Shelly) since then. Three other times, they’d left the office together, gone back to Shelly’s for drinks, and ended up in bed. These assignations had been initiated casually enough by Josie (“Hey, Shelly, are you up for a glass of wine after work?”) and, after each time, Shelly swore to herself that she wouldn’t let it happen again.

Too risky. Too risqué. Too unseemly.

But simply saying no seemed impossible. At least once or twice a day now, Shelly found herself nearly doubled over with longing for the girl:

The small hard nipples under her hands. The soft palpitating at the base of her throat. The way Josie (who required sometimes a steady, blissful hour of tongue and fingers to reach an orgasm) would throw her head back in the final seconds, and Shelly could glimpse just the bottom of her bright white front teeth between her parted lips, and a hissing sound would escape from Josie that sent what felt like a shockwave ripping through Shelly’s body, bringing her to her own climax without even needing to be touched.

It was only when they were in bed that they discussed the fact that they had ever slept together before or that they ever would again, so each “date” was like some kind of extreme sport—the rush of not knowing what would happen next.

In the meantime, Josie’s work ethic had dwindled down to nothing. She’d stopped bothering even to apologize for leaving early. She simply announced that she was leaving. Twice, she called in sick, depositing scratchy-voiced messages on the voice mail, having clearly timed her calls so that Shelly wouldn’t be in the office to actually answer the phone.

This morning, the flip-flops. Late again.

It didn’t surprise Shelly. (Why would it? Josie had been a bad work-study student from the start.) But it frightened her. She knew that the sexual relationship meant she was no longer in a position to reprimand Josie, or even gently critique her. That first morning, after that first night, Josie had shimmied her jeans on, zipped up her hoodie, and said, before sliding out Shelly’s front door, “Shelly, I’m going to have to make up tomorrow for missing my Chem Lab yesterday afternoon, ’kay? So, I won’t be in. But I’ll see you soon?”

Shelly had found herself unable to remind Josie that she had responsibilities related to the St. Crispin Quintet concert the next day. Someone needed to walk them from their hotel to Beech Auditorium (because it was written into their contract that the St. Crispin Quintet did nothing without an escort), and it was the work-study’s job to attend to these details. It was, in fact, the whole reason Shelly had been given a work-study student in the first place, because the experience of rubbing elbows with these professionals was supposed to be so beneficial to the student’s education.

But that morning Shelly had stood in the doorway holding her robe closed around her and said, “Okay,” to Josie, while any last shred of denial about the new dynamic between them dissolved as Josie cocked her head and blew a kiss in Shelly’s direction. Shelly could feel herself flushing, but also could not stop herself from reaching out the door (in full view of the mailwoman across the street) and taking hold of one of the dangling pompoms on Josie’s pink hoodie, and gently urging her back inside.

Josie had smiled sleepily, dreamily, allowed herself to be lured back through the screen door and into the foyer, where she kept her eyes open as Shelly pulled her to her and put her hands in the silky black hair and kissed Josie’s lips with as much restraint as she could (and still found herself trembling, making little noises in her throat, her tongue running over those perfect little teeth, her hands, as if they belonged to someone else, traveling up to Josie’s waist to her breasts again, running clumsily over them as Josie sagged passively, pliantly, against the screen door and let it all happen). When Shelly had finally managed to step back, there was what could almost have been a look of triumph on Josie’s face.

She’d narrowed her eyes and licked her lips, sighed, and reached out to touch Shelly’s throat, and then said, “See you next time,” before turning and leaving (for real this time), swaying down the walk, surely aware that she was being watched, without turning around once to look at Shelly in the doorway.

In the other office, Shelly could hear her talking on the phone. Every sentence ended with the sound of a question.

“And then we went to the bar? And Crystal and Stephanie were there? And so anyway I guess tonight we’re supposed meet back at the house and take away their privileges, you know? And after that, we’ll vote? So, like, tell them not to wear any shoes, okay? Everybody else can wear shoes?”

Jesus, Shelly thought. What could Josie be talking about, or did she even want to know? Was this some sort of hazing? No “privileges”? No shoes?

Maybe a punishment for having been at the bar when they were supposed to be home making doilies for the Founders’ Tea?

It was, Shelly thought, possibly Trials Week—which had been renamed Spirit Week by the Pan-Hellenic Association after the scandal a few years ago when a drunken sorority sister had been driven forty miles out of town and left on the side of a rural highway.

It was, apparently, a common prepledge trial these days. You were taken to a party, where you were prompted to get drunker than you had ever been before in your life, and then your sympathetic older “sisters” pretended to insist on driving you home because of their great concern for you—but, instead, they dropped you off in the middle of nowhere and told you, as their car sped away, to find your way back to the house.

Maybe most of the girls did make it back to the house, and lived long enough to inflict this trial the next year on a new generation of sisters. But one year, a victim panicked and tried to chase the car that had dropped her off, managing to run fast enough to toss herself against the bumper and hit her head and die.

The administrators and the parents and the Pan-Hellenic Association swooped in screeching, as if they hadn’t known perfectly well that this kind of thing was taking place on a regular basis. There was a great deal of “shock” and “outrage” among the university community—especially since this was a sorority. “Girls Hazing Girls!” was the headline, as if it were news.

Not a single woman Shelly knew was surprised by the ruthlessness of girls toward one another—and certainly no one Shelly knew who’d ever been in a sorority could manage much more than the raising of an eyebrow, if not a stifled yawn, at the news that sorority sisters were dropping each other off in the dark, drunk, and laughing as they sped away. Shelly herself had never been dropped off drunk on a highway, but she’d had to go two weeks without brushing her teeth, and was required to arrive every evening on the front porch of the Eta Lambda house to have the scum on her enamel approved.

Over a cup of tea after their third time in bed together, Shelly had asked Josie if sororities still did things like that, and Josie had laughed pretty hard while recounting how, as a newbie, she’d had to wear the same underpants every day for four weeks—period to period—and take them off in the living room, standing there bottomless in front of the Pledge Board, while they passed her panties around and either sniffed them or screamed about them and threw them from one sister to the next until they were given back, and Josie had to put them back on.

“I cheated,” Josie said. “I washed my panties out in the sink a few times, and then I put toothpaste on the crotch to make it look really yeasty, so they just freaked when they saw it, and didn’t smell it—luckily, since it smelled like mint!”

“Jesus,” Shelly had said, rubbing her eyes.

Although, as a hazing practice, this sort of thing happened only during the prepledge part of sorority life, the spirit of it was part of the very air they had breathed in the Eta Lambda house. Every few weeks some sister would find your hairbrush matted with hair on the bathroom sink, or some clump of something crusty in the shower after you’d just gotten out, and she would scream Ee-w-w-w! for everyone to hear.

And these little humiliations called up everything:

The filth of being human, of being female, of being alive, of living in a body, of having the shame of that exposed to prettier, cleaner, better girls.

Shelly looked up, and was startled to find Josie standing in the threshold, leaning against the doorjamb. One thin strap of her little tank top had slid down her shoulder. Her hips looked so thin that the denim skirt she was wearing seemed to be held up over her pelvic bone by some sort of antigravitational force. Shelly tried to keep her eyes on a spot just over Josie’s shoulder as she said, “Oh, hi, Josie. Did you call the School of Music yet, about Jewett Smith?” Shelly could hear the thinness of her own voice as she spoke, and it made her want to crawl away somewhere to die.

“No,” Josie said. “But I will.”

“Thank you,” Shelly said, and turned back to her computer, stared at the blank document on which she’d only managed to type, “Funds Request.”

“Um, Shelly?”

Shelly turned and saw that Josie was chewing on the shiny pinkie fingernail of her left hand. What Shelly felt, seeing that pinkie between the girl’s teeth, could only have been described as a sharp pain in her chest—a kind of sexual agony. If she’d been standing up, her knees might have buckled. When she tried to form the word yes, nothing came out of her mouth.

Was she losing her mind?

Was this what happened to old dykes? Was this some sort of peri-menopausal insanity? She hadn’t even blinked, but there before her eyes was a flash of Josie on her back, hips propped up on one of Shelly’s flowered pillows, sleek thighs open, and Shelly parting the pink shell between her legs with her fingertips, leaning in with her own lips parted as Josie writhed beneath her—and Shelly felt a kind of terror that was so much like ecstasy that, sitting there at her desk in front of her computer, she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.

“Shelly, I have to tell you something, and I’m really sorry.”

38

Jeff Blackhawk lingered in Mira’s office, touching a few of the little things she kept on her bookshelf, turning them over in his hands—a paperweight that had been a gift from a student (velvety red rose petal floating, without weight or age, inside a glass globe), a Petoskey stone Mira had picked up on the beach during a trip to Lake Michigan the year before, a couple of paperclips. A few minutes earlier he’d stood up as if he were leaving, so Mira had stood as well, but now he seemed reluctant to go, and genuinely charged up about their conversation, which seemed like a strange and not unpleasant turn of events, as Mira couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a conversation about anything other than the weather with any of her colleagues.

She’d always thought that becoming an academic (especially if she was lucky enough to land a place, as she had, at a major research university, and then in a niche noted for its encouragement of free intellectual exploration like Godwin Honors College) would mean endless conversations in hallways, in offices. Graduate school had been rich with such talk among students, and although Mira had to admit now that she couldn’t remember, looking back, ever having actually seen two or more professors speaking to each other about anything more interesting than whether or not the copier was out of paper—still, somehow, she’d expected that when she became a professor herself she would find herself engaged in passionate daily debates in the lunchroom over the finer points of the most obscure topics.

But she could not have been more wrong.

Nightshift factory workers probably spent more time philosophizing with one another than she did with her colleagues at Godwin Honors Hall. In three years, the most passionate discussions she’d had in the lunch room pertained to the best temperature at which to keep the minifridge and who kept stealing the secretary’s Diet Cokes.

But today Jeff Blackhawk had stopped by to speak with Mira specifically about her new research. Dean Fleming had mentioned it to him in passing one afternoon, and it seemed to have genuinely seized Jeff’s interest.

Last fall, he’d had Nicole Werner in his first-year seminar, and although he claimed not to have gotten to know her very well, he had clearly been affected by her death. Like everyone else, he blamed the boyfriend. He said, “The guy used to wait for her outside our classroom, like he thought maybe she’d run off with somebody else if he didn’t walk her to and from class.”

Given Jeff’s reputation for romancing the most beautiful of his undergraduates, Mira ungenerously considered that he might have resented Craig Clements-Rabbitt’s hanging around because that would have made it hard for him to snag Nicole Werner alone. Still, Mira was flattered by his interest in her research. He had a variety of suggestions for her, and although Mira had been trained to pay the least amount of attention to the creative writers in any department (their educations were always lacking), she thought that his ideas were genuinely good ones, his anecdotes interesting.

Did she know, for instance, that for many years, until the administrators managed to squelch it, there’d been a kind of hysteria in Godwin Honors Hall among groups of students who thought it was haunted?

“There was an article in the student newspaper. You could look it up. All these reports that a girl was coming around to the rooms, looking for somebody. I mean, the story changes with the teller, but it was more or less reported that this girl was frantic, and half-dressed, and looked like she was from another era, and when they asked her who she was, she’d tell them she was Alice Meyers.”

He emphasized the name, and paused afterward, as if Mira should recognize it.

She didn’t.

“You know. The study room? In the south end of the basement?”

Mira’d had no idea that there was a study room in the south end of the basement. Despite teaching a fair number of her classes in basement classrooms (an honor given mostly to assistant professors), she’d been on the south side, where there were no classrooms, only once, in search of a student she’d been told was in the ceramics workshop and who’d left her backpack in Mira’s classroom. That side of the basement of Godwin Hall seemed to be just arts and crafts workshops, knocking pipes, and laundry facilities, although there was, she knew, a little student hangout over there somewhere called the Half-Ass, where they sometimes held poetry readings and bad student rock band concerts.

“Yeah. There’s a study room down there. They’ve quit using it, I think. It was paid for by the parents of Alice Meyers. She was a Godwin Honors College student who disappeared in 1968. She posted her name on a board at the Union for a ride home to some small town in Ohio. The last anyone saw of her she was walking around the Union, looking for her ride.”

“Jesus,” Mira said. She was used to such stories, but they still gave her goose bumps.

“Well. Anyway. There’s that. And, you know, the brass isn’t letting it out, but there was another death on campus recently. A girl over in Bryson. A freshman. They just found her dead after somebody noticed the stench outside her room. I think they can’t say for sure it was a suicide, so they’re not saying much at all. This was three weeks ago, and it hasn’t even made the papers. Luckily, I guess, her parents are nobodies from some rural town pretty far from here.”

Mira nodded. She hadn’t heard about it, but it didn’t surprise her. There was always a student who killed herself, or himself, every year in a single, in a dorm. (An excellent argument for doubles.) Always a stench. Always the possibility left open that it had been an undetected heart defect or an accidental overdose, not a suicide or, God forbid, a murder, so the university could pretend it wasn’t neglecting its young people—their mental health, their safety—although everyone knew that there wasn’t the slightest bit of attention paid in a place this big to any individual’s mental health or safety. The only people on campus with any responsibility for that at all were kids like Lucas, resident advisors, who got free room and board to pretend to be taking responsibility.

Jeff Blackhawk picked up a paperclip Mira had on the bookshelf and put it in his mouth. He held it for a second, first, between his front teeth, but then it disappeared. Being the mother of two toddlers, Mira had to check her alarm—her first instinct being to pry Jeff’s mouth open and fish it out. But Jeff managed to keep talking with the paperclip in there.

“And you know there’s that other girl from Nicole Werner’s sorority.”

“What?”

“Yeah. See?” He gestured at Mira as if he’d already proven his point. “Nobody’s getting this information. State secrets. Cover-ups all over the place. This place is full of ’em.”

“What happened? Who?”

“Denise Something. They’re trying to pass it off as a runaway situation. Supposedly she was dating some older guy, and her parents disapproved, so she disappeared off the face of the earth. It was right around the time Nicole got killed, and her sorority sisters are all saying the last time they saw Denise What’s-Her-Name was at that ghastly cherry tree thing, and then she got in a car with some guy, took her stuff with her, and that was that. The parents can’t even get the cops in this town to investigate—which of course gives the brass around here a great excuse to just toss up their hands and say, ‘Sorry your kid got lost! Not our problem! Even the cops can’t help you!’”

“What year was she?”

“Sophomore, I think. Music school. She lived in the OTT house, but the year before, she lived in Fairwell—ironically enough.”

He opened his mouth to laugh, and Mira was relieved to see the paperclip still on his tongue.

Fairwell was an all-girls dorm, and the campus folklore was that the girls who lived there as freshmen never got to be sophomores, that they all flunked out. Statistically, it wasn’t true. Fairwell girls were no more likely than any other group of freshmen to fail their first years. But it was still a struggle to fill the beds in that dorm. The university allowed students to rank their top choices, and because Fairwell was so unpopular, the dorm was mostly filled with foreign students or girls from such small towns they’d never met anyone from the university to tell them this story. (Of course, with the Internet, it was getting harder and harder to capture the ignorant.) Mira had asked the dean once, at a stiff cocktail party for junior faculty, why they didn’t just change the dorm’s name. Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Clearly, she pointed out, the rumor had started because the dorm’s name, Fairwell, was Farewell.

“Never thought of that,” he’d said. “But, nope. Marjorie Fairwell was the wife of the university’s first major donor. She’s got scads of descendants still pouring money into the place. They’d rather let it sit empty than change the name. Eventually they’ll make it a charity dorm, I suppose. All the girls there will be on financial aid or academic probation, and just grateful to have a place to sleep, period.”

Jeff leaned against her office wall, looking down at Mira’s legs. He always got there eventually, it seemed to Mira. She was surprised it had taken him so long. It must have been an indication of his sincere interest in the topic they were discussing. She asked him, “How do you know about it, this runaway, if it’s been kept so quiet?”

“A friend of mine works in the provost’s office,” Jeff said. “She’s sworn to secrecy about everything that goes on there, but a couple glasses of wine and she’s all tongue.”

Mira tried not to picture the scene inspired by the choice of words, his female friend’s tongue. Jeff was, himself, an exceptionally sexy man—tall, olive green eyes, a head of shaggy brown hair. But Mira found him as attractive as a catalog model of men’s underwear. Sure, you looked twice, but there was that problem of you existing in the three-dimensional world, and his being just a flat, glossy surface. Plus, there was Jeff’s absolute lack of discernment, it seemed. (“If she’s breathing, he’ll sleep with it,” one of the part-time language teachers had told Mira once in passing. “It’s pretty sad, really. If he were a woman, we’d all feel sorry for him and be worried about his self-esteem.”)

Mira looked at her watch (where was Clark? she needed to call) and thanked Jeff, who took the paperclip out of his mouth before he said good-bye, and put it back on her bookshelf.

39

So many years in an academic environment: that had to be the reason that Shelly’s first thought was, It’s not a dead metaphor.

Her blood really had run cold. It dropped twenty degrees in her veins as she looked up at Josie in the doorway, realizing that, because Josie never apologized for anything she did wrong in the office, this was something else. This was something bad.

Josie swallowed. Shelly could see it in the muscles on her neck, hear the little wash of spit in the girl’s mouth, as her own mouth went completely dry.

“What?” Shelly asked, curling her toes inside her suede boots. “What is it?”

“Oh, God, Shelly. You’re going to be so mad at me.” The girl was whining, but she also sounded strangely as if she were reading from a script. Without realizing it, Shelly found that she had stood up, and that she was stepping backward, as if to put some space between the two of them. “And I don’t blame you. But. Well. You know those pictures I took? With my cell phone? You know, when we—?”

Shelly raised an alarmed hand to stop Josie from going on.

No, the hand said. Don’t say it. No need to remind me. Of course she knew:

They’d been lying together in Shelly’s bed. Skin to skin. The top sheet and blanket were crumpled on the floor at the foot of it. Josie had been kissing Shelly’s neck, and her Cover Girl lipstick was smeared all over Shelly’s throat (something she’d noticed only later, at the bathroom mirror, with alarm, thinking at first that she was bleeding) and they’d been drinking red wine, and a splash of it had landed in a violent-looking slash across the bottom sheet. Shelly was a little drunk, and Josie had seemed more so. She’d giggled hard enough at a very stupid joke Shelly had told her (while licking the girl’s hip: “What do the hippies do?” “They hold the leggies on”) that she’d finally jumped out of bed squealing, “Oh, my God, stop it, Shelly, or I’m going to pee in the bed!” (Shelly had noticed that the more Josie drank the more her speech became less and less of the Valley Girl and more harder-voweled Midwestern.) After the bathroom, Josie had stumbled back to the bed with her cell phone and snuggled next to Shelly, and held the phone an arm’s length away from them, and then scooted down and sunk her sharp little front teeth pleasantly into Shelly’s nipple, and snapped the cell phone at the same time.

A giggle.

Shelly said, “What did you do?”

She knew, of course, about camera phones, knew her own cell phone had such an application, although she’d never bothered to learn how to use it, but it still took a few seconds for her to process that Josie was snapping photos, and in those seconds Josie had managed to snap another, and another, and then she climbed on top of Shelly, straddled her pelvis—the incredible warm-moist sensation of Josie’s crotch pressed onto hers—and held the phone at arm’s length again, and managed to get them both together, smiling and naked and, surely, from a distance, completely obscene.

Then Josie had snuggled back down to show Shelly the photo:

It took her breath away.

This miniaturized image of herself as a fit, creamy-skinned middle-aged woman holding a dark-haired sylph in her arms. She was lost, completely lost, and knew it, even as she took the phone from Josie herself and snapped a photo of Josie reclining, sloe-eyed, one hand cupped under her breast, and another of Josie’s dark hair floating around Shelly’s hips as she flicked Shelly’s clitoris with her tongue. After that, Josie took a photo of Shelly propped up against the headboard, legs spread, and Josie’s hand—thrillingly recognizable by the little gold and ruby ring she wore—between them. A single bright index finger disappearing inside her, and Shelly’s face registering the pleasure of it, her mouth a subtle O, eyes half-closed, the bliss of the moment, and the bliss of capturing it, perfectly and suddenly, like something snatched out of the air still buzzing and humming and coming and pinned to time forever with a tack.

If anything in this world had ever excited Shelly more, brought her more fully into this world, she could not have said what it was.

Now, as Josie stood before her in the Chamber Music Society offices, one half-naked shoulder raised in a tiny apology, Shelly recognized it, all of it, for what it was: insanity.

The undoing of her small, carefully constructed life.

Oh, how they would love it, too. After so many male professors had been taken apart, witch-hunted down for their dalliances with undergraduates, how satisfying and self-affirming it would be to chase a lesbian out the door.

“I was, you know,” Josie said, “going to email them to you, you know. I thought…” Shelly groaned a little, closed her eyes tightly. “They were on my computer. And my roommate saw them, and I guess she turned them in to the Omega Theta Tau Board.”

“Oh, Josie. Oh, my God. How could—”

Josie lifted her chin defensively, and shook her head so that the dangling pearl earrings she was wearing began to swing around in her hair.

“Well, Shelly,” she said, sounding petulant. “I’m really scared, too. I mean, I won’t tell them who, in the pictures, you know, I’m with. But I think there might be something about this in the by-laws. Like, maybe if I won’t tell them, and they think you’re a professor, or my boss, or something—”

Shelly put her head in her hands and went back to her desk chair, sank down in it. After a few seconds she said into her hands, “Please. Just let me have a few minutes to think. Alone. Please. Go.”

“Sure.”

It was said so brightly that Shelly looked up, and it was a shock to find that Josie hadn’t moved an inch, was still leaning against the doorjamb, was smiling down at Shelly, quite happily, it seemed, from a very great height.

40

“Mom?”

“Perry. Honey. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for days. Is everything okay there?”

“I’ve just been busy, Mom. I’m sorry. I started a work-study job for one of my professors, and I’ve been researching and interviewing. I lost track of how long it had been since I called.”

“Oh, Perry. Don’t let a job get in the way of your school work. That’s why you’ve got that scholarship, sweetheart, so you have time for studying, not—”

“This is like studying, Mom. It’ll be good. My professor’s writing a book. I’m getting academic credit for it, too. Really, it’ll be—”

“Okay. I believe you. I just worry when I don’t hear from you. I don’t want you to overload yourself. You don’t sound right, sweetheart. Are you sleeping? Are you okay? Is Craig okay?”

“Craig’s okay. I’m fine. I sleep.”

There was a silence and, in it, Perry thought he could hear the second hand on the clock on the kitchen wall in Bad Axe make its little snapping sound, traveling between the black dashes between numbers. He closed his eyes, saw that clock over his mother’s shoulder, and in that moment he considered, briefly, telling her everything.

Nicole. The photo. Lucas.

He imagined asking her—what? To pray for him?

To come and pick him up?

To tell him he’d lost his mind, or that, yes, this sort of thing, it happened all the time.

Girls died, and they rose from the dead.

Did he think his mother would tell him, Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. You’ll figure it all out in good time.

No, she would be stunned into silence. She would panic. She would cry. He cleared his throat, instead, in the silence, and his mother said, “Good, sweetheart. That’s good. You just be sure to get plenty of sleep and eat right, okay? And tell Craig we said hi. I sent some cookies for both of you. They should get there in another day or two.”

Perry rubbed his eyes. He said, trying to sound rested, well fed, sane, “Thanks, Mom. How’s Dad?”

“Dad’s fine. We’re both fine. Can you come home for a few days before Thanksgiving, or won’t we see you until then?”

“I’ll work on a ride,” he said. “I’ll let you know. I have to check my calendar, and with my professor.”

“Sure. We just miss you. That black bear is back.”

“Really?” Perry asked.

“Really.”

“Wow.”

The summer before, there’d been a male cub wandering around in the backyard. They’d decided it must have been orphaned. There’d been an article in the Bad Axe newspaper about a black bear found shot in a cornfield outside of town. (Someone had taken the bear’s head, and left the body, and the farmer who’d found it had called the Department of Natural Resources.) Everyone knew there were bears in the area, but there were not so many that it didn’t make the news when one was found shot and beheaded.

“You’re sure it’s the same one?” Perry asked.

“Well, it’s a lot bigger this year, and it’s got a chewed-off ear, but it has to be the same one, don’t you think?”

“Sounds like it. Is it causing trouble?”

“It figured out how to take the lid off the trash can without making any noise—but, no, otherwise, no trouble. Dad got a chain for the lid. Tiger doesn’t want to go outside much, though.”

They laughed. Tiger was the world’s most timid tom. He’d sit outside on the back steps for a few seconds every day, and if a squirrel or a bird landed in the yard, he’d start scratching at the screen door frantically to get back in.

“I saw Nicole’s parents at church last Sunday, honey.”

“Oh. How are they?”

“Not well at all, Perry. Mrs. Werner’s ill. They don’t know what’s wrong with her, but Mr. Werner talked to your dad, and told him it’s a ‘wasting disease,’ which means, I guess, that she’s losing weight and they don’t know why. I thought he looked as weak as she did. His hair’s all fallen out.”

“Oh, man.” Mr. Werner hadn’t even been balding when Perry last saw him. “Is it cancer? I mean, Mrs. Werner?”

“Well, of course that’s what we all think, but I guess the doctors say no. They’ve even been down there, to the university hospital, for some tests, and they wanted Jenny to come back in six weeks, but Mr. Werner said they couldn’t go back. They just can’t be in that town, because of—”

“Of course.”

“And I saw the baby. Mary’s baby.”

It took Perry several seconds to realize who his mother was talking about. For a startled second he thought—when she said, “baby,” “Mary”—of his imaginary friend, and the sister who’d died as a baby before him. “Baby Edwards.” But then he remembered, both with relief and a stab of bitter pain: Mary.

“How is she?”

“Well, she’s living with her sister now. The father, you heard what happened?”

It occurred to Perry then that his mother thought Bad Axe news made the news all over the state. “No. What?”

“Oh, he was injured. Brain damaged. He was in a hospital in Germany until last week, and now he’s in North Carolina. One of those crazy bomber people.”

“God,” Perry said, and could think of nothing more to say.

“Perry, you still don’t sound right.”

“I’m fine, Mom.” He rubbed his eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone, trying hard to sound “right.” “Look, I’ll call you in a few days about when I can come home. I just have to check on some things, okay?”

“That’s fine, darling. You just keep up with your studies. That’s what matters. You’re keeping up?”

“Yeah, Mom. I’m doing well.”

“I knew you would be. I knew you would. I love you, Perry.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

“Bye, baby. Talk to you later.”

Perry had put the phone in the cradle and was headed to the fridge (peanut butter? crackers and cheese?) when the apartment door slammed open, and Craig burst in, hair wild around his face and his eyes wide with—what? Horror? Awe? Joy?

“Read it. Read it,” he said, holding a small square of paper out to Perry in a trembling hand.

41

The dean of the music school and his administrative assistant were waiting for Shelly in his office when she arrived.

Shelly hadn’t slept that night but she’d run enough scalding hot water, followed by freezing cold water, over herself in the morning, and then consumed enough caffeine, that she thought she might at least look like someone with a heartbeat. She’d worn her gray suit, which hadn’t been out of the dry-cleaning sheath in the closet for two years, and some pastel makeup, brown mascara, eyeliner. She was trying to look sexless, she supposed, but not like a sexless lesbian. Low-heeled pumps. Pantyhose. Some lace along the collar of her blouse. She’d painted her fingernails peach. She reached out and put her hand on the threshold of the dean’s doorway before stepping in, and tried to breathe slowly—in through her nose, out through her mouth, counting to four, although she forgot to stop at four, and found that she had been exhaling a long time before she realized she was still counting, and that the dean and the administrative assistant were looking up at her gravely.

The dean seemed to be choking with embarrassment in his necktie. The administrative assistant, who was very young and very pretty and new enough in her position that Shelly hadn’t met her in person yet, looked up, but not at Shelly. Her blue eyes traveled across the wall and fixed on the ceiling. She folded her cool little hands on a yellow legal pad in her lap.

Looking at those lily-white hands, Shelly reminded herself, inhaling, that she must not faint. And she must not cry. And she must not let her voice shake. And she must not put her own hands over her face and stifle a terrible little sobbing scream—although she’d done this at least once each hour since getting the news that a formal grievance had been filed against her, and that she should probably consult with a lawyer.

“Hello,” the dean said, rising from his chair just long enough to get his butt a few inches off the seat before setting it back down, tightening his tie as if to hang himself, and then gesturing with a flat open hand to his administrative assistant. “This is Allison. She’ll be taking notes. Have a seat, Ms. Lockes.”

The dean hadn’t called Shelly “Ms. Lockes” since he’d hired her. Although she would not have called him a personal friend, they had known each other a long time now. She’d watched him go gray. She’d sent cards to his children when they graduated from this or that, and a bouquet to his house when his sister died. He’d always liked her, and she him. They had, she thought, seen one another as occupying together an island of good taste in a sea of philistinism. Early on, he’d complained bitterly to her about the new Jazz Department, but that turned out to be nothing compared to the folk/rock, and then the pop/rock, course offerings that followed with the years. Their only disagreement when it came to music was about Mozart, whom Dean Spindler saw as superior to Handel. Shelly had insisted on her own assessment: that Mozart was a youthful machine, brilliant but soulless, and that Handel was a mortal who’d gotten a glimpse of eternity and put notes to it. Dean Spindler had charmingly pretended to be offended, but for Christmas she’d given him a recording of Giulio Cesare, and during Christmas break he’d emailed her telling her he’d been listening to it nonstop:

“Did you bring your lawyer?” he asked.

Shelly shook her head. She sat down in the empty chair across from him. “I don’t have a lawyer,” she said.

“But you were advised to seek legal counsel?”

Shelly nodded, but he seemed to be waiting for her to speak. “Yes,” she said, and the administrative assistant scratched lightly across her pad without looking either at Shelly or at the words she was writing, as if she were trying to take notes without being accused of taking notes.

“We need to have that for the record—that you were advised to bring a lawyer, and chose not to do so,” the dean said.

Shelly nodded.

“Also, we need to have it on record that you understand what this disciplinary action is about.” He cleared his throat then, but he seemed less embarrassed now, emboldened by the high moral ground on which he safely stood. “So, do I need to show you the photographs, or can I simply describe them, and you can tell me whether or not you’re one of the subjects in them?”

“You don’t need to do that,” Shelly said. There was no way to keep her voice from cracking. It was as if it belonged to someone else.

“Actually, I’m required to do that. Believe me, I’d rather not. But if you don’t confirm that the photographic evidence we’re using is the same evidence you’re familiar with, later you could claim confusion, and this could go on forever.”

Now he sounded bitter. Put out. She was, she knew, probably adding all sorts of tedious tasks to his day, not to mention the discomfort, the unsavory nature of this.

“It won’t go on forever,” Shelly said, “believe me,” and then she put her face in her hands and began to weep, exactly in the manner she had vowed not to. With hysterical abandon. With deep wrenching sobs. With bottomless grief and self-pity and self-loathing. She had no idea what the dean and his assistant were doing as she wept, but no one said a word, or seemed to move, stand, leave the room, sneeze. It was as if they were frozen in time, and in horror, somewhere beyond her weeping. She wept and wept, and it was only when she realized that she had no choice—that she was going to drown right there in her own palms, her accumulated tears, if she didn’t ask for a tissue—that Shelly finally looked up and saw that the administrative assistant was gone.

The dean, it seemed, had been paralyzed into silence. He managed to hand her a tissue, but the expression on his face as he did so was that of someone who’d been staring into an abyss of shame so long that its reflection was permanently etched on his face. She took the tissue from him, and then he handed her the whole box. He was squinting, as if Shelly were very far away from him, or incomprehensible in every detail, and then he said, like an actor stepping off a stage, “Shelly. Jesus. What the hell happened here? How did this happen?”

She opened and closed her mouth, but finally quit trying to speak. There were tears running off her lips. She could only imagine what her face looked like.

“You do understand,” he asked her, “don’t you, that this means the end of your employment with the university? And that’s the best-case scenario. Who knows what other complications could follow? Lawsuits? Investigations?”

Shelly nodded, and he rubbed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, addressed the ceiling:

“You can have a day or two to clean out your office, and until the final paperwork, all of that, and the various committees, et cetera, you’ll officially be on leave, with your salary. Again, you can get yourself a lawyer, but I have to tell you in all honesty, especially with our new policies regarding inappropriate use of power in student/faculty and employer/employee relationships, it’s—”

“I know,” Shelly said. “I know. I know.”

He looked at her again, and then he nodded gently toward the door, and Shelly stood.

He said good-bye as she stepped out the door, but she couldn’t turn around.

42

Even with the distraction of Lucas and Perry and teaching and meetings, Mira had been bereft without the twins. She found herself lingering in the doorway of their room, staring into it, feeling the kind of grief that would have been more suited, she thought, to their deaths than to their being gone for two days to visit their grandmother. When she found the UPS package with their Halloween costumes in it, she’d ripped it open, and her eyes had welled with tears.

She had ordered them off the Internet:

Little cow hoods with little cow horns, little hoofed hands, black and white spots.

The boys had been going through a cow phase for months. At the petting zoo they’d stood enraptured before one particular enormous bovine mass of weight and skepticism, humid nose pulsing, as if recognizing something from their previous lives.

The cow chewed her cud with such pensive blankness, looking from Matty to Andy, Andy to Matty (both were struck dumb in her presence), for so long that Mira finally felt the need to pull them back, fearing that this cow was either as in love with them as they were with her or was about to let loose her many years of petting zoo resentment and frustration on them.

But as Mira tried to take the twins’ arms and guide them over to the llama, they began to shriek with the kind of outrage she’d seen on documentaries about parents trying to kidnap their children from cults.

And, after that day, everything was cows.

Cows in books. Cows in magazines. Cows in pastures glimpsed in passing from the freeway.

Mira had delighted the twins with two stuffed Beanie Baby cows one afternoon. She’d stopped and bought them at the bookstore on her way home from the office. Each of them had snatched one of the cows up and now guarded it jealously from the other. She had no idea how they could tell the cows apart, but they could. Once, she accidentally tried to tuck Matty’s cow into bed with Andy, and he’d sneered at it in disgust and tossed it over to his brother, exclaiming what sounded to Mira like, “Buckholtz!” or “Bullshit!” She was hoping it was bullshit, which would mean that the “imitative stage” of their language development, as the books she was reading called it, was getting on schedule. She had no doubt that they’d heard both her and Clark utter that word on numerous occasions.

They slept with the cows. They carried the cows with them everywhere. And, unlike every other toy they’d had so far in their short lives, they never lost the cows. The cows were never dropped and forgotten at the supermarket. They were never left behind in the backseat of the car overnight.

So, after that success, Mira had brought home a couple of plastic cows one night after teaching, and Matty and Andy had gone crazy with delight. A few days later, she bought a couple of cow-decorated cookies at a specialty bakery that she passed on her way to the parking ramp. They loved the cookies, licked the cookies, but they shrank from Mira when she pointed to her own teeth, her own open mouth, suggesting that they eat the cookies.

“You’re overcompensating,” Clark had said.

“What?”

“Overcompensating,” Clark said. “Trying to buy them off.”

“Buy them off?” Mira had tried to follow him down the hallway, to ask him what exactly she’d be overcompensating for, but he’d gone into the bathroom and shut the door and stayed in there until she had to leave for work.

In the nursery, Mira tacked up a poster of a cow grazing on a grassy hillside in Vermont, and every morning before they were taken out of their cribs the twins would stand and gaze at the poster, babble to each other in their language about the cow:

“Descher neigelein harva stora.”

“Gott swieten mant brounardfel.”

Mira imagined they were speculating. Was the cow happy? Did she have a family? Would her future be as peaceful as her present seemed to be? But when Mira herself pointed at the cow and said, “Cow!” and then waited for them to say the word, they looked at her blankly. “Haller,” one or the other would say. “Haller,” one or the other would reinforce. Then, they mirrored her own expectancy, waiting, it seemed, for her to say the word. To confirm it. To show that she understood what a haller was—that it was black and white and grazing on a grassy hillside in Vermont right in front of her face—and it was all Mira could do to keep from saying it (clearly they were talking about the same thing here, trying to give it a name), but she said, “Cow,” again, more desperately this time, and with less assurance, and they looked, she thought, disappointed in her.

When Clark had finally walked in the door with the twins that afternoon, Mira got on her knees and embraced them so tightly for so long that Matty, who could never get enough, finally pulled away, looking alarmed.

“Mommy just really, really missed you,” she said, and Matty gave her a reassuring kiss on the crown of her head and patted her shoulder as if she were an old woman in a nursing home. She’d looked up then and caught Clark’s eye, and they’d both laughed. She stood and embraced him, and he seemed to take her in his arms with genuine warmth. “I missed you,” Mira said, and they kissed—not a lingering kiss, but she’d felt the goodwill in it. He must have missed her, too.

Now she was hoping they’d have a good, peaceful evening. She’d bought two tuna steaks from the expensive gourmet market near campus. The woman behind the fish counter had wrapped them in several layers of white paper, and Mira had carried them hopefully home. Clark used to like to cook tuna steaks in sesame oil—pink in the middle, seared white on the outside. It had been at least a year since he’d done that, but she recalled that they were always delicious, and Mira fantasized that he’d make the fish that night after the boys went to bed, while she tossed a salad and boiled rice.

Maybe, after dinner and a last glass of wine, they would make love.

Clark seemed refreshed, in a better mood than he’d been in for a while. The only jab he’d made when she mentioned his good mood was, “It was nice to have some help.”

Maybe, then, he’d seen the look on her face and was as eager as she was to avoid a fight, because he’d qualified it right away:

“My mother really takes over, you know. She’d have spoon-fed me for two days if I’d let her. She had the boys up and dressed and playing with an old set of my blocks before I woke up both mornings.”

Since then they’d had only one stiff exchange—he couldn’t find his running shoes, which he’d left under the bed, but which, before finding them, he accused Mira of having put “in the toybox or something” while he was gone—and one argument that had ensued when she found, after Clark had left to go running, a note in his handwriting on the kitchen counter:

Mira had held the torn piece of notebook paper in her hand for quite a while, staring at it, trying to discern its meaning. For a crazy second she imagined he was referring to Jeff Blackhawk, but never once had she spoken to Jeff Blackhawk on the phone. Still, Jeff was honestly the only man who’d even looked at her, as far as she could tell, since before the twins were born.

Surely, she thought, Clark couldn’t be referring to any of the boyfriends she’d had before they were married?

When he came back in the door, Mira held the piece of paper up, and said, “What is this?”

Panting, red-faced, sweat trickling in zigzagging rivulets down his cheeks, Clark didn’t meet her eyes. He brushed past her to the bedroom.

“Clark?” she asked, following him.

“You know perfectly well, Mira. Your Eagle Scout. Your ‘work-study’ student,” he said, making air quotation marks around the word, and sat on the edge of the bed and began unlacing his shoes.

“Perry Edwards? Perry’s my boyfriend now?” Mira laughed. “Perry’s nineteen.” Relieved, Mira thought, It’s a joke, that’s it, and reached out to ruffle Clark’s sweaty hair, but when he felt her hand on his head, he flinched away from her.

“Clark?” Mira said. “You’re joking, right?”

“Yeah,” Clark said. “That’s right. I’m a big joker. Or, I’m a big joke.”

He took his shirt off, soaked with sweat, tossed it on the bedroom floor, and walked past her. He was, Mira saw for the first time, losing a bit of weight. He didn’t have the chiseled look of a few years before, but he was getting there. The extra ten (fifteen?) pounds he’d put on was coming off.

“What’s this about?”

Mira whispered it, following Clark past the twins’ room. They were blessedly asleep an hour earlier than usual.

“Clark?”

He’d continued to the bathroom and gotten in the shower. She stood outside, staring at the bathroom door until, finally, she went into the living room and tried to read the newspaper. When he came back out, he seemed to have forgotten the argument.

“Glass of wine? A little QT?” he’d asked.

She told him about the fish, and that she’d ordered Halloween costumes for the boys that she wanted to show him. She put two glasses of wine on the coffee table, and when he came into the living room—face still flushed, hair damp—Mira held up the cow costumes, and said, “Can you even believe how cute these are?”

Clark looked at them as if he didn’t recognize them as children’s costumes at first, and then he blinked, and he said with so little emotion that he might as easily have been expressing hatred or contempt as complete apathy, “Are those for the boys?”

“Yeah,” Mira said, and couldn’t help adding, although as soon as she did she wished she hadn’t, “Who else?”

“I’m just asking,” Clark said, “because cows aren’t boys.”

It took Mira a few seconds to compose any kind of response at all, and then she said, “I’m aware of that, Clark,” and let the costumes drop to her lap.

“Well, the twins are. Boys, that is. Males.”

“Thanks for that penetrating insight,” Mira said, and began to put the costumes back in the box.

“Well, it seems to me like, I don’t know, Mira—bulls, Superman, something like that might be more appropriate for two little boys for Halloween? I mean, I’m sorry if this offends you, or it’s too burdensome to come up with something gender-appropriate. It’s not like I suggested that you sew a thousand sequins onto a handmade serpent costume or something.”

Oh, yes.

The handmade serpent costume with the thousand sequins was something Clark’s mother had made for him when he was a kid. It was something he’d told Mira about his mother when they’d first started dating, to give her a sense of the woman who’d raised him—her fanatical dedication to her son, how seriously she’d taken her role as Homemaker. (“I wore the thing once,” he’d said. “The woman would have been perfectly happy to go blind making my Halloween costume.”)

They’d been driving in the dark together, Clark at the wheel. Mira couldn’t see his face, but there was no mistaking the grief, maybe even the shame, in his voice. She’d reached across to him, taken his hand, and her own eyes had filled with tears. She’d wanted, then, completely, to love Clark with that kind of devotion herself. She wanted to be, someday, the kind of mother to his child who would sew a thousand green sequins to a felt suit simply because the child had a passing fancy for sea serpents. She would be that kind of mother, she vowed to herself then, even if, someday, it pained her children to consider those pointless sacrifices. She wanted those she loved to be that certain of her love.

Now, looking up at Clark, Mira said, “Well, I wish I had time to stay home and sew the boys’ costumes myself, but I have to pay the fucking rent. Somebody around here has to work to pay the fucking rent.”

Mira hadn’t even noticed that Clark had the newspaper in his hand until he’d thrown it at her, and it had fallen in a wrinkled rasping disorder around her, and she was grabbing it up by the fistfuls and ripping it to pieces, throwing it back at him as he headed for the door.

43

“Hell Week? Is this, like, hazing? You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, why would you join a ‘club’ that tortured you for a week?”

“It helps you bond,” Nicole said, and Craig choked a little on his milkshake. The way she said it was so sweet, so utterly naïve. “It makes it so you’re really sisters,” she went on.

“Nicole, I thought you already did this during ‘Challenge’ Month. I mean, if having to wear the same pair of panties for four weeks didn’t cement your bond, what good will Hell Week do?”

“Come on, Craig. You promised not to joke about that.”

He nodded. He had. He’d promised up and down as a way of getting her to tell him what she was so self-conscious about in November. He’d assumed she was planning on dumping him, since every time he kissed her she found some reason to squirm away, and even in the cafeteria she sat as far from him as you could get and still be technically eating a meal with someone. He’d showed up outside the Omega Theta Tau house after one of her “secret meetings” on a Tuesday night, holding a bouquet of red roses, and she’d burst into tears and started to run away from him. By the time he finally caught up with her, half a block away, he was crying, too. He grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away and she started to beg, “Please, please, just stay away from me for a few more days.”

“Why? Nicole, I love you. What’s wrong?”

She ran a little farther, but weakly, seeming to be losing her will to run from him, until he managed to pull her into an alleyway between a liquor store and a sushi place. By this time, he’d already tossed the roses onto a park bench. He grabbed her arms in both of his and pulled her to him, and she sobbed, but she also went limp when he wouldn’t let go, and he muttered into her hair, “Please. Nicole. I’m dying here. I love you. Just tell me.”

“You’ll hate me,” she said. She sobbed. “You’ll think I’m so stupid. You’ll think I’m so, so—gross. You’ll laugh at me, or you’ll tell people. You’ll—”

“Don’t tell me what I’ll do, Nicole! There’s nothing that would make me hate you. And I’d never betray you. You’re the most precious, the most—”

“Okay! Okay! My underpants!” she shouted. Some guy walking by the alley did a double-take then, and Nicole cringed, buried her head in her hands, and said it again in a ragged whisper. “My underpants.” And again. “My underpants.”

“What?” A slideshow of brief, crazy images flashed through his mind. He saw a football team throwing Nicole’s panties around on a field, panties flown from a flagpole, panties for sale on eBay, photographs of panties tacked to bulletin boards, and then she said, “They’re dirty. You’ll just tell me how stupid I am.”

It took a long time in the alley, and a lot of tears soaked into his corduroy jacket, to get the story out. She had three more days to wear them. On Saturday she had to hand over the filthy things to the Omega Theta Tau president in some sort of ritual celebration of sisterhood. Then she could wear new ones.

Nicole sobbed, “I can smell them.”

It was hard not to laugh, but even harder not to lecture:

“This is absurd, Nicole. You’re not joining the armed forces here. You shouldn’t have to do this kind of shit just to live in a big house with a bunch of prom queens.”

“I knew you’d—!”

“Okay, okay,” Craig said, and closed his mouth by pressing his lips to her forehead.

That was back in November. Now, the first week of March, she was informing him that for Hell Week she wasn’t going to be able to leave the basement of the Omega Theta Tau house except to attend classes.

“What the hell—no pun intended—are you going to be doing down there?”

“They don’t tell you. But the girls from last year said it was mostly different projects. Stuff for events. And tests on Pan-Hellenic things, facts. The Founders.” She shrugged.

“That’s total, unadulterated bullshit,” Craig said. “Why would you need to be in the basement?”

“It’s a trial.” Nicole lifted her chin, and he could see that it was quivering. “It’s a tradition.” She lifted a shoulder, let it fall. “I actually think it sounds fun.”

“Fun?”

“You’re not in a fraternity, Craig. I don’t think you can relate to… to…”

“You got that right,” Craig said. The waitress came over to their table then and started to take Nicole’s plate away even though she’d never touched her grilled cheese. Craig put his hand out and waved the waitress away. “She’s still eating that,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” the waitress said without a shred of sarcasm, and held her hands up as if he’d tried to slap her. She was one of those infuriating middle-aged Midwestern women who used her friendliness like a weapon. Already she’d complimented everything about the two of them before she’d bothered to take their orders—I love your coat, I love your sweater, I love your hair thing, I love your ring, I love your boots. Craig had stared at the menu, imagining his mother shooing this woman away: Thanks, we love you, too…

But Nicole engaged the waitress exuberantly, told her that the sweater was from the Gap, that Craig’s coat was from the Salvation Army (!), that the hair thing was just a scrunchie of her sister’s, that the boots were Uggs, and the ring—Craig had given her the ring.

Here, at least, Craig quit grimacing at his menu and looked up at the waitress looking at the ring on Nicole’s right hand. Nicole held it up to her like a queen waiting for it to be kissed.

“Wow,” the waitress said, taking Nicole’s little fingertips in her own, twisting her hand so she could see the ring in better light. “Wow. It’s sap, isn’t it? There’s… something in it.” She bent down to look at it closely.

“A little fruit fly,” Nicole said proudly. “It could be forty million years old.”

Craig had told her this.

His science teacher in sixth grade at Fredonia Middle had kept a little collection of things stuck in amber—a spider, a frog, some mosquitoes. He’d even had a piece of amber with what looked like a long black hair floating in it, and another with two sad little ants scrambling over each other to get out before they were trapped in the stuff forever. Craig had been horrified and thrilled by the idea that, as Mr. Barfield had explained it, they’d probably stumbled in there in the first place because they were attracted to the whole sticky mess. Imagine, he’d thought, having the evidence of your fuck-up preserved for millions of years in amber.

“It’s not sap,” Craig told the waitress. “It’s resin.”

The waitress nodded then as if that were the most interesting thing she’d ever heard in her life, left their table finally, tossed the piece of paper with their order at the cook, and then disappeared, later leaving their sandwiches under the red lamps on the counter between the kitchen and the restaurant for a good ten minutes. When she finally brought them over to the table, they were stone-cold.

“Why do you have to be so negative?” Nicole asked after the waitress was gone. “What difference does it make? If you were a Greek, you’d be doing something like this, and I’d understand.”

“Look, Nicole. Hell Week, whatever. Do what you have to do—but, like, don’t expect me not to be unhappy that I’m not going to see you for a week. I mean, if you were going to Spain or something, I’d get it, but sewing doilies in a basement?”

The tears that had been pricking at the inner corners of Nicole’s eyes ever since he’d waved the waitress away turned into the real thing. When they started to run pathetically down the side of her nose, one of them even spilling over her upper lip, Craig jumped up from his seat and came around to her side of the booth, and put his arms around her, and kissed it away.

“Never mind, never mind. I’m an asshole, I’m sorry,” he said, kissing and kissing. “Do your damn doilies. Just come back to me. I can’t survive without you.” He took her face in his hands and looked at it.

Nicole inhaled a wavering, aborted laugh before she put her head on his shoulder and started to cry even harder:

“But you’re never going to understand. It’ll always be this thing between us. You’ll always be laughing at me. I just—”

“Are you saying you want to break up?” Craig asked, stiffening, trying not to shout it. He was painfully aware of the waitress hovering around behind him now, and knew she wasn’t going to go anywhere until she’d caught enough of this conversation to figure out what the problem was. He lowered his voice, and said, “So, you want to dump me for some frat asshole? Is that what this is about?” He started to pull away, and then Nicole reached out and grabbed the lapel of his corduroy jacket, bunched it up in her fist, the way a baby would, and it made him want to start sobbing, too, looking at her small soft hand clutching at his Salvation Army jacket. (She’d bought it for him. She and her sorority sisters had gone to the thrift shop to buy costumes for some carnival they were planning, and she’d seen it there. “I knew you’d look so cute in it! And it was your size!”)

“No, Craig. No. I want you, but I just wish—”

“I told you, Nicole, I’ll think about it. I can’t join this year anyway. Next year, okay? I’ll think about next year, okay?” She didn’t nod or say anything, just continued to clutch the jacket with her face against his shoulder. “Okay?”

She whimpered a little, and then she said, “No. You won’t. You’d hate it.”

Craig was about to try to deny it, but then she looked up at him and she had a little smile on her face—a wistful, regretful little smile like nothing he’d ever seen on her face before, maybe never before seen on anyone’s face.

She said it again, “You’d hate it,” and started to laugh. “I can just see you.” She was laughing really hard now, and he started to laugh, too, looking at her, looking at him, regarding him, and he realized what it was, that expression—that she was recognizing him, that she knew him for exactly what he was, and it amused her:

Despite herself, she liked what she saw.

She maybe loved what she saw.

He could see it in her eyes.

Had anyone ever looked at him that way?

Craig felt as if he were made of glass, that a note played now on a violin or a flute could shatter him into a thousand pieces. He was trembling, he realized, and he had her hair in his hands, and he was trying to keep himself from sobbing out loud, and he vowed in that moment, not for the first time, that whatever she wanted, whatever it took to keep her, for the rest of his life, for the rest of her life, he would do it.

A bitterly cold wind blew through their booth at that moment, and he instinctively turned to look at the door of the diner. Someone had come in—a silhouetted figure in the doorway, blurred in Craig’s teary eyes—and the figure stood in the threshold for a second or two before Craig, blinking, looking more closely, recognized him just as he turned quickly and walked back out the door.

Craig pulled away from Nicole, and nodded toward the door. “That was him,” he said.

“Who?”

“That guy. The EMT guy, Nicole. The fucking ambulance driver. He saw us, and he left.”

“What EMT guy?” Nicole asked, bringing her napkin to her eyes to wipe them. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve seen him, that guy, like five times at your sorority. I told you already. Remember? I told you that I keep seeing him around there. Who is he?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Craig. I don’t even know what EMT stands for.”

Craig didn’t bother to argue with her, or to tell her what EMT stood for. He watched the plate glass window to see if the guy would walk past it, but he must have gone the other way: To avoid the window? To avoid being seen by Craig?

Craig stood up, as if to follow, although he had no idea what he’d do if he caught up with the guy—and, anyway, Nicole took the sleeve of his jacket in her hand and tugged him back down to her, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him so sweetly, and for so long, that even the waitress, who’d been watching them, must have felt embarrassed, and went away.

44

“Let me get the mail,” Perry said, trying to grab Craig’s elbow as he turned from the window to the door, but Craig was already gone before Perry could stop him.

They’d been watching from the window together, waiting. Below, the mailman was finally crossing the street, his face down against what must have been a pretty stiff wind (a bright end-of-October day, not a cloud in the sky, but the bare branches of the trees were being whipped around mercilessly, and the wind blowing through the gaps between the window frames and the glass panes felt frigid to Perry). The mailman disappeared from view for a few minutes, presumably standing in the foyer of their apartment house, sorting and distributing. Then they saw him emerge and start to walk across the grass to the apartment house next door, a bright red leaf stuck to his blue cap, scores of other leaves catching to his black boots as he trampled through them.

Perry stayed behind in the apartment and listened to the stairs make their familiar groaning and rattling sounds as Craig slammed down them in his sneakers on his way to the mailbox. He could even hear the missed beat of Craig skipping over the seventh step.

A week earlier, someone’s foot had punched through that one, and there was a hole in it now that you had to avoid if you didn’t want to end up knee-deep in the stairwell on your way up or down. No one in the building seemed to know who it was who’d gone through it first, but since then, one of the girls next door had twisted her ankle, and she was on crutches, so Perry had left the landlord a message about the problem. When there was no response to that, he left a note at the top and bottom of the stairs himself (“CAUTION, HOLE IN SEVENTH STEP”), and when the girl on crutches found out that Perry was the one who’d put up the sign, she hobbled over with some cookies she’d baked, to thank him for his concern.

The cookies had tasted like cardboard, but she was a pretty girl—bright red cheeks and dyed black hair cut in a kind of bowl shape around her head. If she’d told him her name, Perry had forgotten it. A couple days after Perry taped up the warning, someone had written on the bottom of it, “Signed, Rumpelstiltskin.”

Craig must have fished the mail out of their little metal box by now. Perry could hear him coming back up, taking the stairs two at a time. Maybe three at a time. He could hear what sounded like panting, and then Craig shoved the door open and stood there in the threshold holding another fluttering white postcard out to Perry in one hand, a handful of glossy pizza and sub sandwich flyers in the other.

“It’s her. It’s really her,” Craig said. “It’s another postcard from her.”

Perry took a step carefully toward him and took the postcard from Craig’s hand. It looked the same as the last one—one of those prestamped post office cards made of thin, pulpy paper. Perry looked at the address, reading Craig’s name there, and then he flipped it over.

He had to rub his eyes, and look again, and then rub his eyes again:

The handwriting.

Perry had been seeing that handwriting for years. Soft fat pencil on lined paper. Crayon signatures at the bottom of art projects. Invitations, exclamations pinned to lockers, notes he’d had to borrow, to copy, in Global Studies, in AP English, for classes he’d missed, and poems written out in this handwriting in a poetry workshop he’d taken with her in eleventh grade.

He rubbed his eyes again, but Perry would have recognized those loopy lowercase consonants anywhere, even if he didn’t know exactly the kind of poem she would have written to Craig on a postcard. Mr. Brenner had taught them about slant rhyme. He’d been especially harsh with Nicole (whose poems always rhymed: “What’s the point otherwise?!” she’d said) regarding her “moon/June predilections.”

She’d been a good student. She’d absorbed the lesson completely by the end of the quarter, and gone on to critique her classmates’ poems for exactly the same thing Mr. Brenner had said about hers.

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said, “Jesus Christ,” as he sank onto the couch, the postcard still in his hand. His heart was slamming against his ribs. He hadn’t been sure before, despite what he himself believed about Nicole and despite all Craig’s insistence. The last postcard had only said, I miss you. N. It could have been from anyone. It could have been a sick prank. Perry had said this to Craig, who’d seemed to take it in, but for the past two days, the way he’d been waiting for the mail, it was obvious he’d only been humoring Perry while waiting for another postcard from Nicole.

“Fuck,” Perry said, and he handed it back to Craig, and then he turned around, heart still slamming, and hands shaking. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

Until now, he hadn’t believed anything, had he? He’d been unable to believe anything. He’d been on a search for something, but he hadn’t expected to find it.

Now, Perry’s hands were trembling, and he felt his throat all but close in a kind of panicked voicelessness when Craig said, as soberly as Craig had ever said anything, “She’s not dead, Perry. Or. She’s—she’s something.”

Perry looked up at him, and found himself both shocked and not even surprised to see what he saw:

Craig was happy.

Craig didn’t even seem confused.

Craig had a bright look on his face that Perry hadn’t seen there since before the accident. He looked, Perry thought, like the girls at Confirmation Camp right after the Final Acceptance of Christ into Our Hearts ceremony: shiny-eyed, full of faith, seeing beyond this world and its flimsy trappings. Ecstasy. That look was ecstasy.

He had to tell him. He had to show him the photograph. He had to tell Craig about Lucas, and Patrick Wright, and Professor Polson. Until this, it had seemed too crazy, too cruel. But now—now Craig had to know.

But first, Perry had to call Professor Polson. He had to ask her advice. He had to tell her about this.

“I have to go for a walk,” he said. “I have to clear my head. And I need to call someone. Give me your cell phone.”

“Sure,” Craig said. “Sure. Sure.” Nodding like a lunatic. Smiling like a little kid. He’d have given Perry anything at that moment. If they’d been standing on a rooftop, Craig could have flown right off of it. Not only had he been expiated from the worst crime imaginable—killing the person you love the most in the world—he’d also learned that the dead could come back to life. He handed his cell phone to Perry as he continued to cradle the flimsy postcard in his hands, the way he might an injured bird. He wandered out of the living room with it like a zombie, back to his room, seeming to be laughing and crying at the same time.

Perry didn’t bother to put on his coat. He just turned up the collar of his shirt against the wind and dialed Professor Polson’s phone number as soon as he was out of the apartment house.

Her office phone rang and rang, and finally he hung up before her voice mail clicked in. He’d have to call her at home. He didn’t want to, but he had to know what to do next. Whom else could he ask? Still, he hesitated. The last time he’d called, a couple of days before, Professor Polson’s husband had answered and said she was in the shower, and then hung up without saying good-bye, as if he were pissed that Perry had called.

“Hello?”

It was the husband again.

“Hello. This is Perry Edwards, Professor Polson’s—”

“Work-study,” the husband said. “As usual, she’s not available. I’ll tell her you called again, pal.”

He hung up with what sounded like the receiver slamming against a wall.

45

Mira hadn’t slept or eaten for a day and a half. For the first half hour, she tried to fake it for her class, but that eventually proved impossible. Every time she stood up from the desk with a piece of chalk and headed for the blackboard, the blackboard telescoped away from her. She wrote the same thing on it twice without realizing that she had:

She only noticed it when Karess Flanagan pointed out that she’d spelled it differently the second time. Then, Mira had turned around, and, indeed, there it was, misspelled the second time. She had no memory of having written it on the board the first time.

She was trying to conduct a class on the subject of Frau Holle-Percht, the German Death Demon, the “Hidden One.” It was usually one of her favorite classes to teach. The students had been assigned to read the translation of a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript from Tegemsee condemning the pagan practice of decorating houses in December to appease the Death Demon and the leaving of little cakes on the hearth for “Frau Holle and her seven lads.”

It was an epiphany for eighteen-year olds, making the connection between Santa Claus and the fear of death. There was always at least one student in every class who’d been afraid of Santa Claus as a child, and told a story of lying awake on Christmas Eve terrified.

But that day Mira got only as far as the custom of tossing little swaddled dolls into the darkness on December 24 (still practiced in a village in the Harz Mountains that Mira had visited her Fulbright year) to try to trick Frau Holle into believing she was being given the families’ actual “dead” babies, and she began to tear up. Where were her own fucking babies right now?

She’d come home from an Honors College curriculum committee meeting later than she’d said she would Tuesday night because there’d been an unexpected challenge to the syllabus for her proposed upper-level seminar on Death and the Cultural Landscape. The chair of the committee wanted to know why Mira had chosen to substitute “field study” for one of the two required theses, and Mira had found herself having to explain that the field study was a precursor to the thesis, that the field study would be the foundation upon which a thesis would be written, and that it would be impossible to accomplish both in a meaningful way in fifteen weeks if she had to assign two papers.

Even Dean Fleming, who’d urged her to propose the course in the first place, had seemed skeptical, and the meeting ended with nothing more than an agreement to revisit the proposal at the next meeting, although it also managed to run an hour over.

It was raining when Mira finally got out of Godwin Hall, and she had no umbrella. She was ruining her shoes, she knew—nice Italian leather pumps she’d bought on sale a few years before—but she couldn’t risk calling Clark for a ride. He’d have had to bring the twins out with him in the rain, and all the car seat stuff, and he’d specifically asked Mira to get home as early as she could because he wanted to go to a meeting of the Armchair Philosophers, a book group recommended by one of the mothers from the regular Espresso Royale play dates. This mother, too, had been on her way to a degree in philosophy (“The real thing,” Clark had said of her, “studying with Kurdak at Princeton”), which had been derailed by a baby. The group she’d talked Clark into joining sounded to Mira like exactly the kind of thing Clark would despise, but he seemed to want to go.

“I don’t know,” he’d said noncommittally, “probably a waste of time, but she said these were serious people, and that the group might save my life.”

Clark snorted then at his own words, but Mira could tell that he’d confided in this coffee klatsch companion that his life needed saving, and that her advice meant something to him. Mira might have been suspicious of Clark’s relationship with this female philosopher, except that a few weeks earlier, on the street outside the hardware store, Clark had introduced Mira to her (Deirdre), and Mira had seen that not only was Deirdre pregnant again—seven months—but that the rolling enormity of that pregnancy was on top of what appeared to be already a lot of excess weight. His interest really was, it seemed, solely in the club, and the idea that Clark might rekindle his passion for philosophy filled Mira with a kind of hope that also felt like panic. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed that Clark—the one with the books piled up beside the bed, the one with the pencil tucked behind his ear.

So, now she was filled with grief for the lost opportunity of the Armchair Philosophers as she ran for their apartment, her shoes filling with water (she could literally feel the fine stitches and the glue that held them together melting around her feet), knowing that it was too late. Even if she’d gotten home ten minutes earlier, Clark could not have made it across town to the meeting in time, and he was not the kind of person who showed up at something like this late. He would be furious, probably. Relieved, too, but he would be angry at her for that relief. He hadn’t spoken to her since their fight the night before, except to remind her to get home on time so he could make it to the “book club for would-have-beens,” and she’d assured him that she would do her best.

Mira ran through the parking area outside their apartment house so quickly that she didn’t notice that their car wasn’t parked in its usual space, and when she found that the door to their apartment was locked, she assumed he’d done it to frustrate her, to make her have to fish through her bag to find her keys. She felt so guilty about being gone that it didn’t occur to her to be furious. He was probably on the couch with the newspaper, listening to her struggle with the lock.

Then, when she’d finally gotten herself into the apartment, thrown her bag on the floor, and called out, “Clark?” and he hadn’t answered, she figured he was in the bedroom, fuming, that she’d find him on his back in their bed, staring at the ceiling, an angry little lecture all prepared—or, he’d simply put on his shoes, walk past her without a word, wearing his running shorts, heading out into the rain, refusing to turn around when she spoke to him.

But when Mira went in the bedroom and he wasn’t there, she put a hand to her mouth, her first thought being, Jesus Christ, he’s gone to his fucking meeting and left the twins alone in the apartment.

“Andy? Matty?”

They weren’t in their room. The Thomas the Tank Engine sheets were on the floor, and the dresser drawers were open:

Clark had taken them with him to the meeting, she thought, and she almost laughed out loud with relief. She went into the kitchen, looked on the counter.

No note.

Typical.

He wanted to punish her. But that would be nothing compared to the guilt he’d pile on her when he got back, and told her how the twins had ruined the meeting for everyone.

Or, maybe not. Maybe Deirdre’s husband was watching the kids? What was her last name? Had Clark ever mentioned it?

Mira opened the phone book, but soon realized there was no point combing it for a Deirdre. She’d simply have to wait for her punishment. She’d make it up to him with a loaf of Irish soda bread. It was her specialty. Clark loved it. Or, he used to love it.

Mira poured herself a glass of wine from a bottle they’d opened a week before, wrestled off her ruined shoes, and tossed them in the closet. She mopped up the floor with a paper towel where she’d tracked in water, and then opened the cupboards and took out the canister of flour, the little yellow box of baking soda.

The wine tasted like vinegar and rainwater and reminded her of a train station in which she’d once had to spend the night. (Was it Albania?) The station was in a small village with no hotels, no restaurants, and no one to tell her why the last train of the night hadn’t arrived, or when it would. Luckily, there’d been an old man selling loaves of bread and bottles of wine to the few passengers who, like Mira, had shown up for the train but who, unlike Mira, did not seem surprised when it didn’t arrive. So, she’d drunk the entire bottle of wine, which was sour and warm, and eaten the bread, and listened to the rain until she fell asleep, and in the morning, the train blew its whistle outside the station, and the passengers who’d waited all night for it simply handed over their tickets, and got on.

She mixed the flour and water and baking soda, and listened to Mozart. She drank a second glass of wine. The bread came out of the oven looking perfect, but, Mira thought, she wouldn’t slice it until Clark got home. It would be her peace offering. She’d pour him a glass of wine, ask about the meeting. It was late, and the twins would go right to sleep if they weren’t already asleep in his arms when he walked in.

It wasn’t until midnight that her own stupidity began to dawn on her, the time she’d wasted baking bread, the short-sighted relaxation of the wine (how had she allowed herself the evening to relax? Who had she thought she was?) and went back into the twins’ room and realized that the dresser drawers were open because Clark had packed the twins’ clothes when he left with them, and that the sheets were on the floor because he’d taken their blankies with him, too. She stood staring at the room while her heart caught up with her mind, beating wildly, and then she turned to the doorway with her hands held out, empty.

What was she going to do now?

Stupidly, she thought of the cell phone plan she’d intended to sign them up for but hadn’t gotten around to, getting two phones for the price of one. They had only one cell phone, and it was in her purse.

Mira stumbled into the living room and, after some frantic searching through scraps of paper in the junk drawer, found Clark’s mother’s phone number, and punched the digits in as quickly as she could with her trembling hands.

Her mother-in-law sounded startled out of a drug-enhanced sleep when she answered—panicked, confused, panting. “Kay,” Mira said, “it’s just me. Please, is Clark there? Are the twins with him?” After much stammering, Mira finally managed to explain, in the mildest terms and tone she could muster, that she and Clark had argued, that Clark had left with the twins, that Mira supposed they were on their way to Kay’s. “Has he called you?” she asked.

“No,” Kay said, but managed, even in her half sleep, to muster the maternal energy and clarity to comfort Mira. “But he’ll call in the morning, honey, if he’s not home before then. He’s probably bringing the boys here, but it got too late, so he stopped at a motel. You two will make it up. Believe me, sweetie, if I had a dollar for every time Clark’s daddy and I had a fight like this—”

The tone of her voice, quaveringly compassionate, and the image in Mira’s mind of Clark’s mother, her thin hair a mess on a flowered pillow, her slack cheeks creased with sleep, lying on her side talking into a telephone in the dark, wearing a ratty polyester nightie, trying to make her feel better, caused Mira to whimper, audibly, into the phone, and then Kay sounded alarmed, suddenly fully awake.

“Honey? Honey? Don’t worry. Clark’s not going to do anything. Clark’s not like that. Clark loves you, and he loves the babies, and tomorrow you two will talk this out. Now, you get in your bed, okay, and you call me the second you hear anything, and I’ll call you, too, and in a year we’ll be laughing about this. I’m a lot older than you. I know about this stuff. Okay? You’re listening to me?”

“Yes,” Mira said. She held the receiver away from her mouth so Kay couldn’t hear her voice trembling. “Thank you.”

“Yes, of course. Now, you call me if you need me, but you try to sleep, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Thank you, Kay.”

“Good night, sweetheart.”

But Mira hadn’t slept, and by the time she had to leave to teach in the morning, she hadn’t heard from Clark, and Clark’s mother hadn’t answered her telephone when Mira called. She considered calling the dean, explaining that she was having a crisis and couldn’t teach her class, but what would she do instead? Drive? Where? In what? Clark had the car. At what point did you call the police to tell them that your completely sane husband, a loving father, a house husband who spent more time with your children on a daily basis than you did, had gone somewhere with the kids without leaving a note?

And what did the police do then?

She brushed her teeth and ran a washcloth across her face, set her cell phone to vibrate mode in a little pocket in her blouse, over her breast, where she would feel it no matter what she was doing, and left a large note on the kitchen counter.

Mira turned from the blackboard shakily to face the class, and then had to steady herself to sit down, and then just told them the truth:

“I had a bad night. I’m sorry. I’d like to start this lecture again another day. In the meantime, can we have a class discussion?”

The look on her students’ faces—profound surprise and concern—made Mira’s heart feel actually heavy. (How many clichés were more accurate in describing the eternal verities than anything poets could come up with? It never ceased to amaze her.) Her heart sank in her like bait at the end of a line, buoyed up only by reverse gravity again, and those expressions on her students’ faces.

“Please, tell me what attracted you to this class. Why are kids your age so interested in death?”

Mira wasn’t even really expecting an answer, just trying to think of a way to manage the rest of the hour without completely dropping it. She knew that Dean Fleming was in his office. He’d certainly notice if she went back to hers before her class could possibly have been over.

Jim Enright spoke first. He was a quiet guy from a small town up north. Mira had already pegged him as the Savior. He was the student who couldn’t stand to see any of the other students stammer, or lose their train of thought. Once, another student had been trying to think of the word cremation, and Jim Enright had offered about ten possible words that he might have been searching for until the student landed on it.

Now Jim Enright said in a tentative tone, “Because we’re not afraid of it yet?”

Mira managed to nod.

Ben Hood said, “Yeah. Or, like, we—”

Melanie Herzog jumped in:

“I’m afraid. I think it’s just so scary, you know, thinking of never existing—so everybody wants to know about what might happen afterward. I mean, I think the class isn’t about death. I think it’s about the afterlife.”

Mira couldn’t help but feel revived then. These were interesting thoughts. They’d come up with nothing new, but they were earnest, and expressing themselves fairly well. She nodded, and then Karess (who had her long, smooth legs wrapped around each other a couple of times) scooted to the edge of her seat and said, “You know, I think maybe we’re still young enough that we might have it right. Like, we haven’t given up hope. I mean, old people think it’s scary to die because they’ve seen other people die, but we haven’t, so we don’t have all this baggage, so we still know you can, like, maybe, live after you die.”

There was a bit of laughter—mostly inspired by her California accent, Mira thought. Karess couldn’t say anything without sounding like a character in a Disney sitcom.

“Well, okay,” Mira said, and folded her shaky hands on her desk. “I guess I haven’t asked this question yet, and maybe now’s a good time to ask it. How many of you think you will live beyond your deaths?”

It took a little time (some people always took a bit longer to search their souls before answering such a question) but, eventually, every hand was in the air.

Mira looked at her class.

The room was full of hands held above heads, acknowledging the saddest, most personal hope of all the sad, hopeless, personal hopes in this hopeless world, and this caused Mira to put her own hand over her mouth to keep herself from sobbing, or crying out, or even laughing. She shook her head a little, took her hand away, and said, “That’s all. Class is dismissed. We’ll meet here Tuesday to walk together to the morgue.”

46

Karess Flanagan followed Perry out of class, down the hall, and around the corner. He’d turned right when Professor Polson hurried out of the room, following at what he hoped was a considerate distance. He didn’t want to annoy Professor Polson, but he also needed to speak with her. Often she stuck around until all the students were gone—erasing the board, packing up her things, turning off the lights, and closing the door behind her. But today there was something wrong. She’d said it to the class, although she hadn’t needed to. They could all see it in her expression when she’d walked in. Her eyes were puffy.

Perry thought of her husband and that angry slamming of the phone.

Something had happened—and besides wanting to talk to her about the postcard, about Craig (he had to ask her what he should do: was it okay to tell Craig about the photograph, about Lucas, about Patrick Wright?), Perry also didn’t feel right not going up to her office, asking her if there was something he could do. He knew they weren’t friends exactly, but he was not, any longer, just her student either.

And the look on her face: her hand over her mouth, staring back at the class. He’d wanted to stand up right then and go to her. He’d imagined, so easily, putting his arms around her, maybe kneeling in front of her, taking her heart-shaped face in his hands.

He hadn’t, of course, but he’d followed her out of class. After all the other students had turned left out of the classroom, Perry headed to the nearest stairwell, the one that led to the hall where Professor Polson’s office was (she was still close enough that he could hear her heels clicking on the stairs), and because the others were leaving from the other direction, Perry couldn’t help being aware of Karess behind him, her pointy black boots striking the linoleum sharply, in quick succession. She was hurrying after him, it seemed. Perry began to walk faster himself, and it occurred to him that if he turned around he might find that Karess was actually running to catch up with him. He hoped not. He had absolutely no interest whatsoever in having any kind of conversation with Karess Flanagan at the moment.

“Hey!” she called out just as he reached the foot of stairwell. The heavy fire door was propped open. “Hey. Perry! Can I talk to you a sec?”

Reluctantly, he stopped and turned around.

There she was, the whole glittering thing of her, only a few feet behind him: Karess Flanagan in some kind of purple leggings and thigh-high boots, some kind of blousey top that was half shirt, half dress. Her hair was floating around her shoulders in luxurious curls, ablaze with expensive highlights and lowlights and whatever else brunettes like Karess got done to their hair to make it too dazzling for mere mortals to behold. She had tiny silver half-moons dangling from her ears, and was wearing a sheer red lip gloss that made it look as if, recently, she’d been kissing a raspberry patch so deeply that her lips had begun to bleed. “Okay?” she asked, stopping, taking a step toward him. “Can we talk?”

Perry didn’t answer. He tried to look at her as if he didn’t understand her, as if that might make her go away, but it didn’t. She stepped closer.

“Like, can I ask you what’s going on?”

She said it in the same tone in which she said everything: “Do we need, like, a blue book?” “Are we supposed to, you know, have a title page?” “Is there, like, a special font or something we’re supposed to type in?” “Is the universe, like, expanding?” No matter what she said in class, she always sounded half-exasperated, half-confused, and pretty stupid. Apparently she sounded that way outside of class, too.

“What?” Perry asked.

“Well?” Karess said, holding up her palms. They were pale, and for a crazy second Perry considered looking into them, and felt pretty sure that if he did they would be completely unlined. “What’s going on with you, and this class?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Perry said, although he was afraid he might.

“First, like, why are you in this class? It’s a freshman seminar. You’re not a freshman.”

Perry just stared at her.

“I mean, maybe it’s none of my business, but—”

“Maybe it’s none of your business?”

She laughed good-naturedly about this, maybe even blushed a little. She was wearing so much blush already that it was hard to tell, but he gave her credit for it. He’d sounded hostile, even to himself, and she seemed unfazed. Or maybe a little genuinely embarrassed by herself.

“Okay,” she said, “it’s definitely none of my business. I’m just, I guess, really curious. I don’t expect you to tell me, since, like, why would you, since we don’t even know each other, but something really weird seems to be going on here. I mean, I don’t necessarily believe it, but a lot of people in the class think you’re sleeping with Professor Polson.”

Spontaneously, Perry choked out a wild little laugh, and then he could feel himself blushing, a rising burn from his chest to his scalp. Karess shrugged and made a wistful little smirk, as if she’d caught him at something and felt a little bad about it. She crossed her arms, waiting, it seemed, for him to speak, but Perry couldn’t even take a breath. Finally, she cleared her throat, and said, “Well, that was awkward.”

Tucking a dark ringlet behind her ear, Karess licked her lips and went on, “Well, I’m not saying anyone cares. You’re a big boy, and she’s obviously got some domestic issues, but between that and all this shit in the dorm about Nicole Werner and Alice Meyers and that girl who ran away”—she emphasized every few words with both her intonation and a rolling motion of her hands, as if to churn the air around each new item on the list—“and all the Internet photos of Nicole Werner’s roommate having metro-sex with the music prof, and then this weird-as-fuck class, going to the morgue next time, and Professor Polson having, like, a nervous breakdown in front of us today. I for one am starting to wonder what the hell kind of college this is. I mean, I got into Columbia. I came here because I thought it would be calmer.”

“Josie?” Perry managed to ask after moving backward through her monologue, searching it for meaning.

“What?” Karess asked.

“Nicole’s roommate. Josie?”

“I guess so. That sorority chick. It’s been all over the Internet. I got it forwarded to me from like four hundred different people. I don’t think her name is there, just all these disgusting pictures, but people have been saying she was Nicole Werner’s roommate.”

“That’s Josie,” Perry said.

“Well, whatever,” Karess said. “So, like, my parents hear about this, and they want to know what the hell is going on down here? I was in a parochial school before this. I mean, we might be from Hollywood, but we’re Catholic.”

“Who’s Alice Meyers?” The name was familiar to Perry, but he couldn’t attach a face to it.

“Oh, God, you don’t know? Everybody knows. She’s the ghost of Godwin Hall.” Karess opened her eyes wide and made a fluttering gesture in the air with her hand, which Perry supposed was meant to indicate ironic spookiness.

“What are you talking about?” Perry asked.

Karess tossed her book bag onto the floor against the wall, as if she intended to stand there in the basement of Godwin Hall talking to Perry for a very long time. She jerked her thumb behind her.

“The study room,” she said. “You know. Alice Meyers? She disappeared in, like, the sixties or something? No one’ll go near that study room because they say she’s still in there.”

The Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room. Of course.

“We used to study in there,” Perry said. “Last year.”

“Well, whatever,” Karess said, batting her eyes and raising her eyebrows at the same time, as if to say, “That figures.” “Most people don’t. I guess they’d finally gotten a grip on the whole ghost rumor thing in the last few years, before Nicole Werner. So, maybe you missed it last year, and didn’t know. You’re not living in the dorm this year, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, Alice Meyers is showing up all over the place—but mostly, you know, it’s this group of girls. These cutters. They have this club. They’ve done all this research on Alice Meyers, and they go down there to the study room, supposedly, and do voodoo and Ouija board and shit. I mean, I don’t know. I just know there’s a girl across from me in the hall walking around with all these razor scratches on her arms, and somebody told me she was part of this club. It’s sick.”

Karess made a face that portrayed genuine horror, but Perry wasn’t too surprised by any of this. Even in Bad Axe there’d been some Goth girls who were into Wicca and cutting. There were always rumors that they’d go to the cemetery and lie naked on the graves of dead teenage girls. Perry had never taken as much interest in those rumors as some of his classmates had, but now he thought of Professor Polson, and her book. This would be exactly the kind of thing she’d want to hear about. Something else he needed to talk to her about. Perry nodded, hoping it might conclude the conversation, and turned back toward the stairwell, but Karess reached out and grabbed his arm. She said, “Hey, I’m not done talking to you.”

It was so preposterously demanding that Perry actually guffawed, and Karess, who at least seemed to understand, again, how ridiculous she was being, stammered, “I’m sorry. I just—you know, I’m curious about you. I’ll buy you some coffee, or breakfast, or whatever. I just want to talk. Do you have an appointment or something? I mean—”

She nodded to the stairwell, and was clearly indicating Professor Polson’s office.

”I mean, Professor Polson didn’t seem like she was in much shape to talk about whatever it is the two of you are always in there talking about. Why don’t you come talk to me instead?”

She lowered her eyes then, still looking up at him, and batted her heavy eyelids in a parody of flirtation. Perry opened his mouth at the outrageousness of it, and tried to speak, but he couldn’t manage even to shake his head. Karess waited, and when it became clear that no response from Perry would be forthcoming, she pretended to pout, and then she said, “I’ll let you carry my ten-thousand-pound book bag,” gesturing toward it on the floor.

47

The girl with the sprained ankle was standing near the mailboxes when Craig hurried down to check the box. He’d been watching from the front window for the mailman to leave ever since he’d heard his boots stomp across the front porch.

The girl, whom he and Perry now called the Cookie Girl, apparently hadn’t heard Craig come down the stairs—he was in his socks—and she jumped, stifling a little yelp, and whirled around as fast as a person can on crutches.

“Jesus,” she said, “you scared me.”

“I’m sorry,” Craig said. He tried to smile politely, but he was hoping she’d hurry up and get out of his way so he could get the mail, and she wasn’t budging, just sort of sagging there with her armpits pressed hard into the crutches’ rubber rests, letting her left foot dangle loosely over the floor.

“You never leave the apartment,” she said, not to him, exactly, but to a spot over his shoulder, “except to get your mail.”

Craig shook his head, feeling the smile freeze on his face. “Sure I do,” he said. “I go to classes.”

“Do you?” she asked. “I mean, I guess you must, but not much.”

Craig shrugged, his discomfort growing as she continued to regard him. She hadn’t even gotten her own mail out of the box yet. It would be a long time before he could get to his unless he pushed her out of the way, which he obviously couldn’t do.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

At this, Craig consciously tried to turn the smile into a straight line. He never had been that clear on what the expression on his face revealed about him, and had been accused by his mother a million times of smirking or grimacing, accused by girlfriends of rolling his eyes. Once, in middle school, one of his teachers (Ms. Follain, Language Arts) had actually stopped in the middle of a little lecture she was giving on phonemes and asked Craig what was so funny.

Craig had looked up at Ms. Follain, completely taken by surprise. Nothing had been funny. And he wasn’t even stoned. He hadn’t even been thinking about anything funny.

“What are you laughing about?” Ms. Follain asked.

“I’m not laughing,” Craig said—but then, of course, he couldn’t help starting to laugh. The irony—and the absurdity of it: that he hadn’t been laughing when she accused him of laughing, and now he was going to start laughing his ass off. He’d put his face in the crook of his elbow, but was helpless to stop, and the rest of the class started in then, snickering at first, followed by outright hysterical laughter, until finally Ms. Follain, hollow cheeks blazing, tossed him out of class and into the hallway, where he managed to get hold of himself only after about twenty minutes of gasping. Luckily, the bell had rung before he had to either go in and get a hall pass from Ms. Follain or go down to the office. When his friend Teddy got out of class, he’d said, “Jesus, man. What the hell was so funny? We could all hear you still laughing in the hallway. I thought Follain was going to shit her pants.”

“Nothing,” Craig said. “I was laughing because I wasn’t laughing.”

Of course, that started him laughing again.

“You are so fucked up,” Teddy had said.

The Cookie Girl seemed disinclined to say more, but she was looking at him as if maybe the expression on his face was very strange, or a little threatening, and when Craig tried even harder to straighten it out, she opened her eyes in alarm, and then she looked away, hopped around with her back to him, and managed, after a lot of struggle with her keys, finally to open her mailbox and take out a flyer for the Hungry Hippo (“Buy One Hungry Hippo Sub and Get One 1/2 Off!”). When she was able to turn back around, Craig was already trying to inch around her to get to his and Perry’s mailbox, and she froze in front of him and blurted out, “I know who you are, and I just want you to know that I don’t believe you killed that girl.”

Hand poised with the key at the mailbox, Craig felt what could only have been his blood running cold. Literally, there was the sensation inside him that some faucet connected to a frozen river had been turned on, and icy stuff had been let to flow. He did not move.

“What happened to you—something like that happened to me,” she said under her breath. She wasn’t looking at him, but he could feel her presence burning into him nonetheless. “Ran a stop sign,” she muttered. “Didn’t even see it. I killed a guy on a bike. I was sixteen. Got my driver’s license the week before. His sister still sends me hate mail. I think about it every, fucking, minute, of every, fucking, day.”

Her voice was a deep, wild, awful sob with the last sentence—and although she was on crutches and it had to have taken her at least five minutes to make it up the stairs, Craig had the sense that she had been blown away in gust of wind, taken off in a cloud of dust, far too quickly for him to say anything in response or to reach out to touch her shoulder. And by the time he’d turned around with his mail trembling in his hands, he was beginning to wonder if the Cookie Girl had been there at all—had he hallucinated her?—and also to hope that if she actually existed she hadn’t paused at the top of the stairs, turned, and seen how he’d dropped to his knees after he’d flipped through his mail. The Hungry Hippo flyer, a piece of first-class mail for Perry, and a postcard from some tourist spot:

The Frankenmuth Glockenspiel.

And on the back, Nicole’s unmistakable handwriting.

48

Shelly didn’t bother to get out of her robe and slippers for four days except when she had to take them off to get into bed. Eventually she’d have to go to the store, she knew, mostly for cat food and litter, but today she thought she might be able to get away with one more twenty-four-hour robe-and-slipper stint. She turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the book she hadn’t been able to read one page of in all the hours she’d spent with it open in front of her face since the afternoon she’d been fired.

That afternoon she’d come home and unplugged the phone, and she hadn’t turned on the computer even once. A few times there’d been knocks on the door, and once it had sounded as if someone had thrown a brick or a dead body onto her porch, but still she hadn’t stepped outside to look, or even parted the curtains. The mail came through a slot in the door, so she didn’t have to worry about it piling up outside and the neighbors wondering if she’d slipped in the bathtub. She didn’t subscribe to a newspaper. She just let the bills and flyers and whatever else came through the slot pile up on the floor where it fell.

Jeremy thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Finally, he had a companion all day and all night—a companion who slept even more hours than he did.

Still, Shelly wasn’t so foolish as to think she would stop living. Sooner or later she was going to have to pay the bills lying scattered on her floor. Sooner or later she would have to put the house up for sale, pack all of her things, and move somewhere she could get a job.

But not today.

Today would be another stare-blankly-into-Cold Mountain-day.

Back in the last months of her marriage to Tim, Shelly had lived for the few days a month when he’d go away for work or on one of his fishing weekends and she could pull on the robe (it was, actually, the same robe she wore now) and pull down the shades, and crawl into their bed.

She’d never thought of herself as depressed back then. She had not yet seen the now-ubiquitous list of the symptoms of depression in magazines, at the top of which was always something like “can’t drag your ass out of bed.” She’d ask Tim to call her when he was about an hour from home, and told him it was so she could have something on the stove for him—when, in truth, it was so she could get herself up, and shower, and dress, and be ready to face the world in the guise of Tim again when he stomped through the door.

Now there was no one to drag herself out of bed for, to impress or appease—although Shelly knew that if this went on much longer (the phone unplugged, the cell phone off, not even checking her email), Rosemary would become alarmed, and come by.

But Shelly had gone longer than a week in the past without talking to Rosemary. Rosemary would assume for a while that Shelly was just busy with work. Rosemary had no idea that Shelly had been fired. Shelly had not mentioned Josie to Rosemary again after the phone conversation during which Rosemary had asked, “Are you in love with this girl?” She’d planned to tell her, eventually, but hadn’t gotten around to that yet. Let alone the sex. Let alone the photographs. Let alone the disciplinary meeting with the dean. There would be, as they said, a lot of catching up to do.

Shelly rolled onto her side, and Jeremy growled a little, dreamily, and rolled onto his side as well.

Jesus.

And to add to the horror, the shame, Shelly found herself, each time she closed her eyes, to her own shock and amazement, instead of thinking about the public humiliation, instead of grieving the loss of her livelihood and her identity and her job and her life—thinking instead about Josie Reilly.

About her clavicle. About the shadows gathered there in the moonlight in Shelly’s bed. About those white teeth locked onto her lower lip, damp and shining in the morning light.

Like her cat, Shelly growled a little, and put her face in her hands, and remembered the last phone call she’d answered from the university administration. “We want to be certain you understand that there is to be no communication between you and the student in question. Any attempts to contact her may result in legal action on her part or on ours.”

Shelly had held the phone away from her ear then, and muttered, “Of course,” thinking, Oh my God, as she hung up. I’ve become the kind of lecherous vermin they fear will call and stalk a student.

But even as she was thinking it, Shelly was flipping her cell phone open to the address book, scrolling down to Josie’s number, uttering a little cry before she snapped it closed.

Never again even to speak with the stupid little bitch, the most beautiful creature in this whole exhausted world?

Shit.

Now she shoved off the blankets, put her feet on the floor.

What did she really have to lose?

They’d told her she could not attempt to contact the “student in question,” but they had not told her she could not sit in the Starbucks that she happened to know for a fact the student in question visited ten times a day.

49

“Where are you?”

“What do you care, Mira? The boys are fine. I’ve just dropped them off at my mother’s. They were ecstatic to see her.”

“Why didn’t you tell where you were going? Why didn’t you call last night to tell me where you were?”

Mira was trying to keep her voice down. She was in her office and had just passed Jeff Blackhawk in the hallway. A few days before, they’d made plans to talk in her office after their Tuesday classes, and now he was waiting for her. She should have told him that something had come up, that they’d have to meet another time, but he was talking to Ramona Cherry out there, Godwin’s only fiction writer and its worst gossip, and Mira couldn’t bring herself to speak as she passed. She knew the expression Ramona would be wearing: that looking-on-the-misfortunes-of-others-from-a-distance-with-amusement look.

Schadenfreude, but Mira’s Serbian grandmother had called it, so much more beautifully, zloradost—“eviljoy.”

Mira couldn’t have stood it. She’d simply held up a hand in greeting and hurried past them, and then the phone rang as soon as she closed the door behind her.

“How was I supposed to know you were home?” Clark asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, I waited for you. You said you’d be early, or at least on time, and then you didn’t show up. For all I knew you were the one who’d taken off.”

“I didn’t take off. I was late. I was in a meeting. I’m trying to make a living here, Clark.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all about that Mira, and I’m sorry I’ve been such dead weight, you know, dragging you down the toilet along with your glorious career. In the meantime, everything’s fine, and you can just go about your business, your important business. The twins are being taken good care of by their grandmother. I’ll pick them up in a few days, and then—”

“What? What do you mean you’ll pick them up? Where are you going?”

“I’m taking a little R-and-R. I’ve earned it, Mira. I’ve spent the last two years trapped in a nine-hundred square-foot apartment with two toddlers while you were pursuing your Big Career. Now I’m going to rent a little cottage on the lake, and maybe a boat. Maybe fish for a few days. I’ll let you know—”

“Fish? It’s almost winter.”

“Yeah, well, there are still fish in the lake, Mira. They don’t migrate.”

“For God’s sake, Clark, why did you take the twins with you? Why didn’t you leave them home with—”

“Are you kidding, Mira? Because there’s no one to take care of them at home! They need a mother. I left them with the only mother they have—mine.”

“Fuck you, Clark. Fuck you. Fuck—”

But he’d hung up already, and Mira was holding the receiver in her hand, staring straight ahead at her bulletin board, on which a snapshot of the twins—red Kool-Aid smiles shadowing their real smiles, wearing Chicago Cubs caps and bathing trunks with sharks on them, Lake Michigan frothing in the background—was thumbtacked at a terrible slant so that they appeared to be slipping sideways into a pile of ungraded student papers on her desk.

Mira dropped the receiver and lunged at the photo, tore it off the bulletin board and pressed it to her breasts. She was clinging to it when Jeff Blackhawk pushed open her door, which she’d left unlocked in her hurry to answer the phone, and said, registering the expression on her face, “Mira? Is everything okay?”

50

Perry followed Karess Flanagan up the stairs to her dorm room. He hadn’t been on the residence floors of Godwin Hall since he’d moved out last May, and the scent of it (old carpeting and something else that smelled inexplicably of wet straw) brought the whole previous year back to him. Karess’s midthigh boots had clunky heels, and each step she took rang through the stairwell. She talked loudly over the sound of her own footsteps.

“You never answered my question about why you’re in the class. Did you flunk your own first-year seminar or something?”

“No,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he’d intended. “I’m taking it because I find it interesting.”

“Really?” Karess made no attempt not to sound skeptical. She got to the door at the top of the stairwell first, and held it open for Perry, who hesitated, trying to engineer some way to walk behind her, hold the door open for her, or at least for himself. He wasn’t used to girls holding doors for him, and was not, in fact, sure that a girl ever had. But he couldn’t avoid it without elbowing her out of the way, so he walked through the door as she held it.

“Why’s death so interesting to you?”

Perry didn’t answer. He waited in the hallway for Karess to pass over the threshold herself.

The residence floors of Godwin Honors Hall were divided into halls named after alumni long forgotten except for their associations now with the better bathrooms or the direction the windows faced. Perry and Karess were in Hull House, where Nicole and Josie had lived the year before. All along the hallway, doors were open, and Perry could see girls sitting at desks, staring into computer screens, lying on beds, holding cell phones to their ears. One girl had a towel wrapped in a turban on her head and was standing in front of a wall mirror, holding a pair of tweezers to an eyebrow, seeming to be trying to muster up the courage to pluck. Perry looked away after that, and tried to watch his feet as he walked instead of looking through the open doors.

“You can wait here, if you want,” Karess said. “Our room’s a pigsty. I just need to grab my wallet and change my shoes.” She nodded down at her boots. They looked like medieval torture devices. Perry felt relieved that she wasn’t going to try to walk across campus to Starbucks in them. He leaned up against the wall and folded his arms.

Across from him, a bulletin board hung on a closed door. A pink plastic flower was tacked to it, and underneath that, a blurry photograph of a kitten. The kitten appeared to be running—either that or the photographer had been running while snapping the photograph. It was a bad photo, but he could imagine girls crowding around it, oohing over the cute haze of that cat.

He consciously chose not to look down the hallway in the direction of Nicole and Josie’s old room, but he couldn’t help but wonder who occupied it this year, and if whoever it was knew that it was the room in which the Dead Girl had lived.

Or, maybe no one lived there. Maybe the college administration did something in these circumstances. Or maybe they scrambled the room numbers so it would be impossible for the incoming class to figure out which room could be the haunted one. Godwin was the oldest dorm on campus. Probably quite a few students had died while living here. Likely, there was a procedure for handling the assigning of their rooms. Even if the residents themselves didn’t mind living in a dead student’s dorm room, parents might object, Perry supposed, to having their kid sleeping on the mattress that had been slept on by the previous year’s Unthinkable Tragedy.

Then, Perry caught himself wondering if Nicole had come back to this hallway since her death. Had she wanted to get a look at her old room, to see if—

He was startled by Karess when she stepped out of the door and said, brightly, electrically, “Ready?!”

She wearing different shoes (an even higher heel, as it happened) and a different top—pale purple, lower cut, a little mesh of lace across her cleavage, which Perry looked away from even as he was noticing it.

“So,” Karess said, “you were about to tell me what you find so fascinating about the death class. And if you can’t come up with something convincing, I’m going to have to conclude, as most of our classmates have, that it’s actually Professor Polson you find so fascinating.”

Perry found himself opening and closing his mouth, issuing nothing but exasperated breaths, feeling what he thought must be a kind of hatred for Karess Flanagan.

Who the hell did she think she was?

She looked over her shoulder, batted her eyes, and said, “Cat got your tongue?” and Perry put his hands in his pockets so she wouldn’t see that he’d balled them into fists.

“No,” he said, finally, and continued down the stairs behind her.

Why? Why was he continuing to walk behind her, follow after her? Was it the same reason any guy might?

Because of those dark curls, and the way her waist tapered into her hips, and the way her ass looked like two solid handfuls of ripe flesh packed into that little miniskirt? Perry had noticed within hours of first laying eyes on her in class that she had such high-arched eyebrows that she always looked surprised—or as if she were flirting, or as if she were experiencing some kind of physical pleasure.

Sexual pleasure.

He’d made a conscious effort not to glance over at her. It had always seemed undignified, disrespectful, maybe even dangerous, letting a girl like that know you noticed her—although now, looking down onto her soft shampoo-commercial hair (a few strands lifted away from the rest, shining and amber in the sun that was coming through the little panes of the windows), another possibility occurred to him:

That Karess Flanagan was actually harmless. That she was just having fun. She wanted him, too, to have harmless fun.

He felt better, thinking this. She’d simply been teasing him. That was something Mary had always said (“I’m just teasing you, Perry”) and that he’d never understood. The little jabs, the sarcasm. (“Don’t be such an Eagle Scout.”) He’d taken them all wrong, he thought now, hearing Karess Flanagan’s throaty, casual humming under her breath. She was enjoying his company. She wanted him to like her.

Was this what girls did?

Long silver earrings twirled down from her lobes, nearly grazing her shoulders, glinting, and he could smell something citrusy, slightly bitter but also spicy and appealing, wafting off of her. She had some kind of leather thong around her neck, some kind of charm dangling from the end of it, but also a gold chain, and a silver chain, and something else that was beaded. She had about twenty bracelets on each wrist.

Jesus, Perry thought, it must take this girl four hours to get dressed every morning.

She chatted on and on brightly about what a drag it was to live on the third floor, and how, when her parents moved her in they’d had to lug all her stuff up the stairs because the elevator was broken.

“The elevator’s always broken,” Perry said.

“What floor did you live on?” Karess asked him.

“Fourth,” he said.

“What house?”

“Mack.”

“So, you knew him? Craig Clements-Rabbitt?”

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, and she was waiting for Perry at the door. There was a sign on it that read, FIRE EXIT, ALARM WILL SOUND, but everyone knew there was no alarm. Karess pushed her way through it, and out into the brisk late-morning air.

He considered lying, or saying nothing, but what would be the point? Karess was obviously curious enough about everything that she was going to find out one way or another. Perry’s name, Googled along with Craig Clements-Rabbitt, told that whole story. Except for a few things about his making Eagle rank, which had been in the Bad Axe paper, Perry’s Internet claim to fame was that he’d been Craig’s roommate and had said to a reporter for the local paper, “He’s not a murderer.”

“He was my roommate,” he now said to Karess.

She whirled around. “What? You lived with him?” Her eyes were so wide he could see the little pinpricks of her pupils pulsing in the startling blue of her irises.

“Yeah,” Perry said.

“Well,” she said. She smiled. Her teeth were so white they seemed, like her incredibly blue eyes, more like fashion accessories than body parts. “The plot thickens.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it must have been pretty fucked up, your freshman year, living with a killer—”

“What?” Perry asked.

“A fucking murderer.”

“He’s not a murderer,” Perry said.

“Jesus,” Karess said. “You’re not still friends with him, are you? I mean, he killed his girlfriend.”

“He didn’t kill his girlfriend,” Perry said. “He had an accident, and his girlfriend got killed.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Karess said.

“Then you heard wrong.”

“I heard he was stoned and drunk, and he picked her up at her sorority because he was jealous of some older guy there, and even though she was screaming and pleading for him not to take her, he forced her into the car, and then he drove off the road at like a hundred miles an hour, to try to kill them both together. It was like some kind of sick love bond he thought they had. He wanted to die with her—and, so, like, she had no choice. And now she’s dead and he’s back here. Unbelievable.”

Perry had to hold a hand to his forehead because, now that they were outside, the sun was shining blindingly over Karess’s shining head. They were in the courtyard, and students were passing them, talking on cell phones, stuffing protein bars into their mouths, ears plugged into their iPods. Some pink-cheeked girl squealed when she saw Karess and was about to hug her, but must have seen the serious expression on her face, so just wiggled her fingers, made a face, and kept walking.

With no leaves on the trees, no clouds, and the sun so distant in the autumn sky, there was nothing to absorb the light, and Perry felt his eyes filling up with tears. He turned around and started to walk away from Karess. “Are you crying?” she called after him, and grabbed his elbow. “God, I’m, like, so sorry.”

“I’m not crying,” Perry said, but kept walking because he wasn’t so sure he wasn’t crying, and if he was crying, he had no idea why he was. He tried to walk fast under the archway to Godwin Avenue. It was always forty degrees colder under that arch than anywhere around it. Even when the temperature was ninety degrees outside, under that archway it was cool and damp. Someone had spray-painted the name Jean at the top of the arch, and Perry found himself stopping, putting his hand flat against the bricks, trying to catch his breath. “I’m not crying,” he said again, although he was even more blind now, having stepped from the sun into this darkness. He rubbed his eyes and said, “But you shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about. Where did you hear all this crap, about him forcing her into the car, and the death bond or whatever?”

“It’s true,” Karess said. She was standing so close to him that he could smell her breath. Cinnamon. “There was this, like, assembly for first-year women our second day in the dorm, and these sorority types came from Omega Theta Tau, and it was supposedly supposed to be this meeting about how to avoid getting into abusive relationships with guys, but mostly it just scared the shit out of us about living in the dorm where the dead girl had lived. They did this slideshow? Of Nicole? And told us how guilty they all felt because they all knew she was dating this stalker dude, Craig Clements-Rabbitt, who was always waiting for her outside the house and wouldn’t let her have her own life, and then he killed her, and they were all crying, and by then we were all crying, and then we went back to our rooms, and I heard later that these girls who were living in her old room did the Ouija board in there, and then I don’t know what happened, but I guess it scared the shit out of them, and they got a room change.

“Nobody’s living in that room now. It’s all locked up. And those Goth girls with the Alice Meyers Club thing are always lighting candles outside of it and burning these smudge stick things, and it sets off the fire alarms, and they make little shrines that the housekeeping people throw away. It’s fucked up. And you were that guy’s roommate?”

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. A kind of vertigo took over him—the archway seemed to shift, and suddenly he was feeling the weight in that white coffin again. The dead weight of a body sliding around inside.

Karess looked alarmed. She said, “Are you okay?” She took a step even closer to him, looking carefully at his face, and slid her arm through his. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a hot chocolate. I promise not to talk about this. Don’t cry.”

He looked at her.

“I’m not crying,” he said, and having to say it again actually made him laugh.

She laughed, too.

“I think you’re a really cool guy,” Karess said, pulling him out of the archway by the arm that she had locked into his. “I thought so the first day I saw you.”

51

The walk from her house to Starbucks seemed to take hours, but when Shelly looked at her watch, she saw that only fifteen minutes had gone by since leaving home and, now, passing the building that housed the Chamber Music Society. She willed herself not to look up at the window to her office, but she could feel the window looking down at her. She could feel her former self watching this present self walking by.

What might she have thought, say, six months before, if she’d been told of a woman who had a secure well-paying job at the university and had thrown it all away to have a sleazy affair with an undergraduate work-study student?

What would she have thought if she’d been told the way the woman had been caught red-handed in this affair—that she’d allowed a series of cell phone photographs to be taken of herself in bed with a nineteen-year-old sorority girl?

What would she have thought if she’d looked down now and seen this woman walking by, moving inexorably, but also as if there were heavy weights tied around her ankles and wrists, toward the place she thought she might be able to find this girl—this girl that university officials had warned her not to harass?

She’d have thought, perhaps, no fool like an old fool?

Or would it have been something harsher? Much harsher.

Now, she thought, imagining looking down at herself from the lofty heights she’d once occupied, she was one of them. The fallen.

She was so lost to these thoughts that, as she approached Starbucks and glimpsed herself in the plate glass window, she was surprised to see her own reflection. She’d expected, she realized, to see herself as a warted hag, a specter, a creature—lecherous and leering, and that much more repulsive because, although she looked sexless, she wasn’t.

But that’s not how she looked.

In the window, she looked frantic, even to herself. And pitiable. Harmless. Maybe sad. Her hair was messed but shining in the dim November sunlight. A man in a black suit and red tie looked her over appreciatively as he held the door for her. She did not, it seemed, appear to be a monster to him. To him, she looked like the reflection in the plate glass window.

But there was no mistaking the horror on Josie Reilly’s face as she turned at the counter, holding her white cup, and saw Shelly walking through the door.

52

Mira had never shared anything about her personal problems with a colleague before. Even in graduate school when her fellow students regularly wept late into the night in one another’s arms over their breakups and their breakdowns, Mira had kept a close check on what she told others about herself.

One of her best friends, Tessa, another doctoral candidate in anthropology, had told Mira about the years of incest abuse she’d endured as a child by a much older half-brother, and then had reacted with bitterness that seemed to border on rage when Mira told her, many years into their friendship, about her mother’s death.

“You never told me your mother was dead.”

“She died years ago,” Mira tried to explain. “I was an undergraduate. You and I hadn’t met.”

“But we’ve discussed your mother on about five hundred occasions,” Tessa had said as Mira recognized in her friend’s eyes a dawning apprehension, a withdrawal, a dismissal that heralded the end of their friendship, “and you never once indicated that your parents weren’t both still happy and healthy and living in Ohio. I told you all about my father’s death. It seems like that might have been a good time to mention that you, too, had a parent who’d died.”

Mira hadn’t intended to shrug. She knew that a shrug indicated that either it didn’t matter or she couldn’t comprehend the big fuss. But she’d felt herself doing it anyway—and, as she shrugged, she felt as if something shawl-like (her friendship with Tessa?) was slipping off her shoulders, discarded behind her.

So it was that much more surprising to find herself now weeping into her hands as Jeff Blackhawk sat across from her, watching, rubbing his knees with his palms. She could not suppress the sobs.

Truly, Mira had meant to tell him only that she was in a hurry because she had to rent a car, that her husband had theirs, that she was going to drive up north to get her children from their grandmother. But the second she uttered their names (Andy, Matty) her lungs had seemed to fill instantly with tears, and she’d found herself choking, gasping, spluttering. Finally, after what must have seemed to him to be an alarming amount of time, Jeff said, “Mira,” the way you might call a dog that was running toward the road, and she looked up, and the expression of doomed embarrassment on his face snapped her back.

Mira turned around quickly in her chair and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her desk, and hurriedly began to wipe her eyes and nose, her cheeks, her lips. God only knew what she must look like, she thought, or what the condition of her eye makeup might be, but she finally managed to take a deep, trembling breath, and speak.

“Jeff,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry. I haven’t slept and—”

He waved his hand as if to clear the air of smoke or tear gas. “No,” he said. “You don’t have to apologize, but I’d like to know what I can do to help. Certainly you’re not in any shape to drive up north, are you? Let me call someone for you. Or, I don’t really have anything to do until I teach on Thursday, except read bad student poetry. I could take you in my car. I like kids. I’d like to meet yours.”

“Oh, that’s so—” Mira felt the shame of her relief in that moment like an implosion. “But I—”

“Just let me, okay, Mira. They’re predicting the first snowfall of the year today. Or tonight. It might even be a big one. The roads’ll be slippery, and in your condition?” He held up his hands at the obviousness. “You owe it to your kids not to get killed on the road. Let me—”

“Okay,” she said.

53

“Who is this?” Craig asked. His hand was shaking, but he was managing to hold the phone to his ear. The clock on his dresser said 12:00. Was it midnight? No: The sun was shining weakly outside. It had to be noon. He’d set his alarm for 9:00 a.m., and he remembered it bleating for him to wake up, remembered hearing Perry close the front door behind him as he left for his early class, but then he must have turned it off, gone back to sleep.

There was no answer on the other end of the line.

“Who is this?” Craig asked again. He could hear breathing. He listened. He sat up. He put his free hand to his temple and rubbed it. He was trying not to say anything else, just listen, but then, despite himself, under his breath, he asked, “Nicole? Is it you?”

There was a high crazy scream of laughter then:

“No, you idiot! This is Alice. Did you forget about Alice?”

And then the phone went dead in his hand, and Craig, heart pounding, was out of bed, bolting through the apartment, into the hallway, and the door was slamming, locked, behind him.

54

The look on Josie’s face, standing in front of the Starbucks counter (slender fingers wrapped around a white paper cup, just turning around) froze Shelly in the threshold, holding the door open with one hand, clutching her shoulder bag to her hip with the other. There was a rush of cold air around her ankles, and it seemed that, in addition to Josie, everyone in the café had turned at that moment to look at her, to see where the draft had come from, to scowl at her for holding the door open. (When had it gotten so cold? Shelly had walked all the way here from her house in a thin dress. Was the dampness she felt on her neck that of melting snow?)

A woman with a stroller pushed past, and after she’d managed to squeeze by Shelly with her baby and her contraption and her diaper bag, she turned back around and nodded at the door. “Better shut that,” she said. There was such gentleness in her tone that Shelly looked at the woman, trying to comprehend not what she’d said but the way she’d said it. “The door,” the woman said, nodding at it again. “It’s gotten cold out.”

Shelly stepped all the way into the coffee shop and let the door swing shut behind her. By then, Josie was on the other side of the room, putting a lid on her cup, glancing furtively around her, and Shelly, despite the warnings of the university bureaucrat, was approaching her, moving her mouth, saying the girl’s name loudly enough that other people were turning at their tables to look.

Josie started to back away, but Shelly was ready for it, and reached out, took hold of the slender arm (bare, despite the cold: Josie was wearing a pair of faded jeans with holes in the knees and a little silky black top, a cashmere sweater wrapped casually around her waist, like an afterthought)—and held on.

“Please,” Shelly said.

Josie yanked her arm away, looked around, exasperated, and, under her breath, said, “What do you want?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“You’re not supposed to harass me.”

“I’m not harassing you. Josie. Please. I’ll leave you alone, I swear, I won’t”—Josie took a step back as if in anticipation of the word touch—“but I have to talk to you. Please.”

“No.” Josie was shaking her head emphatically, but then she stopped, seemed to think briefly, but seriously, about something, and then, to Shelly’s great relief and surprise, she was nodding her head. “Okay,” she said, sounding more annoyed than reluctant or frightened. “Okay, okay,” she repeated, as if in defeat, and then she lifted her chin and pointed it toward an empty table in the back corner, and Shelly followed her to it.

Josie slid behind the table and leaned back, tossing one leg over the other and crossing her arms over her chest. Shelly sat down hard in the stiff wooden chair across from her, doing everything she could not to slump. (That was something her ex-husband had accused her of: “You don’t sit in a chair, Shelly. You slump in it.”) Josie didn’t hesitate to look her straight in the eyes when she was seated, or to lean forward with her hands folded on the table between them. Shelly had expected an awkward silence, but right away, Josie was talking:

“Look, I know you’re probably pissed as hell at me, but I have to tell you this is really not my fault. I can’t help it if we had this… involvement, and maybe I should have, yeah, kept my pictures where no one else could see them, but you’re the older one here, you’re the authority figure. You were supposed to—” Here, Josie seemed to search for some word she’d memorized and couldn’t find. Instead, she went on with some thoughts about the nature of the student/employer relationship, which seemed both scripted and poorly delivered, and for the first time Shelly began to wonder if it had all been an act.

She reached across the table, put a hand on Josie’s wrist to quiet her, and said, “Why?”

“Why what?” Josie said, looking startled to have her monologue interrupted.

“Why any of it?”

“I was just explaining that,” Josie said. “There are certain perimeters in student/employer relations at the university—”

“Parameters?” Shelly asked.

“Whatever,” Josie said. “But, being your work-study—”

“Why me?” Shelly interrupted. “Is this some kind of hazing thing?”

Josie didn’t laugh.

She didn’t even blink.

She held Shelly’s gaze long and hard enough that Shelly didn’t need an answer to the question, and then she finally said, “I told you, Omega Theta Tau doesn’t participate in hazing.”

“What about the underwear?” Shelly asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You told me. You said you had to wear the same panties for a month, and—”

“Oh, that.” Josie swatted her hand through the air as if to clear it of an annoying insect. “That’s not hazing.”

“Well if that’s not hazing, maybe this isn’t either.”

“What’s ‘this,’” Josie said, making quotation marks in the air around her own face.

“You know,” Shelly said, her voice sounding automated even to her, “an affair. With a woman. Photographs. To prove it. Maybe getting someone in trouble, getting someone fired.”

“No way. We’d get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council if—”

“No,” Shelly said. She realized that she was shaking, but her words came out of her passionlessly, as if she were reading them, and what she was reading was already familiar to her, had been read and reread a hundred times. “I was in a sorority, too, Josie. We did all the same stuff, knowing full well we’d never get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council. We knew, just like you do, that if the National Pan-Hellenic Council ever heard about it, they’d just help cover it up. People who’ve never pledged might be fooled by that, but not me.”

“You can’t prove anything,” Josie said, and the way she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair made it clear to Shelly that Josie was right.

55

Jeff chewed on hard cinnamon candies as he drove, and the sound coming from his closed mouth was so loud and chaotic it occurred to Mira that he was splintering his teeth, but when she looked over at him, and he looked back at her and smiled, she was relieved to see that his teeth were intact. “Would you like some?” he asked, pointing to the bag of candies between them. “Help yourself.”

“No, thanks,” Mira said.

After they’d left Godwin Hall, and before they’d gone to get Jeff’s car from the university parking garage, they’d gone back to Mira’s apartment so she could get her credit card. (Despite Clark’s protests that she was treating him like a two-year-old, Mira had insisted on keeping their joint card at home, in a box at the bottom of their bureau, since they were already so deeply in debt that it could only, in her opinion, be used in emergencies.) But when she’d gotten to the bureau, to the bottom of the drawer, and then to the bottom of the box, it wasn’t there.

Clark had taken that, too?

She’d called to Jeff in the other room, “I’ll be right out!” as she pawed through a few other drawers, and even looked under the bed, and went to the closet to check the pockets of Clark’s jackets.

Not there.

She could hear Jeff in the living room humming to himself as he paged through some of the books on her shelf.

Now what?

It was two hundred miles, at least a couple of tanks of gas there and back. She’d had the ATM withdrawal maximum lowered to fifty dollars a day (again, so there would be no temptations), and she certainly didn’t want to make Jeff stand around in line at the credit union as she tried to get money out of hers and Clark’s savings account.

“I’m sorry this is taking so long!” she called, mostly to buy herself some time to think about what to do.

“It’s not a problem, Mira,” Jeff called back. “I’ve got forty hours before anyone will notice I’m missing, and that’ll just be a dozen relieved undergrads. That’s the great thing about being a bachelor. Nobody files a Missing Person’s report for at least a week. Hey, I see you’ve got a whole shelf of Camille Paglia. Are you a fan?”

Later, Mira thought, she would tell him about her interest in Paglia’s popularization of literary criticism, and how she hoped, herself, to emulate something of it in her own anthropological studies—but at the moment she was back on her hands and knees feeling the carpet under the bureau for the credit card. She sat for a few minutes on the floor before she stood, went into the living room, and said to Jeff, because she had to, “I don’t have any money. Except what I can get out of the bank. My husband took the credit card.”

Jeff was holding Sexual Personae in his hands as if it he’d never held an actual book before, as if he had no idea how to open it, both hands wrapped around the edges like a plateful of potluck food. He looked over at Mira, shrugged, and said, “I’ve got cash and a full tank of gas. And now I know where you live. I have people who can help me get the loan repaid if I have to.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows ridiculously, without bothering to smile, and Mira understood instantly, physically (although she couldn’t muster the energy to feel it) why, if the rumors were true, so many girls and women allowed themselves to be used by him.

“Thank you,” she said to him for the tenth or fifteenth time that morning, and he acknowledged it with another shrug, turning back to the book. She offered him a cup of tea, or a sandwich, but he said he’d rather hit the Wendy’s on the freeway if she didn’t mind.

“I have a man-size hunger,” he said. “I’d like to wait for a Bacon-ator if you don’t mind.”

They’d headed together to the parking garage closest to Godwin Hall then. It was a short walk, but the sky was spitting a damp snow, and they had to keep their heads down. It would have been impossible to carry on an easy conversation, even if Mira had been in a state of mind that allowed for small talk.

Jeff was parked on the first floor, under a sign that read, NO PARKING. He pulled the ticket off his windshield and tossed it into the backseat without saying a word about it.

His car was a mess.

Mira had, she supposed, expected a Porsche. Although she knew Jeff couldn’t make much more money than she did, she also found herself so continually surprised by the opulent houses and the exotic vacations of her colleagues (who had the same salaries that, for Mira and Clark, barely covered the rent) that she’d grown used to assuming that most academics had secret sources of income—trust funds, inheritances, law suit settlements. If Jeff were one of those, with that kind of money, Mira had imagined he would spend it on something flashy, something women would be impressed by, like a sports car.

But not only wasn’t this a sports car, it was even rustier and more exhausted-looking than Mira and Clark’s car:

The door of the glove compartment had been torn off somehow, and Jeff had stuffed it with candy wrappers, many of which had fallen on the floor. The backseat was a pond of memos and flyers and Wendy’s bags. (Where, Mira wondered, looking back there, would she put the twins? Clark had their car seats, too, she realized. But she’d have to worry about that later.) It took Jeff several tries to start the car—and once he did, the motor made a sound like a spaceship taking off, only to grow disconcertingly silent as he started to drive. It crossed Mira’s mind that they were actually coasting out of the parking ramp, with no engine at all, but Jeff seemed in control of things, and the confidence he exuded—popping candies into his mouth, fiddling with the ancient-looking radio dial—was reassuring. He said, “I know she doesn’t look like much, but she’s as reliable as they get. We’ll be the fastest thing on the freeway, sweetheart.”

The little endearment did not seem to Mira to be a come-on, or even overly familiar. It seemed, instead, to be an attempt to comfort her—and, again, for the hundredth time that day, tears sprang to her eyes, and she vowed to herself that she would buy that slim collection of his poems she’d seen at the bookstore on the shelf of Local Authors as soon as they got back: The Blind Horizon. She would read them carefully, and ask him about his influences, his inspirations and aspirations. She would treat him with more respect. She was sorry, so sorry, that she hadn’t done so before now.

Jeff flashed his U-Parking pass at the attendant in the booth. Then they were winding their way through campus.

The day was getting colder. The sky, darker. It would be a matter of minutes, Mira felt certain, before the first blizzard of the year began in earnest—and, still, there were boys crossing the street in short sleeves, girls in mini-dresses and tank tops. Was this vanity, ill-preparedness, or did their youth give them some sort of metabolic advantage in the cold?

Mira herself was shivering as Jeff’s car’s heating system blew cool air smelling of dust through the vents and into her face.

Jeff slowed down at an intersection full of pedestrians and bicyclists, and at the corner of State and Seymour, Mira saw Dean Fleming standing under the crosswalk sign, waiting for the signal to change. His red tie had blown over his shoulder, and he had his tweed cap pulled down low on his head of bushy gray hair. He looked, it seemed, right at Mira as they passed—but if he registered who she was and that she was a passenger in Jeff Blackhawk’s junker, it didn’t show on his face. An enormous snowflake landed on the windshield right in front of Mira, and made no sign of melting.

“Freeway? Wendy’s?” Jeff asked.

“Sure, yes,” Mira said. “And, Jeff, I’m so, so grateful for this.”

“I know,” he said, and ground his molars down on the piece of candy in his mouth, turned to her, and winked without smiling.

56

Craig was in his boxer shorts and an old, soft SKI FREDONIA! T-shirt, no shoes. He knew he’d locked himself out as soon as he heard the inner workings of the knob and the doorjamb click into position, but he was too freaked out to care.

He was bathed in sweat, and the sweat was cold, but instead of shivering (it was always a lot colder in the hallway than in the apartment because people were always propping the front door open so their friends could come in without having to be buzzed in) he was burning. He felt the way he used to when he was running track in middle school, before he started smoking dope instead of running track: that feeling, after a long run, that somebody was giving you a bear hug from behind, and it was crushing your lungs, and you were desperate for air, but that the temperature of the air was seven hundred degrees, and breathing it in short little gasps was going to set your insides on fire.

He leaned over in the hallway, trying to stop the gasping, the way the coach had showed them back in Fredonia, and then he put his hands on his knees and tried to count to four as he inhaled through his mouth, hold it for four, exhale to four, but he was panting about ten times faster than that.

He’d thought it was Nicole. He’d been sure of it. That Nicole was calling him from…

He didn’t hear the Cookie Girl come out of her room, and didn’t know she was there until she cleared her throat beside him, and then he jumped back about a foot, standing up straight, clutching his chest. Her eyes sprang wide open in alarm, and she said, “What’s the matter?”

It didn’t even occur to Craig, yet, that he was half-naked, crazed looking, and that he didn’t know this girl. He said, “I don’t know. Someone’s fucking with me. Someone’s haunting me.”

A sad look crossed the Cookie Girl’s face, as if he’d told her something she’d dreaded hearing but had fully expected to hear. Her small, pale face in the dim hallway light looked, he thought, anguished. It was the same expression she’d had on her face just before she’d told him, at the mailbox, in a monotone, “Killed a guy on a bike. I was sixteen.” Now, in a sad, calm voice, she asked, “Is your roommate home?”

Craig shook his head.

“Did you lock yourself out?” She looked toward his closed door. All Craig could do was nod.

“Look,” she said. “Come in here.” She gestured for him to follow her to her apartment. “My roommates are out. You can sit on the couch and cover up with a blanket, and I’ll call the landlord to let you back in.”

The Cookie Girl hopped, then, on her one good foot, to the door, and turned to look behind her to make sure he was following. She pointed at the couch for him to sit on, and hopped around a corner, out of sight. “I’ll get the phone,” she said as she hopped.

The air inside the Cookie Girl’s apartment smelled closed and flowery to Craig. It reminded him—painfully, suddenly, completely—of Josie and Nicole’s dorm room: that smell of girls’ foreign products, perfumes, toilet waters, conditioners, clean clothes, floral soaps. And also chemicals, like nail polish and nail polish remover, and witch hazel, maybe—that’s what his mother used to clean her face with, wasn’t it? And creams and lotions with honey and buttermilk in them.

He sat on the Cookie Girl’s couch and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and in a few seconds she’d hopped back out with the phone and a soft, pink blanket. She wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and held out the phone to him. When he just stared at it blankly, she said, “Okay. I’ll call him.”

But apparently the landlord didn’t answer. The Cookie Girl had gone back into the other room, and Craig could hear her say to a machine, “This is Deb Richards? 326? Um, my neighbor is locked out? Can you call me back so I can let him know if you’ll come and let him back in?”—followed by a string of numbers: land lines, cell phone numbers, Craig’s apartment number, her apartment number. She came back into the living room, this time leaning on her crutch, and said, “I’m going to make you a cup of tea.”

Craig nodded.

“Look,” she said when she came back out of her kitchenette holding a microwaved mug from which a cloud of steam swirled, a string with a little Lipton flag hanging off the rim. “Look. I know you don’t know me, but I have to talk to you. I think I know what’s going on here—but first I have to ask you not to tell anyone that I talked to you about this. And that other thing? That I told you in the hallway? Nobody here knows about that, okay? I purposely came to a school two thousand miles away from where that happened, and I only told you because I’ve been listening to what people are saying about you, and I looked up this stuff about you on the Internet, and I feel like I can—relate, and now I have to tell you something else.”

Craig nodded again. He sipped from the tea without bothering to take the bag out or even bounce it around in the water the way he knew he was supposed to. The tea tasted like very hot water, and burned his tongue, but it also seemed like the best thing he’d ever put to his lips. The mug said FIELD DAY on the side. There was a little hockey stick under the words.

“They’re fucking with you,” the Cookie Girl (Deb?) said. “I know some of these girls. My roommate from Woodson Hall freshman year is an Omega Theta Tau, and whenever she has more than a couple of margaritas she starts to blab. Those girls have a plan to get you off this campus.”

Craig sipped from the mug again. He felt strangely and entirely at peace. Wrapped in this nice girl’s pink blanket. Sipping her tea. Her voice reminded him of his mother’s—his mother’s voice back when he was a child, when she used to speak to him quietly, enunciating every syllable. Deb Richards didn’t seem to understand that Craig already knew how much Nicole’s sorority sisters hated him, how they wanted him off campus. She seemed to think she would shock him if she spoke too quickly—either that or this was simply the most natural way to speak to someone you’d just found panting in his boxer shorts in your hallway, doubled over, flipping out.

Deb went on about how she’d overheard this or that, and how the father of the boy she had killed had stopped in his tracks at her hometown supermarket and shouted, pointing, “That fucking bitch, that fucking little bitch, that fucking little bitch killed my little boy,” so loudly and frantically that she couldn’t even leave the store because people were staring at her, and also screaming at her, and how a cashier even stood in front of her to block her way to the exit, turning all red, saying something about how she, Deb Richards, was the one who should be dead and, “You’re gonna rot in hell you negligent spoiled brat, you’re gonna rot in hell every night of your rotten life and then for all of eternity in hell…”

Craig felt awful for her.

And it was so kind of her to feel awful for him, which made him even sadder that he couldn’t even pretend to be surprised at what she had to tell him. She seemed to think these were pretty big secrets. She told him that she felt pretty sure the Omega Theta Tau sisters had all kinds of plans to scare him, and torment him, and drive him out of here. Did he have any idea how vengeful girls could be? Sorority girls especially?

Briefly he considered telling her that, yes, he did know all about how much Nicole’s sorority sisters hated him, but that, no, it wasn’t Omega Theta Tau today. It was something else. Someone. It was Alice Meyers. She’d visited him, too. She was somewhere, and she knew Nicole. She and Nicole, it seemed, were together somewhere—sending postcards, making house calls, making phone calls. But he said nothing.

And then Deb Richards was tearing up, taking his hand, telling him everything would be all right, but he really should go to school somewhere else, that it was the only thing that had helped her, that it had saved her life to get away (although, to Craig, she looked as if she had that place with her, right there in the room and all around her, in her posture, in her face) and he had to at least consider it, because—

And then she said, “I know Lucas, too.”

“Lucas?” Craig asked.

“I met Lucas last year. He used to sell me weed once in a while. They’ve got it out for him, too, you know. I don’t know why. They think he sold you bad dope or something. Or, just that he let you borrow his car, and you were stoned, so—”

“I wasn’t,” Craig said, but he said it without force, having said it so many times he no longer thought anyone cared or believed him.

“They’ve got some bad thing going with Lucas, like you. My ex-roommate, she had this story she thought was hilarious about how he’d called the suicide hotline, and one of the Omega sisters who happened to be a volunteer on the hotline that night took the call and recognized the caller ID, and was really trying to talk him into killing himself. He was going on and on about how he’d been seeing ghosts and shit, and some girl who died like twenty years ago was haunting him, and this sorority bitch was just like, ‘Oh that’s so scary. I would just want to be dead if I were being haunted by a ghost. I mean, ghosts just choose people at random, but after that it’s like your whole life they follow you around. Do you have, like, access to a gun or anything, because that would help a lot…’

“And they were all just cracking up, waiting to read in the Police Beat in the newspaper that some college senior had shot himself.”

“Lucas?” Craig asked again.

He hadn’t thought about Lucas for a little while, and it suddenly dawned on him what all of this must have done to Lucas, too—and then he put the mug down on the table next to the couch and started to feel really bad, looking around (for help? For an excuse?) like Jesus, Craig, how many people’s lives do you think you can ruin in the course of your own? All he’d done for Lucas was one stupid phone call in the summer, from New Hampshire, when some of the pieces had fallen into place again. On the phone, Lucas had said nothing, really. He’d muttered, “Oh, man. Craig, Jesus,” a few times, and then, “I have no hard feelings toward you. But I gotta go. I really can’t talk about this, man. I hope everything works out, and I have to say, if I were you, I’d stay back there, you know. Go to school in Connecticut or something. Here, you know, it’s not cool right now. But maybe someday we’ll meet again. Peace, man,” and he’d hung up.

Lucas, shit. He’d ruined Lucas’s life, too.

Deb seemed moved to tears again, looking at the expression on Craig’s face, and she got out of her seat and put her arms around his neck, pulled the pink blanket more tightly around his neck, and hugged him, and Craig felt himself sag into the hug just the way he remembered sagging against his mother as a little kid, even when he knew she was pissed at him, because at least she was pretending she wasn’t.

And then he was back there, eyes closed, sobbing into his mother’s shoulder, soaking it, and saying things in a language he wasn’t even sure he spoke, and she was patting and patting him—Deb, not his mother, and crying, too. “Look,” Deb said, “just get in my bed and go to sleep. The sheets are clean. If the slumlord ever shows up to unlock your door, I’ll wake you up. In the meantime, just rest.”

When Craig woke again, the Martian green hands of the clock beside the Deb’s bed read 4:10 (a.m.?). The room was dark except for the glow of her iPod in its charging dock, and there wasn’t a sound through the whole apartment. He wanted to pee, but not badly enough, he decided, to wake up an apartment full of girls and scare the hell out of them. He lay on his side between the Deb’s crisp sheets, which smelled of Nicole and the starch his mother used to spray on his khaki pants, and watched the hands of the alarm clock move in little twitches around the dial until Deb came in and sat down beside him in a T-shirt and gym shorts and laid a cool hand on his forehead.

And then he fell asleep again.

57

Josie seemed to soften after it became clear that, although Shelly had uncovered a truth, she wasn’t going to make threats, or a scene.

Maybe Josie even seemed excited.

She was sitting at the edge of her seat now, leaning toward Shelly, moving her hands lightly through the air between them, explaining the finer points of hazing in sorority life. She was bouncing her knee a little, and although she didn’t look directly into Shelly’s eyes, she grazed Shelly’s face as she talked, letting her eyes linger on Shelly’s shoulder or earring for a split second before scouting the room around them again.

“We never do anything physically dangerous,” Josie said. “But you really can’t feel like a group, you know, without some rituals and traditions. And secrets. If it’s not at least a little dangerous, there’s no point in keeping it a secret, so—”

Could Josie simply be relieved that the truth had come out, and that Shelly seemed to have accepted it?

Josie was thrilled, Shelly realized, to be able to spill the secrets, to have a captive audience in Shelly. Because what could Shelly possibly do with any information she received from Josie now?

“I mean, it’s not hazing like they used to haze. We’ve heard all about that. The sisters used to cut their palms—I mean really slice them open until they were gushing blood—and stand naked in a circle around a candle and have these, like, mystical things happen or something that made them sisters. In the attic there are these black-and-white photos from the sixties or something, and there’s blood all over the place, and some naked guy with long hair playing the flute. Freaky.”

It seemed like the kind of thing that would have gone on in the sixties, Shelly thought. Josie was laughing.

“I wonder what happened if someone bled too much?” Shelly said, more to herself than to Josie. She was thinking of a story her ex-husband had told her about a girl he’d had to treat after something like that: some blood ritual between volleyball teammates. They’d sliced their inner arms, and the girl had managed to hit an artery. Shelly’s ex-husband had described it in such a way that she could still, twenty years later, see the imagined girl (red, white, and blue, wearing nothing but her Wildcats Varsity jacket), who died in the ER waiting room.

“I suppose they’d get help,” Josie said, seeming disinterested. What did she care? What were the sixties to her? “We’ve always got someone standing by, in case something goes wrong.”

Josie checked behind her shoulder, but there was nothing there except the wall. Still, it was clear she knew she was now headed toward forbidden territory, about to tell Shelly something she wasn’t supposed to tell.

“We’ve got this EMT. This paramedic guy. He belongs to us. He’s like everybody’s boyfriend or a mascot or something. We love him. We make him wear his uniform because it’s so cute! He sleeps in a room at the back of the house, and the sorority pays him to be there for the events, and to be on call so…” Josie drifted off, eyes seeming to go unfocused, moving down to some place between her own knees and the floor.

“What ‘events’?” Shelly asked.

“Well, there’s this thing. There’s a Spring Event and a Winter Event. You do it your second year—so, for me it’s coming up.” She giggled a little. “I’m scared shitless. Promise not to tell anyone?”

The absurdity of this seemed to occur to Josie even as she said it, and she continued before Shelly could have answered.

“We’re reborn. As sisters. You won’t believe this.”

Shelly raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Try me, but the thing she was having a hard time, at the moment, believing was that she’d ruined her career, tossed off her entire life, to go to bed with this chatty, banal, empty person, who was sitting across from her at Starbucks talking about her sorority as if she were the only person who’d ever been in one, as if the things that took place in it were of some kind of import in the wider world. Only a week ago, Shelly marveled as she looked at Josie Reilly’s pale, excited face, she had felt she would be willing to chop off a few digits if it meant another lazy afternoon in bed with this girl. She’d actually believed herself to be in love.

“It’s called the Raising. We keep a coffin in the basement,” Josie said, leaning forward, whispering so energetically that if anyone in Starbucks had the slightest interest, they could have heard her from four tables away. “And every second-year pledge gets put into it. They do this thing where—well, first everybody’s drunk off their ass, and then the girl who’s being raised sits on the floor, and you breathe in and out really fast for two minutes exactly, and another girl presses on your neck, your artery, and you’re out.

“They put you in the coffin, and when you come to—there you are, reborn. And your sisters are all holding candles.

“The pledges all wait upstairs because they won’t let you see the ceremony until you’re either being reborn or have already been reborn.

“It’s my turn in three weeks.”

“Jesus Christ,” Shelly said, but she was reacting not to the upcoming ordeal but to the wideness of Josie’s pupils. Her eyeballs—had Shelly ever noticed before how large they were? Certain cartoon characters came to mind: Minnie Mouse. Betty Boop.

“Can you believe it?” Josie asked.

“Yes,” Shelly said. “I mean, no.”

But of course she could believe it. It seemed almost laughably believable. Par for the course. Shelly would have thought that by now sororities might have come up with some truly new, shocking, and innovative ritual. This one hardly merited the term hazing. She had herself, in fact, participated in such passing-out rituals in junior high, in Valerie Kolorik’s rec room while her parents were at their country club. There’d been no coffin, of course, but only because they could never have located or afforded one. They’d have loved a coffin. Shelly could still remember the feeling of Valerie’s clammy hands on her neck after the two minutes of hyperventilation. Those small clammy hands were the last physical sensation she’d had before slipping into oblivion. When she awoke, the other girls were all sitting around her, laughing.

“Yeah,” Josie said, nodding at Shelly with such anxious energy that it occurred to her that the girl might actually be scared. “I mean,” she said, “it’s really just a game, but there have been times when sisters got hurt. So the EMT’s there, in case.”

She sincerely whispered this last part—no longer the stage whisper—and Shelly knew it was her own cue either to ask about the sisters who’d gotten hurt, or to express concern for Josie, but she couldn’t bring herself to do either. This, she thought, was its own kind of falling into oblivion—but, this time, the little hands around her neck were Josie’s, and Shelly knew she’d be feeling them there for the rest of her life.

“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” Josie said, her eyes narrowed to slits. A statement, not a question. “About the Events. I mean, it’s not really hazing, but if the Pan-Hellenic Council—”

“No,” Shelly said. “Of course not.”

“Thank you,” Josie said, but it was pure formality. “Especially after Nicole got killed, and all this bullshit with fucking Denise disappearing…”

“Denise?”

Josie waved her had and smirked. “Ran away or something. She was creepy. But people keep snooping around like we buried her in the back yard or something.”

It came back to Shelly from her research of the accident: the music school student who’d disappeared. “What happened to her?” Shelly asked.

“How would I know? But we can’t be blamed for psycho sisters running off. She should never have gotten in to OTT in the first place. She was the kind of trash that belongs in—” She stopped herself before naming Shelly’s sorority, and a ridiculous flush spread across Shelly’s chest. She blinked, and swallowed, and stood (chair legs scraping loudly and obscenely against the bare Starbucks floor), and said, trying to sound composed, “I should go now.”

Josie looked annoyed, and disappointed, as if she’d had more surprises in store, as if she were considering whether or not to let Shelly go—and they both knew that if Josie commanded her to sit back down, Shelly would have to, so she stayed where she was, standing before Josie Reilly, waiting to see if she would be dismissed, and Josie seemed to be considering this as she looked around the coffee shop, and then to the front door, where, it seemed, someone more interesting had just stepped in.

When Josie rose, Shelly saw her opportunity to say good-bye, and even found herself bowing a little, but Josie brushed past her, and said, “Sit down, would you? I have to say hello to someone, but I’ll be right back.”

What could Shelly do?

Slowly, but inexorably, she felt her weight, and the weight of Josie’s words, pull her into the chair as she sat back down.

58

Jeff Blackhawk drove with one hand on the steering wheel. He ate his Baconator with the other hand, kept his gigantic Coke between his knees, and Mira held his carton of large fries within reach for him. As he ate and drove, Jeff also kept up both sides of the conversation for them. It seemed that the difficulty Mira was having holding up her end had become apparent to him after he’d asked her about her childhood (the simple stuff: where had she grown up, what had her parents done) and she’d spluttered something about her mother being a housewife before she’d had to stop talking in order to stifle the sob she knew would be coming if she allowed herself to utter even one more word.

“I fucking hate this state,” Jeff said. “I grew up in West Texas, which everyone makes fun of, but I’ll tell you what—” He chewed on that and his Baconator for quite a while before he continued. “People know how to live in West Texas. You get yourself some land, no trees, for one thing. A trailer. Flat. Flat! And there’s the sky. It’s everywhere.”

It occurred to Mira that Jeff Blackhawk’s poetry might be of the super-minimalist variety. He seemed to need a long time to find the words for what he wanted to convey, but when he did, they were the right words.

She could see his West Texas, although she’d never been to it. The trailer. The flat land. A bush far out in the distance. Blue. Blue.

“Here,” Jeff said, waving his Baconator at the windshield as if to erase the landscape. “Clutter. Junk. Nothing.”

He was nothing like Clark, Mira was realizing. Clark would never have used the word fucking in casual conversation, only in anger—and if he’d found himself having to go to Wendy’s for some reason, he would have ordered a chicken breast with lettuce and tomato. If he’d had to eat in his car, he would have eaten in the parking lot before driving off. He would never, ever, Mira felt entirely certain, have offered to drive a woman he knew distantly from work two hundred miles away to retrieve her children from her mother-in-law.

“How’s your research going?” Jeff asked Mira, but he didn’t wait for her to answer. “I’ve gotten even more interested in your subject, you know. So, sorry, but you might have some competition from me. Not that I can write prose, so you don’t have any competition there. But this whole thing, with the girl. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but a couple of years ago I dated a girl. She wasn’t my student”—he turned to look at Mira seriously here, and didn’t look away until she’d looked him in the eyes—“but she was a student, and she was in that sorority, the one Nicole Werner was in. Hoo. Did she have some stories! She got out when they wanted to put her in a coffin and raise her from the dead, and then they ostracized her so badly she transferred to Penn State. Now, there’s something for your sex and death book: sorority girls in coffins.

“She was an incredible girl, really. Hair like”—he swallowed the last bite of his Baconator, but it seemed to be going down with difficulty, as if crossing paths with the simile he was considering—“glass, sheet metal. I don’t date students usually, Mira. I’m well aware of my reputation, but it’s just a lonely man’s reputation, not a Casanova. I have a bad feeling, anyway, these days, that if I decided to cut a swathe through the female student population of Godwin Honors College, it would be more like a square inch than a swathe. But!” He held both hands above the steering wheel and said to the windshield, “There was a time! Yes, indeed, there was a day in the life of a lonely man named Jeff Blackhawk. Indeed.”

Mira looked down at his knees. There was a grease stain on his jeans where he’d rested the burger between bites. She realized, then, that the scent that wafted around him in the hallways, the one she’d taken for some kind of masculine emission of heat, was the smell of this car, and Baconators. She resisted an urge to put her hand on the knee and pat it. It was not a sexual urge, and Mira felt certain that he would not have misconstrued it as a sexual gesture—but at that moment he did not have his hands on the steering wheel, and he seemed so excitable that Mira was a little worried they’d end up in the median if she made even the gentlest of sudden movements.

59

“Hi, Perry.”

“Josie.”

“Haven’t seen you around for a while.”

Perry couldn’t walk around her. She was standing directly in front of him and in front of Karess, who was standing beside him. The only place to go without knocking over one of the two of them was to crawl over a table at which two guys who looked like graduate students sat, passing a page full of calculations angrily back and forth between them, and he couldn’t do that.

“Yeah,” he said to Josie, and looked around her showily in the direction of the Starbucks counter, trying to make it clear that he was on his way past her, that he didn’t plan to linger here with her. But Josie had never been one to take her cues from other people. “Are you living with Craig?” she asked him. “Because that’s the rumor.” She glanced at Karess, head to toe, and seemed to dismiss her before turning back to Craig again.

“Why do you want to know?” Perry asked.

“Because I want to know,” Josie said.

“Look. Josie, I’ve—”

“Excuse me,” Karess said, sounding meekly polite as she squeezed between Perry and Josie. When she reached the counter she turned and gestured for Perry to follow, but he couldn’t, because Josie was still standing in front of him.

“Who’s that?” Josie asked, jerking her head in Karess’s direction. “You’re dating a hippie chick?”

“Josie—”

“Look,” Josie said. “I want you to tell Craig something for me.”

Perry looked at the ceiling. He waited.

“I want you to tell Craig ‘fuck you’ for me.”

Perry continued to stare at the ceiling—although, out of the corner of his eye he could see that Karess was still waving her pale hand at him, a bit more frantically now. Her bracelets seemed to catch the light, which danced around on the ceiling. He tried to concentrate on that even as he saw (as if, suddenly, he had panoramic vision and could take in all of Starbucks without taking his eyes off the ceiling) Josie’s equally pale hand rise up and rush toward him, colliding with his face.

The smacking sound was oddly muffled to him because, along with his cheek, Josie had struck him in the ear, but it was clear to him, even in his shocked state, that everyone else in Starbucks had heard it, because they all turned to stare at him at once as Josie’s little black shoes snapped away, back to the corner she’d come from, sounding like claws or talons tapping across the linoleum as she went.

“Oh, my God!” Karess cried out, and rushed toward him as if she thought he’d been shot. She grabbed his arm and body-slammed him toward the door, pushed him out into the street. “Oh, my God!” she screamed again. “That girl slapped you!”

60

Shelly turned at the sound of a slap to see Josie red-cheeked and openmouthed, heading back toward their table, the boy she’d apparently slapped and his girlfriend careening back out the door into what now seemed to be an actual blizzard.

The same feeling of surrender, defeat, with which she’d sat back down when Josie told her to came over Shelly when she realized she was going to have to walk home in that blizzard wearing only a dress and a thin sweater. Maybe Josie would slap her, too, before she had to go back out there.

Josie tossed herself down in the chair across from Shelly, and the whole room erupted in cheers and laughter, as if the home team had just scored a touchdown. Two scholarly-looking guys at a table near the door high-fived each other. There were a few whistles, and a girl alone at a table in the corner looked up from her laptop, pumped her fist in the air. “You go, girl!” the cashier behind the counter shouted. The guy who was making cappuccinos and lattes stabbed a thumbs-up into the air, and even the mother with the toddler in the stroller who’d followed Shelly in from the cold and spoken to her so kindly was smiling.

Had something been said that Shelly hadn’t heard—something for which the boy deserved to be slapped? And if he had said something, could so many have heard it? Shelly herself hadn’t heard a thing until she’d heard the sound of the slap, and the girlfriend’s alarmed exclamations, and some of those hooting with approval had been sitting even farther from the scene than she was.

Of course, had that boy slapped Josie he would have been tackled by the very guys who were high-fiving one another now. The police would have been called. The boy would have been taken out of Starbucks in handcuffs.

Josie was pink-cheeked, her lips parted. She wasn’t smiling, but neither did she look particularly upset.

“What happened?” Shelly asked, trying to sound more concerned than she felt, more alarmed. What she wanted was to get out of there.

“Fucking asshole,” Josie said. “He lives with somebody I hate.”

“Who?” Shelly asked, and Josie muttered a name. Shelly leaned forward and asked again. “Who?”

“Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” Josie said, exasperated, as if Shelly had been badgering her about it for days. “He’s this jerk who—”

“The boy who was in the car crash,” Shelly said—and as she said it, her own voice sounded to her like someone else’s. A narrator’s voice. The distant voice of a storyteller. An omniscient narrator. A narrator who’d known all the facts all along but had chosen to reveal them slowly. “Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” she repeated, not to Josie, but to herself. “You knew him.”

Josie snorted, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I knew him,” she said. “He’s a liar and a womanizer and he deserves everything that’s coming to him—and, believe me, it will be bad, what’s coming to him.”

“You think he killed your roommate,” Shelly said. “Nicole. Your friend.”

Josie didn’t deny it, although she’d yet to tell Shelly that she’d been the dead girl’s roommate. And in all that had passed between them since, Shelly had never asked.

But now, if there’d ever been a reason to deny it, there was no longer any reason, and no more denying it. Josie shrugged, and said, “Yeah. That’s part of it.”

It was a dismissal.

Yes, he might have killed her friend, but there was something even worse he’d done.

“What did he do, Josie?”

Josie waved her question away, and said, “It doesn’t matter now. He’s going to pay.”

“He’s already paid,” Shelly said, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I was at the scene of the accident. I saw what happened. And what didn’t happen.”

“Everybody pays in the end,” Josie said, and then she laughed without the slightest hint of joy.

“Is that how you feel about me?” Shelly asked her.

Josie looked genuinely surprised at the question. Her eyebrows disappeared under her bangs.

“No,” Josie said, after considering it for what seemed like an eternity. She then uttered one more sharp, strange laugh, and left her mouth hanging open afterward, still looking at Shelly in surprise. “Don’t you get it by now? This has nothing to do with us. And it’s not some stupid hazing thing like you think. I mean, I wouldn’t degrade myself for something like that, and Omega Theta Tau would never ask me to! God. The thing with us has to do with that: You were at the scene. They want to get you out of here.”

Josie leaned back against her chair and regarded Shelly as if from a very great distance. She had the expression of someone who had just dotted the last i on a writing assignment, stapled the pages, and handed it in:

There you have it, what do you think?

Shelly could do nothing but stare back.