Far From True

Sixty-eight

It was after midnight, but this was when Lorraine Plummer got most of her work done. Plenty of Thackeray students were like that. Lorraine’s parents said they were all “night owls.” They slept through the day, never getting up before noon, sometimes staying in bed until three or four in the afternoon. But it didn’t mean they were lazy, or unproductive. They were just on a different clock from everyone else.

Lorraine often read and studied and wrote essays until three or four in the morning. Sometimes, she’d work straight through, head down for breakfast in the college cafeteria, and, once full of scrambled eggs, greasy bacon, and a bruised banana, head back up to her dormitory room, collapse on top of the bed, and fall asleep before she could get under the covers.

Of course, if you had an early-morning lecture, that could be a bit of a problem. When she had one of those, she’d force herself to go to bed no later than one, and set the alarm on her phone to make sure she got up in time. But often, she’d toss and turn and stare at the ceiling and lie awake until five, finally drifting off into a deep sleep a few minutes before her phone went off.

Her first class the next day wasn’t until one in the afternoon, so she planned to work until she could no longer keep her eyes open. She was writing an essay for Professor Blackmore’s English and psychology class that was due the end of the following week. Blackmore was pretty open to letting students stray from the curriculum if they had a good idea for an assignment, and he had liked her proposal to explore the themes of cyberbullying and intimidation in modern young adult fiction designed for a female audience.

Blackmore had said, “Go for it.”

He could be pretty cool like that, although, boy, something was very wrong with him at the lecture the other day, when he left the hall only a couple of minutes after everyone had come in. And he hadn’t been around for the tutorial he was supposed to have led that afternoon.

Lorraine had long thought that one day she would like to write a novel, but so many people said she should write about what she knew, and she believed her own life was too boring to write about. Who cared about some girl who grew up in a normal house with normal parents and led a perfectly normal life? And not everyone wrote about what they knew. What about Stephen King? She was betting he didn’t actually know any evil clowns living in the sewer.

That was more the kind of thing Lorraine wanted to write. She wanted to know what real honest-to-God writers thought about this issue, so she’d been totally thrilled when Clive Duncomb, the head of security at Thackeray, whom she had met one day when he was talking to Professor Blackmore, arranged for her to meet Adam Chalmers. Duncomb said he’d written a whole bunch of books.

She was a dinner guest at the house once. Chalmers’s wife, Miriam, who was absolutely beautiful, was there, as well as Blackmore and his wife, Georgina, who was sort of pretty but in a mousy kind of way. Also there was Duncomb, who, Lorraine learned, used to be a Boston cop and got to know Chalmers when the writer was looking for inside info on the life of a police detective. Duncomb’s wife, Elizabeth, or Liz, was this thin woman in her forties with skin that had seen way too much sun. Almost leathery. It added to a hardness about her, Lorraine remembered.

Although, she had to admit, there was a lot about that night she didn’t remember at all. She was so excited to meet a real, live writer that she got ridiculously nervous. Everyone was so nice, telling her to have some more wine to calm herself down, even though, technically speaking, Lorraine, being twenty years old, was not of legal drinking age in the state of New York. Not that she hadn’t had a drink or two — thousand — but these were grown-ups offering her booze.

Lorraine had made a joke about this, how they were all going to get into trouble.

It was Duncomb who pointed out that while the law did forbid anyone under twenty-one from purchasing alcohol, it did allow parents or legal guardians to offer someone under that age a drink in their home.

Lorraine laughed. “You guys aren’t my parents.”

Duncomb smiled. “Well, for the purposes of dinner, let’s say we are your legal guardians.”

That was good enough for her.

Trouble was, the wine went straight to her head. Big-time. Next thing she remembered, the Duncombs were driving her home.

“Please, please tell the Chalmerses I am so sorry,” she said. “I feel like such an idiot.”

“Don’t you worry about it,” Liz Duncomb said. “He thought you were lovely. We all did. Didn’t we, Clive?”

“You bet,” Clive Duncomb said.

The weird thing was, the next morning, she didn’t just feel stupid. She felt sore. Like that time after her high school grad dance, with Bobby Bratner, in his mom’s minivan, parked behind a church. But nothing like that could have happened at the Chalmerses’ place. They were all, like, good people. She couldn’t figure it out.

But what really blew her mind now was that Adam and Miriam Chalmers were dead. Crushed under that drive-in movie screen. That was so crazy. There seemed to be no end of shit going on around here.

First, there was that whole business of getting attacked by that guy in the hoodie with “23” on the front. Which was totally nuts. Why does some guy drag you into the bushes, and then tell you he isn’t actually going to do anything to you?

Not that she was sorry that nothing worse happened. But still, it was weird.

And then the guy turns out to be Mason Helt, whom she didn’t really know, but had seen around campus. Gets his head blown off by Duncomb.

What a place Thackeray was.

Despite all that, she felt safe in this cocoon of a room, which was about the size of a walk-in closet in some of her friends’ houses. There was a desk built into the wall, but she did most of her work on the bed, sitting on it sideways, her back propped against the wall, a pillow tucked in to provide comfort.

She had the laptop resting on her thighs, a couple of paperback novels, spines cracked, open and facedown on the covers next to her. Just within reach on the shelf above her pillow, a cup of tea.

Lorraine figured she had at least two more hours in her before she wouldn’t be able to keep her eyes open, but found, only minutes later, that she was nodding off. She had her fingers poised over the keyboard, was staring at the screen, when she felt her eyelids growing heavy.

Her phone trilled. A text.

She reached for it. It was from someone else in her English class with Blackmore. A girl named Cleo. She wrote: Did u hear about Bmore?

Lorraine texted back: What?

Cleo wrote: He got arrested. Ran down someone with his car

To which Lorraine wrote back: Holy shit

Cleo said: Yeah

Lorraine wrote: Hate to think of this first but what about essay

Cleo wrote: Yeah I know

The knock on the door was like a thunderclap.

Lorraine texted: GTG someone here

She tossed the phone onto the bed and called out, “Who is it?”

From behind the door, a man’s voice: “Lorraine? Sorry to trouble you so late. But I need to talk to you.”

Lorraine slid the laptop off her thighs and padded in her bare feet to the door. All Thackeray dorm rooms had peepholes in the doors. She went up on her tiptoes to get a look at whoever needed to see her at such a crazy hour.

“Oh!” she said. “It’s you!”

“Do you have a second?”

“I’m — God, I’m just in my sweats. I look like a horror show!”

“I’m really, really sorry. I wouldn’t be coming by if it wasn’t important.”

“Okay, okay,” she said.

She turned back the dead bolt and swung open the door.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“May I come in? Just for a second?”

Lorraine shrugged. “Sure, but excuse the mess.”

Her visitor just needed her to turn around, have her back to him for a second. It was always easier that way.

She obliged when she turned to walk back to her bed. He was able to do it the way he had with Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor.

They struggled, but it went quickly. Surrender was almost instant once the blade went in, and across.

Like a smile.