Rapture

TWENTY PERFECT STRANGERS

Seventeen Years Later

Luce clipped her dorm room key card between her teeth, craned her neck to swipe it through the lock, waited for the small electric click, and opened the door with her hip.

Her hands were full: Her collapsible yellow laundry basket was heaped with clothes, most of which had shrunk during their first dryer cycle away from home.

She dumped the clothes onto her narrow bottom bunk, amazed she’d found a way to wear so many different things in so short a span of time. The whole week of freshman orientation at Emerald College had passed in a disconcerting blur.

Nora, her new roommate, the first person outside Luce’s family to see her wearing her retainer (but it was cool because Nora had one, too), was sitting in the windowsill, painting her nails and talking on the phone.

She was always painting her nails and talking on the phone. She had a whole bookshelf devoted to nail polish bottles and had already given Luce two pedicures in the week they’d known each other.

“I’m telling you, Luce isn’t like that.” Nora waved excitedly at Luce, who leaned against the bed frame, eavesdropping. “She’s never even kissed a guy. Okay, once—Lu, what was that shrimpy kid’s name, from summer camp, the one you were telling me about—”

“Jeremy?” Luce wrinkled her nose.

“Jeremy, but it was, like, truth or dare or something.

Child’s play. So yeah—”

“Nora,” Luce said. “Is this really something you need to share with . . . who are you even talking to?”

“Just Jordan and Hailey.” She stared at Luce. “We’re on speaker. Wave!”

Nora pointed out the window at the dusky autumn evening. Their dorm was a pretty U-shaped white brick building with a small courtyard in the middle where everyone hung out all the time. But that wasn’t where Nora was pointing. Directly across from Luce and Nora’s third-floor window was another third-floor window.

The pane was up, tan legs dangled out, and two girls’ arms appeared, waving.

“Hi, Luce!” one of them shouted.

Jordan, the spunky strawberry blond from Atlanta, and Hailey, petite and always giggling, with thick black hair that fell in dark cascades around her face. They seemed nice, but why were they discussing all the boys Luce had never kissed?

College was so weird.

Before Luce had driven the nineteen hundred miles up to Emerald College with her parents a week earlier, she could have named each time she’d been outside Texas—once for a family vacation to Pikes Peak in Colo-rado, twice for regional championship swim meets in Tennessee and Oklahoma (the second year, she beat her own personal best in freestyle and took home a blue ribbon for the team), and the yearly holiday visits to her grandparents’ house in Baltimore.

Moving to Connecticut to go to college was a huge deal for Luce. Most of her friends from Plano Senior High were going to Texas schools. But Luce had always had the feeling that there was something waiting for her way out in the world, that she had to leave home to find it.

Her parents supported her—especially when she got that partial scholarship for her butterfly stroke. She’d packed her whole life into one oversized red duffel bag and filled a few boxes with sentimental favorites she couldn’t part with: the Statue of Liberty paperweight her dad had brought her back from New York; a picture of her mom with a bad haircut when she was Luce’s age; the stuffed pug that reminded her of the family dog, Mozart. The cloth along the bucket back seats of her battered Jeep was frayed, and it smelled like cherry Popsicles, and that was comforting to Luce. So was the view of the back of her parents’ heads as her father drove the speed limit for four long days up the East Coast, stopping from time to time to read historical markers and take a tour at a pretzel factory in northwestern Delaware.

There had been one moment when Luce thought about turning back. They were already two days’ drive from home, somewhere in Georgia, and her dad’s “shortcut” from their motel to the highway took them out along the coast, where the road got pebbly and the air started to stink from all the skunk grass. They were barely a third of the way up to school and already Luce missed the house she’d grown up in. She missed her dog, the kitchen where her mom made yeast rolls, and the way, in late summer, her father’s rosebushes grew up around her windowsill, filling her room with their soft scent and the promise of fresh-cut bouquets.

And that was when Luce and her parents drove past a long winding driveway with a high, foreboding gate that looked electrified, like a prison. A sign outside the gate read in bold black letters SWORD & CROSS REFORM SCHOOL.

“That’s a little ominous,” her mother chirped from the front seat, looking up from her home-remodeling magazine. “Glad you’re not going to school there, Luce!”

“Yeah,” she said, “me too.” She turned and watched out the back window until the gates disappeared into the winding woods. Then, before she knew it, they were crossing into South Carolina, closer to Connecticut and her new life at Emerald College with every revolution of the Jeep’s new tires.

Then she was there, in her dorm room, and her parents were all the way back home in Texas. Luce didn’t want her mom to worry, but the truth was she was desperately homesick.

Nora was great—it wasn’t that. They’d been friends since the moment Luce walked into the room and saw her new roommate tacking up a poster of Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn from Two for the Road. The bond cemented when the girls had tried to make popcorn in the seedy dorm kitchen at two in the morning the first night and succeeded only in setting off the fire alarm, sending everyone outside in their pajamas. The whole week of orientation, Nora had gone out of her way to include Luce in every one of her many plans. She’d gone to a fancy prep school before Emerald, so she walked into college orientation already assimilated to life inside a dorm. It didn’t seem weird to her that there were boys living next door, that the online campus radio station was the only acceptable way to listen to music, that you had to swipe a card to do anything around here, that class papers would have to be a whopping four pages long.

Nora had all these friends from Dover Prep, and she seemed to make twelve more every day—like Jordan and Hailey, still dangling and waving through their window.

Luce wanted to keep up, but she had spent her whole life in a sleepy nook of Texas. Things were slower there, and now she realized that she liked it that way. She found herself pining for things she’d always said she hated at home, like country music and gas station fried chicken on a stick.

But she’d come to school up here to find herself, for her life to finally begin. She kept having to tell herself that.

“Jordan was just saying their next-door neighbor thinks you’re cute.” Nora gave Luce’s wavy waist-length dark hair a tug. “But he’s a player, so I was making it clear that you, dear, are a lady. You wanna go over there in a few and pre-party before that other party I told you about tonight?”

“Sure.” Luce popped the top on the Coke she’d bought at the vending machine near the powder-deter-gent-strewn laundry stations.

“I thought you were bringing me a diet?”

“I did.” Luce reached into her laundry basket for the can she’d bought for Nora. “Sorry, I must have left it downstairs. I’ll run and get it. Be right back.”

“Pas de prob,” Nora said, practicing her French. “But hurry. Hailey says there’s a varsity soccer team infiltra-tion on their side of the hall. Soccer boys equal good parties. We should head over there soon. Gotta go,” she said into the phone. “No, I’m wearing the black shirt.

Luce is wearing yellow—or, are you gonna change? Either way . . .”

Luce waved to Nora that she’d be right back and ducked out of the room. She took the stairs two at a time, winding down the floors of the dorm until she stood on the tattered maroon carpet at the entrance to the basement, which everyone on campus called the Pit, a term that made Luce think of peaches.

At the window leading out into the courtyard, Luce paused. A car full of boys was stopped in the circular drive of the dorm. As they climbed out, laughing and shoving each other, Luce saw they all had Emerald Varsity Soccer shirts on. Luce recognized one of them. His name was Max and he’d been in a couple of Luce’s orientation sessions that week. He was seriously cute—blond hair, big white smile, typical prep-school-boy look (which she recognized now after Nora drew her a dia-gram the other day at lunch). She’d never talked to Max, not even when they were teamed up with a few other kids on the campus scavenger hunt. But maybe if he was going to be at the party that night . . .

All the boys getting out of that car were really cute, which for Luce equaled intimidating. She didn’t like the thought of being the one shy girl in Jordan and Hailey’s room upstairs.

But she did like the thought of being at the party.

What else was she supposed to do? Hide in her dorm room because she was nervous? She was obviously going to go.

She jogged down the final flight of stairs to the basement. It was getting close to sunset, so the laundry room had emptied, giving it a lonely glow. Sunset was the time you wore the things you’d washed and dried. There was just one girl in crazy thigh-high striped kneesocks, savagely scrubbing a stain from a tie-dyed pair of jeans as if all her future hopes and dreams depended on the stain’s removal. And a boy, sitting atop a loud and shaking dryer, tossing a coin in the air and catching it in his palm.

“Heads or tails?” he asked when she walked in. He had a square face, wavy amber hair, big blue eyes, and a tiny gold chain around his neck.

“Heads.” Luce shrugged and gave a little laugh.

He flipped the coin, caught it, and flipped it over into his palm, and Luce saw that it wasn’t a quarter. It was old, really old, a dusty golden color with faded writing in another language’s script. The boy raised an eyebrow at her. “You win. I don’t know what you won yet, but that’s probably up to you.”

She twirled around, searching for the diet soda she’d left down there. Then she saw it about an inch from the boy’s right knee. “This isn’t yours, is it?” she asked.

He didn’t answer; he just stared at her with icy blue eyes, which she saw now suggested a profound sadness that didn’t seem possible in someone his age.

“I left it down here earlier. It’s for my friend. My roommate. Nora,” Luce said, reaching for the can. This boy was strange, intense. She was blabbering. “I’ll see you later.”

“One more time?” he asked.

She turned around in the doorway. He meant the coin game. “Oh. Heads.”

He flipped. The coin seemed to hover in the air. He caught it without looking, flipped it over, and opened his palm. “You win again,” he sang in a voice eerily iden-tical to that of Hank Williams, a favorite old singer of Luce’s dad.

Back upstairs, Luce tossed Nora the Coke. “Have you met the crazy coin-toss guy in the laundry room?”

“Luce.” Nora squinted. “When I run out of underwear, I buy new underwear. I am hoping to make it to Thanksgiving without having to do laundry. Are you ready? Soccer boys are waiting, hoping to score. We are their goal, but we must remind them they can’t use their hands.”

She took Luce by the elbow and steered her out of the room.

“Now, if you meet a boy named Max, I suggest avoid-ance. I went to Dover with him, and I’m positive he’ll be on the soccer team. He will seem cute and very charming. But he has the biggest bitch of a girlfriend back home. Well, she thinks she’s his girlfriend”—Nora murmured behind her hand—“and she got rejected from Emerald and is ferociously bitter about it. She’s got spies everywhere.”

“Got it.” Luce laughed, frowning inside. “Stay away from Max.”

“What’s your type, anyway? I mean, I know you’ve moved on from gangly old Jeremy.”

“Nora.” Luce gave her a little shove. “You are not allowed to bring him up all the time. That was late-night roommate private conversation. What happens in pajamas stays in pajamas.”

“You’re totally right.” Nora nodded, putting up her hands in surrender. “Some things are sacred. I respect that. Okay. If you had to describe your dream kiss in five words or less . . .”

They were walking around the second bend of the U-shaped dorm. In a moment, they would turn the corner and approach the end of the hall, called the Caboose, where Jordan and Hailey’s room was. Luce leaned against the wall and sighed.

“I’m not embarrassed about having, you know, no experience,” Luce said quietly—these walls were thin.

“It’s just, do you ever feel like nothing has happened to you? Like you know you have a destiny, but all you’ve seen of life so far is unexceptional? I want my life to be different. I want to feel that it’s begun. I’m waiting for that kiss. But sometimes I feel like I could wait forever and nothing would ever change.”

“I’m in a hurry, too.” Nora’s eyes had gone a little fuzzy. “I know what you mean—but you do have at least a little control. Especially when you stick with me. We can make things happen. Our first semester’s barely even started, kid.”

Nora was eager to get to the party, and Luce wanted to go; she really did. But she was talking about that inde-scribable thing that was bigger than having a good time at a party. She was talking about a destiny that Luce felt like she had as much control over as the outcome of a coin toss—something that was and wasn’t really in her hands.

“You okay?” Nora tilted her head at Luce. A short auburn curl flopped down over her eye.

“Yeah.” Luce nodded nonchalantly. “I’m good.”

They went to the party—which was just a bunch of open dorm room doors and freshmen walking into and out of them. Everyone had plastic cups filled with this super-sweet red punch that seemed to replenish itself automatically. Jordan DJ’ed from her iPod, shouting,

“Holla!” every now and then. The music was good. Her sweet next-door neighbor David Franklin ordered pizza, which Hailey improved by adding fresh oregano from the herb garden she’d brought from home and installed in the corner by the window. These were good people, and Luce was glad to know them.

Luce met twenty students in thirty minutes and most of them were boys who leaned in and put their hands on the small of her back when she introduced herself, as if they couldn’t hear her otherwise, as if touching made her voice clearer. She realized she was keeping an eye out for the coin-toss guy from the laundry room.

Three cups of punch and two slices of amazing thin-crust pepperoni pizza later, Luce had been officially introduced to and then spent the next ten minutes trying to avoid Max. Nora was right: He was good-looking, but way too flirtatious for someone with a crazy girlfriend back home. She and Nora and Jordan were crammed on Jordan’s bed, whispering ratings for all the boys there in between fits of giggles, when Luce decided that she’d had a little too much mystery punch. She left the party and slipped down the stairs, seeking quiet air.

The night was cool and dry, nothing like Texas. This breeze refreshed her skin. There were a few stars out and a few kids in the courtyard, but no one Luce knew, so she felt free to sit down on one of the stone benches between two stout peony bushes. They were her favorite flowers.

She’d taken it as a good omen when the grounds around her dorm were blooming with them, even at the end of August. She fingered the deeply lobed petals of one of the full white blossoms and leaned forward to breathe in its soft nectar.

“Hello.”

She jumped. With her nose buried in a flower, she hadn’t seen him approach. Now a pair of ragged Con-verse sneakers was standing right in front of her. Her eyes traveled up: faded jeans, a black T-shirt, a thin red scarf tied loosely around his neck. Her heart picked up and she didn’t know why; she hadn’t even seen his face—short golden hair . . . obscenely soft-looking lips . . . eyes so gorgeous that Luce sucked in her breath.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” What color were his eyes?

“That’s not why I gasped. I mean . . .” The flower fell from her hand, three petals landing on the boy’s shoes.

Say something.

He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me.

Not that!

It was physically impossible to say anything. Not only was this guy the most incredible thing Luce had ever seen in all her life, he’d walked up to her and introduced himself. The way he was looking at her made Luce feel as if she were the only other person in the courtyard.

As if she were the only other person on Earth. And she was blowing it.

Instinctively, she reached up to touch her necklace—and found her neck was bare. That was strange. She always wore the silver locket her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday. It was a family heirloom, containing an old picture of her grandmother, looking very much like Luce, taken right around the time she’d met the man who would become her grandfather. Had she forgotten to put it on that morning?

The boy tilted his head in a kind of smile.

Oh no. She’d been staring at him this whole time. He raised his hand as if to give a little wave. But he didn’t wave. His fingers hovered in the air. And her heart started pounding, because all of a sudden, she had no idea what this stranger would do. He could do anything.

A friendly gesture was just one possibility. He could flip her off. She probably deserved to be flipped off for staring at him like a crazy stalker. That was ridiculous. She was being ridiculous.

He waved, as if to say, Hello in there. “I’m Daniel.” When he smiled, she saw that his eyes were beautifully gray with just a hint of—was that violet? Oh God, she was going to fall in love with a guy with purple eyes.

What would Nora say?

“Luce,” she finally managed. “Lucinda.”

“Cool.” He smiled again. “Like Lucinda Williams.

The singer.”

“How did you know that?” No one ever guessed Lucinda Williams. “My parents met at a Lucinda Williams concert in Austin. Texas,” she added. “Where I’m from.”

“Essence is my favorite of her albums. I listened to it for half the drive out here from California. Texas, eh?

Big adjustment coming to Emerald?”

“Total culture shock.” It felt like the most honest thing she’d said all week.

“You get used to it. I did after two years, anyway.” He reached out and touched her shoulder when he noticed her panicked expression. “I’m kidding. You look much more adaptable than I am. I’ll see you next week and you’ll be completely settled in, wearing a sweatshirt with a big ‘E’ on it.”

She was looking at his hand on her arm. But more than that, she was experiencing a thousand tiny explosions inside her, like the finale of a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. He laughed and then she laughed and she didn’t know why.

“Do you”—she couldn’t believe she was about to say this to a model-gorgeous upperclassman from California—“want to sit down?”

“Yeah,” he said instantly, then glanced up at the window where the lights were on and the party was happening. “You wouldn’t happen to know about a soccer party going on somewhere in there?”

Luce pointed, slightly crestfallen. “I was just there.

It’s right up the stairs.”

“No fun?”

“It was fun,” she said. “I just—”

“Thought you’d catch your breath?”

She nodded.

“I was supposed to meet a friend.” Daniel shrugged, looking up at the window, where Nora was flirting with someone they couldn’t see. “But maybe I already have.” He squinted at her and she wondered, horrified, if she’d been talking to him with flower pollen dusting her nose. Wouldn’t be the first time.

“Are you taking cell biology this quarter?” he asked.

“No way. I barely got out of there alive in high school.” She looked at him, at his eyes, which were most definitely a shade of violet. They glowed when she said,

“Why do you ask?”

Daniel shook his head, as if he’d been thinking something that he didn’t want to say aloud. “You just—you look so familiar. I could have sworn we’d met somewhere before.”