The Raising

1

There was a sad landmark on every block of that town:

The bench they’d sat on, watching the other students walk by��with their backpacks, short skirts, iPods.

The tree they’d stood under during a downpour, laughing, kissing, chewing cinnamon gum.

There was the bookstore where he’d bought the collection of poems by Pablo Neruda for her, and the awful college sports bar where they’d first held hands. There were the pretend-Greek columns that pretended to hold up the roof of the Llewellyn Roper Library, and Grimoire Gifts, reeking of patchouli and incense and imported cloth, where he’d bought the amber ring for her—set in silver, a globe of ancient sap with a little prehistoric fruit fly trapped in it for eternity.

And the Starbucks where they went to study, and never opened a book.

Craig’s father cleared his throat and slowed down at an intersection when a girl in tight jeans, flip-flops, and a low-cut tank top walked in front of the car without even glancing over. She was nodding her head in time to something she was hearing through the white wires plugged into her ears. Craig’s father looked over and said, in a voice thick with emotion, “You okay, buddy?”

Craig nodded solemnly, straight ahead, and then looked over at his father. They both attempted to smile, but to someone seeing it through the Subaru’s windshield it might have looked like two men grimacing at one another, each gripped suddenly and simultaneously by chest pains or intestinal discomfort. Sun slid through the car windows in the slanted, distant way of a bright day in early autumn; obviously, their side of the planet was tilting away from the sun. The girl passed, Craig’s father stepped on the gas, and the car moved through the green shade of the huge, leafy oaks and elms that lined the road through campus, and which had been greeting new and returning students to the university for nearly a hundred and fifty Septembers.

“Take a left here, Dad,” Craig said, pointing.

His father turned onto Second Street. On the corner a girl with an old-fashioned bike was stomping at the kickstand near the curb. Her hair was so blond it glowed. It was the kind of hair that Craig had always distrusted—too seraphic, almost God-fearing—on girls.

Until Nicole.

But this girl at the curb with the bike was nothing like Nicole.

This girl had seen too many music videos, and was trying to look like one of the straggly, anemic blondes dancing behind the band. Her hair was greasy. Her nose was pierced. Her jeans sagged down over the sharp blades of her hipbones. She was the kind of girl Craig might have dated for a few weeks back home. Back then, before Nicole.

“Take a right now, Dad,” he said.

His father slowed down on narrow King Street. It was still cobblestone, somehow. Some strange nineteenth-century leftover. (Had they simply forgotten to pave it?) The tires of the Subaru rumbled over the stones, and the rearview mirror rattled.

Here, on King Street, the trees made a canopy overhead, and the houses sagged with their decades at the edges of the sidewalks. These decrepit mansions must have been, at one time, inhabited by the town’s elite; Craig could picture women in bustled skirts, men with handlebar mustaches and bowties, rocking on the front porches, being brought glasses of lemonade by servants.

But it was a student slum now. The thudding bass of someone’s stereo served as a heartbeat to the whole block. Couches sat on the porches and on the lawns. Bikes appeared tossed into piles, leaning into each other, locked up to wrought-iron fences. There were hitching posts for horses at the ends of the driveways, most of them painted the school’s colors: crimson and gold. Two shirtless guys standing several lawns apart threw a football between them with what seemed like malicious force, while a girl in a bikini on a lawn chair watched it fly back and forth in front of her. Against the sky that football looked like the pit of some piece of bright blue fruit.

“It’s this one.”

Craig’s father slowed down in front of the house, which had once been painted white but had weathered to gray. There were ten mailboxes beside the front door—the number of apartments—and there was Perry.

Good old Perry.

How long had he been standing there, waiting?

Eagle Scout. Altar boy. Best friend.

The realization of that fact filled the back of Craig’s throat with something that tasted like tears. He swallowed. He lifted his hand to wave.

Perry was wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates cap, a clean T-shirt, and khaki shorts. New tennis shoes? Had his mother ironed that perfect crease in the shorts?

Perry saluted—sadly, ironically, the perfect gesture—and Craig’s father’s chuckle sounded vaguely like a sob. “There’s your pal,” he said, and pulled up to the curb, and Perry strode solemnly over to the car, yanked open the passenger door, and called in, “Hey, asshole, welcome back,” and then bent down and looked past Craig to his father. “How are you, Mr. Clements?”

Dependable, presentable, sociable Perry. Just profane enough. Just polite enough.

“Great, Perry,” Craig’s father said in a voice full of gratitude and relief. “It’s really good to see you.”

Craig and Perry’s apartment was on the third floor. Perry had picked it out for them back in July. “It’s not the Ritz,” he said as they climbed the stairs behind him. “But it has indoor plumbing.”

Craig’s father carried a box of books and a tangled mass of USB cords. Perry had Craig’s duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a trash bag full of sheets and pillowcases over the other. Craig carried his laptop, towels, and another trash bag—boots and shoes and his down jacket—up a narrow staircase carpeted in dust and dirt, to the left, past the closed doors of two other apartments. One of the doors had a whiteboard nailed to it and I went to Good Time Charlie’s! meet us! written in purple Magic Marker on it, a big smiley face for the o in to.

“This is us,” Perry said, nodding at number seven. He pushed open the door with his sneaker.

“Great!” Craig’s father said again, stepping in behind Perry, exclaiming it so loudly that his voice echoed off the bare floors and walls, sounding even more falsely bright the second time.

The apartment was, of course, immaculate. Perry had moved in a few weeks before, having worked as an orientation guide for new students over the summer, and he’d obviously done his thing—swept, dusted, arranged a collection of books in alphabetical order on the narrow bookshelf next to the couch. Craig carried his things through the dark little kitchen with its freshly scoured sink, past Perry’s bedroom, to his own, and stood in the middle of it.

A bright whiteness. The windows looked freshly washed—something Craig felt pretty sure their slumlord hadn’t done—and the bed was made in crisp-looking blue sheets, a plaid bedspread.

“My mom did that,” Perry said, nodding at the bed, “and that,” he added, nodding at a bouquet of daisies in a clear vase on a scratched-up plywood dresser. “I like you, man, but not enough to buy you flowers. Yet.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows in the way that only Perry could, and Craig felt what might have been a chuckle start in his chest, but he suppressed it, just in case it might turn into something else.

“Well,” Craig’s father said, clapping both guys on the back at once. “This looks great!”

The year before, his freshman year, Craig’s whole family had rolled onto campus together to bring him to Godwin Honors Hall. Craig’s father had been laying on the horn the whole way through town, startling pedestrians and causing the drivers of the other vehicles to swivel their shocked faces at the Subaru. “Don’t they teach people how to drive in the Midwest?” he had growled.

Craig’s mother had just stared out the window, taking it in. Her silence made her dissatisfaction with the place palpable—a kind of thick green mist filling up the car. “It’s pretty,” she’d said, tapping her finger in the direction of the library’s ridiculous faux-classical columns, as if it weren’t the most damning praise she was capable of giving. Beside Craig in the backseat, Scar maniacally twiddled at the Game Boy in his hands, breathing heavily through his mouth as if he were alone at the control panel of a spaceship that was about to spin out of control.

Finally Craig’s father pulled the car up to the curb right under a sign that read, NO PARKING HERE TO CORNER, and asked, “This it?” as if it might not be, despite the name chiseled into the stone above the entrance, GODWIN, and the crimson-and-gold sign posted near the gate, GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the banner strung between two trees in the courtyard, WELCOME TO GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the student standing outside with a poster board sign that read, GODWIN HONORS HALL.

“I think so,” Craig said.

Godwin Honors Hall was the oldest building on campus, and looked it. It was the campus’s only “Living Learning” facility, a dorm in which selected students slept, ate, and attended classes all in one building. On a campus that covered two hundred and fifty acres, if you were allowed into the Godwin Honors Hall program, it was implied by the brochure materials, the farthest you would ever have to walk was to the library, and you would never have to take a class or share a meal with any non-honors student for your entire four years at the university.

The whole thing had started as an experiment in 1965—a way, mainly, for some hippie activists to keep the decrepit building from being torn down, Craig would learn later—the proposal being to create a private little liberal honors college (Oberlin? Antioch?) right there at the dead-center of one of the country’s biggest public universities. It would appeal, they’d implied, to students who didn’t want to get lost among the unwashed hordes.

Or who’d applied to Oberlin and not gotten in.

To Craig, it had sounded claustrophobic, a rat-in-a-maze kind of experiment that should have failed by 1966 due to rat insanity, but his father had insisted that the prestige of getting into the program would confer some sort of magical properties on Craig’s future. And once Craig got his acceptance letter, which had shocked them all, the subject was closed for discussion.

The windows of Godwin Honors Hall were of the tiny diamond-paned variety, one or two of them cracked, glittering in the sun. The heavy wooden doors—gouged and shellacked, gouged and shellacked—shone with the sad decay of having been abused by thousands of students for a century and a half. The tiles of the entranceway were blood red and cracked, chipped, ice-picked away in places and sloppily replaced in others. Inside, there was the smell of mildew and disinfectant. A guy leaned against a wall of mailboxes, wearing a baseball cap on backward and a football jersey. He might have taken a long soaking bath in stale beer that morning. Someone had spray-painted, misspelled, the great philosophical advice “KNOW THYSEFL.” Scar tapped Craig on the shoulder and mouthed the now-familiar and maddeningly annoying joke: “It’s not Dartmouth.”

Four flights up, through a maze of old carpet and blasted rap music and flyers taped to cinderblock warning the residents about STDs and inviting them to church jamborees and library orientations, they dead-ended at Craig’s room, number 416, opened the door, and found Craig’s roommate sitting at one of the two desks, reading a textbook of human anatomy.

That was Perry, back when Perry was a stranger.

His hair was shaved down to a millimeter of his scalp, and he was wearing khaki shorts and a fluorescent orange T-shirt that looked brand new, but which Craig would learn later wasn’t (Perry’s mother starched his T-shirts, per Perry’s request), that read, EVENT ASSIST, on it in alarmingly large black capital letters. What event? What assist? Craig would also learn later that this was the standard T-shirt worn by Perry’s Scout troop when they helped out in the parking lots of state fairs and Civil War reenactments. He just liked to wear it, whether he was assisting any events or not, and at the moment, it struck Craig as disorienting.

“Hello!” Perry said, closing his book.

“Hey,” Craig said, and then, “I guess I’m your roommate,” shrugging, feeling noncommittal, but Perry stood up quickly and offered his hand to Craig, shook it firmly, and then went around the room shaking the hands of each of Craig’s family members—even Scar, shaggy bangs falling across his face, who stood openmouthed before this new breed of human being. Had Scar ever seen a person under the age of twenty-five shake another person’s hand, except on television, or as a joke?

Had Craig?

“Welcome,” Perry said, and then, without a hint of irony, gesturing around, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”

They all looked at the room at once:

Four bare walls, a dustless linoleum floor, two closets with doors closed. Perry’s bed was made. (A green comforter. A pillow in a plaid pillowcase.) Where was the mess?

“Where are you from?” Craig’s mother asked Perry in a tone that suggested she fully expected Perry to admit that he’d been assembled in a laboratory, or that he’d grown up on the moon.

“Bad Axe,” Perry said, as if everyone would be familiar with “Bad Axe.”

“No way,” Scar said, sounding sincerely astonished.

“Yeah,” Perry said. He held up his hand and pointed at his thumb, as if that might explain something. “What about you?”

“New Hampshire,” Craig’s mother said. “Via Boston,” she added, as she always did, and Craig’s father stiffened, as he always did—but Craig could tell, by looking at Perry, that none of this meant anything to him.

Now, obviously, a year later, Perry had given Craig the better room in the apartment. The closet was large, and the window faced the backyard instead of the street.

“Don’t you think?” Craig’s father asked. “I mean, that it’s a great apartment? A lot better than the dorm?”

“Yeah,” Craig said, trying hard to sound appreciative. “It’s great.”

“We were pretty lucky,” Perry said. “Leaving it so late. It’s got a good view.” He walked across Craig’s room to the window and gestured out. Craig and his father followed, looked down into the backyard, where two girls of the bed-head-and-belly-button-ring variety were lying in bikinis on towels. Glistening in the sun. Their hipbones seemed to glow under their tanning skin. Craig looked away fast. His father and Perry looked at him, and then both cleared their throats at the same time.

“So. Shall we get something to eat?” Craig’s father asked. “Before I head back to New Hampshire?”

“You’re going back already?” Perry asked. “We can put you up for a night, Mr. Clements. Or for as long as you like.”

“No. No,” Craig’s father said, shaking his head, making the expression of someone who’d just been offered a lifesaving drug but who didn’t want to bother anyone to go to the cupboard to fetch it. Clearly he wanted to escape. “I really need to—”

Perry nodded, pretending Rod Clements had finished the sentence with something that explained it—although Craig knew that there could be nothing his father needed to get back to New Hampshire for so fast. His father was a writer. He was in the middle of writing a one-thousand-page sequel to his last novel. He hadn’t sat down at the computer to work on it since Christmas.

Craig knew precisely why his father wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. If there was anything Rod Clements couldn’t stand, it was to see anyone he cared about suffer. Even as a child, Craig had intuitively understood that it would have been easier for his father to shoot him, like a racehorse, than to drive him to the hospital screaming in pain with a broken leg.

It had happened once—the broken leg—and Craig’s mother had done the driving, Craig’s father insisting that he should drive behind them, separately, just in case her car broke down, and even in his writhing agony Craig had picked up on the sneer of contempt his mother shot at his father’s back as he trotted away from her car, huge sweat stains spreading out in the armpits of his gray shirt.

This time, Craig knew, his dad would probably drive a couple of hours east, as quickly as he could, and take a room at a Holiday Inn.

“That’s a lot of driving, Mr. Clements,” Perry said. “But, okay.”

For the bite to eat, they went to the fanciest restaurant in town, Chez Vin. Chez Vin was where the Clements-Rabbitts had dined as a family the year before, overdressed and exhausted after their long drive, the four of them shoulder to shoulder at the hostess’s podium as Craig’s father announced to the toothy redhead that they were meeting a friend.

“Oh!” she’d said. “You guys are here to meet Dean Fleming!”

Craig’s mother rolled her eyes behind the hostess’s back and mouthed “you guys” to Scar. She’d been complaining about this phrase since they’d passed through Ohio, where, at every gas station and fast food place, someone addressed them as “you guys.” At a 7-Eleven in Dundee, Michigan, when the ponytailed twenty-something at the cash register chirped, “How are you guys today?” Craig’s mother had finally snapped and said, “Do I look like a guy?” She’d gestured toward the family she obviously thought looked far more dignified than they were being given credit for, and said, “Are we guys? What’s this you guys thing?”

Craig had turned with his Tic Tacs and hurried out the electric doors into the parking lot as quickly as he could, listening to the girl at the register giggle in panic. Hopefully, she thought it was a joke. Hopefully, Craig’s dad would get his mother out of there before she disabused the poor girl of that.

But, that first night at Chez Vin, standing at the hostess’s podium, Craig had looked away from his mother, away from Scar, and away from the redhead, and had stared hard at the side of his father’s face while registering for the first time that his father’s friend from college, the one they’d come to meet for dinner, this friend from way back, was the dean of the Honors College—the incredibly selective honors college they’d all been so astonished that, “with your low-achiever grades and unambitious test scores,” Craig had been so lucky, so honored, to get into.

“What?” his father had said to Craig, sensing his stare and turning around with both his hands up, as if to prove that there was nothing up his sleeve.

This year, the hostess was an older woman, who nevertheless said, “Hi, you guys,” to which they all three nodded as she directed them to a corner table. Only Perry had bothered to wear a long-sleeve buttoned shirt and dress shoes. They ate all the bread in the basket before the waiter arrived with their mineral water. Craig’s father and Perry talked about weather and the relative merits of certain kinds of mountain bikes as Craig watched the candle at the center of the table surge and recede—now a perfect diamond shape, now a teardrop, now a fluttering fingernail followed by a crescent followed by a dog tooth followed by a burning vertical eyelid.

“Perry,” Craig’s father said later, in front of the apartment house, pressing both of Perry’s hands in his own as the boy bid them farewell, “I’m so glad Craig’s—”

“Craig will be fine, Mr. Clements,” Perry said.

“Son,” Rod Clements said, turning to Craig, “I—”

“Be careful driving, Dad.”

They stood in the middle of the sidewalk. A few feet away from them a couple kissed with abandon under a dead streetlamp. A sad foursome of ugly guys parted around the couple, and then around Perry, Craig, and his father.

“Love ya,” Craig’s father said, and clapped Craig to him, patting him hard on the back.

“I love you, too,” Craig said.

They held the embrace for at least three seconds, long enough for Craig to notice, just beyond his father’s shoulder, hanging above the couple kissing, far over the place where the streetlamp should have been shining, the moon, which appeared to be made of either solid rock or the softest of human flesh, floating in an ink-blue sky.

2

Shelly Lockes called the newspaper after the first article, full of inaccuracies about the accident, came out, and although the reporter to whom her call was forwarded assured her that he would “set the record straight on the details of the accident as reported in our paper right away,” no corrections ever appeared.

After that, Shelly asked to speak to the newspaper’s editor, and her call was passed on by a receptionist, who said, “Well, he doesn’t take calls from the public, but this person is one of our editors, and she could speak to you.”

On the phone, this person sounded like a child:

“You mean, like, you were the first one at the scene of the accident?”

“Yes. I was. Why hasn’t anyone spoken to me? My name’s part of the public record. The paramedics and the police took all my information. I’d like to correct the record.”

The editor stammered a bit before she said, “Wow. Okay. Well, I’ll have someone call you this afternoon.”

No one called, and the next day, again, there was a front-page story that described how the girl had been found in a “lake of blood” in the backseat of the car. How she’d been thrown there by the impact. How she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. How she’d already bled to death before the ambulance arrived, and that she was unrecognizable. That her face had hit the front windshield, and then the rear window. That her roommate had identified her at the morgue from the black dress and jewelry she’d been wearing that evening, and that the boyfriend who’d been driving the vehicle was found hours later wandering down a rural road, covered in his girlfriend’s blood.

The newspaper said that medical professionals could only wonder at how he’d managed to stumble so far with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, a closed-head injury, and a ruptured spleen.

But Shelly Lockes had been there.

She’d called the ambulance herself within minutes of the accident. She’d waded through a ditch full of water and stood above the boy and girl. The girl had been thrown into the grass. She was not in the car. The light of the full moon had been plenty bright for Shelly to see it all—and she knew for a fact that the only blood at the scene had been her own.

The gash to her hand.

Admittedly, it was a nasty gash. She’d needed stitches, and bandages, and if she’d ever played handball or mandolin, she’d probably never be able to play again. The scar still surprised her every time she looked at it. How had she not felt the cut when it happened? It wasn’t until she was in the Emergency Room, holding it up, wrapped in her own sweatshirt, that her hand had started to hurt like hell.

But it had not created a “lake of blood.”

There had been no lake of blood.

“Maybe they’re all like this,” her friend Rosemary suggested. “Maybe every goddamn article about every event in the local newspaper is completely made up, but we don’t know because we didn’t witness most of them. ‘A lake of blood’ sells a lot more newspapers than no blood.”

The next article described the “first person at the scene of the accident” as a middle-aged woman who came upon it hours after it had happened, and made a call to 911 but left the scene before the paramedics arrived, and could not be reached by police. After that article, Shelly called the newspaper and the police.

“Not one word of what’s being reported is accurate. This needs to be looked into. For the record. There are implications here, for all of us.”

The officer in charge of the case assured Shelly that he had all her information, that her help with this was invaluable, that he himself would contact the newspaper and make the correction. But he also said, “It’s a rag, you know. I wish I had a dime for every time they slaughtered a story. I’d be a very rich man.”

The managing editor of the paper promised Shelly that a correction would appear the next day: “We have so many sources of information, ma’am. I’m sure you understand that with so much effort put into each story by so many people, mistakes can and do occur.”

Shelly waited for the correction—scoured the next week’s newspaper, every day—and never found it.

3

“Her name’s Nicole Werner,” Perry told his roommate, whose mouth was open, staring at her. Perry was hoping that if he distracted him with information, Craig would close his mouth and quit leering. “Her whole family’s from Bad Axe, for generations. She’s got about four hundred cousins. Our elementary school was called Werner Elementary.”

“Farm slut?” his roommate asked. “Dumb blonde?”

“She was our valedictorian,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he felt. He had no particular stake in Nicole Werner per se, but everything Craig Clements-Rabbitt had said about everything since spreading out his high-tech sleeping bag on his bare mattress in their dorm room on move-in day had been either annoying or infuriating.

“Huh. Valedictorian? I thought that would have been you, Perry-my-man. What the hell happened?”

“She was the better student.” Perry nodded with what he hoped looked like sincerity, not bitterness.

There’d been, certainly, a period of bitterness. Nicole Werner, in addition to being valedictorian, had also gotten the Ramsey Luke Scholarship—the first time in Bad Axe High history that it hadn’t been given to the president of the senior class, which had been Perry. But Perry had told himself that they couldn’t really give the Ramsey Luke and the E. M. Gelman Band Scholarship to the same student, and he’d clearly been the leading candidate for the latter.

They were in the cafeteria. It was the end of their first week in Godwin Honors Hall. Craig was eating chili piled so high with chopped onion that every time he put his spoon in the bowl, onions fell onto the laminate table. “What do her parents do?”

“They own a German restaurant in town. Dumplings.”

“They make dumplings?” Craig let his spoon hover over the bowl for a moment, as if this were a bowl of absurdity itself. He shook his long dirty-blond rock-star bangs out of his face by whipping his face to the left—a kind of cool twitch Perry had seen on VH1 more than a few times.

“No,” Perry said. “The restaurant’s called Dumplings.”

Craig snorted loudly and leaned back in his chair. This was routine for Craig as far as Perry could tell. Everything about the Midwest was one big joke to Craig Clements-Rabbitt—the food, the trees, the names of the streets, the girls.

“It’s the most popular restaurant in Bad Axe,” Perry said, again sounding, and wishing he didn’t, as if he had some personal investment in this. Craig opened his mouth as if at news too astonishing to believe. Perry looked away, shaking his head.

One might think, from his attitude, that this Craig Clements-Rabbitt came from a huge city, but when pressed for the details it turned out that the town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in was, if anything, a bit smaller than Bad Axe.

“But it’s not the same,” Craig had said, sounding weary already, as if the whole subject would be too complicated to explain and he dreaded the task. This had been the first night in their shared dorm room, while they were still attempting to be polite to each other. Craig had left his duffel bag unpacked at the foot of his bed, and rolled out the technologically advanced sleeping bag onto his mattress. It was made of some sort of metallic material that even Perry, with a great deal of outdoor-gear expertise from the Boy Scouts, didn’t recognize. No pillow.

“The town I live in is small,” Craig said, “but nobody’s from it. Everybody’s got a place there because they work on the Internet, or only have to travel to Boston or New York every couple of weeks. Or they’re independently wealthy, or they retired early. Except for a couple of people whose parents work at the ski resort. I guess they’re sort of like small-town kids. But not really.”

Perry imagined a few hundred families like Craig’s: Mothers in slim beige skirts, rolling their eyes. Fathers in corduroy jackets and jeans.

In fact, while Rod Clements had been wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket earlier that day, he’d also been wearing bright green Converse All Stars and a couple of hemp bracelets around his wrist, as if he were in middle school, while the little brother, Scar, already looked like an old man, if old men had ponytails. The kid’s face had appeared chiseled in stone, as if he hadn’t laughed or frowned in his whole life—and although Perry had not yet asked Craig why his brother was called Scar, he felt sure there was some story behind it. Perry had only been in the company of the Clements-Rabbitts for an hour before they’d managed to share several seemingly amusing stories about Craig.

(“Oh, Perry,” Craig’s mother had said, “I hope you can adjust to living with our son. We knew he was different when he was only three years old and asked, in all seriousness, if he could have for his birthday his own agent.”)

And the family.

(“Remember that time,” his father had asked, looking around the dorm room skeptically, “when we thought we were renting a cottage on the beach in Costa Rica and it turned out to be a storage shed?”)

“Dumplings,” Craig repeated, trancelike, as he watched Nicole Werner cross the cafeteria. She was carrying her tray ahead of her as if it had something radioactive on it. Perry knew her well enough, after thirteen years of sharing classrooms with her, to know that Nicole was walking that way because she knew she was being watched, and she didn’t particularly mind it. Her ponytail was swinging behind her like an actual pony’s tail, the palest of blond, just like the hair of all the other Werners—except Etta Werner, who was Nicole’s grandmother, a nice old lady who lived down the block from Perry’s family and who always had on hand the most incredible homemade cookies you could imagine. Her hair was pure white.

“She looks like a milkmaid.”

Perry didn’t respond to this. He supposed it was intended as an insult. He might not have been Nicole Werner’s biggest fan himself, but he couldn’t help feeling protective. For one thing, he was pretty sure any insults Craig Clements-Rabbitt was going to think up for Nicole—hick, nerd, etc.—would eventually come around to him. When Perry had asked him about his last name, the hyphen, Craig had rolled his eyes and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a hyphenated name before. Are the womenfolk in your town allowed to vote yet?”

In truth, Perry hadn’t ever known anyone with a hyphenated name.

“I have two parents,” Craig had said. “A Clements and a Rabbitt.”

“I thought your dad was the Clements,” Perry said.

“So you have seen hyphenated names—enough to know that my parents are so hip they decided to put my mother’s name last.”

Really, Perry hadn’t figured that out himself. A guy on their hall had speculated that Craig’s mother was actually R. E. Clements, because of the order of the names. His girlfriend had said, “No way. Have you read those books? No woman would write anything so stupid. That’s testosterone-inspired schlock.”

“So,” Craig said, plunging his spoon into the chili, spilling more onions around the bowl, “in this town of yours, this Bad Ass, do all the girls look like that?”

“Like what?” Perry asked.

“Rosy-cheeked? Sunny blond? Strong but slender limbs? Big hooters?”

Perry thought about this for a minute, and then said, quite honestly, “Pretty much.”

“Fair enough,” Craig said. “So, when you go with your family to this”—he waved his free hand in the air—“this Dumplings, do you see Nicole Werner there?”

Perry had to think again, but then remembered that, yes, she’d started working as a waitress the summer before last. She was there, it seemed, mostly on Friday nights and some Saturday afternoons, moving quickly from table to table in her bustley skirt and frilly top. But usually his family went to Dumplings on Sunday, after church, with Perry’s grandfather, who loved the sauerbraten, and although Perry saw Nicole in church, he never saw her at Dumplings those afternoons. Sundays must have been her day off.

“What’s the uniform like?”

Perry described it. The wide blue satin belt. The—what’d-ya-call it?—peasant blouse. The pinstriped skirt.

“Oh, man, stop.” Craig put up his hand and shook his head. “You’re going to make me come.”

Perry cleared his throat, and when Nicole looked over at him and gave him her usual polite (apologetic?) smile from across the cafeteria, Perry could feel himself blushing from his Adam’s apple up.

“How’d you get so fucking idealistic, man?” Craig asked one night a few weeks later, after their relationship had become openly hostile. Perry had come back from the library once again to find his roommate lying on his back in bed on top of the covers (he’d rolled up the high-tech sleeping bag he’d arrived with and put it in the closet), wearing boxer shorts and headphones. He had a paperback open on his bare stomach, a novel his father had published a few years ago and which, according to Craig at least, had been a big hit. Brain Freeze, by R. E. Clements. A lot of the other students in the Honors College seemed to know who Craig’s father was, and not to hold him in very high regard, but Perry had never heard of him.

It was an achingly beautiful autumn. Clear and dry, skies so blue day after day that somehow it was possible to see the moon hanging there above the library, as if all the atmosphere had been scoured away. And the brightness of the changing red and gold and russet leaves of the big trees that lined Campus Ave seemed more like cinema than nature in so much light.

“You should see Dartmouth,” Craig had said to him one morning as they walked down the staircase to breakfast. “Dartmouth was founded before there was even a dirt path hacked through this state.”

Perry had heard about Dartmouth from Craig already a couple of times, and he’d already asked the obvious question, to which Craig had answered, “Because I couldn’t get into Dartmouth. It’s a real college. At Dartmouth I’d have gotten a real roommate, too.”

“Fuck you,” Perry had said, not for the first or last time.

“Thanks,” Craig said, “but I’m not horny right now.”

It had never crossed Perry’s mind to go to college anywhere but here. All the smartest kids from Bad Axe had come to this university over the decades, and only three of them had gotten in this year—Perry, Nicole, and an obese girl named Maria, who played the harp and hadn’t spoken a word to anyone except the school psychologist, as far as Perry knew, since eighth grade, when her mother had committed suicide.

His parents, both of whom had gone to a smaller university closer to Bad Axe, were nearly beside themselves with pride. His father had painted the big cement squares of their patio crimson and gold a couple days after Perry got his acceptance letter. “This is the big time,” he’d said. “You did it, kiddo.”

It was hard for Perry to imagine an older, more formidable looking college than this—the library’s enormous pillars, the gold trim around the ceiling of Rice Auditorium, the leafy Commons with its marble benches. What could Dartmouth have that this school didn’t?

“It’s selective,” Craig had said. “It’s private. Not a jock-ocracy,” waving his hand around at the walls of their room.

But for Perry, this was like a dream of being in college. The heavy books with their translucently thin pages. The gregarious professors and the unsmiling ones. The fat columns of the library, and the crammed stacks of books inside it.

The smell between those narrow walls of books was, Perry felt, the smell of rumination itself. Decades of reason and reflection. He checked out books that had nothing to do with the classes he was taking, just to be able to bring the heft and the scent of them back to the dorm with him. A Handbook of Classical Physics. A History of the Anglo-Saxons.

“Huh?” Craig asked. “How’d you get like this, man—all romantic about it all?”

“I don’t know, man,” Perry said, dragging out the man in imitation of that East Coast accent. “How’d you get so fucking cynical?”

“Native intelligence. Born with it,” Craig said without missing a beat. He never missed a beat. He had a whole encyclopedia of comebacks on the tip of his tongue at all times.

“Is it a burden,” Perry asked, “being so much better than everyone else? Or is it pleasing?”

“I’m so used to it by now,” Craig said, “I really couldn’t say.”

Perry sat down on his own bed and unzipped his backpack. You could have drawn a line straight down the center of the room. Every time some piece of Craig’s laundry or a magazine or a discarded protein bar wrapper inched over onto Perry’s side, he carefully pushed it back over to Craig’s side with his foot.

“Your mom called,” Craig said. “I told her you were out trying to score some heroin, but you’d be back in an hour or so.”

“Thanks.”

“Here,” Craig said. “You can call her from my cell in the lounge if you want some privacy.” He tossed the phone, slightly larger than a matchbook and just as thin, to Perry. It had been a source of endless surprise to Craig Clements-Rabbitt that Perry didn’t own a cell phone and was dependent on the antique mounted to the wall of their room. Craig did not, himself, even know their phone number, and had only touched the telephone in the room to take calls for Perry.

“Thanks,” Perry said. He took the phone, stood, and closed the door behind him.

“Mom?”

There was no one else in the second-floor lounge, so Perry lay back on the blue couch, careful to keep his shoes from touching the cushions.

He and his mother talked about his classes, his grandfather, his father’s business—a lawn mower shop, the best one in town—and about the weather, which had been beautiful. The leaves in Bad Axe had changed dramatically already, she said, and were starting to fall, and she joked that she supposed she was going to have to do the raking now, with Perry at college.

“I can come home for a weekend,” he said, “if I can get a ride.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother said. “We can handle the leaves. You just get good grades.”

Perry was an only child—except that there’d been another, a sister before him, who’d died at birth, a baby his mother had never once spoken of to him. The only reason Perry knew about her was because his grandmother, when he was nine, had decided Perry needed to know.

Since he’d been a toddler, Perry’d had an imaginary sister whose name was Mary.

He was getting too old for imaginary playmates, his grandmother told him one day, and God knows what it must be doing to his parents, listening to him in his room, talking for hours to that imaginary girl. Unlike the other adults in Perry’s life, Grandma Edwards pulled no punches just because he was a child. She was the one who’d told him that his grandfather had been an alcoholic, and that his Uncle Benny took after him, a slobbering drunk, and that’s why he was never invited for Christmas dinner. She was the one who would, eventually, tell him that she herself was dying of bladder cancer, not “recuperating” in the hospital, as his parents had said.

So Grandma Edwards took him to the grave—a flat, shining stone engraved with “Baby Girl Edwards,” and a date that meant nothing to Perry—and that very day, his imaginary friend Mary had vanished, as if the imaginary could die as easily as the actual. Perry almost never thought about her again, except on the rare occasion that her translucently pale skin would come back to him, and the way her soft, cool, imaginary hand had felt on his, guiding it across a piece of paper, teaching him how to draw a dinosaur.

And the scent of her hair—that red tangle of curls—like warm earth.

“I love you, Mom,” Perry said before hanging up.

“I love you, Perry,” his mother said.

“Tell Dad I love him.”

“He loves you, too.”

A few more good-byes, back and forth, and Perry snapped Craig’s snazzy cell phone shut, rose from the couch, and headed back. A few students passed him on the way—strangers, but strangers he recognized now from the hallways, from the cafeteria. One guy, with wire-frame glasses, Perry recognized from a class, although he couldn’t remember which one. They nodded seriously, politely, to each other.

The stairwell was empty when he got there. He could hear his own steps ringing around him, and as he climbed to the fourth floor, he suddenly was struck with a terrible grieflike longing for his mother, home alone in their two-bedroom bungalow. What would she do now that their phone call was over? Call her own mother? Watch television?

And there was grief for his father, too, still at the shop. He might be trying to fix something, or sell something, or schedule some kid to work on Saturday now that Perry was gone.

He thought about his grandfather, too, sitting on the bench in the hallway of Whitcomb Manor, already looking forward to Sunday, when Perry’s parents would pick him up to go to Dumplings.

And then he was feeling sorry for the whole town of Bad Axe. The drugstore. The pizza place. The brick façades of the few, desperate businesses downtown. The strip malls at the edge of everything. The cemetery with its little flags and flowers stuck into the soft, green ground. The women at Fantastic Sam’s, staring out at the parking lot, waiting for someone with too much hair to come inside.

Homesick. Now he knew what that was. And as soon as he stepped out of the stairwell, eyes fogged with emotion, Perry realized how stupid he was being, and rubbed away his ridiculous, homesick tears. Sentimental crap. The only other Eagle Scout from his troop in Bad Axe was already in the Marines, sent off to Afghanistan. That guy had something to get teary about, not Perry.

A girl in a miniskirt rounded the corner of the hallway, laughing hysterically into her cell phone. She didn’t even glance at him. When Perry rounded the corner himself, he saw that the door to his dorm room was open, and someone was standing in it.

And then he saw who it was.

The bright blond ponytail. The perfect posture.

Nicole Werner.

She turned when Perry came up behind her, and she said, “Hi!” in that voice so bright and girlish it sounded like it was coming out of a piccolo.

“Hi,” Perry said back, sounding like a party pooper in comparison, but who could compete with Nicole Werner when it came to congeniality? He saw Craig, still in his boxer shorts, no shirt, standing a few feet in front of her.

“I came by to see, you know, how it’s going,” she said to Perry, but glanced back at Craig as if trying politely to include him in the conversation. “You know, see if you’d want to set up a study time…”

“Oh. Yeah,” Perry said. He’d forgotten. They’d talked about this back in Bad Axe—after they’d both gotten their acceptance letters, but before she’d been awarded the Ramsey Luke. They’d said they’d keep up the ritual, the weekly study marathons. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged.

Craig caught Perry’s eye then, and Nicole looked from Perry to him. “You’re welcome to join us,” she said to Craig.

Craig nodded, appeared to consider it, and then said, “That would be helpful. I could use the support, you know, to keep up the good study habits.”

Nicole nodded. She’d obviously missed the false note, and the fact that Craig Clements-Rabbitt was half-naked, having been lying in bed with an iPod and Brain Freeze at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night. “Great!” she said. “So, now we just need a time and a place.” She whipped her academic planner out from under her arm in a flash, and slid out a pen conveniently tucked into her ponytail. She stuck the pen in her mouth as she scanned the pages of the planner.

“I’m free anytime,” Craig said.

Perry rolled his eyes.

4

Maybe her students thought she was deaf. They could chase her down a hallway for half a mile calling out, ��Professor? Professor?”and it did not occur to Mira to turn around.

Professor?

That couldn’t be her.

But here she was, a professor at one of the largest universities in the world. They called her a cultural anthropologist, as if that were an occupation. She was an “Expert on the Treatment of Human Remains in Preliterate Civilizations”—the way her father had been an Insurance Salesman, or her mother, a Homemaker.

She was thirty-three, the mother of two-year-old twins, the wife of a Nice Guy who happened to be content in the role of Stay-at-Home Dad. She’d gotten her Ph.D. with honors and kudos and special awards: a Fulbright to Croatia, and even the unheard-of Guggenheim for a graduate student. Her dissertation, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins: Fear, Fantasy, and the Cults of Death, had been published by a major academic press just a few months after she’d finished it. There’d been positive reviews in the specialized journals, and even a quick notice in a newspaper or two because of popular interest in her subject.

So, why, when they called out, “Professor!” did Mira not assume they were calling out to her? Why, day after day in that place, did she feel like such a fraud?

Because, perhaps, she was a fraud?

Mira Polson had ridden into her position as an assistant professor at the Honors College on the merit of that first book, and the “promise” the college saw for her future publications. That was three years ago, and now she was two years away from her tenure review, and there was no doubt—the department chair had made sure she had no doubt—that she would not receive it, and would not be kept on at the university, if she did not publish a book between now and then. And, so far, in the last three years allotted to her by the university to write and publish that book, Mira had produced nothing beyond some scrawled notes on a legal pad—notes that had become, in the year and a half since she’d scrawled them, illegible even to her.

And if she did not get tenure, then what?

Then she would be far worse than a fraud. She would be an unemployed expert on an obscure subject with two toddlers and a husband to support.

This Mira had considered as she closed the apartment door behind her and headed off to Godwin Honors Hall, trying not to listen to the twins scream after her, or to Clark’s impatient shushing on the other side of the door. It took every ounce of fortitude she had to keep walking down the hall toward the stairs.

They had been sick in the night. No fevers, but both had barfed over the sides of their cribs around two o’clock in the morning, Andy taking his cue from Matty, as he usually did when it came to vomiting. They had apparently gorged themselves on Doritos while Mira was at a department meeting the evening before. Clark had been dead asleep when she got home, although it was only nine o’clock.

“The twins sleep, you sleep,” their pediatrician had advised at their two-year checkup when Clark complained that the twins were still waking up once or twice in the middle of the night. Clark had been doing that anyway—sleeping when they slept—as far as Mira could tell, but after the pediatrician’s advice, Clark had made a religion of it. Sometimes he even slept while the twins were awake. Mira would come home to find him out cold on the carpet in the living room beside the playpen while the twins stood inside it, shaking the cushioned edges like bars on a prison door.

They were healthy, active, curly-haired boys who spoke to one another in a rapid chatter that, when she was being irrational, Mira thought might be some linguistic or genetic remnant of her Eastern European forebears in their blood. When they asked for milk, it was milekele; “bye-bye” was gersko; “mama” and “papa” were meno and paschk. Sometimes Mira caught herself wishing that her grandmother was still alive to translate. Even more irrationally, she’d gone to the Llewellyn Roper Library in the summer to look up the words for milk, good-bye, mother, father, in Romanian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and cross-referenced them to everything—Latin, French, German, and all the dialects—to find, of course, nothing that indicated that her twins were actually speaking a foreign language.

Of course.

Walking away from the library that day—its stiff neoclassical columns pretending to hold it up—Mira had felt silly, at best. Slightly insane, at worst. So, less insanely, she consulted medical books and websites, but when she asked their pediatrician if the twins might be experiencing some kind of language development delay, he’d laughed and said, “You professors all think your kids should be delivering lectures a few months out of the womb. Look, if they’re still babbling in a foreign language this time next year, we’ll explore the possibilities. But I’m telling you, they won’t be.”

Clark was becoming more and more frustrated these days by the twins’ refusal to speak his language, and Mira knew it was because he was the one at home day after day while she was doing research, going to meetings, teaching. He was exhausted most of the time, wired up with manic energy the rest. There were dark circles the size of half-dollars under his eyes, and in the last three years he’d gone from the horniest man she’d every met—hard inside her again before he’d even pulled out—to the kind of guy women called radio talk shows about: I wonder if my husband’s having an affair; he hasn’t wanted to have sex for the last three months.

An affair might have occurred to Mira, too, if she didn’t know exactly how Clark spent his days, and how impossible fitting anything extra into them would have been. The twins woke at 5:00 a.m., and did not stop having needs or making demands in their foreign language until 9:00 p.m. If she didn’t have class, Mira would get up with them in the morning and let Clark sleep. But when she did have class, which was most days, he’d be the one stumbling and swearing out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Mira would roll over and pretend to be asleep—even on the occasions when Clark seemed to take forever to wake up and roll out of bed—although her whole body would be screaming as she listened to the twins cry out. Their cries, always the same (Braclaig! Braclaig!), made it impossible to know whose attention they were demanding, but Mira felt certain they were calling for her. It made her feel as if an alarm clock were rattling inside her chest, sending vibrations through every nerve and into every nerve ending of her body.

There were so many nerve endings.

The year before, in the fall, she and Clark had gotten a babysitter and gone to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Natural History Museum in the city.

Dead bodies.

Her specialty.

It was why Clark had thought to buy the tickets. A birthday present. “Right up your alley,” he’d said, holding them up.

Except that these weren’t historical dead bodies. Folkloric dead bodies. These weren’t the kinds of primitive embalmings Mira studied. Instead, these were plastinated, dissected corpses, standing right in front of the viewer, filleted and splayed. A dead guy was set up on horseback, holding his own brain in one hand and his horse’s brain in the other. Another was lobbing a basketball into the air, all his muscles on display, stringy and red. There was a corpse reclining in front of a dark television set, and one kneeling in prayer, literally holding his heart in his hands. The worst, the one that haunted Mira for weeks afterward, was the pregnant woman lying on her side like a centerfold—nothing left but tissue and bone and a net of blood vessels, but still with her baby floating eerily in her womb.

Maybe it was because Mira was a cultural anthropologist and had never had the vaguest interest in biology or physiology, but standing in the moving line of gawkers at the Natural History Museum that day, all of them together shuffling past that woman and her child (both of whom looked unborn and undead at the same time), Mira had urgently wanted to know how that woman had died. The brochure they’d been handed when they turned in their tickets insisted that the people who’d donated their bodies for the exhibit had requested anonymity, had donated in the interest of science, and that to reveal the mundane details—age, race, nationality, dates, and circumstances of their deaths—was to muddy the waters, lessen the message of the exhibit, which was to show the human body in all of its glorious detail.

Bullshit, Mira thought. The only important thing here was who that woman was and what she had been doing on the day of her death. Had she known she would die? Had she lingered for weeks, or had she simply failed to look both ways as she crossed the street? Had she had her throat cut by a husband who suspected the baby she was carrying wasn’t his? Had she been stoned to death in some dark corner of the world for some supposed crime—maybe she’d flirted with a man of another religion, or sold some book to his wife that women weren’t allowed to read?

“They were executed,” Clark whispered into her ear as they stood in line waiting to view the dead Madonna, as if he’d gotten the news firsthand from someone who’d threatened to kill him, too, if he passed it on. “The men at least. You can tell. They’re all Asian. They’re shorter than Americans. Chinese prisoners.”

Clark hadn’t liked the exhibit either, but he said it was because he’d found it dull. It reminded him of high school health class, Mrs. Liebler. “I shouldn’t have wasted the money,” he’d said, but there was an edge of bitterness in it as if he’d expected Mira to love it even if he hadn’t. Instead, Mira had agreed—not that it was dull, but that they shouldn’t have wasted the money. God knows they did not, at the moment, have money to waste. And they so rarely hired a babysitter that Mira felt they should have used the free time to do something more important, like bathe, or sleep.

Still, she had learned something from looking at those corpses. She had learned that nerves were not the invisible, semi-imaginary forces inside the body she’d always thought they were.

No.

Nerves hung off the body in dangling cords, draping like willow switches. They looked damp and heavy. Humans were tangled in them like ropes and pulleys.

No wonder she felt as if every inch of her had been electrified as she lay there listening to the twins cry in the mornings, Clark taking his time shuffling out of the bedroom to meet their demands. She was, Mira realized, wrapped in a curtain of nerves! She was wearing a web of them. She was strung with them, like a Christmas tree in lights.

So, why didn’t she get up?

Because that was his job.

His only job.

She had an actual job.

Mira wasn’t, she thought, a feminist. Not exactly. If she had been, she wouldn’t have married a man like Clark—not with his lascivious admiration of women’s legs, and his belief in the supremacy of men in all things requiring logic or mechanical inclinations.

But she also felt it would be a terrible precedent to take over these tasks for him on the days she was teaching. It would take away the last thing he seemed to be contributing to the running of the household—attending to the children when she had to work.

Work in the world. For pay. An activity Clark, it seemed, had no plans to engage in again anytime soon.

And then she felt terrible for thinking this.

If Clark were a woman, a housewife, and Mira had heard some man say that the work of caring for two children wasn’t real, Mira would have been the first to stand up, waving a banner, shouting the chauvinist down. Of course it was a full-time job. A job she should have been grateful he was doing so that she could do hers.

So why, now, did she wish she were the one staying home with the screaming twins? Why, now, did she resent Clark for not having to get up in the morning, find his notes, pack his briefcase? She’d known exactly what his plans were when she’d married him, and bread-winning hadn’t been one of them. Mira had been the one who’d bristled when her father had asked if Clark planned, maybe someday, to go to law school, and proudly explained to her father that they both valued their “freedom to pursue intellectual endeavors” too much for either to take on such a mundane endeavor as law school.

Still, Mira had finished her doctorate, and Clark had dropped out of his master’s program in comparative philosophy, finding it to be another “mundane endeavor.” Now they were in their thirties, with two children, living in an apartment complex full of undergraduates, many of whom drove much nicer cars than the clunker she and Clark shared. Sometimes, Clark let his beard grow for days before shaving, and Mira occasionally wondered, from the smell of his breath, if he was taking sufficient care of his teeth. She knew he was bathing, because he would spend a long hour every night in the claw-foot tub with the door latched while she put the twins to bed. Once, she’d mentioned to him that their electric bill, $125, might be so high because of the hot water heater, and he’d turned to her with wide, desperate-looking eyes and said, “The fucking tub is the only thing I have to look forward to all day.”

“What about the gym?” she’d asked.

They’d joined the nicest one in town because Clark insisted he needed a place with Nautilus machines and childcare. Mira rarely got to this gym herself, but on the occasions she did, she couldn’t help noticing that the parking lot was full of BMWs. You cannot afford this membership, the BMWs said to her.

“And what about Espresso Royale—?” where Clark met a gaggle of stay-at-home mothers many afternoons, and where, as far as Mira could tell, they just let their children climb around on the upholstered cubes in the Kid Corner while they drank coffee and complained.

Clark looked at her blankly. “I need the bath,” he’d said.

“Professor Polson?”

This time Mira turned around, recognizing, finally, even in her sleep-deprivation and distraction, her own last name.

How long had he been running after her? The boy was sweating. He had the clean-shaven, buzzed-head look of an ROTC student, or maybe a member of College Students for Christ. But these kids could fool you. Sometimes the conservative look was an ironic statement, right down to the pressed khaki shorts. He could be the lead guitarist in some bad college band. She’d seen flyers around Godwin Hall for an upcoming performance by the Motherfuckers.

“Professor Polson,” he said. “I saw you, and I wanted to ask—” He gasped for breath. “I wanted to ask if I could get into your seminar.”

“I’m sorry. It’s full,” she said, and started to turn from him as quickly and unsympathetically as she could. She always felt bad, sending students away, but these late registers would keep demanding entrance into the class for weeks into the semester if she didn’t stand firm. This was a first-year honors seminar, and Mira couldn’t teach it well with more than fifteen students in it because of the amount of writing and discussion she required. The seminar was called Death, Dying, and the Undead. A lot of students wanted in. It was the most popular seminar in the college. This was, Mira supposed, because they were only eighteen, so the death and dying part didn’t faze them—what eighteen-year-old believes in death?—and because they wrongly imagined that the “Undead” part would mean vampires, when that was only the thinnest (and, in Mira’s opinion, the least interesting) thread in the vast tapestry of Undead material.

“But—”

“I have a waiting list,” Mira said. “Twenty-seven students are on it before you, and there’s not a chance that any one of them will get in, but I’ll add your name to the bottom if you insist.”

“Can I just tell you one thing?”

Mira inhaled, but stopped walking. She looked at a spot over the boy’s shoulder so she wouldn’t seem to be encouraging a long explanation of his scheduling problems or credit deficits or financial aid requirements. They were the only two people in the hallway, and the stone floors beyond him were gleaming in the September sunlight as it shone through the windows. Godwin Hall was the oldest building on campus, and where it showed its age most was in its windows, which were an intricate crisscross of glass diamonds and molten lead. The panes were multicolored, warped, and one or two had been cracked and not yet replaced—but these cracked ones added to the prismatic blues and golds when the sun hit them and made dazzling patterns of light and shadow on the walls and floors.

“I’m a sophomore,” the boy said.

“Well,” Mira said, no longer as reluctant to reveal her impatience. “In that case, you’re not eligible for a first-year seminar anyway.”

“But I don’t want to take the class for credit. I just need to sit in. For personal reasons.”

This time Mira looked at him, directly into his eyes, which were dark brown and long-lashed. His hair was so short it was impossible to know what color it was, but she imagined it must also be dark, although his skin was fair. His cheeks were still flushed from him running after her.

“Why?” she asked, but then she stopped herself—why bother to encourage his explanation or excuse?—and held up a hand. “Just so you know, I’m against auditors. I find they’re an intrusion in the closed circle of a seminar, and often they have very little stake in the class. And, the class is full.”

Still, she tilted her head, to show him she was listening. It was rare, but there were the occasional students who took Death, Dying, and the Undead because of a trauma in their backgrounds. A car crash involving high school pals. An older sibling who had committed suicide. Twice, she’d had students who’d had childhood leukemia and been cured, but the experience of it had left a strange gray haze over the landscape of their lives. The year before, there’d been a girl in the class who’d revealed, only a few weeks before the end of the semester, that her mother had been murdered by her father:

That, in itself, was enough of a story, but this girl had been in utero when the murder took place, and had been delivered two months prematurely at the Emergency Room in the same hour her mother had died. The girl had been raised by wealthy grandparents who’d told her that her parents had been killed in a tragic car accident when she was a baby—of course, is there ever any other explanation for such things?—but the student discovered the truth on the Internet, her grandparents being of a generation that hadn’t anticipated that one day, thanks to Google, no family secret would be safe.

The boy was still breathing heavily. He said, “I would participate fully, Professor. I’m a straight-A student. I’ve—” He stopped. A cool, rose-colored diamond passed over his eyes through the broken windowpane—a cloud traveling across the sun—and he blinked it away. “I’ve never gotten a grade lower than an A.”

“That’s impressive,” Mira said. “But it’s a first-year seminar, and if you audit you won’t get a grade anyway, so your special interest in the subject is…?” She waved her hand through the air to indicate that he needed to continue, and then shivered. She was wearing a silk dress—catalog stuff, deeply discounted—and it had short cap sleeves. She knew it looked good on her because Jeff Blackhawk, the poet-in-residence in the Honors College, had nearly spilled his coffee when he saw her walk into the faculty lounge. He was the kind of man who was completely undone by a woman in a sexy dress, or a low-cut blouse, or a nicely tailored pair of black slacks, and Mira was glad, almost relieved, that she’d caught his attention. Still, the dress was too light without a sweater, a cool-weather one, and autumn had come on before she’d expected it—only the first week of September, and that morning the sky had been full of the kind of fat blue clouds Mira associated with snow.

The student inhaled, and wiped a hand across his brow. He said, “I was good friends with Nicole. Nicole Werner. I grew up with her. And Craig Clements-Rabbitt was—is—my roommate.”

Nicole Werner.

And that horrible rich boy who’d killed her.

Mira had known neither of them personally, but of course she knew the story. Everyone did. It was last year’s Tragic Incident. Most years, there was at least one, and this year the victim had been perfect for the leading role: Virgin. Girl Scout. Sorority pledge. A devout Christian from a small town. Two married, devoted parents. The youngest child. The baby. A straight-A student, but full of goodwill and vivacity, too. In her spare time she tutored illiterate children. She’d been beloved by her professors and her classmates alike. Until the end of the spring semester, the whole of Godwin Hall had been draped in black.

Mira hadn’t, herself, attended the memorial service in the auditorium, but another professor at the college told her that the girl’s mother had wept so piteously throughout the service that no one could help but join her in sympathy until the four hundred and fifty people gathered around the high school senior portrait of the dead Nicole Werner were sobbing.

And then they’d let her murderer back into the university. Despite the public protests, the outrage, the letters to the editor of the student and local papers, the university lawyers had concluded that since no criminal charges had been filed against him, they had no grounds for keeping him out. Only the Honors College had the balls to ban him, and everyone knew that was only because the dean, who was old pals from Dartmouth with the boy’s father, had bent all the rules to admit him in the first place, and didn’t want that getting any more press than it already had.

There were goose bumps on her arms now. Wrapping her arms around herself, Mira realized that not only had she shivered, but now she was trembling. She worried that her teeth might begin to chatter. It was truly autumn. The sun had clearly slipped a few notches down on the horizon, and the light on the leaves was amber now, not white, not even golden, as it had been the week before, and a breeze seemed to be pouring through the centuries-old windows of Godwin Honors Hall despite the fact that they were all closed. That cold breeze seemed to pour in a steady stream down the hallway, bathing her.

“I know you’re an expert on death,” the boy said to her, “and dying, and the undead. All I know about is Nicole and Craig. But there are… circumstances. I could tell you, but you might think I was nuts. Basically, I just need to know more, and I thought your seminar might help me with that.”

5

Perry had—on purpose, most likely—picked out an apartment for them that was as far from Godwin Honors Hall as you could get within the boundaries of the same circumscribed college town. And since Craig no longer had any classes at the Hall, he had no reason to go there. Still, he found himself standing outside of it within an hour of the dismissal of his first class of the semester, staring up at the window of the room he was certain had been hers—fourth from the end, facing East University Avenue.

The window was open. The curtains were closed. They rippled a little, without parting. A flock of starlings circled the roof, landing and rising over and over in a mass that managed to look both fluid and nervous. The wrought-iron gate around the courtyard was freshly painted. Black. And the grass was emerald green. The branches of the walnut tree near the entrance were bowed under the weight of big green fruit, and every few minutes one of those walnuts fell from the tree and onto the lawn with a muffled thump.

Craig didn’t know how long he stood there, but for whatever period of time it was, no one entered or exited Godwin Hall. No one passed him on the sidewalk. No one parted the curtains and looked out a window. And not a sound came from anything except for those occasional thuds of a walnut, and the starlings—but only their wings, very swift and distant, churning up the air around the roof.

It could have been, he realized, a year to the very day that he’d opened the door on that Tuesday night, thinking it would be Perry, who’d left for the lounge with his cell phone to call his mother (did he think he’d locked himself out?), and found her standing in the hallway instead.

“Hi. Is Perry here?”

Her hair was pulled back in that ponytail, and he could see how a few brilliant threads had worked loose around her face, and how they were lifting and falling weightlessly with her breathing.

Later, he’d remember the exchange as having taken place in slow motion:

Nicole Werner turned her face away from Craig, and looked down the hallway—for Perry, presumably, but also probably so she wouldn’t have to look at him, naked except for the boxers—and the trick of light on those loose blond strands made him feel as if he, too, were floating brightly in the air around Nicole Werner.

“No,” he said, sounding underwater to himself. By then she’d already raised her hand to Perry, who was walking toward them with Craig’s cell phone in his hand and a desolate expression on his face, as if he’d just gotten news that the love of his life was imprisoned in Turkey.

It amazed Craig then how casually Perry nodded to the heavenly creature who’d come looking for him. As if she were his sister, or as if, in Bad Axe, girls who looked like her grew on trees.

At Craig’s high school in New Hampshire there’d been only seventy-one students in his class at the time of his graduation, and only twenty-nine of them had been girls. Occasionally there’d be a new one, but usually she stayed only a few months, half a year—maybe she’d flunked out of her boarding school or come to town from Boston or Manhattan to live with the noncustodial parent for a while.

Otherwise, Craig had known those twenty-nine girls since he was in kindergarten. His parents knew their parents. He’d taken skiing lessons and swimming lessons and tennis lessons with them. He’d called them names, and had been called names by them. He’d seen them emerge from the girls’ bathroom with eyes swollen red from crying, or dashing into the girls’ bathroom in their prom dresses to vomit up vodka and Fruitopia. He’d fooled around with a few, had sex with a few, been slapped in the face hard by one of them. And he had never seen anyone like Nicole Werner:

The pink cheeks, the serious expression, the sincerity radiating off of her so nakedly he wanted to close his eyes, or throw a coat over her.

She was the All-American Girl.

Eventually, he’d had to take a step back.

“You hate chicks, don’t you?” his best friend Teddy, his only real friend back in New Hampshire, had said to him in the high school cafeteria once—and then stuttered, “I-I-I mean, not like you’re a fag, you j-j-just—”

“I like chicks,” Craig had said. “Just not these chicks. Not here.”

He’d meant Fredonia High, and he’d believed it to be true—that they were, all of them, a special breed of brainless, or bitch.

Except, he had to admit, he didn’t like the chicks at the Quaker camp he went to in Vermont every summer, either. And he didn’t particularly care for the tourist girls who passed through town with their parents. Or the girls his cousin in Philadelphia had introduced him to over winter break.

“Ah,” his father had said once when Craig tried to draw him out on the subject of females. “The war between the sexes. It’s as old as time.” He went on to tell Craig a story about a nurse he’d met in Vietnam. The Perfect Woman. She’d ended up marrying his buddy. “I set it all up,” his father said wearily. “I knew if I had anything to do with her, it would ruin her.”

“What happened to her? To them?” Craig asked.

His father shook his head. “Don’t know.”

When Craig’s little brother, Scar, turned thirteen and asked Craig for advice about girls, the only thing Craig could think of to say was, “Just forget it, man.”

“Thanks, man,” Scar had said, without irony, and wandered back to his own room, where, it seemed to Craig, the kid had proceeded to take the advice:

By the time Craig left for college, Scar was fifteen, and spent most of his time at the computer, blowing things up. Craig had been waiting for the last two years for one or both of his parents to say something to Scar about the “productive use of time,” or the “mind-numbing soul-sapping” nature of video games, but they never said a word. Maybe they’d used up all their parental energy on Craig.

Or maybe it was because, by the time Craig graduated from high school, they seemed to spend all of their time, too, in front of their computers. His father, Craig knew, was writing, or trying to write. His mother, he guessed, was doing something she also considered work, but wasn’t. She’d taken to answering her cell phone by saying, “This is Lynnette Rabbitt,” as if someone besides her friend Helen or her personal trainer might be calling. Occasionally Craig considered asking her what she was doing on the computer, but he always ended up following his father’s advice when it came to his mother:

Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

Still, he sometimes had a bad feeling—jealousy? apprehension?—when he heard her on the other side of Scar’s closed door, talking to his little brother in a tone that, even muffled by oak, sounded alarmingly like confession.

“So, is she your love interest?” Craig had asked Perry as the door closed on Nicole Werner’s retreating form.

(Corn silk. That was the color and texture and general impression of the girl’s hair.)

Perry shook his head, and turned his back on Craig.

“Well, she seemed pretty anxious to find you,” Craig said.

“Superstitious.”

“Huh?”

“She’s superstitious,” Perry said, louder, as if Craig hadn’t heard him. There was a bitter edge to his voice when it came to Nicole Werner—something Craig had noticed in the cafeteria when he’d first asked Perry who she was. Craig assumed it was the result of unrequited love, or at least unrequited lust.

“Care to elaborate?” Craig asked.

Perry sat down at his desk and opened his laptop. To his computer screen, he said, “We studied together in high school. She always thought that when we did she got A’s, and that when we didn’t, she didn’t.”

“So,” Craig said, “you’re the Magic Man? The Buddha? All the girls gotta rub the lucky boner before their tests?”

Perry made a disgusted face, and then shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Have you slept with her?”

Perry looked at Craig for a long time, but from a distance, as if he were counting to ten or twenty before speaking.

“No,” he finally said. “Why?”

“Why not?”

This time Perry turned around and kept his eyes on his computer screen for a long time, waiting for something to materialize, gigabyte by gigabyte, on it. Craig gave up and lay back down, stuck the iPod buds back in his ears.

But that night, waking from a dream in the darkness of the dorm room, he remembered something his brother had said years before at the Petrified Forest. They’d gone there with their father, who was speaking at a writers’ conference in California.

They hadn’t set out to go to the Petrified Forest at all, or even known about it, but on their way to Napa Valley, they’d passed the place, along with six or seven signs urging them to turn left, to see the WONDERS OF THE PREHISTORIC PAST! STEP BACK IN TIME! 3 MILLION YEARS! “Hard to say no to that,” their father had said, slowing down, slapping on the blinker.

Craig was fifteen that summer, and he hadn’t wanted to see the Petrified Forest. He’d wanted to get to the hotel where they were staying, to lie down in a dark air-conditioned room, maybe watch MTV, definitely check his text messages, jerk off in the bathroom if his father and brother went out for burgers. But the next thing he knew, they were standing in a gift shop surrounded by shining rocks and plastic dinosaurs, waiting in line to buy tickets, and then they were walking the red, dusty trail into the Petrified Forest.

It was just past noon, and there was an unnerving insect drone taking place somewhere overhead and, at the same time, all around them. The shadow of a bird crossed the path in front of their own shadows, and made Craig jump backward. He was tired from the drive up from San Francisco, and that insect drone was like having your head inside a computer that was perpetually booting up, or like the feeling you had after a blow by a basketball to the ear. It made him think of bad sleep, the kind of nap you wake up from on a summer afternoon, realizing you’re sick. They stopped in front of a plaque nailed to a post beside a fenced-in pit. The plaque explained that the log lying in the pit had been, millions of years before, a towering “Redwood Giant” that had been knocked down and buried in ash by a volcanic eruption.

Big deal.

After three more pits like it, with logs like the first lying at the bottom, Craig said, “I’ve got to find the crapper.”

His father, standing before a plaque, reading closely, waved him away without looking at him. “Go,” he said.

But Scar, who was eleven then and not yet nicknamed Scar, turned with big kid eyes to Craig and said, “Don’t you think this is cool?”

Craig shook his head. Maybe he rolled his eyes. He said, in a voice that he remembered consciously trying to make sound adult, “Looking at logs that have turned to stone doesn’t seem much different to me than looking at logs.”

As he walked away, toward the gift shop and, hopefully, the restrooms, Scar said to his back, “That’s because you always decide what you think about things before you see them.”

Craig’s father chuckled at that and rested his hand on Scar’s head as if the kid had just performed some good trick. It was how Craig knew his father thought Scar was right, and it crossed his mind then that, possibly, the thing Scar had said was something he’d overheard their father say about Craig to their mother, or to one of his writer buddies: That son of mine, his problem is he always decides what he thinks about something before he sees it.

Craig had turned his back to them both and muttered, “Fuck you,” under his breath, and didn’t bother to go back out to the path and find them after the bathroom, just waited for them at the rental car, leaning against the burning hot chrome, every once in a while yanking on the handle of the door as if it might spontaneously decide to unlock itself. He didn’t speak again until that night, over dinner at some fancy restaurant in St. Helena, when some beautiful woman leaned across the table and asked him what it was like to have such a famous writer for a father.

“It sucks,” Craig had said, and everyone at the table laughed as if that were a really witty response.

But that night, the night after Craig met Nicole Werner up close and personal at the threshold of his dorm room, those words of his little brother came back to him, as if on a dusty California breeze over the miles and years—and, with them, the sight of that giant redwood, turned to rock, at the bottom of that pit.

In truth, a log that had turned to rock looked nothing like a log.

The million-year-old trunk of that tree had appeared to be laced with diamonds, had seemed to be bathed in powdery pink-and-green gems. It was as if the volcanic ash, burying it, had turned it into something celestial, instead of arboreal. The pressure and the time and the isolation of death had entirely changed the nature of the thing. Had made it eternal. Had made it not just rock, but space.

Craig had already decided that Nicole Werner was a bitch, hadn’t he? A dumb blonde. A tease. An empty, pretty vessel. A single glimpse in the cafeteria, and he thought he knew what she was all about.

Lying in the dark, listening to his roommate’s steady breathing, Craig knew that if he wanted, he could still let himself think that—think it and think it all the way back down the path and through the gift shop to the men’s room, so to speak. But he could also still see and feel the brilliant image of her in his doorway burning against his eyelids, like something so obvious it might blind you if you really let yourself look at it.

If he slept at all that night, he didn’t remember it.

It was the screaming of a blue jay that broke Craig’s trance. The jay was perched on the low branch of a crabapple tree in the Godwin Honors Hall courtyard, yawping unattractively, frantically, maybe even directing its harsh warnings at Craig, who looked up at the bird for a minute as it hopped mechanically up and down the branch.

He’d never seen them arrive, but now there was a cluster of homely girls standing around the bike rack, casting furtive glances in Craig’s direction. And a guy was looking out of a second-floor window at Craig, one hand on the curtain, the other absentmindedly scratching his bare stomach.

The jay made a few more threatening noises, and Craig looked at it again. He could even see one beady little eye, seeming to shine with some inner bird light from the branch, trained on him.

Craig stepped backward, nodded to the bird, and turned away.

6

“Perhaps you could write a letter to the editor?” the unhelpful receptionist said to Shelly Lockes the day she actually went down to the offices.

“This isn’t my opinion,” Shelly told her. “These are facts. Doesn’t your paper want to publish facts?”

The receptionist looked at her blankly, almost as if she were blind.

“Can I see someone? An editor?” Shelly asked.

The receptionist moved her fingers around on a phone, holding the receiver to her ear, before she looked back up at Shelly and told her that there were no editors in the building (“Big convention in Chicago”), but that she would call for a reporter. The reporter who finally met with Shelly, a girl who appeared all of twenty years old, took copious notes on a yellow legal pad and nodded meaningfully at every detail—but the next article repeated the same false information:

No one knew how long Craig Clements-Rabbitt and his girlfriend, Nicole Werner, lay there in the lake of Nicole Werner’s blood, or how soon afterward the young man had fled the scene.

The middle-aged woman who made the cell phone call did not give adequate information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to find it until it was too late to assist the victim.

After that, Shelly Lockes quit reading articles about the accident, and not long after that, she quit buying the newspaper altogether.

Still, she imagined there would be a trial, or some sort of investigation having to do with Craig Clements-Rabbitt, and that she might have a chance then to deliver the facts.

But by the end of the summer, she’d quit expecting that as well.

7

“Omega Theta Tau,” their resident advisor, Lucas, said, nodding drunkenly at the house on the hill.

Lucas owned about fourteen flasks, and had four of them on him that night—one in each pocket, except for the one in his hand. He stumbled on a sidewalk crack, and Craig laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Perry just kept walking. The two of them kept falling behind, and if they stopped again to piss on someone’s lawn, Perry had already decided he’d just keep walking back to the dorm.

“They’re virgins. Every last one of ’em.”

“No,” Craig said, and slapped his hand onto Lucas’s shoulder. “No,” he said again.

“Yep,” Lucas said. “And they’re the most beautiful fucking bitches on this campus, too.”

“No.”

“Yep.”

“That oughta be illegal. That oughta be fucking against the fucking law.”

“Yep,” Lucas said.

Perry looked up at the house on the hill. It was a dark, tall, rambling, and formidable brick edifice—one of those turn-of-the-century mansions with a carriage house out back and hundred-year-old oaks and elms in the yard. A white banner with black Greek letters on it fluttered between the pillars that held up the front porch. There were lace curtains in the front windows, and maybe a candle flickering behind them. Otherwise, the house looked so quiet it might have been empty—completely different from most of the fraternity and sorority houses on the row, which looked used up, neglected. Plastic cups in the driveways. Towels hung in the windows.

Perry had been at the university for only two weeks, but he’d already gotten used to seeing the parties spill out of those houses and onto the lawns. The girls, wearing soft sweaters and miniskirts, would be stumbling drunk, sprawled on the grass or in the mud. He’d seen those girls hobbling down the sidewalk back to their houses after a party—one high heel in a hand, the other on a foot, laughing or crying. The week before, someone had set fire to a frat house with a barbecue grill. One of the frat brothers had been passed out on a couch on the porch as the Fire Department sprayed down the front of the house with water, and no one had realized he was there until the fire was out and he’d been burned over 60 percent of his body.

Perry had no interest, he already knew, in Greek life. He did not want to be a fraternity brother, or to have any. Still, this sorority house on the hill seemed a part of some better, older, more elegant tradition, he thought. He could picture the sorority sisters sitting around some large oak table speaking seriously of the traditions of their house. They’d be wearing dark and sober clothes. There would be some sort of Oriental rug on the floor, a Siamese cat asleep on it. Maybe a tapestry on the wall. That candle flickering he saw from where he stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the house, would be at the center of their circle. There would be a large ancient book on the table, opened to a page that held some message from the Founding Sisters. One of the girls, her long hair falling over the text, would be reading aloud in a respectful tone.

“Somebody better go fuck those sluts, don’t you think?” Lucas asked.

Craig was fumbling at Lucas’s back pocket, trying to retrieve one of his flasks, and didn’t answer.

“I said,” Lucas shouted, and then held a hand to his mouth, shouting toward the house on the hill, “Somebody better go fuck those Omega Theta Tau sluts!”

A porch light snapped on.

The front door opened.

A slim silhouette with cascades of hair stepped out and stood under the light in the doorway, looking in their direction.

Craig unscrewed the flask and tipped it into his mouth, leaning his head back. Perry turned and left them there just as Lucas was taking another deep breath to shout at the house again.

“Are you having fun there, honey?” his mother had asked Perry on the phone that afternoon.

He’d said yes.

She’d asked if he’d gotten the cookies she’d mailed.

He had, a few days before, but had eaten only one before Craig and Lucas finished them off in a stoned frenzy on a Wednesday night. Standing over them with the empty wax-paper-lined shoebox in his hand, he’d said, “You fucking assholes.” They’d looked up at him from the floor, where they had a chessboard without enough pieces on it between them. Their eyes were so bloodshot Perry had to look away. They’d fucking eaten his mother’s cookies. Fucking assholes.

To be fair, they both apologized profusely then. Stammering, ashamed. “We are assholes, man. You should kick our asses.”

Lucas, especially, seemed horrified by his own actions, but Craig, looking into the empty shoebox, also appeared appalled. “This is unforgivable,” he said, without irony. Getting stoned seemed to rinse the irony right out of Craig, although it made him a jerk in about a hundred other ways.

Perry had tossed the empty shoebox down between the two of them, taken the towel off the hook inside his closet, and gone to the shower. By the time he got back, both Lucas and Craig were gone. Craig returned a few minutes later with a package of Chips Ahoy, handing them over to Perry.

“You like these, don’t you?” he asked.

Perry held the package, shaking his head wearily.

“We fucked up,” Craig said. “We were only going to eat one, I swear.”

“Do you always smoke so much dope?” Perry asked.

Craig seemed to think about that question for a long time, his eyebrows knitted together. But, apparently, he forgot what he’d been asked; he stripped off his clothes and got into bed without ever answering.

Talking to his mother on the phone, Perry could picture her in their kitchen at home. She’d be wearing one of her heavy, old sweaters. Jeans. She never wore shoes in the house, and didn’t like slippers, so he could see her polka-dotted socks. Or the green wool ones. It would be colder up there than it was down here. In the distance, if the window was open a crack, you would be able to hear Lake Huron churning in the wind. An undulating static. There would be the smell of fish and seaweed and the metallic air that skimmed for many miles across water.

She said, “Dad and I are taking Grandpa to Dumplings tomorrow. We’ll miss you.”

“Have a strudel for me,” Perry said. “I’ll miss you guys, too. Tell Grandpa hi.”

“Do you ever see Nicole Werner down there? I saw her mom at the grocery store the other day, and she said Nicole was liking school.”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “I see her all the time. She lives one floor down, and we’re in a study group. With our roommates. She’s fine.”

“Any other girls there, sweetie?”

Perry cleared his throat. “Well, there are a lot of other girls here, Mom.”

Perry’s mother laughed softly. “Ha, ha, smart aleck,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

Nicole’s roommate, Josie, flashed through his mind—the kind of girl he didn’t like. When she looked at you, she started with your shoes before deciding whether or not to bother with the rest of you. And why she was bothering with their study group, Perry didn’t know, except that maybe she was interested in Craig. Every one of her classes was something she’d already taken at the private high school she’d attended in Grosse Isle. She just rolled her eyes at her textbooks when she opened them, and said, “This again.”

“No. No girls, Mom,” Perry said.

“Well, your mama loves you. Why would you need any girls?”

She laughed again, and Perry tried to laugh, too.

“I talked to Mary the other day,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Just on the phone. She called to say hi. See how you were doing.”

Perry snorted.

“Now, Perry, really. That’s the reason she called, and I can’t just hang up on her, you know. I feel sorry for that girl.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Yeah, well, what?”

“Yeah, well, she’s the one who dumped me, Mom. Shouldn’t I be the one you feel sorry for?”

“I would, Perry, if you weren’t down there starting your whole life when she’s up here, stuck forever, having ruined her own.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Well, I think we’ve had this conversation before, honey. I only told you I’d spoken to her because I thought you’d want to know.”

“I do. I did. It’s okay, Mom. How pregnant is she?”

“Four months.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right.”

Of course.

For three years, dating Perry, Mary had virtuously clung to her virginity, never wavering in her commitment to save herself for their wedding night. Within two months of dating Pete Gerristsen, though, she was having his baby whether Pete liked it or not.

The moon followed Perry all the way back to Godwin Hall, and caused him to cast a long foreshadow stretching so far ahead that it looked like a redwood or a telephone pole was meandering down the sidewalk. There was a smell to this town, completely different from the smell of Bad Axe. Carbon emissions maybe? Not that Bad Axe didn’t have cars and busses and trucks, but not centralized, like this. Not blocks and blocks of cars, parking garages, bus stops.

Perry had spent his whole life in Bad Axe, and even the summer camp he’d gone to, deep in the Hiawatha National Forest, had been within eighty miles of his own front door. He’d traveled, of course. A trip every year with his parents. Nova Scotia. Gettysburg. Washington, D.C. They’d gone to Mexico for spring break a few years before. But he’d never lived anywhere else. And, already, after only a couple of weeks in this college town, he was beginning to see how some of the ways he’d assumed the world worked everywhere were not the ways they worked at all.

Perry kept walking at a steady pace, following his own shadow until he’d crossed the whole campus and was back at the dorm.

“Hey.”

She was standing in the entryway of Godwin Hall:

Nicole Werner, wearing jeans and a dark, bulky sweatshirt. Her hair wasn’t in the usual ponytail, and looked uncombed, a bit frayed at the ends around her shoulders. He hadn’t recognized her as he walked across the courtyard, and had almost walked past her without noticing. A few other girls were sitting on the cement stairs. One was talking on a cell phone. Another was smoking a cigarette. They didn’t seem to be with Nicole.

“Hi, Nicole.”

She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, tilted her head, and said, “How are you, Perry?”

“Great,” Perry said. “You?”

She shrugged. Her shoulders looked narrower than he thought he remembered. In high school, she’d played volleyball, and he remembered being surprised, seeing her in her uniform in the gym one afternoon their junior year, that she was so muscular—not in a bad way, just sort of sturdy, sinewy, which he wouldn’t have expected from such a slender girl.

But tonight, on the front steps of Godwin Honors Hall, Nicole looked like a kid. Like a waif, he thought. And the baggy sweatshirt. What was with that? She’d been one of the best-dressed girls at Bad Axe High, which was saying something. You might think that in a small town like that, girls wouldn’t have much fashion sense. But the Bad Axe High girls, most of them anyway, did. They’d drive every weekend the two hours to Birch Run to go to the outlet malls, and come back wearing Calvin Klein and those other designers, looking like models, and Nicole had definitely been one of those. And up until now, when he’d seen her around campus, she’d seemed to be carrying on the tradition. Even when they were just meeting in the lounge for study group, she’d been in a neat blouse or sweater. One night, she’d even worn a skirt and sandals with heels.

Nicole wrapped her arms around herself. She looked down at her feet, which Perry was surprised to see were bare.

“I’m not so great, I guess,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Perry thought maybe she meant she had the flu or something. She looked like she had the flu, but maybe that was just the harsh electric light over the stairs.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m having adjustment issues,” she said.

“To college?” he asked.

She nodded, and made a puckery little expression with her lips. Perry hoped she wasn’t going to cry. What was he supposed to do if she did? He didn’t have a handkerchief on him, and he couldn’t imagine giving her his shoulder, or putting his arm around her. He’d have to just stand there like an idiot, saying stupid things, until she stopped.

Unable to think of anything else to say, Perry shrugged and said, “Yeah, well. It’s not like high school.”

“Not that high school was so great,” Nicole said.

“You always seemed pretty happy.”

“I did?” She looked up at him with what appeared to be genuine surprise.

“Well. I don’t know,” Perry said. “Weren’t you?”

“Well, I guess it was better than this,” she said, looking out at the courtyard of Godwin Honors Hall. “But I hated it.”

Perry snorted a little. He couldn’t help it. He pictured Nicole in that bright floral dress, accepting the Ramsey Luke Scholarship from Mr. Krug, then climbing the step to the lectern to deliver her valedictorian speech about the importance of being “first and foremost moral people.”

Nicole seemed to have heard the little involuntary sound he’d made, and her eyebrows sprang up. “What?” she asked, locking her eyes onto his.

Perry looked away fast, down at his own shadow stretched between them. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, running a hand over the top of his head. “It’s just that… well, you were the queen of the school, Nicole. You did everything, or won everything, or were president of it. What wasn’t to like?”

She let her arms drop to her sides. Her eyes seemed to be pooling with tears.

Shit, Perry thought. She was going to cry.

“Are you still pissed at me about the scholarship, Perry?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“What?!” Perry took a step back, and nearly stumbled down the stairs. The girls who’d been sitting there had left; now there was only a cigarette butt where they’d been. He put his hand on his chest.

“‘What?’” Nicole echoed, putting her own hand on her own chest, mocking him. She said, “Don’t you know I only got the Ramsey Luke because you got every other award?”

Perry shook his head. He felt he could actually hear something rattling around inside his skull. He said, trying hard to sound convincing, if only to himself, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, get off it, Perry,” Nicole said. “Why are you so competitive? I mean, haven’t you won enough stuff? You still have to begrudge everybody else the few bones they tossed us?”

Perry stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He was pretty sure they were shaking. He said, “Why are we having this conversation? I was just on my way to bed.”

“We’re having this conversation because…” Nicole seemed to choke on whatever she meant to say next, and then, to Perry’s horror, a few fat teardrops actually spilled out of her eyes and onto her cheeks. He opened his mouth, more in protest against the tears than to say something, and then she buried her face in her hands and sobbed, “Because we’re family. We’re like family, Perry. You’re the only person in this whole place who knows me. You’ve known me forever. You’re the only one, and you hate me.”

The two girls who’d been sitting on the steps had wandered back, and were now openly staring at Perry as if he’d committed some crime and was thinking he could get away with it. He looked from them back to Nicole, and then took a step toward her as slowly as he could. She started to sob more loudly. A couple of people on the other side of the doors looked out the window to see what was going on.

“Um, Nicole…” he said. But she didn’t say anything or take her hands away from her face. He could see now that a lot of tears were leaking out from between her fingers, and his heart began to hammer in alarm. He’d never been around a girl really crying before. Mary had never cried except a kind of teary nervousness the day she dumped him, handing him his class ring with an awful little shove. Even his mother only cried when she’d been laughing too hard, too long. Desperately, he patted his pockets, although he already knew he had no tissue.

The girls who’d been smoking were still staring at him, waiting. Perry looked around, as if someone else might be able to step in for him, but no one was going to—so, although his arm felt like it weighed five hundred pounds, he managed to raise it in Nicole’s direction, and to put a hand on her shoulder. She seemed to sag a little when he did this, and then sort of hopped toward him and buried her head in his chest, and then Perry had no choice but to put his hands on her back and pat it.

8

How long had he been standing there in front of Godwin Honors Hall, staring up at the room that had been Nicole’s the year before?

Had he been talking to himself?

Craig was walking fast back toward his and Perry’s apartment now, staring at his Converse, trying not to look around him at the people he felt pretty sure were looking at him.

On the phone, his father had said from back in New Hampshire, “You call me, bud, the second you feel like you’re losing it, you hear me? I’ll get there, and if I can’t get there fast enough, I’ll find someone who can.”

Losing it.

Even his father, the famous writer, had never been able to find the right words for it—that madness, or confusion, or fog that had enveloped Craig after the accident, and had lasted for months, only to mysteriously evaporate in July when Craig simply woke up one morning, looked around, and understood, perfectly, who and where he was again.

Who was that other person who had inhabited him during those months? Had he really believed that the rehab nurse, Becky, was his grandmother, raised from the dead and fifty years younger?

“Closed head injuries can take years to heal,” Dr. Truby had said when Craig was Craig again. “You got lucky. A few months.”

Lucky.

Was he?

Craig knew where he was now, but would he ever be able to shake the sense that the other world, the one he’d spent months living in, was still there? That back in that world, animals could talk, just not with their mouths? That if you stared at the grass, it spelled messages to you in the breeze? That every blond female was some perverted version of Nicole—face twisted, or wrinkled, or made insipid to torment him?

“Synapses,” Dr. Trudy said. “Misfiring.”

“You were bonkers,” Scar had said. “You were livin’ in Creepyville, man. Welcome back.”

His mother had been horrified when she discovered that his plan was to go back to school in September if they’d let him back in. She’d said the words relapse and what if about five thousand times.

“No one in this family cares what I think, but I am stating for the record that he should not go back to that horrible school,” she’d said to Craig’s father. She was standing in the street talking loudly to the side of the Subaru as if no one were in it. “What if… relapse… or something worse?”

“What could be worse?” Craig asked from the passenger seat. “I killed my girlfriend.” He even managed a laugh. Beyond his mother, he could see her new boyfriend’s shadow moving around behind the curtains of his parents’ bedroom.

“Lynette, you’re right about one thing,” Craig’s father had said, rolling the car window up as he said it. “No one gives a flying fuck what you think.”

Craig’s mother started screaming at the Subaru as they pulled away from the curb, but his father had turned up his Vivaldi, and Craig didn’t hear from her again until the next week, just before they headed back out to the Midwest, when she came by his father’s apartment and said—subdued, choked with emotion, spilling tears all over the place—“Just come back the second you can’t stand it anymore,” as if it were a foregone conclusion that it would come to that. “If… relapse.”

“And do what?” Craig had asked. “Come back and live with you and Scar and ‘Uncle Doug,’ work at the ski resort?”

His mother turned her back then, and walked out the front door, down the stairs, and crisply back to her car, sobbing openly the whole way, as other apartment dwellers passed her in the parking lot and Craig watched from the balcony. For a second it had crossed his mind to run out there after her, tackle her, press his face into her chest, and sob, too, but she was already driving away in her Lexus before he could.

Now he was back, and wondering if she’d been right.

He shouldn’t be here.

They’d let him back in, but that didn’t mean he belonged here.

Even Dr. Truby had seemed worried, and Dr. Truby had been, from the beginning, all about self-empowerment and complete recovery.

“You may… begin… to have frightening recall,” he’d said. “Please phone me if you do.”

The last time Craig had met with the shrink it was a hundred degrees outside and the air-conditioning in the office was blowing in the smell of an overheated refrigerator. He knew Dr. Truby was about to ask him, for the ten millionth time, the same question:

“Tell me, Craig, anything you can recall at this time about the accident.”

Craig had looked down at his lap, as he always did, and then rubbed his eyes where he saw, against his lids, a woman’s face.

Unfamiliar.

It was round as a moon. She was speaking to him in a foreign language, but somehow he understood what she was saying:

Don’t move the girl.

Craig looked up at Dr. Truby. He said, “I think there was a lady there.”

Dr. Truby nodded. His head was shaved, and so perfectly shaped it seemed to have been made with the idea of shaving it in mind.

“And this lady…?” Dr. Truby moved his hand through the air, churning it in his own direction.

Craig thought for a minute, and then said, “She told me not to move Nicole.”

“And then you…?” Again, the paddling. Pulling him in.

Craig had looked down at Dr. Truby’s shoes. Slippers? Loafers. They looked soft and suede, not like something you could wear to walk on pavement.

“And then…?”

But Craig had no words for what came after that.

After that, there were hands on him. A blow to the stomach. His head and ears were ringing. And water. Was he being baptized? There was a needle in his arm. A man in a blue uniform shouting at some flashing lights. Someone kicked him hard in the ass, and then he was stumbling. And all the time, he was trying to ask about Nicole, but the words came out so garbled he knew no one could understand him. Someone wanted to know if Craig knew his own name, and where he was, but when Craig tried to form, in his mouth, the shape of the words of her name, someone said, in a soothing voice, “You shouldn’t think about that now. You should rest. Nicole is dead.”

“I don’t know,” Craig had said, and Dr. Truby, who must have been waiting for a long time for Craig to say more than this, leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and sighed.

9

Mira always started the semester with the story of Peter Plogojowitz:

In 1725, in the village of Kisilova, a peasant by the name of Peter Plogojowitz died of natural causes and was buried. Within a week, nine other villagers died, and Peter Plogojowitz appeared to his wife demanding his shoes. It was widely assumed that the dead man was “walking,” and that he was the cause of the other deaths, so his grave was dug up and the corpse examined.

Except for his nose having fallen away, Peter looked as good as new in his grave. His hair and beard and nails had grown. His skin had peeled away, and what looked like new, pink skin had grown beneath it. There was fresh blood in his mouth. The crowd that had gathered at the grave became enraged. A stake was driven through the peasant’s heart, whereupon he shouted, bled from the ears and mouth, and acquired an erection. After that, the corpse was burned and the ashes scattered.

Peter Plogojowitz walked no more.

Several of the girls in the back row covered their mouths. One, a dark-haired beauty with nearly translucent skin, covered her whole face. A couple of boys began to laugh nervously, and some others chuckled loudly. A few of the more serious students were taking notes. Perry Edwards, the only student whose name Mira knew already, since she’d had to sign his override form, was nodding, looking at her so fixedly she felt as if he were looking through her.

“So,” Mira said. She clapped her hands together, turned to the blackboard, and picked up a piece of chalk. Holding it up, she said to the class, “What do we learn from this anecdote about the Serbian burial practices and superstitions of the eighteenth century?”

She wrote the number one on the board, a pale wisp of white dust rising from it.

Usually, no one had a word to say at this point. Perry Edwards had his hand raised.

“Yes?” she said, nodding at him to speak.

“Apparently they believed that a dead person could get out of his grave and back into it.”

Mira nodded. Next to the number one, she wrote, The dead can escape and reenter their graves.

“Two?” she asked.

There was a moment of polite silence before, again, Perry Edwards raised his hand.

“The dead who can do this don’t decay?” he asked.

Mira wrote on the board: 2. The “walking dead” do not decay as expected.

“And they cause other deaths,” Perry said without raising his hand this time. As Mira was writing this down, he continued. “They drink blood? They can be killed a second time, more completely?”

Mira wrote these down as well, and then: 6. These creatures are sexual in nature.

As Mira knew they would, the girls in the back with their hands over their mouths giggled, and the boys who’d chuckled before chuckled again. But Perry Edwards just held her gaze so long that, finally, Mira was the one who had to look away.

10

Craig tried hard not to stare at Nicole Werner while she studied, but the way her hair slipped over her face when she cast her eyes down on her History of the English Language textbook, and the way the highlighter in her right hand flashed over the pages, and even the way her foot seemed to tap out some rhythm for four or five seconds, then stop, was so much more riveting than the book he was reading that he couldn’t look away.

If she knew he was watching her, she was pretending she didn’t.

Perry had found a study room for them in the basement of Godwin Hall—an old lounge tucked away behind a storage room, with dust-covered chairs and maroon carpeting. There was a brass plaque on the door that read, THE ALICE MEYERS MEMORIAL STUDENT STUDY ROOM, and although it looked like no one had used the room for years for anything but furtive sex (empty condom wrappers were stuffed into a glass vase that was otherwise full of plastic flowers), it was really a very comfortable room.

There were no light bulbs in any of the lamps, so they’d brought down their own desk lamps from their dorm rooms and set them up on the end tables. The dim, focused light was intense and relaxing at the same time. Perry sat at a table in the corner, one elbow on each side of an open book. Nicole was curled up in a cushioned chair with a battered ottoman. Her roommate, Josie Reilly, sat on the floor with her back to the wall, legs folded in the lotus position as if her body were made of clay. Craig lay on the couch, watching Nicole over the edge of his book as she flipped a page and bit her lower lip.

He had thought a study group would entail talking. Quizzing. The sharing of test-taking tips. Maybe flash cards. He’d never been in a study group before so had no way of knowing that it meant, simply, a circle of companionable silence, concentration—except for the occasional yawn, the clearing of a throat, Nicole’s dainty sneeze, Josie’s distracted “Bless you.” It crossed Craig’s mind, when the silence grew so thick that you could have reached into the air and grabbed a handful of it, to crack a joke. But he didn’t know what the joke would be. It would have to be incredibly funny to warrant the interruption, and he wasn’t really that funny unless there was something to be made fun of, and nothing here seemed stupid enough to make the kind of joke Craig usually got a good laugh out of—the kind of comment that got him in trouble in high school or had Scar snorting chocolate milk out of his nose at the dinner table.

Now and then, their desk lamps flickered. (Maybe one of the washing machines in the laundry room next to the lounge had started its spin cycle and sucked up all the electricity in the basement for a minute.) Briefly, Nicole looked up to the ceiling, and then back down. She highlighted something else on the page she was reading, and then she took the pencil out of the place in her hair where she’d tucked it and wrote something quickly in the margin.

“You make me sick!”

Randa Matheson had screamed that at him in her parents’ bedroom one afternoon after school. She was naked, standing at the edge of the bed, screaming down at Craig, who was lying on his back with a hard-on, wondering, What? What? Where did this come from?

“Huh?” he finally managed to ask.

“I said,” Randa shouted, “that you make me sick.” She enunciated each word as if she were shouting to a foreigner, a retard. Her dark eyes were narrowed, and her lips, bloated and red from all the kissing they’d been doing, made her look exactly like her mother, whose face was well known to anyone who watched reruns of a very stupid sitcom from the late seventies.

“What? What did I do?”

“Just forget it,” Randa snapped, pulling her thong up over her narrow hips, hiding her perfectly trimmed pussy, which made his hard-on throb even harder, before she turned and ran from the room, holding her jeans and her shirt against her breasts. Behind her, the door slammed so loudly Craig flinched and closed his eyes, thinking for a split second that maybe he’d been shot.

After a while, he got dressed and let himself out.

The Mathesons’ house was immaculate, and enormous, and he got lost on his way out, finding himself in some kind of sunroom with no door. Randa herself was nowhere to be seen.

For months afterward Craig wondered what he had done, although it didn’t really occur to him to call Randa or to stop her in the hallway and ask. The day after the “incident,” his mother pulled her car up next to Randa’s empty Jeep in the parking lot of the Trading Post. Craig slumped down in the passenger seat. “What’s the matter with you?” his mother asked. Luckily, she realized then that she’d forgotten her purse, so they didn’t stay.

But it was impossible not to cross Randa’s path. In school. At parties. At the video store. At first, Craig tried not to look directly at her, hoping to avoid her eyes, but after a while it became clear that she was treating him as if he were invisible, so it wouldn’t have mattered what he did anyway. In the stairwell one day between classes, just the two of them passed each other (she was going up, he was going down) and, stupidly, he sputtered out, “Hey.”

She looked right at him, seeming to register nothing. Not the vaguest hint of an expression crossed her face. She was looking through his head, seeing nothing but the wall behind it.

He tried, now and then, to think about what could have happened, what he’d done or failed to do.

They’d been kissing, he was clear on that, and the shirts had come off, and then the jeans—around their thighs at first, and then around their ankles, and then on the floor—and then he’d eased that thong down her silky legs while she ran her fingers over one of his eyebrows. He’d stood up and pulled his own underwear off, and she’d sort of propped herself up to look at him, and asked, “Do you like me?”

Craig was fairly certain that his answer to the question had been yes (why wouldn’t it have been?), but the question was followed by a long, fast series of other questions, and he was less sure of what his answers to those had been.

Do you think Michelle has better tits, who’s the skinniest girl you ever had sex with, have you ever had sex with Melody, when did you first notice me, is Tess the one you really want, are you using me to get to her, did you just come over here this afternoon because you were hoping you were going to have sex with me?

Craig had gotten back into bed beside her and lay there with his throbbing hard-on, until finally he interrupted her, and said, “Are we going to fuck or what?” And that’s when she’d leapt out of bed and screamed at him.

Craig had hardly been within a few feet of a girl since that day with Randa. The whole summer after graduation had passed without a flirtation, let alone a kiss.

Now he closed his eyes and let the image of Nicole Werner—only two feet away from him—linger on his lids for a minute. He tried to picture her in Fredonia, carrying on a conversation with someone’s actress turned mother or millionaire father strutting around in a suit with nowhere to go but the Trading Post.

No.

He could not picture Nicole Werner anywhere he’d ever been before this minute.

Nicole Werner belonged here, now, in the lounge of Godwin Honors College.

Virgin valedictorian, daughter of the Dumplings’s owners.

Probably that gold chain around her neck held a crucifix dangling somewhere down between her perfect, untouched breasts, in the powder-scented shadows of her plain cotton bra and flowery blouse. At night, she probably said prayers and probably cuddled up to her stuffed monkey. Maybe back in eleventh grade she’d let some asshole grope her ass and stick his tongue in her mouth, but she’d never sauntered out of her parents’ hot tub stark raving nude, stoked up on Ecstasy, and invited every guy from Fredonia High at the party to stick his dick in her—a not-uncommon event back home.

Nicole Werner had never even been to a party like that. She’d never heard of a party like that. They did not, Craig felt certain, have parties like that in Bad Axe.

She sneezed again—a dainty sneeze, all consonants and wheee!—and Craig opened his eyes.

She was looking back at him with a tissue held to her nose.

I’m sorry, she mouthed.

God bless you, he mouthed back.

11

Shelly went over it again every morning in her mind, and every night before she went to bed. She thought about it as she drove to work and as she sat behind her desk. When the telephone rang, the sound sometimes startled her. She forgot she was in her office, that she had a phone on her desk that might ring.

First, she’d remember the car, solidifying her own description of it in her mind:

Dark colored. Two door.

Then, the familiar road:

A semirural highway. Two lanes, north and south, just on the outskirts of town. She’d driven that road a million times before, and had driven it a hundred times since.

That time, she’d been listening to a country station—a guilty pleasure. (If anyone she worked with at the Chamber Music Society knew her secret, she might not actually be fired, but she’d be chastised so relentlessly she’d eventually have to quit. Sure, it was a free country, but not when it came to certain aesthetic preferences or political opinions and you happened to work at the Chamber Music Society at the university.) One of her favorite country stars was singing about how great it was to live in the U.S.A., and Shelly was singing along.

She remembered the yellow line down the middle of the road.

She remembered noting the small, dark-colored car that was just far enough ahead of her that she didn’t need to pay much attention to it. It wasn’t going fast. There were no other cars on the road.

As she sang the words to the country song along with the radio, she realized for the first time (although she’d heard the song a hundred times) that the subtext of it was that if you didn’t like it in the U.S.A., you should leave.

Personally, Shelly Lockes more or less agreed. Her big brother had been killed in Vietnam. Her parents had never gotten over it and had died young of the kind of diseases the grief-stricken die of: heart attack for her father, stomach cancer for her mother.

Still, Shelly was wondering to herself even as she sang the catchy lyrics at the top of her lungs, if you did decide to leave the U.S.A., where would you go? If you were able to think of a country that appealed to you more, would they be willing to let you in? What if, afterward, you wanted to come back?

Then the red lights of the car ahead of her swerved, and blinked, and seemed to dance in the air for a few wild seconds. And then they vanished.

How many hundreds of hours had she logged on Google by now, searching for information on the accident? The girl. The boy. The “investigation,” which seemed to have ended before it ever began.

But every hit Shelly came across that wasn’t the local paper’s colorful misinformation had something to do with the cherry trees in the memorial orchard at the dead girl’s sorority, or quoted sappy things her sorority sisters had to say about her purity. Shelly plugged in her own name, and found nothing. She plugged in the date and accident and, on a whim, the truth. Nothing. She plugged in the truth and the name of Nicole Werner’s sorority, and came up with one surprising detail about a music school student, a violinist named Denise Graham, who’d disappeared in the spring, right around the time of the accident—and many of the same sorority sisters who were quoted as saying that Nicole was “the sweetest girl who ever lived” said of the disappeared violinist, “She was really aloof and strange. No one ever got to know her.”

It almost seemed staged, this juxtaposition, as if to prove that Nicole had, indeed, been an angel in the guise of a sorority girl—the proof being that this other one’s life was of such little concern to anyone. If she’d ever been located, there was nothing about it on the Internet that Shelly could find.

“Shelly?”

Josie was standing in the threshold, wearing her usual surprised expression. It had taken Shelly three months of working with this girl before she realized that Josie wasn’t actually surprised by anything, ever. That the expression was some kind of amusement—perhaps at someone else’s expense. Perhaps Shelly’s.

“Yes?”

“Would it be okay with you if I went down to Starbucks? Espresso fix? I could get you something?”

“That’s fine. Go ahead. But I don’t need anything.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

After Josie had clipped away in her little hard-soled shoes, Shelly went back to the file she’d opened on her computer—numbers surging electrically, shimmering, seeming for the moment to be unrecognizable as anything but shapes and dots. She rubbed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, and after she thought it had been long enough for Josie to get down the stairs and out to the street, she looked out the window, found Josie among the hundreds of other students passing (between classes) on the sidewalk, and then watched her sway along the sidewalk with her hands tucked into the pockets of her cashmere hoodie, threading her elegant way toward Starbucks.

The girl’s back was straight, and her long, dark hair whipped around her face. She was gorgeous. As Josie crossed the street, Shelly saw two guys turn around to watch her, and although Shelly was too far away to see their faces, she could see that they were nudging one another the way guys did when they were talking about a girl’s body. Josie bent over and picked something up—a dropped coin?—and put it in her pocket, and then ran her hand through her beautiful hair. The two guys had a hard time walking straight while craning their necks around to observe her ass. Shelly turned back to her computer screen.

She dreaded it, but she was going to have to fire Josie Reilly, who’d worked in the office only since July. She was the most unreliable work-study student Shelly’d ever had, and had gotten hired because, frankly, it was hard to find work-study students living on campus during the summer months. Josie had also seemed so intelligent, so composed, during her interview, that Shelly had been genuinely impressed.

But now, nearly every afternoon, there were guys hanging around in the lobby waiting for her more than an hour before she was supposed to get off work—cracking jokes, talking about parties—until, finally, exhausted by her own annoyance, Shelly would say, “You can leave early if you want to, Josie,” to which Josie never objected.

Then, each Monday, the one day Josie was supposed to come into the office in the morning, she never failed to stumble in an hour late, apologizing profusely but always with that amused look on her face.

And, inexcusably, a few weeks earlier, Shelly had found the expense-reimbursement form for the Marymount String Quartet, which was supposed to have been submitted a month before, collecting dust under Josie’s desk. There was a doodle of a shoe on the back of the form—a high heel with straps and buckles. “Oh, my God!” Josie shrieked when Shelly waved the piece of paper at her, but she offered no real explanation, just a series of false-sounding self-recriminations, and there was always that look on her face.

It was true that all of Shelly’s work-study students over the years had been bad, and she’d tried repeatedly to make a case to the dean that what she needed was a real assistant, but every year they foisted a new work-study kid on her. They were all sloppy, unreliable, and empty-headed, for the most part, but Josie Reilly was perhaps the worst. She barely even made an effort to pretend she was making an effort.

Shelly looked back out the window just in time to see her come out of Starbucks with a cup in each hand.

She always did that.

Shelly always told Josie she didn’t want anything, and Josie always brought her something anyway. It would have seemed thoughtful if it didn’t somehow also seem like an afterthought, as if Josie had gotten to the Starbucks with no recollection whatsoever of what Shelly had answered when she’d asked her if she wanted anything.

As Josie crossed the street back to the Chamber Music Society offices, she glanced up and Shelly ducked away from the window, looking back at her computer fast, feeling her cheeks flush, her heart beating in embarrassment.

Josie Reilly seemed to her to be precisely the kind of sorority girl who would assume that because Shelly was a lesbian she was attracted to her. She was, Shelly thought, precisely the kind of girl who went through the world assuming everyone was attracted to her.

Josie would assume she was being watched by her boss from the window of her office because she was so irresistible. She would come back into the offices bearing that paper cup of hot chocolate, or mint tea, or peppermint chai, and Shelly was going to have to look into her amused expression without batting an eye, and take it from her, and thank her, and offer to pay her the outrageous three or four dollars it had cost. And, this time, because she’d been caught watching the girl cross the street—horny old dyke in a position of power at a university so sensitive to such matters that the very air around them felt censored, as if it had actually become possible to neuter the mind—Shelly would now have to wait at least another week before she fired her.

12

The twins threw themselves onto the living room floor—Andy on his butt, Matty on his face—when Mira walked in the door. It was a part of the routine.

She came back from her teaching and her office in the afternoons, and they wept and screamed for a solid hour while Clark stomped around the apartment. When she asked him if they’d been fussy during the day, he shook his head with his lips sealed tightly, letting her know that this behavior had to do with her, and was, therefore, her problem.

But what, she wondered, did it mean? Were the boys weeping with excitement because she was back, or crying with their just-realized grief that she’d been gone? Mira’s terrible suspicion was that they’d longed to cry all day, but because their father seemed either so unsympathetic in his weariness or so close himself to cracking, they’d suppressed it until she came home.

She pulled off her shoes and sat down on the floor, and gathered them to her. Matty opened his mouth and sucked onto her kneecap, sobbing. Andy grabbed a fistful of her hair, stuffed it into his mouth, and wept into her neck. “Clark?” Mira called to him over their sobbing. She needed a glass of water but couldn’t risk standing up yet, having to disengage the twins.

He didn’t answer.

“Clark?”

Mira had grown up in a traditional family. Her father sold insurance all day while her mother slammed doors and screamed at the kids. Mira had little idea what her mother did with those precious hours when they were at school. Early on she’d imagined her lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, hands crossed over her chest until she heard the school bus pull up to the curb at 3:45.

Later Mira considered other possibilities: A secret life of some sort. Not a lover, surely, but maybe a group of friends to whom her mother confided, over neighborly cups of tea, the disappointments of her marriage, her difficulty with her children. Or maybe she read romance novels, bodice-rippers she kept hidden around the house. Maybe she pursued some passion Mira hadn’t considered: bird watching, poetry-writing.

But no sooner had Mira turned twenty, the age at which she might actually have gotten to know this stranger who’d raised her, than her mother died, and the only genuinely revealing scene of her childhood she could remember with clarity was an afternoon when she’d had to stay home from school, suffering as she was from such debilitating menstrual cramps that even her mother, who had no patience at all for female-related troubles, had to admit that Mira looked green, and let her stay in bed.

That afternoon, Mira was fourteen. She’d gone straight back to bed after breakfast and slept until noon, and then she’d woken up to a silent house, and tiptoed into the hallway.

Why had she tiptoed? Had she expected to find her mother doing something she wouldn’t want her daughter to witness?

Whatever the reason for it, Mira could still remember her sense of being on a furtive mission—the way she’d stepped gingerly over the floorboard that creaked, and then how she’d slid, rather than stepped, down the hallway in her socks.

Their house was small. There were only three bedrooms, one of which her brothers had to share (an endless source of conflict: Why does she get her own room?) She moved from the hallway’s bare floorboards to the living room’s orange shag with only the vaguest of whispered footsteps, and then peered around the corner, to the living room.

Her mother wasn’t there.

She’d held her breath as she passed under the low arched doorway of the dining room, separated from the kitchen by a swinging door (one side of which would no longer swing, since either Bill or Frank—neither of whom would admit to it—had pulled it off the door frame by hanging from it, and because their father, who had no carpentry skills, also refused to hire anyone to do any work around the house.) If her mother was behind that door, she was standing too still to be detected.

Mira pushed open the side that still opened, and stepped into the kitchen.

Nothing.

Only her mother’s half-empty coffee cup on the counter, with a bright red imprint of her lips on the rim.

Mira touched the cup. It was cold.

There were only two other places in the house her mother could be, Mira knew: the half-finished basement (except that Mira didn’t hear the washer or dryer) or the walk-in pantry. They had only one car, and her father would have taken it to work, so unless her mother had walked into town (unthinkable, as she didn’t even own a pair of real walking shoes, and it had rained that morning, so there would be puddles, and what would she do in their small town anyway?), she had to be in the house.

Perhaps, Mira thought, her mother was alphabetizing soup cans in the pantry or checking expiration dates. There was one bare bulb in the pantry, and the space was large enough, even crammed as it was with cans and jars and boxes of pasta and Pop Tarts and Frosted Flakes, that her mother might comfortably stand inside it or even sit on a chair if she wanted to, looking around, making lists.

Mira walked to the door and put her hand on the warm solidity of the fake brass knob, and had the sure sense of something beyond the door. But what? Not her mother, exactly, but some suppressed energy, some barely perceptible movement, some silent intense activity, like cell growth or furtive sex. It crossed Mira’s mind that there might be someone behind that door who was not her mother at all—or that her mother might be in there with someone.

She hesitated, and then pulled the door open so quickly she felt a rush of wind on her face and neck, and the bright overhead light nearly blinded her after the darkness of the hallway, and she gasped when her mother turned around, seeming less bathed in that light than emitting it, standing as she was in the center of the pantry, directly under the one bare bulb, wearing what looked to Mira at first like some kind of white choir robe made of feathers, or giant wings wrapped around her body, eyes closed but lips and cheeks vividly, garishly, painted red (although in real life Mira’s mother wore makeup only on Sundays, for church, or on the rare weekend nights Mira’s father took her out to dinner). Her skin looked wet, coated with dew or sweat, and Mira got a quick but definite impression that her mother had just hatched or was in the process of hatching, or being born, or being reanimated after death.

Mira froze in the doorway, hand flat against her chest, heart pounding into her palm. Her mother slowly opened her eyes and said, “Mira?” in a voice a hundred times softer and more full of patience and motherly affection than Mira had ever heard it.

“Mama?”

“Yes?”

“Are you—?”

“What, sweetheart?”

Mira took a step backward, and her mother simply pulled the door closed again between them, and Mira hesitated for only a second or two before returning quickly to her room and getting back into her bed where she belonged.

As the years passed, like so many other incidents from childhood and adolescence, that moment became a confused vision in her memory, and often Mira would think she’d simply dreamed the whole thing, or hallucinated it. (Was it possible the Tylenol she’d taken that morning had codeine in it? Could she have had, in addition to her period, a fever?) But she also never lost the sense that she’d stumbled upon a deep secret that day, a secret in the pantry as well as in her mother, and the distant, irrational suspicion that her mother spent her days in the pantry regenerating, reanimating, shedding cells and making new ones, would make its way into Mira’s dreams for years, until it eventually entered her conscious life, permanently, when her mother succumbed to the breast cancer she must surely have known she had that day in the pantry—must have known she’d had for years. (The physicians who were eventually rounded up to treat her expressed shock and horror that an illness that might have been successfully addressed had been ignored, or concealed, or borne in silence for so long.)

At the funeral parlor on a cool April afternoon, Mira looked down at her mother in the white coffin and remembered that glimpse of her in the pantry in the flush on her mother’s cheeks, the ghoulishly painted red lips, the cool, waxy film of her skin, and the smell of the embalming fluid.

By then, it would seem like a century since that day in the pantry and the diagnosis that had followed a few months later. The breast cancer went on for what seemed like another lifetime, straight through Mira’s high school prom, and then through her graduation (which no one had expected her mother to live to see), and then through her first and second years of college—during which there were four or five exhausting Greyhound bus rides home, because it seemed her mother was in her last days—until, in her sophomore year, just before final exams, Mira’s father called to say that they again expected her mother to die within a few days and that she shouldn’t rush home, but…

So, as it happened, her mother died while Mira was scrawling a response to question number eight: “In Jung’s consideration of synchronicity, he establishes that tertium comparationis is meaning. Explain.”

As her mother left this world, Mira was sitting hunched in an auditorium trying to describe the way an outer event and an inner event might bear equal significance, and the example she’d used was of a woman being reminded one day, by a song on the radio, of a boy she used to love but hadn’t seen or thought of in many years, and then coming across his obituary in a newspaper she did not ordinarily read.

The next week, looking down at her mother in her coffin bathed in funeral home light, it would all come together—the memory and the precognition, the symbolism and the folklore, inherent in that day years earlier when Mira, in her own delirium and bleeding, had come upon her mother in the pantry, and had seen not only her mother’s death in it but also, in a flash, the trajectory of her own career.

Within a few weeks of her mother’s funeral, Mira had read The American Way of Death, and then, of course, eventually, she’d read every book ever written on the traditions and rites and superstitions related to the decomposition and reanimation of the body, until she finally ran out of books to read, and began to write one herself.

With his Nikes in his hands, Clark stood above Mira and said, “Maybe you could take care of their dinner tonight? I’ve had it. I’m going for a run.”

“Clark,” she said, looking up at him—that body, which, one lazy Saturday long ago, after a hot bubble bath, she’d licked the sinewy length of from the tip of the big toe to the crown of the head—and tried not to let her gaze linger on the belly, which was both slack and bulging. (How was it that Clark had recently taken on the physical attributes of a person who had given birth to twins when there was no longer a shred of evidence of it on Mira herself?) She tried to hold his eyes and to keep a steady tone of unexcited objectivity in her voice, even as Matty sank his incredibly sharp new teeth into the flesh of her thigh, as she said, “I have an Honors College thesis committee meeting tonight, Clark. I have to leave in an hour. I told you that this morning.”

He turned from her then, and before she even realized he’d thrown them, the running shoes had sailed across the living room and knocked over their only nice lamp, which Mira could hear shattering even before it hit the coffee table, and the twins began to shriek with what seemed to be all of the hysterical energy of human history channeling itself through their lungs.

13

It was not a dorm known for its great parties, to say the least, but there was a tradition in Godwin Honors Hall of throwing one big blowout the Friday night after midterms.

Craig had, himself, only one exam (Political Science) and a paper due (Great Books). He’d already tracked down on the Internet a “model” for the paper, and had begun to sketch out some tentative plans for the model’s rebirth as his own term paper. The Poli-Sci exam seemed like no big deal. He’d just make it a priority to go over the outline at the back of the book the morning before the test.

Apparently, his fellow students had harder schedules, or approached their studies differently. Beginning the weekend before midterms, Godwin had become a ghost hall, and Perry barely darkened the doorway of their room except to sleep for a few hours in the early morning before he was gone again.

(“Where you been, man?” Craig asked him in passing, to which Perry replied, “The library. Studying,” as if it were a given.)

Even the cafeteria was silent. Instead of the usual clusters, people sat separately, absentmindedly lifting forkfuls of eggs or baked beans to their mouths while staring intently into the textbooks open beside their plates. Craig watched as one kid accidentally speared the page of his book instead of the meatloaf on his plate, and then even brought the fork halfway to his mouth before realizing there was nothing on it.

Jesus Christ. No wonder his father had had to call on his old buddy Dean Fleming to get Craig into this place. These were not his people. They were an entirely different species. Back in Fredonia there’d been professional students, for sure, but theirs had been such a casual superiority that Craig never bothered to pay any attention to how they were doing it. They just waltzed out of their Advanced Placement courses fluttering the A-pluses on their exams, sauntered down the hallway to the meetings of the clubs they were presidents of, or grabbed their violins and headed off to the orchestra room.

That these Godwin Honors College kids worked so hard both frightened and puzzled Craig, and made it even more impossible for him to imagine, somehow, joining them at the library. So far the only thing he’d done at the library was check out an armload of CDs, which he’d downloaded to his laptop.

“Are we going to meet this week?” Craig asked as Perry stumbled past him on his way to the shower in the middle of midterm week.

“Huh?”

“Study group?”

“We’ve been meeting,” Perry said.

“When?” Craig asked.

“At the library,” Perry said. “Constantly.”

“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” Craig asked.

“I don’t know,” Perry said. “I guess we figured if you wanted to study you’d be at the library.” The two of them looked at each other blankly, and then Perry grabbed his towel and was basically gone again until Friday night.

Craig’s paper looked pretty good, he thought. He’d gone way out of his way to make sure no series of words in any given sentence could be Googled to reveal his source. He also thought his Political Science exam had gone well, though it concerned him a bit that he’d finished it so much more quickly than the other twenty-two students in the class, who were still chewing the erasers at the ends of their pencils as Craig handed his test in and grabbed his backpack (making as little noise as possible, but, still, a couple of girls on either side of his seat looked up from their papers and glared at him).

It had been a bright October afternoon. Blue sky, red and yellow leaves, green grass. A very distant and watery-looking half-moon was hanging over it all.

It was Thursday, so he went looking for Lucas, to get high. On Thursday afternoons they usually met in the arboretum with their stashes and smoked weed until it was time to go back to the hall for dinner, but this Thursday even Lucas seemed to be off somewhere studying, so Craig smoked up what he had alone, and then he went to Village Corners, flashed his fake ID at the fat man behind the counter, bought himself a fifth of Jack Daniels, and headed back to the deserted dorm.

He was feeling, for no reason he could pinpoint, the kind of vague depression he’d felt on and off for years, but which had lifted last summer (forever, he’d hoped). It had been bad, the few weeks right after graduation, when the sense that he should be happy, and proud of himself, somehow made him want to cry all the time (although he never did). It had been June, he’d graduated from high school, he was on his way to college, and his dad kept telling him he was going on to greatness and better things and should be excited, and the fact that he wasn’t happy, proud, or excited made his arms feel tired all the time, as if he were carrying around a big block of cement.

The first “episode,” as his family doctor would come to call these periods of depression, came on him when he was fourteen, in Belize. A famous movie director was trying to woo Craig’s dad into selling him the rights to his most successful novel, The Jaguar Operation, and it was supposed to be his dad’s special treat for Craig, taking just him along, leaving Craig’s mother and Scar in New Hampshire.

Craig was only partly fooled by this. He knew his mother hated going on these kinds of trips with his father. She hated the drinking, the schmoozing, the phony bonhomie, and the competition from younger women smitten with the famous writer, leaning across the dinner table with their silverware held high so that their cleavage practically spilled onto his plate. His mother would have turned down the invitation to Belize anyway, and Scar didn’t go anywhere without their mother unless he was forced.

Still, stepping out of the tiny jet that had been sent for them in Miami—just ahead of his father, a breeze wafting around them that was both fragrant and heavy with the smell of dead things rotting in seawater—when the famous director took off his straw hat and whooped, and an actress Craig recognized from a movie he’d seen the week before on HBO smiled with brilliant familiarity, Craig felt privileged, and thrilled.

He was the famous writer’s kid.

“Hey,” the director said, “you must be the famous kid!”

The Caribbean was an amazing blue backdrop to the director’s resort. Twenty thatched bungalows lined the beach, a kidney-shaped pool behind them, and green miles of jungle behind that. Smiling people with beautiful bodies sauntered around the sand paths in bright little bathing suits, sipping drinks. A few fat gray iguanas dragged their tails between the bungalows, and in the jungly distance Craig heard the screaming of crazed-sounding birds. While the director led his father around, Craig sat poolside downing one after another of the rum punches a grumpy Belizean man old enough to be Craig’s grandfather brought to him on a tray.

He was completely plastered by the time his father and the director came back, laughing companionably. The wind had picked up, and the thrashing of the jungle and the Caribbean surf together made a deafening roar around Craig’s head, pummeling his ears, making it impossible to hear the conversations taking place around him at the dinner table. The meal itself was one unrecognizable dish after another, spooned up by the same angry-seeming black man, whom the director called Handsome Man.

No one else seemed deafened by the wind. There was a beautiful young woman on either side of the director, and one sitting across from Craig’s father, and the conversations they were having seemed both lighthearted and intense, as if they could hear and understand one another. But even when the Belizean man leaned down and spoke directly into his ear, Craig had to ask three times before he understood:

“Are you finished? Will you want more? Cream sauce or broth?”

Craig’s father shouted across the table to him, “Fred here says if it’s not too windy tomorrow we’ll go out to the barrier reef and swim with the sharks. What do you think about that?”

Craig had somehow managed to hear this proposition. “Wow!” he said. “Yeah! Sure!”

The director and Craig’s father laughed.

“The boy wants to swim with the sharks!” The director raised his glass. The young women all laughed, and then stared at Craig for several seconds as their smiles faded. It was as if they’d just noticed he was there, that the fact of the writer’s adolescent son had just occurred to them, and that they weren’t necessarily happy about it.

Craig flushed. One of the women said something to him then, but over the wind he couldn’t hear it. He shrugged. She laughed again, even less enthusiastically. He looked down at his plate. It was gone.

He woke the next morning with a throbbing headache and had to lie very still under the thwacking ceiling fan, willing himself not to open his eyes until the bed had stopped spinning. He could hear the wind rattle the thatch overhead and the sound of waves crashing in the distance. He sat up and heaved, once, dryly, before getting his hand around a bottle of water on the nightstand and drinking it down. After he’d managed to stand for a minute or two on his rubbery legs, he wove his way out of the thatched hut to find his father sitting at a glass table with the director, the old black man pouring coffee into their cups.

“Are we going to swim with the sharks?” he asked.

Both Craig’s father and the director looked up. They had obviously been having a serious conversation, maybe a disagreement. Neither of them looked happy to see Craig.

“Sorry, kid. Too windy to get out there,” the director said, holding up his hand as if offering the wind for proof. Over the Belizean man’s head, a ferny tree was leaning so far over it looked like it would be torn up by the roots and blown into the sea.

Craig couldn’t help it: He was far from home, fourteen, hung over, and exhausted, and the idea of facing a long day alone at the side of the pool being waited on by the black man, deafened by the wind, ignored by the director and his women, eating little muscled things in coconut sauce, hit him like a punch in the gut. (Why had his father brought him here? Maybe, it occurred to Craig for the first time, simply to placate his mother, to make it seem less likely that he was going to the famous director’s resort in Belize for the attentions of the young women she knew would be there.) “Oh, man,” he whined.

A grim shadow passed over the director’s face. He said something to Craig that Craig couldn’t hear again over the wind, and then looked up at Craig’s father and said, more loudly, “Unless the Great American Writer here can do something about the wind!”

Craig’s father strained to smile. He looked up to the sky. He tapped his fingernails on the glass top of the table, something he did when he was being criticized by Craig’s mother, and then shouted, “Cease, wind! I command you!” The director guffawed and looked over at Craig with a genuine sneer.

It didn’t happen right away, but it happened.

Within a half hour, the air had grown eerily calm. Craig was sitting cross-legged on the beach, staring glumly out at the crashing surf, when suddenly the churning bath of the wind around his head stopped. A pelican that had been pumping its wings strenuously through the air over the ocean began to glide effortlessly, and Craig could hear again. There was hearty laughter coming from somewhere behind him, and he turned to see the director clapping his father on the back hard enough that the impact of it registered on his father’s face as annoyed surprise.

“Let’s go, Miracle Guys!”

The old black man drove the boat over the placid pale blue ocean while Craig’s father and the director drank beer in the back. They seemed no longer to be on speaking terms. Craig sat up front, and the ocean sprayed him in the face with a fine, spitty mist. The Belizean man cut the engine in what seemed to be simply an undefined spot in the middle of the Caribbean, specific nevertheless, and then he turned to Craig and nodded. “Here,” he said. “Put on your snorkel equipment.”

“Have fun, pal,” the director said, raising a brown bottle to him. “Been nice knowin’ ya!”

Craig’s father laughed, but looked uneasy. He stood up with his beer in his fist and looked over the edge of the boat, and Craig, struggling to pull his fins over his feet, felt his enthusiasm for swimming with sharks drain out of him as the Belizean man reached into a cooler, pulled out a handful of bloody fish pieces, and tossed them into the sea.

The chunks floated along the surface for a few seconds, and then there was a roiling of the water beneath them, and then they were gone, and Craig saw beneath the unearthly aqua blue two long black shadows, side by side, moving in awesome silence, each one longer than a tall man. The Belizean man threw another handful of fish into the water, and it never even floated, just disappeared in an instant into a mob of shadows.

“Is this safe?” Craig’s father asked the Belizean man, who shrugged his bony shoulders.

The director said, “I’ve done it myself a million times. Never even been nipped.”

There was, Craig realized now, something sinister about the director.

(Was it possible that the irises of his eyes had no pupils?)

Craig looked away from him, swallowed, put on his snorkeling mask, and stood, but his father reached out and took him by the arm. “Whoa, wait a second there, son,” he said.

“Let him go!” the director shouted. “The boy wants to swim with the sharks!”

It was then that Craig understood what was going on, that the director had cast him in a role: impetuous, spoiled, foolhardy boy.

The sharks rose closer to the surface of the water again, their shadows made of flesh circling over and around one another, and Craig instinctively took a step back, into his father’s arms.

“Forget it, son,” his father said. “You don’t need to do this. I won’t let you do this.”

Craig turned around, and the Belizean man was looking at him with an expression that was impossible to read.

“Let’s go,” his father said, and the Belizean man started the boat, and Craig sat back down and took his flippers off.

Back at the resort, he drank rum punch by the side of the pool until everyone else had gone to bed, and got so drunk that the stars seemed to be blowing around in the completely windless black air over him, like moths or silvery ashes. He got up to replenish his punch only to find that someone had locked up the tiki bar, so he stood with his empty plastic cup under the stars and listened to the calm, distant pounding of the surf against its barriers. He tilted his head back and tried to drink the very last drops from his empty cup, lost his balance in the sand, and fell on his ass with a soft thud, and then he sat there for a few minutes and laughed at himself, held up the plastic cup to the stars the way the director had raised his beer bottle to him back on the boat. “Been nice knowin’ ya!” he shouted, and waited for an echo.

It didn’t come.

The tropical air was like cotton, soaking up his voice.

Craig shouted again, looking around to see if anyone was there to hear him, and saw then, at the edge of the boat dock, a light. He stood up, leaving the plastic cup on the sand, and stumbled toward it.

It was a kid. Maybe Craig’s age. He had a flashlight at his feet and a net. He cast the net off the end of the dock, and Craig stood behind him, watching it float loosely in the clear water and then sink under, and then the kid pulled it out, heavy with thrashing small silver-dollar-size fish, which the kid dumped into the bottom of the boat in which the Belizean man had taken them to the sharks that afternoon.

“Hey,” Craig said, feeling suddenly much drunker in the hallucinatory darkness. The boy was so completely ignoring him that Craig felt as if he might be dreaming the boy, or that the boy was dreaming him.

The boy cast his net back out into the water, although there was still a fish in it, caught in the strings, wriggling.

“What are you doing?” Craig asked, and then the kid turned to look at him. His dark skin made his eyes even brighter in the light shining up from the flashlight at his feet.

“Fishing,” he said.

“Yeah,” Craig said. “I guess so.”

The kid turned back to the net, which was sinking into the water again, and the two of them were silent for what seemed like a long time before the kid said, “My father said you wouldn’t swim with the sharks.” He was looking at his net instead of at Craig. “Even after your own father stopped the winds for you.”

Craig snorted with laughter, and began to walk backward, his legs feeling as if they were made of that wiggling fish stuff in the kid’s net, and also the bloody, inert muscle of stuff the kid’s father had tossed by the handfuls into the Caribbean. As best he could, he trotted away on those weak legs, laughing and snorting, back to the hut, where he dropped into bed and a waveful of stars and ocean closed over him. He slept like death. When he woke up, his father had already packed, and they left the resort without saying good-bye to the director.

It was back at home that Craig began to carry the cement block with him. He was so tired every morning from carrying it, and facing carrying it again all day, and utterly unable to articulate to his mother what was wrong and why he could hardly hold his head up at the breakfast table.

She assumed, of course, that he was on drugs, and she would scowl at him when he woke from the naps that lasted all day on the weekends and stretched from after school to dinner during the week. She sent him to a shrink, who prescribed some pills Craig never took because of the warning that he couldn’t get a hard-on if he took them, but after a couple of months, the cement block simply lifted, on its own, returning now and then with a change in seasons but disappearing after he got used to the rain, or the snow, or the falling leaves, or the first brilliant days of summer. He hoped this wasn’t the beginning of that again—here at school, in October, during midterm week.

Friday night Godwin Honors Hall was loud, and drunk, and full of good cheer. Girls—even the homely ones he’d never seen wearing anything but sweat pants—had gotten dressed up in short skirts and high heels and lipstick. Guys were stocking their dorm refrigerators with Michelob and Corona, and competing iPod playlists were blaring from speakers aimed toward open windows and into the courtyard.

Craig had woken up in the late afternoon with a hangover, and hadn’t even realized that everyone was back from their weeklong absence, and that the beer was already flowing, until he stepped out into the hallway, headed for the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist, and walked right into the party.

Perry was there, leaning against the wall, holding a beer. He and some chick were comparing answers to an essay exam. The girl had buggy eyes but great calves and ankles. She and Perry were so absorbed in the shared vocabulary of their exam that neither one said hi when he passed them and said, “Hey.”

When he came back out of the bathroom, he had to push his half-naked way through a crowd of guys in glasses who were silently nodding their heads to some bad old rock ’n’ roll blaring from one of their rooms. One of them slapped him on his bare back, and Craig turned fast, ready to punch the asshole, until he realized the guy was just drunk, and happy. Perry was still in the hallway, and he and the buggy-eyed girl were still arguing the finer points of their comparisons and contrasts, and Craig was relieved to close the door to his room behind him. He was in no mood for a party. He was in the mood for some extra-potent stuff with Lucas, and maybe a trip to Pizza Bob’s, he thought, and it wasn’t until he was bent over, picking his jeans up off the floor, that he noticed a pair of long legs stretched out on his bed.

“Hey, Craig.”

“Jesus Christ,” Craig said. “How did you get in here?”

“I walked in the door.”

Craig let the jeans slip out of his hand, back onto the floor, and stood up straight, hitching the towel tighter around his waist and looking at Josie Reilly, who was lying on his bed with her black hair spread out on his pillow, holding his Maxim magazine open in front of her but looking at him, not it. She was wearing a little skirt with orange flowers on it, and her legs and feet were bare.

“Um, Josie, can I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Reading your dirty magazine.”

“Oh,” Craig said. “Okay. Well, I’m going to get dressed now.”

“Okay,” Josie said without taking her eyes off him.

“So…” He waved his right hand through the air while holding on to the towel at his waist with the left.

“So…?” she said. She tossed the magazine onto the floor, and then swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up. He felt the perfumey breeze of her pass him as she made her way barefoot to the door and locked it before turning back around. She stumbled sideways then, but caught herself on the edge of Craig’s desk, and laughed, and then slid down it and sat hard on the floor with her ankles tucked under her butt.

“How drunk are you?” Craig asked.

“Just a”—she held her thumb and index finger an inch apart—“drunk,” and then she held her arms up to him like a little kid wanting to be picked up.

“Josie,” Craig said. “I’m wearing a towel.”

“Take off the towel!”

“I think you’re more than a little drunk,” he said.

“I flunked,” she said. “I know it. Didn’t even study.” She made the motion of erasing something on a blackboard in front of her. “Shupe.”

“Probably you didn’t,” he said. “You probably did better than you think you did.” He had no idea if this was true or not, but what else was he going to say?

She started moving toward him on her knees then, and he backed up a couple of steps, but then she got on her hands, too, and scrambled toward him, grabbing his ankles.

“Shit, Josie,” Craig said, sort of dancing away from her, but she was holding on tight. “Cut it out. It tickles. Shit.”

He couldn’t help laughing. It really did tickle. She was laughing, too, and spidering her way up his legs to his towel, and then she was standing with her whole clothed body pressed against his whole naked one, with her tongue in his mouth and his hair in her hands, and despite his reservations (honestly, he just wanted to find Lucas and get stoned), his dick was fully into it within half a second of the kiss, and then she had her hand on that and her mouth on his neck, and she was pulling him backward onto his bed.

14

Perry saw her coming out of Starbucks with a cup in each hand, and he ducked around the corner. The last person he wanted to see right now was Josie Reilly. The last time he’d seen her was in May, the end of the semester, at a memorial tree-planting ceremony for Nicole.

An entire orchard of cherry trees paid for by Omega Theta Tau had been planted around the sorority in Nicole’s honor. A backhoe dug the holes, and then dropped the trees one by one into the soft earth. A crowd gathered to sing and pray all day, and then there was a candlelight vigil all night. There were eighteen trees, one for each of Nicole Werner’s years. Their branches were actually in bloom.

(“Do you know how expensive it is to plant an orchard of almost full-grown trees in bloom?” he’d overheard one student at Godwin Hall say to another over soggy pancakes that morning. There were a few bad jokes made about cherries, and the whole virgin rumor, with regard to the Omega Theta Tau house in general, and Nicole in particular.)

Somehow, in the crowd during the candlelight vigil, Josie had found him, snuggled up to him, and whispered dramatically, “She’s still with us, Perry. Can you feel it? She isn’t dead.”

He’d backed away.

“What’s with you?” she’d asked, offended, but he just shook his head, and she moved on to someone else. The candle some sorority girl had handed him in a waxed cup sputtered out. A few minutes later, when they started singing “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” he tossed the waxed cup into a trash can and headed back to Godwin Hall.

Josie had hardly known Nicole, but you wouldn’t have known that from all the mileage she got out of having been the dead girl’s roommate and sorority sister for six months. She’d read a putrid poem at the memorial service, been interviewed for the newspaper, worn a tight T-shirt with Nicole’s photo on it and a black armband all through April and into May, and managed to be excused not only from finals but also from having to turn in her essay for Classical Sources of Modern Culture because she was organizing the petition to expel Craig Clements-Rabbitt from the university:

“Drunk + Driver + Death = Murder.”

She went to Houston, Perry learned from the school newspaper, to speak to the annual SADD convention “in memory of my best friend, who was murdered by a drunk driver.”

To Perry, she apologized for whoever had splashed his and Craig’s door with red paint and plastered that sad senior portrait of Nicole at the center of it:

“Nobody blames you for anything, Perry,” she’d said. “We all know you just had the bad luck of being his roommate.”

“He’s not even here,” Perry said. “Why are people messing with my door?”

“It’s symbolic. You have to understand that.”

When it happened again, the university housing department arranged for Perry to finish the semester in a vacant room on the other side of the dorm.

Now, glimpsing Josie Reilly, who was clipping purposefully out of Starbucks, Perry imagined she knew that Craig was back (it had been in the paper, after all), but he had no idea if she knew that Perry was living with him again, and didn’t want to find out. He was on the way back to their apartment from the bookstore, where he’d bought the book Professor Polson had assigned for them to read that week: The Body After Death. The cover was white, the letters black, and on the back there was a quote from Professor Polson herself, saying that this book was the definitive text on folklore and the funereal sciences. Except for a four-subject notebook, it was the only thing in his backpack, which slipped around loosely between his shoulder blades as he turned the corner at State Street and Liberty as quickly as he could, ducking around a bagel place before Josie could see him and maybe try to talk to him about Nicole, or Craig.

By the time of the memorial service in April, Nicole had already been buried for two weeks. Four hundred people had crammed into Trinity Lutheran Church in Bad Axe for the funeral, and another hundred had spilled out the front doors and into the parking lot, where a late March blizzard was doing its best to bury them inch by inch. Some of the women were wearing open-toed shoes. Some of the men wore only their suit coats. A few people had put up umbrellas to keep the snow from soaking them. One of those umbrellas was decorated with smiley faces, and Perry found it hard to take his eyes off of it as he and the other three pallbearers passed it carrying Nicole’s white coffin between them.

It wasn’t so much the irony of the smiley faces as the banality. The simplicity.

And it wasn’t just the umbrella. It was everything:

The shiny coffin. The white, cheap-looking cloth that had been spread over it near the altar, and Nicole’s smiling senior portrait propped up on the lid. The coffin, of course, was closed. As the paper had reported over and over, Nicole had been identified only by the jewelry and clothes she’d been wearing because there was nothing left about her that was identifiable as her.

Not that perfect smile. Not that blond ponytail. Not those pink cheeks.

The last time Perry had seen her was two nights before the accident, when she’d passed him on the sidewalk on Campus Ave. She’d been holding on to some older guy’s arm, wobbling in her high heels back to his frat, Perry supposed, hair soaking wet and plastered to her face, although it was a completely clear night and hadn’t, in fact, rained or snowed for days. She had a red plastic cup in her hand.

Perry hadn’t recognized her at first. She could have been any drunk sorority girl. When finally he did recognize her, he was shocked by how drunk she looked. The guy who was holding her up seemed both very pleased with himself and stone-cold sober.

Perry stopped in front of the two of them and said, “Nicole. Are you okay?”

It seemed to take her several seconds to realize she’d been spoken to, and then even longer for her eyes to focus on him. Finally, she hiccupped a little and said, “Oh, hi, Perry.”

“You want me to walk you back to the dorm?” he asked. “You’re looking like you need some help.”

“Get lost, man,” her frat guy said. “We’re doing just fine here.”

Nicole leaned into the guy’s arm, tripped on the heel of her shoe, giggling, and the guy caught her, propped her up on his shoulder again. She raised up her red plastic cup to Perry. “No, I’m doing great. But thanks for being such a Boy Scout,” she said, and the frat guy snorted, and Nicole stumbled away with him.

Perry had turned and watched them go, feeling uneasy, but what could he do?

At her funeral, in the photograph on her coffin, Nicole was wearing the dress Perry remembered from the Senior Class Awards Ceremony: pale blue with ruffles down the front. As she’d accepted the Ramsey Luke Scholarship with a little curtsy, that dress had shimmered under the gym lights. In the front pew of Trinity Lutheran Church in Bad Axe, as the funeral was coming to an end with weeping and prayers and organ music and the blowing of noses, Perry was thinking about that little curtsy—how it had infuriated him—and then Pastor Heine plucked the photo off the coffin and nodded at the pallbearers to come forward, to take Nicole Werner in her coffin out to the hearse that was waiting in the parking lot.

It was amazingly heavy, that coffin, even with the four of them balancing the weight of it between them. Perry was on the right side, at her head. As they passed down the aisle of the church, he stared in a straight line into the distance, having to work especially hard not to look at Nicole’s sisters, who were tossed together in the first pew in a dark lacy heap of blond grief, or to glance in the direction of his own mother, although he could feel her red eyes on the side of his face.

Then they were stepping out of the church and into that cold rain beyond the doors, and the ushers motioned for the mourners to move off the church steps in order to clear a path to the hearse. The crowd parted for the pallbearers and the coffin, and that’s when Perry saw the umbrella with the smiley faces. Maybe the other pallbearers saw it, too. They all hesitated at the same time at the top of the stairs, preparing for the precarious journey down. Nicole’s uncle—in the front, across the coffin from Perry—seemed to be having trouble bearing the weight and weeping uncontrollably at the same time, but they took the stairs one at a time, slowly, until, on the last one, Tony Werner, Nicole’s cousin and the guy who’d once punched Perry in the stomach for refusing to give him a ball on the playground, stumbled. Some salt had been thrown on the snow, but it had only made the cement slushier, more dangerous.

Nothing ridiculous happened, thank God. The other three pallbearers compensated by leaning backward, and Tony managed to regain his footing and get right back in sync with the others within a few seconds, and they crossed the parking lot and guided the coffin into the back of the hearse without further incident. Still, in those seconds, Perry had felt Nicole’s weight shift to his shoulder before settling down between them all again—and, now, he thought of that weight often.

On the other side of Bagels and Bites, he waited until he was sure Josie would be down the block, across the street, and then he turned around and headed back in the direction of his and Craig’s apartment.

15

The night Shelly had come across the accident, she had been on her way home from the gym. It was the Ides of March. All day, a watery sun had been trying to creep out from behind the same sloppy, gray, and borderless cloud until finally, giving up, it just sank into the horizon. Of course, then it cleared, and hard little stars blinked on one by one as the sky grew darker, and a huge round moon rose over everything, tremendously bright, as if it had somehow managed to finally push the sun out of the sky.

Et tu, Brute?

It had seemed unfair that it had been such a cloudy dark day, only to be such a crystal clear night. By mid-March, Shelly was always weary of winter and its continuing, small injustices. She wanted spring.

Her arms and back ached. She’d overdone it again. Every night before she stepped foot in the gym, she told herself she wouldn’t overdo it, and then she’d start hauling the heaviest weights she could lift off the rack and over to the bench.

Why?

She wasn’t trying to impress the men, and there were almost never any women in the free weights corner of the gym.

She was, she supposed, trying to impress her own reflection in the mirror.

Often, she did.

Shelly was five feet, five inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, but when she yanked those forty-pound dumbbells off the floor, you could have counted the sinews in her biceps and triceps. You could have sketched the grainy fibers. She was a forty-eight-year-old woman made of muscle. “Whoa,” some guy would almost always say from the other side of the weight rack. “You a bodybuilder, or trying to scare somebody?”

Usually, Shelly said nothing in response, but once she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “I have a past.”

She had sounded serious. The guy who’d been joking with her looked away, but a leering teenager on her other side said, “I bet you do.”

Shelly knew she looked her age, but that she also looked good. Her stomach was flat. Her legs were lean. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her hair was long and strawberry blonde. Boys like this one—chiseled body, face full of acne—had been staring at her body her whole life, although, these days, the older men left her alone. More experienced, probably they smelled it on her.

Lesbian.

She didn’t do men.

She wished she never had. She still had a scar that ran straight from her collarbone down to her hipbone, left over from the great heterosexual mistake of her life, and the last one of those she’d ever make.

Not that she was doing very well with women, either. The last woman she’d dated for more than a few weeks had moved to Arizona with the life partner she’d never bothered to tell Shelly she had.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Rosemary had said. But Rosemary had three teenage sons and a dashing brain-surgeon husband. It was easy for her to cast people out of Shelly’s life without a backward glance. Except to go to work, Shelly herself had hardly left the house for a month after the break-up.

And now, to top off a whole lifetime of sexual misadventures, it seemed that early menopause had arrived. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself stripping off her jacket and sweater in the checkout line of the grocery store. Dripping, panting. What the hell? Had they turned the heat up to three hundred degrees? Was the place on fire? She had a sudden nauseating memory of being placed by some beautician under a steaming plastic hood in a sweltering hair salon as a child, and being told to sit still as it poured stinking air from a hundred little holes onto her hair and the chemicals burned their way into the skin on her scalp.

“Jesus,” Shelly said in the grocery store, and the woman at the cash register said in a cigarette-husky Midwestern drawl, “Yer havin’ a hot flash darlin’. Ain’t ya ever had a hot flash before?”

No. She most certainly had not. But now she had one every other day. “Oh,” her doctor had said, “this is a little early, but might as well get it over with, right?” Shelly wondered if he’d say this to her someday when she came to him with a terminal illness.

Up ahead, someone seemed to be swerving around. Shelly rubbed her left bicep with her right hand, holding the steering wheel with her left, and then changed biceps and hands.

She was solid. She was aching, but her arms were hard as rock. She was singing along with the radio. A country song about staying loyal to the U.S. of A. If you didn’t like it here, you could leave, the lyrics twanged—and Shelly’s brother’s black-and-white high school yearbook picture floated up out of the ten billion images in her unconscious.

He was smiling, getting ready to die in Vietnam.

Ahead, the red brake lights of the meandering vehicle seemed to be making elliptical dashes across the centerline, into the shoulder, back into the right lane, back over the yellow line. Kids, screwing around. Or a defensive driver avoiding something in the road. Too far ahead to worry too much about. Shelly was still singing along to the radio as she still rubbed her aching muscles. She was thinking of how tired she was of pretending to be everything she was not, and then wondering who she might be if she stopped pretending not to be what she was, when the car in front of her (fifty yards? Forty?) seemed to be plucked out of the moonlit darkness by a gigantic hand.

Gone.

16

Nicole Werner was standing outside the library shivering. She had a book pressed to her chest. She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. It was the last week in October, but it had been a weirdly hot, hazy day—the sky purple and fuzzy-looking behind the changed leaves—and although the sun had seemed far away, it had still managed to turn Craig and Perry’s dorm room into a sauna by two o’clock in the afternoon. They had a west-facing window.

Because it had seemed so much like summer, Craig, too, had left Godwin that afternoon in shorts and a T-shirt, but he’d been back to his room since then and gotten his jacket, which he was glad about, because as soon as the sun set, it felt like late autumn again. Obviously, Nicole Werner hadn’t been out of the library since the temperature had dropped.

“Hey, Nicole. What are you doing?” Craig asked when he reached her at the top of the steps. He’d already told Lucas to get lost.

(“Aw, man,” Lucas had said as Craig veered away from him, a clear diagonal cut across the Commons toward the column Nicole was leaning against. “You gonna dump me for that bitch?”)

Nicole looked up, and the light from inside the library fell on her flossy hair, which was pulled back in the usual ponytail but also looked mussed, as if she’d been rolling around in a stack of hay, or studying philosophy all night. Midterms had been over since the week before. Could she already be cramming for something else?

“I was waiting for Josie,” she said.

“Oh,” Craig said, trying not to display any particular reaction to the name Josie, but he couldn’t help taking a quick look over both shoulders to make sure she wasn’t there. “Here,” he said to Nicole. He took off his jean jacket and handed it to her. He would have preferred to step around and drape it over her shoulders (a gesture he felt certain he must have seen made by men in movies, since it wasn’t the kind of thing his father would have done for his mother), but he found himself unable to step into the circle of light in which Nicole Werner stood.

Nicole balanced her book on her hip with one hand, took the jacket from him with the other. “Thanks, Craig,” she said. “Wow!”

“I’m not cold,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. Instead of sounding chivalrous, now he sounded like he’d been looking around for a coat rack and had happened to run into her.

“Well, I’m freezing,” Nicole said, stuffing her arms into his jacket. “I was so stupid leaving the dorm like this. I guess I thought I’d be back for dinner, but then I got obsessed with this stupid paper, and ended up just eating one of those disgusting sandwiches out of the vending machine. I had no idea how cold it had gotten.”

“Yeah,” Craig said. “When’s your paper due?”

“Couple of weeks,” she said.

He couldn’t help opening his mouth and eyes in astonishment. “And you’re working on it already?”

Nicole laughed, rolled her eyes, and then widened them, mimicking him. “Yeah,” she said. “College is hard for some of us, Craig. Just because you’re one of those guys who just sails through everything with no problems…”

Craig considered correcting her, but decided not to. He shrugged.

“Perry says you just sort of open your book, and close it, and you’re done. Believe me, I wish I could get away with that.”

Craig was ready to get this part of the conversation over with. He remembered the clammy handshake Dean Fleming had given him in Chez Vin that first night, and the few phony sentences the dean had managed to stammer out about how great it was to have his old friend’s son in the Honors College, pretending it was a coincidence. Since then, on the few occasions Craig had passed Dean Fleming in the administrative hallway, the guy had gone way out of his way to pretend he didn’t know Craig any better than any of the other students, and Craig felt pretty certain he was pissed he’d had to do that favor for his old Dartmouth pal.

“Well, I should probably study more than I do.” He dragged a hand across his eyes. Was he mistaken, or was the light getting brighter the longer it lingered on Nicole Werner’s hair and face? He inhaled, and said, “So, want to walk back to Godwin?”

“Like I said, I’m waiting for Josie. Want to wait with me?”

“No,” Craig said. Too quickly. For a second there he’d forgotten about Josie. “That’s okay.”

He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell and took a step backward, but Nicole said, “What about your coat?”

She sounded alarmed, as if he were about to walk off a plane without a parachute—but maybe she always sounded alarmed. He remembered the way she’d waved Perry over in the cafeteria one night. Perry! she’d said. I forgot to tell you! I went home last weekend, and I saw Mary. She said to say hi!

Perry had just grunted. He hadn’t even looked up from his tray. Whoever Mary was had seemed like a really big deal to Nicole, but when Craig asked Perry about it, he said, “Who cares?”

“Nicole seems to care,” Craig pointed out. “She made this Mary sound like a long-lost cousin, or somebody risen from the dead.”

“Well, Nicole always sounds excited.”

It had occurred then to Craig, again, that Perry was nursing some unrequited love grudge, but he also thought he had a point. Nicole, and girls like her, did usually sound excited, or alarmed, or semihysterical, when they weren’t. It was something about the hard vowels and the crisp consonants and the way most of their sentences ended with “you guys!” And sounding like a question: “I’m, like, so hungry, you guys?!” You’d think some girl was starving to death, but she might just mean she wanted to borrow some quarters for a roll of Lifesavers.

“It’s not a problem,” Craig said, still backing away. “I’ll get it from you back at the dorm.”

“Wow!” Nicole said. “Thanks so much, Craig. You’re so nice!”

“Sure,” he said, trying to smile like a nice guy but imagining his own mug shot on a sexual predator website.

Josie had not, it seemed, told Nicole about the other night. Maybe, he hoped, she wouldn’t. But why wouldn’t she? Briefly he’d held out some hope that she’d been so drunk she didn’t even remember the incident, but that hope had been dashed when he’d passed her in the courtyard on Sunday morning, and she’d stopped dead in front of him.

“Hi,” he’d said.

“Yeah,” Josie had said. Craig had tried hard not to look her in the eyes, but they just bored straight into his own, and then he couldn’t look away. It was a bright morning, too, and his eyes started to water in the glare. He hadn’t left the dorm since Friday. He’d been pretty much either stoned or sleeping since he’d last seen her. “So, ‘hi’ is all you have to say to me?” she asked.

About a hundred bad jokes flashed through Craig’s brain, like having Eddie Murphy or Lenny Bruce shuffling a deck inside his skull, but he managed to keep his mouth firmly shut. The morning sun was making Josie’s hair look so black and shiny and smooth it scared the hell out of him. He couldn’t have spoken if he wanted to.

“You’re a great guy, Craig,” she’d said. “Really exceptional. I hope you rot in hell.”

And then she was gone so fast he didn’t know in which direction she’d left.

Shit, he thought. She definitely remembered.

He didn’t see her again for at least a week, but that was mostly because he’d been staying away from anywhere she might be—avoiding the stairwells near her hall, slipping out the side entrance to Godwin instead of going through the courtyard—and when he did see her again, luckily she didn’t see him. She and Nicole were together in the cafeteria, dressed up for some sort of Greek tea or soiree or salon or something equally feminine and mysterious and inane. (Rush Week started as soon as midterms were over, and half the girls in Godwin Honors Hall were joining sororities, appearing suddenly around the dorm every evening in pearls and skirts, while the guys who were rushing stumbled around looking disoriented and hung over.) As soon as he recognized Josie’s black hair, he’d scrambled to the back of the cafeteria as fast as he could.

The next week, he didn’t go looking for the study group on the night he knew they’d be down in the Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room, although he missed the group. He missed Nicole, and it pained him to think he’d never be in that room with her again, listening to her breathe through her nose as she read her textbook. By then, he assumed she hated him and that Josie had given her some ugly Cliffs Notes version of the events:

The way, in his bed, Josie had asked, “Are you wearing a condom?”

It was the first whole sentence she’d uttered since she’d stripped off her clothes and, standing shiningly naked in front of him, had whispered, “I want you to fuck me. I’ve wanted you to fuck me for a long time.”

“Condom? No,” he’d said, sounding more annoyed than he’d meant to. But when would he have put on a condom? Did she think he’d come out of the shower wearing one?

Her dark eyes, bleary as they were, shot open then, and Josie put her hands on his chest, shoving, and said, “Get off!”

“What?” Craig asked.

“I said get off of me!”

Craig rolled off of her, although every nerve ending and instinct he had—his brain having been turned into a kind of strobe light—was telling him to stay on top of her and to keep going.

“I’ll get pregnant,” she said. “Or a disease!”

“Huh?” Craig said. “Aren’t you on the pill or something?”

“No,” Josie said. “Why would I be? I’m not even sexually active right now.”

At this, Craig had snorted, and said, “I’d say right now you’re pretty sexually active.” He hadn’t intended to sound so sarcastic, but the whole thing was just so fucking stupid. He’d been minding his own business when she’d come into his room and taken off her clothes and pulled him down onto her in his bed.

But at that point, she was already out of his bed, pulling her little silky panties up over her wildly lush and dark-haired pussy, and then she was looking around for her top, and Craig sighed, too loudly, and flopped down on his back and said, “I’ll go see if somebody on the floor will give me a condom,” before he realized she was crying.

“I can’t believe this,” Josie said, pulling her lacy tank top down over her breasts.

Craig sat up at the edge of the bed then. Luckily, he’d completely deflated, but he pulled his towel up off the floor and put it over his dick anyway. “Can’t believe what?” he asked, but by then she was dressed, and she’d unlocked his door, slipped out of it, and slammed it behind her. For just a second, in the space she opened as she left, Craig could hear the party going on in the hallway—all the hardworking students celebrating the harvest. Somehow he pictured them in plaid shirts and gingham dresses—ruddy with good health, living their productive lives, while he searched the dresser for clean boxers, put them on, got back in his messed-up bed, and shoved the buds of his iPod as deeply into his ears as he could.

But now, as he rounded the corner, jacketless, to Godwin Honors Hall—which looked stately and decrepit at the same time under a low, bright moon—he was really hoping that maybe Josie wasn’t so mad at him anymore, or at least had never told Nicole what had happened. Truly, he never really thought he stood a chance with Nicole anyway (because, for one thing, he knew he’d never have enough courage or imagination to figure out how to get together with a girl like that: every girl he’d ever hooked up with had made the moves on him first, and it seemed unlikely that Nicole would be that kind of girl), but it had surprised him how sad he was, after the shit with Josie, to think he’d blown that chance with Nicole without ever even actually having it.

When he came up the walk to the dorm, Lucas was smoking a cigarette under an elm tree in the courtyard.

“So!” Lucas called out. “Did you strike out again, young man?”

Craig held out his hand for a cigarette, but Lucas patted his pocket and said, “I’m out,” and then, “She’s not for you anyway, Craig. She’s one of those girls who’s waiting for marriage, and then she wants two kids and an SUV, and wants to stay home and bake cookies all day while you slave away at some shitty job. On the other hand, you’ve got ‘fuck-’em-and-dump-’em’ written all over you.”

“What?” Craig asked, sincerely astonished by this assessment. “Go to hell, Lucas. I do not have ‘fuck-’em-and-dump-’em’ written all over me.”

“Yeah, you do, Craig. You look at girls like you hate ’em.”

“What? I do not.”

Lucas shrugged, and tossed his cigarette over the wrought-iron fence and onto the sidewalk.

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. Whatever. But I just don’t see you taking Little Miss Sunshine there on a walk through the park before you propose to her.”

To this, Craig said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. He watched the shadows of other students pass on the other side of the tiny glittering windows of Godwin Honors Hall. They knew what the hell they were doing there. For one thing, they hadn’t gotten into the Honors College just because their father was buddies with the dean.

“Besides,” Lucas asked, “wouldn’t you rather have a really great blow job than a really nice date? I mean, I just don’t picture that little virgin on her knees with her sweet red lips wrapped around your massive man tool.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Craig said.

But there was no animation in it.

No energy.

Lucas was probably right, he knew.

Lucas was often right.

Craig had never, he realized, been on an actual date. And the idea of one—asking for one, going on one—seemed like another one of those ten million things that all the normal guys, wearing khaki pants and carrying bouquets of daisies, would know exactly how to do, but which would be about as easy for Craig as building a spaceship and then going for a zip around the earth in it.

“Hey, sorry,” Lucas said to Craig’s silence. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Forget it,” Craig said, more to himself than to Lucas. “Let’s just go smoke a bowl.”

“Splendid idea, dude,” Lucas said. “Let us indeed go smoke a bowl.”

17

Perry Edwards was waiting outside her office when Mira got there. She wasn’t surprised. There’d been a look on his face when she dismissed the class at the end of the first session, and a hesitancy, as if he wanted to stay behind, had more to say. But Mira was already late for a committee meeting and had made a conscious effort to avoid eye contact, to gather her books and papers up in a way that would convey how rushed she was. She told herself that it was because she was rushed, but she knew there was something else, too—Perry Edwards’s intensity during class combined with what he’d said that day in the hallway when he was imploring her to let him audit:

“I have some fundamental questions about death, questions I’m trying to find answers to,” he’d said. “Because of Nicole. And not just philosophical questions. I have metaphysical questions. Physical questions.”

There was such an urgency in the way he’d said it that Mira had signed his override without asking for any further explanation.

At best, she thought, this was a true philosopher—a metaphysician in the making, one of the rare twenty-year-olds she occasionally encountered who actually had a mission, and the mind with which to accomplish it.

At worst, he was just another morbid college kid, and Mira knew all about those. Who knew better than she the fascination people had with death? Every year she took her class on a field trip to the local funeral parlor and the university hospital morgue, where she had plenty of opportunity to observe their rapt attention to the embalming table, their hushed awe upon being led through the basement to the room with the refrigerators. When there happened to be no dead bodies at the moment, someone—often the most squeamish-seeming of the girls—would express bitter disappointment. And when they were ushered into the autopsy room to find a body still on the coroner’s cabinet, there would be a rush of excited breathing, stillness, awe. Occasionally someone fainted, but no one ever left because they didn’t want to look.

Still, Perry Edwards’s interest seemed bigger than morbid fascination. During that first class he had an answer to every question. This material wasn’t new to him. He’d been doing his own research, for his own reasons. That’s what had made her think she might not want to talk to him after class—that she was not, perhaps, ready to hear about those reasons.

“See you next time,” she’d said that day at the end of class, without looking up.

“Thank you, Professor Polson,” he’d said as he stepped past her, out the door, and into the hallway.

Now he was standing outside her office door, and Mira cleared her throat so she wouldn’t startle him when she came up behind him. There was no one else in the corridor this early on a Thursday morning. He was looking at something she’d tacked up two semesters earlier, a photograph she’d taken in the Balkans during her Fulbright year: a color image of a charnel house in a small village in the mountains.

It had been, in the nineteenth century, the custom in the village to exhume corpses from the local cemetery a few months after their burial, and to display the skulls and long bones, brightly painted with the names and dates of their former owners. Mira had taken the photograph from a distance, but with a zoom lens on a sunny day, and the effect, when the photograph was printed up, startled even her: A dizzying multitude of skulls stared from their dry sockets at a little gathering of tourists, staring back.

Below the photo, Mira had taped an explanation of how the villagers believed that the dead could escape from their graves, and that the only way to avoid this was to dig up the bodies, to make sure they were in their graves, and that the flesh had fully decomposed. That way, if they came upon a corpse on which the flesh hadn’t rotted away (a potential “walker”), the villagers could go through the stake-through-the-heart ritual.

Once or twice, according to village folklore, they came upon an empty grave, and panic broke out. It was said that the village lost three quarters of its nonelderly population during one such panic. They packed up their wagons and moved, leaving behind any grandparents too enfeebled to come along. The year Mira visited the village it was little more than a field of a daisies with a stone church at the center of it, and its only attraction was the charnel house.

“Oh,” Perry said, turning. “Professor Polson. I don’t want to bother you. I just wonder if I could—”

Mira handed him the book she held in her hands, Nils Stora’s Burial Customs of the Skolt Lapps, as she felt around in the darkness of her leather bag for her keys, coming up, first, with the purple nipple of one of the boys’ bottles:

Despite everything she’d read or been told about what she should do, Mira still let the twins carry their bottles around with them when she took them to the store, or to the park. Sometimes the nipples were dislodged, or dirtied, or they wound up on the floor of the car. Who knew how long ago she might have stuffed this one into her bag? Perry Edwards looked at it, and then looked away, as if Mira had shown him something intimate—which, she supposed, it was.

She reached in again, and this time snagged the key ring, which was attached to a rubber heart that Clark had given to her years ago. (“Squeeze me,” it read, and when you did, a little mechanical voice said, “I WUV you.”) She unlocked the door and ushered Perry in, and he sat in the chair across from her desk, looked around, and then handed Mira’s book back to her.

“Are you…? Is this… time? An okay…?” he stammered politely.

“It’s fine,” Mira said. She cleared the books she had piled on her own chair, stacking them on the floor at her feet, and then sat down at her desk, folded her hands in her lap, and said, “How can I help you?”

“I’ve been reading,” Perry said, unzipping his backpack on the floor and leaning over it. He took out a book with the Roper Library’s generic brown cover, and held it up as if it would explain something on its own.

She took the book from him. It was G. Melvin’s Handbook of Unusual Phenomena—book twenty-four on the suggested reading list. It was a text Mira had put on loan in the Godwin Hall dormitory library several years before, but that, to her knowledge, no one had ever checked out. She kept it there for students who might want to explore Ukrainian death and burial superstition further—in particular an account (late for such an account) of a teenage girl killed in a farm accident circa 1952 in a primitive village in the foothills. The girl was said to have managed an escape from her tomb, and the proof of this was that, although she was not seen in the flesh, whenever a photograph was taken in the village in the year following her death, the girl’s shadowy image could be seen in the upper left- or right-hand corner.

In the Handbook were several grainy photos of stiff and formally dressed peasants staring expressionlessly into the camera. In the corner of each photograph a dark-haired girl, blurred, seemed to be moving as quickly as possible out of the photographer’s range. And as if that weren’t enough, the girl had appeared to every man in the village, in the night, unclothed, demanding sex. Apparently, the men obliged her, however reluctantly, and during the act she bit them—a few on the neck, a few on the arm, and one, mercilessly, on the nipple, which she bit clean off his torso before disappearing. Each man died in a farming accident within a few weeks of the event.

But what Mira wanted the students to read was the part that followed this:

How the body was dug up, and how the body was found in her coffin, a year after the girl’s death, good as new. Her flesh was pink. Her hair had grown luxuriously around her shoulders. Her mouth was red, filled with blood. Her teeth had grown, and they glistened. Only her clothes had rotted away, revealing, of course, her beautifully gleaming breasts.

The village then managed to engage, at great expense, a cement truck to back up to the grave and fill it in, and the girl, whose name was Etta, never walked through the village again, and the farm accidents mysteriously drew to a halt—a fact the villagers attributed to the cementing-in of this tomb, not to the fact that their agricultural lifestyle was, within a few years, completely eradicated when a cardboard box factory moved into the village.

Melvin, the author, had been an ancient professor at Mira’s undergraduate institution and had given her the only B she’d ever received in college, but she still thought his was a brilliant analysis of the superstitions of the period and the move from an agrarian to an urban culture that fueled them. This story of Etta, he said in the Handbook, was the last real “vampire” story the world would ever know. In only another year or two, all the young adults who might have died tilling the land or harvesting the grain were working in that box factory or in shops in some Soviet metropolis, and the funerary traditions were forever changed. Instead of simple burials in wooden coffins in the churchyard, the whole commercial funeral business moved in, complete with embalming and sealed tombs and caskets that cost more than most families in the area made in a year.

“It’s a good book,” Mira said to Perry, handing it back to him. “I’m glad you thought to check it out.”

“I’ve read all the articles,” he said, “that you assigned, and—”

“Those aren’t assignments,” Mira said. “That’s the suggested list. That’s for supplemental research.”

“I know,” Perry said. “But…” He shook his head, and then he held up one of the photos of “Etta.” He’d had the page bookmarked. Mira looked at it and nodded.

It was possible, she realized, that this student was mentally ill. It was far from unusual. There were always mentally ill students, especially in the Honors College. Intelligence and ambition went hand in hand, it seemed, with some kinds of delusion. These days, too, Mira found that students who were perhaps only minimally depressed (and how many smart twenty-year-olds weren’t depressed?) had been medicated by their family doctors into a state of either apathetic insensibility or manic excitement. These kids carried their bottles of Klonopin and Xanax from class to class, and swigged their pills down by the handfuls with their energy drinks. Who knew what this particular kid might be taking, especially if he had, as he claimed, been close friends with Nicole Werner?

Mira nodded at the book, leaned forward, and considered the photo. The small gray girl in the corner was dashing out of out it while a grim-looking family stared solemnly into the camera, oblivious. Although it was 1952, this photograph was black and white, and there was an aura of antiquated severity about it that made it seem more like an image from the late 1800s. But Mira had been to villages near this one, and even in the mid-nineties, in broad daylight, in the spring, in real life, there was always something black and white about the places and the people, as if their joyless lives had drained the color out of the world around them.

She looked from the photograph to her student. His brow was furrowed. “Yes?” she said.

“I read the whole essay,” he said, “and the author’s analysis. And I understand what he’s saying about the cultural context, and the societal changes, and the folklore, but—” He stopped, seeming to search for words. He closed the book.

“But what?” Mira asked.

He reached into his backpack again, and unfolded a copy of the student newspaper on his lap. It was the front-page article that had run about Nicole Werner a few days after the accident. On one side of the page there was the now-familiar senior portrait of Nicole with a warm halo of studio light pouring over her blond hair, and beside it a photograph of the memorial orchard-planting that took place at her sorority. In that photograph, a group of slender sorority sisters in black dresses and sunglasses held one another’s hands, heads bowed, around one of the blooming cherry trees that had been planted. Perry Edwards pointed to this photograph, his finger on the tree—which looked, even in miniature and in black and white, like the lush icon of lost innocence it was meant to be. He slid his finger over the blossoms and then into the right-hand corner of the photo.

“Look,” he said.

Mira did.

There was nothing there.

She moved her eyes slowly from the newspaper back to Perry Edwards’s face, and shook her head.

“There’s a girl there,” he said.

Mira looked again, more closely—although by now she suspected where this was going, and that her hunch about mental illness had been right. She searched the grainy distance until, finally, just over the boy’s clean fingernail, she did see what looked like a gray figure of a girl moving out of the photograph.

She looked back at Perry, and shrugged. She said, “Okay. Maybe. Yes?”

Perry let the newspaper drop onto his lap, and then leaned over his backpack again and took a manila envelope out of it.

“I scanned the photo,” he said. “And then I enlarged it.” He reached into the envelope, took it out—glossy, gray, eight by twelve—and handed the photo to Mira. Now only the right-hand corner of the whole image remained—a few petals on a bough at the bottom, like a cloudy carpet, and, in the left-hand corner, the shining bumper of someone’s car parked in the sorority driveway—and, in the center of it all, the blurred girl.

She was wearing something filmy, either a mid-thigh-length dress or a shift over a miniskirt or shorts. Her arms were bare, and she was obviously in a hurry to get somewhere—one leg was bent behind her, like she was running. Her arms were swinging widely at her sides, or pumping. There was a flash of silver or gold around her wrist—a bracelet—and the side of her face had caught the sunlight, and the light obscured her features. Her blond hair was flowing behind her from her shoulders, lifted by a breeze or by her own momentum.

Certainly, from this distance, the girl looked like Nicole Werner, but so did half the other girls standing in the first photograph, in their black dresses, with their straight hair, holding one another’s hands.

So did half the girls on this campus, especially the sorority girls.

“Yes,” Mira said again, nodding, and handed it back to him.

She continued to nod as she tried to think carefully about what to say next. She’d made mistakes with students in the past, given them too much encouragement. She swallowed, and inhaled, and then said, “You’ve been through a terrible trauma. I understand that. I think, for that reason, this is not a class you should be taking right now. The material is too relevant, perhaps, at the moment, and it might be”—she used her hands to try to soften the word before it came out of her mouth, opening the hands on her lap—“suggesting things to you.”

Perry Edwards nodded, but he didn’t look away. He seemed to have expected her to say this, and was neither disappointed nor insulted.

He inhaled, bit his lower lip for a second, and then he said, “I understand what you’re saying. But I’ve had this photograph since May. And there are other things.” He looked up to the ceiling, as if searching for the words, and then back at Mira. “Professor Polson, Nicole’s here. She’s still on this campus. I was here all summer. I’ve seen her.”

Mira sat back in her chair, a kind of recoiling she immediately regretted. The tone of his voice. It was so certain.

Perry Edwards reached into his backpack again, took out another envelope, and out of it, a second photograph—this one of a slender girl with shoulder-length brown hair emerging from one of the sorority houses on the Row. She was glaring at the camera. She looked ready to sneer an obscenity at the photographer, or raise her middle finger. He held the newspaper—the senior portrait of the blond Nicole Werner—up next to the photograph.

Mira looked from one to the other, and said, “I do see the resemblance, Perry, but, surely, you—”

“I know,” he said. “I know these girls all look alike to people who don’t know them. But, Professor Polson, I went all through school with Nicole Werner. We grew up in the same town. We went to Sunday school together. We were confirmed at the same church. I know what she looks like. I see her. She’s here. She’s dyed her hair, but it’s her. I don’t know how. And I didn’t expect anyone to tell me anything except that I’m crazy if I told them, so I haven’t told anyone. But, I thought—well, I read your book, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins.” He pronounced the words carefully, as if Mira might not recognize the title of her own book. “And,” he said, “I thought maybe, if you’re working on a new book, a book like it, what could be better than if you had a campus equivalent of this?” he held up Melvin’s book again, open to the photograph of Etta. “I mean, even if you just think we’re crazy—”

“We?” Mira asked.

“That’s the thing,” Perry said. “There are two other guys who’ve seen her. Lucas Schiff. He’s a fifth-year senior. He was our resident advisor last year—”

“I know Lucas,” Mira said. Lucas Schiff. He’d been in her first-year seminar her first year on campus. He’d been busted for possession of a controlled substance then, but had gotten off on some technicality. He was one of those politically active kids who used their political activism as an excuse not to bathe, and to smoke a lot of dope.

“And also Patrick Wright.”

“I know Patrick, too,” Mira said. Patrick was clean-cut, from a small town in the northern part of the state. Nothing like Lucas Schiff. “He’s a junior?”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “He and Lucas—they’ve both been with her since she died.”

“Excuse me?” Mira asked.

“They’ve had sex with her.”

Mira put her hand over her mouth. She wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or cry. Perry seemed not to notice the gesture. He went on.

“What my point is, Professor Polson. I mean, couldn’t you, maybe, write, say, something comparing Etta to—”

“Nicole Werner?”

“Yeah. I mean, if you’re working on another book. You wouldn’t have to believe us. Melvin doesn’t believe what the villagers are saying about Etta. He just listens. He analyzes.”

Mira looked at Perry Edwards carefully. For a crazy second she wondered if he’d spoken to the dean of the Honors College about her, if he somehow knew she hadn’t even begun the book she was going to have to have published in the next eighteen months. That she hadn’t even come up with a solid idea for the book.

No, of course not. He was just a bright, passionate, or maybe crazy kid. She inhaled. She said, “Why, Perry? Why do you want me to do that? What’s the point?”

“I need your help. There’s something here. I need”—something seemed to catch in his throat, and he swallowed—“a grown-up.”

“Perry,” Mira said, and then stopped, literally biting her tongue.

Although, later, she would try to tell herself that it was this last appeal to her as a “grown-up” that had brought the two of them together in their search for Nicole, Mira could already see, in her office that September afternoon, the book, published by a major university press, in her hands, the bright, smiling senior portrait of Nicole Werner on the cover, her own name underneath that photo, and the letter to the dean from the department chair, and the recommendation it expressed for her tenure.

What, at this point, did she have to lose? Did she have any better ideas?

“Professor Polson?” Perry Edwards asked after Mira was silent for a very long time.

She held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else, and then she put the hand over her eyes and forced herself to count to five before she looked at this boy again, and said, “Okay.”