26
“Lucas!”
Perry recognized the ponytail and the long lopsided gait from a block away, and he jogged up behind Lucas on the sidewalk, and then next to him. “Hey.”
Lucas jumped and spun around. He had apparently not heard Perry calling his name until he was right next to him. “Jesus Christ, Perry,” he said. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry. I thought you heard me.”
“I didn’t,” Lucas said. He was panting. His face, in the bright autumn sunlight, looked strangely haggard, much paler than it had even the week before, when Perry had last seen him. He looked like he’d been stoned for days, and maybe like he hadn’t slept more than a few hours the night before, and maybe like he was losing weight, rapidly.
“I wanted to tell you something,” Perry said.
Lucas stopped. He turned to Perry, although he was glancing to his left and right at the same time, as if looking for someone, or wondering who might be nearby to overhear them. But there was no one on their side of the street. All the students were flooding in the direction of Main Campus, hurrying to make their morning classes on time.
Lucas was carrying a bag. It looked like maybe he’d just come out to go to the store and buy a six-pack, and was headed back to his apartment.
“Is it about her?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” Perry said. “It’s about my professor. Professor Polson. I’m taking her seminar.”
“The Death one?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that was for freshmen.”
“Yeah, well, she let me in.”
“Why?” Lucas asked. He looked expressionless and suspicious at the same time.
“Because I asked her to make an exception. I wanted—”
“Because of her?”
“Partly,” Perry said. Lucas had made it sound like some kind of accusation, and Perry felt defensive. “Also, Professor Polson is working on a book about—”
“Why are you talking to me about this?” Lucas asked, suddenly animated, waving his free hand as if to shoo Perry away. “I don’t want to hear about this.”
“Because she wants to talk to you, Lucas. Professor Polson wants to ask you some questions. About Nicole. I told her what you told me. And about Patrick, too. And what I’ve seen. She’ll believe you. She needs to interview you, though.”
“You talked to a professor about this? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Lucas, it’s important. She can help.”
“Help? What’s she going to do to help?”
Perry opened his mouth to answer, but could think of nothing to say.
It was raining when Perry and Professor Polson had met, after class, at Espresso Royale. They sat at a table near the back, far from the windows that faced the street, but Perry could hear rain on the roof—hard, fast rain, like a lot of small feet running furiously overhead—and Professor Polson’s dark hair was curled in damp ringlets that clung to her neck and the sides of her face. She looked cold, wearing only a silk dress and a cardigan, and she’d gotten soaked, it seemed, on her walk over from Godwin Honors Hall. Perry had gone ahead when she’d told him she had to stop by the library and drop off a book before meeting him. Now, looking across the table at her, he felt bad. He’d had an umbrella. If he’d known she didn’t, he would have given her his own, or walked with her to the library and then to the café. She wrapped her hands around the white paper cup and brought it to her mouth to breathe in the steam before she sipped from it. It was the kind of thing Perry had seen women do in movies—drink a cup of coffee like this, with both hands, sipping and peering up over the rims of their cups at the same time, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone do it in real life. Professor Polson’s hands were very white and thin, with a few pale blue veins crisscrossing them.
“I’d like to interview Lucas,” she said. “Have you told him that you shared his information with me?”
“No,” Perry said. “But he never told me I couldn’t tell anyone. I’ll find him. I’ll bring him to your office. I think he’d be willing.”
“Maybe not the office,” Professor Polson said. “I’d like to record it. I don’t want him to be inhibited by the office. Let’s meet off campus. Perhaps you could bring him to my apartment.”
“Sure,” Perry said.
“After that, we’ll see. Maybe Patrick Wright, too. What do you think?”
Patrick had been, it seemed, avoiding Perry since the night he’d spoken about Nicole. He’d been drinking when he called Perry. They barely knew each other—Patrick had been a sophomore on Perry’s and Craig’s hall at Godwin the year before—but he knew that Perry had gone to high school with Nicole, and he knew that Perry’s roommate had been the one who’d had the accident that had killed her. (“I just wondered,” Patrick had slurred, “you know. Have you seen her? Am I losing my mind, Perry? Whass happening here?”) Perry’d had no idea what to say to Patrick, so he had stammered something about sobering up and calling back in the morning, but Patrick never called, and Perry didn’t run into him. He’d heard the details from Lucas.
“But, let’s see how it goes with Lucas first. And, Perry?” She put the cup down on the table between them and tucked her hands somewhere inside her sweater. “Have you told anyone else—for instance, anyone else on the faculty—about any of this?”
Perry had no idea why he was unable to hold her gaze. He hadn’t told anyone, and he had no reason to lie to Professor Polson, but he glanced down at her cup instead of at her. There was something about her eyes. She had crow’s feet—something he knew women worried about, because his mother had about a hundred different potions to combat those and was always complaining that they didn’t do a thing—but around Professor Polson’s eyes, they were crinkly and intriguing. They made her look both sexy and wise.
“Perry?” she asked again.
“No,” he said. “No, ma’am. I haven’t said anything to anyone. Not even Craig. Not even my parents. You’re the only one I’ve talked to about any of this.”
Professor Polson removed a hand from the place she’d had it tucked between her sweater and her dress, and raised it over her cup, and said, “I’m not asking you not to. I’m just curious what the rumors might be, if any.”
“I understand,” Perry said, nodding.
“And I don’t want to mislead you, Perry. My angle on this might not be exactly what you’re hoping for. I believe what you’re telling me, that you believe it, and that what you’re hearing from others, like Lucas—I believe you’re each telling the truth as you see it. But I also know that death is a deep, potent, incomprehensible force on the psyche—especially for the young. In other words, I’m not necessarily on a hunt with you for Nicole Werner, Perry.”
“I understand that,” Perry said.
“But I also believe you. I believe in your sincerity, and also in your intelligence,” she said. “I have no reason not to. Based on what I’ve seen so far, you’re an impressive person, Perry. I’m proud to take on this project with you.”
“Why would she believe me?” Lucas asked. He lifted one shoulder, let it fall again, and it seemed to Perry that his shirt shifted oddly on his back, as if he might be even thinner under his clothes than he appeared to be.
“She believes me,” Perry said. “She’s open-minded. I mean, I don’t think you have anything to lose, Lucas. She’s not going to have us both committed, or—”
Lucas shrugged again, and said, shaking his head and starting to walk away, as if the conversation were over, “I’ve definitely got nothing to lose.”
27
“Who is that guy?” Craig asked. Nicole was wrapping and wrapping a long red scarf around her face. Only her eyes were showing by the time she was done.
Hard little bits of snow flew at their faces as they walked across campus. Craig held onto her hand, but between his insulated ski glove and her fat wool mitten, he might as well have been holding anything—the university mascot’s paw,
a tree branch swathed in bandages. She said something into the scarf, but he couldn’t hear it.
“What?”
Nicole shook her head. She looked over at him. There were little heartbreaking flecks of snow on her black eyelashes. He couldn’t see her mouth, but he could tell by her eyes that she was smiling, and he decided to drop the subject.
But, a few days later, Craig saw the guy again: thick-shouldered, blond buzz-cut, slushing in black boots through the snow across the yard of the Omega Theta Tau house only seconds before Nicole appeared on the front porch, wrapping the scarf around and around her face again, raising a mittened hand to Craig.
“That was him again,” Craig said.
“Who?”
“That guy, Nicole. Don’t play dumb. He had to have just left the house. Again. That’s the third time this week I’ve seen that guy coming or going from the house. He leaves just before you do. Those are his footprints.” Craig pointed to the melting impressions on the lawn.
Nicole squinted at the footprints, and then looked in the direction of the blue-jacketed man on the other side of the street. She shrugged her shoulders, shook her head, looked up at Craig, and raised her eyebrows as if the mystery intrigued her as much as it did him.
“That’s not a frat guy,” Craig said. “That’s not some sorority sister’s boyfriend. That’s a man.”
“Well,” Nicole said. “Some of the sisters date men, you know. We’re not all strictly into boys.”
“You know what I mean,” Craig said. He took her trigonometry text out of her hands and tucked it under his arm. He’d lost his gloves by then, maybe left them in the cafeteria, and the tips of his fingers were completely numb, but he knew enough from watching sitcoms that you didn’t let your girlfriend haul a book this heavy around without helping.
“What I mean is,” he went on, “that guy doesn’t look like he belongs around here.”
Nicole slipped her hand through his free arm and leaned against him. Even through the layers of nylon and down feathers between them he thought he could feel the little thrill of her heart beating against his side. It was a Thursday afternoon, the time of the week they usually headed straight to Starbucks to linger, holding hands, with their cappuccinos and their unopened textbooks between them. He’d looked forward to it since going to bed the night before. But when they got to the corner of State and Campus Boulevard, Nicole stopped and said, “Craig, I can’t do Starbucks this afternoon. I told Josie I’d meet her back at our room. We have to start making tissue roses for the formal. We—”
“You have to start today?” (Whining. He wished he weren’t, but he was whining.) “I thought the formal was in, like, three weeks.”
“No, it’s in four weeks, but you have no idea how many of these things we have to make. And Josie and I are it. We’re the only ones assigned to the roses, and there have to be at least five thousand.”
“What?” Craig literally stopped in his tracks at the absurdity of this. “Five thousand tissue roses?”
Nicole laughed and nodded. They’d gotten to the edge of campus, and the arm Craig was using to carry her textbook was cramped. He shifted the book to the other, and then stepped around Nicole, put his stiff arm around her shoulders, exposing his bare hand to the cold again—but who cared, since it was already completely numb?
“Five thousand?”
“Yeah!” Nicole said, seeming to share his astonishment. “And it takes us like an hour to make a hundred. So far, we’ve only got, like, a hundred and ten.”
“What the hell is this?” Craig asked. “Some kind of indentured servitude? I mean, it’s not like they’re paying you to be in this sorority. Don’t they think you have a life?”
He was sincerely outraged, but Nicole laughed pleasantly, and Craig heard the sound of it echo off the brick wall of the Engineering Building a few feet ahead of them, like a lot of little bells.
“Craig, they think Omega Theta Tau should be my life!”
“Well, is that what you want, Nicole? I mean, do you want to be locked in a room making paper roses with Josie for the next four years?”
“Well, it’s always the new pledges who make the roses, actually, so next year—”
“Okay, not roses. Next year you’ll be baking crumpets or something. It’ll always be something.”
“Sorry, Craig.” He looked at the side of her face. The scarf was down around her chin now, and she was doing that pouty thing with her lips. At the bridge of her nose was the faintest bump—an adorable little glitch there that made it possible, Craig thought, to tell her apart from the two or three other completely perfect girls in the world. He was about to apologize for getting all worked up, but she brightened suddenly and turned to him. “You could help!” she said. “Josie would be fine with that. She suggested it anyway—getting some guys to come and work on it, if, like, we got some beer to pay them with or something. You could bring, like, Lucas.”
Craig felt the familiar sensation of sweat breaking out in a fine film under his arms, which happened each time Nicole brought up the subject of Josie, of his doing anything that might involve Josie—Josie joining them for a pizza, for instance. Or even when Nicole just said something like “Josie says to say hi.” Or the one time he almost lost his dinner as he and Nicole were stepping out of the cafeteria and there was Josie with her arm hooked through Lucas’s, both of them clearly stoned out of their minds:
“Hey, big boy,” Josie had said, waving at Craig with all her fingers up near her mouth.
“Josie,” Nicole had blurted out, laughing. “You’re totally stoned!”
“Yup,” Josie said. “Be careful, or I’ll jump your boyfriend’s bones.”
Nicole had playfully slapped Josie’s arm, while Craig started walking away as fast as he could. Nicole followed him, still laughing, and Josie called something else in their direction, but it was slurred, and Craig couldn’t hear it over his pounding heart, and after they’d rounded the corner, Nicole had stopped him, turned him to face her, and looked at him carefully.
Outside, the sun was setting behind the glittering lead-paned windows that looked out onto the Godwin Hall courtyard, and her eyes in that light seemed nearly fluorescent in their blueness—like the ocean in Belize, like the sky from the top of Mount Washington. “What’s with you, Craig?” she asked, suddenly terrifyingly serious. “And Josie?”
For a second, Craig couldn’t breathe, but he worked hard to hold her eyes as if he had nothing to hide. All these weeks he’d held on to some glimmer of hope (false, he could see now) that maybe Josie had told Nicole all about it, and Nicole didn’t care—or, at least, that she understood. He’d never had any evidence of that, he realized, and he had no reason whatsoever to believe that if and when Nicole heard about what had happened between him and Josie she wouldn’t dump him in a heartbeat. Especially now that they’d been seeing each other for two months and he hadn’t said a word.
“Nothing,” Craig said. It sounded ridiculous. His voice actually squeaked when he said it.
“Then why does she hate you?”
“What?” Craig tried to make his expression look like one of surprise.
“Why does Josie hate you?”
He tried to open his eyes even wider. “She hates me?”
Nicole burst out laughing. “Uh, yeah. You haven’t noticed?”
Craig shrugged.
“Well, you avoid her like the plague, so you know something. You quit coming to the study group even though you seemed so into it for a while. You never even walk by our room if she might be in there. Practically every time I even say her name you change the subject as quick as you can.”
His mind was blank. His mouth was open. Over the weeks, Craig had tried to think of a few things he might possibly be able say if this subject came up. Excuses. Lies. Or at least some kind of spin-doctoring. He’d tried to come up with some way to make it sound like Josie had been so drunk and insistent that night that Craig felt he had to do something or it would have hurt her
feelings, which was pretty much true, except that he’d been completely happy to fuck her; it had nothing to do with being polite. But maybe if he could find the right words? Nicole, Craig knew, was pretty naive when it came to people and their secret sex lives. She was always astonished to find out that some unmarried celebrity was pregnant, or that Craig had seen some girl from her hall slip out of the room of some boy on his hall in the morning. (“They were probably studying,” she’d say in total seriousness, and then punch him hard in the bicep when he laughed.) It was possible, wasn’t it, that she’d believe whatever he said?
But here, now, actually confronted this way in the hallway near the cafeteria with Nicole’s beautiful eyes lit up in the sunset—all that pink and mauve pouring through the window panes, and her little half-smile, her head cocked like a chickadee, waiting—not only his mind but his soul went completely blank. She waited another long second or two, and then she shook her head. “O-kay,” she said. “Uh, just forget I asked.”
He tried as hard as he could to read her face as it was closing down before him. Did she know? Did she know and not care? Did she not know, and if she did know, would she slap him as hard as she could and never speak to him again?
He had no idea, he realized, and remembered fifth grade. Map reading. He couldn’t do it. He tried to fake it (“Mongolia?”), which resulted in gales of laughter. This was what it would be like in Limbo, he realized. It could go either way—everything that mattered.
“Nicole, I—” he blurted with no idea what he was going to say. Luckily, she held up a hand to stop him.
“You’re probably right,” she said. “I probably don’t want to know. Or, actually, I think I probably do know.”
Craig took a step back. He was afraid to look at anything but the place directly between Nicole’s eyes. He was wearing an army green T-shirt, and he was sure there must be spreading triangles of sweat at his pits. Nicole wrapped her arms around herself, holding on to her own arms hard. Her knuckles went white.