Spontaneously, Perry choked out a wild little laugh, and then he could feel himself blushing, a rising burn from his chest to his scalp. Karess shrugged and made a wistful little smirk, as if she’d caught him at something and felt a little bad about it. She crossed her arms, waiting, it seemed, for him to speak, but Perry couldn’t even take a breath. Finally, she cleared her throat, and said, “Well, that was awkward.”
Tucking a dark ringlet behind her ear, Karess licked her lips and went on, “Well, I’m not saying anyone cares. You’re a big boy, and she’s obviously got some domestic issues, but between that and all this shit in the dorm about Nicole Werner and Alice Meyers and that girl who ran away”—she emphasized every few words with both her intonation and a rolling motion of her hands, as if to churn the air around each new item on the list—“and all the Internet photos of Nicole Werner’s roommate having metro-sex with the music prof, and then this weird-as-fuck class, going to the morgue next time, and Professor Polson having, like, a nervous breakdown in front of us today. I for one am starting to wonder what the hell kind of college this is. I mean, I got into Columbia. I came here because I thought it would be calmer.”
“Josie?” Perry managed to ask after moving backward through her monologue, searching it for meaning.
“What?” Karess asked.
“Nicole’s roommate. Josie?”
“I guess so. That sorority chick. It’s been all over the Internet. I got it forwarded to me from like four hundred different people. I don’t think her name is there, just all these disgusting pictures, but people have been saying she was Nicole Werner’s roommate.”
“That’s Josie,” Perry said.
“Well, whatever,” Karess said. “So, like, my parents hear about this, and they want to know what the hell is going on down here? I was in a parochial school before this. I mean, we might be from Hollywood, but we’re Catholic.”
“Who’s Alice Meyers?” The name was familiar to Perry, but he couldn’t attach a face to it.
“Oh, God, you don’t know? Everybody knows. She’s the ghost of Godwin Hall.” Karess opened her eyes wide and made a fluttering gesture in the air with her hand, which Perry supposed was meant to indicate ironic spookiness.
“What are you talking about?” Perry asked.
Karess tossed her book bag onto the floor against the wall, as if she intended to stand there in the basement of Godwin Hall talking to Perry for a very long time. She jerked her thumb behind her.
“The study room,” she said. “You know. Alice Meyers? She disappeared in, like, the sixties or something? No one’ll go near that study room because they say she’s still in there.”
The Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room. Of course.
“We used to study in there,” Perry said. “Last year.”
“Well, whatever,” Karess said, batting her eyes and raising her eyebrows at the same time, as if to say, “That figures.” “Most people don’t. I guess they’d finally gotten a grip on the whole ghost rumor thing in the last few years, before Nicole Werner. So, maybe you missed it last year, and didn’t know. You’re not living in the dorm this year, are you?”
“No.”
“Well, Alice Meyers is showing up all over the place—but mostly, you know, it’s this group of girls. These cutters. They have this club. They’ve done all this research on Alice Meyers, and they go down there to the study room, supposedly, and do voodoo and Ouija board and shit. I mean, I don’t know. I just know there’s a girl across from me in the hall walking around with all these razor scratches on her arms, and somebody told me she was part of this club. It’s sick.”
Karess made a face that portrayed genuine horror, but Perry wasn’t too surprised by any of this. Even in Bad Axe there’d been some Goth girls who were into Wicca and cutting. There were always rumors that they’d go to the cemetery and lie naked on the graves of dead teenage girls. Perry had never taken as much interest in those rumors as some of his classmates had, but now he thought of Professor Polson, and her book. This would be exactly the kind of thing she’d want to hear about. Something else he needed to talk to her about. Perry nodded, hoping it might conclude the conversation, and turned back toward the stairwell, but Karess reached out and grabbed his arm. She said, “Hey, I’m not done talking to you.”
It was so preposterously demanding that Perry actually guffawed, and Karess, who at least seemed to understand, again, how ridiculous she was being, stammered, “I’m sorry. I just—you know, I’m curious about you. I’ll buy you some coffee, or breakfast, or whatever. I just want to talk. Do you have an appointment or something? I mean—”
She nodded to the stairwell, and was clearly indicating Professor Polson’s office.
”I mean, Professor Polson didn’t seem like she was in much shape to talk about whatever it is the two of you are always in there talking about. Why don’t you come talk to me instead?”
She lowered her eyes then, still looking up at him, and batted her heavy eyelids in a parody of flirtation. Perry opened his mouth at the outrageousness of it, and tried to speak, but he couldn’t manage even to shake his head. Karess waited, and when it became clear that no response from Perry would be forthcoming, she pretended to pout, and then she said, “I’ll let you carry my ten-thousand-pound book bag,” gesturing toward it on the floor.
47
The girl with the sprained ankle was standing near the mailboxes when Craig hurried down to check the box. He’d been watching from the front window for the mailman to leave ever since he’d heard his boots stomp across the front porch.
The girl, whom he and Perry now called the Cookie Girl, apparently hadn’t heard Craig come down the stairs—he was in his socks—and she jumped, stifling a little yelp, and whirled around as fast as a person can on crutches.
“Jesus,” she said, “you scared me.”
“I’m sorry,” Craig said. He tried to smile politely, but he was hoping she’d hurry up and get out of his way so he could get the mail, and she wasn’t budging, just sort of sagging there with her armpits pressed hard into the crutches’ rubber rests, letting her left foot dangle loosely over the floor.
“You never leave the apartment,” she said, not to him, exactly, but to a spot over his shoulder, “except to get your mail.”
Craig shook his head, feeling the smile freeze on his face. “Sure I do,” he said. “I go to classes.”
“Do you?” she asked. “I mean, I guess you must, but not much.”
Craig shrugged, his discomfort growing as she continued to regard him. She hadn’t even gotten her own mail out of the box yet. It would be a long time before he could get to his unless he pushed her out of the way, which he obviously couldn’t do.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
At this, Craig consciously tried to turn the smile into a straight line. He never had been that clear on what the expression on his face revealed about him, and had been accused by his mother a million times of smirking or grimacing, accused by girlfriends of rolling his eyes. Once, in middle school, one of his teachers (Ms. Follain, Language Arts) had actually stopped in the middle of a little lecture she was giving on phonemes and asked Craig what was so funny.
Craig had looked up at Ms. Follain, completely taken by surprise. Nothing had been funny. And he wasn’t even stoned. He hadn’t even been thinking about anything funny.
“What are you laughing about?” Ms. Follain asked.
“I’m not laughing,” Craig said—but then, of course, he couldn’t help starting to laugh. The irony—and the absurdity of it: that he hadn’t been laughing when she accused him of laughing, and now he was going to start laughing his ass off. He’d put his face in the crook of his elbow, but was helpless to stop, and the rest of the class started in then, snickering at first, followed by outright hysterical laughter, until finally Ms. Follain, hollow cheeks blazing, tossed him out of class and into the hallway, where he managed to get hold of himself only after about twenty minutes of gasping. Luckily, the bell had rung be
fore he had to either go in and get a hall pass from Ms. Follain or go down to the office. When his friend Teddy got out of class, he’d said, “Jesus, man. What the hell was so funny? We could all hear you still laughing in the hallway. I thought Follain was going to shit her pants.”
“Nothing,” Craig said. “I was laughing because I wasn’t laughing.”
Of course, that started him laughing again.
“You are so fucked up,” Teddy had said.
The Cookie Girl seemed disinclined to say more, but she was looking at him as if maybe the expression on his face was very strange, or a little threatening, and when Craig tried even harder to straighten it out, she opened her eyes in alarm, and then she looked away, hopped around with her back to him, and managed, after a lot of struggle with her keys, finally to open her mailbox and take out a flyer for the Hungry Hippo (“Buy One Hungry Hippo Sub and Get One 1/2 Off!”). When she was able to turn back around, Craig was already trying to inch around her to get to his and Perry’s mailbox, and she froze in front of him and blurted out, “I know who you are, and I just want you to know that I don’t believe you killed that girl.”
Hand poised with the key at the mailbox, Craig felt what could only have been his blood running cold. Literally, there was the sensation inside him that some faucet connected to a frozen river had been turned on, and icy stuff had been let to flow. He did not move.
“What happened to you—something like that happened to me,” she said under her breath. She wasn’t looking at him, but he could feel her presence burning into him nonetheless. “Ran a stop sign,” she muttered. “Didn’t even see it. I killed a guy on a bike. I was sixteen. Got my driver’s license the week before. His sister still sends me hate mail. I think about it every, fucking, minute, of every, fucking, day.”
Her voice was a deep, wild, awful sob with the last sentence—and although she was on crutches and it had to have taken her at least five minutes to make it up the stairs, Craig had the sense that she had been blown away in gust of wind, taken off in a cloud of dust, far too quickly for him to say anything in response or to reach out to touch her shoulder. And by the time he’d turned around with his mail trembling in his hands, he was beginning to wonder if the Cookie Girl had been there at all—had he hallucinated her?—and also to hope that if she actually existed she hadn’t paused at the top of the stairs, turned, and seen how he’d dropped to his knees after he’d flipped through his mail. The Hungry Hippo flyer, a piece of first-class mail for Perry, and a postcard from some tourist spot:
The Frankenmuth Glockenspiel.
And on the back, Nicole’s unmistakable handwriting.
Visited this place, know you would laugh, I miss who you were, I am what they say.
48
Shelly didn’t bother to get out of her robe and slippers for four days except when she had to take them off to get into bed. Eventually she’d have to go to the store, she knew, mostly for cat food and litter, but today she thought she might be able to get away with one more twenty-four-hour robe-and-slipper stint. She turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the book she hadn’t been able to read one page of in all the hours she’d spent with it open in front of her face since the afternoon she’d been fired.
That afternoon she’d come home and unplugged the phone, and she hadn’t turned on the computer even once. A few times there’d been knocks on the door, and once it had sounded as if someone had thrown a brick or a dead body onto her porch, but still she hadn’t stepped outside to look, or even parted the curtains. The mail came through a slot in the door, so she didn’t have to worry about it piling up outside and the neighbors wondering if she’d slipped in the bathtub. She didn’t subscribe to a newspaper. She just let the bills and flyers and whatever else came through the slot pile up on the floor where it fell.
Jeremy thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Finally, he had a companion all day and all night—a companion who slept even more hours than he did.
Still, Shelly wasn’t so foolish as to think she would stop living. Sooner or later she was going to have to pay the bills lying scattered on her floor. Sooner or later she would have to put the house up for sale, pack all of her things, and move somewhere she could get a job.
But not today.
Today would be another stare-blankly-into-Cold Mountain-day.
Back in the last months of her marriage to Tim, Shelly had lived for the few days a month when he’d go away for work or on one of his fishing weekends and she could pull on the robe (it was, actually, the same robe she wore now) and pull down the shades, and crawl into their bed.
She’d never thought of herself as depressed back then. She had not yet seen the now-ubiquitous list of the symptoms of depression in magazines, at the top of which was always something like “can’t drag your ass out of bed.” She’d ask Tim to call her when he was about an hour from home, and told him it was so she could have something on the stove for him—when, in truth, it was so she could get herself up, and shower, and dress, and be ready to face the world in the guise of Tim again when he stomped through the door.
Now there was no one to drag herself out of bed for, to impress or appease—although Shelly knew that if this went on much longer (the phone unplugged, the cell phone off, not even checking her email), Rosemary would become alarmed, and come by.
But Shelly had gone longer than a week in the past without talking to Rosemary. Rosemary would assume for a while that Shelly was just busy with work. Rosemary had no idea that Shelly had been fired. Shelly had not mentioned Josie to Rosemary again after the phone conversation during which Rosemary had asked, “Are you in love with this girl?” She’d planned to tell her, eventually, but hadn’t gotten around to that yet. Let alone the sex. Let alone the photographs. Let alone the disciplinary meeting with the dean. There would be, as they said, a lot of catching up to do.
Shelly rolled onto her side, and Jeremy growled a little, dreamily, and rolled onto his side as well.
Jesus.
And to add to the horror, the shame, Shelly found herself, each time she closed her eyes, to her own shock and amazement, instead of thinking about the public humiliation, instead of grieving the loss of her livelihood and her identity and her job and her life—thinking instead about Josie Reilly.
About her clavicle. About the shadows gathered there in the moonlight in Shelly’s bed. About those white teeth locked onto her lower lip, damp and shining in the morning light.
Like her cat, Shelly growled a little, and put her face in her hands, and remembered the last phone call she’d answered from the university administration. “We want to be certain you understand that there is to be no communication between you and the student in question. Any attempts to contact her may result in legal action on her part or on ours.”
Shelly had held the phone away from her ear then, and muttered, “Of course,” thinking, Oh my God, as she hung up. I’ve become the kind of lecherous vermin they fear will call and stalk a student.
But even as she was thinking it, Shelly was flipping her cell phone open to the address book, scrolling down to Josie’s number, uttering a little cry before she snapped it closed.
Never again even to speak with the stupid little bitch, the most beautiful creature in this whole exhausted world?
Shit.
Now she shoved off the blankets, put her feet on the floor.
What did she really have to lose?
They’d told her she could not attempt to contact the “student in question,” but they had not told her she could not sit in the Starbucks that she happened to know for a fact the student in question visited ten times a day.
49
“Where are you?”
“What do you care, Mira? The boys are fine. I’ve just dropped them off at my mother’s. They were ecstatic to see her.”
“Why didn’t you tell where you were going? Why didn’t you call last night to tell me where you were?”
Mira was trying to keep her voice down. She was in
her office and had just passed Jeff Blackhawk in the hallway. A few days before, they’d made plans to talk in her office after their Tuesday classes, and now he was waiting for her. She should have told him that something had come up, that they’d have to meet another time, but he was talking to Ramona Cherry out there, Godwin’s only fiction writer and its worst gossip, and Mira couldn’t bring herself to speak as she passed. She knew the expression Ramona would be wearing: that looking-on-the-misfortunes-of-others-from-a-distance-with-amusement look.
Schadenfreude, but Mira’s Serbian grandmother had called it, so much more beautifully, zloradost—“eviljoy.”
Mira couldn’t have stood it. She’d simply held up a hand in greeting and hurried past them, and then the phone rang as soon as she closed the door behind her.
“How was I supposed to know you were home?” Clark asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, I waited for you. You said you’d be early, or at least on time, and then you didn’t show up. For all I knew you were the one who’d taken off.”
“I didn’t take off. I was late. I was in a meeting. I’m trying to make a living here, Clark.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about that Mira, and I’m sorry I’ve been such dead weight, you know, dragging you down the toilet along with your glorious career. In the meantime, everything’s fine, and you can just go about your business, your important business. The twins are being taken good care of by their grandmother. I’ll pick them up in a few days, and then—”
“What? What do you mean you’ll pick them up? Where are you going?”
“I’m taking a little R-and-R. I’ve earned it, Mira. I’ve spent the last two years trapped in a nine-hundred square-foot apartment with two toddlers while you were pursuing your Big Career. Now I’m going to rent a little cottage on the lake, and maybe a boat. Maybe fish for a few days. I’ll let you know—”