It didn’t even occur to Craig, yet, that he was half-naked, crazed looking, and that he didn’t know this girl. He said, “I don’t know. Someone’s fucking with me. Someone’s haunting me.”
A sad look crossed the Cookie Girl’s face, as if he’d told her something she’d dreaded hearing but had fully expected to hear. Her small, pale face in the dim hallway light looked, he thought, anguished. It was the same expression she’d had on her face just before she’d told him, at the mailbox, in a monotone, “Killed a guy on a bike. I was sixteen.” Now, in a sad, calm voice, she asked, “Is your roommate home?”
Craig shook his head.
“Did you lock yourself out?” She looked toward his closed door. All Craig could do was nod.
“Look,” she said. “Come in here.” She gestured for him to follow her to her apartment. “My roommates are out. You can sit on the couch and cover up with a blanket, and I’ll call the landlord to let you back in.”
The Cookie Girl hopped, then, on her one good foot, to the door, and turned to look behind her to make sure he was following. She pointed at the couch for him to sit on, and hopped around a corner, out of sight. “I’ll get the phone,” she said as she hopped.
The air inside the Cookie Girl’s apartment smelled closed and flowery to Craig. It reminded him—painfully, suddenly, completely—of Josie and Nicole’s dorm room: that smell of girls’ foreign products, perfumes, toilet waters, conditioners, clean clothes, floral soaps. And also chemicals, like nail polish and nail polish remover, and witch hazel, maybe—that’s what his mother used to clean her face with, wasn’t it? And creams and lotions with honey and buttermilk in them.
He sat on the Cookie Girl’s couch and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and in a few seconds she’d hopped back out with the phone and a soft, pink blanket. She wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and held out the phone to him. When he just stared at it blankly, she said, “Okay. I’ll call him.”
But apparently the landlord didn’t answer. The Cookie Girl had gone back into the other room, and Craig could hear her say to a machine, “This is Deb Richards? 326? Um, my neighbor is locked out? Can you call me back so I can let him know if you’ll come and let him back in?”—followed by a string of numbers: land lines, cell phone numbers, Craig’s apartment number, her apartment number. She came back into the living room, this time leaning on her crutch, and said, “I’m going to make you a cup of tea.”
Craig nodded.
“Look,” she said when she came back out of her kitchenette holding a microwaved mug from which a cloud of steam swirled, a string with a little Lipton flag hanging off the rim. “Look. I know you don’t know me, but I have to talk to you. I think I know what’s going on here—but first I have to ask you not to tell anyone that I talked to you about this. And that other thing? That I told you in the hallway? Nobody here knows about that, okay? I purposely came to a school two thousand miles away from where that happened, and I only told you because I’ve been listening to what people are saying about you, and I looked up this stuff about you on the Internet, and I feel like I can—relate, and now I have to tell you something else.”
Craig nodded again. He sipped from the tea without bothering to take the bag out or even bounce it around in the water the way he knew he was supposed to. The tea tasted like very hot water, and burned his tongue, but it also seemed like the best thing he’d ever put to his lips. The mug said FIELD DAY on the side. There was a little hockey stick under the words.
“They’re fucking with you,” the Cookie Girl (Deb?) said. “I know some of these girls. My roommate from Woodson Hall freshman year is an Omega Theta Tau, and whenever she has more than a couple of margaritas she starts to blab. Those girls have a plan to get you off this campus.”
Craig sipped from the mug again. He felt strangely and entirely at peace. Wrapped in this nice girl’s pink blanket. Sipping her tea. Her voice reminded him of his mother’s—his mother’s voice back when he was a child, when she used to speak to him quietly, enunciating every syllable. Deb Richards didn’t seem to understand that Craig already knew how much Nicole’s sorority sisters hated him, how they wanted him off campus. She seemed to think she would shock him if she spoke too quickly—either that or this was simply the most natural way to speak to someone you’d just found panting in his boxer shorts in your hallway, doubled over, flipping out.
Deb went on about how she’d overheard this or that, and how the father of the boy she had killed had stopped in his tracks at her hometown supermarket and shouted, pointing, “That fucking bitch, that fucking little bitch, that fucking little bitch killed my little boy,” so loudly and frantically that she couldn’t even leave the store because people were staring at her, and also screaming at her, and how a cashier even stood in front of her to block her way to the exit, turning all red, saying something about how she, Deb Richards, was the one who should be dead and, “You’re gonna rot in hell you negligent spoiled brat, you’re gonna rot in hell every night of your rotten life and then for all of eternity in hell . . .”
Craig felt awful for her.
And it was so kind of her to feel awful for him, which made him even sadder that he couldn’t even pretend to be surprised at what she had to tell him. She seemed to think these were pretty big secrets. She told him that she felt pretty sure the Omega Theta Tau sisters had all kinds of plans to scare him, and torment him, and drive him out of here. Did he have any idea how vengeful girls could be? Sorority girls especially?
Briefly he considered telling her that, yes, he did know all about how much Nicole’s sorority sisters hated him, but that, no, it wasn’t Omega Theta Tau today. It was something else. Someone. It was Alice Meyers. She’d visited him, too. She was somewhere, and she knew Nicole. She and Nicole, it seemed, were together somewhere—sending postcards, making house calls, making phone calls. But he said nothing.
And then Deb Richards was tearing up, taking his hand, telling him everything would be all right, but he really should go to school somewhere else, that it was the only thing that had helped her, that it had saved her life to get away (although, to Craig, she looked as if she had that place with her, right there in the room and all around her, in her posture, in her face) and he had to at least consider it, because—
And then she said, “I know Lucas, too.”
“Lucas?” Craig asked.
“I met Lucas last year. He used to sell me weed once in a while. They’ve got it out for him, too, you know. I don’t know why. They think he sold you bad dope or something. Or, just that he let you borrow his car, and you were stoned, so—”
“I wasn’t,” Craig said, but he said it without force, having said it so many times he no longer thought anyone cared or believed him.
“They’ve got some bad thing going with Lucas, like you. My ex-roommate, she had this story she thought was hilarious about how he’d called the suicide hotline, and one of the Omega sisters who happened to be a volunteer on the hotline that night took the call and recognized the caller ID, and was really trying to talk him into killing himself. He was going on and on about how he’d been seeing ghosts and shit, and some girl who died like twenty years ago was haunting him, and this sorority bitch was just like, ‘Oh that’s so scary. I would just want to be dead if I were being haunted by a ghost. I mean, ghosts just choose people at random, but after that it’s like your whole life they follow you around. Do you have, like, access to a gun or anything, because that would help a lot . . .’
“And they were all just cracking up, waiting to read in the Police Beat in the newspaper that some college senior had shot himself.”
“Lucas?” Craig asked again.
He hadn’t thought about Lucas for a little while, and it suddenly dawned on him what all of this must have done to Lucas, too—and then he put the mug down on the table next to the couch and started to feel really bad, looking around (for help? For an excuse?) like Jesus, Craig, how many people’s lives do you think you can
ruin in the course of your own? All he’d done for Lucas was one stupid phone call in the summer, from New Hampshire, when some of the pieces had fallen into place again. On the phone, Lucas had said nothing, really. He’d muttered, “Oh, man. Craig, Jesus,” a few times, and then, “I have no hard feelings toward you. But I gotta go. I really can’t talk about this, man. I hope everything works out, and I have to say, if I were you, I’d stay back there, you know. Go to school in Connecticut or something. Here, you know, it’s not cool right now. But maybe someday we’ll meet again. Peace, man,” and he’d hung up.
Lucas, shit. He’d ruined Lucas’s life, too.
Deb seemed moved to tears again, looking at the expression on Craig’s face, and she got out of her seat and put her arms around his neck, pulled the pink blanket more tightly around his neck, and hugged him, and Craig felt himself sag into the hug just the way he remembered sagging against his mother as a little kid, even when he knew she was pissed at him, because at least she was pretending she wasn’t.
And then he was back there, eyes closed, sobbing into his mother’s shoulder, soaking it, and saying things in a language he wasn’t even sure he spoke, and she was patting and patting him—Deb, not his mother, and crying, too. “Look,” Deb said, “just get in my bed and go to sleep. The sheets are clean. If the slumlord ever shows up to unlock your door, I’ll wake you up. In the meantime, just rest.”
When Craig woke again, the Martian green hands of the clock beside the Deb’s bed read 4:10 (a.m.?). The room was dark except for the glow of her iPod in its charging dock, and there wasn’t a sound through the whole apartment. He wanted to pee, but not badly enough, he decided, to wake up an apartment full of girls and scare the hell out of them. He lay on his side between the Deb’s crisp sheets, which smelled of Nicole and the starch his mother used to spray on his khaki pants, and watched the hands of the alarm clock move in little twitches around the dial until Deb came in and sat down beside him in a T-shirt and gym shorts and laid a cool hand on his forehead.
And then he fell asleep again.
57
Josie seemed to soften after it became clear that, although Shelly had uncovered a truth, she wasn’t going to make threats, or a scene.
Maybe Josie even seemed excited.
She was sitting at the edge of her seat now, leaning toward Shelly, moving her hands lightly through the air between them, explaining the finer points of hazing in sorority life. She was bouncing her knee a little, and although she didn’t look directly into Shelly’s eyes, she grazed Shelly’s face as she talked, letting her eyes linger on Shelly’s shoulder or earring for a split second before scouting the room around them again.
“We never do anything physically dangerous,” Josie said. “But you really can’t feel like a group, you know, without some rituals and traditions. And secrets. If it’s not at least a little dangerous, there’s no point in keeping it a secret, so—”
Could Josie simply be relieved that the truth had come out, and that Shelly seemed to have accepted it?
Josie was thrilled, Shelly realized, to be able to spill the secrets, to have a captive audience in Shelly. Because what could Shelly possibly do with any information she received from Josie now?
“I mean, it’s not hazing like they used to haze. We’ve heard all about that. The sisters used to cut their palms—I mean really slice them open until they were gushing blood—and stand naked in a circle around a candle and have these, like, mystical things happen or something that made them sisters. In the attic there are these black-and-white photos from the sixties or something, and there’s blood all over the place, and some naked guy with long hair playing the flute. Freaky.”
It seemed like the kind of thing that would have gone on in the sixties, Shelly thought. Josie was laughing.
“I wonder what happened if someone bled too much?” Shelly said, more to herself than to Josie. She was thinking of a story her ex-husband had told her about a girl he’d had to treat after something like that: some blood ritual between volleyball teammates. They’d sliced their inner arms, and the girl had managed to hit an artery. Shelly’s ex-husband had described it in such a way that she could still, twenty years later, see the imagined girl (red, white, and blue, wearing nothing but her Wildcats Varsity jacket), who died in the ER waiting room.
“I suppose they’d get help,” Josie said, seeming disinterested. What did she care? What were the sixties to her? “We’ve always got someone standing by, in case something goes wrong.”
Josie checked behind her shoulder, but there was nothing there except the wall. Still, it was clear she knew she was now headed toward forbidden territory, about to tell Shelly something she wasn’t supposed to tell.
“We’ve got this EMT. This paramedic guy. He belongs to us. He’s like everybody’s boyfriend or a mascot or something. We love him. We make him wear his uniform because it’s so cute! He sleeps in a room at the back of the house, and the sorority pays him to be there for the events, and to be on call so . . .” Josie drifted off, eyes seeming to go unfocused, moving down to some place between her own knees and the floor.
“What ‘events’?” Shelly asked.
“Well, there’s this thing. There’s a Spring Event and a Winter Event. You do it your second year—so, for me it’s coming up.” She giggled a little. “I’m scared shitless. Promise not to tell anyone?”
The absurdity of this seemed to occur to Josie even as she said it, and she continued before Shelly could have answered.
“We’re reborn. As sisters. You won’t believe this.”
Shelly raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Try me, but the thing she was having a hard time, at the moment, believing was that she’d ruined her career, tossed off her entire life, to go to bed with this chatty, banal, empty person, who was sitting across from her at Starbucks talking about her sorority as if she were the only person who’d ever been in one, as if the things that took place in it were of some kind of import in the wider world. Only a week ago, Shelly marveled as she looked at Josie Reilly’s pale, excited face, she had felt she would be willing to chop off a few digits if it meant another lazy afternoon in bed with this girl. She’d actually believed herself to be in love.
“It’s called the Raising. We keep a coffin in the basement,” Josie said, leaning forward, whispering so energetically that if anyone in Starbucks had the slightest interest, they could have heard her from four tables away. “And every second-year pledge gets put into it. They do this thing where—well, first everybody’s drunk off their ass, and then the girl who’s being raised sits on the floor, and you breathe in and out really fast for two minutes exactly, and another girl presses on your neck, your artery, and you’re out.
“They put you in the coffin, and when you come to—there you are, reborn. And your sisters are all holding candles.
“The pledges all wait upstairs because they won’t let you see the ceremony until you’re either being reborn or have already been reborn.
“It’s my turn in three weeks.”
“Jesus Christ,” Shelly said, but she was reacting not to the upcoming ordeal but to the wideness of Josie’s pupils. Her eyeballs—had Shelly ever noticed before how large they were? Certain cartoon characters came to mind: Minnie Mouse. Betty Boop.
“Can you believe it?” Josie asked.
“Yes,” Shelly said. “I mean, no.”
But of course she could believe it. It seemed almost laughably believable. Par for the course. Shelly would have thought that by now sororities might have come up with some truly new, shocking, and innovative ritual. This one hardly merited the term hazing. She had herself, in fact, participated in such passing-out rituals in junior high, in Valerie Kolorik’s rec room while her parents were at their country club. There’d been no coffin, of course, but only because they could never have located or afforded one. They’d have loved a coffin. Shelly could still remember the feeling of Valerie’s clammy hands on her neck after the two minutes of hyperventilation. Those smal
l clammy hands were the last physical sensation she’d had before slipping into oblivion. When she awoke, the other girls were all sitting around her, laughing.
“Yeah,” Josie said, nodding at Shelly with such anxious energy that it occurred to her that the girl might actually be scared. “I mean,” she said, “it’s really just a game, but there have been times when sisters got hurt. So the EMT’s there, in case.”
She sincerely whispered this last part—no longer the stage whisper—and Shelly knew it was her own cue either to ask about the sisters who’d gotten hurt, or to express concern for Josie, but she couldn’t bring herself to do either. This, she thought, was its own kind of falling into oblivion—but, this time, the little hands around her neck were Josie’s, and Shelly knew she’d be feeling them there for the rest of her life.
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” Josie said, her eyes narrowed to slits. A statement, not a question. “About the Events. I mean, it’s not really hazing, but if the Pan-Hellenic Council—”
“No,” Shelly said. “Of course not.”
“Thank you,” Josie said, but it was pure formality. “Especially after Nicole got killed, and all this bullshit with fucking Denise disappearing . . .”
“Denise?”
Josie waved her had and smirked. “Ran away or something. She was creepy. But people keep snooping around like we buried her in the back yard or something.”
It came back to Shelly from her research of the accident: the music school student who’d disappeared. “What happened to her?” Shelly asked.
“How would I know? But we can’t be blamed for psycho sisters running off. She should never have gotten in to OTT in the first place. She was the kind of trash that belongs in—” She stopped herself before naming Shelly’s sorority, and a ridiculous flush spread across Shelly’s chest. She blinked, and swallowed, and stood (chair legs scraping loudly and obscenely against the bare Starbucks floor), and said, trying to sound composed, “I should go now.”