“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.