Cecily Von Ziegesar (20 page)

 

I
t was nearly 2
A.M.
and still snowing hard. The haunting notes of Taps drifted underneath the door, the efforts of an ROTC student who had recently taken up bugling. Shipley lay under the sheet with her head on Adam's bare chest, drifting in and out of sleep. Adam was wide awake. How could he sleep? He felt like he'd just been born. He was finally alive!

“When you were a kid, what did you want to be?” he asked. “I mean, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

Shipley was just drifting into a dream. She was so tired, but she wanted to talk to Adam too.

“A train conductor,” she responded drowsily.

Adam laughed, his rib cage jostling her head. “Seriously?”

“I loved the sound when they punched your ticket,” Shipley told him with her eyes closed. “Greenwich is only a forty-minute train ride from Manhattan. I used to take the train into the city with my mother to go shopping. Saks, Bendel's, Bergdorf. Afterward we'd walk up Fifth Avenue next to Central Park. Mom liked to look at the buildings.”

Adam waited for her to continue.

“I didn't really want to be a train conductor,” she admitted with a yawn. “I always thought I'd get married and have two little girls and live in one of those buildings on Fifth Avenue.
They'd go to Sacred Heart so they could wear those adorable uniforms with the red-and-white-checked pinafores.”

“Uh-huh,” Adam murmured encouragingly. He had no idea what she was talking about. “Go on.”

She inched closer to him so the top of her head was in the crook of his neck. Her hair smelled like seawater. “I have no idea what I'm going to do when I grow up. I guess I could be a poet,” she mused. “Professor Rosen likes my poems.”

“What else?” he prompted.

“What else?” She opened her eyes briefly and then closed them again. “I have this brother…,” she said, her voice trailing off as she fell back to sleep and into her dreams.

Her ice cream was dripping onto her skirt. The steps of the Met were crowded with tourists and schoolgirls. Only a few feet away from her a group of them sat smoking and gossiping.

“Here, use this,” her mother said, handing her a Kleenex. “Don't forget we're meeting your father for dinner at seven.”

A uniformed doorman pushed open the door to the green-awninged building across the avenue. He raised his white-gloved hand, his lips curled around a silver whistle as he hailed a taxi. A cab stopped, the doorman opened the door to the building, and out strolled Tom, wearing black Ray-Ban sunglasses and the same plain white T-shirt, black pants, and old tennis shoes he'd worn in the play, minus the blood. He looked like a movie star. No, he
was
a movie star.

Now she was kissing Tom and he didn't smell like chemicals, he smelled like Ivory soap, and his skin was so soft and—

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Orange lights flashed through the window as the staff of Buildings and Grounds plowed Dexter's section of Homeward Avenue. The sky was the pinkish gray of near-dawn and it was still snowing, although not quite as heavily. It was almost six
o'clock in the morning. Adam was still awake. The bugler, who'd been practicing all night, burst into a rousing reveille.

“I don't know,” Shipley said sleepily, picking up half from her dream and half from their conversation a few hours before. “I probably shouldn't have gone to college in Maine.”

They were both quiet for a moment. Adam brushed his chin against her hair. “If you hadn't gone to school in Maine, you wouldn't have met me,” he remarked pointedly.

The plows moved on down the road and the bugler paused for breath. For a moment the room was silent. Then a gunshot rang out, ricocheting off the windows and sending chills up their spines. The bugler recommenced his playing, this time a march.

 

L
ess than half a mile away, Tragedy lay bleeding in the snow. Whoever had shot her had broken the law; bear hunting season had ended just after Thanksgiving. Not that she was a bear. She was a person, wearing a coat, which wasn't even made out of bear fur. Raccoon hunting season might well have run all year, the little pests.

“At least I'm not fucking dead,” she swore, attempting to stand. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! I'm fucking bleeding over here!”

Nothing. Snowflakes drifted prettily down through the whitewashed trees. The storm was tapering off.

“Hey!” Tragedy shouted again, but her shout came out too hoarse to go anywhere. The bullet had gone right through her, somewhere near her belly button. She felt like she'd eaten a whole fucking pound of hot chili peppers. “Hey!” she shouted, even more hoarsely this time. Her voice was just a whisper, quieter than a snowflake.

She couldn't walk, so she dragged herself through the snow, scraping at it with her bare hands. A break in the trees and there
was Dexter College, sitting prettily on its hill, the brick buildings all frosted with snow, the blue light shining from the chapel spire like a Christmas tree topper. It looked just like it did in the snow globes they sold at the campus bookstore. It looked like a fucking Christmas present. And just on the fringes of campus was that huge tent. She'd have to drag herself a hundred fucking miles to get there, but she'd get there. And then she'd yell her fucking head off until someone came.

“Shit,” she whimpered. Her hands hurt. “Mom's going to kill me.”

T
hey say a pet can do wonders for your mental health. A pet is a source of comfort. Making a home for a pet gives you a sense of security and well-being. Providing for a pet is very satisfying and teaches responsibility for others. Pets appreciate leftover surf and turf from the Lobster Shack. Most of them do anyway.

Patrick hadn't thought of the right name for the kitten yet. Frodo was a good one, but once you named your cat after a character from
The Lord of the Rings,
you were pretty much done for—just you and your cat, living in your own little fairyland of magic and wizardry. Blackie was retarded. Jet was too gay. Raymond—so gay. Hugo was sort of theatrical. Or maybe Victor? No, gay again. Pink Patrick with a black cat named Victor. It was like something out of
Psycho
.

His Outward Bound instructors had written about the Pink Patrick incident in the report that went out to his parents.

“Patrick, are you gay?” his father had asked him after reading the report.

“What?” Patrick said. “Huh?” It was all he could think of to say. He'd never had a girlfriend, but he'd never had a boyfriend either. He was Pink Patrick. People avoided him.

“Here, kitty,” he called, setting down a plastic bowl of surf and turf that he'd shredded into tiny scraps. The kitten scampered over to the bowl and sniffed it. Then it sat down on its haunches and began licking its asshole.

“Are you gay?” Patrick demanded of the kitten. He cracked a smile when it paused to look up at him with its big yellow eyes.

One of the thick wool blankets that girl had brought for him lay in a heap on the floor, right where he'd left it a few days ago. He lay down and rolled himself up in it, rubbing his palms against his thighs. The yurt's flaps were shut tight, but it was still freezing. He thought about lighting the little stove for the kitten's sake but he wanted to sleep, and it said in the directions not to leave the camp stove unattended.

“Here, kitty,” he said again, but the kitten didn't move.

“Suit yourself,” Patrick told it and rolled over.

He'd been driving for hours, hypnotized by the snow and the
flap, flap, flap
of the Mercedes's windshield wipers. He almost hit the same white car several times. Idiot, driving a white car in the snow. Eventually the kitten started mewing like crazy in the backseat and he decided it must have to poop. He couldn't very well let a cat poop all over a room at the Holiday Inn, so he'd brought it back to the yurt. He'd even dug away a place in the corner for it to use as a litter box, but the damn thing still hadn't pooped.

He dozed off. A while later he was awakened by a scratching sound. He sat up.

“You finally pooping?” he asked the kitten, but found that it was curled up asleep inside the red wool hat that girl had brought
him on Thanksgiving. Its tiny chest rose and fell with every breath.

“
Hey,
” someone called from outside the tent. It was just a whisper, or maybe it was the wind. “
Hey
.”

Patrick stood up and untied the door flap. The girl who'd brought him things was lying at his feet, wearing what looked like a bear skin. A trail of pink snow led down the hill behind her and into the woods.

“Hey,” Tragedy whispered to the toes of Patrick's boots. Then she passed out. The black kitten stalked over and lay down on her hair.

It wasn't snowing anymore. The sun was trying to come out. A few stray flakes drifted down from the trees. Patrick picked up the girl's cold, red hands and dragged her inside. She didn't stir. Was she dead? He knelt down and put his ear next to her mouth. A little puff of air tickled his earlobe. But man, her hands were cold, and her face was all shiny and red, like it had been power-washed. She was frozen stiff.

He flailed around in the half dark of the tent, setting up the little camping stove and lighting it with the wooden kitchen matches he kept sealed in a Ziploc bag. He turned the flame up as high as it would go and moved the stove as close to the girl as he dared. She lay stiff and cold in her mangy fur coat.

“Shit.” The stove was pathetic. It barely gave off enough heat to defrost a mouse. He needed a bigger flame.

The tent was full of random crap—a metal cooking pot, a pair of mittens, a can of corn. He was suddenly reminded of
Quest for Fire,
the only movie he'd ever seen at a drive-in, and one of his earliest memories. His parents had taken him just after Shipley was born, and they had both fallen asleep in the front seat with the baby while he watched the movie from the backseat. It was all about cavemen looking for burning embers in old fires be
cause they'd lost their original embers and didn't know how to start fires on their own. Man could not exist without fire. Man's evolution could be traced back to the quest. In the half-dark of the yurt he stumbled over
Dianetics
by L. Ron Hubbard. It killed him to burn it, but it was a nice thick book. Once it got going, the flames would be huge.

He opened the book and ripped out a few pages, crumpling them into tight balls and dropping them into the bottom of the cooking pot before tossing the whole book in. Then he turned off the stove and disconnected the little kerosene tank so he could douse the book with kerosene. Perching the pot on top of the stove, he lit a match, dropped it in, and poof, the book burst into flames. He rocked back on his heels, pleased with his work. It even smelled good.

One by one, the sage words of L. Ron Hubbard—“survival,” “engrams,” “audit,” “clear,” were singed and disintegrated as the book caught fire. Patrick placed the pot right next to the girl's shoulder. The girl slept on, except she didn't look like she was sleeping. She looked like a drowned person who'd been dredged out of the Gowanus Canal, just like on
Law & Order,
a TV show he'd watched in the truck stop in Lewiston where he hung out from time to time. The kitten mewed plaintively and pawed at the girl's limp hand. It seemed less afraid of her than it was of him. Patrick put one hand on the floor and reached out over her body with the other hand to pet the kitten.

“Go on, crawl inside her coat or something,” he told it. “Warm her up.”

The kitten walked around the girl's head and lay down on her hair, blinking its eyes in the firelight. Patrick sat back on his haunches. The hand that had been on the floor felt sticky. He examined his palm in the flickering light. It was matted with dark red stuff. Blood.

“Shit!”

The girl hadn't moved since he'd dragged her inside. He poked at her fur. Was that the source of the blood? Had she skinned an animal and put on its coat? No, the coat had buttons. He unbuttoned them all and pulled aside the lapels. Only the shoulder straps of her white sundress were still white, the rest of it was covered with blood. She was bleeding to death.

He buttoned up the coat, grabbed the kitten off her hair, and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he shoved his hands beneath the girl's back and thighs and did his best to lift her.

She was bigger than he was—tall. Her dark hair and big feet dragged on the ground as he staggered behind the dorms, skirting the fringes of Dexter's campus, to the parking lot across the road from Coke. The sun was getting brighter now, but it was still early, and the campus was quiet. Stumbling, he dropped the girl in the deep, powdery snow and opened the back door of the Mercedes. Her head bumped against the door frame going in, but she didn't even flinch.

The car sputtered to life. “Come on,” he growled as the wheels spun in the deep snow. He backed onto the road and floored the accelerator, headed toward the hospital just outside of town. Back behind the dorms, the fire burned bright inside the yurt, causing it to smoke like a volcano.

 

S
ea Bass was the only one with four-wheel drive and snow tires. “You'd think, coming to college in Maine, people would have more sense,” he scoffed. Nick, Eliza, and Geoff were huddled in the back of his 4Runner. Everyone else was stuck at Adam's house, trying to dig their cars out with the two shovels they'd found in the barn.

“I've got chains,” Damascus announced defensively from the passenger seat. “On my car at home.”

“It's not about the tires,” Geoff spoke up, his bony hands folded placidly in his lap as he gazed out the window. None the worse for wear after staying up all night and huffing an entire bottle of ether, Geoff couldn't wait to lace up his Nikes and head out for a run. “It's like running shoes. What matters is the distribution of weight.”

Eliza was holding Nick's red, welted hand. They'd fallen asleep on top of each other in the hay. Now Nick's entire body was covered in an angry rash and his eyes were almost swollen shut.

“I think I need to go to the Health Center,” he complained. “Get some cortisone.”

“I think I need to sleep in a bed,” Eliza muttered. She turned to examine Nick's profile. She expected him to look older, more manly, after last night. But his beard was just peach fuzz, not even worth shaving. “Sorry to be a buzz kill, but we have exams tomorrow,” she reminded everyone.

“Fuck,” Sea Bass moaned. “I'm so fucking screwed.”

Nick wiped his nose on the cuff of his shirt. “Maybe I can get the nurse to write me a note.” He looked down at his other hand, tucked inside Eliza's. He hadn't expected her to be the hand-holding type—more the whips and leashes type—but she was almost affectionate. He imagined her introducing him to one of her friends back home. “This is my boyfriend, Nick.” He supposed that would be all right.

“Hey,” he murmured into her ear. “Do you think I could go home with you for Christmas?” After all, he had nowhere else to go.

“Hell yeah,” Eliza whispered back. She grabbed his swollen, drippy face and kissed him. This was what she'd always yearned
for—someone who wanted to be around, someone who was hers. “Better not bring your bong though.”

She imagined Nick smoking up right in the middle of the living room while her parents were out working in their real estate office over the garage.
Are you burning incense, princess?
they'd ask with their usual distracted cheerfulness.

“I was thinking of quitting anyway,” Nick said. Something about the snow and staying up most of the night in a dusty barn without getting high had made him game for contest. Or maybe it was Eliza who made him want to stay on his toes.

The 4Runner barreled up the hill toward campus. Dexter looked like it was trying very hard to look adorable so the students would remember to come back after Christmas. Golden rays of morning sun shone gloriously down on the dapper redbrick buildings nestled in nearly two feet of fresh, white snow. A giant snowman wearing a Dexter baseball cap stood jauntily in the center of the quad.

Sea Bass rolled down his window. “Nice!” he called out to a pair of girls on cross-country skis. The girls turned their heads and gave him a cheery wave. It was that kind of day.

“Holy shit,” Damascus cried, pointing. “What's going on?”

Black smoke erupted from Root's roof. The dorm appeared to be on fire.

“It's not the dorm.” Geoff squinted out his window. “It's a forest fire out back.”

Sea Bass put on his blinker and pulled into the driveway that led to the temporary parking lot on the other side of the quad, behind Root. Just beyond the parking lot, near the woods, was a gigantic bonfire. The flames were twenty feet high and dark orange. Sparks flew up into the air like firecrackers. The snow around the fire had already melted.

“It's the yurt,” Nick said, feeling almost pleased with him
self. It served that loser right, living in there without his permission. “The yurt is burning down.”

“No way,” Eliza gasped. The whole damn thing was ablaze. She squeezed his hand protectively. “Holy shit.”

“Holy
fucking
shit,” Sea Bass exclaimed.

“It's burning all the way the fuck
down,
” Damascus said, stating the obvious.

Everyone was quiet for a moment, transfixed by the flames. Then Geoff opened his door. “Hey, come on, you guys,” he said with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “Let's check it out.”

They staggered out into the snow. The fire was magnificent. And the authorities didn't seem to have noticed it yet. Swaying a little from shock and lack of sleep, Nick raised his hand to shield his sore eyes from the smoke. Just beyond the fire rose the chapel spire, its blue light burning bright and blue and true as ever.

 

P
atrick pulled the car up in front of the emergency room. He flicked on the hazard lights and glanced into the backseat. The girl lay in a pile of bloody fur on the plush beige leather, her dark hair spilling onto the floor and her knees bent in a fetal position to accommodate her long legs.

He stepped out of the car, wondering if he should notify someone inside or if he should just carry her in. In movies they just carried them in.

There were a few old people in the waiting room, sleeping.

“She's bleeding,” Patrick told the woman behind the desk. “She might already be dead,” he added, although he'd seen the girl's nostrils flare and her brow furrow when he'd dragged her out of the car.

The receptionist stood up and peered at the girl in his arms. She picked up the phone. “I have a bleeder. Possible NGMI.
I need wheels!” she barked into it and then slammed the phone down. She pushed a clipboard across the counter. “You'll need to sign in.”

Patrick just stood there, breathing hard. The girl was heavy in her fur coat. “What should I do?” he said. “Put her on the floor?”

The receptionist took back the clipboard. “Is she your wife?”

Patrick stared back at her for a moment. “No. I don't even know—” He stopped, and then started again. “She's my friend.”