Cecily Von Ziegesar (21 page)

“Name? Date of birth?”

“Who, me?” he stammered.

“No, her. What's her name?” the receptionist said impatiently. “When was she born?”

“I don't know,” Patrick admitted. “She's young.”

The receptionist picked up the phone again. “Where the hell are my wheels?” She slammed the phone down. “You can both have a seat until they get here,” she told Patrick.

He staggered over to the nearest chair and sat down with the girl across his lap. Her face was purple and she smelled weird. She looked terrible. The weekend morning news played on the little television rigged in the corner near the ceiling. Just before the commercial, the camera flashed on the big Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. His dad used to take him to see that tree, just the two of them. Every Christmas break, from the time he was about eight until he left for Dexter, they'd ride in on the train, go to Brooks Brothers to buy him a new pair of pants and a jacket, and then they'd visit the tree. They'd just look at it without talking. Sometimes they drank hot chocolate. Then his dad would say, “Better get you back home,” and they'd walk back to Grand Central and he'd get on the train and ride back to Greenwich by himself.

A gurney arrived powered by two medics.

“Patient is female, name and age unknown! Trauma!” the receptionist shouted at them.

The medics helped Patrick lift the girl onto the gurney, smearing the white sheets with blood. “She's that girl from my sister's grade,” one of them noted as they wheeled her away.

“Should I come back later?” Patrick asked the receptionist. “To see if she's okay?”

The receptionist didn't even look up. “That's not up to me.”

The glass doors slid open and two burly policemen arrived wearing dark blue police-issue parkas and guns in their holsters. They were accompanied by the old ex-cop who managed Dexter Security.

“That your car parked there?” the Dexter Security guy asked. He pronounced “there” like “they-ah.”

Patrick nodded. “Yeah.”

“You're not a student up to the college, are ya?” the guy said.

Patrick shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“He just brought a girl in,” the receptionist spoke up. “She wasn't doing too good.”

The policemen approached him from either side and clasped his arms. “That car's stolen,” one of them said. “How 'bout you come with us.”

T
he dorms were alive again. Everyone had returned from the party, or from wherever they'd been the night before—their girlfriend's dorm, skiing at Sugarloaf, a friend's house in Boston. It wasn't a noisy return, not with exams starting tomorrow. That bitter pill would have to be swallowed or chewed or crushed up and snorted, with no rush or high as a reward, just a blue book and two hours of tedious hell. Studying was advisable, and now was the very last chance to do it.

Shipley woke up with a start. Her hair was crusted to her cheek and she needed a shower. Someone was knocking on the door. Next to her Adam yawned and sat up too.

“Hi,” he said, grinning.

The knocking began again. “Security,” the knocker explained with a shout. “We found your car.”

“Just a minute!” Shipley gathered the duvet around her shoulders and approached the door. Three months ago she'd arrived at Dexter a virgin. Now here she was, opening the door and talking to Campus Security with only a duvet around her while a naked
guy lay sprawled on her bed. She opened the door and smiled pleasantly, like it was no big deal.

“You Miss Gilbert?” The security guy didn't seem to notice that she wasn't wearing any clothes. He didn't seem to notice Adam either. He'd probably seen it all in his day.

Shipley nodded and he handed over her wallet. “Car's parked in the lot across the way. You better go down to the police station when you get a chance. Guy stole the car is in jail. Claims he's your—”

“I know who he is,” Shipley said curtly. “He didn't leave a note, did he?”

The security guy frowned. “Not that I'm aware of.”

Behind them Adam cleared his throat. His red boxer shorts lay like a deflated balloon on the linoleum floor.

Shipley held out her hand. “May I have the keys, please?”

The man handed her the keys. “There's lots going on this morning,” he said as he turned away. “You people was busy last night.”

Just then Eliza came barreling down the hall, her bangs all tangled and bits of hay stuck to her coat. The security officer stood aside to let her pass.

Shipley slammed the door closed in Eliza's face and threw Adam his boxers. He scrambled into them while she put on her bathrobe.

“HELLO?!” Eliza burst in a moment later. “What the fuck did you do that for?” She took in the scene. Shipley's jeans were all wadded up at the bottom of the bed. Her ironed underwear lay where it had been flung, halfway across the room. “Fucking A, Slutcakes, you move fast!” She kicked off her sneakers and thrust her feet inside a pair of red rubber rain boots. “Hey, you guys have to come outside and see this. Nick's yurt is on fire. Come on, get dressed. I swear, it's amazing.”

She waited outside for them while Shipley and Adam got back into yesterday's clothes.

“I can't believe I still haven't had a shower,” Shipley said.

It was the only thing either of them said. Adam was embarrassed. Being alone with Shipley was one thing, but there was suddenly so much else going on—campus security, stolen cars, roommates, fires. It was a little overwhelming. And then there was the fact that he'd left his fifteen-year-old sister alone at the party. He had to get back.

Outside the air was clean and dirty at the same time. The snow was magnificent. It was everywhere. But the sky was filled with ash. At first it looked to Shipley as though Root's roof was on fire. Tom's in there, she thought guiltily. But as she drew closer, she could see that the fire was out back, beyond the dorm.

The yurt was a cone of fire rising thirty feet into the air. Sea Bass and Damascus and Geoff and the three Grannies and a crowd of other students fed the fire with sticks and newspaper, trying to make it last as long as possible—anything to procrastinate.

Adam kept his hands in his pockets as they approached. Indeed, this was news. This was excitement. But he needed to go home.

“Nick!” Shipley cried when she spotted him, gazing up at the fire with his flap hat on backward, eyes bloodshot from smoke and allergies. “I'm so sorry,” she commiserated. “All your hard work.”

Eliza slipped her arms around Nick's waist. “He doesn't give a shit.” She lifted up one of his earflaps and licked his ear.

Nick swiped the hat off his head and threw it into the fire.

“Yes! Thank the lord!” Eliza cried. She unzipped her cutoffs beneath her long down coat and stepped out of them.

“No, not those. I love those!” Nick rescued the shorts before she could throw them into the flames.

“Aw.” Eliza cupped his rashy face in her hands and kissed him.

“Wow,” Shipley remarked. “That must have been some party.”

“I think maybe—” Nick bent down and retrieved the gigantic red bong that was lying at his feet. “I think maybe this is the dawn of a new era.” He tossed the bong into the fire and it exploded with a dramatic popping sound.

Grover threw his red bandanna into the fire. Then Liam took off his tie-dyed shirt and threw that in too. Next came Wills's skirt. All of a sudden everyone was taking off their clothes and throwing them into the fire.

“All right, all right,” Mr. Booth, Dexter's president, shouted into a bullhorn from the front steps of the chapel. “The fire department is standing by, but I wanted to let you kids have your fun first. I know this is a stressful time, what with exams coming up tomorrow. You've got half an hour to go crazy around that bonfire of yours, and then I want you all in the library, studying.”

If he hadn't won over the students before, he'd won them over now.

“And don't forget your coffee. The Starbucks café will be open twenty-four hours a day for the next week. The first coffee of the day is on me. Just show them your ID.”

“Yeah, Boothy!!”

Adam cleared his throat. “Hey, will you be all right?” he asked Shipley. “I mean, would you mind if I just went home? I kind of have to clean up and everything, before my parents get home.”

Shipley nodded, blushing. She wondered if Tom was watching from his window. “Good. That's good. Go home and I'll call you later, okay? I mean, I have two exams tomorrow, so I'm going to
be cramming, but we'll figure something out.” She couldn't believe how casual and distracted she sounded. “Okay?”

Adam was in too much of a hurry to even notice. He'd have to dig out his car. “Okay. So, I'll see you,” he said, and strode away with his hands still in his pockets.

The fire burned with gusto. Students frolicked around it in various stages of undress.

“
Fire, fire on the mountain!
” Wills sang out in a high falsetto, making everybody laugh.

 

T
he house was just as Adam had left it except for the crisscrossing car tracks the party-goers had made on the snowy lawn. The porch steps were slippery, and he cursed Tragedy for not shoveling them and coating them with salt the way their parents had taught them to do when they were each about six.

“Hey, I'm home!” he called as he stomped into the kitchen, eager to tell his sister all about last night. On the drive home he'd imagined how he would quietly gloat at dinner that night while his mother and sister chided him about being in love. He imagined bringing Shipley home and fooling around with her in his room while his parents were downstairs drinking wine and dancing to “How Deep Is Your Love.” He imagined his sister and Shipley becoming friends and trading clothes and hair bands and jewelry, or whatever girls did with their friends. But Tragedy didn't answer. He ran upstairs.

“Anybody home?

“Tragedy, you here?” he called, striding down the hall to her room. As usual her bed was made with perfect hospital corners. The floor was spotless. A neat stack of books far beyond her years sat on the desk. Advanced Latin. Calculus II.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.
Tender Is the Night.
Chaos Theory. Fodor's
Greece.
Michelin's
Brazil.
Her collection of Rubik's cubes adorned the bureau. One of the windows had been left wide open and snow had collected on the sill. It was freezing. He walked over and tugged the window closed, brushing the snow onto the floor. From where he stood there was a clear view of the driveway and the lawn. Except for the path he'd just taken from the end of the driveway to the front porch, and the dozens of tire tracks that looped around the yard, the eighteen or so inches of new snow was immaculate and untouched. No new footprints led from the house to the barn, where Tragedy should have gone that morning to hay the sheep. In fact, the sheep were standing out in the snow by the fence, baahing like crazy. He shivered violently and went into his room to put on a sweater.

Everything in his room was just as he'd left it too—bed hastily made with clothes pushed underneath it, desk chair askew. He whirled around and dashed downstairs again. Four pairs of green-gold cat eyes stared up at him from out of a towel-lined cardboard box beneath the kitchen table. Storm, the gray mother cat, got up and stretched, then leapt out of the box and trotted over to her empty bowl on the floor beside the woodstove. She meowed plaintively.

“All right, all right,” Adam told her as he rummaged around in the cupboards in search of cat food. Where the hell was his sister anyway, he wondered, growing increasingly annoyed. After he'd fed the cat, he put on his good Sorel snow boots and went up to the barn to hay the sheep. The barn door stood open. He flicked on the light. The three spent kegs lay on their sides like abandoned carcasses. Plastic cups littered the floor like bones. He climbed up the ladder and threw two bales of hay down from the hayloft and carried them out to the snowy pasture. The sheep baahed eagerly when they saw him, crowding around the fence and butting their heads against their neighbors' woolly
sides. They attacked the bales hungrily before he'd even cut the twine.

He watched them eat for a while, wondering what to do. How could he enjoy his feeling of elation at having spent the night with Shipley, his first real love, when there was no one there to share it with? Had Tragedy gone home with someone? Was she just out for a walk? Or had she finally done it this time, had she finally run away?

Back in the house he dialed Uncle Laurie's number and examined the contents of the fridge while the phone rang. Save for a piece of leftover shepherd's pie and an uncooked ham, the usually well-stocked fridge was strangely empty. There weren't even any grapes. Ravenous, he glanced at the counter, searching for the familiar containers in which Tragedy stored her daily baking endeavors. Nothing.

“Hello, this is Laurence,” Uncle Laurie finally answered. Ellen's younger brother was the head of the History Department at the public high school in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He'd graduated from Columbia, cum laude.

“It's Adam. I was just calling to ask…to tell my parents something.” All of a sudden he wished he hadn't called. If Tragedy was really gone, there was nothing they could do about it except wait for her to come back.

“They're on their way, son. They only just left,” Uncle Laurie told him. “How are you, anyway? How's college?”

Adam closed the refrigerator and looked out the window at his car. “College is good. College is great,” he said enthusiastically.

“Well, that's good. Your parents said you were having kind of a hard time,” Uncle Laurie countered. “Said you were thinking of transferring.”

Adam had forgotten all about transferring. He'd even met with
Professor Rosen to discuss his options. As far away as possible, he'd told her, and she'd suggested Dexter's brother school, the University of East Anglia, in England.

But after last night, all that was irrelevant.

“I think it's getting better now,” he told his uncle. “Look, I had this party in the barn last night. I'd better clean up before they get home, okay?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Uncle Laurie laughed. “You take care. And say hello to your sister for me. I'll see you at Christmas.”

“See you at Christmas,” Adam said, and hung up.

It took a long time to clean up the barn and put everything back where it belonged. Someone had thrown up into the muck bucket and on one of the old horse blankets. Rusty horseshoes were scattered all over the place, and one of the shovels was missing. When he was finished, Adam lined the kegs up by the barn door, ready for his dad to load into the pickup and return to the liquor store in town. Then he dragged the heavy-duty trash bags out to the end of the driveway and returned to the house to shovel and salt the porch steps. Back inside, he lit a fire in the fireplace, stoked the woodstove, and walked from room to room, matching up stray shoes and neatening magazines and loose bits of paper. He was just sitting down to the reheated piece of shepherd's pie when the phone rang.

“Hello?” he answered, fork poised.

“This is Kennebec Regional Hospital. Is this Mr. Gatz?” said the person on the other end.

Adam put down his fork. “No. I mean yes. What's wrong? Is there something wrong?”

“We have a Tragedy Gatz here. In the intensive care. I assume she's your—”

“Sister,” Adam answered robotically. Out the window he could
see his parents' blue pickup make the turn into the driveway and amble toward the house with Ellen behind the wheel. He could see their innocent faces behind the thick glass of the windshield and wished they'd just keep driving, past the house, past Home, to a place with better weather and better news. “We'll be there soon,” he said before hanging up.

He stood up and put on his coat. The shepherd's pie sat untouched on its plate. His parents were just opening the pickup's doors when he stepped out onto the porch.

“What the hell, Adam?” Eli shouted. “Didn't anyone bother to bring in the goddamned sheep last night?”

Ellen remained uncharacteristically silent, her mouth rigid and her cheeks pale. She seemed to sense that something was wrong.