Conviction (8 page)

Harpsten,

For your information, a lot of the music I listen to is very inspiring for all of my academic endeavors. Tyler (a little guy I babysit sometimes) also likes my taste in music (although he’s about my only friend out here who does). But what are these songs you’ve sent me? I’ve honestly never even heard of half these bands!

On another note, (ha, see what I did there) you are almost as bad as my Dad. If I had any travel plans, I’d tell you just like I said I would, okay?

Best,

Addie

I could smell Charlie before I could hear him. In my absence he had been smoking, and had tried to cover it up with some kind of balmy aftershave.

“You said you were done with this for the night.” I closed the laptop before he could see who the recipient of the message was almost at the same moment he sat on the bed behind me, wrapping his legs behind me as best he could.

I leaned into the crook of his neck and closed my eyes. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I felt how they burned. “I was just checking a few things.”

He kissed the place on my collarbone he liked so well. “I gotta go away next week.”

“No.”

I felt his grin on my neck. “You can be in denial all you want. It won’t change—”

“I prefer my denial, thank you very much.” I slid my laptop over to the side. “Where are you guys going?”

That hesitation, I hated that hesitation. It told me he was considering keeping something from me, maybe not a big something, but a something nevertheless. And if he wasn’t going to hide something, he would sugarcoat it, stretch the detail so that it didn’t seem as dangerous or awful as it probably was.

“It’s probably better if you don’t know.”

“Let’s say I wasn’t in denial about you going off and committing more crimes. Theoretically, when could I expect you back? When would my worrying countdown begin?”

He spun me around so I was facing him, the smell of clove even more pronounced than before. I didn’t care. With all my faults, who was I to lecture about a bad habit?

“I have to go on Friday.”

“No.” I wrapped my arms around his neck. I never asked about what Charlie did during the week, I just avoided the local newspapers and hoped I’d never read anything about cargo disappearing from semi-local vineyards, storage facilities, boat yards, or truck stops.

In a second he became serious again. I think he could probably feel the way I clung to him, desperate, not unlike a child. I hated that my emotions were so obvious in a single act, yet at the same time I didn’t know how to say it out loud. I didn’t know how to be strong enough to make him stay.

“You know I’ll always come back to you. Don’t you?” Charlie kissed the top of my head, and despite how much I willed myself, those same tears of fear sprung to my eyes anyway.

“Do you promise?”

“I promise, Addie. You know I promise.”

Chapter 6

After he left, I diligently worked on all things academic, venturing to keep my thoughts off of Charlie and my worry. I agreed that I would still come to Ben and Elise’s for the weekend as usual, though without Charlie, the entire idea seemed somewhat pointless. And though he had left for ‘work’ before, since my move to California, the majority of his absences had occurred during the work week, while I was busy with school, so I was slightly less inclined to worry.

In the meantime, however, there was talk of potential summer plans, and birthdays, but I couldn’t relinquish the nagging feeling that kept me anxious, that looming feeling that not just something bad was about to happen, but that its gears were already beginning to wind in that direction.

I hummed my nervous energy the same way I always did, focusing on the dreadful stacks of econ notes I had taken over the last few weeks. They helped some, but occasionally I’d catch myself and my finger bouncing around on sloppily drawn graph lines, imagining they were the outlines of lips or ears of the one I loved. And the more frequently I caught myself, the more I felt my stomach tighten, not out of my girlish lust, but from the pestering feeling that not all was well.

I was so preoccupied with my thoughts that for once I didn’t hear Melinda returning from class. As usual, she was chatting with a guy in the hall. I was aware she had many male friends whose friendship extended beyond the classical realms of friendship, but I was also willing to respect her privacy if she respected mine. So I looked back down and pretended to fiddle with my highlighter when she walked in, lip-gloss smeared and cheeks flushed. She leaned against the door after she shut it, then heaved her backpack across the room and sighed.

“Hey.”

“Oh, hi.”

As though she hadn’t been making-out in the hallway, Melinda flounced over to her desk and spun in the office chair, wrapped in different shades of duct tape. It was hard to tell if the chair had ever been genuinely broken, or if that was just another tell-tale sign of the whimsical doings of a theater-art major. 

“How was statistics?”

She groaned. “Boring. What else?”

I glanced back down at my notebook and flipped it back and forth. I had somewhat hoped for one of her stories about someone I didn’t know, gossip that could make me feel normal, give me names to put with faces, but she seemed preoccupied with something of her own and I felt bad for assuming she could entertain me.

Instead, I let my eyes wander. Both sides of the room were splattered in posters from Broadway plays and the faces of contemporary actors whose names I wouldn’t know if my life depended on it. I stared at the torn edges of one poster, remembering the rose bedroom I had at Ben and Elise’s house. How could I really compare the two? Still, it wasn’t like Melinda’s decorating had ever bothered me.

“So listen…” She picked up a cotton ball and dabbed something on it. “I think you should come with me to rehearsal tonight.”

I looked up from my notebook, slightly startled that she was even acknowledging me. For a second I thought she was practicing lines. “Say what now?”

“Rehearsal.” She wiped the color off her eyes. “You should go with me. Afterwards, a bunch of us going to a party at one of the Phi Beta houses. You’ll have to borrow something of mine, maybe some lipstick…but those Phi Beta boys will go for you, a lot of them like the ‘good girls.’”

A few months ago, I might have blushed at the semi-compliment, but Charlie had revealed this same bit of information to me before, and though I was reluctant to admit it, there was something confident in knowing that someone already found you sexually attractive. It made the world less scary, gave you enough power to be a little less shy.

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

I saw her eyes roll from her reflection in the mirror. I often saw her practicing facial expressions there. It seemed like other than reading, it was the only homework she ever had.

“We’re doing
Othello
for the spring play. Did I tell you that?”

I did my best to turn my attention back to my notes while simultaneously trying to picture Charlie grinning and safe with the guys on the
Diyu
. I failed at both. I reminded myself that I was being paranoid, that looking up severe weather alerts, and all of the things that could have gone wrong wouldn’t help. “I’ve been listening to you practice your lines for the last month.”

“Well, I think you should come with me. You don’t have classes tonight, do you?”

I shook my head. “I kind of have plans…”

“Plans? What plans? You hardly talk to anybody outside of our floor and I don’t think you’ve been to a single party since you got here.”

The thought of Elise’s party made me cringe. The best part of it had been Charlie, of course, but even with my semi-new confidence, the idea of socializing made me uneasy and I didn’t know if I was willing to test it.

Though, what if Elise and Charlie had a point? What if I was so preoccupied by worrying and school that it literally drove me crazy? Kids in college had nervous breakdowns all the time, plagued by stress and the pressures of early adulthood before they were ready. For weeks after returning from my abduction, I’d see print-outs Dad tried to hide from me between the pages of fantasy football magazines about breakdowns and PTSD. At the time I admired his efforts but was annoyed by all the tip-toeing. Now there was less admiration but just as much tip-toeing. Maybe that was what gave me this feeling I had now, this edgy feel, like needles poking at my neck, encouraging me to turn around though there was nothing there.

Maybe I did need to get out. Maybe I did need to have fun.

I reasoned that for once, a party might not be such a bad idea. A new kind of distraction from my worries could be healthy, right? Besides, with Dad constantly asking me about my friends, it would give me something safe to talk about.

“Okay.” I flipped my notebook shut. “I guess I’ll try it.”

“Cool.” She didn’t even look away from the mirror. “But we kind of have to go in like a minute, so you might want to get ready.”

I sat up and smoothed out my blouse. “Ready.”

“You might be hopeless,” she mumbled.

“What do you mean?”

She sighed and went to one of her Tupperware containers that contained her costume jewelry. And though there were mornings when Melinda couldn’t even find a pen to take to class, I had to give her credit that every jewelry piece was organized according to color and all the chains and gems untangled from one another. She definitely had her priorities.

“Hmm,” she said after fishing around for a minute. “Try these.”

She handed me a pair of loopy turquoise earrings that had an antique backing. I thought they were a little too extravagant for a college party but she laughed and promised they were only fakes anyway.

“Here,” she said, rustling through her closet. “I have this great little cami tank top you can wear that matches…” 

Once we were ready, I grabbed a book, despite Melinda’s complaining the entire way to Warren Auditorium. I knew the studying would give me more Charlie time later and ignored her nagging. We had to take one of the school shuttles to get there, and it made me realize Melinda definitely had a point about me getting out more. The auditorium was on the other side of campus that I had hardly ever seen before, and with it, new groups of faces and personalities.

There were some theatre groupies smoking cigarettes around the pillars outside but few others. I kept stride with Melinda, wondering if any of these people were as good at reading body language as they thought they were. One of Melinda’s friends waved us over and I felt as though I was playing follow the leader throughout the awkward introductions.

“Come on, we’re just about to get started.”

A green-haired boy used his ID to scan all of us in and I stuck behind the group with the same vacillation I felt when I was first taken hostage. I had no idea what to do with my hands or what expressions were appropriate at any given moment. I tried not to focus on the sweat that broke out on my forehead and palms, making it that much worse. If I couldn’t handle hanging out with a few of my peers, how was I supposed to deal with an internship when the time came or the interviews for law school?

Luckily, I was invisible in the world of dancers, singers, and actors; a universe unto itself where everyone very much wanted to be noticed. I sat in the most random seat in the most random aisle I could manage while Melinda and her group went backstage. I took out a copy of
D’entre les morts
though I could hardly read a single page. I saw some of the theater groupies listening to something I once heard Melinda call Swedish death metal while repainting old patchwork scenery. The director of the theater department, the green-haired guy and a few others were doing something on the scaffolding above, and an older woman, dressed eccentrically, was waddling around Melinda and the other actors, mumbling to herself with mounds of purple cloth. She didn’t seem to care whether she bumped into anyone or not. Most of the students onstage however, didn’t notice, and those who did weren’t bothered by her at all. I figured out after a minute that the small groups they collected in were being supervised by professors in the department.

I strained my ears to listen. I quickly gathered that Melinda worked with a student everyone called Carter. I didn’t know the girl playing Desdemona, but it was easy to see by the way the stagehands and The Clown sneered that she might be something of a prima donna.

“Where should I lose that handkerchief, Emilia?”

Melinda’s voice perked up above Desdemona. And I had to hand it to her—her obsessive practice was starting to show. 

“I know not, madam.”

“Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse

Full of crusadoes. And but my noble Moor

Is true of mind and made of no such baseness

As jealous creatures are, it were enough

To put him to ill thinking.”

The lights went out and apologies were shouted from above before they came back on. I saw one of the supervising professors swallow something from a pill cartridge before telling everyone to continue.

“
Is he not jealous?”

“Who, he? I think the sun where he was born

Drew all such humors from him.”

“Look where he comes.”

Melinda left the scene, leaving her marked piece of painters’ tape on the stage and returning to the wings. The scene continued without her.

I hadn’t read
Othello
since I was a kid. Mom always said the best way to start Shakespeare was with his tragedies because they were the most interesting. When Robbie and I had the chicken pox we got through
Hamlet
,
Romeo and Juliet
, and about halfway through
Othello
before Robbie was ready to poke his eyes out just to have an excuse to get out of it. Later on, he had to read them for high school English anyway, so it didn’t make any difference, but Mom waited another year or two before letting me dive into Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and more perverse tragedies; having to stop every two seconds to explain the contexts to me.

Though I was never a big fan of the tragedies, I’d have to say
Othello
is one of my favorites. There’s just enough political backdrop and themes of social reform to go with the drama; a good balance. And while Othello himself was a prideful idiot (as most tragic heroes are) at least there was some substance there. The lovers in question actually get to know each other before getting married and the affection Othello and Desdemona have for one another seem genuine. But then I always had to wonder if she just married the guy to piss off her father. And there is that perpetual logic that if Othello was
really
in love with Desdemona he wouldn’t have killed her no matter what she did or didn’t do. But once I really start thinking about it, I have to remind myself about the correlation between love and jealousy. The theme of madness.

The stagehand mouthed, ‘
Enter Othello,’
and waved a neon clipboard like a music conductor, but Carter was already there without so much as a script. 

“
I will not leave him now till ah Cassio

Be called to him. um—How is ’t with you, my lord?”

“Well, my good lady,”
Othello called off to the side as though the play was in full assemble. It was easy to see he was passionate about his art.
“Oh, hardness to dissemble!—How do you, Desdemona?”

I faded out between the scenes, glancing at the clock on the wall somewhere between acts four and five. It told me it was already past six, meaning that I had just missed the last afternoon bus that would take me into Healdsburg. I felt like I had only been there for a few minutes, but apparently I was way off.

D’entre les morts
fell out of my lap when I realized just how late I was. Fumbling like a numbskull, I dug through my bag to get my Charlie phone out, typing out a message faster than the phone could keep up with and sending it out to the only number I used other than Charlie’s.