P
eople laughed as they passed him in the hallway, but when they saw the expression on his face and the blood smeared across it, they stopped. Only Megan Brenner spoke:
“You okay, Craig? Did someone punch you in the face or something? What’s on the back of your shirt? That’s not blood, too, is it?”
Craig said nothing to her. Megan was perhaps the most petite fully grown human being he’d ever known. He could have wrapped his arms around her waist twice. He could have carried her across the Sahara and not even gotten thirsty or winded. He and Perry had taken to calling her Mega, because it was so absurd. He looked at her—that face peering up at him, the size of a cat’s—and all he could do was nod.
He went to the boys’ bathroom. No one else was in there. Just the slick, bright, urine-colored tiles (Perry had suggested they’d once been white; Craig had said the tile people had simply been thinking ahead) vaguely reflecting him at the sink as he washed the blood off his face, careful to avoid the actual mirror and his actual reflection in it, and tossed the T-shirt with the manicotti on it into the garbage can, and headed to his room to put on a new one.
Perry was back from the cafeteria himself, sitting at his desk chair with his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when Craig came in, but he cleared his throat. For a terrible second Craig thought maybe Perry was going to say something, that maybe he’d even try to apologize, or explain, and if that happened, there was no way Craig was going to be able to take it:
He would have to kill Perry, or die trying.
But that wasn’t what he wanted to do, not at all.
Perry had been on top of him, straddling him, not that different, really, from the way what’s-her-name, the girl in the hot tub (what
was
her name?) had straddled him in the MacGuirres’ pool house back in Fredonia, looking down on him, staring him in the eyes, except that he’d been inside that girl, and she’d been looking into him, pretending that fucking was some big spiritual experience.
He doubted it was, since she had the same experience every Saturday night in Fredonia with a different guy. She’d been stoned as hell, and so was he, but Craig remembered her saying as she stared into his eyes, “I know what you’re thinking. You and I are one . . .”
And how she’d slapped him hard when he started to laugh.
Even then, with his dick seven inches into her, Craig couldn’t remember her name, and he’d told her that.
But Perry.
Craig had known something at that moment. Something transcendent. Truly, this time, as Perry was straddling him, staring down at him, slamming him into the floor, Craig had felt his whole life grabbed like his T-shirt in Perry’s fist, and yanked, and shoved back down, and it
was
a spiritual experience.
“Fucker. Asshole. Listen. You stupid, stupid idiot.”
Perry was his friend. His first real friend.
He didn’t want to kill Perry. He wanted Perry to be Perry. Underlining shit in a book like his life depended on it, giving Craig advice on how to keep his side of the room a little bit tidier, piling up his salad bowl with things his mother must have threatened him for eighteen years to eat, and that he was still eating. He wanted Perry to be his roommate, his friend.
But what he
had to do
was see Nicole.
That
had nothing to do with Perry.
Luckily, Perry didn’t speak.
Craig grabbed his coat and closed the door more carefully than usual behind him—not slamming it, but not leaving any doubt that he was closing it, either.
He headed for Lucas’s room.
He didn’t have time to walk to the OTT house.
He needed a car.
J
eremy purred in her lap as Shelly sat at the computer and scrolled through the articles. There were a hundred of them, and she was familiar with all of them, but they were cast in a new light now.
The
lake of blood,
the
beyond recognition
, the
burned over ninety-percent of her body
, the driver of the car
fleeing the scene on foot
, and herself: the middle-aged woman who was the first to arrive on the scene, and who failed to give the emergency operator enough information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to locate it in time to save the victim.
According to the articles, by the time the EMTs had arrived, the victim had been abandoned, lying in a lake of her own blood, burned beyond recognition, in the backseat of the vehicle for over an hour.
No.
Not even close.
Shelly remembered one EMT hurrying out of the ambulance. He had a large black satchel in one hand and a fire extinguisher under his arm. Shelly had stood up from where she’d been kneeling beside the girl and the boy, on the other side of the ditch of water she’d had to wade through to get there.
She’d waved her arms to get his attention.
Naturally enough, he’d gone first to the car, and he was peering in the window. He had no way of knowing that the victim had been thrown from the vehicle, and how far.
“Over here,” Shelly had called out, and he’d turned, looking confused.
Where, she’d wondered then, were the others? Surely, there was someone with him—following, driving, on the way.
“Ma’am,” the EMT had shouted. “Don’t touch her! Step back! Please return to your own vehicle immediately.”
Reluctantly, Shelly had followed his directions. She made her way back through the ditch of cold water, passing him as she did so. He didn’t even look at her. He’d tossed the fire extinguisher onto the ground, and he seemed to be muttering under his breath.
When she stumbled up on the other side, she’d looked behind her again:
The couple in the moonlight.
The boy with his arms wrapped around the girl.
Shelly had seen the girl up close. She’d seen and touched both of them. They were warm. They were alive. She’d been grateful to feel that warmth. The girl was wearing a black dress, and it made her bright gold hair shine even more brightly in the moonlight. When Shelly put her hand on the girl’s neck to feel for a pulse (and she had felt it, that little insistent throbbing of some artery beneath the skin), her eyelids had fluttered. The boy had kissed her forehead then, and then he’d sobbed with relief. He’d said her name. Nicole
.
And at the sound of her name, Nicole had opened her eyes and looked at him, smiling and wincing at the same time.
Fine, Shelly had thought. She’s fine. Bruised and shocked and disoriented, but utterly alive.
S
helly opened the next, familiar Google result, and there was Josie in her black dress, black sunglasses, a wristful of black bracelets. The sun shone down on her black hair and those elaborate, exotic earrings she was wearing, which were Denise Graham’s dead great-grandmother’s. Beyond her, a fresh orchard was in bloom.
Shelly enlarged the photo.
She looked more closely.
They were all wearing the same black dress.
Every single sorority sister.
The same V neck, the ruffle at the hem. The sleevelessness and drape of the dresses identical. The small satin ribbon around the waist. Shelly remembered saying to Josie one afternoon in bed, “The thing I hated about being in a sorority was that we were all supposed to look and act alike.” And how Josie had snorted. “Like that’s not how it is with everybody? Like all the lesbians your age aren’t all trying to look and act alike? Like all the counter-culture kids, or all the conservatives, or all the professors or librarians or bookstore clerks around here aren’t, every one of them, completely interchangeable?”
Interchangeable
.
The word, frankly, had surprised Shelly.
It had seemed beyond Josie, somehow, that word, as if she’d been thinking about sameness, about sororities, about the human condition or
something
for a long time, trying to find just the right word to describe it. Thumbing through the thesaurus. The effect of hearing Josie use this word, so perfect, was not unlike the way it might have felt if Jeremy had suddenly turned to her and expressed a dislike for a certain brand of cat food. (
I would prefer no more Fancy Feast, if you don’t mind.
) It seemed somehow to change the rules of the game she thought they’d been playing, if only for a second or two.
In this photograph, there were at least thirty girls, and every one wore the exact same dress. Where had they gotten so many at once, especially since nearly every one of these girls would have been the same size? What store, what catalog, what warehouse, could possibly have held them all?
And the black sunglasses. The black bracelets. Some with straight blond hair, shoulder length, and the rest with straight black hair, shoulder length. Not one of them was smiling, but neither were any of them crying.
Shelly enlarged the image once more, and then again, and when she leaned farther forward, with more urgency this time, Jeremy jumped off her lap and went scrambling across the wood floors, sliding on his claws into the hallway.
“Jeremy? Baby?” Shelly called after him, still intent on her computer screen, but he didn’t come back. She’d scared him.
One more double click, and the central thing in this image became something she had only peripherally registered until now:
A single blurred girl behind the scenes, moving with what looked like genuine swiftness through the parking lot behind them all. Her arms were swinging at her sides as if she were moving quickly. One foot was an inch above the ground. Her blond hair was blowing around behind her, either because of the swiftness with which she was traveling or because of a stiff breeze. There was a purposeful expression on her face. She was looking straight ahead. A few nice cars glinted in the sunlight around her.
There were still a couple of branches of blossoms framing the screen.
Shelly touched one of those without taking her eyes off the girl’s face.
The multiple enlargements had obscured her features, but even through this veil of haze and distorted pixels, Shelly felt she knew exactly who this was, and where she’d seen her before.
With a trembling hand, she hit the left-hand arrow a few times until she was back at the article attached to the image, and the little box to the left of Josie’s pretty feet.
“Craig Clements-Rabbitt has not yet been accused of a crime, inspiring outrage within the grief-stricken Omega Theta Tau community.”
Shelly sat back, put a hand to her forehead, and then over her eyes. She had to find him. Why hadn’t she done it already? What had she been waiting for? There were things this boy needed to know that only she could tell him. Her hand was still trembling as she typed in the Internet address of the university directory, and realized with some chagrin how incredibly easy he was to find. Like the Grahams, like all of them, he was captured there in the Web—his address and phone number and all the public and personal details of his life. Shelly jotted down the address and grabbed her purse, hurrying out the door.
“P
rofessor Polson’s on her way over.”
“Our professor is on her way to your
apartment
?” Karess asked. She was standing by the window with her arms crossed over her chest. Since they’d left the morgue and come back to the apartment, she’d never stopped shaking. She and Perry had walked so quickly they might as well have been running, and he was, himself, sweating in his jacket, but when they got to the front door and he saw how pale she was, and how much she was trembling, he took her in his arms and held her as she muttered, “Oh, God, Oh, my God, I remember that guy. Me and my roommate bought weed from him during Orientation. Oh, my God, Perry, that was his dead body.”
Perry had pulled her into the hallway and pressed her up against the mailboxes, trying to warm her, hold her close enough to calm her—or maybe himself—but it hadn’t worked at all. Hours and many cups of hot coffee later, Karess was still shaking, standing against the window with her legs pressed to the radiator. She’d barely spoken until now, except to say hello to Craig when Perry introduced them to each other, and to say no when he asked her if she wanted something to eat.
“Does Professor Polson spend a
lot
of time here?”
“We’re working together on—”
“Yeah,” Karess said.
“Look,” Perry said. “She’s never been here before, but this thing, with Lucas—I could tell on the phone, she’s really upset.”
“Fuck
her
,” Karess said, suddenly completely animated. The jewels and feathers she was wearing started to swing and flutter around her. She stomped the heel of her boot hard enough that Perry felt pretty sure that if anyone had been sleeping in the apartment below them, they weren’t anymore. “
She
was upset? She had us all set up, Perry. Couldn’t you tell? That’s why she left us all there, and went out in the alley. She knew there was a body in there, that it was a guy our age. I mean, that was her other boyfriend in there, that diener. You didn’t notice the big hug and all that? You think he didn’t bother to tell her there was a dead college kid in the morgue today? Professor Polson’s been trying to scare the shit out of us since day one, and I for one plan to file a complaint about it. This class has been a freak show from the beginning. My parents are
not
going to be amused.”
“She didn’t know,” Perry said. “I’m telling you, she had no way of knowing. She was as shocked as the rest of us. I was there when she recognized Lucas. I thought she was going to pass out.”
“Yeah. Right,” Karess said, and turned her back to him. He could see her shoulder blades under her sweater and the tank top and sheer blouse she was wearing. It crossed his mind that, undressed, she might be either impossibly beautiful or a skeleton. She was always decorated in so many layers of flowing clothes he could never have begun to guess how much she weighed, but it couldn’t have been much.
From the bathroom, he could hear the shower running, and Craig in there bumping around in the tiny shower stall, and then the intercom buzzed through the apartment, and Perry hit the button to open the apartment house door. Karess snorted out of her nose, and Perry went to stand in the hallway, listening to the sound of what he thought were Professor Polson’s black boots on the stairwell (solid, steady steps in sharp heels, as if she were tired or trying to figure out if she was in the right building, heading toward the right apartment), so he was surprised when the woman turned at the top of the stairwell, and she wasn’t Professor Polson. At first he thought somehow that she was his aunt Rachel. Same coloring. Reddish-blond hair. Pale skin. Maybe forty years old. Pretty, but not trying to be. This woman was wearing a silk dress and a very large black down parka. “Are you Craig?” she asked.