“I know. I’ve been saving them since you were little. I thought it would make a nice project for you and me and Willie some afternoon.”
“Oh.”
“. . . ”
“. . . ”
“But not anymore,” she says.
“I guess not.”
“I can always do it by myself. I think I must have more than five hundred by now.”
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Why don’t you just buy a hammock?”
She opens her mouth, as if to answer right away, closes it, opens it again. She looks like she has no idea where she even is. “I’ve been saving these for so long.” It seems like the thought has never occurred to her. She frowns, puts her empty beer can on the counter. “I have to go check on your father.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Where?”
“In the medicine cabinet.”
“Oh. Nothing. Something to help me sleep. I don’t think it matters, though.”
“Take some nighttime cold medicine.”
She shakes her head. “You can’t mix those things with alcohol, honey. It’ll kill you.”
My mother’s problem, I realize, isn’t that she’s a drunk, or that she’s cold or uncaring. I have an idea of who she is, of the kind of mom she tried to be when I was a kid. I imagine that she woke up one day, looked around at her life as a parent, and realized that it was not anything like she’d expected. It was our fault, I know. Will was so sick, and the two of us were just so bad.
Downstairs, Mazzie is curled in a ball in the crook of my parents’ sofa, her hands pressed together as though in prayer and slid between her upper thighs. Her mouth hangs open slightly.
I stand over her for a while, just watching, and then I tap her on the shoulder with one finger.
She opens her eyes a sliver. When she begins to speak, the spit that has pooled in her cheek spills over onto her pillow.
“What do you want?”
I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I have to get out of here. Right now.”
She sits up. “What, you mean now? It’s the middle of the night. I was asleep.”
“We have to go back.”
She can sense the urgency in my voice. She moves slowly at first, gathering up her things, and then faster as she sees me shoving my clothes into my duffel bag, not even bothering to change out of my pj’s.
“Should we say good-bye to your parents?” she asks.
I shake my head. “It’s done.”
Since we haven’t even been gone twenty-four hours, nobody at the dorms seems to notice we ever left. We have to sneak up the fire escape and into our room through the window, since it’s the middle of the night. At least we missed Lindsey’s Halloween party.
The dorm is deserted; aside from Mr. and Mrs. Christianson downstairs, Mazzie and I are the only students left for the weekend.
While we were driving home, I told her what happened with my brother.
“Do you think he did it?” she asked.
I didn’t answer her for a while. As I was driving, the highway stretching out in a long straight line before me, I remembered so many things about my big brother: the way he trained our first dog, Wags, to sit and stay and roll over. The time Will saved a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and tried to nurse it back to health. Will was devastated when it died. I remember my brother as such a gentle and loving child, the best big brother a girl could hope for, but I remember when I started to sense our family’s world tilting on its axis, the kaleidoscope turning, when things started to go wrong. From then on, it was like we were still ourselves, but our lives played out as though reflected back to us from a funhouse mirror. But I know it’s real: it happened, it’s still happening, and eventually it will be over. Maybe it already is.
“I think it was his roommate,” I said. “I can’t imagine my own brother—”
“Katie,” Mazzie interrupted, “that’s just it. You can’t imagine your own brother, period. You have no idea what he’s like now.”
“But I remember what he was like,” I insisted. “And there still must be a part of the old Will somewhere inside, right?”
Mazzie shrugged. “Whatever you want to believe.”
I expect everyone to know. I expect it to be on the news, to be the absolute talk of the school. But nobody treats me any differently. Actually, that’s not true. People are happy for me. On the bulletin board in the cafeteria, Mrs. Waugh has posted a list of all the seniors and all the colleges they’ve been admitted to so far. Beneath my name, in twelve-point font, it says, “Yale University.”
“I haven’t gotten my letter yet,” I tell her.
She gives me a wide smile. “Katie, you should be more confident. You were there for two summers, correct?”
I nod.
“And both summers, you went to swimming practice every morning.”
“Yes.”
“Beyond that, you have an impeccable record here, you have great SAT scores, you’re in AP classes, you’ve been scouted by coaches all over the country, and you have letters of recommendation from your professors at Yale.”
I nod again.
“Why wouldn’t you get in? How could that possibly happen?”
I lick my lips and give her the biggest smile I can muster. “You’re right,” I say. “I’m sure I’ll get in.” Apparently she hasn’t talked to Solinger lately.
chapter 15
Because it’s the last weekend before everybody goes home for Christmas break, we’ve all decided to do something really special together by heading down to Virginia for the weekend. Our plan is to visit some of last year’s seniors who go to college now at the University of Virginia. According to the social grapevine, there’s supposed to be some really superb marijuana available. Some college-grade marijuana.
It’s a relief to get away. Despite the letter I wrote him, which I don’t even know if he ever got, I haven’t heard from Will, and it’s killing me. My parents don’t like to talk about him, or what’s going to happen next. I have nightmares again almost every time I close my eyes for more than a few seconds. When sleep takes hold of me, I feel my insides coming undone, my whole self unglued and whirring like goo in a centrifuge. I feel a near-constant tingling in my fingertips, and I start to have difficulty breathing again—I can’t relax knowing that he’s all alone somewhere, probably scared and confused, and even if he isn’t the brother I knew, there will always be a part of him who’s still my brother, somehow, in some way.
Ordinarily, none of the boarding students would ever have permission to visit a college campus without an adult chaperone. Getting out of town this weekend has taken a complex web of lies—lying to Mrs. Christianson, lying to Lindsey’s parents, lying to Estella’s parents. So we are totally disregarding the Woodsdale Academy honor code in order to spend a weekend at college. I don’t feel that guilty. Seniors are supposed to do things like this.
Once we get to UVA, I make a conscious decision to try to forget about Will and have a good time. It’s an odd mix of people this weekend: of course there’s me, Drew, Mazzie, Lindsey, Estella—but then there’s the people we’re staying with: Stetson McClure and Jeremy Chase. Despite all the drama over Estella, they’re roommates. And this weekend the rest of their crew from high school is visiting, too.
The second I see Stetson, it’s obvious that college has only made him cooler. He takes us down the hall in his bathrobe, drinking a forty of malt liquor in a paper bag, to show us the signs that he’s made and posted all over the dorm. They say:
Do you find yourself feeling alone at college?
Is it difficult for you to make friends?
Do you feel like nobody understands you?
(And then, all the way at the bottom of the page)
IF SO, THEN YOU ARE A LOSER.
We all agree that it’s the funniest thing any of us has ever seen. Stetson catches my eye while I’m laughing and winks at me.
&nbs
p; For a second, I don’t know how to respond—where’s Drew? Did he notice what Stetson just did?
But I have some experience with college boys now; I’m not as freaked as I would have been, say, a year ago. When I look back at Stetson, intending to smile, he’s talking to Lindsey—he’s telling her she’s really “filled out in all the right places”—and everyone has turned around to head back to his room.
Stetson lives in a suite, which is as big as an apartment. The whole setup feels very grown-up. He and Jeremy live with another guy from Woodsdale whom I don’t know very well, John Whitaker.
When we get to the suite, the boys show us how they’ve taken all the shelves out of their refrigerator in order to make room for a keg. In the bathroom tub, several bags of ice have been spread out to hold the contents of the fridge that wouldn’t fit around the keg: a few gallons of whole milk, half a case of Schlitz, a package of American cheese, and what looks like a lifetime supply of ketchup and soy sauce packets from take-out restaurants.
Stetson sits down next to me on the sofa and gives me a tap on the shoulder “So . . . Katie,” he says while everybody else talks and drinks and looks around, “how do you like the place?”
“Are you kidding? It’s awesome.” I stare at the walls, plastered with band posters, the coffee table covered in ashtrays and beer bottles and college-level textbooks and a few porno DVDs. “It’s just so . . . man, it’s like you’re a real grown-up.”
“How’s the swimming coming?” he asks.
“Pretty good,” I say. I’m lying. We only took second place at OVACs this year, and since I’m the captain, everyone thinks it was my fault. They don’t understand that I can’t breathe, not even underwater anymore. They don’t know that I barely sleep at night, waiting for the phone to ring. Most mornings, my arms and legs are so achy from lack of sleep, I can barely force myself to move through the water.
“Do you know where you’re going to college yet?” Stetson asks.
I nod. “I think I’m going to Yale.”
His perfect mouth forms an O. “Yale. Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow, that’s great. Did you apply early admission, or what?”
I try to give him a coy grin. “No. But I’m not worried.”
“Well, if you change your mind . . .” He kind of tilts his head to one side and grins. “You can always come here. I’ll swim with you.”
Is he trying to be sexy? Is Stetson trying to flirt with me?
“That would be fun,” I say.
Then he reaches over and puts his hand on my leg.
“It sure would.” He doesn’t seem at all fazed by all the people around us—not even Drew, who is only a few feet away. Nobody is paying attention to our conversation—but even if they were, I don’t think he’d care. Guys like Stetson—they’re the kind of guys who could start their own religion if they wanted to.
I’m drinking a lukewarm beer—the keg still isn’t chilled—and my body has sunk deeply into the couch, which is probably several decades old and has more threadbare spots on the upholstery than I can count. “Good,” I say, “then we should do that sometime.” I have no idea why he’s paying so much attention to me, and I don’t really care. I already feel so out of control inside, I can’t help myself from wanting to get a little bit reckless. Besides, if Drew were paying any attention to me, I wouldn’t be talking to Stetson.
He nods, smiling some more. “Good.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
Drew and Mazzie are in the kitchenette. I think they’re talking about some type of biblical theory. I watch Drew drinking a beer and shaking his head, disagreeing with her about something. Mazzie looks bored. John Whitaker has decided that we should all watch Beetlejuice while we break into this half pound of reefer that he’s produced for us from underneath a sofa cushion.
“Do you want another beer?” Stetson asks me.
“Sure.”
“I’ll get you one.” He gets up and heads toward the kitchenette, then stops, twirls around, and points his finger at me. “Do you want a glass, too?”
What a gentleman. What a fox. “That’s okay. Just a beer.” He didn’t ask anybody else if they wanted a beer. He just asked me. I light up a cigarette and cross my legs, exhaling delicately to showcase my sexy smoke.
I’ve been saying for a long time that I’m going to stop smoking cigarettes now, but the plan is constantly getting postponed. I can give them up for a few weeks, and then I start again. And every time I start telling people that I’m going to quit smoking for good, they all tell me that I can’t—that I won’t be me if I quit smoking. And everybody else smokes, so what would be the point, really? But most mornings when I jump in the water, I can feel my lungs getting full too soon. I know it isn’t just the stress of Will that’s been slowing me down. If I don’t quit smoking soon, I’ll have full-blown asthma. When I fall asleep above Mazzie, in our room, we are a two-woman symphony: she grinds her teeth, wearing through one mouth guard after another, while I wheeze. We have our rhythm: crunch-phee, crunch-phee—it goes like that all night. She pushes in and I push out, each separate noise competing for space, and in the morning she rubs her jaw in the mirror while I cough over the sink, and we both wonder what the hell is wrong with us. Why we can’t just relax, for once.
By three a.m., everybody in the suite has fallen asleep. Mazzie is out on the sofa, a trickle of drool working its way into the foam upholstery, her forehead sweaty. Lindsey lies bowed over an armchair, and Drew is asleep facedown on the floor in a sleeping bag, which I’m supposed to be sharing with him. Estella is in Jeremy’s bedroom. There are Schlitz cans covering the countertops in the kitchen and the living room coffee table. There are ashtrays overflowing everywhere. Cigarette butts are ground into the hardwood floor. The ceiling is cloaked in fat gray swabs of smoke.
Stetson and I are the only ones still awake, determined to drink all the beer in the keg.
“It was a plan to save money,” he explains, referring to the keg. “We figured that, if we invested in the keg, it would last us a lot longer than a case or two of beer. As it is, our alcohol budget pretty much breaks us.”
The keg is almost kicked; a few more drinks and it will be gone. “How long ago did you get the keg?” I ask.
He grins. “Yesterday.”
I can feel myself growing more and more dehydrated; when I wake up in the morning I’ll go into the bathroom and my pee will come out like dark yellow syrup, no matter how much water I drink tonight.
We both fall silent. It’s strange to be the only two people awake in the room, trying to have a conversation while everyone around us is unconscious. We both watch as, in her sleep, Mazzie rubs a finger back and forth across the bottom of her nose. I know it’s probably the smoke bothering her. Finally she sneezes. The sneeze sets off a small chain of motion in the room: Lindsey opens her eyes for a moment, looks around in suspended panic before falling back asleep almost immediately. Drew rolls onto his back, kicking over several empty beer cans in the process. One of them rolls along the uneven hardwood floor, across the room, coming to a halt when it makes contact with Stetson’s foot.
He turns his head, looking at me. “Are you tired?”
I am. I am so, so tired. “Not really.”
“Me neither.” He licks his lips. “We should go somewhere else and talk. I don’t want to wake everyone up.”
The common area of the suite is big, big enough that we can move to the other side of the room, behind the sofa, and it’s almost like we’re somewhere else entirely. I don’t know why we don’t go into his bedroom. The thought crosses my mind that I’ve completely misunderstood his intentions. Maybe he really does just want to talk.
I figure out soon enough that I haven’t misunderstood at all. We sit in a corner of the room, where Stetson moves close enough that his head is almost touching mine. “Shh,” he whispers, putting a finger to his lips. “We should still be quiet, okay? Quiet like mice.” He pause
s. “It’s really hot in here, isn’t it?”
Before I can respond, he reaches behind his head and pulls his shirt off. Then he leans over and tugs off his socks.
He leans against the wall, takes a long sip of beer, and smiles. “There. That’s better.” He doesn’t have any chest hair. His hair is just long enough so that it’s growing into small yellow curls, just below his neck. I give the curls a little tug and his shoulders go up. He elbows me and says, “Hey, that tickles,” so I do it some more.
We’re positioned in such a way that I can see Drew’s sleeping form—at least, from the shoulders down—from where I’m sitting. His free hand reaches outward, in my direction, palm up. His fingers are callused from building houses all year for Habitat.
In contrast, Stetson’s fingers are smooth and boyish. They’re sweaty on my neck. We start kissing and I feel tingles in my whole body, partly because it feels good to kiss him, and partly because I’ve got one eye open, looking at Drew, trying to figure out how it feels to hurt him. It feels awful, worse than I could have imagined, but I don’t stop.
“Let’s go into the bathroom,” Stetson whispers.
I hesitate. But only for a second. I’m so tired of being the one trying to convince someone—my own boyfriend, for godsakes—to want me. I missed my opportunity with Eddie. I’m not going to miss it again. What does it matter? Drew already thinks I’m going to hell. Right now, I feel like he’s probably right, and I don’t even care. At least I’ll get to see my brother.
As soon as the door is closed, Stetson pushes his hands up my shirt, down my pants, rubbing against me, tugging my clothes off.
I am leaning against the wall, self-conscious as Stetson stands a few feet away, gazing down at my body. All that’s left are my underwear. He nods at them. They are pink with tiny images of Tweetie Bird printed on them. “Take those off.”
Drew would never tell me what to do like this. But that’s why I’m here: I don’t want Drew. “Why?” I ask. Even as the word leaves my lips, I can see the mildest hint of annoyance in Stetson’s expression. Before it has a chance to surface, though, he covers it up with his usual, easygoing smile, as though he’s amused by my naiveté.