She lifted the video camera up to her eye, but did not push the record button. She had already seen all she wanted.
Jordan could feel a rush of warmth, even though the air was chilly. Here is the first fight, she told herself. Don’t panic. He was standing right here, right where you are right now. What else does it tell you?
One answer she already knew, and she reminded herself of it, speaking out loud to no one: “He’s been watching all of us for months.” The video was the culmination of many hours. It wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment picture.
This seemed completely unfair to her. It was like a surprise test in a classroom on material that she’d neglected to study. Only failure here meant much more than a lousy mark.
She reached out and idly ran her fingers over the pitted brick of the science building, as if the old stone could tell her something else.
Jordan had the sensation there was some reply to her touch to be found, but it seemed to elude her in the late afternoon gloom. Torn-a part of her wanted to flee, a part of her told her to keep looking because there might be other answers just lying about near the trash-she pivoted. For a moment, she stared at the gray concrete wall behind the trash containers, her eyes flowing over all the faded and misspelled messages. She took a couple of steps closer, reading.
Kathy gives good head. Call her 555-1729.
Fcuk the class of 2009. There assholes.
I Luv S. Forever.
She was about to turn when her eyes spotted a small hand-drawn heart shape scratched into the wall. Inside it were the letters RT and BW. Jordan stared at the heart, as if her eyes could burn some truth out of it.
RT, she thought. That can’t be Red Three.
BW can’t be Bad Wolf.
She shook her head. No, it would have to be BBW because that’s how he signed his letters. She scoured her memory. Isn’t there a Robbie Townsend in that boys’ dorm? Didn’t he have a crush on Betty Williams last semester?
That has to be it.
But trying to insist that nothing was wrong seemed like a complete lie. She felt chilled, and she turned around and began to march toward her dormitory. She had the eerie sensation that the Wolf was suddenly right behind her, hidden in that location and once again filming her, materializing out of shadow as soon as she’d turned her back. The nape of her neck burned. A surge of frantic fear came over her and she nearly broke into a sprint. But instead, Jordan forced herself to slow down and walk steadily. One foot in front of the other, she told herself. She wanted to sing out in some loud and raucously obscene cadence, like a soldier, but she couldn’t find the strength to raise her voice, so she began to whisper in a singsong, “I don’t know but I’ve been told, Eskimo cocks are mighty cold. Left. Right. Left. Right…” Her pace, she hoped, was every bit as defiant as the words she couldn’t find for herself earlier. But she doubted it was.
Act normal.
Sarah Locksley had joked to herself that this should mean popping some pills and washing them down with warm vodka. My new normal. Not my old normal.
Instead, she had spent most of the day relentlessly straightening up her house. She collected debris and placed empty liquor bottles in recycling bins. She vacuumed carpets and washed floors. The laundry ran nearly nonstop for hours, each load carefully folded and placed in her drawers as it was finished. She cleaned every countertop and surface in the kitchen, and switched on the oven’s self-cleaning mechanism. The refrigerator was a challenge, but she scrubbed out every bit of spilled milk. Spoiled food was thrown into a trash bag and carted outside. She assaulted the bathrooms with brush, cleanser, and military precision, bending over until her back shouted with pain, but afterward the porcelain and stainless steel glistened. And, in what she truly believed was complete idiocy, she took two plastic garbage bags and went from window to window, door to door, disassembling her Home Alone security system. The broken glass spread beneath each entranceway clinked as she swept it up with dustpan and broom.
She couldn’t quite bring herself to open windows and air the house out-although she knew she needed to do that. An open window seemed like an invitation to cold air, trouble, and maybe worse.
Nor could Sarah take a feather duster into her husband’s study or her daughter’s bedroom. Those remained shut. Normal could only go so far.
When she’d restored her home to something approximating reasonable, Sarah stepped into her shower and let steaming-hot water run over her, the heat seeping into sore muscles. She stood beneath the stream almost like a statue, unable to move, but not frozen by fatigue as much as turmoil. When she soaped up her hair and body, she felt like her hands were running over the skin of a stranger. It seemed to her that nothing was familiar-not the shape of her breasts, the length of her legs, the tangles in her hair. When she emerged from the shower, she stood naked in front of a mirror, imagining that she was looking at some odd identical twin she had never known, from whom she’d been separated at birth, but who had just moments before suddenly reappeared in her life.
She dressed carefully, choosing a modest pants-and-sweater outfit from the rows of clothes that she’d once worn to work at the elementary school. They were loose-fitting when she had a job, a husband, and a family. Now, with none of those things, her body baggier from the weight loss of depression, they hung on her, and she wondered whether they would ever fit again.
She found her overcoat, brushed a few spots of dust from it, and searched around for her satchel. She double-checked to make sure that her husband’s revolver was snugly contained inside. Out loud, she said, “Normal doesn’t include being stupid.”
She wasn’t sure that this statement was accurate.
Sarah stepped outside into weak afternoon sunlight. She could feel her hands twitch, and knew that she was on an edge of fear. She desperately wanted to stop, search up and down the roadway with her eyes, inspect her small world for some telltale sign of the Wolf’s presence.
Normal, she thought, doesn’t need to look around nervously and worry about every step outside.
She felt a shaft of cold within her as she thought that if her husband had only looked in the right direction, perhaps…
She shut off that small bit of despair. Instead, she hastily moved to her car and slid behind the wheel, behaving like any person who had someplace to go.
She did. But this was not the sort of trip that would fit into anyone’s definition of routine. This trip was to combine the insistently ordinary with the deepest sadness.
Her first stop was the mundane: the local grocery store. She seized a cart from the rack and filled it up with salads, fruit, lean meats, and fish. She purchased bottled water and freshly squeezed juices. Sarah felt a little like a stranger walking through the aisles of healthy foodstuffs. It had been a long time since she’d bought anything to eat that had any nutritional value.
At the floral displays she grabbed two cheap bunches of colorful flowers.
The checkout girl took Sarah’s credit card and ran it through the register, which gave Sarah a twinge of embarrassment, because she was sure it would be declined. When it was approved, Sarah was mildly astonished.
She steered her cart and groceries over to her car, keeping her eyes focused on loading, steeling herself against the desire to look about furtively. For the first time in her life she felt a little like a wild animal. The demands of caution and remaining alert to all threats nearly overcame her.