Robin took another slug of whiskey. The room swam, and through the pleasant spinning she noticed hazily a quality of anticipation in the room itself, a curiosity. The room seemed to be waiting for her, almost holding its breath.
The distant roaring was back in her ears…like the sound inside a seashell…..
Robin set the whiskey down beside the chair and pushed down on the childproof cap of the medicine bottle. It felt like a great effort to twist it open. She poured the entire bottle of pills into her palm.
She took a breath, then sat up, leaned over the pills in her hand. A line floated into her head, a fragment of Sappho from the margins of her Ancient Worlds textbook: “I love, I burn, and only love require, and nothing less can quench the raging fire…”
She swallowed through the ache in her throat, lifted her hand.
In the back of the room, someone coughed.
Robin jumped from the chair, twisted around.
In the darkness at the back of the long room, a slight, pale young man in glasses sat hunched over several piles of books spread out on one of the heavy tables.
The pure shock of it sobered her instantly. Through her confusion, she recognized the face: the White Rabbit, from her psych class. A name popped into her head that she hadn’t known she knew: Martin.
Her hand curled around the pills in her palm, hiding them. She eased that hand behind her back. “I thought…I was the only one here.”
Martin looked at her without speaking. Robin was flustered. Had he seen what she was about to do? Had he—the thought turned her crimson—coughed on purpose? To alert her, or stop her?
Ambient light from a streetlamp outside glimmered off his glasses. She couldn’t see his eyes to know for sure. Desperate to break the silence, she cast around for something to say. Her eyes fell on the books stacked in front of him and she recognized the titles. Totem and Taboo. Psychoanalysis and the Occult. Dreams and Telepathy. All Freud. Not required reading for class, either. He must really be into it.
She groped for words to make the situation seem more normal, spoke carefully so as not to slur her words. “Is that for Psych 128? I’ve seen you in class.”
He stared at her, pale-eyed behind glasses. “Behavioral or developmental?”
She blinked, then realized what he was asking. “Oh, I’m not a major. I’m just…there.”
Martin looked at her blankly, returned to his book without comment.
Robin stood for a moment, feeling dismissed. She turned her back to him, carefully opened her fist, and poured the pills, warm from her clenched hand, back into the bottle. She capped it and slid it into her skirt pocket with a feeling of relief at accomplishing the maneuver.
She glanced back at Martin. He was bent over the shadowed table, completely absorbed in his bode. She wanted to flee, but the arch of the doorway seemed too far away to negotiate; she didn’t trust her legs.
At a loss, she looked around the room and focused on the dark fireplace. Well, a fire, maybe. I could do that.
She put a hand on the arm of the chair and lowered herself to kneel on the smoke-stained stone base of the hearth. Carefully, she pulled logs from the wood box and piled them onto the andirons.
She stole a glance back at Martin. He seemed to have forgotten her entirely.
Invisible again, she thought bleakly. The Forgotten.
The dreamlike languor had returned, but the motions of building the fire, wadding and packing newspaper between the logs, kept her awake. She sat back on her heels, looked around on the flagstone hearth and in the wood box for matches.
A voice spoke right behind her, at ear level. ‘Try this.”
Robin twisted on her knees in startled disbelief.
A slim, edgy young man lay stretched out on his back on a sagging faux-leather couch the size of a small barge. A Rolling Stone magazine lay open on his chest. He looked at her, a cool gray gaze, extended a lighter without sitting up.
Robin breathed out. “God. I didn’t see you.”
His face was expressionless. “You weren’t looking.”
Robin forced herself to reach and take the lighter from him. She flicked it and held it to several edges of the newspaper with a trembling hand. To her relief, flames blazed up obligingly, catching and spreading.
Willing herself to act normal, she turned to the young man and handed the lighter back. He kept it in his hand, pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, and offered it to Robin with a slight, silent gesture. She shook her head. He lighted up and smoked, all interest in her abruptly withdrawn, like a door being shut.
Robin turned back to the fire, watching the rolling flames. The pleasant, drowsy lull she had been experiencing, the presence, almost support, of the house was gone, and she felt anxious and wary of these strangers, vaguely ashamed. Her silent, womblike room had turned out to be crawling with people, and now she was stuck pretending she had not been here to—
Her mind flinched away from the thought, though she could feel the pill bottle digging into her thigh. She glanced carefully at the whiskey bottle, mercifully concealed by the side of the couch. She didn’t think either of the boys had seen. Not that they’d care.
She sneaked a look at the one on the couch.
He was staring ahead of him with an abstracted look, off in his own world. Looks like a musician, she thought, and decided it was his hands that made her think so, even more than the long limbs, scruffy hair, and Rolling Stone on his chest. His hands were alive, deliberate—precise and graceful with the cigarette he held, even though they seemed huge, almost the wrong size for the litheness of his body.
As she looked up from his hands, she realized he was watching her watch him. She blushed deeply, instantly, and he looked at her, unsmiling.
But before either could speak, if either was going to, a voice called from the doorway of the lounge, big and hearty and familiar. “Hello, orphans. Happy Turkey Day.”
Robin turned, caught her breath as she saw Patrick roll through the archway into the lounge, dressed in a Green Bay jersey and sweats, pulling a massive beer cooler on creaking wheels behind him.
Her heart leapt with sudden life, hope knocking against her chest. The young man on the couch shook his head slightly and returned to his magazine. In the back, Martin stiffened, hunched lower over his Freud.
Patrick navigated a little unsteadily toward the big old TV. “Let the games begin.”
He stopped, finally noticing Robin kneeling on the floor. A strange look crossed his face; he looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to see him. “Hey, Robin. You stayed, too, huh?”
The look on his face was almost guilty. Robin thought of the duffel he’d been carrying yesterday, the show he’d made of leaving with Waverly. He doesn’t want her to know he stayed, she realized.
Patrick flipped open the cooler and dipped into the ice for a beer, handed a dripping long-necked bottle to Robin with a gallant flourish. “Drink up,” he ordered. “I’m way ahead of ya.”
Robin gingerly shook icy water from the bottle and used the edge of her sweater to twist off the cap. Self-conscious, she drank too quickly, but the beer was instantly warming.
She sat back against the armchair and found, to her surprise, that her dark thoughts of before had retreated. The fire was a hot blaze; the room felt full of maleness and possibility.
Patrick found the remote on the top of the TV and clicked it on. The sound blasted in the room, preshow for the college game.