Craig had already decided that Nicole Werner was a bitch, hadn’t he? A dumb blonde. A tease. An empty, pretty vessel. A single glimpse in the cafeteria, and he thought he knew what she was all about.
Lying in the dark, listening to his roommate’s steady breathing, Craig knew that if he wanted, he could still let himself think that—think it and think it all the way back down the path and through the gift shop to the men’s room, so to speak. But he could also still see and feel the brilliant image of her in his doorway burning against his eyelids, like something so obvious it might blind you if you really let yourself look at it.
If he slept at all that night, he didn’t remember it.
It was the screaming of a blue jay that broke Craig’s trance. The jay was perched on the low branch of a crabapple tree in the Godwin Honors Hall courtyard, yawping unattractively, frantically, maybe even directing its harsh warnings at Craig, who looked up at the bird for a minute as it hopped mechanically up and down the branch.
He’d never seen them arrive, but now there was a cluster of homely girls standing around the bike rack, casting furtive glances in Craig’s direction. And a guy was looking out of a second-floor window at Craig, one hand on the curtain, the other absentmindedly scratching his bare stomach.
The jay made a few more threatening noises, and Craig looked at it again. He could even see one beady little eye, seeming to shine with some inner bird light from the branch, trained on him.
Craig stepped backward, nodded to the bird, and turned away.
6
“Perhaps you could write a letter to the editor?” the unhelpful receptionist said to Shelly Lockes the day she actually went down to the offices.
“This isn’t my opinion,” Shelly told her. “These are facts. Doesn’t your paper want to publish facts?”
The receptionist looked at her blankly, almost as if she were blind.
“Can I see someone? An editor?” Shelly asked.
The receptionist moved her fingers around on a phone, holding the receiver to her ear, before she looked back up at Shelly and told her that there were no editors in the building (“Big convention in Chicago”), but that she would call for a reporter. The reporter who finally met with Shelly, a girl who appeared all of twenty years old, took copious notes on a yellow legal pad and nodded meaningfully at every detail—but the next article repeated the same false information:
No one knew how long Craig Clements-Rabbitt and his girlfriend, Nicole Werner, lay there in the lake of Nicole Werner’s blood, or how soon afterward the young man had fled the scene.
The middle-aged woman who made the cell phone call did not give adequate information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to find it until it was too late to assist the victim.
After that, Shelly Lockes quit reading articles about the accident, and not long after that, she quit buying the newspaper altogether.
Still, she imagined there would be a trial, or some sort of investigation having to do with Craig Clements-Rabbitt, and that she might have a chance then to deliver the facts.
But by the end of the summer, she’d quit expecting that as well.
7
“Omega Theta Tau,” their resident advisor, Lucas, said, nodding drunkenly at the house on the hill.
Lucas owned about fourteen flasks, and had four of them on him that night—one in each pocket, except for the one in his hand. He stumbled on a sidewalk crack, and Craig laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Perry just kept walking. The two of them kept falling behind, and if they stopped again to piss on someone’s lawn, Perry had already decided he’d just keep walking back to the dorm.
“They’re virgins. Every last one of ’em.”
“No,” Craig said, and slapped his hand onto Lucas’s shoulder. “No,” he said again.
“Yep,” Lucas said. “And they’re the most beautiful fucking bitches on this campus, too.”
“No.”
“Yep.”
“That oughta be illegal. That oughta be fucking against the fucking law.”
“Yep,” Lucas said.
Perry looked up at the house on the hill. It was a dark, tall, rambling, and formidable brick edifice—one of those turn-of-the-century mansions with a carriage house out back and hundred-year-old oaks and elms in the yard. A white banner with black Greek letters on it fluttered between the pillars that held up the front porch. There were lace curtains in the front windows, and maybe a candle flickering behind them. Otherwise, the house looked so quiet it might have been empty—completely different from most of the fraternity and sorority houses on the row, which looked used up, neglected. Plastic cups in the driveways. Towels hung in the windows.
Perry had been at the university for only two weeks, but he’d already gotten used to seeing the parties spill out of those houses and onto the lawns. The girls, wearing soft sweaters and miniskirts, would be stumbling drunk, sprawled on the grass or in the mud. He’d seen those girls hobbling down the sidewalk back to their houses after a party—one high heel in a hand, the other on a foot, laughing or crying. The week before, someone had set fire to a frat house with a barbecue grill. One of the frat brothers had been passed out on a couch on the porch as the Fire Department sprayed down the front of the house with water, and no one had realized he was there until the fire was out and he’d been burned over 60 percent of his body.
Perry had no interest, he already knew, in Greek life. He did not want to be a fraternity brother, or to have any. Still, this sorority house on the hill seemed a part of some better, older, more elegant tradition, he thought. He could picture the sorority sisters sitting around some large oak table speaking seriously of the traditions of their house. They’d be wearing dark and sober clothes. There would be some sort of Oriental rug on the floor, a Siamese cat asleep on it. Maybe a tapestry on the wall. That candle flickering he saw from where he stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the house, would be at the center of their circle. There would be a large ancient book on the table, opened to a page that held some message from the Founding Sisters. One of the girls, her long hair falling over the text, would be reading aloud in a respectful tone.
“Somebody better go fuck those sluts, don’t you think?” Lucas asked.
Craig was fumbling at Lucas’s back pocket, trying to retrieve one of his flasks, and didn’t answer.
“I said,” Lucas shouted, and then held a hand to his mouth, shouting toward the house on the hill, “Somebody better go fuck those Omega Theta Tau sluts!”
A porch light snapped on.
The front door opened.
A slim silhouette with cascades of hair stepped out and stood under the light in the doorway, looking in their direction.
Craig unscrewed the flask and tipped it into his mouth, leaning his head back. Perry turned and left them there just as Lucas was taking another deep breath to shout at the house again.
“Are you having fun there, honey?” his mother had asked Perry on the phone that afternoon.
He’d said yes.
She’d asked if he’d gotten the cookies she’d mailed.
He had, a few days before, but had eaten only one before Craig and Lucas finished them off in a stoned frenzy on a Wednesday night. Standing over them with the empty wax-paper-lined shoebox in his hand, he’d said, “You fucking assholes.” They’d looked up at him from the floor, where they had a chessboard without enough pieces on it between them. Their eyes were so bloodshot Perry had to look away. They’d fucking eaten his mother’s cookies. Fucking assholes.