Friday night Godwin Honors Hall was loud, and drunk, and full of good cheer. Girls—even the homely ones he’d never seen wearing anything but sweat pants—had gotten dressed up in short skirts and high heels and lipstick. Guys were stocking their dorm refrigerators with Michelob and Corona, and competing iPod playlists were blaring from speakers aimed toward open windows and into the courtyard.
Craig had woken up in the late afternoon with a hangover, and hadn’t even realized that everyone was back from their weeklong absence, and that the beer was already flowing, until he stepped out into the hallway, headed for the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist, and walked right into the party.
Perry was there, leaning against the wall, holding a beer. He and some chick were comparing answers to an essay exam. The girl had buggy eyes but great calves and ankles. She and Perry were so absorbed in the shared vocabulary of their exam that neither one said hi when he passed them and said, “Hey.”
When he came back out of the bathroom, he had to push his half-naked way through a crowd of guys in glasses who were silently nodding their heads to some bad old rock ’n’ roll blaring from one of their rooms. One of them slapped him on his bare back, and Craig turned fast, ready to punch the asshole, until he realized the guy was just drunk, and happy. Perry was still in the hallway, and he and the buggy-eyed girl were still arguing the finer points of their comparisons and contrasts, and Craig was relieved to close the door to his room behind him. He was in no mood for a party. He was in the mood for some extra-potent stuff with Lucas, and maybe a trip to Pizza Bob’s, he thought, and it wasn’t until he was bent over, picking his jeans up off the floor, that he noticed a pair of long legs stretched out on his bed.
“Hey, Craig.”
“Jesus Christ,” Craig said. “How did you get in here?”
“I walked in the door.”
Craig let the jeans slip out of his hand, back onto the floor, and stood up straight, hitching the towel tighter around his waist and looking at Josie Reilly, who was lying on his bed with her black hair spread out on his pillow, holding his Maxim magazine open in front of her but looking at him, not it. She was wearing a little skirt with orange flowers on it, and her legs and feet were bare.
“Um, Josie, can I ask what you’re doing here?”
“Reading your dirty magazine.”
“Oh,” Craig said. “Okay. Well, I’m going to get dressed now.”
“Okay,” Josie said without taking her eyes off him.
“So…” He waved his right hand through the air while holding on to the towel at his waist with the left.
“So…?” she said. She tossed the magazine onto the floor, and then swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up. He felt the perfumey breeze of her pass him as she made her way barefoot to the door and locked it before turning back around. She stumbled sideways then, but caught herself on the edge of Craig’s desk, and laughed, and then slid down it and sat hard on the floor with her ankles tucked under her butt.
“How drunk are you?” Craig asked.
“Just a”—she held her thumb and index finger an inch apart—“drunk,” and then she held her arms up to him like a little kid wanting to be picked up.
“Josie,” Craig said. “I’m wearing a towel.”
“Take off the towel!”
“I think you’re more than a little drunk,” he said.
“I flunked,” she said. “I know it. Didn’t even study.” She made the motion of erasing something on a blackboard in front of her. “Shupe.”
“Probably you didn’t,” he said. “You probably did better than you think you did.” He had no idea if this was true or not, but what else was he going to say?
She started moving toward him on her knees then, and he backed up a couple of steps, but then she got on her hands, too, and scrambled toward him, grabbing his ankles.
“Shit, Josie,” Craig said, sort of dancing away from her, but she was holding on tight. “Cut it out. It tickles. Shit.”
He couldn’t help laughing. It really did tickle. She was laughing, too, and spidering her way up his legs to his towel, and then she was standing with her whole clothed body pressed against his whole naked one, with her tongue in his mouth and his hair in her hands, and despite his reservations (honestly, he just wanted to find Lucas and get stoned), his dick was fully into it within half a second of the kiss, and then she had her hand on that and her mouth on his neck, and she was pulling him backward onto his bed.
14
Perry saw her coming out of Starbucks with a cup in each hand, and he ducked around the corner. The last person he wanted to see right now was Josie Reilly. The last time he’d seen her was in May, the end of the semester, at a memorial tree-planting ceremony for Nicole.
An entire orchard of cherry trees paid for by Omega Theta Tau had been planted around the sorority in Nicole’s honor. A backhoe dug the holes, and then dropped the trees one by one into the soft earth. A crowd gathered to sing and pray all day, and then there was a candlelight vigil all night. There were eighteen trees, one for each of Nicole Werner’s years. Their branches were actually in bloom.
(“Do you know how expensive it is to plant an orchard of almost full-grown trees in bloom?” he’d overheard one student at Godwin Hall say to another over soggy pancakes that morning. There were a few bad jokes made about cherries, and the whole virgin rumor, with regard to the Omega Theta Tau house in general, and Nicole in particular.)
Somehow, in the crowd during the candlelight vigil, Josie had found him, snuggled up to him, and whispered dramatically, “She’s still with us, Perry. Can you feel it? She isn’t dead.”
He’d backed away.
“What’s with you?” she’d asked, offended, but he just shook his head, and she moved on to someone else. The candle some sorority girl had handed him in a waxed cup sputtered out. A few minutes later, when they started singing “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” he tossed the waxed cup into a trash can and headed back to Godwin Hall.
Josie had hardly known Nicole, but you wouldn’t have known that from all the mileage she got out of having been the dead girl’s roommate and sorority sister for six months. She’d read a putrid poem at the memorial service, been interviewed for the newspaper, worn a tight T-shirt with Nicole’s photo on it and a black armband all through April and into May, and managed to be excused not only from finals but also from having to turn in her essay for Classical Sources of Modern Culture because she was organizing the petition to expel Craig Clements-Rabbitt from the university:
“Drunk + Driver + Death = Murder.”
She went to Houston, Perry learned from the school newspaper, to speak to the annual SADD convention “in memory of my best friend, who was murdered by a drunk driver.”
To Perry, she apologized for whoever had splashed his and Craig’s door with red paint and plastered that sad senior portrait of Nicole at the center of it:
“Nobody blames you for anything, Perry,” she’d said. “We all know you just had the bad luck of being his roommate.”
“He’s not even here,” Perry said. “Why are people messing with my door?”
“It’s symbolic. You have to understand that.”
When it happened again, the university housing department arranged for Perry to finish the semester in a vacant room on the other side of the dorm.