Usually, Shelly said nothing in response, but once she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “I have a past.”
She had sounded serious. The guy who’d been joking with her looked away, but a leering teenager on her other side said, “I bet you do.”
Shelly knew she looked her age, but that she also looked good. Her stomach was flat. Her legs were lean. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her hair was long and strawberry blonde. Boys like this one—chiseled body, face full of acne—had been staring at her body her whole life, although, these days, the older men left her alone. More experienced, probably they smelled it on her.
Lesbian.
She didn’t do men.
She wished she never had. She still had a scar that ran straight from her collarbone down to her hipbone, left over from the great heterosexual mistake of her life, and the last one of those she’d ever make.
Not that she was doing very well with women, either. The last woman she’d dated for more than a few weeks had moved to Arizona with the life partner she’d never bothered to tell Shelly she had.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Rosemary had said. But Rosemary had three teenage sons and a dashing brain-surgeon husband. It was easy for her to cast people out of Shelly’s life without a backward glance. Except to go to work, Shelly herself had hardly left the house for a month after the break-up.
And now, to top off a whole lifetime of sexual misadventures, it seemed that early menopause had arrived. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself stripping off her jacket and sweater in the checkout line of the grocery store. Dripping, panting. What the hell? Had they turned the heat up to three hundred degrees? Was the place on fire? She had a sudden nauseating memory of being placed by some beautician under a steaming plastic hood in a sweltering hair salon as a child, and being told to sit still as it poured stinking air from a hundred little holes onto her hair and the chemicals burned their way into the skin on her scalp.
“Jesus,” Shelly said in the grocery store, and the woman at the cash register said in a cigarette-husky Midwestern drawl, “Yer havin’ a hot flash darlin’. Ain’t ya ever had a hot flash before?”
No. She most certainly had not. But now she had one every other day. “Oh,” her doctor had said, “this is a little early, but might as well get it over with, right?” Shelly wondered if he’d say this to her someday when she came to him with a terminal illness.
Up ahead, someone seemed to be swerving around. Shelly rubbed her left bicep with her right hand, holding the steering wheel with her left, and then changed biceps and hands.
She was solid. She was aching, but her arms were hard as rock. She was singing along with the radio. A country song about staying loyal to the U.S. of A. If you didn’t like it here, you could leave, the lyrics twanged—and Shelly’s brother’s black-and-white high school yearbook picture floated up out of the ten billion images in her unconscious.
He was smiling, getting ready to die in Vietnam.
Ahead, the red brake lights of the meandering vehicle seemed to be making elliptical dashes across the centerline, into the shoulder, back into the right lane, back over the yellow line. Kids, screwing around. Or a defensive driver avoiding something in the road. Too far ahead to worry too much about. Shelly was still singing along to the radio as she still rubbed her aching muscles. She was thinking of how tired she was of pretending to be everything she was not, and then wondering who she might be if she stopped pretending not to be what she was, when the car in front of her (fifty yards? Forty?) seemed to be plucked out of the moonlit darkness by a gigantic hand.
Gone.
16
Nicole Werner was standing outside the library shivering. She had a book pressed to her chest. She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. It was the last week in October, but it had been a weirdly hot, hazy day—the sky purple and fuzzy-looking behind the changed leaves—and although the sun had seemed far away, it had still managed to turn Craig and Perry’s dorm room into a sauna by two o’clock in the afternoon. They had a west-facing window.
Because it had seemed so much like summer, Craig, too, had left Godwin that afternoon in shorts and a T-shirt, but he’d been back to his room since then and gotten his jacket, which he was glad about, because as soon as the sun set, it felt like late autumn again. Obviously, Nicole Werner hadn’t been out of the library since the temperature had dropped.
“Hey, Nicole. What are you doing?” Craig asked when he reached her at the top of the steps. He’d already told Lucas to get lost.
(“Aw, man,” Lucas had said as Craig veered away from him, a clear diagonal cut across the Commons toward the column Nicole was leaning against. “You gonna dump me for that bitch?”)
Nicole looked up, and the light from inside the library fell on her flossy hair, which was pulled back in the usual ponytail but also looked mussed, as if she’d been rolling around in a stack of hay, or studying philosophy all night. Midterms had been over since the week before. Could she already be cramming for something else?
“I was waiting for Josie,” she said.
“Oh,” Craig said, trying not to display any particular reaction to the name Josie, but he couldn’t help taking a quick look over both shoulders to make sure she wasn’t there. “Here,” he said to Nicole. He took off his jean jacket and handed it to her. He would have preferred to step around and drape it over her shoulders (a gesture he felt certain he must have seen made by men in movies, since it wasn’t the kind of thing his father would have done for his mother), but he found himself unable to step into the circle of light in which Nicole Werner stood.
Nicole balanced her book on her hip with one hand, took the jacket from him with the other. “Thanks, Craig,” she said. “Wow!”
“I’m not cold,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. Instead of sounding chivalrous, now he sounded like he’d been looking around for a coat rack and had happened to run into her.
“Well, I’m freezing,” Nicole said, stuffing her arms into his jacket. “I was so stupid leaving the dorm like this. I guess I thought I’d be back for dinner, but then I got obsessed with this stupid paper, and ended up just eating one of those disgusting sandwiches out of the vending machine. I had no idea how cold it had gotten.”
“Yeah,” Craig said. “When’s your paper due?”
“Couple of weeks,” she said.
He couldn’t help opening his mouth and eyes in astonishment. “And you’re working on it already?”
Nicole laughed, rolled her eyes, and then widened them, mimicking him. “Yeah,” she said. “College is hard for some of us, Craig. Just because you’re one of those guys who just sails through everything with no problems…”
Craig considered correcting her, but decided not to. He shrugged.
“Perry says you just sort of open your book, and close it, and you’re done. Believe me, I wish I could get away with that.”
Craig was ready to get this part of the conversation over with. He remembered the clammy handshake Dean Fleming had given him in Chez Vin that first night, and the few phony sentences the dean had managed to stammer out about how great it was to have his old friend’s son in the Honors College, pretending it was a coincidence. Since then, on the few occasions Craig had passed Dean Fleming in the administrative hallway, the guy had gone way out of his way to pretend he didn’t know Craig any better than any of the other students, and Craig felt pretty certain he was pissed he’d had to do that favor for his old Dartmouth pal.