Craig nodded. “I knew it,” he said.
“So, you’re going to shut up now?”
“No,” Craig said, and he went on to tell Perry about their date that night. Pizza at Knockout’s. Hours afterward at Starbucks, holding hands. A long walk across the Commons in a bright, sparkling snow. He’d walked her back to her room, and kissed her outside her door.
“Did I tell you yet that I’m in love?” he asked Perry.
“I think you might have mentioned that,” Perry said.
21
Craig knew it was a bad idea to walk by the sorority. He’d promised Perry he wouldn’t, and his father, and he’d managed to get through the entire month of September without doing so, without visiting any of the old haunts, except that one day he’d stood outside Godwin Honors Hall in September. Now, it was October.
Where had September gone?
Craig had simply sleepwalked through it, it seemed. He woke up in the mornings and realized that, somehow, he’d done his homework. He’d have only the vaguest recollection of doing it, but there it would be on his laptop: an essay on the Ptolemaic strategy waiting to be taken to the lab to be printed up. The notes he took in his classes were in his own handwriting, so he had to have taken them himself, but it was like that story “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” Craig just woke up and found all the work had been done, as if by elves, or some other self.
That morning he woke to hear Perry running water in the kitchen, nuking something. Through the other wall he could hear a thudding bass from the neighbor’s stereo. Outside, the masses of blackbirds that had taken to roosting in the trees outside their apartment windows were already cawing and squawking. The black arrow of one’s shadow passed over his window shade. He was going to have to get out of bed, he knew, and he knew that once he did that, he was going to walk by the Omega Theta Tau house.
“Pal,” his father had said on Saturday when he’d called. “You don’t sound right. Are you depressed? Are they harassing you there? Any problems? Memory? Et cetera?”
“No, Dad. No one’s harassing me. And, yeah, I guess I’m a little depressed. I wouldn’t be any less depressed anywhere else, though. And I think I’m okay in the head. As good as I’m going to be again, I guess.”
“You’re sure no one’s giving you a hard time?”
“No one,” Craig said, realizing, not for the first time, that maybe he’d hoped they would. Maybe he’d come back here hoping to be hounded off campus, ridiculed, killed. Where were the outraged sorority sisters? Why hadn’t they chased him down on the Commons and ripped him limb from limb? Had they forgotten about Nicole? Shouldn’t there be daily protests outside the administration building?
How could they have let Nicole Werner’s killer back in?
But Nicole’s death, it seemed, was last year’s news. He hadn’t overheard a word about it anywhere. If people recognized him, they didn’t show it. If his professors made the connection between Nicole’s death and his name, they kept it to themselves. Maybe back at Godwin Honors Hall there were still some flyers posted to the bulletin boards, or a memorial in the lobby or something, but there wasn’t anything else anywhere else on campus.
He dragged himself out of bed. He was packing up his laptop, pulling a sweatshirt over his grungy T-shirt, saying, “See ya later,” to Perry, and trying to get out of the apartment quickly enough that Perry couldn’t ask him where he was headed.
He was headed there. He hadn’t even glimpsed it, he realized, since that last night in March. Back then.
Back then, Craig had hated the Omega Theta Tau house and the way, each time he walked across campus to it, the front door would open for Nicole and swallow her whole. There was always some blonde standing in the shadows beyond the threshold, and the door would swing closed, and Craig knew he wouldn’t get her back until whatever party, or pledging, or tea, or secret meeting, or special election of floral arrangement committee members, or selection of the menu for the next Founders Formal that night was over.
How many times had he walked by the Omega Theta Tau house (its brooding brown and blond bricks, the wraparound porch, the long windows, the eaves crawling with ivy) after he’d started dating Nicole, just to see if the candles were still flickering in the rooms beyond the windows?
And the guys hanging around.
Those frat guys with their handshakes and their collars turned up. Tossing a football, hard. The smack of it hitting their hands.
“Maybe you could think about a house, you know, for next year? It’s not too late. Plenty of guys rush their sophomore years,” Nicole said one night as he was walking her from Godwin Honors Hall to the Omega Theta Tau house.
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, sweet and pouty. “It would just, maybe, make things easier, you know.”
“What’s hard now?”
“I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of social stuff. The sorority likes it, you know, if your dates are Greek. When I’m living in the house next year, there might be a bit more, I don’t know, pressure or something to be dating a frat guy.”
“Nicole,” Craig said, speaking slowly, as if to a child, humoring her, but, he hoped, radiating affection at the same time. “I’m not going to be one of those assholes. I mean, I think your whole sorority sister stuff is cute. But you’re a girl. It’s all about hair and makeup for you, and shaving chocolate onto gelato, and decorating floats. But if I joined one of those things I’d have to, I don’t know, wear a beanie propeller or shave my pubic hair or something.”
“What? Is that what you think?”
“Okay, not that maybe. But something equally dumb, and obnoxious. Those guys are all about dumb and obnoxious. I’d rather die than live in a houseful of those kinds of guys.”
Nicole hadn’t said anything. She’d grown quiet.
Sometimes, when she sulked, Craig glimpsed a single dimple at the right corner of her mouth, and he could imagine her as a toddler then, mad about something: A teddy bear. A lollipop. It made him want to give her anything she wanted.
“But I’ll think about it,” he said. “I understand why you think that would make things easier.”
“Really?” she asked, turning to him, taking both his hands in hers, kissing them.
He’d hated having to let go of those hands—soft and white as little cashmere mittens—and watch her walk away from him, sway up the paving stones to the front door of that house in her silver sandals, some meaty frat guy watching her ass from the porch of the frat house next door.
Now he walked across campus as quickly as he could, long strides, without looking up. He had a reason for going to the Omega Theta Tau house today, although the reason was only a half-formed idea in his head, a kind of dreamy inclination that had begun at the Roper Library a few days earlier. He’d gone there to check out a book his Western Mind professor had put on reserve, but the book had already been checked out, so Craig had found himself at a computer instead, plugging Nicole’s name into the friendly Google rectangle and coming up with about four hundred and twenty hits—mostly local newspaper accounts of the accident, which he’d read a hundred times already, and a few reports from the Bad Axe Times, including an obituary, and a couple of articles from the school newspaper calling for his blood, and then lamenting his readmittance to the university, all of which he’d also seen and gotten used to.