“But, let’s see how it goes with Lucas first. And, Perry?” She put the cup down on the table between them and tucked her hands somewhere inside her sweater. “Have you told anyone else—for instance, anyone else on the faculty—about any of this?”
Perry had no idea why he was unable to hold her gaze. He hadn’t told anyone, and he had no reason to lie to Professor Polson, but he glanced down at her cup instead of at her. There was something about her eyes. She had crow’s feet—something he knew women worried about, because his mother had about a hundred different potions to combat those and was always complaining that they didn’t do a thing—but around Professor Polson’s eyes, they were crinkly and intriguing. They made her look both sexy and wise.
“Perry?” she asked again.
“No,” he said. “No, ma’am. I haven’t said anything to anyone. Not even Craig. Not even my parents. You’re the only one I’ve talked to about any of this.”
Professor Polson removed a hand from the place she’d had it tucked between her sweater and her dress, and raised it over her cup, and said, “I’m not asking you not to. I’m just curious what the rumors might be, if any.”
“I understand,” Perry said, nodding.
“And I don’t want to mislead you, Perry. My angle on this might not be exactly what you’re hoping for. I believe what you’re telling me, that you believe it, and that what you’re hearing from others, like Lucas—I believe you’re each telling the truth as you see it. But I also know that death is a deep, potent, incomprehensible force on the psyche—especially for the young. In other words, I’m not necessarily on a hunt with you for Nicole Werner, Perry.”
“I understand that,” Perry said.
“But I also believe you. I believe in your sincerity, and also in your intelligence,” she said. “I have no reason not to. Based on what I’ve seen so far, you’re an impressive person, Perry. I’m proud to take on this project with you.”
“Why would she believe me?” Lucas asked. He lifted one shoulder, let it fall again, and it seemed to Perry that his shirt shifted oddly on his back, as if he might be even thinner under his clothes than he appeared to be.
“She believes me,” Perry said. “She’s open-minded. I mean, I don’t think you have anything to lose, Lucas. She’s not going to have us both committed, or—”
Lucas shrugged again, and said, shaking his head and starting to walk away, as if the conversation were over, “I’ve definitely got nothing to lose.”
27
“Who is that guy?” Craig asked. Nicole was wrapping and wrapping a long red scarf around her face. Only her eyes were showing by the time she was done.
Hard little bits of snow flew at their faces as they walked across campus. Craig held onto her hand, but between his insulated ski glove and her fat wool mitten, he might as well have been holding anything—the university mascot’s paw, a tree branch swathed in bandages. She said something into the scarf, but he couldn’t hear it.
“What?”
Nicole shook her head. She looked over at him. There were little heartbreaking flecks of snow on her black eyelashes. He couldn’t see her mouth, but he could tell by her eyes that she was smiling, and he decided to drop the subject.
But, a few days later, Craig saw the guy again: thick-shouldered, blond buzz-cut, slushing in black boots through the snow across the yard of the Omega Theta Tau house only seconds before Nicole appeared on the front porch, wrapping the scarf around and around her face again, raising a mittened hand to Craig.
“That was him again,” Craig said.
“Who?”
“That guy, Nicole. Don’t play dumb. He had to have just left the house. Again. That’s the third time this week I’ve seen that guy coming or going from the house. He leaves just before you do. Those are his footprints.” Craig pointed to the melting impressions on the lawn.
Nicole squinted at the footprints, and then looked in the direction of the blue-jacketed man on the other side of the street. She shrugged her shoulders, shook her head, looked up at Craig, and raised her eyebrows as if the mystery intrigued her as much as it did him.
“That’s not a frat guy,” Craig said. “That’s not some sorority sister’s boyfriend. That’s a man.”
“Well,” Nicole said. “Some of the sisters date men, you know. We’re not all strictly into boys.”
“You know what I mean,” Craig said. He took her trigonometry text out of her hands and tucked it under his arm. He’d lost his gloves by then, maybe left them in the cafeteria, and the tips of his fingers were completely numb, but he knew enough from watching sitcoms that you didn’t let your girlfriend haul a book this heavy around without helping.
“What I mean is,” he went on, “that guy doesn’t look like he belongs around here.”
Nicole slipped her hand through his free arm and leaned against him. Even through the layers of nylon and down feathers between them he thought he could feel the little thrill of her heart beating against his side. It was a Thursday afternoon, the time of the week they usually headed straight to Starbucks to linger, holding hands, with their cappuccinos and their unopened textbooks between them. He’d looked forward to it since going to bed the night before. But when they got to the corner of State and Campus Boulevard, Nicole stopped and said, “Craig, I can’t do Starbucks this afternoon. I told Josie I’d meet her back at our room. We have to start making tissue roses for the formal. We—”
“You have to start today?” (Whining. He wished he weren’t, but he was whining.) “I thought the formal was in, like, three weeks.”
“No, it’s in four weeks, but you have no idea how many of these things we have to make. And Josie and I are it. We’re the only ones assigned to the roses, and there have to be at least five thousand.”
“What?” Craig literally stopped in his tracks at the absurdity of this. “Five thousand tissue roses?”
Nicole laughed and nodded. They’d gotten to the edge of campus, and the arm Craig was using to carry her textbook was cramped. He shifted the book to the other, and then stepped around Nicole, put his stiff arm around her shoulders, exposing his bare hand to the cold again—but who cared, since it was already completely numb?
“Five thousand?”
“Yeah!” Nicole said, seeming to share his astonishment. “And it takes us like an hour to make a hundred. So far, we’ve only got, like, a hundred and ten.”
“What the hell is this?” Craig asked. “Some kind of indentured servitude? I mean, it’s not like they’re paying you to be in this sorority. Don’t they think you have a life?”
He was sincerely outraged, but Nicole laughed pleasantly, and Craig heard the sound of it echo off the brick wall of the Engineering Building a few feet ahead of them, like a lot of little bells.
“Craig, they think Omega Theta Tau should be my life!”
“Well, is that what you want, Nicole? I mean, do you want to be locked in a room making paper roses with Josie for the next four years?”
“Well, it’s always the new pledges who make the roses, actually, so next year—”
“Okay, not roses. Next year you’ll be baking crumpets or something. It’ll always be something.”