“And they were all just cracking up, waiting to read in the Police Beat in the newspaper that some college senior had shot himself.”
“Lucas?” Craig asked again.
He hadn’t thought about Lucas for a little while, and it suddenly dawned on him what all of this must have done to Lucas, too—and then he put the mug down on the table next to the couch and started to feel really bad, looking around (for help? For an excuse?) like Jesus, Craig, how many people’s lives do you think you can ruin in the course of your own? All he’d done for Lucas was one stupid phone call in the summer, from New Hampshire, when some of the pieces had fallen into place again. On the phone, Lucas had said nothing, really. He’d muttered, “Oh, man. Craig, Jesus,” a few times, and then, “I have no hard feelings toward you. But I gotta go. I really can’t talk about this, man. I hope everything works out, and I have to say, if I were you, I’d stay back there, you know. Go to school in Connecticut or something. Here, you know, it’s not cool right now. But maybe someday we’ll meet again. Peace, man,” and he’d hung up.
Lucas, shit. He’d ruined Lucas’s life, too.
Deb seemed moved to tears again, looking at the expression on Craig’s face, and she got out of her seat and put her arms around his neck, pulled the pink blanket more tightly around his neck, and hugged him, and Craig felt himself sag into the hug just the way he remembered sagging against his mother as a little kid, even when he knew she was pissed at him, because at least she was pretending she wasn’t.
And then he was back there, eyes closed, sobbing into his mother’s shoulder, soaking it, and saying things in a language he wasn’t even sure he spoke, and she was patting and patting him—Deb, not his mother, and crying, too. “Look,” Deb said, “just get in my bed and go to sleep. The sheets are clean. If the slumlord ever shows up to unlock your door, I’ll wake you up. In the meantime, just rest.”
When Craig woke again, the Martian green hands of the clock beside the Deb’s bed read 4:10 (a.m.?). The room was dark except for the glow of her iPod in its charging dock, and there wasn’t a sound through the whole apartment. He wanted to pee, but not badly enough, he decided, to wake up an apartment full of girls and scare the hell out of them. He lay on his side between the Deb’s crisp sheets, which smelled of Nicole and the starch his mother used to spray on his khaki pants, and watched the hands of the alarm clock move in little twitches around the dial until Deb came in and sat down beside him in a T-shirt and gym shorts and laid a cool hand on his forehead.
And then he fell asleep again.
57
Josie seemed to soften after it became clear that, although Shelly had uncovered a truth, she wasn’t going to make threats, or a scene.
Maybe Josie even seemed excited.
She was sitting at the edge of her seat now, leaning toward Shelly, moving her hands lightly through the air between them, explaining the finer points of hazing in sorority life. She was bouncing her knee a little, and although she didn’t look directly into Shelly’s eyes, she grazed Shelly’s face as she talked, letting her eyes linger on Shelly’s shoulder or earring for a split second before scouting the room around them again.
“We never do anything physically dangerous,” Josie said. “But you really can’t feel like a group, you know, without some rituals and traditions. And secrets. If it’s not at least a little dangerous, there’s no point in keeping it a secret, so—”
Could Josie simply be relieved that the truth had come out, and that Shelly seemed to have accepted it?
Josie was thrilled, Shelly realized, to be able to spill the secrets, to have a captive audience in Shelly. Because what could Shelly possibly do with any information she received from Josie now?
“I mean, it’s not hazing like they used to haze. We’ve heard all about that. The sisters used to cut their palms—I mean really slice them open until they were gushing blood—and stand naked in a circle around a candle and have these, like, mystical things happen or something that made them sisters. In the attic there are these black-and-white photos from the sixties or something, and there’s blood all over the place, and some naked guy with long hair playing the flute. Freaky.”
It seemed like the kind of thing that would have gone on in the sixties, Shelly thought. Josie was laughing.
“I wonder what happened if someone bled too much?” Shelly said, more to herself than to Josie. She was thinking of a story her ex-husband had told her about a girl he’d had to treat after something like that: some blood ritual between volleyball teammates. They’d sliced their inner arms, and the girl had managed to hit an artery. Shelly’s ex-husband had described it in such a way that she could still, twenty years later, see the imagined girl (red, white, and blue, wearing nothing but her Wildcats Varsity jacket), who died in the ER waiting room.
“I suppose they’d get help,” Josie said, seeming disinterested. What did she care? What were the sixties to her? “We’ve always got someone standing by, in case something goes wrong.”
Josie checked behind her shoulder, but there was nothing there except the wall. Still, it was clear she knew she was now headed toward forbidden territory, about to tell Shelly something she wasn’t supposed to tell.
“We’ve got this EMT. This paramedic guy. He belongs to us. He’s like everybody’s boyfriend or a mascot or something. We love him. We make him wear his uniform because it’s so cute! He sleeps in a room at the back of the house, and the sorority pays him to be there for the events, and to be on call so…” Josie drifted off, eyes seeming to go unfocused, moving down to some place between her own knees and the floor.
“What ‘events’?” Shelly asked.
“Well, there’s this thing. There’s a Spring Event and a Winter Event. You do it your second year—so, for me it’s coming up.” She giggled a little. “I’m scared shitless. Promise not to tell anyone?”
The absurdity of this seemed to occur to Josie even as she said it, and she continued before Shelly could have answered.
“We’re reborn. As sisters. You won’t believe this.”
Shelly raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Try me, but the thing she was having a hard time, at the moment, believing was that she’d ruined her career, tossed off her entire life, to go to bed with this chatty, banal, empty person, who was sitting across from her at Starbucks talking about her sorority as if she were the only person who’d ever been in one, as if the things that took place in it were of some kind of import in the wider world. Only a week ago, Shelly marveled as she looked at Josie Reilly’s pale, excited face, she had felt she would be willing to chop off a few digits if it meant another lazy afternoon in bed with this girl. She’d actually believed herself to be in love.
“It’s called the Raising. We keep a coffin in the basement,” Josie said, leaning forward, whispering so energetically that if anyone in Starbucks had the slightest interest, they could have heard her from four tables away. “And every second-year pledge gets put into it. They do this thing where—well, first everybody’s drunk off their ass, and then the girl who’s being raised sits on the floor, and you breathe in and out really fast for two minutes exactly, and another girl presses on your neck, your artery, and you’re out.