The Raising: A Novel Part 19

And these little humiliations called up everything: The filth of being human, of being female, of being alive, of living in a body, of having the shame of that exposed to prettier, cleaner, better girls.

Sh.e.l.ly looked up, and was startled to find Josie standing in the threshold, leaning against the doorjamb. One thin strap of her little tank top had slid down her shoulder. Her hips looked so thin that the denim skirt she was wearing seemed to be held up over her pelvic bone by some sort of antigravitational force. Sh.e.l.ly tried to keep her eyes on a spot just over Josie's shoulder as she said, "Oh, hi, Josie. Did you call the School of Music yet, about Jewett Smith?" Sh.e.l.ly could hear the thinness of her own voice as she spoke, and it made her want to crawl away somewhere to die.

"No," Josie said. "But I will."

"Thank you," Sh.e.l.ly said, and turned back to her computer, stared at the blank doc.u.ment on which she'd only managed to type, "Funds Request."

"Um, Sh.e.l.ly?"

Sh.e.l.ly turned and saw that Josie was chewing on the s.h.i.+ny pinkie fingernail of her left hand. What Sh.e.l.ly felt, seeing that pinkie between the girl's teeth, could only have been described as a sharp pain in her chest-a kind of s.e.xual agony. If she'd been standing up, her knees might have buckled. When she tried to form the word yes, nothing came out of her mouth.

Was she losing her mind?

Was this what happened to old d.y.k.es? Was this some sort of peri-menopausal insanity? She hadn't even blinked, but there before her eyes was a flash of Josie on her back, hips propped up on one of Sh.e.l.ly's flowered pillows, sleek thighs open, and Sh.e.l.ly parting the pink sh.e.l.l between her legs with her fingertips, leaning in with her own lips parted as Josie writhed beneath her-and Sh.e.l.ly felt a kind of terror that was so much like ecstasy that, sitting there at her desk in front of her computer, she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.

"Sh.e.l.ly, I have to tell you something, and I'm really sorry."

38.

Jeff Blackhawk lingered in Mira's office, touching a few of the little things she kept on her bookshelf, turning them over in his hands-a paperweight that had been a gift from a student (velvety red rose petal floating, without weight or age, inside a gla.s.s globe), a Petoskey stone Mira had picked up on the beach during a trip to Lake Michigan the year before, a couple of paperclips. A few minutes earlier he'd stood up as if he were leaving, so Mira had stood as well, but now he seemed reluctant to go, and genuinely charged up about their conversation, which seemed like a strange and not unpleasant turn of events, as Mira couldn't remember the last time she'd had a conversation about anything other than the weather with any of her colleagues.

She'd always thought that becoming an academic (especially if she was lucky enough to land a place, as she had, at a major research university, and then in a niche noted for its encouragement of free intellectual exploration like G.o.dwin Honors College) would mean endless conversations in hallways, in offices. Graduate school had been rich with such talk among students, and although Mira had to admit now that she couldn't remember, looking back, ever having actually seen two or more professors speaking to each other about anything more interesting than whether or not the copier was out of paper-still, somehow, she'd expected that when she became a professor herself she would find herself engaged in pa.s.sionate daily debates in the lunchroom over the finer points of the most obscure topics.

But she could not have been more wrong.

Nights.h.i.+ft factory workers probably spent more time philosophizing with one another than she did with her colleagues at G.o.dwin Honors Hall. In three years, the most pa.s.sionate discussions she'd had in the lunch room pertained to the best temperature at which to keep the minifridge and who kept stealing the secretary's Diet c.o.kes.

But today Jeff Blackhawk had stopped by to speak with Mira specifically about her new research. Dean Fleming had mentioned it to him in pa.s.sing one afternoon, and it seemed to have genuinely seized Jeff's interest.

Last fall, he'd had Nicole Werner in his first-year seminar, and although he claimed not to have gotten to know her very well, he had clearly been affected by her death. Like everyone else, he blamed the boyfriend. He said, "The guy used to wait for her outside our cla.s.sroom, like he thought maybe she'd run off with somebody else if he didn't walk her to and from cla.s.s."

Given Jeff's reputation for romancing the most beautiful of his undergraduates, Mira ungenerously considered that he might have resented Craig Clements-Rabbitt's hanging around because that would have made it hard for him to snag Nicole Werner alone. Still, Mira was flattered by his interest in her research. He had a variety of suggestions for her, and although Mira had been trained to pay the least amount of attention to the creative writers in any department (their educations were always lacking), she thought that his ideas were genuinely good ones, his anecdotes interesting.

Did she know, for instance, that for many years, until the administrators managed to squelch it, there'd been a kind of hysteria in G.o.dwin Honors Hall among groups of students who thought it was haunted?

"There was an article in the student newspaper. You could look it up. All these reports that a girl was coming around to the rooms, looking for somebody. I mean, the story changes with the teller, but it was more or less reported that this girl was frantic, and half-dressed, and looked like she was from another era, and when they asked her who she was, she'd tell them she was Alice Meyers."

He emphasized the name, and paused afterward, as if Mira should recognize it.

She didn't.

"You know. The study room? In the south end of the bas.e.m.e.nt?"

Mira'd had no idea that there was a study room in the south end of the bas.e.m.e.nt. Despite teaching a fair number of her cla.s.ses in bas.e.m.e.nt cla.s.srooms (an honor given mostly to a.s.sistant professors), she'd been on the south side, where there were no cla.s.srooms, only once, in search of a student she'd been told was in the ceramics workshop and who'd left her backpack in Mira's cla.s.sroom. That side of the bas.e.m.e.nt of G.o.dwin Hall seemed to be just arts and crafts workshops, knocking pipes, and laundry facilities, although there was, she knew, a little student hangout over there somewhere called the Half-a.s.s, where they sometimes held poetry readings and bad student rock band concerts.

"Yeah. There's a study room down there. They've quit using it, I think. It was paid for by the parents of Alice Meyers. She was a G.o.dwin Honors College student who disappeared in 1968. She posted her name on a board at the Union for a ride home to some small town in Ohio. The last anyone saw of her she was walking around the Union, looking for her ride."

"Jesus," Mira said. She was used to such stories, but they still gave her goose b.u.mps.

"Well. Anyway. There's that. And, you know, the bra.s.s isn't letting it out, but there was another death on campus recently. A girl over in Bryson. A freshman. They just found her dead after somebody noticed the stench outside her room. I think they can't say for sure it was a suicide, so they're not saying much at all. This was three weeks ago, and it hasn't even made the papers. Luckily, I guess, her parents are n.o.bodies from some rural town pretty far from here."

Mira nodded. She hadn't heard about it, but it didn't surprise her. There was always a student who killed herself, or himself, every year in a single, in a dorm. (An excellent argument for doubles.) Always a stench. Always the possibility left open that it had been an undetected heart defect or an accidental overdose, not a suicide or, G.o.d forbid, a murder, so the university could pretend it wasn't neglecting its young people-their mental health, their safety-although everyone knew that there wasn't the slightest bit of attention paid in a place this big to any individual's mental health or safety. The only people on campus with any responsibility for that at all were kids like Lucas, resident advisors, who got free room and board to pretend to be taking responsibility.

Jeff Blackhawk picked up a paperclip Mira had on the bookshelf and put it in his mouth. He held it for a second, first, between his front teeth, but then it disappeared. Being the mother of two toddlers, Mira had to check her alarm-her first instinct being to pry Jeff's mouth open and fish it out. But Jeff managed to keep talking with the paperclip in there.

"And you know there's that other girl from Nicole Werner's sorority."

"What?"

"Yeah. See?" He gestured at Mira as if he'd already proven his point. "n.o.body's getting this information. State secrets. Cover-ups all over the place. This place is full of 'em."

"What happened? Who?"

"Denise Something. They're trying to pa.s.s it off as a runaway situation. Supposedly she was dating some older guy, and her parents disapproved, so she disappeared off the face of the earth. It was right around the time Nicole got killed, and her sorority sisters are all saying the last time they saw Denise What's-Her-Name was at that ghastly cherry tree thing, and then she got in a car with some guy, took her stuff with her, and that was that. The parents can't even get the cops in this town to investigate-which of course gives the bra.s.s around here a great excuse to just toss up their hands and say, 'Sorry your kid got lost! Not our problem! Even the cops can't help you!' "

"What year was she?"

"Soph.o.m.ore, I think. Music school. She lived in the OTT house, but the year before, she lived in Fairwell-ironically enough."

He opened his mouth to laugh, and Mira was relieved to see the paperclip still on his tongue.

Fairwell was an all-girls dorm, and the campus folklore was that the girls who lived there as freshmen never got to be soph.o.m.ores, that they all flunked out. Statistically, it wasn't true. Fairwell girls were no more likely than any other group of freshmen to fail their first years. But it was still a struggle to fill the beds in that dorm. The university allowed students to rank their top choices, and because Fairwell was so unpopular, the dorm was mostly filled with foreign students or girls from such small towns they'd never met anyone from the university to tell them this story. (Of course, with the Internet, it was getting harder and harder to capture the ignorant.) Mira had asked the dean once, at a stiff c.o.c.ktail party for junior faculty, why they didn't just change the dorm's name. Wouldn't that solve the problem? Clearly, she pointed out, the rumor had started because the dorm's name, Fairwell, was Farewell.

"Never thought of that," he'd said. "But, nope. Marjorie Fairwell was the wife of the university's first major donor. She's got scads of descendants still pouring money into the place. They'd rather let it sit empty than change the name. Eventually they'll make it a charity dorm, I suppose. All the girls there will be on financial aid or academic probation, and just grateful to have a place to sleep, period."

Jeff leaned against her office wall, looking down at Mira's legs. He always got there eventually, it seemed to Mira. She was surprised it had taken him so long. It must have been an indication of his sincere interest in the topic they were discussing. She asked him, "How do you know about it, this runaway, if it's been kept so quiet?"

"A friend of mine works in the provost's office," Jeff said. "She's sworn to secrecy about everything that goes on there, but a couple gla.s.ses of wine and she's all tongue."

Mira tried not to picture the scene inspired by the choice of words, his female friend's tongue. Jeff was, himself, an exceptionally s.e.xy man-tall, olive green eyes, a head of s.h.a.ggy brown hair. But Mira found him as attractive as a catalog model of men's underwear. Sure, you looked twice, but there was that problem of you existing in the three-dimensional world, and his being just a flat, glossy surface. Plus, there was Jeff's absolute lack of discernment, it seemed. ("If she's breathing, he'll sleep with it," one of the part-time language teachers had told Mira once in pa.s.sing. "It's pretty sad, really. If he were a woman, we'd all feel sorry for him and be worried about his self-esteem.") Mira looked at her watch (where was Clark? she needed to call) and thanked Jeff, who took the paperclip out of his mouth before he said good-bye, and put it back on her bookshelf.

39.

So many years in an academic environment: that had to be the reason that Sh.e.l.ly's first thought was, It's not a dead metaphor.

Her blood really had run cold. It dropped twenty degrees in her veins as she looked up at Josie in the doorway, realizing that, because Josie never apologized for anything she did wrong in the office, this was something else. This was something bad.

Josie swallowed. Sh.e.l.ly could see it in the muscles on her neck, hear the little wash of spit in the girl's mouth, as her own mouth went completely dry.

"What?" Sh.e.l.ly asked, curling her toes inside her suede boots. "What is it?"

"Oh, G.o.d, Sh.e.l.ly. You're going to be so mad at me." The girl was whining, but she also sounded strangely as if she were reading from a script. Without realizing it, Sh.e.l.ly found that she had stood up, and that she was stepping backward, as if to put some s.p.a.ce between the two of them. "And I don't blame you. But. Well. You know those pictures I took? With my cell phone? You know, when we-?"

Sh.e.l.ly raised an alarmed hand to stop Josie from going on.

No, the hand said. Don't say it. No need to remind me. Of course she knew: They'd been lying together in Sh.e.l.ly's bed. Skin to skin. The top sheet and blanket were crumpled on the floor at the foot of it. Josie had been kissing Sh.e.l.ly's neck, and her Cover Girl lipstick was smeared all over Sh.e.l.ly's throat (something she'd noticed only later, at the bathroom mirror, with alarm, thinking at first that she was bleeding) and they'd been drinking red wine, and a splash of it had landed in a violent-looking slash across the bottom sheet. Sh.e.l.ly was a little drunk, and Josie had seemed more so. She'd giggled hard enough at a very stupid joke Sh.e.l.ly had told her (while licking the girl's hip: "What do the hippies do?" "They hold the leggies on") that she'd finally jumped out of bed squealing, "Oh, my G.o.d, stop it, Sh.e.l.ly, or I'm going to pee in the bed!" (Sh.e.l.ly had noticed that the more Josie drank the more her speech became less and less of the Valley Girl and more harder-voweled Midwestern.) After the bathroom, Josie had stumbled back to the bed with her cell phone and snuggled next to Sh.e.l.ly, and held the phone an arm's length away from them, and then scooted down and sunk her sharp little front teeth pleasantly into Sh.e.l.ly's nipple, and snapped the cell phone at the same time.

A giggle.

Sh.e.l.ly said, "What did you do?"

She knew, of course, about camera phones, knew her own cell phone had such an application, although she'd never bothered to learn how to use it, but it still took a few seconds for her to process that Josie was snapping photos, and in those seconds Josie had managed to snap another, and another, and then she climbed on top of Sh.e.l.ly, straddled her pelvis-the incredible warm-moist sensation of Josie's crotch pressed onto hers-and held the phone at arm's length again, and managed to get them both together, smiling and naked and, surely, from a distance, completely obscene.

Then Josie had snuggled back down to show Sh.e.l.ly the photo: It took her breath away.

This miniaturized image of herself as a fit, creamy-skinned middle-aged woman holding a dark-haired sylph in her arms. She was lost, completely lost, and knew it, even as she took the phone from Josie herself and snapped a photo of Josie reclining, sloe-eyed, one hand cupped under her breast, and another of Josie's dark hair floating around Sh.e.l.ly's hips as she flicked Sh.e.l.ly's c.l.i.toris with her tongue. After that, Josie took a photo of Sh.e.l.ly propped up against the headboard, legs spread, and Josie's hand-thrillingly recognizable by the little gold and ruby ring she wore-between them. A single bright index finger disappearing inside her, and Sh.e.l.ly's face registering the pleasure of it, her mouth a subtle O, eyes half-closed, the bliss of the moment, and the bliss of capturing it, perfectly and suddenly, like something s.n.a.t.c.hed out of the air still buzzing and humming and coming and pinned to time forever with a tack.

If anything in this world had ever excited Sh.e.l.ly more, brought her more fully into this world, she could not have said what it was.

Now, as Josie stood before her in the Chamber Music Society offices, one half-naked shoulder raised in a tiny apology, Sh.e.l.ly recognized it, all of it, for what it was: insanity.

The undoing of her small, carefully constructed life.

Oh, how they would love it, too. After so many male professors had been taken apart, witch-hunted down for their dalliances with undergraduates, how satisfying and self-affirming it would be to chase a lesbian out the door.

"I was, you know," Josie said, "going to email them to you, you know. I thought . . ." Sh.e.l.ly groaned a little, closed her eyes tightly. "They were on my computer. And my roommate saw them, and I guess she turned them in to the Omega Theta Tau Board."

"Oh, Josie. Oh, my G.o.d. How could-"

Josie lifted her chin defensively, and shook her head so that the dangling pearl earrings she was wearing began to swing around in her hair.

"Well, Sh.e.l.ly," she said, sounding petulant. "I'm really scared, too. I mean, I won't tell them who, in the pictures, you know, I'm with. But I think there might be something about this in the by-laws. Like, maybe if I won't tell them, and they think you're a professor, or my boss, or something-"

Sh.e.l.ly put her head in her hands and went back to her desk chair, sank down in it. After a few seconds she said into her hands, "Please. Just let me have a few minutes to think. Alone. Please. Go."

"Sure."

It was said so brightly that Sh.e.l.ly looked up, and it was a shock to find that Josie hadn't moved an inch, was still leaning against the doorjamb, was smiling down at Sh.e.l.ly, quite happily, it seemed, from a very great height.

40.

"Mom?"

"Perry. Honey. I've been trying to get a hold of you for days. Is everything okay there?"

"I've just been busy, Mom. I'm sorry. I started a work-study job for one of my professors, and I've been researching and interviewing. I lost track of how long it had been since I called."

"Oh, Perry. Don't let a job get in the way of your school work. That's why you've got that scholars.h.i.+p, sweetheart, so you have time for studying, not-"

"This is like studying, Mom. It'll be good. My professor's writing a book. I'm getting academic credit for it, too. Really, it'll be-"

"Okay. I believe you. I just worry when I don't hear from you. I don't want you to overload yourself. You don't sound right, sweetheart. Are you sleeping? Are you okay? Is Craig okay?"

"Craig's okay. I'm fine. I sleep."

There was a silence and, in it, Perry thought he could hear the second hand on the clock on the kitchen wall in Bad Axe make its little snapping sound, traveling between the black dashes between numbers. He closed his eyes, saw that clock over his mother's shoulder, and in that moment he considered, briefly, telling her everything.

Nicole. The photo. Lucas.

He imagined asking her-what? To pray for him?

To come and pick him up?

To tell him he'd lost his mind, or that, yes, this sort of thing, it happened all the time.

Girls died, and they rose from the dead.

Did he think his mother would tell him, Don't worry about it, sweetheart. You'll figure it all out in good time.

No, she would be stunned into silence. She would panic. She would cry. He cleared his throat, instead, in the silence, and his mother said, "Good, sweetheart. That's good. You just be sure to get plenty of sleep and eat right, okay? And tell Craig we said hi. I sent some cookies for both of you. They should get there in another day or two."

Perry rubbed his eyes. He said, trying to sound rested, well fed, sane, "Thanks, Mom. How's Dad?"

"Dad's fine. We're both fine. Can you come home for a few days before Thanksgiving, or won't we see you until then?"

"I'll work on a ride," he said. "I'll let you know. I have to check my calendar, and with my professor."

"Sure. We just miss you. That black bear is back."

"Really?" Perry asked.

"Really."

"Wow."