"You talked to a professor about this? Are you out of your f.u.c.king mind?"

"Lucas, it's important. She can help."

"Help? What's she going to do to help?"

Perry opened his mouth to answer, but could think of nothing to say.

It was raining when Perry and Professor Polson had met, after cla.s.s, at Espresso Royale. They sat at a table near the back, far from the windows that faced the street, but Perry could hear rain on the roof-hard, fast rain, like a lot of small feet running furiously overhead-and Professor Polson's dark hair was curled in damp ringlets that clung to her neck and the sides of her face. She looked cold, wearing only a silk dress and a cardigan, and she'd gotten soaked, it seemed, on her walk over from G.o.dwin Honors Hall. Perry had gone ahead when she'd told him she had to stop by the library and drop off a book before meeting him. Now, looking across the table at her, he felt bad. He'd had an umbrella. If he'd known she didn't, he would have given her his own, or walked with her to the library and then to the cafe. She wrapped her hands around the white paper cup and brought it to her mouth to breathe in the steam before she sipped from it. It was the kind of thing Perry had seen women do in movies-drink a cup of coffee like this, with both hands, sipping and peering up over the rims of their cups at the same time, but he wasn't sure he'd ever seen anyone do it in real life. Professor Polson's hands were very white and thin, with a few pale blue veins crisscrossing them.

"I'd like to interview Lucas," she said. "Have you told him that you shared his information with me?"

"No," Perry said. "But he never told me I couldn't tell anyone. I'll find him. I'll bring him to your office. I think he'd be willing."

"Maybe not the office," Professor Polson said. "I'd like to record it. I don't want him to be inhibited by the office. Let's meet off campus. Perhaps you could bring him to my apartment."

"Sure," Perry said.

"After that, we'll see. Maybe Patrick Wright, too. What do you think?"

Patrick had been, it seemed, avoiding Perry since the night he'd spoken about Nicole. He'd been drinking when he called Perry. They barely knew each other-Patrick had been a soph.o.m.ore on Perry's and Craig's hall at G.o.dwin the year before-but he knew that Perry had gone to high school with Nicole, and he knew that Perry's roommate had been the one who'd had the accident that had killed her. ("I just wondered," Patrick had slurred, "you know. Have you seen her? Am I losing my mind, Perry? Wha.s.s happening here?") Perry'd had no idea what to say to Patrick, so he had stammered something about sobering up and calling back in the morning, but Patrick never called, and Perry didn't run into him. He'd heard the details from Lucas.

"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 s.e.xy 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 a.s.signed 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 h.e.l.l 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."

"Sorry, Craig." He looked at the side of her face. The scarf was down around her chin now, and she was doing that pouty thing with her lips. At the bridge of her nose was the faintest b.u.mp-an adorable little glitch there that made it possible, Craig thought, to tell her apart from the two or three other completely perfect girls in the world. He was about to apologize for getting all worked up, but she brightened suddenly and turned to him. "You could help!" she said. "Josie would be fine with that. She suggested it anyway-getting some guys to come and work on it, if, like, we got some beer to pay them with or something. You could bring, like, Lucas."

Craig felt the familiar sensation of sweat breaking out in a fine film under his arms, which happened each time Nicole brought up the subject of Josie, of his doing anything that might involve Josie-Josie joining them for a pizza, for instance. Or even when Nicole just said something like "Josie says to say hi." Or the one time he almost lost his dinner as he and Nicole were stepping out of the cafeteria and there was Josie with her arm hooked through Lucas's, both of them clearly stoned out of their minds: "Hey, big boy," Josie had said, waving at Craig with all her fingers up near her mouth.

"Josie," Nicole had blurted out, laughing. "You're totally stoned!"

"Yup," Josie said. "Be careful, or I'll jump your boyfriend's bones."

Nicole had playfully slapped Josie's arm, while Craig started walking away as fast as he could. Nicole followed him, still laughing, and Josie called something else in their direction, but it was slurred, and Craig couldn't hear it over his pounding heart, and after they'd rounded the corner, Nicole had stopped him, turned him to face her, and looked at him carefully.

Outside, the sun was setting behind the glittering lead-paned windows that looked out onto the G.o.dwin Hall courtyard, and her eyes in that light seemed nearly fluorescent in their blueness-like the ocean in Belize, like the sky from the top of Mount Washington. "What's with you, Craig?" she asked, suddenly terrifyingly serious. "And Josie?"

For a second, Craig couldn't breathe, but he worked hard to hold her eyes as if he had nothing to hide. All these weeks he'd held on to some glimmer of hope (false, he could see now) that maybe Josie had told Nicole all about it, and Nicole didn't care-or, at least, that she understood. He'd never had any evidence of that, he realized, and he had no reason whatsoever to believe that if and when Nicole heard about what had happened between him and Josie she wouldn't dump him in a heartbeat. Especially now that they'd been seeing each other for two months and he hadn't said a word.

"Nothing," Craig said. It sounded ridiculous. His voice actually squeaked when he said it.

"Then why does she hate you?"

"What?" Craig tried to make his expression look like one of surprise.

"Why does Josie hate you?"

He tried to open his eyes even wider. "She hates me?"

Nicole burst out laughing. "Uh, yeah. You haven't noticed?"

Craig shrugged.

"Well, you avoid her like the plague, so you know something. You quit coming to the study group even though you seemed so into it for a while. You never even walk by our room if she might be in there. Practically every time I even say her name you change the subject as quick as you can."

His mind was blank. His mouth was open. Over the weeks, Craig had tried to think of a few things he might possibly be able say if this subject came up. Excuses. Lies. Or at least some kind of spin-doctoring. He'd tried to come up with some way to make it sound like Josie had been so drunk and insistent that night that Craig felt he had to do something or it would have hurt her feelings, which was pretty much true, except that he'd been completely happy to f.u.c.k her; it had nothing to do with being polite. But maybe if he could find the right words? Nicole, Craig knew, was pretty naive when it came to people and their secret s.e.x lives. She was always astonished to find out that some unmarried celebrity was pregnant, or that Craig had seen some girl from her hall slip out of the room of some boy on his hall in the morning. ("They were probably studying," she'd say in total seriousness, and then punch him hard in the bicep when he laughed.) It was possible, wasn't it, that she'd believe whatever he said?

But here, now, actually confronted this way in the hallway near the cafeteria with Nicole's beautiful eyes lit up in the sunset-all that pink and mauve pouring through the window panes, and her little half-smile, her head c.o.c.ked like a chickadee, waiting-not only his mind but his soul went completely blank. She waited another long second or two, and then she shook her head. "O-kay," she said. "Uh, just forget I asked."

He tried as hard as he could to read her face as it was closing down before him. Did she know? Did she know and not care? Did she not know, and if she did know, would she slap him as hard as she could and never speak to him again?

He had no idea, he realized, and remembered fifth grade. Map reading. He couldn't do it. He tried to fake it ("Mongolia?"), which resulted in gales of laughter. This was what it would be like in Limbo, he realized. It could go either way-everything that mattered.

"Nicole, I-" he blurted with no idea what he was going to say. Luckily, she held up a hand to stop him.

"You're probably right," she said. "I probably don't want to know. Or, actually, I think I probably do know."

Craig took a step back. He was afraid to look at anything but the place directly between Nicole's eyes. He was wearing an army green T-shirt, and he was sure there must be spreading triangles of sweat at his pits. Nicole wrapped her arms around herself, holding on to her own arms hard. Her knuckles went white.

"You liked her first, didn't you?" she asked, a little sob in her voice. "She's why you were in the study group, and then you found out that she's got that boyfriend from Grosse Isle. That Princeton guy."

Craig took a trembling breath, trying not to explode with relief. It was like watching in the rearview mirror as the tanker that had been barreling down on you flipped straight into a ditch. "No!" he said, finding that he could blink again because now he was actually telling the truth. "No! My G.o.d! Nicole, I was knocked out by you the first time I saw you. You were the only reason I joined that group. I hadn't even seen your roommate. I've never felt this way about any girl. Josie? Jesus. No . . ."

"Craig," Nicole said. "I know you love me now. But I also know that there are other girls, girls who are prettier, and-"

This time Craig did explode, with laughter. He put his hands in his hair, as if to keep his head on his neck, and then he rushed at her, lifted her off her feet, laughing and kissing her and twirling her around in his arms as the after-dinner crowd started pouring out of the cafeteria, which had just closed-all those faceless others splitting around him and Nicole, not even glancing at them, and Craig thought he could just hold her and kiss her there forever. She was laughing, too, and he hoped she thought he was so sweaty and his heart was beating so hard because it was so warm in the hallway, and because he was so in love.

That afternoon he didn't say anything more about the paper roses, or the amount of her time they were going to take away from him between now and her formal (which she couldn't even invite him to because he wasn't in a frat: "I'm just going to go with a sister," she'd a.s.sured him when he'd asked).

They kept walking, past their Starbucks, back to the dorm so she could start on the roses. They'd changed the topic to how crazy it was that someone had spray-painted a different word under every Stop sign in town, so the signs read, STOP WAR, STOP SHRUBBERY, STOP STOPPING, STOP UP, STOP OVER, STOP DIAPER RASH, etc. They speculated about which campus group would have done it, or if it was just one weird guy, or maybe high school students-who knew? Craig had his arms wrapped around her, and his mouth and nose were full of the smell and taste of her red wool scarf. His hands were so numb he had to look at them every few feet to make sure the trig book was still in them.

Then Craig saw him again: up ahead, that same guy who'd come out of the Omega Theta Tau house just before Nicole. He was walking out of the bank in his blue jacket, stuffing his wallet into the back pocket of his khaki pants.

"There he is again," Craig said, pointing.

"Who?" Nicole asked absently. She wasn't even looking in the direction he was pointing.

"That guy who was in your house. That man."

Nicole looked around this time, seeming to scan the horizon, not finding anything of interest. "So?"

"I just want to know who he is," Craig said. "Who is he, Nicole?"

"I wouldn't know," she said. "I can't even see who you're pointing at." She was looking in the exact opposite direction. The guy turned around then, and Craig was sure he looked right at them, as if he'd known they were there, as if he were looking for them.

There was a patch on the guy's jacket pocket. Craig could see it clearly now: "EMT."

"He's an ambulance driver or something," Craig said, more to himself than Nicole.

"So?" she said.

"Why does he hang out at your sorority? Why is he always there?"

Nicole held a hand up to her forehead and looked in the wrong direction again, and then said, "I have no idea what you're talking about Craig. There's no EMT hanging out at the sorority."

Craig looked at her and said, "How did you know he was an EMT?"

"You just said it," she said, and seemed to stomp her foot a little in frustration. "Sheesh!"

"No, I didn't," Craig said. "I said 'ambulance driver,' after I saw there was an EMT patch on his pocket."

"Same thing," she said.

"It's not," he said.

She continued looking around, exactly where the guy was not standing, and then the guy turned his back and stepped into the street, and a white truck pulled into the intersection, blocking Craig's view, and by the time it had pa.s.sed, the man was gone and Craig was staring at nothing but a brick wall.