7.

"Omega Theta Tau," their resident advisor, Lucas, said, nodding drunkenly at the house on the hill.

Lucas owned about fourteen flasks, and had four of them on him that night-one in each pocket, except for the one in his hand. He stumbled on a sidewalk crack, and Craig laughed like it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen. Perry just kept walking. The two of them kept falling behind, and if they stopped again to p.i.s.s on someone's lawn, Perry had already decided he'd just keep walking back to the dorm.

"They're virgins. Every last one of 'em."

"No," Craig said, and slapped his hand onto Lucas's shoulder. "No," he said again.

"Yep," Lucas said. "And they're the most beautiful f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.hes on this campus, too."

"No."

"Yep."

"That oughta be illegal. That oughta be f.u.c.king against the f.u.c.king law."

"Yep," Lucas said.

Perry looked up at the house on the hill. It was a dark, tall, rambling, and formidable brick edifice-one of those turn-of-the-century mansions with a carriage house out back and hundred-year-old oaks and elms in the yard. A white banner with black Greek letters on it fluttered between the pillars that held up the front porch. There were lace curtains in the front windows, and maybe a candle flickering behind them. Otherwise, the house looked so quiet it might have been empty-completely different from most of the fraternity and sorority houses on the row, which looked used up, neglected. Plastic cups in the driveways. Towels hung in the windows.

Perry had been at the university for only two weeks, but he'd already gotten used to seeing the parties spill out of those houses and onto the lawns. The girls, wearing soft sweaters and miniskirts, would be stumbling drunk, sprawled on the gra.s.s or in the mud. He'd seen those girls hobbling down the sidewalk back to their houses after a party-one high heel in a hand, the other on a foot, laughing or crying. The week before, someone had set fire to a frat house with a barbecue grill. One of the frat brothers had been pa.s.sed out on a couch on the porch as the Fire Department sprayed down the front of the house with water, and no one had realized he was there until the fire was out and he'd been burned over 60 percent of his body.

Perry had no interest, he already knew, in Greek life. He did not want to be a fraternity brother, or to have any. Still, this sorority house on the hill seemed a part of some better, older, more elegant tradition, he thought. He could picture the sorority sisters sitting around some large oak table speaking seriously of the traditions of their house. They'd be wearing dark and sober clothes. There would be some sort of Oriental rug on the floor, a Siamese cat asleep on it. Maybe a tapestry on the wall. That candle flickering he saw from where he stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the house, would be at the center of their circle. There would be a large ancient book on the table, opened to a page that held some message from the Founding Sisters. One of the girls, her long hair falling over the text, would be reading aloud in a respectful tone.

"Somebody better go f.u.c.k those s.l.u.ts, don't you think?" Lucas asked.

Craig was fumbling at Lucas's back pocket, trying to retrieve one of his flasks, and didn't answer.

"I said," Lucas shouted, and then held a hand to his mouth, shouting toward the house on the hill, "Somebody better go f.u.c.k those Omega Theta Tau s.l.u.ts!"

A porch light snapped on.

The front door opened.

A slim silhouette with cascades of hair stepped out and stood under the light in the doorway, looking in their direction.

Craig unscrewed the flask and tipped it into his mouth, leaning his head back. Perry turned and left them there just as Lucas was taking another deep breath to shout at the house again.

"Are you having fun there, honey?" his mother had asked Perry on the phone that afternoon.

He'd said yes.

She'd asked if he'd gotten the cookies she'd mailed.

He had, a few days before, but had eaten only one before Craig and Lucas finished them off in a stoned frenzy on a Wednesday night. Standing over them with the empty wax-paper-lined s...o...b..x in his hand, he'd said, "You f.u.c.king a.s.sholes." They'd looked up at him from the floor, where they had a chessboard without enough pieces on it between them. Their eyes were so bloodshot Perry had to look away. They'd f.u.c.king eaten his mother's cookies. f.u.c.king a.s.sholes.

To be fair, they both apologized profusely then. Stammering, ashamed. "We are a.s.sholes, man. You should kick our a.s.ses."

Lucas, especially, seemed horrified by his own actions, but Craig, looking into the empty s...o...b..x, also appeared appalled. "This is unforgivable," he said, without irony. Getting stoned seemed to rinse the irony right out of Craig, although it made him a jerk in about a hundred other ways.

Perry had tossed the empty s...o...b..x down between the two of them, taken the towel off the hook inside his closet, and gone to the shower. By the time he got back, both Lucas and Craig were gone. Craig returned a few minutes later with a package of Chips Ahoy, handing them over to Perry.

"You like these, don't you?" he asked.

Perry held the package, shaking his head wearily.

"We f.u.c.ked up," Craig said. "We were only going to eat one, I swear."

"Do you always smoke so much dope?" Perry asked.

Craig seemed to think about that question for a long time, his eyebrows knitted together. But, apparently, he forgot what he'd been asked; he stripped off his clothes and got into bed without ever answering.

Talking to his mother on the phone, Perry could picture her in their kitchen at home. She'd be wearing one of her heavy, old sweaters. Jeans. She never wore shoes in the house, and didn't like slippers, so he could see her polka-dotted socks. Or the green wool ones. It would be colder up there than it was down here. In the distance, if the window was open a crack, you would be able to hear Lake Huron churning in the wind. An undulating static. There would be the smell of fish and seaweed and the metallic air that skimmed for many miles across water.

She said, "Dad and I are taking Grandpa to Dumplings tomorrow. We'll miss you."

"Have a strudel for me," Perry said. "I'll miss you guys, too. Tell Grandpa hi."

"Do you ever see Nicole Werner down there? I saw her mom at the grocery store the other day, and she said Nicole was liking school."

"Yeah," Perry said. "I see her all the time. She lives one floor down, and we're in a study group. With our roommates. She's fine."

"Any other girls there, sweetie?"

Perry cleared his throat. "Well, there are a lot of other girls here, Mom."

Perry's mother laughed softly. "Ha, ha, smart aleck," she said. "You know what I mean."

Nicole's roommate, Josie, flashed through his mind-the kind of girl he didn't like. When she looked at you, she started with your shoes before deciding whether or not to bother with the rest of you. And why she was bothering with their study group, Perry didn't know, except that maybe she was interested in Craig. Every one of her cla.s.ses was something she'd already taken at the private high school she'd attended in Grosse Isle. She just rolled her eyes at her textbooks when she opened them, and said, "This again."

"No. No girls, Mom," Perry said.

"Well, your mama loves you. Why would you need any girls?"

She laughed again, and Perry tried to laugh, too.

"I talked to Mary the other day," she said.

"Oh."

"Just on the phone. She called to say hi. See how you were doing."

Perry snorted.

"Now, Perry, really. That's the reason she called, and I can't just hang up on her, you know. I feel sorry for that girl."

"Yeah, well . . ."

"Yeah, well, what?"

"Yeah, well, she's the one who dumped me, Mom. Shouldn't I be the one you feel sorry for?"

"I would, Perry, if you weren't down there starting your whole life when she's up here, stuck forever, having ruined her own."

"And whose fault is that?"

"Well, I think we've had this conversation before, honey. I only told you I'd spoken to her because I thought you'd want to know."

"I do. I did. It's okay, Mom. How pregnant is she?"

"Four months."

"Oh, yeah. That's right."

Of course.

For three years, dating Perry, Mary had virtuously clung to her virginity, never wavering in her commitment to save herself for their wedding night. Within two months of dating Pete Gerristsen, though, she was having his baby whether Pete liked it or not.

The moon followed Perry all the way back to G.o.dwin Hall, and caused him to cast a long foreshadow stretching so far ahead that it looked like a redwood or a telephone pole was meandering down the sidewalk. There was a smell to this town, completely different from the smell of Bad Axe. Carbon emissions maybe? Not that Bad Axe didn't have cars and busses and trucks, but not centralized, like this. Not blocks and blocks of cars, parking garages, bus stops.

Perry had spent his whole life in Bad Axe, and even the summer camp he'd gone to, deep in the Hiawatha National Forest, had been within eighty miles of his own front door. He'd traveled, of course. A trip every year with his parents. Nova Scotia. Gettysburg. Washington, D.C. They'd gone to Mexico for spring break a few years before. But he'd never lived anywhere else. And, already, after only a couple of weeks in this college town, he was beginning to see how some of the ways he'd a.s.sumed the world worked everywhere were not the ways they worked at all.

Perry kept walking at a steady pace, following his own shadow until he'd crossed the whole campus and was back at the dorm.

"Hey."

She was standing in the entryway of G.o.dwin Hall: Nicole Werner, wearing jeans and a dark, bulky sweatshirt. Her hair wasn't in the usual ponytail, and looked uncombed, a bit frayed at the ends around her shoulders. He hadn't recognized her as he walked across the courtyard, and had almost walked past her without noticing. A few other girls were sitting on the cement stairs. One was talking on a cell phone. Another was smoking a cigarette. They didn't seem to be with Nicole.

"Hi, Nicole."

She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, tilted her head, and said, "How are you, Perry?"

"Great," Perry said. "You?"

She shrugged. Her shoulders looked narrower than he thought he remembered. In high school, she'd played volleyball, and he remembered being surprised, seeing her in her uniform in the gym one afternoon their junior year, that she was so muscular-not in a bad way, just sort of st.u.r.dy, sinewy, which he wouldn't have expected from such a slender girl.

But tonight, on the front steps of G.o.dwin Honors Hall, Nicole looked like a kid. Like a waif, he thought. And the baggy sweatshirt. What was with that? She'd been one of the best-dressed girls at Bad Axe High, which was saying something. You might think that in a small town like that, girls wouldn't have much fashion sense. But the Bad Axe High girls, most of them anyway, did. They'd drive every weekend the two hours to Birch Run to go to the outlet malls, and come back wearing Calvin Klein and those other designers, looking like models, and Nicole had definitely been one of those. And up until now, when he'd seen her around campus, she'd seemed to be carrying on the tradition. Even when they were just meeting in the lounge for study group, she'd been in a neat blouse or sweater. One night, she'd even worn a skirt and sandals with heels.

Nicole wrapped her arms around herself. She looked down at her feet, which Perry was surprised to see were bare.

"I'm not so great, I guess," she said.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Perry thought maybe she meant she had the flu or something. She looked like she had the flu, but maybe that was just the harsh electric light over the stairs.

"I don't know. I guess I'm having adjustment issues," she said.

"To college?" he asked.

She nodded, and made a puckery little expression with her lips. Perry hoped she wasn't going to cry. What was he supposed to do if she did? He didn't have a handkerchief on him, and he couldn't imagine giving her his shoulder, or putting his arm around her. He'd have to just stand there like an idiot, saying stupid things, until she stopped.

Unable to think of anything else to say, Perry shrugged and said, "Yeah, well. It's not like high school."

"Not that high school was so great," Nicole said.

"You always seemed pretty happy."

"I did?" She looked up at him with what appeared to be genuine surprise.

"Well. I don't know," Perry said. "Weren't you?"

"Well, I guess it was better than this," she said, looking out at the courtyard of G.o.dwin Honors Hall. "But I hated it."

Perry snorted a little. He couldn't help it. He pictured Nicole in that bright floral dress, accepting the Ramsey Luke Scholarship from Mr. Krug, then climbing the step to the lectern to deliver her valedictorian speech about the importance of being "first and foremost moral people."

Nicole seemed to have heard the little involuntary sound he'd made, and her eyebrows sprang up. "What?" she asked, locking her eyes onto his.

Perry looked away fast, down at his own shadow stretched between them. He cleared his throat. "Well," he said, running a hand over the top of his head. "It's just that . . . well, you were the queen of the school, Nicole. You did everything, or won everything, or were president of it. What wasn't to like?"

She let her arms drop to her sides. Her eyes seemed to be pooling with tears.

s.h.i.t, Perry thought. She was going to cry.

"Are you still p.i.s.sed at me about the scholarship, Perry?" she asked in a trembling voice.

"What?!" Perry took a step back, and nearly stumbled down the stairs. The girls who'd been sitting there had left; now there was only a cigarette b.u.t.t where they'd been. He put his hand on his chest.

" 'What?' " Nicole echoed, putting her own hand on her own chest, mocking him. She said, "Don't you know I only got the Ramsey Luke because you got every other award?"

Perry shook his head. He felt he could actually hear something rattling around inside his skull. He said, trying hard to sound convincing, if only to himself, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Oh, get off it, Perry," Nicole said. "Why are you so compet.i.tive? I mean, haven't you won enough stuff? You still have to begrudge everybody else the few bones they tossed us?"

Perry stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He was pretty sure they were shaking. He said, "Why are we having this conversation? I was just on my way to bed."

"We're having this conversation because . . ." Nicole seemed to choke on whatever she meant to say next, and then, to Perry's horror, a few fat teardrops actually spilled out of her eyes and onto her cheeks. He opened his mouth, more in protest against the tears than to say something, and then she buried her face in her hands and sobbed, "Because we're family. We're like family, Perry. You're the only person in this whole place who knows me. You've known me forever. You're the only one, and you hate me."

The two girls who'd been sitting on the steps had wandered back, and were now openly staring at Perry as if he'd committed some crime and was thinking he could get away with it. He looked from them back to Nicole, and then took a step toward her as slowly as he could. She started to sob more loudly. A couple of people on the other side of the doors looked out the window to see what was going on.