"It's symbolic. You have to understand that."

When it happened again, the university housing department arranged for Perry to finish the semester in a vacant room on the other side of the dorm.

Now, glimpsing Josie Reilly, who was clipping purposefully out of Starbucks, Perry imagined she knew that Craig was back (it had been in the paper, after all), but he had no idea if she knew that Perry was living with him again, and didn't want to find out. He was on the way back to their apartment from the bookstore, where he'd bought the book Professor Polson had a.s.signed for them to read that week: The Body After Death. The cover was white, the letters black, and on the back there was a quote from Professor Polson herself, saying that this book was the definitive text on folklore and the funereal sciences. Except for a four-subject notebook, it was the only thing in his backpack, which slipped around loosely between his shoulder blades as he turned the corner at State Street and Liberty as quickly as he could, ducking around a bagel place before Josie could see him and maybe try to talk to him about Nicole, or Craig.

By the time of the memorial service in April, Nicole had already been buried for two weeks. Four hundred people had crammed into Trinity Lutheran Church in Bad Axe for the funeral, and another hundred had spilled out the front doors and into the parking lot, where a late March blizzard was doing its best to bury them inch by inch. Some of the women were wearing open-toed shoes. Some of the men wore only their suit coats. A few people had put up umbrellas to keep the snow from soaking them. One of those umbrellas was decorated with smiley faces, and Perry found it hard to take his eyes off of it as he and the other three pallbearers pa.s.sed it carrying Nicole's white coffin between them.

It wasn't so much the irony of the smiley faces as the ba.n.a.lity. The simplicity.

And it wasn't just the umbrella. It was everything: The shiny coffin. The white, cheap-looking cloth that had been spread over it near the altar, and Nicole's smiling senior portrait propped up on the lid. The coffin, of course, was closed. As the paper had reported over and over, Nicole had been identified only by the jewelry and clothes she'd been wearing because there was nothing left about her that was identifiable as her.

Not that perfect smile. Not that blond ponytail. Not those pink cheeks.

The last time Perry had seen her was two nights before the accident, when she'd pa.s.sed him on the sidewalk on Campus Ave. She'd been holding on to some older guy's arm, wobbling in her high heels back to his frat, Perry supposed, hair soaking wet and plastered to her face, although it was a completely clear night and hadn't, in fact, rained or snowed for days. She had a red plastic cup in her hand.

Perry hadn't recognized her at first. She could have been any drunk sorority girl. When finally he did recognize her, he was shocked by how drunk she looked. The guy who was holding her up seemed both very pleased with himself and stone-cold sober.

Perry stopped in front of the two of them and said, "Nicole. Are you okay?"

It seemed to take her several seconds to realize she'd been spoken to, and then even longer for her eyes to focus on him. Finally, she hiccupped a little and said, "Oh, hi, Perry."

"You want me to walk you back to the dorm?" he asked. "You're looking like you need some help."

"Get lost, man," her frat guy said. "We're doing just fine here."

Nicole leaned into the guy's arm, tripped on the heel of her shoe, giggling, and the guy caught her, propped her up on his shoulder again. She raised up her red plastic cup to Perry. "No, I'm doing great. But thanks for being such a Boy Scout," she said, and the frat guy snorted, and Nicole stumbled away with him.

Perry had turned and watched them go, feeling uneasy, but what could he do?

At her funeral, in the photograph on her coffin, Nicole was wearing the dress Perry remembered from the Senior Cla.s.s Awards Ceremony: pale blue with ruffles down the front. As she'd accepted the Ramsey Luke Scholarship with a little curtsy, that dress had shimmered under the gym lights. In the front pew of Trinity Lutheran Church in Bad Axe, as the funeral was coming to an end with weeping and prayers and organ music and the blowing of noses, Perry was thinking about that little curtsy-how it had infuriated him-and then Pastor Heine plucked the photo off the coffin and nodded at the pallbearers to come forward, to take Nicole Werner in her coffin out to the hea.r.s.e that was waiting in the parking lot.

It was amazingly heavy, that coffin, even with the four of them balancing the weight of it between them. Perry was on the right side, at her head. As they pa.s.sed down the aisle of the church, he stared in a straight line into the distance, having to work especially hard not to look at Nicole's sisters, who were tossed together in the first pew in a dark lacy heap of blond grief, or to glance in the direction of his own mother, although he could feel her red eyes on the side of his face.

Then they were stepping out of the church and into that cold rain beyond the doors, and the ushers motioned for the mourners to move off the church steps in order to clear a path to the hea.r.s.e. The crowd parted for the pallbearers and the coffin, and that's when Perry saw the umbrella with the smiley faces. Maybe the other pallbearers saw it, too. They all hesitated at the same time at the top of the stairs, preparing for the precarious journey down. Nicole's uncle-in the front, across the coffin from Perry-seemed to be having trouble bearing the weight and weeping uncontrollably at the same time, but they took the stairs one at a time, slowly, until, on the last one, Tony Werner, Nicole's cousin and the guy who'd once punched Perry in the stomach for refusing to give him a ball on the playground, stumbled. Some salt had been thrown on the snow, but it had only made the cement slushier, more dangerous.

Nothing ridiculous happened, thank G.o.d. The other three pallbearers compensated by leaning backward, and Tony managed to regain his footing and get right back in sync with the others within a few seconds, and they crossed the parking lot and guided the coffin into the back of the hea.r.s.e without further incident. Still, in those seconds, Perry had felt Nicole's weight shift to his shoulder before settling down between them all again-and, now, he thought of that weight often.

On the other side of Bagels and Bites, he waited until he was sure Josie would be down the block, across the street, and then he turned around and headed back in the direction of his and Craig's apartment.

15.

The night Sh.e.l.ly had come across the accident, she had been on her way home from the gym. It was the Ides of March. All day, a watery sun had been trying to creep out from behind the same sloppy, gray, and borderless cloud until finally, giving up, it just sank into the horizon. Of course, then it cleared, and hard little stars blinked on one by one as the sky grew darker, and a huge round moon rose over everything, tremendously bright, as if it had somehow managed to finally push the sun out of the sky.

Et tu, Brute?

It had seemed unfair that it had been such a cloudy dark day, only to be such a crystal clear night. By mid-March, Sh.e.l.ly was always weary of winter and its continuing, small injustices. She wanted spring.

Her arms and back ached. She'd overdone it again. Every night before she stepped foot in the gym, she told herself she wouldn't overdo it, and then she'd start hauling the heaviest weights she could lift off the rack and over to the bench.

Why?

She wasn't trying to impress the men, and there were almost never any women in the free weights corner of the gym.

She was, she supposed, trying to impress her own reflection in the mirror.

Often, she did.

Sh.e.l.ly was five feet, five inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, but when she yanked those forty-pound dumbbells off the floor, you could have counted the sinews in her biceps and triceps. You could have sketched the grainy fibers. She was a forty-eight-year-old woman made of muscle. "Whoa," some guy would almost always say from the other side of the weight rack. "You a bodybuilder, or trying to scare somebody?"

Usually, Sh.e.l.ly said nothing in response, but once she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, "I have a past."

She had sounded serious. The guy who'd been joking with her looked away, but a leering teenager on her other side said, "I bet you do."

Sh.e.l.ly knew she looked her age, but that she also looked good. Her stomach was flat. Her legs were lean. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her hair was long and strawberry blonde. Boys like this one-chiseled body, face full of acne-had been staring at her body her whole life, although, these days, the older men left her alone. More experienced, probably they smelled it on her.

Lesbian.

She didn't do men.

She wished she never had. She still had a scar that ran straight from her collarbone down to her hipbone, left over from the great heteros.e.xual mistake of her life, and the last one of those she'd ever make.

Not that she was doing very well with women, either. The last woman she'd dated for more than a few weeks had moved to Arizona with the life partner she'd never bothered to tell Sh.e.l.ly she had.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," Rosemary had said. But Rosemary had three teenage sons and a dashing brain-surgeon husband. It was easy for her to cast people out of Sh.e.l.ly's life without a backward glance. Except to go to work, Sh.e.l.ly herself had hardly left the house for a month after the break-up.

And now, to top off a whole lifetime of s.e.xual misadventures, it seemed that early menopause had arrived. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself stripping off her jacket and sweater in the checkout line of the grocery store. Dripping, panting. What the h.e.l.l? Had they turned the heat up to three hundred degrees? Was the place on fire? She had a sudden nauseating memory of being placed by some beautician under a steaming plastic hood in a sweltering hair salon as a child, and being told to sit still as it poured stinking air from a hundred little holes onto her hair and the chemicals burned their way into the skin on her scalp.

"Jesus," Sh.e.l.ly said in the grocery store, and the woman at the cash register said in a cigarette-husky Midwestern drawl, "Yer havin' a hot flash darlin'. Ain't ya ever had a hot flash before?"

No. She most certainly had not. But now she had one every other day. "Oh," her doctor had said, "this is a little early, but might as well get it over with, right?" Sh.e.l.ly wondered if he'd say this to her someday when she came to him with a terminal illness.

Up ahead, someone seemed to be swerving around. Sh.e.l.ly rubbed her left bicep with her right hand, holding the steering wheel with her left, and then changed biceps and hands.

She was solid. She was aching, but her arms were hard as rock. She was singing along with the radio. A country song about staying loyal to the U.S. of A. If you didn't like it here, you could leave, the lyrics tw.a.n.ged-and Sh.e.l.ly's brother's black-and-white high school yearbook picture floated up out of the ten billion images in her unconscious.

He was smiling, getting ready to die in Vietnam.

Ahead, the red brake lights of the meandering vehicle seemed to be making elliptical dashes across the centerline, into the shoulder, back into the right lane, back over the yellow line. Kids, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around. Or a defensive driver avoiding something in the road. Too far ahead to worry too much about. Sh.e.l.ly was still singing along to the radio as she still rubbed her aching muscles. She was thinking of how tired she was of pretending to be everything she was not, and then wondering who she might be if she stopped pretending not to be what she was, when the car in front of her (fifty yards? Forty?) seemed to be plucked out of the moonlit darkness by a gigantic hand.

Gone.

16.

Nicole Werner was standing outside the library shivering. She had a book pressed to her chest. She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. It was the last week in October, but it had been a weirdly hot, hazy day-the sky purple and fuzzy-looking behind the changed leaves-and although the sun had seemed far away, it had still managed to turn Craig and Perry's dorm room into a sauna by two o'clock in the afternoon. They had a west-facing window.

Because it had seemed so much like summer, Craig, too, had left G.o.dwin that afternoon in shorts and a T-shirt, but he'd been back to his room since then and gotten his jacket, which he was glad about, because as soon as the sun set, it felt like late autumn again. Obviously, Nicole Werner hadn't been out of the library since the temperature had dropped.

"Hey, Nicole. What are you doing?" Craig asked when he reached her at the top of the steps. He'd already told Lucas to get lost.

("Aw, man," Lucas had said as Craig veered away from him, a clear diagonal cut across the Commons toward the column Nicole was leaning against. "You gonna dump me for that b.i.t.c.h?") Nicole looked up, and the light from inside the library fell on her flossy hair, which was pulled back in the usual ponytail but also looked mussed, as if she'd been rolling around in a stack of hay, or studying philosophy all night. Midterms had been over since the week before. Could she already be cramming for something else?

"I was waiting for Josie," she said.

"Oh," Craig said, trying not to display any particular reaction to the name Josie, but he couldn't help taking a quick look over both shoulders to make sure she wasn't there. "Here," he said to Nicole. He took off his jean jacket and handed it to her. He would have preferred to step around and drape it over her shoulders (a gesture he felt certain he must have seen made by men in movies, since it wasn't the kind of thing his father would have done for his mother), but he found himself unable to step into the circle of light in which Nicole Werner stood.

Nicole balanced her book on her hip with one hand, took the jacket from him with the other. "Thanks, Craig," she said. "Wow!"

"I'm not cold," he said, and then wished he hadn't. Instead of sounding chivalrous, now he sounded like he'd been looking around for a coat rack and had happened to run into her.

"Well, I'm freezing," Nicole said, stuffing her arms into his jacket. "I was so stupid leaving the dorm like this. I guess I thought I'd be back for dinner, but then I got obsessed with this stupid paper, and ended up just eating one of those disgusting sandwiches out of the vending machine. I had no idea how cold it had gotten."

"Yeah," Craig said. "When's your paper due?"

"Couple of weeks," she said.

He couldn't help opening his mouth and eyes in astonishment. "And you're working on it already?"

Nicole laughed, rolled her eyes, and then widened them, mimicking him. "Yeah," she said. "College is hard for some of us, Craig. Just because you're one of those guys who just sails through everything with no problems . . ."

Craig considered correcting her, but decided not to. He shrugged.

"Perry says you just sort of open your book, and close it, and you're done. Believe me, I wish I could get away with that."

Craig was ready to get this part of the conversation over with. He remembered the clammy handshake Dean Fleming had given him in Chez Vin that first night, and the few phony sentences the dean had managed to stammer out about how great it was to have his old friend's son in the Honors College, pretending it was a coincidence. Since then, on the few occasions Craig had pa.s.sed Dean Fleming in the administrative hallway, the guy had gone way out of his way to pretend he didn't know Craig any better than any of the other students, and Craig felt pretty certain he was p.i.s.sed he'd had to do that favor for his old Dartmouth pal.

"Well, I should probably study more than I do." He dragged a hand across his eyes. Was he mistaken, or was the light getting brighter the longer it lingered on Nicole Werner's hair and face? He inhaled, and said, "So, want to walk back to G.o.dwin?"

"Like I said, I'm waiting for Josie. Want to wait with me?"

"No," Craig said. Too quickly. For a second there he'd forgotten about Josie. "That's okay."

He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell and took a step backward, but Nicole said, "What about your coat?"

She sounded alarmed, as if he were about to walk off a plane without a parachute-but maybe she always sounded alarmed. He remembered the way she'd waved Perry over in the cafeteria one night. Perry! she'd said. I forgot to tell you! I went home last weekend, and I saw Mary. She said to say hi!

Perry had just grunted. He hadn't even looked up from his tray. Whoever Mary was had seemed like a really big deal to Nicole, but when Craig asked Perry about it, he said, "Who cares?"

"Nicole seems to care," Craig pointed out. "She made this Mary sound like a long-lost cousin, or somebody risen from the dead."

"Well, Nicole always sounds excited."

It had occurred then to Craig, again, that Perry was nursing some unrequited love grudge, but he also thought he had a point. Nicole, and girls like her, did usually sound excited, or alarmed, or semihysterical, when they weren't. It was something about the hard vowels and the crisp consonants and the way most of their sentences ended with "you guys!" And sounding like a question: "I'm, like, so hungry, you guys?!" You'd think some girl was starving to death, but she might just mean she wanted to borrow some quarters for a roll of Lifesavers.

"It's not a problem," Craig said, still backing away. "I'll get it from you back at the dorm."

"Wow!" Nicole said. "Thanks so much, Craig. You're so nice!"

"Sure," he said, trying to smile like a nice guy but imagining his own mug shot on a s.e.xual predator website.

Josie had not, it seemed, told Nicole about the other night. Maybe, he hoped, she wouldn't. But why wouldn't she? Briefly he'd held out some hope that she'd been so drunk she didn't even remember the incident, but that hope had been dashed when he'd pa.s.sed her in the courtyard on Sunday morning, and she'd stopped dead in front of him.

"Hi," he'd said.

"Yeah," Josie had said. Craig had tried hard not to look her in the eyes, but they just bored straight into his own, and then he couldn't look away. It was a bright morning, too, and his eyes started to water in the glare. He hadn't left the dorm since Friday. He'd been pretty much either stoned or sleeping since he'd last seen her. "So, 'hi' is all you have to say to me?" she asked.

About a hundred bad jokes flashed through Craig's brain, like having Eddie Murphy or Lenny Bruce shuffling a deck inside his skull, but he managed to keep his mouth firmly shut. The morning sun was making Josie's hair look so black and shiny and smooth it scared the h.e.l.l out of him. He couldn't have spoken if he wanted to.

"You're a great guy, Craig," she'd said. "Really exceptional. I hope you rot in h.e.l.l."

And then she was gone so fast he didn't know in which direction she'd left.

s.h.i.t, he thought. She definitely remembered.

He didn't see her again for at least a week, but that was mostly because he'd been staying away from anywhere she might be-avoiding the stairwells near her hall, slipping out the side entrance to G.o.dwin instead of going through the courtyard-and when he did see her again, luckily she didn't see him. She and Nicole were together in the cafeteria, dressed up for some sort of Greek tea or soiree or salon or something equally feminine and mysterious and inane. (Rush Week started as soon as midterms were over, and half the girls in G.o.dwin Honors Hall were joining sororities, appearing suddenly around the dorm every evening in pearls and skirts, while the guys who were rushing stumbled around looking disoriented and hung over.) As soon as he recognized Josie's black hair, he'd scrambled to the back of the cafeteria as fast as he could.

The next week, he didn't go looking for the study group on the night he knew they'd be down in the Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room, although he missed the group. He missed Nicole, and it pained him to think he'd never be in that room with her again, listening to her breathe through her nose as she read her textbook. By then, he a.s.sumed she hated him and that Josie had given her some ugly Cliffs Notes version of the events: The way, in his bed, Josie had asked, "Are you wearing a condom?"

It was the first whole sentence she'd uttered since she'd stripped off her clothes and, standing shiningly naked in front of him, had whispered, "I want you to f.u.c.k me. I've wanted you to f.u.c.k me for a long time."

"Condom? No," he'd said, sounding more annoyed than he'd meant to. But when would he have put on a condom? Did she think he'd come out of the shower wearing one?

Her dark eyes, bleary as they were, shot open then, and Josie put her hands on his chest, shoving, and said, "Get off!"

"What?" Craig asked.

"I said get off of me!"

Craig rolled off of her, although every nerve ending and instinct he had-his brain having been turned into a kind of strobe light-was telling him to stay on top of her and to keep going.

"I'll get pregnant," she said. "Or a disease!"

"Huh?" Craig said. "Aren't you on the pill or something?"