"No," Josie said. "Why would I be? I'm not even s.e.xually active right now."

At this, Craig had snorted, and said, "I'd say right now you're pretty s.e.xually active." He hadn't intended to sound so sarcastic, but the whole thing was just so f.u.c.king stupid. He'd been minding his own business when she'd come into his room and taken off her clothes and pulled him down onto her in his bed.

But at that point, she was already out of his bed, pulling her little silky panties up over her wildly lush and dark-haired p.u.s.s.y, and then she was looking around for her top, and Craig sighed, too loudly, and flopped down on his back and said, "I'll go see if somebody on the floor will give me a condom," before he realized she was crying.

"I can't believe this," Josie said, pulling her lacy tank top down over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Craig sat up at the edge of the bed then. Luckily, he'd completely deflated, but he pulled his towel up off the floor and put it over his d.i.c.k anyway. "Can't believe what?" he asked, but by then she was dressed, and she'd unlocked his door, slipped out of it, and slammed it behind her. For just a second, in the s.p.a.ce she opened as she left, Craig could hear the party going on in the hallway-all the hardworking students celebrating the harvest. Somehow he pictured them in plaid shirts and gingham dresses-ruddy with good health, living their productive lives, while he searched the dresser for clean boxers, put them on, got back in his messed-up bed, and shoved the buds of his iPod as deeply into his ears as he could.

But now, as he rounded the corner, jacketless, to G.o.dwin Honors Hall-which looked stately and decrepit at the same time under a low, bright moon-he was really hoping that maybe Josie wasn't so mad at him anymore, or at least had never told Nicole what had happened. Truly, he never really thought he stood a chance with Nicole anyway (because, for one thing, he knew he'd never have enough courage or imagination to figure out how to get together with a girl like that: every girl he'd ever hooked up with had made the moves on him first, and it seemed unlikely that Nicole would be that kind of girl), but it had surprised him how sad he was, after the s.h.i.t with Josie, to think he'd blown that chance with Nicole without ever even actually having it.

When he came up the walk to the dorm, Lucas was smoking a cigarette under an elm tree in the courtyard.

"So!" Lucas called out. "Did you strike out again, young man?"

Craig held out his hand for a cigarette, but Lucas patted his pocket and said, "I'm out," and then, "She's not for you anyway, Craig. She's one of those girls who's waiting for marriage, and then she wants two kids and an SUV, and wants to stay home and bake cookies all day while you slave away at some s.h.i.tty job. On the other hand, you've got 'f.u.c.k-'em-and-dump-'em' written all over you."

"What?" Craig asked, sincerely astonished by this a.s.sessment. "Go to h.e.l.l, Lucas. I do not have 'f.u.c.k-'em-and-dump-'em' written all over me."

"Yeah, you do, Craig. You look at girls like you hate 'em."

"What? I do not."

Lucas shrugged, and tossed his cigarette over the wrought-iron fence and onto the sidewalk.

"Okay," he said. "Sorry. Whatever. But I just don't see you taking Little Miss Sunshine there on a walk through the park before you propose to her."

To this, Craig said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. He watched the shadows of other students pa.s.s on the other side of the tiny glittering windows of G.o.dwin Honors Hall. They knew what the h.e.l.l they were doing there. For one thing, they hadn't gotten into the Honors College just because their father was buddies with the dean.

"Besides," Lucas asked, "wouldn't you rather have a really great b.l.o.w. .j.o.b than a really nice date? I mean, I just don't picture that little virgin on her knees with her sweet red lips wrapped around your ma.s.sive man tool."

"Shut the f.u.c.k up," Craig said.

But there was no animation in it.

No energy.

Lucas was probably right, he knew.

Lucas was often right.

Craig had never, he realized, been on an actual date. And the idea of one-asking for one, going on one-seemed like another one of those ten million things that all the normal guys, wearing khaki pants and carrying bouquets of daisies, would know exactly how to do, but which would be about as easy for Craig as building a s.p.a.ceship and then going for a zip around the earth in it.

"Hey, sorry," Lucas said to Craig's silence. "I didn't mean to-"

"Forget it," Craig said, more to himself than to Lucas. "Let's just go smoke a bowl."

"Splendid idea, dude," Lucas said. "Let us indeed go smoke a bowl."

17.

Perry Edwards was waiting outside her office when Mira got there. She wasn't surprised. There'd been a look on his face when she dismissed the cla.s.s at the end of the first session, and a hesitancy, as if he wanted to stay behind, had more to say. But Mira was already late for a committee meeting and had made a conscious effort to avoid eye contact, to gather her books and papers up in a way that would convey how rushed she was. She told herself that it was because she was rushed, but she knew there was something else, too-Perry Edwards's intensity during cla.s.s combined with what he'd said that day in the hallway when he was imploring her to let him audit: "I have some fundamental questions about death, questions I'm trying to find answers to," he'd said. "Because of Nicole. And not just philosophical questions. I have metaphysical questions. Physical questions."

There was such an urgency in the way he'd said it that Mira had signed his override without asking for any further explanation.

At best, she thought, this was a true philosopher-a metaphysician in the making, one of the rare twenty-year-olds she occasionally encountered who actually had a mission, and the mind with which to accomplish it.

At worst, he was just another morbid college kid, and Mira knew all about those. Who knew better than she the fascination people had with death? Every year she took her cla.s.s on a field trip to the local funeral parlor and the university hospital morgue, where she had plenty of opportunity to observe their rapt attention to the embalming table, their hushed awe upon being led through the bas.e.m.e.nt to the room with the refrigerators. When there happened to be no dead bodies at the moment, someone-often the most squeamish-seeming of the girls-would express bitter disappointment. And when they were ushered into the autopsy room to find a body still on the coroner's cabinet, there would be a rush of excited breathing, stillness, awe. Occasionally someone fainted, but no one ever left because they didn't want to look.

Still, Perry Edwards's interest seemed bigger than morbid fascination. During that first cla.s.s he had an answer to every question. This material wasn't new to him. He'd been doing his own research, for his own reasons. That's what had made her think she might not want to talk to him after cla.s.s-that she was not, perhaps, ready to hear about those reasons.

"See you next time," she'd said that day at the end of cla.s.s, without looking up.

"Thank you, Professor Polson," he'd said as he stepped past her, out the door, and into the hallway.

Now he was standing outside her office door, and Mira cleared her throat so she wouldn't startle him when she came up behind him. There was no one else in the corridor this early on a Thursday morning. He was looking at something she'd tacked up two semesters earlier, a photograph she'd taken in the Balkans during her Fulbright year: a color image of a charnel house in a small village in the mountains.

It had been, in the nineteenth century, the custom in the village to exhume corpses from the local cemetery a few months after their burial, and to display the skulls and long bones, brightly painted with the names and dates of their former owners. Mira had taken the photograph from a distance, but with a zoom lens on a sunny day, and the effect, when the photograph was printed up, startled even her: A dizzying mult.i.tude of skulls stared from their dry sockets at a little gathering of tourists, staring back.

Below the photo, Mira had taped an explanation of how the villagers believed that the dead could escape from their graves, and that the only way to avoid this was to dig up the bodies, to make sure they were in their graves, and that the flesh had fully decomposed. That way, if they came upon a corpse on which the flesh hadn't rotted away (a potential "walker"), the villagers could go through the stake-through-the-heart ritual.

Once or twice, according to village folklore, they came upon an empty grave, and panic broke out. It was said that the village lost three quarters of its nonelderly population during one such panic. They packed up their wagons and moved, leaving behind any grandparents too enfeebled to come along. The year Mira visited the village it was little more than a field of a daisies with a stone church at the center of it, and its only attraction was the charnel house.

"Oh," Perry said, turning. "Professor Polson. I don't want to bother you. I just wonder if I could-"

Mira handed him the book she held in her hands, Nils Stora's Burial Customs of the Skolt Lapps, as she felt around in the darkness of her leather bag for her keys, coming up, first, with the purple nipple of one of the boys' bottles: Despite everything she'd read or been told about what she should do, Mira still let the twins carry their bottles around with them when she took them to the store, or to the park. Sometimes the nipples were dislodged, or dirtied, or they wound up on the floor of the car. Who knew how long ago she might have stuffed this one into her bag? Perry Edwards looked at it, and then looked away, as if Mira had shown him something intimate-which, she supposed, it was.

She reached in again, and this time snagged the key ring, which was attached to a rubber heart that Clark had given to her years ago. ("Squeeze me," it read, and when you did, a little mechanical voice said, "I WUV you.") She unlocked the door and ushered Perry in, and he sat in the chair across from her desk, looked around, and then handed Mira's book back to her.

"Are you . . . ? Is this . . . time? An okay . . . ?" he stammered politely.

"It's fine," Mira said. She cleared the books she had piled on her own chair, stacking them on the floor at her feet, and then sat down at her desk, folded her hands in her lap, and said, "How can I help you?"

"I've been reading," Perry said, unzipping his backpack on the floor and leaning over it. He took out a book with the Roper Library's generic brown cover, and held it up as if it would explain something on its own.

She took the book from him. It was G. Melvin's Handbook of Unusual Phenomena-book twenty-four on the suggested reading list. It was a text Mira had put on loan in the G.o.dwin Hall dormitory library several years before, but that, to her knowledge, no one had ever checked out. She kept it there for students who might want to explore Ukrainian death and burial superst.i.tion further-in particular an account (late for such an account) of a teenage girl killed in a farm accident circa 1952 in a primitive village in the foothills. The girl was said to have managed an escape from her tomb, and the proof of this was that, although she was not seen in the flesh, whenever a photograph was taken in the village in the year following her death, the girl's shadowy image could be seen in the upper left- or right-hand corner.

In the Handbook were several grainy photos of stiff and formally dressed peasants staring expressionlessly into the camera. In the corner of each photograph a dark-haired girl, blurred, seemed to be moving as quickly as possible out of the photographer's range. And as if that weren't enough, the girl had appeared to every man in the village, in the night, unclothed, demanding s.e.x. Apparently, the men obliged her, however reluctantly, and during the act she bit them-a few on the neck, a few on the arm, and one, mercilessly, on the nipple, which she bit clean off his torso before disappearing. Each man died in a farming accident within a few weeks of the event.

But what Mira wanted the students to read was the part that followed this: How the body was dug up, and how the body was found in her coffin, a year after the girl's death, good as new. Her flesh was pink. Her hair had grown luxuriously around her shoulders. Her mouth was red, filled with blood. Her teeth had grown, and they glistened. Only her clothes had rotted away, revealing, of course, her beautifully gleaming b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The village then managed to engage, at great expense, a cement truck to back up to the grave and fill it in, and the girl, whose name was Etta, never walked through the village again, and the farm accidents mysteriously drew to a halt-a fact the villagers attributed to the cementing-in of this tomb, not to the fact that their agricultural lifestyle was, within a few years, completely eradicated when a cardboard box factory moved into the village.

Melvin, the author, had been an ancient professor at Mira's undergraduate inst.i.tution and had given her the only B she'd ever received in college, but she still thought his was a brilliant a.n.a.lysis of the superst.i.tions of the period and the move from an agrarian to an urban culture that fueled them. This story of Etta, he said in the Handbook, was the last real "vampire" story the world would ever know. In only another year or two, all the young adults who might have died tilling the land or harvesting the grain were working in that box factory or in shops in some Soviet metropolis, and the funerary traditions were forever changed. Instead of simple burials in wooden coffins in the churchyard, the whole commercial funeral business moved in, complete with embalming and sealed tombs and caskets that cost more than most families in the area made in a year.

"It's a good book," Mira said to Perry, handing it back to him. "I'm glad you thought to check it out."

"I've read all the articles," he said, "that you a.s.signed, and-"

"Those aren't a.s.signments," Mira said. "That's the suggested list. That's for supplemental research."

"I know," Perry said. "But . . ." He shook his head, and then he held up one of the photos of "Etta." He'd had the page bookmarked. Mira looked at it and nodded.

It was possible, she realized, that this student was mentally ill. It was far from unusual. There were always mentally ill students, especially in the Honors College. Intelligence and ambition went hand in hand, it seemed, with some kinds of delusion. These days, too, Mira found that students who were perhaps only minimally depressed (and how many smart twenty-year-olds weren't depressed?) had been medicated by their family doctors into a state of either apathetic insensibility or manic excitement. These kids carried their bottles of Klonopin and Xanax from cla.s.s to cla.s.s, and swigged their pills down by the handfuls with their energy drinks. Who knew what this particular kid might be taking, especially if he had, as he claimed, been close friends with Nicole Werner?

Mira nodded at the book, leaned forward, and considered the photo. The small gray girl in the corner was dashing out of out it while a grim-looking family stared solemnly into the camera, oblivious. Although it was 1952, this photograph was black and white, and there was an aura of antiquated severity about it that made it seem more like an image from the late 1800s. But Mira had been to villages near this one, and even in the mid-nineties, in broad daylight, in the spring, in real life, there was always something black and white about the places and the people, as if their joyless lives had drained the color out of the world around them.

She looked from the photograph to her student. His brow was furrowed. "Yes?" she said.

"I read the whole essay," he said, "and the author's a.n.a.lysis. And I understand what he's saying about the cultural context, and the societal changes, and the folklore, but-" He stopped, seeming to search for words. He closed the book.

"But what?" Mira asked.

He reached into his backpack again, and unfolded a copy of the student newspaper on his lap. It was the front-page article that had run about Nicole Werner a few days after the accident. On one side of the page there was the now-familiar senior portrait of Nicole with a warm halo of studio light pouring over her blond hair, and beside it a photograph of the memorial orchard-planting that took place at her sorority. In that photograph, a group of slender sorority sisters in black dresses and sungla.s.ses held one another's hands, heads bowed, around one of the blooming cherry trees that had been planted. Perry Edwards pointed to this photograph, his finger on the tree-which looked, even in miniature and in black and white, like the lush icon of lost innocence it was meant to be. He slid his finger over the blossoms and then into the right-hand corner of the photo.

"Look," he said.

Mira did.

There was nothing there.

She moved her eyes slowly from the newspaper back to Perry Edwards's face, and shook her head.

"There's a girl there," he said.

Mira looked again, more closely-although by now she suspected where this was going, and that her hunch about mental illness had been right. She searched the grainy distance until, finally, just over the boy's clean fingernail, she did see what looked like a gray figure of a girl moving out of the photograph.

She looked back at Perry, and shrugged. She said, "Okay. Maybe. Yes?"

Perry let the newspaper drop onto his lap, and then leaned over his backpack again and took a manila envelope out of it.

"I scanned the photo," he said. "And then I enlarged it." He reached into the envelope, took it out-glossy, gray, eight by twelve-and handed the photo to Mira. Now only the right-hand corner of the whole image remained-a few petals on a bough at the bottom, like a cloudy carpet, and, in the left-hand corner, the shining b.u.mper of someone's car parked in the sorority driveway-and, in the center of it all, the blurred girl.

She was wearing something filmy, either a mid-thigh-length dress or a shift over a miniskirt or shorts. Her arms were bare, and she was obviously in a hurry to get somewhere-one leg was bent behind her, like she was running. Her arms were swinging widely at her sides, or pumping. There was a flash of silver or gold around her wrist-a bracelet-and the side of her face had caught the sunlight, and the light obscured her features. Her blond hair was flowing behind her from her shoulders, lifted by a breeze or by her own momentum.

Certainly, from this distance, the girl looked like Nicole Werner, but so did half the other girls standing in the first photograph, in their black dresses, with their straight hair, holding one another's hands.

So did half the girls on this campus, especially the sorority girls.

"Yes," Mira said again, nodding, and handed it back to him.

She continued to nod as she tried to think carefully about what to say next. She'd made mistakes with students in the past, given them too much encouragement. She swallowed, and inhaled, and then said, "You've been through a terrible trauma. I understand that. I think, for that reason, this is not a cla.s.s you should be taking right now. The material is too relevant, perhaps, at the moment, and it might be"-she used her hands to try to soften the word before it came out of her mouth, opening the hands on her lap-"suggesting things to you."

Perry Edwards nodded, but he didn't look away. He seemed to have expected her to say this, and was neither disappointed nor insulted.

He inhaled, bit his lower lip for a second, and then he said, "I understand what you're saying. But I've had this photograph since May. And there are other things." He looked up to the ceiling, as if searching for the words, and then back at Mira. "Professor Polson, Nicole's here. She's still on this campus. I was here all summer. I've seen her."

Mira sat back in her chair, a kind of recoiling she immediately regretted. The tone of his voice. It was so certain.

Perry Edwards reached into his backpack again, took out another envelope, and out of it, a second photograph-this one of a slender girl with shoulder-length brown hair emerging from one of the sorority houses on the Row. She was glaring at the camera. She looked ready to sneer an obscenity at the photographer, or raise her middle finger. He held the newspaper-the senior portrait of the blond Nicole Werner-up next to the photograph.

Mira looked from one to the other, and said, "I do see the resemblance, Perry, but, surely, you-"

"I know," he said. "I know these girls all look alike to people who don't know them. But, Professor Polson, I went all through school with Nicole Werner. We grew up in the same town. We went to Sunday school together. We were confirmed at the same church. I know what she looks like. I see her. She's here. She's dyed her hair, but it's her. I don't know how. And I didn't expect anyone to tell me anything except that I'm crazy if I told them, so I haven't told anyone. But, I thought-well, I read your book, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins." He p.r.o.nounced the words carefully, as if Mira might not recognize the t.i.tle of her own book. "And," he said, "I thought maybe, if you're working on a new book, a book like it, what could be better than if you had a campus equivalent of this?" he held up Melvin's book again, open to the photograph of Etta. "I mean, even if you just think we're crazy-"

"We?" Mira asked.

"That's the thing," Perry said. "There are two other guys who've seen her. Lucas Schiff. He's a fifth-year senior. He was our resident advisor last year-"

"I know Lucas," Mira said. Lucas Schiff. He'd been in her first-year seminar her first year on campus. He'd been busted for possession of a controlled substance then, but had gotten off on some technicality. He was one of those politically active kids who used their political activism as an excuse not to bathe, and to smoke a lot of dope.

"And also Patrick Wright."

"I know Patrick, too," Mira said. Patrick was clean-cut, from a small town in the northern part of the state. Nothing like Lucas Schiff. "He's a junior?"

"Yeah," Perry said. "He and Lucas-they've both been with her since she died."

"Excuse me?" Mira asked.

"They've had s.e.x with her."

Mira put her hand over her mouth. She wasn't sure if she was going to laugh or cry. Perry seemed not to notice the gesture. He went on.

"What my point is, Professor Polson. I mean, couldn't you, maybe, write, say, something comparing Etta to-"

"Nicole Werner?"

"Yeah. I mean, if you're working on another book. You wouldn't have to believe us. Melvin doesn't believe what the villagers are saying about Etta. He just listens. He a.n.a.lyzes."

Mira looked at Perry Edwards carefully. For a crazy second she wondered if he'd spoken to the dean of the Honors College about her, if he somehow knew she hadn't even begun the book she was going to have to have published in the next eighteen months. That she hadn't even come up with a solid idea for the book.

No, of course not. He was just a bright, pa.s.sionate, or maybe crazy kid. She inhaled. She said, "Why, Perry? Why do you want me to do that? What's the point?"

"I need your help. There's something here. I need"-something seemed to catch in his throat, and he swallowed-"a grown-up."

"Perry," Mira said, and then stopped, literally biting her tongue.

Although, later, she would try to tell herself that it was this last appeal to her as a "grown-up" that had brought the two of them together in their search for Nicole, Mira could already see, in her office that September afternoon, the book, published by a major university press, in her hands, the bright, smiling senior portrait of Nicole Werner on the cover, her own name underneath that photo, and the letter to the dean from the department chair, and the recommendation it expressed for her tenure.

What, at this point, did she have to lose? Did she have any better ideas?