Part 24 (1/2)
Perry followed Karess Flanagan up the stairs to her dorm room. He hadn't been on the residence floors of G.o.dwin Hall since he'd moved out last May, and the scent of it (old carpeting and something else that smelled inexplicably of wet straw) brought the whole previous year back to him. Karess's midthigh boots had clunky heels, and each step she took rang through the stairwell. She talked loudly over the sound of her own footsteps.
”You never answered my question about why you're in the cla.s.s. Did you flunk your own first-year seminar or something?”
”No,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he'd intended. ”I'm taking it because I find it interesting.”
”Really?” Karess made no attempt not to sound skeptical. She got to the door at the top of the stairwell first, and held it open for Perry, who hesitated, trying to engineer some way to walk behind her, hold the door open for her, or at least for himself. He wasn't used to girls holding doors for him, and was not, in fact, sure that a girl ever had. But he couldn't avoid it without elbowing her out of the way, so he walked through the door as she held it.
”Why's death so interesting to you?”
Perry didn't answer. He waited in the hallway for Karess to pa.s.s over the threshold herself.
The residence floors of G.o.dwin Honors Hall were divided into halls named after alumni long forgotten except for their a.s.sociations now with the better bathrooms or the direction the windows faced. Perry and Karess were in Hull House, where Nicole and Josie had lived the year before. All along the hallway, doors were open, and Perry could see girls sitting at desks, staring into computer screens, lying on beds, holding cell phones to their ears. One girl had a towel wrapped in a turban on her head and was standing in front of a wall mirror, holding a pair of tweezers to an eyebrow, seeming to be trying to muster up the courage to pluck. Perry looked away after that, and tried to watch his feet as he walked instead of looking through the open doors.
”You can wait here, if you want,” Karess said. ”Our room's a pigsty. I just need to grab my wallet and change my shoes.” She nodded down at her boots. They looked like medieval torture devices. Perry felt relieved that she wasn't going to try to walk across campus to Starbucks in them. He leaned up against the wall and folded his arms.
Across from him, a bulletin board hung on a closed door. A pink plastic flower was tacked to it, and underneath that, a blurry photograph of a kitten. The kitten appeared to be running-either that or the photographer had been running while snapping the photograph. It was a bad photo, but he could imagine girls crowding around it, oohing over the cute haze of that cat.
He consciously chose not to look down the hallway in the direction of Nicole and Josie's old room, but he couldn't help but wonder who occupied it this year, and if whoever it was knew that it was the room in which the Dead Girl had lived.
Or, maybe no one lived there. Maybe the college administration did something in these circ.u.mstances. Or maybe they scrambled the room numbers so it would be impossible for the incoming cla.s.s to figure out which room could be the haunted one. G.o.dwin was the oldest dorm on campus. Probably quite a few students had died while living here. Likely, there was a procedure for handling the a.s.signing of their rooms. Even if the residents themselves didn't mind living in a dead student's dorm room, parents might object, Perry supposed, to having their kid sleeping on the mattress that had been slept on by the previous year's Unthinkable Tragedy.
Then, Perry caught himself wondering if Nicole had come back to this hallway since her death. Had she wanted to get a look at her old room, to see if- He was startled by Karess when she stepped out of the door and said, brightly, electrically, ”Ready?!”
She wearing different shoes (an even higher heel, as it happened) and a different top-pale purple, lower cut, a little mesh of lace across her cleavage, which Perry looked away from even as he was noticing it.
”So,” Karess said, ”you were about to tell me what you find so fascinating about the death cla.s.s. And if you can't come up with something convincing, I'm going to have to conclude, as most of our cla.s.smates have, that it's actually Professor Polson you find so fascinating.”
Perry found himself opening and closing his mouth, issuing nothing but exasperated breaths, feeling what he thought must be a kind of hatred for Karess Flanagan.
Who the h.e.l.l did she think she was?
She looked over her shoulder, batted her eyes, and said, ”Cat got your tongue?” and Perry put his hands in his pockets so she wouldn't see that he'd balled them into fists.
”No,” he said, finally, and continued down the stairs behind her.
Why? Why was he continuing to walk behind her, follow after her? Was it the same reason any guy might?
Because of those dark curls, and the way her waist tapered into her hips, and the way her a.s.s looked like two solid handfuls of ripe flesh packed into that little miniskirt? Perry had noticed within hours of first laying eyes on her in cla.s.s that she had such high-arched eyebrows that she always looked surprised-or as if she were flirting, or as if she were experiencing some kind of physical pleasure.
s.e.xual pleasure.
He'd made a conscious effort not to glance over at her. It had always seemed undignified, disrespectful, maybe even dangerous, letting a girl like that know you noticed her-although now, looking down onto her soft shampoo-commercial hair (a few strands lifted away from the rest, s.h.i.+ning and amber in the sun that was coming through the little panes of the windows), another possibility occurred to him: That Karess Flanagan was actually harmless. That she was just having fun. She wanted him, too, to have harmless fun.
He felt better, thinking this. She'd simply been teasing him. That was something Mary had always said (”I'm just teasing you, Perry”) and that he'd never understood. The little jabs, the sarcasm. (”Don't be such an Eagle Scout.”) He'd taken them all wrong, he thought now, hearing Karess Flanagan's throaty, casual humming under her breath. She was enjoying his company. She wanted him to like her.
Was this what girls did?
Long silver earrings twirled down from her lobes, nearly grazing her shoulders, glinting, and he could smell something citrusy, slightly bitter but also spicy and appealing, wafting off of her. She had some kind of leather thong around her neck, some kind of charm dangling from the end of it, but also a gold chain, and a silver chain, and something else that was beaded. She had about twenty bracelets on each wrist.
Jesus, Perry thought, it must take this girl four hours to get dressed every morning.
She chatted on and on brightly about what a drag it was to live on the third floor, and how, when her parents moved her in they'd had to lug all her stuff up the stairs because the elevator was broken.
”The elevator's always broken,” Perry said.
”What floor did you live on?” Karess asked him.
”Fourth,” he said.
”What house?”
”Mack.”
”So, you knew him? Craig Clements-Rabbitt?”
They'd reached the bottom of the stairs, and she was waiting for Perry at the door. There was a sign on it that read, FIRE EXIT, ALARM WILL SOUND, but everyone knew there was no alarm. Karess pushed her way through it, and out into the brisk late-morning air.
He considered lying, or saying nothing, but what would be the point? Karess was obviously curious enough about everything that she was going to find out one way or another. Perry's name, Googled along with Craig Clements-Rabbitt, told that whole story. Except for a few things about his making Eagle rank, which had been in the Bad Axe paper, Perry's Internet claim to fame was that he'd been Craig's roommate and had said to a reporter for the local paper, ”He's not a murderer.”
”He was my roommate,” he now said to Karess.
She whirled around. ”What? You lived with him?” Her eyes were so wide he could see the little pinp.r.i.c.ks of her pupils pulsing in the startling blue of her irises.
”Yeah,” Perry said.
”Well,” she said. She smiled. Her teeth were so white they seemed, like her incredibly blue eyes, more like fas.h.i.+on accessories than body parts. ”The plot thickens.”
”What do you mean?”
”Well, it must have been pretty f.u.c.ked up, your freshman year, living with a killer-”
”What?” Perry asked.
”A f.u.c.king murderer.”
”He's not a murderer,” Perry said.
”Jesus,” Karess said. ”You're not still friends with him, are you? I mean, he killed his girlfriend.”