Part 29 (1/2)

”As I've said,” Mira said (pointlessly, because no one ever left), ”this is optional. You can wait for us here, or leave altogether if you need to. No penalties.”

The shock turned to resignation then. In some, it looked like excited antic.i.p.ation. They might insist that they did not want to see dead bodies, but they did. And each semester this viewing was a turning point in her cla.s.s. For a while afterward, anyway, they would feel in a way they hadn't felt before that the living body was a temporary condition. Funereal black would no longer be a fas.h.i.+on statement. They would communicate with one another and with her more carefully.

The gla.s.s doors slid open, and Kurt stepped through them, and Mira and all of her students followed.

66.

”I love you,” Nicole said again, and squeezed her eyes and kissed him. ”I love you, and I love you, and I love you. But now I have to go.”

He watched Nicole's small, tight, perfectly smooth body as she got out of his bed to slip into the black dress she'd bought to wear that night to her sorority's ridiculous ritual. Except for the girls who were being raised, who wore white dresses, the others were to wear funeral black. The ones who'd already been raised, and the ones who were yet to be raised, were ”mourners.”

It was ridiculous, he thought, even as he admired the dress as Nicole unfurled it from the hanger she'd so carefully put it on when she brought it to his room-and even more ridiculous that the sorority hadn't been imaginative enough to come up with a name for it that didn't rhyme with hazing.

Still, he vowed, he would say no more about it. It was the kind of absurdity you had to be outside of to see. Nicole, he knew, would have found absurd the painfully hard slaps on the a.s.s his track teammates gave each other after a meet, and the writers' conferences he went to with his father (languid poets and novelists wandering around with gla.s.ses of wine and little leather-bound diaries), not to mention the tradition among teenage males in Fredonia every winter, just before the ski resort opened, of getting naked in the middle of the night on the slopes, dropping acid, and beating the living s.h.i.+t out of each other.

Briefly it crossed Craig's mind to call Lucas and ask him to crash the party with him, but he dismissed it instantly. He couldn't risk the wrath of Nicole's sisters again. He wasn't even allowed to step onto the porch to pick her up anymore. And Nicole would hate him for it.

Her black dress was made of something that seemed silkier than silk. Craig sat up with his feet on the floor, and had to will himself not to crawl to her on hands and knees and kiss the hem of it. She'd gotten her hair cut a few weeks before, and although it was still long, there were blunt little ends now that curled up a little around her shoulders. She'd started wearing it loose more often. Sometimes, when she was studying or thinking or standing in front of the mirror, she'd run her fingers through it and it would appear to pour through them like molten gold.

Now she pulled out Perry's desk chair and started rolling a sheer black stocking up her leg, and Craig stared at her ankle until she started to laugh.

”You're drooling, Craig,” she said, and he snapped his mouth closed.

Her other foot was still bare.

The toenails were painted pale pink. In the light that shone through the crack in the curtains, those toenails seemed to glow-and then he was on his knees, crawling across the floor, taking the foot in his hands, cradling it, bringing it to his lips, kissing first the top of it, up near the ankle, and then moving down toward the toes, until she was squealing, ”Stop! Stop! It tickles!” And then he heard a key flip the lock on the door, and Perry was standing there, looking down at Craig, in his underwear, on his knees in front of Nicole, holding her bare foot to his lips.

”Excuse me,” Perry said, looking up to the ceiling. ”But if you could open the door when you're done. I've got to get my food plan ID out of the desk to get some dinner.” The door slammed shut behind him, but not before Craig and Nicole had burst out laughing. How could they not? What must the scene have looked like to Perry? Craig released the foot and took her face in his hands, and pulled her gently toward him for a kiss, and then sat back on his heels to look at her. All that gold hair. Her cheeks flushed.

He tried not to imagine her then, in a bas.e.m.e.nt, in a black dress, a bunch of drunk and stoned sorority girls holding hands and chanting.

”We'd better hurry,” Nicole said. ”Perry will be mad.”

”Screw Perry,” Craig said, loudly, toward the dorm room door, as if for Perry's benefit, although he doubted Perry could hear him through the solid wood of the door, and he really had no great desire to hurt Perry's feelings or p.i.s.s him off. Perry had been particularly nice lately, letting Craig go on and on about his parents' divorce, offering commiserating head shakes. He was gratifyingly appalled by the behavior of Craig's mother, leaving his father. Once, he'd been in the room when Craig had called home and his mother had said to him, wearily, ”Craig, this has nothing to do with you. This is between me, and Dad, and Scar.”

”Between you and Dad and Scar?” Craig had shouted, and then, without waiting for her answer, he'd slapped his phone shut and thrown it against the wall.

Perry had jumped up from his computer and taken Craig by the shoulders and said, in the voice of a really mature guy, ”It's okay, man. It's okay. You gotta calm down, okay?”

He'd helped Craig duct-tape his cell phone together again. (Perry was great at fixing broken mechanical things, as Craig had learned when Perry'd accidentally stepped on his own calculator.) Afterward, he'd gone to Z's with Craig, and they'd gotten pretty s.h.i.+tfaced-Craig, albeit, much more s.h.i.+tfaced than Perry.

And Craig found that he had grown oddly fond of the way Perry bleached his socks and rolled them into obsessive little b.a.l.l.s lined up in the top drawer of his dresser. When Nicole was off at some sorority function, they'd eat in the cafeteria together, and now and then they'd go down to Winger Lounge and sprawl all over the couch to watch some basketball game neither of them cared about.

”Don't be mean to Perry,” Nicole said. ”He's like family.”

Craig turned back to Nicole. She wasn't joking. She was so sweet.

”You're right,” Craig said. ”I lucked out in the roommate department.”

”Yeah, Perry's true blue.” She was looking at the ceiling as she said this, and her eyes looked oddly blank to him. He stood up so he could see her better, and even from overhead, the expression on her face seemed strange to him. She looked pale, he thought. Even her irises.

”What?” she asked, without looking at him, as if she were blind.

”Are you okay?” he asked.

”Why wouldn't I be?”

”I . . . don't know.”

”Then don't be silly.” There was so little intonation in her voice, and her face still looked weird. Could he be having one of those dreaded acid trip flashbacks, even though he hadn't dropped acid for years?

”Nicole?”

She snapped out of it then, and looked at him. Pure Nicole. Little dimple near the right corner of her lip. He was so relieved, he put a hand on his chest and sighed.

”What's the matter, sweetheart?” she asked.

”Nothing,” he said, but suddenly he had a very bad feeling about the Spring Event.

”Nicole,” he said, kneeling down again at her feet, looking up at her. ”Can't you blow this off? This is so f.u.c.king stupid, and-”

”Are you crazy, Craig?” She was serious. She looked sincerely shocked, as if he'd suggested they jump off the roof together. He shook his head, to let her know he wasn't going to push it. Instead, he straightened up, and she slid the stockings all the way on, and slipped her feet into lacy black heels, blew him a kiss, opened the door, and Craig heard her call bye-bye to Perry, musically, as she stepped out of the room, and he stepped in.

”Want to go to dinner?” Perry asked, grabbing his meal card off his desk, as if he hadn't just walked in while Craig was half-naked kissing Nicole's little foot, as if it were just any of the other hundreds of times they'd headed down to the cafeteria together.

67.

From the Waiting Mortuary, Professor Polson's friend Kurt took them into a hallway lined with doors.

There were numbers nailed to the doors, but the numbers seemed random. Room 3 was adjacent to 11. Room 1 seemed to be missing altogether. Tacked to the door of Room 4 was a photograph of a white cat standing beside a blue mailbox. Perry wondered about that photo, in a place where there were no others, what the significance of that could be, when someone in a pale green shower cap and matching scrubs opened the door and looked out, white light pouring on him (or her), before shutting it again.

Everything in the hallway was bright, and cold. It wasn't the outdoor, winter kind of cold, but a dry, artificial cold, as if freeze-dried air were being poured down from the ceiling by the fluorescent lights.

When they reached the end of the hallway, Kurt stopped, turned, and held up a hand.