“We are probably going to die in the next few hours,” Anna said, to see what it was like to state a truth such as that.
“Probably,” Jenny said, her breath warm on Anna’s cheek.
“I can live with that,” Anna replied in all seriousness.
The cold leached the life from them. Anna lost feeling in her feet, then her hands. Jenny was losing strength as well. The arms that held Anna trembled. The two of them slipped a few inches deeper.
For bits of time, seconds, or perhaps years, Anna forgot where she was, why it was so cold, when she had been rendered sightless. She was glad not to be alone. A sharp pain in her ear shocked her back from a mind drift where she raced, soaring over a cloudless landscape.
“You bit me!” she said.
“You were going to sleep,” said a voice so close she wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t in her head.
“Jenny?”
“If we go to sleep, we won’t wake up,” Jenny said.
Anna remembered that from somewhere. A production she’d crewed in college, she thought.
“Savage Mountain,” she said. “K2, second highest in the world.”
A tiny whisper of a groan let her know Jenny thought she wasn’t making sense. Anna hadn’t the energy to assure her she was perfectly sane.
“Tell me a story,” Anna pleaded.
“What kind of a story?” asked the warm sweet breeze in her left ear.
“One with lots of explosions and sirens and slamming doors,” Anna replied. “I think I might be falling asleep sometimes.”
“Okay.” Jenny was silent long enough Anna had to fight the drift by biting her tongue and the insides of her cheeks. Digging her nails into her palms was an impossibility. Her hands were either curled into fists or clamped on Jenny’s. They wouldn’t open or close. Dark was so dark she didn’t know when her eyes closed, and she couldn’t lift her hands to find out.
“Once upon a time,” began the whisper in her head, “there was a beautiful princess named Adafaire. God, was she a princess! Right out of a fairy tale. Her hair was blond, honest blond, and straight and fine. The princess wore it long and knew how to toss her head so it shone. That hair was as expressive as a cat’s tail. Adafaire would twitch it, and disdain filled the air, toss it, and hearts pounded.
“The princess was rich as well as beautiful and lived with other princesses in the sorority house. Delta Gamma or Theta Tau, I can’t remember. Let’s call it Kappa Kappa Damn. Picture a place the likes of me would be allowed in only as the hired help.
“I was seventeen. Since I’d skipped a grade, I went to college a year early.”
“Smart cookie,” Anna said with difficulty. Her brain did not seem to be in earnest about sending messages to her lips. That or her lips had become anarchists and no longer took orders from her brain.
“Book smart, life stupid,” Jenny said. “I grew up in a podunk town, one of five daughters of parents who went out to a movie one night and didn’t come home for years. Grandma was strict because, without order, there was no way she could have kept all of us fed and clothed. Not mean, though. We all worked. Little jobs when we were little, bigger jobs as we got bigger.
“Socially my sisters and I were functionally illiterate. No time for that sort of thing in our formative years.
“So I get to college in the big city and lay eyes on Adafaire. She was wearing tennis whites, can you believe that? Talk about a cliche. I loved her instantly, madly, passionately.”
Memory ticked at the edges of Anna’s hibernating mind. “The girl at the rape, one of the ones who watched.”
“One and the same. Adafaire had taken me to the frat party; Kappa Kappa Damn girls were the frat boys’ “little sisters.” A misnomer if there ever was one.”
“Did she want you to be raped?” Stringing seven words together took an effort, but Anna needed to know the answer for some reason.
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Jenny said. “I don’t think she did, consciously. Unconsciously? Maybe. Adafaire hated me because I was the one who made her realize she was gay. Lesbian. Once she knew why she had all those feelings all those years, she couldn’t unknow it and go on pretending.”
“Sad story,” Anna managed.
“Ah, but it has a happy ending,” Jenny murmured. The breeze in Anna’s ear felt as if it blew from the north this time. “Revenge.”
“
“I didn’t drop out of college,” Jenny said, “though I think anybody who was there that night expected me to. I wanted them to have to see me every day, look me in the eye and see my hatred. That worked for about a day and a half. Then it was like collective amnesia, like nobody but me remembered.”
“P’leece?” Anna asked.
“I didn’t report it to the police,” Jenny said, and Anna marveled that her words were so neat and well formed. One day, she promised herself, if I’m not dead, I will be as strong as Jenny Gorman.
“I had a plan, and I didn’t want to be the prime suspect. I knew two of the frat boys who’d benched me by sight. The others … I think two but I don’t really know how many. The two I’d seen were seniors, roommates, BMOC. One had been accepted to Stanford for law and one to Cornell. I can’t remember in what, but I knew then. I made it my business to know. Adafaire, Leo, and Phillip never saw me after those first two days. I saw them constantly, learned everything, watched and timed everything.”
“Kill them all?” Anna pushed out the question.
“No. But there were a lot of thefts after the incident at the frat picnic. Jewelry from the sororities, watches and cash from four frat houses. Three professors’ cars were broken into, the stereos stolen. Handheld calculators were taken—and in the eighties, a Hewlett-Packard ran four hundred dollars. A regular crime spree. Thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth. Acting on an anonymous tip, the police found the bulk of it in Leo and Phillip’s storage area in the basement of their frat house. The police also found stolen items in their apartment and cars, along with a very expensive Rolex that had gone missing from the home of the president of the university.
“Leo and Phillip were rich; their daddies got them off with community service. Cornell and Stanford were not that forgiving. They unaccepted them. Not what they deserved, but the best I could do short of killing them.”
Anna didn’t know if she’d asked about what happened to Adafaire out loud, or if Jenny chose to go on with the story without urging.
“Adafaire never admitted she was a lesbian, though she was one of the most enthusiastic and passionate ‘experimenters’ I have ever known. Beautiful and sexual and vain, Adafaire loved posing for pictures. For three or four years, every time Adafaire got close to a longed-for goal—marriage, a job, a membership—darned if one of those old pictures didn’t show up in the wrong person’s mailbox. Petty, but satisfying.
“Until it wasn’t. Now even the memory isn’t satisfying. More like the taste of ashes. She knew it was me. I wanted her to know it was me. Finally, she took me to court. Since she didn’t want publicity, I got off easy. A restraining order and court-ordered therapy.”
“Did you fall in love again?” Anna asked or thought she did. She must have, because Jenny answered softly.
“I did. Shall I tell you about her?”
Anna did her best to nod. Jenny’s arm had fallen from her curled fingers, and Jenny’s words were slurring much as Anna’s.
“She had hair the color of an autumn leaf,” Jenny’s love story began. “She wandered in one day reminding me of a scared, starving, stray kitten.”
The words might have gone on, Anna wasn’t sure. The next thing she was sure of was the water closing over her and she couldn’t raise her arms to swim.
