“Hey.”
He had caught up with me and matched my pace, so I understood he was actually talking to me.
“Yeah?”
“I said, maybe you can help me with math too.”
“Oh. Sure. What’s going on?”
“Just heard you’re really good at it.”
I didn’t deny it.
“Sure, let me know.”
“Maybe you could come over sometime,” he said.
I didn’t think of my problem sets in Brophy’s room as “coming over sometime.” There was a rounded feel to this expression of his, but it made no sense, because of the beautiful girlfriend.
“Sure.”
“I just heard you’re the best,” he repeated.
“Um, not really.”
“Do you mind being called Red?”
Nobody ever called me Red.
“It’s fine, I guess.”
“Or Lacy. Lacy.”
“Yeah.” I wished I had a more ordinary name, like Liz or Jen, so it wouldn’t feel so personal, almost private, when he said it out loud.
“Cool.” His smile was as big as the rest of him. My body felt uncertain, awake. In my mind was something like an electrical storm, fizzing across surfaces. I had no idea what he intended. He would not flirt with me, I thought, because of his girlfriend, and also because I was just me. But what he was doing didn’t feel quite like flirting anyway. It felt like he’d issued me something that he might try to take back later.
Then, for several weeks, he left me alone.
The call came late on a Tuesday night. I have already described who was calling, and what followed—the ordinary cataclysm. Why don’t victims bite or kick or scream? Because we aren’t in a horror movie, we’re in our lives. I was ready for bed when a third former named Stacey knocked on my door. “Phone’s for you.”
This was frightening. My parents would not call so late unless there was a problem. But, I reasoned, heading down the three flights of stairs to the basement, if there were truly an emergency they’d call Mrs. Fenn and have her collect me. So this was something else.
I passed younger girls coming dejectedly up. The line for the phone was long in the fall. To manage this, each girl would reserve her spot as next in line with the caller currently engaged. When the caller finished, she’d replace the receiver to sever the connection and then immediately lift the receiver again and leave it hanging by its silver cable so no new calls could come in while she pounded up the steps to alert the next in line that her turn had come. (The stairwell, far from affording privacy, magnified the speaker’s voice, so we were careful to leave one another alone down there.) My call must have come in as a surprise the moment Stacey ended her conversation. This sometimes happened, and it drove us all nuts. She had answered, and because I was an upperformer, she’d had no choice but to come up and tell me the phone was for me.
I held the phone to my ear. It smelled of tears and morning breath. “Hey, Lacy,” said a deep male voice that was not my dad.
“Yes?”
“I need your help tonight.”
I searched the sound. Nothing came to me.
“Who is this?”
Did he laugh a bit? “It’s Rick.”
“Oh. Hi.” It was strange, but maybe he wanted to go over a problem set on the phone. There was no compelling reason to do so before tomorrow. But that was okay—I was diligent too. I could run up to a new girl’s room on the first floor to borrow notebook paper and a pencil to help work things out. “What is it?”
Then he made a sound in his throat, like a sob or a cough, I couldn’t tell. So that hadn’t been a laugh that I’d heard before. I pressed the phone tighter to my ear. “I really, really need your help,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s—I’ll tell you. Not math. I need to talk to you. I need you to cruise. Please, will you come?”
“Now?”
“Please.”
“It’s late.”
“I know that.” He added, “It’s a thing with…” and then his voice got very small and shivery. “My mom.”
The way he said it, I just knew the diagnosis: either she was dead or would be soon. It was terminal. She’d just told him. And now he was this huge strong man about to lose his mom. I felt a surge of longing for my own mother, and then I settled back into an awareness that she was fine and I was her daughter, also fine, in a tiny way restored.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Please, just come. Please, will you?”
I had never cruised outside my dorm after hours before. I knew other kids did it, but I wasn’t sure how they got away with it. Often enough they didn’t. All year long we heard the results read aloud in Chapel. Nobody ever suggested why a student had left her dorm, but when the name of the suspended or expelled student was read, we all pretty much figured it out. Boys cruised to see girls. Girls cruised to see boys. Where else would they go? Nobody was stargazing. Security caught them and they appeared before the Disciplinary Committee to be, as we called it, D.C.’d. The committee was run by Mr. Gillespie, aka “The Rock.” He’d been at St. Paul’s for a hundred years and he would be there for a hundred more. He taught chemistry and coached varsity boys’ lacrosse, and his trademark exercise was to make the boys start off preseason training running several miles of snow-covered trails in hiking boots. Rumor had it they vomited and bled. He had a military history nobody could identify, but his hair was buzzed and his shoulders wide. When he looked your way, you did your best to smile and scooted out of view fast.
“It’s far,” I told Rick.
“It’s not.” He named his dorm, a one-story building at the center of campus. “I’ll open the window. You can come and I’ll see you.”
Whatever it was he needed, I could deliver it, but his girlfriend could not?
I found a
