This time he reached a recording that gave him a choice between voice mail and an emergency number. Was this an emergency? No footprints except his own: didn’t that mean the thief was still in the dorm, and had been there before the snowfall? A student, then, some other student still on campus, like him, possibly a resident of the dorm, and therefore a freshman, like him, possibly without money to go home, like him. Better to find him in the morning, get him to return the TV without a fuss, without involving security. Nat hung up the phone.
Were there any freshmen who looked like that, big with ponytails? Nat couldn’t recall any, but there were five hundred people in the class, many he still hadn’t even seen. He flipped through the freshman directory, useless because he’d had only a back view of the thief. He came to his own picture-the graduation picture, wearing Mr. Beaman’s blazer-knew with certainty that he didn’t look at all like that anymore. He checked in the mirror and found that he did.
Nat thought of calling Wags in Sewickley, but it was almost one, and he could imagine Wags’s mother picking up the phone. He made sure the front door was locked, took off his wet shoes, put them on the radiator to dry, and went to bed.
Nat’s mother had a funny story she liked to tell about him. When Nattie was very young, before he could talk, he couldn’t bear to go to sleep if any of the dresser drawers in his room were open, even a crack. She didn’t always remember to close them, and would sometimes poke her head in the room to find him laboriously climbing out of his crib and crawling across the floor toward the dresser. Nat thought of this story about half an hour later when he gave up on sleep, unlocked the door, and stepped into the hall.
Plessey Hall had three floors, ten rooms on each, most of them doubles, a few triples, and a single for the RA. Nat started at number thirty on the third floor. He checked for light leaking under the door, listened for any sound, knocked, tried the knob. No light, no sound, no answer to his knock, door locked. All the rooms were just like that down to number one, except for seventeen, his own.
Nat went back to bed, first locking the door. He turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. Once, climbing out of his crib, he’d somehow tangled the back of his Dr. Denton’s on the corner of the guardrail and hung there outside the crib, not strangling or anything, but helpless. He’d heard his parents shouting at each other in the next room. That was Nattie’s earliest memory.
Peter Abrahams
Crying Wolf
4
All Christmas essays that failed to define rococo in the first sentence will be returned unread. They may be resubmitted at the next class. Grades of such resubmissions will be reduced by 10 percent. Those not resubmitted will receive zero.
The next time Nat looked at his bedside clock, it read 10:23. He got out of bed, feeling stiff and sore, as though he’d played some contact sport the previous day, and went to the outer room. Through the window, he saw a morning that could have been painted in a few dull colors: dark gray for the sky and trees, brownish red for the bricks, light gray for the snow, for Emerson, for everything else. One more detail: the footprints. Hard packed, they caught what little light there was, and shone white. Footprints coming and going at the Plessey entrance, crisscrossing between the dorms, meandering over the quad; footprints everywhere. There were even some ski and snowshoe tracks, also white. Had the quad really been unmarred hours before? Nat went into Wags’s bedroom and found the TV still gone. Daytime made it conclusive.
Nat dressed and went outside, headed for the campus security office. A silent campus: as beautiful as in the brochure, but there was more-a sense of gravity, importance, even power-that the brochure, perhaps trying to be friendly, hadn’t conveyed. Nat told himself he was glad to have this time alone. He needed to catch up with himself, if that made sense. The workload, the assignments, the expectations of the teachers: all so demanding, but the real pressure came from the kids. So smart; and so cool, some of them, which was very different from home, where smart and cool were almost always opposites. And here the others, the not so cool, could be strange and fascinating-like Wags, for example, with the little shrine he’d built to Alfred Hitchcock, and the way Nat would sometimes hear him late at night, lying in bed and muttering whole scenes of movie dialogue from memory. So even as the sky darkened still more while he crossed the quad, draining what little color there was and lowering the temperature in seconds, Nat told himself this solitary Christmas would be good.
That thought was still in his mind when he saw he wasn’t quite alone. Across the quad, the main door to Lanark Hall-the residence opposite Plessey, the nicest, by reputation, although Nat had never been inside-opened. Two girls came out-women’s studies majors spoke of women and men, but everyone else on campus said girls and guys-sidestepped down the broad snowy stairs facing each other, carrying something. Nat thought TV at once, because of the mission he was on, and from the way they carried it. The problem was its invisibility. There was nothing to see. Were they pretending to carry something? Was it some sort of pantomime? Nat was about to look around for the film crew when one of the girls lost her footing. He heard a little cry; then the girls were tumbling down the steps, one after the other, a flurry of kicking legs, waving arms, flapping scarves, airborne hats. The object they carried, now free, spun in the air, became visible: an aquarium. It spilled its water in one perfectly shaped wave, a wave topped by a bar of gold.
Everything came crashing down. But no. That was what Nat, moving unconsciously closer as though responding to something gravitational, expected. In fact, only the aquarium crashed. Somehow the two girls landed on their feet, like gymnasts, but without the posturing. He lost sight of the gold object.
The next moment the girls were both on their knees, digging through the snow. Nat reached them in time to hear one say, “Here’s the little bastard.”
“Gentle,” said the other one.
The first girl held up the object in both hands, and Nat saw what it was: a fish. A fish, but unlike any fish, or any living thing, he’d ever seen: a dazzling creature, fat and gold with a wide yellow-lipped mouth, now opening and closing desperately, round yellow eyes, indigo fins, and white polka dots from head to its blue-and-gold tail. A dazzling creature that seemed to contain in its little form all the color lacking in the day.
“Whatever we do better be quick,” said the one holding the fish.
The aquarium lay shattered, the water it had contained now a melting depression in the snow.
“Bathtub?” said the second girl.
“Fresh water,” said the first girl. “Might as well be poison.”
“Then think of something.”
“That’s my role.”
“Not now, Grace, for Christ’s sake.”
They glanced around, as though seeking help, but didn’t seem to see Nat. The fish chose that moment to make a violent flipping motion, flying free. Nat was ready. He caught it in his cupped hands and said: “The bio lab.”
Now they saw him. “Where’s that?” They said it in unison. Nat didn’t reply, partly because the route was complicated, mostly because of how stunned he was by their appearance: one-Grace-light blond, the other darker- haired, both-he couldn’t find the right word, something as absolute as amazing, astonishing, beautiful, but more precise.
He did know where the bio lab was; he was taking a biology course to keep his pre-med option open. Sticking to the beaten footprint tracks and then the plowed paths, he took off as fast as he could with the fish in his hands- around Lanark, up the hill to the chapel, down the other side past the new science complex, across the old quad to the bio lab building. Nat was a good runner, but one girl passed him on the stairs in time to hold the door open, and the other was right beside him.
Nat ran down the dark-paneled first-floor hall. The bio labs were in the oldest building on campus, originally
