Craig tried hard not to stare at Nicole Werner while she studied, but the way her hair slipped over her face when she cast her eyes down on her History of the English Language textbook, and the way the highlighter in her right hand flashed over the pages, and even the way her foot seemed to tap out some rhythm for four or five seconds, then stop, was so much more riveting than the book he was reading that he couldn’t look away.
If she knew he was watching her, she was pretending she didn’t.
Perry had found a study room for them in the basement of Godwin Hall—an old lounge tucked away behind a storage room, with dust-covered chairs and maroon carpeting. There was a brass plaque on the door that read, THE ALICE MEYERS MEMORIAL STUDENT STUDY ROOM, and although it looked like no one had used the room for years for anything but furtive sex (empty condom wrappers were stuffed into a glass vase that was otherwise full of plastic flowers), it was really a very comfortable room.
There were no light bulbs in any of the lamps, so they’d brought down their own desk lamps from their dorm rooms and set them up on the end tables. The dim, focused light was intense and relaxing at the same time. Perry sat at a table in the corner, one elbow on each side of an open book. Nicole was curled up in a cushioned chair with a battered ottoman. Her roommate, Josie Reilly, sat on the floor with her back to the wall, legs folded in the lotus position as if her body were made of clay. Craig lay on the couch, watching Nicole over the edge of his book as she flipped a page and bit her lower lip.
He had thought a study group would entail talking. Quizzing. The sharing of test-taking tips. Maybe flash cards. He’d never been in a study group before so had no way of knowing that it meant, simply, a circle of companionable silence, concentration—except for the occasional yawn, the clearing of a throat, Nicole’s dainty sneeze, Josie’s distracted “Bless you.” It crossed Craig’s mind, when the silence grew so thick that you could have reached into the air and grabbed a handful of it, to crack a joke. But he didn’t know what the joke would be. It would have to be incredibly funny to warrant the interruption, and he wasn’t really that funny unless there was something to be made fun of, and nothing here seemed stupid enough to make the kind of joke Craig usually got a good laugh out of—the kind of comment that got him in trouble in high school or had Scar snorting chocolate milk out of his nose at the dinner table.
Now and then, their desk lamps flickered. (Maybe one of the washing machines in the laundry room next to the lounge had started its spin cycle and sucked up all the electricity in the basement for a minute.) Briefly, Nicole looked up to the ceiling, and then back down. She highlighted something else on the page she was reading, and then she took the pencil out of the place in her hair where she’d tucked it and wrote something quickly in the margin.
“You make me sick!”
Randa Matheson had screamed that at him in her parents’ bedroom one afternoon after school. She was naked, standing at the edge of the bed, screaming down at Craig, who was lying on his back with a hard-on, wondering, What? What? Where did this come from?
“Huh?” he finally managed to ask.
“I said,” Randa shouted, “that you make me sick.” She enunciated each word as if she were shouting to a foreigner, a retard. Her dark eyes were narrowed, and her lips, bloated and red from all the kissing they’d been doing, made her look exactly like her mother, whose face was well known to anyone who watched reruns of a very stupid sitcom from the late seventies.
“What? What did I do?”
“Just forget it,” Randa snapped, pulling her thong up over her narrow hips, hiding her perfectly trimmed pussy, which made his hard-on throb even harder, before she turned and ran from the room, holding her jeans and her shirt against her breasts. Behind her, the door slammed so loudly Craig flinched and closed his eyes, thinking for a split second that maybe he’d been shot.
After a while, he got dressed and let himself out.
The Mathesons’ house was immaculate, and enormous, and he got lost on his way out, finding himself in some kind of sunroom with no door. Randa herself was nowhere to be seen.
For months afterward Craig wondered what he had done, although it didn’t really occur to him to call Randa or to stop her in the hallway and ask. The day after the “incident,” his mother pulled her car up next to Randa’s empty Jeep in the parking lot of the Trading Post. Craig slumped down in the passenger seat. “What’s the matter with you?” his mother asked. Luckily, she realized then that she’d forgotten her purse, so they didn’t stay.
But it was impossible not to cross Randa’s path. In school. At parties. At the video store. At first, Craig tried not to look directly at her, hoping to avoid her eyes, but after a while it became clear that she was treating him as if he were invisible, so it wouldn’t have mattered what he did anyway. In the stairwell one day between classes, just the two of them passed each other (she was going up, he was going down) and, stupidly, he sputtered out, “Hey.”
She looked right at him, seeming to register nothing. Not the vaguest hint of an expression crossed her face. She was looking through his head, seeing nothing but the wall behind it.
He tried, now and then, to think about what could have happened, what he’d done or failed to do.
They’d been kissing, he was clear on that, and the shirts had come off, and then the jeans—around their thighs at first, and then around their ankles, and then on the floor—and then he’d eased that thong down her silky legs while she ran her fingers over one of his eyebrows. He’d stood up and pulled his own underwear off, and she’d sort of propped herself up to look at him, and asked, “Do you like me?”
Craig was fairly certain that his answer to the question had been yes (why wouldn’t it have been?), but the question was followed by a long, fast series of other questions, and he was less sure of what his answers to those had been.
Do you think Michelle has better tits, who’s the skinniest girl you ever had sex with, have you ever had sex with Melody, when did you first notice me, is Tess the one you really want, are you using me to get to her, did you just come over here this afternoon because you were hoping you were going to have sex with me?
Craig had gotten back into bed beside her and lay there with his throbbing hard-on, until finally he interrupted her, and said, “Are we going to fuck or what?” And that’s when she’d leapt out of bed and screamed at him.
Craig had hardly been within a few feet of a girl since that day with Randa. The whole summer after graduation had passed without a flirtation, let alone a kiss.
Now he closed his eyes and let the image of Nicole Werner—only two feet away from him—linger on his lids for a minute. He tried to picture her in Fredonia, carrying on a conversation with someone’s actress turned mother or millionaire father strutting around in a suit with nowhere to go but the Trading Post.
No.
He could not picture Nicole Werner anywhere he’d ever been before this minute.
Nicole Werner belonged here, now, in the lounge of Godwin Honors College.
Virgin valedictorian, daughter of the Dumplings’s owners.
Probably that gold chain around her neck held a crucifix dangling somewhere down between her perfect, untouched breasts, in the powder-scented shadows of her plain cotton bra and flowery blouse. At night, she probably said prayers and probably cuddled up to her stuffed monkey. Maybe back in eleventh grade she’d let some asshole grope her ass and stick his tongue in her mouth, but she’d never sauntered out of her parents’ hot tub stark raving nude, stoked up on Ecstasy, and invited every guy from Fredonia High at the party to stick his dick in her—a not-uncommon event back home.
Nicole Werner had never even been to a party like that. She’d never heard of a party like that. They did not, Craig felt certain, have parties like that in Bad Axe.
She sneezed again—a dainty sneeze, all consonants and wheee!—and Craig opened his eyes.
She was looking back at him with a tissue held to her nose.
I’m sorry, she mouthed.
God bless you, he mouthed back.