“Her name’s Nicole Werner,” Perry told his roommate, whose mouth was open, staring at her. Perry was hoping that if he distracted him with information, Craig would close his mouth and quit leering. “Her whole family’s from Bad Axe, for generations. She’s got about four hundred cousins. Our elementary school was called Werner Elementary.”
“Farm slut?” his roommate asked. “Dumb blonde?”
“She was our valedictorian,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he felt. He had no particular stake in Nicole Werner per se, but everything Craig Clements-Rabbitt had said about everything since spreading out his high-tech sleeping bag on his bare mattress in their dorm room on move-in day had been either annoying or infuriating.
“Huh. Valedictorian? I thought that would have been you, Perry-my-man. What the hell happened?”
“She was the better student.” Perry nodded with what he hoped looked like sincerity, not bitterness.
There’d been, certainly, a period of bitterness. Nicole Werner, in addition to being valedictorian, had also gotten the Ramsey Luke Scholarship—the first time in Bad Axe High history that it hadn’t been given to the president of the senior class, which had been Perry. But Perry had told himself that they couldn’t really give the Ramsey Luke and the E. M. Gelman Band Scholarship to the same student, and he’d clearly been the leading candidate for the latter.
They were in the cafeteria. It was the end of their first week in Godwin Honors Hall. Craig was eating chili piled so high with chopped onion that every time he put his spoon in the bowl, onions fell onto the laminate table. “What do her parents do?”
“They own a German restaurant in town. Dumplings.”
“They make dumplings?” Craig let his spoon hover over the bowl for a moment, as if this were a bowl of absurdity itself. He shook his long dirty-blond rock-star bangs out of his face by whipping his face to the left—a kind of cool twitch Perry had seen on VH1 more than a few times.
“No,” Perry said. “The restaurant’s called Dumplings.”
Craig snorted loudly and leaned back in his chair. This was routine for Craig as far as Perry could tell. Everything about the Midwest was one big joke to Craig Clements-Rabbitt—the food, the trees, the names of the streets, the girls.
“It’s the most popular restaurant in Bad Axe,” Perry said, again sounding, and wishing he didn’t, as if he had some personal investment in this. Craig opened his mouth as if at news too astonishing to believe. Perry looked away, shaking his head.
One might think, from his attitude, that this Craig Clements-Rabbitt came from a huge city, but when pressed for the details it turned out that the town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in was, if anything, a bit smaller than Bad Axe.
“But it’s not the same,” Craig had said, sounding weary already, as if the whole subject would be too complicated to explain and he dreaded the task. This had been the first night in their shared dorm room, while they were still attempting to be polite to each other. Craig had left his duffel bag unpacked at the foot of his bed, and rolled out the technologically advanced sleeping bag onto his mattress. It was made of some sort of metallic material that even Perry, with a great deal of outdoor-gear expertise from the Boy Scouts, didn’t recognize. No pillow.
“The town I live in is small,” Craig said, “but nobody’s from it. Everybody’s got a place there because they work on the Internet, or only have to travel to Boston or New York every couple of weeks. Or they’re independently wealthy, or they retired early. Except for a couple of people whose parents work at the ski resort. I guess they’re sort of like small-town kids. But not really.”
Perry imagined a few hundred families like Craig’s: Mothers in slim beige skirts, rolling their eyes. Fathers in corduroy jackets and jeans.
In fact, while Rod Clements had been wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket earlier that day, he’d also been wearing bright green Converse All Stars and a couple of hemp bracelets around his wrist, as if he were in middle school, while the little brother, Scar, already looked like an old man, if old men had ponytails. The kid’s face had appeared chiseled in stone, as if he hadn’t laughed or frowned in his whole life—and although Perry had not yet asked Craig why his brother was called Scar, he felt sure there was some story behind it. Perry had only been in the company of the Clements-Rabbitts for an hour before they’d managed to share several seemingly amusing stories about Craig.
(“Oh, Perry,” Craig’s mother had said, “I hope you can adjust to living with our son. We knew he was different when he was only three years old and asked, in all seriousness, if he could have for his birthday his own agent.”)
And the family.
(“Remember that time,” his father had asked, looking around the dorm room skeptically, “when we thought we were renting a cottage on the beach in Costa Rica and it turned out to be a storage shed?”)
“Dumplings,” Craig repeated, trancelike, as he watched Nicole Werner cross the cafeteria. She was carrying her tray ahead of her as if it had something radioactive on it. Perry knew her well enough, after thirteen years of sharing classrooms with her, to know that Nicole was walking that way because she knew she was being watched, and she didn’t particularly mind it. Her ponytail was swinging behind her like an actual pony’s tail, the palest of blond, just like the hair of all the other Werners—except Etta Werner, who was Nicole’s grandmother, a nice old lady who lived down the block from Perry’s family and who always had on hand the most incredible homemade cookies you could imagine. Her hair was pure white.
“She looks like a milkmaid.”
Perry didn’t respond to this. He supposed it was intended as an insult. He might not have been Nicole Werner’s biggest fan himself, but he couldn’t help feeling protective. For one thing, he was pretty sure any insults Craig Clements-Rabbitt was going to think up for Nicole—hick, nerd, etc.—would eventually come around to him. When Perry had asked him about his last name, the hyphen, Craig had rolled his eyes and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a hyphenated name before. Are the womenfolk in your town allowed to vote yet?”
In truth, Perry hadn’t ever known anyone with a hyphenated name.
“I have two parents,” Craig had said. “A Clements and a Rabbitt.”
“I thought your dad was the Clements,” Perry said.
“So you have seen hyphenated names—enough to know that my parents are so hip they decided to put my mother’s name last.”
Really, Perry hadn’t figured that out himself. A guy on their hall had speculated that Craig’s mother was actually R. E. Clements, because of the order of the names. His girlfriend had said, “No way. Have you read those books? No woman would write anything so stupid. That’s testosterone-inspired schlock.”
“So,” Craig said, plunging his spoon into the chili, spilling more onions around the bowl, “in this town of yours, this Bad Ass, do all the girls look like that?”
“Like what?” Perry asked.
“Rosy-cheeked? Sunny blond? Strong but slender limbs? Big hooters?”
Perry thought about this for a minute, and then said, quite honestly, “Pretty much.”
“Fair enough,” Craig said. “So, when you go with your family to this”—he waved his free hand in the air—“this Dumplings, do you see Nicole Werner there?”
Perry had to think again, but then remembered that, yes, she’d started working as a waitress the summer before last. She was there, it seemed, mostly on Friday nights and some Saturday afternoons, moving quickly from table to table in her bustley skirt and frilly top. But usually his family went to Dumplings on Sunday, after church, with Perry’s grandfather, who loved the sauerbraten, and although Perry saw Nicole in church, he never saw her at Dumplings those afternoons. Sundays must have been her day off.
“What’s the uniform like?”
Perry described it. The wide blue satin belt. The—what’d-ya-call it?—peasant blouse. The pinstriped skirt.
“Oh, man, stop.” Craig put up his hand and shook his head. “You’re going to make me come.”
Perry cleared his throat, and when Nicole looked over at him and gave him her usual polite (apologetic?) smile from across the cafeteria, Perry could feel himself blushing from his Adam’s apple up.
“How’d you get so fucking idealistic, man?” Craig asked one night a few weeks later, after their relationship had become openly hostile. Perry had come back from the library once again to find his roommate lying on his back in bed on top of the covers (he’d rolled up the high-tech sleeping bag he’d arrived with and put it in the closet), wearing boxer shorts and headphones. He had a paperback open on his bare stomach, a novel his father had published a few years ago and which, according to Craig at least, had been a big hit. Brain Freeze, by R. E. Clements. A lot of the other students in the Honors College seemed to know who Craig’s father was, and not to hold him in very high regard, but Perry had never heard of him.
It was an achingly beautiful autumn. Clear and dry, skies so blue day after day that somehow it was possible to see the moon hanging there above the library, as if all the atmosphere had been scoured away. And the brightness of the changing red and gold and russet leaves of the big trees that lined Campus Ave seemed more like cinema than nature in so much light.
“You should see Dartmouth,” Craig had said to him one morning as they walked down the staircase to breakfast. “Dartmouth was founded before there was even a dirt path hacked through this state.”
Perry had heard about Dartmouth from Craig already a couple of times, and he’d already asked the obvious question, to which Craig had answered, “Because I couldn’t get into Dartmouth. It’s a real college. At Dartmouth I’d have gotten a real roommate, too.”
“Fuck you,” Perry had said, not for the first or last time.
“Thanks,” Craig said, “but I’m not horny right now.”
It had never crossed Perry’s mind to go to college anywhere but here. All the smartest kids from Bad Axe had come to this university over the decades, and only three of them had gotten in this year—Perry, Nicole, and an obese girl named Maria, who played the harp and hadn’t spoken a word to anyone except the school psychologist, as far as Perry knew, since eighth grade, when her mother had committed suicide.
His parents, both of whom had gone to a smaller university closer to Bad Axe, were nearly beside themselves with pride. His father had painted the big cement squares of their patio crimson and gold a couple days after Perry got his acceptance letter. “This is the big time,” he’d said. “You did it, kiddo.”
It was hard for Perry to imagine an older, more formidable looking college than this—the library’s enormous pillars, the gold trim around the ceiling of Rice Auditorium, the leafy Commons with its marble benches. What could Dartmouth have that this school didn’t?
“It’s selective,” Craig had said. “It’s private. Not a jock-ocracy,” waving his hand around at the walls of their room.
But for Perry, this was like a dream of being in college. The heavy books with their translucently thin pages. The gregarious professors and the unsmiling ones. The fat columns of the library, and the crammed stacks of books inside it.
The smell between those narrow walls of books was, Perry felt, the smell of rumination itself. Decades of reason and reflection. He checked out books that had nothing to do with the classes he was taking, just to be able to bring the heft and the scent of them back to the dorm with him. A Handbook of Classical Physics. A History of the Anglo-Saxons.
“Huh?” Craig asked. “How’d you get like this, man—all romantic about it all?”
“I don’t know, man,” Perry said, dragging out the man in imitation of that East Coast accent. “How’d you get so fucking cynical?”
“Native intelligence. Born with it,” Craig said without missing a beat. He never missed a beat. He had a whole encyclopedia of comebacks on the tip of his tongue at all times.
“Is it a burden,” Perry asked, “being so much better than everyone else? Or is it pleasing?”
“I’m so used to it by now,” Craig said, “I really couldn’t say.”
Perry sat down on his own bed and unzipped his backpack. You could have drawn a line straight down the center of the room. Every time some piece of Craig’s laundry or a magazine or a discarded protein bar wrapper inched over onto Perry’s side, he carefully pushed it back over to Craig’s side with his foot.
“Your mom called,” Craig said. “I told her you were out trying to score some heroin, but you’d be back in an hour or so.”
“Thanks.”
“Here,” Craig said. “You can call her from my cell in the lounge if you want some privacy.” He tossed the phone, slightly larger than a matchbook and just as thin, to Perry. It had been a source of endless surprise to Craig Clements-Rabbitt that Perry didn’t own a cell phone and was dependent on the antique mounted to the wall of their room. Craig did not, himself, even know their phone number, and had only touched the telephone in the room to take calls for Perry.
“Thanks,” Perry said. He took the phone, stood, and closed the door behind him.
“Mom?”
There was no one else in the second-floor lounge, so Perry lay back on the blue couch, careful to keep his shoes from touching the cushions.
He and his mother talked about his classes, his grandfather, his father’s business—a lawn mower shop, the best one in town—and about the weather, which had been beautiful. The leaves in Bad Axe had changed dramatically already, she said, and were starting to fall, and she joked that she supposed she was going to have to do the raking now, with Perry at college.
“I can come home for a weekend,” he said, “if I can get a ride.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother said. “We can handle the leaves. You just get good grades.”
Perry was an only child—except that there’d been another, a sister before him, who’d died at birth, a baby his mother had never once spoken of to him. The only reason Perry knew about her was because his grandmother, when he was nine, had decided Perry needed to know.
Since he’d been a toddler, Perry’d had an imaginary sister whose name was Mary.
He was getting too old for imaginary playmates, his grandmother told him one day, and God knows what it must be doing to his parents, listening to him in his room, talking for hours to that imaginary girl. Unlike the other adults in Perry’s life, Grandma Edwards pulled no punches just because he was a child. She was the one who’d told him that his grandfather had been an alcoholic, and that his Uncle Benny took after him, a slobbering drunk, and that’s why he was never invited for Christmas dinner. She was the one who would, eventually, tell him that she herself was dying of bladder cancer, not “recuperating” in the hospital, as his parents had said.
So Grandma Edwards took him to the grave—a flat, shining stone engraved with “Baby Girl Edwards,” and a date that meant nothing to Perry—and that very day, his imaginary friend Mary had vanished, as if the imaginary could die as easily as the actual. Perry almost never thought about her again, except on the rare occasion that her translucently pale skin would come back to him, and the way her soft, cool, imaginary hand had felt on his, guiding it across a piece of paper, teaching him how to draw a dinosaur.
And the scent of her hair—that red tangle of curls—like warm earth.
“I love you, Mom,” Perry said before hanging up.
“I love you, Perry,” his mother said.
“Tell Dad I love him.”
“He loves you, too.”
A few more good-byes, back and forth, and Perry snapped Craig’s snazzy cell phone shut, rose from the couch, and headed back. A few students passed him on the way—strangers, but strangers he recognized now from the hallways, from the cafeteria. One guy, with wire-frame glasses, Perry recognized from a class, although he couldn’t remember which one. They nodded seriously, politely, to each other.
The stairwell was empty when he got there. He could hear his own steps ringing around him, and as he climbed to the fourth floor, he suddenly was struck with a terrible grieflike longing for his mother, home alone in their two-bedroom bungalow. What would she do now that their phone call was over? Call her own mother? Watch television?
And there was grief for his father, too, still at the shop. He might be trying to fix something, or sell something, or schedule some kid to work on Saturday now that Perry was gone.
He thought about his grandfather, too, sitting on the bench in the hallway of Whitcomb Manor, already looking forward to Sunday, when Perry’s parents would pick him up to go to Dumplings.
And then he was feeling sorry for the whole town of Bad Axe. The drugstore. The pizza place. The brick façades of the few, desperate businesses downtown. The strip malls at the edge of everything. The cemetery with its little flags and flowers stuck into the soft, green ground. The women at Fantastic Sam’s, staring out at the parking lot, waiting for someone with too much hair to come inside.
Homesick. Now he knew what that was. And as soon as he stepped out of the stairwell, eyes fogged with emotion, Perry realized how stupid he was being, and rubbed away his ridiculous, homesick tears. Sentimental crap. The only other Eagle Scout from his troop in Bad Axe was already in the Marines, sent off to Afghanistan. That guy had something to get teary about, not Perry.
A girl in a miniskirt rounded the corner of the hallway, laughing hysterically into her cell phone. She didn’t even glance at him. When Perry rounded the corner himself, he saw that the door to his dorm room was open, and someone was standing in it.
And then he saw who it was.
The bright blond ponytail. The perfect posture.
Nicole Werner.
She turned when Perry came up behind her, and she said, “Hi!” in that voice so bright and girlish it sounded like it was coming out of a piccolo.
“Hi,” Perry said back, sounding like a party pooper in comparison, but who could compete with Nicole Werner when it came to congeniality? He saw Craig, still in his boxer shorts, no shirt, standing a few feet in front of her.
“I came by to see, you know, how it’s going,” she said to Perry, but glanced back at Craig as if trying politely to include him in the conversation. “You know, see if you’d want to set up a study time . . .”
“Oh. Yeah,” Perry said. He’d forgotten. They’d talked about this back in Bad Axe—after they’d both gotten their acceptance letters, but before she’d been awarded the Ramsey Luke. They’d said they’d keep up the ritual, the weekly study marathons. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged.
Craig caught Perry’s eye then, and Nicole looked from Perry to him. “You’re welcome to join us,” she said to Craig.
Craig nodded, appeared to consider it, and then said, “That would be helpful. I could use the support, you know, to keep up the good study habits.”
Nicole nodded. She’d obviously missed the false note, and the fact that Craig Clements-Rabbitt was half-naked, having been lying in bed with an iPod and Brain Freeze at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night. “Great!” she said. “So, now we just need a time and a place.” She whipped her academic planner out from under her arm in a flash, and slid out a pen conveniently tucked into her ponytail. She stuck the pen in her mouth as she scanned the pages of the planner.
“I’m free anytime,” Craig said.
Perry rolled his eyes.