The girl with the sprained ankle was standing near the mailboxes when Craig hurried down to check the box. He’d been watching from the front window for the mailman to leave ever since he’d heard his boots stomp across the front porch.
The girl, whom he and Perry now called the Cookie Girl, apparently hadn’t heard Craig come down the stairs—he was in his socks—and she jumped, stifling a little yelp, and whirled around as fast as a person can on crutches.
“Jesus,” she said, “you scared me.”
“I’m sorry,” Craig said. He tried to smile politely, but he was hoping she’d hurry up and get out of his way so he could get the mail, and she wasn’t budging, just sort of sagging there with her armpits pressed hard into the crutches’ rubber rests, letting her left foot dangle loosely over the floor.
“You never leave the apartment,” she said, not to him, exactly, but to a spot over his shoulder, “except to get your mail.”
Craig shook his head, feeling the smile freeze on his face. “Sure I do,” he said. “I go to classes.”
“Do you?” she asked. “I mean, I guess you must, but not much.”
Craig shrugged, his discomfort growing as she continued to regard him. She hadn’t even gotten her own mail out of the box yet. It would be a long time before he could get to his unless he pushed her out of the way, which he obviously couldn’t do.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
At this, Craig consciously tried to turn the smile into a straight line. He never had been that clear on what the expression on his face revealed about him, and had been accused by his mother a million times of smirking or grimacing, accused by girlfriends of rolling his eyes. Once, in middle school, one of his teachers (Ms. Follain, Language Arts) had actually stopped in the middle of a little lecture she was giving on phonemes and asked Craig what was so funny.
Craig had looked up at Ms. Follain, completely taken by surprise. Nothing had been funny. And he wasn’t even stoned. He hadn’t even been thinking about anything funny.
“What are you laughing about?” Ms. Follain asked.
“I’m not laughing,” Craig said—but then, of course, he couldn’t help starting to laugh. The irony—and the absurdity of it: that he hadn’t been laughing when she accused him of laughing, and now he was going to start laughing his ass off. He’d put his face in the crook of his elbow, but was helpless to stop, and the rest of the class started in then, snickering at first, followed by outright hysterical laughter, until finally Ms. Follain, hollow cheeks blazing, tossed him out of class and into the hallway, where he managed to get hold of himself only after about twenty minutes of gasping. Luckily, the bell had rung before he had to either go in and get a hall pass from Ms. Follain or go down to the office. When his friend Teddy got out of class, he’d said, “Jesus, man. What the hell was so funny? We could all hear you still laughing in the hallway. I thought Follain was going to shit her pants.”
“Nothing,” Craig said. “I was laughing because I wasn’t laughing.”
Of course, that started him laughing again.
“You are so fucked up,” Teddy had said.
The Cookie Girl seemed disinclined to say more, but she was looking at him as if maybe the expression on his face was very strange, or a little threatening, and when Craig tried even harder to straighten it out, she opened her eyes in alarm, and then she looked away, hopped around with her back to him, and managed, after a lot of struggle with her keys, finally to open her mailbox and take out a flyer for the Hungry Hippo (“Buy One Hungry Hippo Sub and Get One 1/2 Off!”). When she was able to turn back around, Craig was already trying to inch around her to get to his and Perry’s mailbox, and she froze in front of him and blurted out, “I know who you are, and I just want you to know that I don’t believe you killed that girl.”
Hand poised with the key at the mailbox, Craig felt what could only have been his blood running cold. Literally, there was the sensation inside him that some faucet connected to a frozen river had been turned on, and icy stuff had been let to flow. He did not move.
“What happened to you—something like that happened to me,” she said under her breath. She wasn’t looking at him, but he could feel her presence burning into him nonetheless. “Ran a stop sign,” she muttered. “Didn’t even see it. I killed a guy on a bike. I was sixteen. Got my driver’s license the week before. His sister still sends me hate mail. I think about it every, fucking, minute, of every, fucking, day.”
Her voice was a deep, wild, awful sob with the last sentence—and although she was on crutches and it had to have taken her at least five minutes to make it up the stairs, Craig had the sense that she had been blown away in gust of wind, taken off in a cloud of dust, far too quickly for him to say anything in response or to reach out to touch her shoulder. And by the time he’d turned around with his mail trembling in his hands, he was beginning to wonder if the Cookie Girl had been there at all—had he hallucinated her?—and also to hope that if she actually existed she hadn’t paused at the top of the stairs, turned, and seen how he’d dropped to his knees after he’d flipped through his mail. The Hungry Hippo flyer, a piece of first-class mail for Perry, and a postcard from some tourist spot:
The Frankenmuth Glockenspiel.
And on the back, Nicole’s unmistakable handwriting.
Visited this place, know you would laugh, I miss who you were, I am what they say.