People laughed as they passed him in the hallway, but when they saw the expression on his face and the blood smeared across it, they stopped. Only Megan Brenner spoke:
“You okay, Craig? Did someone punch you in the face or something? What’s on the back of your shirt? That’s not blood, too, is it?”
Craig said nothing to her. Megan was perhaps the most petite fully grown human being he’d ever known. He could have wrapped his arms around her waist twice. He could have carried her across the Sahara and not even gotten thirsty or winded. He and Perry had taken to calling her Mega, because it was so absurd. He looked at her—that face peering up at him, the size of a cat’s—and all he could do was nod.
He went to the boys’ bathroom. No one else was in there. Just the slick, bright, urine-colored tiles (Perry had suggested they’d once been white; Craig had said the tile people had simply been thinking ahead) vaguely reflecting him at the sink as he washed the blood off his face, careful to avoid the actual mirror and his actual reflection in it, and tossed the T-shirt with the manicotti on it into the garbage can, and headed to his room to put on a new one.
Perry was back from the cafeteria himself, sitting at his desk chair with his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when Craig came in, but he cleared his throat. For a terrible second Craig thought maybe Perry was going to say something, that maybe he’d even try to apologize, or explain, and if that happened, there was no way Craig was going to be able to take it:
He would have to kill Perry, or die trying.
But that wasn’t what he wanted to do, not at all.
Perry had been on top of him, straddling him, not that different, really, from the way what’s-her-name, the girl in the hot tub (what was her name?) had straddled him in the MacGuirres’ pool house back in Fredonia, looking down on him, staring him in the eyes, except that he’d been inside that girl, and she’d been looking into him, pretending that fucking was some big spiritual experience.
He doubted it was, since she had the same experience every Saturday night in Fredonia with a different guy. She’d been stoned as hell, and so was he, but Craig remembered her saying as she stared into his eyes, “I know what you’re thinking. You and I are one . . .”
And how she’d slapped him hard when he started to laugh.
Even then, with his dick seven inches into her, Craig couldn’t remember her name, and he’d told her that.
But Perry.
Craig had known something at that moment. Something transcendent. Truly, this time, as Perry was straddling him, staring down at him, slamming him into the floor, Craig had felt his whole life grabbed like his T-shirt in Perry’s fist, and yanked, and shoved back down, and it was a spiritual experience.
“Fucker. Asshole. Listen. You stupid, stupid idiot.”
Perry was his friend. His first real friend.
He didn’t want to kill Perry. He wanted Perry to be Perry. Underlining shit in a book like his life depended on it, giving Craig advice on how to keep his side of the room a little bit tidier, piling up his salad bowl with things his mother must have threatened him for eighteen years to eat, and that he was still eating. He wanted Perry to be his roommate, his friend.
But what he had to do was see Nicole.
That had nothing to do with Perry.
Luckily, Perry didn’t speak.
Craig grabbed his coat and closed the door more carefully than usual behind him—not slamming it, but not leaving any doubt that he was closing it, either.
He headed for Lucas’s room.
He didn’t have time to walk to the OTT house.
He needed a car.