Traditionally, at the first dorm meeting of the year, the
faculty house counselor lies about how thrilled she is to be living
with a bunch of teenagers.
Nothing happened the way I expected that semester.
“I’m on deadline to finish a book,” Ms. Martin said after
briefly introducing herself. “So if the sign on my apartment door is
turned to ‘privacy please,’ which it will be often, only knock for
emergencies. You’re all seniors; I’m assuming you’re responsible
enough not to need much supervision.”
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Her most attractive quality seemed to be her cat, a big-
bellied, saucer-eyed Russian Blue named Leo. When he trotted
by, I scooped him up onto my lap and ran my hand through his
thick, soft coat. He turned in a circle as if he was going to settle
down, but when his face brushed against my T-shirt, he let out a
sharp yowl, leapt off, and darted out of the room, hackles raised,
tail puffed up like a billy club.
“Sorry,” I said to Ms. Martin. “Most cats really like me.”
“He’s not usually going to be allowed out of my apartment,”
she said. “So you won’t have to worry about him.”
One of his claws had left a tiny pull in the fabric of my shorts.
“Was he out earlier today?” I asked. “In our room, maybe?”
“Definitely not,” Ms. Martin said. “He was at my ex-
husband’s. We share custody.”
They shared custody of their cat? Viv and Abby nudged me
simultaneously; Celeste made a noise that began as a snort but
turned into a cough. I bit down on my lips to keep from laughing.
Oblivious, Ms. Martin began going over all of the dorm rules:
sign-in at ten during the week; eleven thirty, face-to-face sign-in
on Friday and Saturday; no drinking, smoking, drugs; parietals—
permission to have a guy in your room—granted any time before
sign-in, as long as Ms. Martin was home to give approval; same
for permission to go outside the town of Barcroft, except for
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overnight, which required a chaperone letter. Then she asked if
anyone had an issue to discuss.
“Last year,” I said, “I organized a dorm dinner one Sunday of
every month. We switched off cooking. It was really fun. I’d like to
do it again this year, if you don’t mind loaning us your kitchen. It’ll
be easier with so few people. We could even invite guests from
outside the dorm.”
“Sounds fine,” Ms. Martin said. “Just give me the dates well
in advance. Anything else?” She checked her watch.
Celeste spoke up. “A couple things. First, I don’t know if they
didn’t clean in here, or what, but my closet smells like something
died in it. Also, we need new shades for the windows back there.
Most are broken, and I swear to God, it felt like someone was
looking in at me when I changed today.”
“Are we talking about stuff that needs to be fixed?” Abby
chimed in. “Because there are a ton of things maintenance could
do upstairs.”
“It’s as if they haven’t touched this place in a million years,”
Celeste said.
“Totally,” Abby agreed.
“That’s not true,” I said. “They painted.”
“You all know that I have nothing to do with this,” Ms.
Martin said. “Put in work orders with maintenance. And, Celeste,
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the house was fully cleaned. I assume the smell is just from years
of being a boys’ dorm.” She stood up and gave us a tight smile,
said, “My research calls, girls,” and left the room.
As soon as her apartment door shut, we all burst out
laughing.
“She’s a charmer,” Abby said.
“What the hell did she mean, it smells because boys lived
here?” Celeste said. “They rubbed their jocks on the walls?”
“Ew,” Abby said. “And that poor cat!”
After we laughed a little longer, Viv asked if we wanted to go
upstairs. “We still have brownies that Abby’s mom made,” she
said to Celeste. “Not to mention popcorn, pretzels, candy . . .”
“Thanks, but I’ve got stuff to do,” Celeste said. She began
maneuvering herself out of the chair.
“You sure?” I said. “The brownies are amazing.”
“AP portfolio class tomorrow. Have to figure out what I’m
showing Ms. Spatz. I have a million things to choose from.”
“Okay,” I said, happy that we’d made the offer, and,
truthfully, relieved that Celeste had refused.
Every year, there was one room in the dorm that became our
default hangout; this year it seemed like it was going to be Viv’s.
When we got upstairs, Abby went to get polish to paint our nails,
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and Viv resumed working on a giant wall calendar to help her
keep track of where she was supposed to be and what
assignments were due when. I hooked up my iPod to her dock
and chose a playlist, an upbeat one Abby and I listened to on road
trips. I was feeling giddy with beginning-of-semester excitement
again. I’d survived my presentation, the dorm meeting had gone
fine, and classes started tomorrow. I loved seeing who else was in
them, meeting new teachers, inaugurating fresh, unblemished
notebooks. . . . Dorky, I know.
Abby returned with three different polish colors and
gestured that she’d do my nails first. I picked a dark metallic blue
called “Nuit de la Coeur,” remembering for a moment how
whenever my dad took me to the hardware store, I used to pore
over the colors and names on the paint chips. He and my mom
had let me choose the paint for our front door when I was seven
or so, and I’d picked “Razzlematazzle,” mostly for the name. Years
later, I’d still said it under my breath when I opened the door.
Abby shook the bottle and started on my right hand. For a
few minutes, we listened to music and concentrated on our
separate thoughts. Eventually, Viv looked over from where she
was drawing a half circle on September 9. Probably noting the
stage of the moon. “So,” she said, “Cam gave me some good
news. It turns out Jake and Eliza broke up.”
I flinched, causing Abby to get polish on my skin. “Why is that
good news?”
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“You guys left stuff in limbo,” Viv said. “Maybe you can see
where it goes again.”
Was she kidding? “It wasn’t left in limbo. He ditched me for
Eliza.”
“Not because he didn’t like you,” Viv said. “He didn’t know
how into him you were.”
“The hooking up didn’t clue him in?” I snapped, more harshly
than I meant.
Viv began fiddling with one of her dangly earrings. “Sorry,”
she said. “I thought . . . I don’t know. I guess I got excited because
he’s friends with Cam and it would be so perfect. I wasn’t
thinking. Sorry.”
I bit my cheeks and stared down at the rhythmic movement
of the brush. “It’s not just about Jake,” I said. “I’ve told you, the
last thing I need this semester is a relationship drama. I don’t
want to have anything to do with anyone until after my
applications are in and I’ve kept my grades up. Do you know how
crazy my schedule is?”
“You always make some excuse, Leen,” Viv said gently.
“Yeah,” Abby said. “Last year you found the stupidest
reasons not to get together with anyone.”
“I didn’t like anyone last year,” I said. “Spare me the lecture,
okay?”
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“Fine,” Abby sighed, and then went on to talk about Ponytail
Guy, her new crush.
It annoyed me when she and Viv made it seem like my
reluctance to get involved was a problem. They were the ones
who’d had to scrape me off the floor at the end of sophomore
year, after Jake McCormick, and freshman year, after Theo
Fletcher.
With both Jake and Theo, I’d assumed that hooking up
meant something more was happening between us—maybe not
the first time we got together, but after that, definitely. I got all
stupid excited: going totally out of my way to run into them at
Commons or between classes, doodling our entwined initials, and
writing the boy’s name in fancy letters on the side of my class
notes. But both times, the old saying about the danger of
assumptions had proved true. Jake moved on to Eliza without
even thinking he needed to tell me, and Theo moved on to the
rest of the freshman class.
Looking back on it now, I knew that I’d been partly to blame.
I hadn’t said what I wanted, or asked what they wanted, just
skipped along in my own little bubble of deluded happiness. But I
still felt the burn of humiliation when I remembered how easily
and thoroughly I’d been devastated back then. I wished I were the
type of person who could casually hook up. I wasn’t, though, no
matter how much I loved kissing and fooling around. (At least
what I’d tried—free rein for my hands; boys’ hands just up top.)
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And this semester, with my tough classes and college
applications, I couldn’t afford any emotional turmoil. Friendship,
flirting—that was fine. It’s not like I wanted to live in a convent.
But that was as far as I’d go. I had the rest of my life for kissing.
Abby finished my nails and moved onto Viv’s, and as the
night went on, the pauses between our comments got longer and
my eyelids grew heavier. I kept thinking about my bed and how
well I’d slept last night. Eventual y, I struggled to my feet. I had to
face Molecular Biology at eight a.m. That was what I needed to
concentrate on this semester—my classes.
I kept my steps on the stairs and down the hall careful and
quiet, assuming Celeste was long asleep. I found her in bed with
the covers pulled all the way over her face. It was a warm, late
summer night. Was she one of those really skinny people who are
always cold? I hoped I wasn’t going to discover she had an eating
disorder. One of the things that had stressed me out about the
bigger dorms was sharing the bathroom with bulimics. Because of
the peer-counseling thing, I usually got roped into confronting
them. There’s an unspoken agreement at Barcroft: whenever
possible, don’t involve faculty.
With all of the windows, our bedroom wasn’t ink dark, so
much as grainy, charcoal gray. I could see Celeste’s closet door
gaping open again, which made me think of her comment at the
dorm meeting—her insistence about the horrible smell. I tiptoed
over and breathed in through my nose. It still smelled good to me.
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I waited a few minutes, letting the scent bring me that feeling I’d
had earlier. Warmth, comfort. Definitely a memory. What was it?
My old cedar chest? No. I leaned farther in, inhaled once more,
and shivered slightly. If the scent had been more perfume-like, I
would have guessed that it reminded me of the way my mother
smelled when I was a baby. The feeling was that essential.
Something made me turn my head. Celeste was propped up
on her elbows, staring at me.
“Oh.” I snatched my hand off the door. “I didn’t know you
were awake.”
“They won’t let me sleep.”
They, meaning us? “I’m so sorry. We tried to be quiet.” She
couldn’t have heard what we were saying, could she? I walked
quickly over to my bed.
“Not you guys,” she said. “Them.” She flailed a skinny arm at
the windows. “The trees, the moonlight. I told you, there are too
many windows here. And there’s this, like, constant breeze
prickling my skin, touching me. It’s creepy. You slept here last
night. Didn’t it bother you?”
“Actually, I fell asleep right away. Should I shut the windows
a bit, so it’s not as breezy?”
“No. That nasty smell from the closet took over the whole
room. It was making me gag.”
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“Do you want some Tylenol PM?”
“I don’t take drugs.” She said it like I’d offered her crack.
“Okay. Well, I’ll get some new shades, if that’ll help. If we put
in a work order, they won’t get around to it until graduation.”
“Can you do something about the closet, too?” she said.
“You must have noticed the smell, standing over there.”
“I think it’s just the wood,” I said, turning on the small lamp
by my bed and finding my basket of toiletries. “Smells kind of old
and musty. I don’t mind it at all, but I grew up in an old house.”
“There’s old, and then there’s dead.”
I glanced back at the closet. She couldn’t be talking about the
same smell I was. “Did you store all your bugs and bones and stuff
in there? Maybe it’s them.”
“Those do not smell. Anyway, you said you didn’t want them
in the bedroom. I put them across the hall. I’m telling you, Leena,
there’s something in here. Something weird and gross. And unless
the boys who lived here left behind a corpse, it has nothing to do
with them.”
With that, she lay down and pulled the sheet back over her
head. In a case of utterly perfect timing, a breeze swept through
the room at the same time and the closet door slammed shut
with a bang.
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Celeste sat up straight. “Why did you do that?” she asked
me, alarmed.
“I didn’t,” I said. “It blew shut.”
“Blew shut?”
She stared at the closet as if she couldn’t quite grasp the
concept. Then lay back down, not taking her eyes off it, making
sure it didn’t startle her with another sudden noise. Finally, she
drew the sheet over her head again.
“’Night,” I said to her covered figure as I turned off the light
and headed to the bathroom.
“I doubt it,” she said. “Not in here.”
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Chapter 9
I STEADIED MY FEET ON THE CHAIR as I reached up, drill
in hand, and repeated, “Many prokaryotes are able to take up
nonviral DNA molecules,” in an accent like the Terminator’s.
It was Saturday morning after our first week of classes, and I
was multitasking: switching the old, broken shades for new ones
I’d bought at the mall, while listening to my recording of Friday’s
unnervingly complicated lecture by my bio teacher, Mr.
