Frost

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.) 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. 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.”

“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.