Frost

Feeling like I’d talked her off the ledge, I started out of the room. The minute I was in the hall, though, I remembered why I’d gone over to begin with. It took bulldozer force to make myself turn back around. “Celeste?” I held out the small white envelope. “David gave this to me at the beginning of school, and I totally forgot to give it to you. I hope I didn’t screw anything up.”

She handed it back without opening it. “You should keep it,” she said.

“Me? I don’t even know what it is.”

“The key to his room. Which makes more sense, for his sister to have it, or his girlfriend?”

For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. David had a girlfriend?

Then I clued in to her implication. “I’m not his girlfriend,” I said.

“I see you guys together all the time,” she said. “I don’t mind. I want you to get together. I told you that right on the first day. Why else do you think I had him come over to help you hang those shades the other week?”

Oh my God. “You did that on purpose?”

She smirked. “Just moving things along.”

I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “How about this. I’ll hang the key on a nail, and then if David’s ever locked out, he can know it’s here. That’s probably why he gave you a copy, right?”

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll see who’s the first one to use it.”

I couldn’t get out of there soon enough. Back in the bedroom, I lay down and tried to breathe away the tightness in my chest and the ache that was beginning to pulse at my temples.

All of these stories she was constructing in her head! It was just like when we were lab partners—the constant dramas—except now I was one of the people involved. She couldn’t just be sad that her vase had broken; she had to make it into a whole mystery with herself as a victim. David and I couldn’t just be friends; it had to be a clandestine relationship—orchestrated by her! She thought everyone lived life as out of control as she did, acting on every little emotion. Was she going to do this all semester? Turn everything into more than it was?

Still, as I was having these thoughts, something tickled at the edge of my brain. The knocking on the wall—that was nothing, I was sure. But did I really think a breeze could have blown over a ceramic vase?

I rolled onto my side, facing the window. Cubby stared at me with her big glass eyes. I reached for her, brought her onto the bed.

When I was little, I knew owls were supposed to be wise, so I made up this schoolmarmish voice for Cubby and would ask her questions like she was a wooden oracle.

I think I convinced myself that when I spoke in Cubby’s voice, my answers were wiser than they’d otherwise have been.

“Did you see how the vase broke?” I asked her now. “It blew over, right?”

No answer.

“You must have seen it. Was someone in here?”

I looked deep into Cubby’s shiny black pupils.

No one, I made her say in her uptight, vaguely English accent. The room was empty.

“Thank you,” I said, resting her back on the sill.

The room had been empty. Of course it had been. To believe anything else was to be sucked into Celeste’s melodrama, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

Chapter 11

TWO DAYS LATER, sitting in my Gender Relations in America seminar, the closer we got to the bell the more distracted I felt.

“So,” Ms. Boutillier was saying from the other side of the round table where the seven of us sat, “do you think the author was ahead of his time? Or was he making a remark that was designed to stir controversy and prove that women didn’t, in fact, deserve the vote? Did you question his motives when reading?”

I kept my eyes on my text, as if giving her questions deep thought. Really, I was thinking about David.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’d gotten in the habit of leaving by the building’s side exit after my seminar. Usually, David would be coming out of his history class at that same spot. We’d walk over to the mailroom together, check our boxes, stop by senior tea . . . I looked forward to it.

Today, I wondered if I should go out the main exit of Holmes Hall instead. I hadn’t run into David anywhere yesterday—the day after the vase incident—and I’d been thinking maybe it would be better if I stopped going out of my way to see him. Just stay away from the freaky Lazar vortex; remove myself from Celeste’s rich, imaginative life.

“Leena?” Ms. Boutillier said. “Did you hear those page numbers for tonight?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Can you repeat them?” She did, with obvious annoyance, and then the bell finally rang.

I slipped into my canvas army jacket, hoisted my bag over my shoulder, and followed the herd, taking a left toward the main entrance where I’d usually take a right. Then I stopped. David and I weren’t doing anything wrong. We weren’t doing anything, period. Why play into Celeste’s bizarre little game? Also, I wanted to talk to him about what was going on in the dorm. I turned around and headed to where I knew he would be lingering, putting books into his bag.