My Last Innocent Year(7)
I took the bus back to New Hampshire on the first Sunday in January. As we pulled onto campus, I thought about how much I’d been looking forward to my final semester, to finishing my thesis and finding a job and taking Joanna Maxwell’s senior fiction seminar. Everything had been coming together, until that night with Zev and Debra’s stupid stunt. I clung to her promise that everything would be okay, forgetting that she was the one who’d gotten me into this mess in the first place. Or maybe, as usual, it was me.
* * *
WHEN I GOT back from class on Monday, there was a message waiting for me, written on the whiteboard in Kelsey’s careful hand.
“I told you this would happen,” I said to Debra when she got back from the gym.
She wedged a granola bar in her mouth and considered the message: Call Dean Hansen.
“Yeah, he called me, too.”
“He did? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.” She finished the bar in four quick bites. “Isabel, think about this rationally. What exactly does Zev have on us?”
“Debra, he saw us with the spray paint. You had the can in your hand.”
“Circumstantial.” Debra unzipped her hoodie, then tossed it on her desk where it landed next to a copy of Katie Roiphe’s latest book, which she was reviewing for bitch slap. “Remember why we were there. Because of what he did, right? The dean probably wants to talk to you about that.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.” I fell back on the sofa. “Debra, I don’t even know what happened anymore. Maybe I overreacted.”
“Stop that,” she snapped. “You know damn well what he did. We’ll just tell the dean what happened, what really happened. Honestly, what can he even do to us at this point? We’re out of here in less than six months. Zev’s the one who should be worried. When this is all over, he’ll be sorry he ever laid eyes on us.”
I picked up Roiphe’s book and flipped through the pages while Debra took a shower. The bruise on the back of my head was nearly healed, but if I pressed on it, I could coax out the ache. I did that now, to remind myself I had skin, bones, a boundary that defined where I ended and someone else began. Then I tossed the book aside and grabbed my coat so I would be gone before Debra got out.
The library’s wood-paneled reading room was quiet, just a handful of people preparing for the semester. Afternoon tea, which they served every day at four o’clock, had just ended, and the smell of Earl Grey filled the warm and cozy space. People looked up as I passed to see if I was someone they might waste time with, as if that was the real work of college, friends and lovers and intrigues, all the rest merely an interruption. The phone booths outside the reading room were empty; as the semester wore on they’d almost always be occupied by students calling home to cry about a breakup or a bad grade. I passed a group of girls from my French class. “Salut, Isabel,” one of them said, pronouncing my name the way our professor did, the s sharp and sibilant. I swept up the stairs, my long gray coat trailing behind me as if I were a Russian princess. The heaters clanked and moaned, working hard against the New Hampshire winter. Then I pushed through the turnstile and into the stacks.
I loved everything about the stacks, the musty smell of glue and paper, the way you were only permitted to enter after showing your student ID, as though the collection of books were an important dignitary to be protected at all costs. I weaved my way slowly through the shelves, running my fingers along the spines until my fingertips were black with dust, pulling out books at random, stopping here and there to read a few pages about World War II or electrical engineering or Willa Cather. Books in Chinese and Yiddish and Russian and French. Books about classical music and film, the history of civilizations ancient and modern. I loved the push and pull of the big and small, the way each writer burrowed deep into his or her subject matter, no matter how obscure, and yet, taken together, the books here felt larger than the world.
I wandered until my stomach growled, reminding me I hadn’t eaten. I thought about leaving and finding Kelsey and Jason, who’d invited me to join them for dinner, but instead found myself standing in front of Andy Dubinski’s carrel. The library was quiet, but I knew I’d find him there. He took his time coming to the door, like he always did.
“Isabel?” He looked as if I had woken him. Andy’s dedication to his work was part of his mystique, that and his honey-colored Jesus hair, which today he had pulled back with an office-supply rubber band, the kind that ripped your hair. Andy was a construct, a type I’d meet again and again in the literary world I eventually became a part of. The kind of guy who wanted you to think it was so hard to do what he did that you wouldn’t try to do it, too.
“C’est moi,” I said. “Can I come in?”
“Oui, oui. Entrez, s’il vous pla?t.”
Andy’s carrel was small, not much bigger than a shower stall. There was a desk pushed up against one wall, a sliver of window, and a long metal heating pipe that ran from floor to ceiling. Andy’s computer was off; he rarely used it, preferring to write his poems on index cards with pencils no longer than his thumb. There were scraps of paper pinned to the bulletin board above his desk, some with only one word: pomegranate, chasm, dun. I wondered if Andy was disappointed to see me. I wasn’t the only girl who visited him in his carrel, but maybe the only one he wasn’t currently sleeping with.