Hearts in Atlantis(103)

There's time, I told myself as I drifted toward sleep. There's plenty of time for studying, plenty of time for phone-calls. Plenty of time.

14

Skip Kirk blew an Anthropology quiz - ended up guessing at half of the answers and getting a fifty-eight. He got a C-minus on an Advanced Calc quiz, and only did that well because his last math course in high school had covered some of the same concepts. We were in the same Sociology course and he got a D-minus on the quiz, scoring a bare seventy.

We weren't the only ones with problems. Ronnie was a winner at Hearts, better than fifty bucks up in ten days of play, if you believed him (no one completely did, although we knew he was winning), but a loser in his classes. He flunked a French quiz, blew off the little English paper in the class we shared ('Who gives a f**k about ties, I eat at McDonald's' he said), and scraped through a quiz in some other history division by scanning an admirer's notes just before class.

Kirby McClendon had quit shaving and began gnawing his fingernails between deals. He also began cutting significant numbers of classes. Jack Frady convinced his advisor to let him drop Statistics I even though add-drop was officially over. 'I cried a little,' he told me matter-of-factly one night in the lounge as we Bitch-hunted our way toward the wee hours. 'It's something I learned to do in Dramatics Club.' Lennie Doria tapped on my door a couple of nights later while I was cramming (Nate had been in the rack for an hour or more, sleeping the sleep of the just and the caught-up) and asked me if I had any interest in writing a paper about Crispus Atticus. He had heard I could do such things. He'd pay a fair price, Lennie said; he was currently ten bucks up in the game. I said I was sorry but I couldn't help him. I was behind a couple of papers myself. Lennie nodded and slipped out.

Ashley Rice broke out in horrible oozing acne all over his face, Mark St Pierre had a sleepwalking interlude after losing almost twenty bucks in one catastrophic night, and Brad Witherspoon got into a fight with a guy on the first floor. The guy made some innocuous little crack - later on Brad himself admitted it had been innocuous - but Brad, who'd just been hit with The Bitch three times in four hands and only wanted a Coke out of the first-floor machine to soothe his butt-parched throat, wasn't in an innocuous mood. He turned, dropped his unopened soda into the sandwell of a nearby cigarette urn, and started punching. Broke the kid's glasses, loosened one of his teeth. So Brad Witherspoon, ordinarily about as dangerous as a library mimeograph, was the first of us to go on disciplinary pro.

I thought about calling Annmarie and telling her I had met someone and was dating, but it seemed like a lot of work - a lot of psychic effort - on top of everything else. I settled for hoping that she'd write me a letter saying she thought it was time we started seeing other people. Instead I got one saying how much she missed me and that she was making me 'something special' for Christmas. Which probably meant a sweater, one with reindeer on it. Reindeer sweaters were an Annmarie specialty (those slow, stroking handjobs were another). She enclosed a picture of herself in a short skirt. Looking at it made me feel not horny but tired and guilty and put-upon. Carol also made me feel put-upon. I had wanted to cop a feel, that was all, not change my whole f**king life. Or hers, for that matter. But I liked her, that was true. A lot. That smile of hers, and her sharp wit. This is getting good, she had said, we're exchanging information like mad.

A week or so later I, returned from Holyoke, where I'd worked lunch with her on the dishline, and saw Frank Stuart walking slowly down the third-floor hallway with his trunk hung from his hands. Frank was from western Maine, one of those little unincorporated townships that are practically all trees, and had a Yankee accent so thick you could slice it. He was just a so-so Hearts player, usually ducking in second or a close third when someone else went over the hundred-point mark, but a hell of a nice guy. He always had a smile on his face . . . at least until the afternoon I came upon him headed for the stairwell with his trunk.

CHAPTER 19

'You moving rooms, Frank?' I asked, but even then I thought I knew better - it was in the look on his face, serious and pale and downcast.

He shook his head. 'Goin back home. Got a letter from my ma. She says they need a caretaker at one of the big lake resorts we got over our way. I said sure. I'm just wastin my time here.'

'You are not!' I said, a little shocked. 'Christ, Frankie, you're getting a college education!'

'I ain't, though, that's the thing.' The hall was gloomy and choked with shadows; it was raining outside. Still, I think I saw color come flushing into Frank's cheeks. I think he was ashamed. I think that was why he'd arranged to leave in the middle of a weekday, when the dorm was at its emptiest. 'I ain't doin nothin but playin cards. Not very well, either. Also, I'm behind in all my classes.'

'You can't be that far behind! It's only October twenty-fifth!'

Frank nodded. 'I know. But I ain't quick like some. Wasn't quick in high school, either. I got to set my feet and bore in, like with an ice-auger. I ain't been doin it, and if you ain't got a hole in the ice you can't catch any perch. I'm goin, Pete. Gonna quit before they fire me in January.'

He went on, plodding down the first of the three flights with his trunk held in front of him by the handles. His white tee-shirt floated in the gloom; when he passed a window running with rain his crewcut glimmered like gold.

As he reached the second-floor landing and his footfalls began to take on an echoey beat, I rushed to the stairwell and looked down. 'Frankie! Hey, Frank!'