At “home,” they felt no need to fake it. Their housemate Sam was an environmental studies concentrator and an aspiring documentary filmmaker (working on something about how gas drilling in Wyoming was poisoning local aquifers), and this meant he was almost never home. The other housemate was April. April was practically an ecoterrorist. Forget absentmindedly tossing a Chobani container in the garbage and not in the recycling bin (Marla) or trying to slip nonorganic blueberries into the compost (Sussannah) or using paper towels (Sri). April, when she wasn’t yelling at them, was stomping out the door with this or that MassPIRG clean-water petition on her clipboard; her VW Golf was held together by rust and bumper stickers: Save the Whales, Greenpeace, Coexist, and the Don’t Tread on Me flag that the Tea Partiers were now using for their illogical statementing (was there something ironic Sussannah was missing?).
April was also in her thirties (they guessed), a Resumed Undergraduate Education student. During Sussannah’s first year, budding journalist that she was, she had done an article on RUE students and therefore knew the biggest majority were former professional ballet dancers who’d needed those years to dance. There was also an Amish guy who’d decided to become un-Amish (there was some name for doing that, which she couldn’t recall), an Iraq vet who’d become a super-pacifist Buddhist. But it was a tiny, self-selecting program and you had to have a compelling reason why you delayed your education. All the RUEs she’d interviewed lived off campus, being kind of beyond the dorm thing, especially the Amish guy who had three kids and also worked at the Job Lot. But what April’s deal was and why as a thirtyish (most of the RUEs were still twentyish) adult she was living in a house with undergrads were questions that no one wanted to ask. The best they’d ever gotten was, “I got into Brown because I have a terminal disease.” Were they supposed to politely laugh? Was this more irony or what?
“April said you came in at 4:53 this morn, Soo-JZAH-nah, you hussy.”
“Yes, I was bedding the Brown Daily Herald,” she said quickly, a bit breathlessly, even though it was true. “Um, that’s accurate but übercreepy—does April sit at the door with a little clicker or something?” April was mysterious like Sri, but in an erratic way that felt ominous to Sussannah.
“So you saw Sri at dinner, but then he didn’t come in last night—”
“It’s barely lunchtime,” she said. “I really think he’s okay.” Saying it was so was going to make it so, right? The gears in her head were whirring. There was “missing,” as in temporarily (if not salubriously) self-extracted from the stream of undergraduate life, versus “missing missing”—Amber Alerts and all that. She had to believe Sri was off somewhere writing and didn’t want to be disturbed. Maybe he was even in some weird place in the house, like that roof cupola that was being refurbished and had yellow Danger No Entry tape across the doorway, that would be irresistible to him. “I think that lady at Brown security wanted to kill all of us when she saw Sri come out of the Rock basically okay except for his massive hangover. Can you imagine if we came in again like three days later?”
But then she considered: the first twenty-four hours of a crime with a missing person were the most crucial. What if . . . “Oh, man,” she said, suddenly emotional.
Brent made his empathy-eyes at her, inviting her to step into his ursine arms. She wasn’t going to fall into that trap. She’d been very aware that Brent had had a crush on her from their days in the first-year unit. His dark good looks made him the object of interest to some of the other girls, but not her.
He looked the tiniest bit disappointed. “Hey, isn’t Sri’s playwriting class today?”
“Yes, it’s at four.”
“So you’ve memorized his schedule, like April.”
“Shut up,” she said, hitting his arm. “I just know because . . . Marla has her orgo lab in Arnold at the same time. And you know what? I think today his piece is up in workshop. He won’t miss it.”
“Okay, okay. If he misses that, we’ll know—”
“We’ll know he still wants to be a writer and piss his parents off. No worries, Brent, okay?”
“Okay,” Brent said. But his eyes were dark, watchful. He was worried. It was touching how close those two unlikelies were, the South Asian kid rebelling against his physician parents by taking mostly writing classes that were graded only Satisfactory/No Credit—bye bye, medical school—paired with the goofball “Portagee from Pawtucket,” as Brent Duarte called himself. He’d grown up just a few miles from here, never flown on an airplane, and was one of the smartest people she knew.
She accepted a goodbye hug. Brent was occasionally hooking up with Naran, a girl from Mongolia who nonetheless looked strikingly Korean. He didn’t try to hide it: “She reminds me of you.” Sussannah found this both touching and stupid. With the guileless Brent, the Asian fetish was a lukewarm annoyance, never approaching the level of creepy. But the move to Environmental House had had unexpected benefits: one of the house rules was, Residents shall maintain a strict gender-neutral space at all times, i.e., they were supposed to eliminate housemates as potential sexual partners so as to promote an easeful “sibling-like atmosphere.”
*
They texted Sri their plans to meet at Nice Slice for dinner after his workshop (as if he would ever see such a message) and arranged for Marla to drop by the classroom and pick him up. Sussannah looked forward to fighting over the hot pepper shaker with him, each of them coating their pieces with flakes. “Who’s hotter?” he’d say with a wink.
*