“According to that sign, they have gluten-free pizzas now,” Brent said listlessly. “What the hell is gluten?”
“Calm down, he’s just late,” Sussannah said, toying with the squat hot pepper dispenser.
Brent glanced at his phone, then put it down. Then picked it up again.
“Would you cut it out?”
He put it down. He picked it back up. He bent his head to stare at the screen.
He looked up, mozzarella-pale. “No,” he said. “He didn’t show.”
The two pushed through the hungry dinnertime crowd. They left a wake of surprised students and locals behind, almost upended a stroller in their haste, but didn’t hear all the people yelling, “Hey!” and, “Watch it!” behind them.
*
Sri could disappear like a magician. He could secret himself in his room, writing for hours, and they wouldn’t even know he was home. But his playwriting class would always flush him out. Your work only came up twice a semester, and there’s no way he would miss it, short of—
Sussannah, Marla, and Brent burst into his room, a complete breach of house rules (No house member shall enter the room of another for any reason without the permission of the inhabitant) because they knew he wasn’t going to be there.
On his desk, laid out like a still life: ID, keys, his wallet, some wooden coins that you could use at the campus farmers’ market, a wristband from last week’s Thursday Night Fishco outing, a few dollar bills, his phone.
“Shit,” said Brent, and Sussannah knew what he was thinking: Marla’s first-year roommate (that ill-fated Ophelia named Ethel) had left a similar tableau, a runic pattern that screamed (in retrospect): I now need nothing. For a full twenty-four hours, Brown security had told them not to panic: “Left her ID and wallet behind? Maybe she’s just gone for a jog.” By the time they started looking for her seriously, she’d been dead for a day.
But was Sri a suicide risk? Ethel (what kind of parents name their daughter Ethel?) had been ill-suited to college life from the start. She’d come in all prim and proper, a little gold cross around her neck, giving Marla the fish-eye when she walked around in just her bra, seeming aghast at the candy-colored condoms given out during study break by an older lady who may have been a professor. But then Ethel started disappearing, staying out all night—this was just during orientation week—kept coming in looking like hell, wouldn’t talk to anyone (granted, Marla didn’t try too hard). And then she’d disappear again.
*
“Are you sure he hasn’t just gone off for a jog or something?”
Marla snorted in anger and tried too late to turn it into a cough. Sussannah didn’t dare look at her. Also, was this the same security lady from Friday? Regulation, middle-aged-lady pageboy, those navy-blue uniforms with work pants (universally unflattering to all women, even the young one with the blond ponytail) . . . she couldn’t tell.
“He’s been missing for more than twenty-four hours now,” Marla said.
Sussannah bit her lip. Okay, not quite, but now was not the time to bring that up.
“We can’t violate this student’s privacy, looking into his ID trail unnecessarily,” said the lady. She gave them both the stink-eye. Same lady. On Friday, they’d found Sri, simply enough, by tracing his ID swipes to the Rock. Sussannah had visions of him bound and gagged in the stacks, but he had stumbled out, reeking like a still, just as they arrived there with the Brown rent-a-cops.
“But that might be the easiest thing to do, to eliminate foul play. We’ve already called his parents. And the BDH—” Marla pointed to Sussannah. “She’s one of their top investigative reporters.”
The lady sighed, disappeared into the room marked Chief. She soon returned, wordlessly typed into the computer, her fingers slamming the keys, repeating on several, 0-0-0-0-1-1-1-0-0-0, as if she were playing a ragtime piece on the piano. “Do you have any reason to think your friend’s met with foul play?”
“It’s really impossible to know.” Sussannah found herself tearing up unexpectedly. She didn’t look toward Brent, because she already had a feeling he was watching her face very, very closely.
“Well, here’s his ID trail.” They all craned their heads forward.
“Last night he entered the Sciences Library at 10:15 and left at 10:56.”
Sussannah thought he was going to stay up there and write. But he’d left not long after she had. She found herself blushing.
“That’s it. No meals swiped. So no one’s seen him since you, Miss Park, at dinner at the Sharpe Refectory?”
She nodded.
*
“No,” April said, in her robot monotone. “He hasn’t come by. But you guys might want to do something about those little kids. I keep telling them to leave, but they won’t.”
“Little kids?” said Brent.
“There,” she said impatiently. She pointed to a corner of the living room where there was nothing but an Earth Day 2011 poster and the phone, an actual landline tethered to the wall by its jack.