“Lizzie, try to stop crying now and tell me exactly what happened so we can figure out what to do.”
Lizzie tried. She went into the bathroom and blew her nose and splashed her eyes with cold water. Coming out, she said, “If I’d just kept quiet and not reacted to what he said, everything would be okay. I ruined everything.”
“I have no idea what happened or what you’re talking about. You need to start at the beginning. You went to Jack’s apartment and . . .”
After Lizzie recited what she hoped was an accurate record of the events in the right order, Marla thought for several minutes before she spoke. “Forget what happened with Jack for a second. The important part is what your parents did to you, which was just awful. They’d really promised not to?”
“I don’t think they promised, I don’t remember anyone using that word, but I know they told me they wouldn’t write about it.”
“Wow. You need to talk to them, Lizzie. You need to make it clear how much it hurt you, what a betrayal it was.”
Lizzie was aghast. “Are you kidding? I can’t talk to them about what they did. I can’t talk to them about anything. I’ve told you how they are. They’ve never cared about my feelings. My feeling bad wouldn’t interest them in the slightest.”
“If it was my parents and they lived a mile away, I’d go over there right now. I’d wake them up and tell them exactly what they did to me. They need to know that.”
“But, Marla, don’t you see, that’s your parents. They’re normal. They care about you. Mendel and Lydia would just figure out a way to make it seem as though I was the one who was wrong. But I’m not. I know I’m not. They shouldn’t have included me in the article.”
“No,” Marla said slowly. “You’re not wrong. They are. I really wish you could confront them about what happened.”
“It’d be totally useless. It’s done, and I can’t think about it anymore tonight. All I hope now is that Jack was serious when he said that what I did didn’t matter to him. But I know it did.”
That night the voices had the final words. “Know it did, know it did, know it did,” they sang. It was the last thing Lizzie heard before she fell asleep.
*?Jack Leaves for Home?*
The night before Jack left, they walked to Island Park and sat on a bench and watched the sky turn a deep dark blue, become nearly indistinguishable from black, and then turn really black. Stars slowly became visible, and Lizzie began quoting one of their favorite Housman poems:
Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.
Jack let her finish before he spoke.
“Nice.”
“Nice? I don’t think it’s nice at all. It’s scary, that nothing really changes, no matter what happens. ‘It rains into the sea, and still the sea is salt.’ That means that change is impossible—terrifying.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he began, clearly not paying much attention to what she’d said. “Listen, Lizzie, let’s head back. I’m leaving really early in the morning and haven’t packed or anything. I need to box up my stuff and put it in the storage locker because I’ve sublet my apartment for the summer.”
“Can I help?”
“No, I think it’ll go faster if I do it myself. I need to figure out what I should take with me.”
They walked back to the dorm in the dark, their arms around each other’s waist. At the door they kissed, most unsatisfactorily from Lizzie’s point of view. She didn’t want to let him go. She didn’t want to let go of him. Jack gently untangled himself from her and said, “I’ll see you at the end of August.”
“Will you write me lots and lots of letters?”
“Sure,” he said, giving her one last kiss.
“Don’t go,” Lizzie whispered to herself, trying not to cry as she watched him leave. “Please, please don’t go.”
Marla was sitting on the floor of the common room, paging through some art books; James was playing solitaire. They both looked up when Lizzie came in. “Gone?” Marla asked sympathetically. Lizzie nodded. “It’s only three months till he’s back,” she reminded Lizzie. Lizzie nodded again, not trusting herself to speak.
James said, in a declaiming sort of tone, “‘And when it was all over, Arthur said, Well, it’s all over.’”
Marla looked as though she were going to throw one of those heavy art history books at her boyfriend. “James, you idiot, what’s wrong with you? That’s a terrible thing to say to Lizzie. Besides, it’s not all over, it’s just for the summer.”
Lizzie knew that as much as Marla and James loved her, they weren’t necessarily huge fans of Jack’s. They tolerated him for Lizzie’s sake, but Lizzie could always hear an undertone of disapproval in their voices when they talked about him.
James shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed appropriate.”
“Well, it’s not. It’s rude and hurtful.”
“It’s okay,” Lizzie managed to say. “This part of it is over, so it does fit in a way.”
The days went by slowly. She and Marla moved to an apartment. Summer-school classes wouldn’t begin for another three weeks. Lizzie worked extra hours at the library shelving books, all of which looked frighteningly uninteresting. Nothing she did managed to keep her from brooding over Jack’s absence from her life. It was a lousy time.
*?The Fullback?*
Dustin Devins, the fullback, was also the kick-return specialist; he ran back five (five!) kickoffs for touchdowns in one game, an achievement that no one before or since had ever come close to duplicating. (When she was bored, Lizzie periodically checked that his record was intact. Last time she looked it was.) Dusty read compulsively, and often quoted Schopenhauer and Heisenberg to the rest of the team, who listened (according to Maverick) in mystification. Everyone thought he’d go to Harvard, but he didn’t. He got a free and full ride to Earlham, in Indiana, where he became a Quaker, majored in sociology, and wrote forcefully in alternative newspapers about the intertwining of football and violence, to the great detriment of football. He’d grown to hate the game.
*?Dr. Sleep?*
That summer—the summer after Lizzie’s freshman year, the summer Jack went home but was supposed to come back to Ann Arbor in the fall to start his PhD program—was the beginning of Lizzie’s antagonistic relationship with sleep.