She stuck her tongue out before disappearing down the hall, leaving the door cracked behind her. Maybe she hadn’t grown up too much yet.
I lay down again to finish Girard, but before long a few uncomfortably evocative words slipped in through the mental barrier I’d built up to keep Richard out: This mimesis of conflict means more solidarity among those who can fight the same enemy together and who promise one another to do so. Nothing unites men like a common enemy. On the next page Casca’s name stopped me as suddenly as if it had been my own, and I snapped the book shut. Was Richard our enemy, then? It felt like a gross exaggeration, but what else could we call him? I strummed my thumb against the pages, marveling that we’d needed so little convincing to acquiesce to Alexander’s Nothing. A few days removed from the moment, my horror was stale and cold, but I asked myself again what made me do it. Was it something so defensible as fear, or was it petty retribution, envy, opportunism? I fingered the edge of my bookmark. A number had been scribbled on the back in impetuous red ink. At the airport after the memorial service, I’d carried one of Meredith’s bags to security, and when I handed it off to her (safely out of earshot of James and Alexander), she suggested I come and see her in New York before heading back to school. Richard was gone. What was there to stop me?
Guilt itched like a rash on my skin. It flared up whenever I brushed against Richard in my mind and faded to a dull discomfort when I could make myself forget him, for an hour or two. Worse than the guilt was the uncertainty. I’m scared, Filippa had told me, of what happens now. As I lay there in the past in my high school bedroom, the future had never seemed so murky. I thought about it in terms of dramatic structure, because I didn’t know any other way to think. Richard’s death felt less like a dénouement than a second-act peripeteia, the catalytic event that set everything else in motion. As Wren had said, the show wasn’t over. It was the unknown ending that terrified me.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyeballs. The exhaustion that had crept into my bones at Hallsworth House clung to me, the lassitude left when a high fever breaks. Soon I was asleep on top of the blankets, wading through a dream in which I and the other fourth-years—just the six of us—stood hip-deep in a misty, tree-studded swamp, saying all at the same time, over and over, “He is drown’d in the brook; look but in, and you shall see him.”
An hour or so later, I twitched awake. The bars of sky visible between the blinds on my window were pitch-black and starless. I propped myself up on my elbows, wondering what had woken me. A dull thud from somewhere downstairs made me sit up straighter, listening. Unsure if I’d really heard anything at all, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and pulled the door open. My eyes adjusted slowly to the semidarkness as I crept down the hall, but I had had plenty of practice sneaking around the house after nightfall and wasn’t likely to stumble. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I paused, ears pricked, one hand on the banister. Something moved on the porch, too big to be a neighborhood cat or a raccoon. Another thud. Someone was knocking.
I crept across the foyer and peered cautiously out through the sidelight. Surprise pounced on me and I fumbled to unlock the door.
“James!”
He stood on the porch with a duffel bag by his feet, his breath a stream of white in the frigid night air. “I didn’t know if you’d be up,” he said, as if he were merely late for a meeting we’d arranged and not completely unexpected.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, looking at him a little blearily, unsure if I might still be dreaming.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should’ve called.”
“No, it’s fine—come in, it’s cold.” I waved him over the threshold, and he came in quickly, grabbing his bag off the porch. I closed the door behind him and locked it again.
“Is everyone asleep?” he asked, voice dropping to a whisper.
“Yeah. Come up, we can talk in my room.”
He trailed behind me up the stairs and down the hall, glancing at pictures on the walls, knickknacks piled on side tables. He’d never been in my house and I was self-conscious, embarrassed by it. I was painfully aware of the fact that we didn’t have enough books.
My own room was less overtly deficient—over the years I’d insulated myself from the rest of the house (the rest of the neighborhood, the rest of Ohio) with layers of ink and paper and poetry, like a squirrel lining a nest. James followed me in and stood looking around with obvious curiosity as I shut the door. The room seemed, for the first time, small.
“Here, let me take that.” I reached for his bag and set it in the narrow alley between the bed and the wall.
“I like your room,” he said. “It looks lived-in.”
James’s bedroom in California looked like a set pulled from a home-decorating magazine for wealthy librarians.
“It’s not much.” I sat on the foot of the bed and watched him absorb his surroundings. He seemed out of place, but not in an entirely unpleasant way—like a student who had wandered into the wrong classroom and found the new subject intensely interesting. At the same time, I couldn’t ignore how worn-out he looked. His shoulders drooped low, his arms hanging lifelessly at his sides. A messy map of creases showed on his sweater, as if he had slept in it. He hadn’t shaved, and the faint shadow of stubble on his jaw was jarringly unfamiliar.
“It’s perfect,” he said.