During the second meeting of the physics class, I’d made the mistake of asking Professor Evans (Hillhouse didn’t call professors who held PhDs “doctors”; the faculty members and administration thought that academic tradition elitist) a question after his lecture. From the other students’ stares and from the professor’s body language, I inferred that asking questions was considered inappropriate in this class. Professor Evans launched into a lengthy discourse on the Higgs boson, a particle my father had explained to me in lucid, elegant detail.
“All particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field, carried by the Higgs boson,” my father had said. “The existence of the Higgs boson has been predicted, but not yet detected. Its existence is necessary to the sixteen particles that make up all matter. In other words, observations of the known suggest the presence of an unknown.” Presence and absence, again, I’d thought.
My father had extensive knowledge of the theoretical framework of particle physics, and he was able to discuss it in precise English—two traits not shared by Professor Evans. As the professor droned on, he began making factual errors as well as syntactical ones, confusing the names of particle accelerators and researchers. At that point I tuned in to his thoughts, and I was astonished to hear how bitter they were. He thought my question was designed to embarrass him, expose his ignorance. And so he talked on, making more and more mistakes.
Most of the other students had stopped listening to him.
I didn’t know what to do. If I pointed out his errors, he’d be even more upset. So I kept quiet, and when the class ended, I was the first to leave the room.
“Hey, Ari?”
I turned around. Jack, our orientation facilitator, was standing by the door. I’d noticed him earlier, sitting in the back of the room.
“I know you’re new and all,” he said. “But the best thing you can do in that class is sleep with your eyes open.”
“I can’t do that.” I folded my arms across my chest.
“Then I’d advise you to drop the course.”
And that’s how I ended up taking Environmental Studies after all.
I joined the recycling team that afternoon. Their operations were based in a low cement-block building near the barn. I much preferred the smell of the barn.
Some crews gathered trash from campus buildings and brought the bags there, where another crew spread the assorted materials over the sorting tables, separating usable items from recyclables from future compost. My first assignment was to be a sorter.
The first time I walked into the room where the sorting took place, two students were scanning trash spread across a table, and near them the boy called Walker was juggling oranges. Everyone wore gloves.
I saw Walker first. When he saw me, he dropped an orange.
Since then I’ve read theories about what attracts people to each other—speculation that they’re drawn by physical and psychological traits that remind them of their parents. I’m not sure how much any of that applies to vampires.
I prefer a simpler explanation: my eyes were drawn to Walker first because he was the most visually appealing person I’d ever seen, and second because he was volatile and enigmatic. His sun-streaked hair; his lean, tan body; his loose-fitting, raggedy clothes—none of the parts of him explained the appeal of the whole.
“Who are you?” His voice had a soft Southern accent.
I let my eyes linger on the table a second before I looked up at him. “My name’s Ari.”
His eyes were a lighter shade of blue than mine. They reminded me of the color of my mother’s new guest room: Indian Ocean blue.
“You going to do any work today, Walker?” One of the other students pushed back the sleeves of his flannel shirt with his gloved hands.
He took a step to the side, then moved away from me, stumbling over nothing that I could see. It was one of the few awkward moves I ever saw him make.
I put on my gloves. Students threw away all kinds of things: photos, books, CDs, clothing, and even old TV sets, as well as genuine garbage. We took out the usable items and put them in a cart. Later they’d be cleaned and placed in the campus Free Store. We sorted out glass, paper, and cans for recycling, and we put food items in a wheelbarrow that would go to the compost pile.
The next time I reported for work, Walker stood at the sorting table next to me. We didn’t talk much as we worked, but we were aware of the proximity of our hands on the table. He smelled fresh, like the woods around campus, in sharp contrast to the trash we were sorting.
He asked me what I was majoring in, and when I asked him the same question, he said, “I’m majoring in magic. My plan is to become a notable eccentric.”
Later that afternoon we both reached for an apple at the same time. The shock of contact felt electric, even through our gloves.
The next day, I went to American Politics for the first time. Walker was there, sitting in the back row. I took the seat next to him. As the lecture grew monotonous, he did surreptitious magic tricks, pulling coins out of his ear and feathers out of his hair.
“Inner sanctum” hardly described the room I shared with Bernadette. People came and went at all hours of the day and late into the night. They came to borrow books and CDs, to bring offerings of food or books or CDs or clothes. (Most of my new clothes had been “distressed” by Bernadette to make them cooler, and now they were much in demand.) Most of our visitors were Hillhouse students, but some were students from other schools or vagabonds who roamed from city to city, campus to campus, all across America. For a self-styled outcast, Bernadette was very popular.
She had a boyfriend, she said, back home in Louisiana. He never called or came to visit, but she showed me his picture: a skinny boy with a shaved head and eyebrow piercings, holding one hand outstretched toward the camera, as if he were asking for something.
From time to time, Walker showed up, and usually he’d ask me if I wanted to study with him. That meant he and I would walk across campus and find a quiet spot in the library. On the way, we talked about where we’d lived before (he was a North Carolina boy, and his accent struck me as sexy), and we talked about where we’d like to travel (both of us wanted to tour Europe; Walker particularly wanted to go to Prague, where his grandfather had been born).
One night Walker played his guitar for me. It was a battered acoustic, but he played well, I thought. That was the first time he told me I was beautiful. The word glimmered silver as it crossed the air between us, and when it reached me, I felt myself begin to glow with the compliment.
Did we study? Not often. We went to classes and completed assignments without thinking much about them. The class work, for me, was far less difficult than the lessons my father had set.
Contra dancing and drum circles were regular events at Hillhouse. So were poetry readings and bonfires. Smoking pot and drinking were popular recreational activities, but Bernadette said they were much more prevalent at the state schools. She didn’t indulge in either. “It’s all too banal,” she said.
From time to time Bernadette tired of the constant activity, slammed the door, and locked it. Then she’d pull out a deck of tarot cards or volunteer to braid my hair.
In her tarot readings, Bernadette always represented me with the Knight of Cups card, because she said its profile resembled mine. In the last reading she gave me, the Knight was covered by the Ten of Swords, which she said signified misfortune, pain, perhaps the death of a loved one. The influence directly ahead of me was the Four of Swords, which she said meant solitude, convalescence, or exile. “It’s not a card of death, even though that’s what it looks like,” she said.
On the card, a knight lay upon a tomb, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “Great,” I said.
I was tempted to dismiss her readings entirely, but I didn’t. I recalled my father talking about Jung’s concept of synchronicity—the opposite of causality. Synchronicity finds patterns and meanings in seeming coincidences, and in the case of the tarot one could argue that the subject’s state of mind or psychic condition is reflected by the choice of cards and their interpretation.
Was I concerned with misfortune, solitude, illness, exile? Of course. These are fears that most vampires and many humans live with every day.
As for the braiding: the light touch of her hands on my hair made me think of my mother, so I tried politely to say no. (I’d called Mãe twice, and each time the conversations had been strained, only reminding us of how much we missed each other. It felt better not to call.)
Some nights Bernadette read aloud her poetry, which was usually about death. Her villanelle about seeing her father in his coffin troubled me, even more because I knew he was alive and apparently healthy.
She was reading aloud a new sonnet. It began “Roses black as onyx crown my grave/And dew like pewter teardrops cannot save/Their youth, or mine—”
At which point my cell phone rang. I bolted from the room to answer it and stood in the corridor to talk.
“Hey, Ari.” It was Autumn’s voice. “Want to go to the mall?”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m not there anymore.”
I told her I was at college, and she said she hadn’t realized I was old enough. She had never heard of Hillhouse.
“It’s a small college in Georgia,” I said. “It’s pretty here.”
“Maybe I’ll come and visit,” she said. “I got my license back, and it looks like I’ll be getting Jesse’s car.”
“He’s giving it up?”
“He’s going into the marines,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“I’m not there anymore,” I said again.
“I thought he’d have called you.” Autumn sounded confused. “I gave him your number.”
“Why is he joining the marines?” I couldn’t picture Jesse wearing a uniform.
Autumn said, “He’s always liked to fight. And it’s a good time for him to get out of town.”
She said the police and the FBI were leaving him alone, but Mysty’s mother had taken to following him around, asking questions. That was something I could picture easily.
“Any news about Mysty?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth.” Autumn coughed, and I wondered if she might still be smoking. “You got a bed for me if I come visit?”
I hesitated to reply. Hillhouse was still new to me, and I didn’t know if Autumn would like it—no, to be honest, I wondered if she’d fit in. Then I felt guilty. With Mysty gone, I was probably the closest thing to a friend she had.
“Better bring a sleeping bag,” I said. “That’s what most people do.”
Chapter Eleven
The night before our field trip left for the Okefenokee Swamp, Walker put on a magic show.
Like most of the Hillhouse community events, the show was staged in the old theater building next to the gym. The theater smelled of cedar and woodsmoke, scents that made the rigid metal chairs more tolerable. Bernadette and I had seats in the second row; we’d arrived early, but the first row was fully occupied.
The boy sitting in front of me turned around—he was Richard, the president of the Social Ecologists Club. (Aside from occasionally circulating pamphlets denouncing liberal politics, the Social Ecologists Club was largely inactive.) He also sat in front of me in American Politics. I’d grown very familiar with the back of his head; his short blond hair lay in tufts that curled tightly against his scalp and threatened to explode if allowed to grow longer.
“Hey, Bernadette,” Richard said. “Why aren’t vampires invited to parties?”
My heart jumped. Did he know about me?
“Shut up, Richard,” Bernadette said, her voice disdainful.