Class

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  She lingered in the deserted hallway for a moment, trying to decide what to do. She hadn’t seen Tom yet—no one had—but she suspected he was still sleeping. A good girlfriend would have brought him a free cup of Starbucks coffee and a plate of toast from the dining hall. A good girlfriend would have spent the day with him writing out flash cards and testing him in Econ so he wouldn’t fail his exam. But she’d already proven that she was not such a good girlfriend.

  The midday sun was high and bright. Through the hall window she could see the black Mercedes, parked neatly by Dexter Security in a spot near the road. What was the trunk full of now? Donuts? Croissants? Cupcakes?

  Four months ago she would have called home to tell on Patrick, but she was not the same person she’d been four months ago. She was not as virtuous or as loyal or as discreet. She was not the good little girl her bad older brother had either teased or ignored. She was not the little sister Patrick had hated so much. She had no idea who she was or what she was becoming, but it was possible that going to see Patrick in jail would help move things along. Never mind Byron. She’d learned enough about Romance over the course of the semester to wing the exam.

  Jail was a concrete addition to the Home police station, a low rectangular building with a wheelchair ramp leading up to the entrance. A steady stream of townspeople marched up the ramp and in and out of the door as if it were the post office. What reason did people have to visit the police station, Shipley wondered, unless they were visiting someone in jail?

  “Parking tickets to your right,” the uniformed woman behind the front desk told her.

  “No, it’s not that,” Shipley faltered. “I’m here to see someone. In your jail?”

  “I need your name, relationship to the detainee, and your ID, please,” the woman said.

  After she’d waited a few minutes, a male officer led her through the station house to the jail. There were no bars. The only indication of security at all was that once they’d gone through the door to the jail, the officer locked it behind them.

  “You have a visitor,” the officer said, knocking on another door in a narrow hallway before opening it with a key. “You okay with him in there?” he asked Shipley.

  Now Shipley wished she hadn’t come. It would be fine if someone else were there to do the introductions and most of the talking. But she was on her own.

  “I guess,” she told the officer reluctantly. “But can you leave the door open?” The idea of being trapped in there with Patrick was completely terrifying. What would they say to each other?

  “That’s fine,” the officer said, opening the door all the way. “That’s standard procedure.” He stepped away from the door and drew up a folding chair in the hallway. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  Patrick sat on a cot, holding a book, his blond hair and beard long and wild. He wore the wool sweater she’d bought him at the Darien Sports Shop, a pair of maroon Dexter sweatpants, and work boots without laces. His ever-present jacket had been removed.

  “Hi,” Shipley said. “Nice sweater.”

  Patrick looked down at the sweater and then back at his sister. “Thanks.”

  “Nice sweatpants too—anyone would think you were still a student.”

  Shipley’s cockiness unnerved him. “Are you going to bail me out?”

  She pressed her back against the wall. The only place to sit down was the bed, and Patrick was already sitting on it.

  “That depends,” she said, although she wasn’t sure what it depended on. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Patrick had spoken face-to-face. “Did you know Mom and Dad split up? Did you know Dad has a place in Hawaii? He’s taking me there, after exams. Oh, and that big tent thing on campus caught fire. The yurt. It’s totally wild.” She put her hands on her hips. “What have you been doing all this time anyway? Where have you been?”

  Patrick shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve been around.”

  He wasn’t surprised about their parents. They’d always argued a lot. And he wasn’t surprised about the tent either. He’d made a pretty good fire.

  “So are you going to bail me out?” he repeated. He needed to see how that girl was doing. He didn’t really care, he just needed to know.

  Shipley glanced around the room. Now that she’d been in there for a few minutes it felt more like a cell. There was no window, and nothing in it except a cot, a toilet, and a sink. “What are you reading?” she asked.

  Patrick turned the book over in his hands. “It’s the Bible,” he said. “I was reading something else, but it got ruined. And you know, the Bible isn’t so bad.”

  Shipley waited for him to launch into some kind of sanctimonious religious lecture. Patrick had been known to delve into certain belief systems, like paganism or mysticism, becoming very devout and intolerant of anyone who didn’t share the same beliefs, until he found something new to believe in. And there was always a book. The Bible was almost too obvious though. With his long hair and unkempt beard he already looked a lot like Jesus.

  “Maybe I should read it sometime,” she said, although she had no intention of doing so. They’d taken her bag at the front desk; otherwise she’d have lit a cigarette. “So what will you do when you get out of here?” she asked. “I mean, you can’t keep on stealing the car.”

  Patrick shook his head. “I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it. Besides, that car’s mine too.”

  Shipley rolled her eyes. She really wished she had a cigarette.

  “I have to see someone,” Patrick told her. “Can you please get me out of here so I can do that, please?”

  Shipley had never heard him speak in this way, like he actually cared about something. “Fine,” she said. “You know I have exams tomorrow?” She poked her head out the door and beckoned the waiting officer. “What do I have to do to get him out?”

  Because Shipley had not pressed charges, and there was no evidence that Patrick had done anything else illegal, all she had to do was get a cash advance on her credit card and post bail.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she said as she signed the receipt.

  The same male officer led Patrick out to the reception area and handed him over to her, like a gift she didn’t want. Again she thought of calling their parents, but it was more interesting not to. She would have enough of them at Christmastime.

  “Okay, so who is this person you so desperately need to see?” she asked once they were outside.

  It would have helped if Patrick knew the girl’s name.

  “Only family,” the hospital receptionist told them.

  “But I brought her here,” Patrick protested. “She was wearing a fur coat and she was bleeding. Are you saying she’s alive?”

  Shipley wondered if maybe she should have called her dad after all.

  The receptionist squinted at a piece of paper on her desk. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Patrick.”

  She squinted at the paper again. “Do you by any chance go by Pink Patrick?”

  Shipley walked over to a chair. “I’ll just wait here while you visit.” She sat down and picked up the November issue of Time magazine with Bill Clinton on the cover.

  “She’s been waiting for you,” the receptionist told Patrick. “It’s upstairs. Tragedy Gatz. Room 209. Just got moved out of surgery.”

  Shipley dropped the magazine on the floor. Patrick was already walking toward the elevator. “Wait!” she called, rushing over to join him. “Wait for me!”

  The receptionist scowled at her, but then the elevator arrived and there was nothing she could do about it. Shipley’s heart beat loud and fast. Forte. Fortissimo.

  The door to the room was open. Adam and two people who must have been his parents stood at the head of the bed where Adam’s sister lay with a blistered face and bandaged hands. An IV drip was taped to her arm.

  “You guys here for the ass transplant?” Tragedy joked hoarsely when she saw them. “You got the right room.”

  The guy who’d arrived
with Shipley blinked his icy blue eyes. He reminded Adam of someone, but he couldn’t quite think of who.

  Patrick wasn’t expecting an audience. And now that he knew the girl was alive, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to see her. “I can come back later,” he said, squeezing the kitten inside his pocket. Amazingly, the kitten had slept, curled deep inside his parka, the entire time he’d been in jail.

  The color had returned to Ellen’s cheeks. “You must be the famous Pink Patrick!” she crowed. “Our hero!” She raised her eyebrows at Shipley. “And who are you?”

  Adam cleared his throat. “Mom, this is Shipley. The girl I was telling you about.”

  Ellen pursed her lips together, making it clear that she wasn’t too keen on whatever she’d heard. “Let’s leave Pinkie and Trag alone for a bit,” she said, herding the rest of them out of the room. “That boy saved her life.”

  Shipley followed them out into the hall and closed the door behind her, still trying to reconcile the fact that Patrick was a hero.

  “You wouldn’t believe the morning I’ve had,” she told Adam.

  “A hunter shot her,” Adam said. “She went for a walk last night in Mom’s fur coat and got lost in the snow. And then a hunter shot her.”

  “And if she’d died, I would have had to kill you too,” Eli declared. “The both of you.”

  “The weather was so bad, the guy probably didn’t even know he’d hit something,” Adam went on, ignoring his father. “Anyway, it was an accident.”

  “But she’s okay,” Shipley insisted, glancing at Adam for assistance. His parents weren’t exactly friendly.

  Adam frowned. “That depends on your definition of okay.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Just so you know, Adam is grounded,” Ellen interjected. “Until he’s about forty-five. Although I don’t suppose it makes any difference.”

  Shipley laughed. Then she stopped laughing. No one else was laughing.

  Adam wanted to touch her, to kiss her, to tell her it was all right, but he’d already resolved something in his mind that had nothing to do with touching her or kissing her or talking to her ever again.

  Ellen and Eli went over to the coffee station and poured themselves two Styrofoam cups of coffee and creamer.

  Shipley leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She needed a nap.

  “My brother was always such a fuckup,” she said to no one in particular.

  Patrick had developed a hatred of hospitals when he was just a boy. He’d suffered from chronic ear infections and post-nasal drip, and when he turned six, the pediatrician ordained that his tonsils and adenoids needed to be removed.

  His parents had lied to him. “You’ll be asleep for the whole thing, and when you wake up you’ll get ice cream,” they said. But when he woke up, his head felt like an octopus whose eight legs had been eaten off by a shark. He didn’t want any ice cream, and he refused to speak to his parents. It was about that time that he stopped taking off his jacket.

  Shipley was only a baby then, sunny and silly. She sat on the floor, making puddles with his ice cream, while he watched back-to-back episodes of The Twilight Zone. He’d thought meeting up with her today would be a turning point of some kind, that he’d become something more than just the sketchy subject of a short poem. But he could see now that that would have been too easy. Turning points were hard to come by.

  The room was full of beeping machinery. There were flowers on the nightstand and a TV was bolted to the wall. It wasn’t anything like jail, although it sort of smelled the same.

  “I brought you something.” Patrick removed the kitten from his pocket and put it down on the bed. The kitten crawled onto Tragedy’s chest and lay down.

  She stroked its soft fur with her bandaged hands. “So, I’m still here, thanks to you.” She glanced up at Patrick and then winced. “I don’t feel so good though. Don’t be offended if I conk out.”

  Patrick nodded. “I was in jail,” he told her, trying to explain why he hadn’t arrived sooner. “Not because of you. For something else.”

  Tragedy closed her eyes. “That’s okay.”

  Out in the hall, Adam took a step toward Shipley and then stopped. “Look,” he murmured. “I have two exams tomorrow and two on Wednesday, and then I’m done.” His gaze met hers. “I’m transferring.”

  “What?” Shipley sucked in her breath. In her mind she’d already played out two separate scenarios. In the first, Tom challenged Adam to a bloody duel, with swords, and Tom won. In the second, she poisoned Tom with arsenic and then she and Adam ran off to Hawaii together. “Transferring where?”

  “East Anglia. It’s in England. Dexter has a sort of brother-sister exchange with them, so I was able to transfer my scholarship. I wasn’t going to go, but now I think it’s for the best. My parents are pretty mad at me.”

  “It’s for the best,” Shipley repeated. She turned around to glance at Adam’s parents, hugging each other by the coffeemaker. She’d wanted to meet them and make friends, but they didn’t want to know her. Someone had to take the blame for what had happened and she was that someone. She was bad news.

  Adam touched her arm and she turned around. Before he could say anything, Shipley grabbed his head and pressed her lips against his. He’d meant to give her a quick, sweet good-bye embrace, but something about rescuing her brother from jail and visiting a half-dead girl in the hospital had given Shipley a taste for the dramatic. It wasn’t the fridge-slamming kiss from Professor Rosen’s kitchen, but it was close.

  “Adam?” Ellen interrupted from behind them. “We’re going to head home in a little bit. Just as soon as Trag’s friend comes out. We’re going to make him some lunch and pick up some things for your sister. You coming?”

  Adam grinned into Shipley’s kissing mouth. He wasn’t going to be the one to stop this. He could kiss her forever. Finally Shipley took a step back and smiled up at him. “Now you have something to remember me by.”

  Adam shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’ll remember you,” he promised.

  “Nice meeting you,” Shipley called to Adam’s parents, but they pretended not to hear. It was pretty obvious she wasn’t invited to lunch, and Patrick was probably better off with the Gatzes than with her. “I guess I should go and study.”

  Adam closed his eyes and opened them again. She was still there, although she had moved down the hall to the elevator. It arrived with a ping and the door slid open. Shipley lifted her hand to wave good-bye and stepped in.

  Tragedy was too tired to talk. The kitten bathed itself in the crook of her arm, its small pink tongue dampening and flattening its black fur with impressive persistence. Patrick switched on the TV, but it was so loud and obnoxious he switched it off again. He opened the nightstand drawer and found another bible. The cover was bright blue with gold lettering and the line “King James Version” at the bottom. The one from jail just said “The Holy Bible” in white on a black background. He traded that one for the King James and closed the drawer.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go,” he said. “I’m glad you’re alive,” he added without a hint of emotion.

  Tragedy turned her head. “Doctor said I probably won’t be able to have kids now,” she told him. “Which sucks like a motherfucker.”

  Patrick smiled at her turn of phrase. “That’s harsh.”

  She closed her eyes. “Don’t think you’re going anywhere either. I told my parents about you. They’re taking you back to our house to eat good food and sleep in a nice warm bed. So suck it up, jackass.”

  Patrick wasn’t so sure about that. He didn’t know the Gatzes, and usually people didn’t want him around. The worst thing about the yurt burning down was that he’d have no place to sleep, but he could always go back to his old winter haunts—a smashed-up windowless Winnebago on the banks of the Messalonskee Stream, an old shed next to a Busch beer warehouse, a truck stop in Lewiston, a homeless shelter in Augusta, and maybe after the students went home for the holidays,
the overheated kitchen in the basement of Root.

  “I’ll see you,” he said.

  He opened the door and closed it quietly behind him. The Gatzes were waiting for him, all smiles and bear hugs.

  “Yeah, see you, Pinkie.” Tragedy yawned and fell asleep.

  23

  Sleep and wakefulness are active states controlled by specific groups of brain structures. The body does its repair work during sleep, restoring energy supplies and muscle tissue. If you happen to be recovering from an ecstasy and ether bender, there’s lots of repair work to be done.

  Tom had passed out facedown on his bed, in his clothes, just before nine o’clock on Saturday night. It was now four o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Deep within his cerebral cortex he detected a rhythmic knocking sound that was too loud and too fast to be the beating of his own heart. His toes twitched. He flexed his ankles. Then he rolled over and opened his eyes. Sun streamed in through the windows. The air smelled like burnt toast.

  “Tom?” Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. “Tom?”

  He lay on his back, blinking up at the ceiling. His lips felt like they’d been caulked shut. His nasal passages felt like they’d been worked with a plumber’s snake.

  Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. “Tom?”

  What day was it? he wondered. He remembered the play, which had gone well, he thought. His parents were there, or maybe that part had been a dream. They’d taken him and Shipley out to dinner to that fishy place on the river. He’d eaten lobster. He’d worn a bib. Right now his stomach felt hollow and sour. Maybe he was allergic to lobster.

  Knock, knock, knock, knock. “Tom? Are you in there? I’m going to come in now. The door’s not locked.”

  Professor Rosen opened the door and stepped into the room, looking like she’d just gotten back from cross-country skiing. Her gray wool kneesocks were pulled up over the legs of her brown wide-wale corduroy pants. Her red Gore-Tex jacket was tied around her waist, and she was still wearing her sunglasses and a purple ski hat. She took a moment to scrutinize the scattered paint tubes and brushes, the drying canvasses, the paint-spattered floor, Nick’s upturned bed, and Tom’s prone form.