In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. Was it? I had no idea what Langdon did with his spare time. It wasn’t my business, and I really didn’t care.

  “I don’t think so.” She licked her lips and I had to avert my eyes. “I’ve heard the rumor more than once.”

  “Oh, well, that proves it.”

  “Time to face it,” she said. “Your crush is a queer.”

  Something hot and nasty pulsed inside me.

  She’d kissed me once. We were both hammered, at a party in the common room at one of the three fraternity houses that sat on the edge of the school property. We were dancing on the makeshift dance floor framed by old, stained couches. The music was some kind of warped electronica. There were strobe lights and a disco ball twirled overhead, casting fragments of light. I was on the wrong side of the line, where being drunk is just about to not be fun anymore. I was watching her, the way her body turned lithe and graceful. And she saw me looking. We were drawn together, a line of energy between us taut and growing shorter, pulling us nearer and nearer. I was powerless to move away, which under other circumstances I surely would have done.

  “Come here,” she whispered in my ear, boozy and sexy. Our bodies were touching, hand to hand, thigh to thigh. Then she put her fingers in my hair. “I want to show you something.”

  She led me up the stairs, and the room around us wobbled and warped. The music was so loud, a throbbing presence pulsating through the thin walls. I could feel it in the floor beneath my feet. I was dizzy, the stairs tilting. (I would later be so ill that to this day I can’t even say the words Fuzzy Navel without feeling a rise of bile in my throat.)

  “Where are we going?” I asked. But I didn’t even know if she heard me.

  She didn’t say anything, just led me up the staircase to the darkened hall. The second level was for lovers—on the chaise, on the floor, on the bed in a room where the door stood open. It was a little quieter here, but my heart started thundering.

  Virginity was just one of my secret shames. I’d never been touched in that way by another person. I’d never even been kissed. All around us couples were groping and thrusting in the dim smoky air, awakening a host of unpleasant, uncomfortable feelings in me. I started pulling her back toward the stairs.

  “Beck,” I said, feeling the first wave of nausea hit. “I want to go. I have to go.”

  But she kept tugging at me, until we were in a room by ourselves. She pushed me against a wall, and a framed picture tumbled from the cheap particleboard dresser beside us. She touched my hair, my face, moved in and sucked lightly on my earlobe. My whole body froze as I started to tremble with desire, terror, and shame.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay to feel good.”

  And she did feel good. Her lips were hot and soft as she pressed her mouth to mine, tasting of whiskey and cigarettes. I stood rigid, unmoving, even as she put her hand inside my shirt. She ran her hand over my belly, and up to my chest. Here, she paused and looked at me, a deep, knowing, penetrating gaze. I almost reached for her, pulled her to me. I wanted to. I wanted her. Bad.

  But then I was on my knees puking up more fluid than I knew my body could hold. And it never ended. We spent the next hour in the bathroom, where I heaved and heaved into the toilet, while she sat beside me, rubbing my back until we both passed out.

  We woke up the next morning, her hanging over the rim of the tub, me with my face pressed against the cool tile floor. We opened our eyes at the same moment, and if we hadn’t been so poisoned by alcohol, so sick, so muddled by drink and fatigue and what had passed between us, we might have laughed. We were ridiculous. When I looked in the mirror, the right side of my face held the small, square impressions of the tile floor.

  We stumbled home in the cold, milky-gray light of morning and slept for the rest of the day. We never, ever spoke of that night again. She’d gone on to suck and fuck girls and boys all over campus, while I remained as chaste as a nun. But there was an undeniable tension, a wondering, a building resentment. It was a current that had threaded its way through our friendship; it was part of who we were together.

  After that night, there was suddenly constant fighting in my relationship with Beck. Spats could spring up over anything—maybe she took one of the million black button-down shirts I had. (That was my uniform—jeans, a button shirt, a pair of chunky shoes, some kind of black coat in winter.) Or she’d steal my class notes and then get mad at me if she didn’t do well on a quiz. She’d say my music was keeping her up. It could be anything that got us going at it. But it wasn’t any of those things.

  “Why don’t you two just fuck and get it over with,” our other suite mate, Ainsley, complained the last time we argued over who had done the dishes last.

  We both stopped mid-bitch and looked at her, then at each other. Then we each marched off for our separate rooms. Our doors slammed in unison. I pressed myself against the wall, my heart doing the dance of shame I knew so well. I could smell the whiskey and cigarette smoke on her breath the night she kissed me.

  My anger at her in the library had me thinking about all of these things. Suddenly I couldn’t stand to be near her another second. I hated that smug look she had on her face, as though she had discovered things about me, as though she knew me. Which she didn’t. Not at all.

  I slammed my book shut so hard that a girl from the next table looked over at us. I started stuffing things into my bag—my iPad, my journal, my textbooks. I clutched my little pen case covered with smiling matryoshka dolls. The nesting doll, a self inside a self inside a self, my own personal symbolism.

  “Really?” she said, pulling an annoyed grimace. But I could see she felt bad. She knew she’d pushed me too far. In fact, she’d been pushing and pushing and pushing me all year in little ways like this. And I was finished with it. I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked out.

  “Grow up,” she called after me, causing everybody in the library to look at her ( just like she liked it). But I was already walking out the door.

  Around 2 A.M., there was a soft knock at my door. It roused me immediately from sleep, but I lay there for a minute listening. My first thought was that it was Beck, come to apologize. But no, that was impossible. Beck was not hardwired to apologize. She clung to her own rightness. Anyway, maybe I was the one who needed to apologize to her. And I wasn’t hardwired for that any more than she.

  Another knock, then: “It’s me, Ainsley.”

  I got up and walked over to the door, which I had locked upon returning home, and opened it. She stood there shivering in an oversize sweatshirt and leggings, her hair a tumble of curls pulled up high on her head.

  “Beck didn’t come home.”

  “So,” I said. I moved past her and sat on the plush couch in the common room. She followed and sat beside me. I handed her the blanket that hung over the arm, and she wrapped it around herself. The old dormitory buildings, built from stone, were freezing in the winter, almost impossible to heat adequately, as though the walls soaked up all the warmth and kept it for themselves. We all walked around in robes and big slippers, wrapped in blankets in the cooler months.

  “So,” said Ainsley, “she should be home by now. The library closed at midnight. Weren’t you there with her?”

  “I was,” I said. “But I left first.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked. “She could be in someone’s room somewhere. You know Beck.”

  She stared off out the window, where the wind was tossing the branches of the tall, bare oak.

  “You know,” she said.

  Her hazel eyes were growing wide. I knew what she was thinking about. Two years ago when we were sophomores, a girl, a friend of ours, disappeared from the campus. Elizabeth Barnett left a party we’d all been attending, but none of us had seen her leave. She’d had a fight with her boyfriend and left in tears, according to someone who’d seen her and let her stumble off into the night drunk and hysterical.

  Befor
e her disappearance, we had all thought of the campus as an idyll of safety. Nothing bad had ever happened here, and it seemed as if nothing ever could. With its rolling grounds and close-knit buildings, its well-lit paths and roaming security guards, we strolled about at all hours, in all conditions, without a worry in our heads. Some people said the woods were haunted, but we all knew that was just a ghost story we told ourselves, something that was cool and entertaining rather than frightening.

  It was days of pandemonium, the campus crawling with police, Elizabeth’s parents running a command center from the gym. All of us stunned and crying, huddling, participating in searches through those haunted woods, gathering together at night to comfort each other. Theories and rumors abounded, and accusations were thick in the air. Elizabeth’s boyfriend was questioned, but not arrested. It was revealed that Elizabeth’s swim coach had been fired from his previous university job for having an inappropriate relationship with one of his students. He was suspended, questioned seriously by police, and by day four he was considered the prime suspect.

  On day seven, Elizabeth’s body was found. She’d fallen down a flight of concrete stairs, one of those staircases on the outside of a building that led down into a cellar. It was a building on the far side of campus that was used for storage—desks, file cabinets, computers—with a workshop in the basement where the janitorial staff made repairs. What had she been doing there, far from any place she would need to be? She’d have had to walk a long winding path through the woods, away from the main campus buildings. We all knew she wouldn’t have done that without a reason.

  She’d broken her neck in the fall. It was unclear how long she’d lived while she lay there, how much she had suffered. The incident was suspicious, but there was no physical evidence to link anyone else to the scene. We were all shattered in ways big and small, and a pall was cast over the rest of our year. It was a small college, and Elizabeth was missed. And we were all afraid. Had it been an accident or foul play? No one was ever sure.

  I could see it all on Ainsley’s face; she’d taken it hard. And last year, we’d started calling her “Captain Safety.” She was always reminding us to not walk home alone, to call if we were going to be very late or spend the night away from the room. And last year, we’d been good about it. But memories fade, and that fear we all felt grew dull and distant. We all wanted to believe that we were safe, and so we let ourselves feel that way again.

  “I thought we weren’t going to let each other walk home alone,” she said. She wasn’t one to be sullen or accusatory. She just sounded disappointed in me.

  “I know,” I said. “But …”

  I didn’t want to tell her that Beck and I had had a fight. I just didn’t want to get into it with her. “I wasn’t feeling well,” I said instead. “And she wanted to stay and study.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. She reached out a hand and put it to my forehead. Beck and I were selfish and lazy. Ainsley was the nurturer, the mother among us. We counted on that from her, took her for granted at times. But we loved her for it, too. “You feel warm.”

  But it was just that her hands were icy cold. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was just feeling super tired.”

  Ainsley nodded slowly and looked back toward the door, as if she expected Beck to come charging through. Beck always entered the room like a gladiator, swinging the door open and tossing her bag to the floor, announcing that she was Exhausted! or Starving! or Pissed off ! about whatever.

  “She’ll be home by breakfast at the latest, I’m sure. Get some rest,” I told Ainsley. And she nodded uncertainly, shuffled off to her bedroom.

  But the next morning when I left for class, I peeked into Beck’s room and her bed hadn’t been slept in. I felt a rush of guilt and regret, but I quickly quashed it. Beck had picked a fight, and I was only guilty of rising to the bait.

  Over our afternoon chess game, I caught Luke staring at me. When I looked up at him, he didn’t avert his eyes.

  “You’re getting better,” he said.

  I was getting better—because I’d been studying chess on the Internet. The kid was destroying me day after day. And even though I bore it with a smile, it was grating on me—and not a little. He was eleven. But he was confident, crafty, always five moves ahead. He was aggressive, backed me into corners. Even when I came armed with strategies, he seemed to know what I was going to do before I did it, made the most stunning evasive maneuvers. I mean, he wasn’t just beating me. Game after game, I never even had a chance.

  I’d been studying chess blogs, playing online. I’d even downloaded a book called Practical Chess Exercises. I still couldn’t beat him, but I’d seen him pause a few times and look up at me. It was pathetic, I know. But the urge to compete with him and win was a fire in my belly. Beck’s voice rang in my ears: Grow up.

  “Do you like other games?” Luke asked. The corners of his mouth turned up in a grin that wasn’t quite a smile, not quite a sneer.

  “What kind of games?” I asked.

  “Checkmate,” he said. There was something unpleasant on his face. It took me a second to realize that it was pity. He pitied me, knew that I could never beat him, and was sorry for me that I kept trying.

  “What?” I said, looking down at the board in dismay. “No.”

  He didn’t say anything, just let me examine the pieces until I saw that his knight was threatening my king, and that the placement of his queen and his bishop made escape or evasion impossible.

  “Wow,” I said. There was literally a taste in my mouth, a thick oatmeal of annoyance. “You’re amazing.”

  He gave me that nod he seemed to have perfected, a princely acknowledgment of his own greatness. He’s a genius, his mother had told me. They call it “profoundly gifted” when your IQ score is over a hundred and eighty. And his levels are right around there.

  It irked me because I, too, prided myself on my superior intelligence, had been classified as profoundly gifted in my youth. But he seemed smarter, had better focus, was more creative or something. But it was childish for me to care, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a competition. Why did it feel like one?

  But his intellect works against him because of his other challenges, Rachel had qualified. He outsmarts the people trying to help him.

  But what was wrong with him exactly? After that first afternoon, our time together had been relatively peaceful and even enjoyable. Of course, it had only been a short time. I didn’t doubt Rachel, and I knew they wouldn’t have taken him into Fieldcrest without good reason. But I hadn’t seen any evidence of behavior problems. He was a little arrogant, kind of obnoxiously sure of himself. There was something deeply unsettling about his cool, adult gaze, his often grown-up word choice and phrasing. I was smart enough to know that his charm was a bit superficial, put on. But there’d been none of the rages Rachel warned me about. If it happens, just sit very still and let him burn himself out. Don’t attempt to subdue him.

  “You didn’t answer me,” he said.

  He was packing up the board. Why bother playing again, really? his aura said. There was even something smug about the way he packed the soapstone pieces into their foam slots, placing them precisely then snapping closed the wooden case.

  “Do I like other games?” I said. “You didn’t answer my question. What kind of games?”

  “Games that you can win,” he said.

  “Nice,” I said. I reached over to give him a playful push on the shoulder. My touch, though very gentle, elicited a wince.

  “What?” I said.

  He pulled down the neck of his striped oxford and I saw that on his shoulder was an enormous bruise, a black-and-purple rose against the snow of his skin. It sent a wave of concern through me.

  “How did that happen?” I asked.

  “I fell down the stairs last night,” he said. But he looked down at his cuticles. And I found myself thinking of that lock on the door. I was silent for a second, waiting for him to go on.

  “My mom put ice
on it,” he said. “But I got in a fight at school today and it got hurt again.”

  There were lots of physical altercations at Fieldcrest. So many troubled kids in such close quarters, and violence was sure to erupt. In fact, it was one of the biggest criticisms of the place leveled by skeptics of Dr. Welsh’s work. The children were violent with each other, manipulated each other, the stronger sometimes preyed upon the weaker. Last year, after an article ran in the New York Times Magazine about the school, some parents had pulled their children from the program. They’d then gone on to form a group lobbying to close the school. All these kids in one place? Aren’t they just learning from each other, forming alliances? one parent railed in an online discussion about the school. Some of these kids, parents complained, are getting worse instead of better.

  My internships there had been brief, just a semester each. But it wasn’t a happy place and I wasn’t sad to leave when they were over. My art therapy class had been an unmitigated failure (Langdon thought differently, but I knew it was bad). My sessions generally devolving into pandemonium with paint being thrown, or someone raging on the floor, or tears shed after cruel words were tossed about. Once, a particularly violent boy tried to stab me in the eye with his brush. Luckily, Langdon had been there to subdue him.

  “So,” said Luke. “Games.”

  “Sure,” I said. He seemed eager to change the subject, so I went along. I was going to bring some of this up with Langdon, ask his advice. “I like other games. Scrabble?”

  “What about scavenger hunts?”

  I thought about this. I wasn’t sure I’d ever participated in a scavenger hunt. I didn’t have that kind of childhood. I didn’t remember games, and family vacations, summer camps, and school field trips. I didn’t spend time with my cousins at the beach. My parents didn’t plan activities and playdates. So none of the places where scavenger hunts might have taken place even existed in my life.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever done one,” I admitted.

  His eyes went wide, and he leaned forward almost halfway across the table. “Never?”