S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller (16 page)

“That’s what you do, Cody.” Now bored with him, she put down the gun and limp/loped back to her own desk in a separate workroom with a large glass window centered on him. She pulled off one clip earring and picked up the telephone.

The two-story atrium lobby peered into the expansive—and empty—Reading Room across from the front desk. Upstairs, lining the mezzanine, stood dozens of bookshelves that hinted at the hundreds of stacks that lay beyond. Search monitors were stationed throughout. The library was wood-paneled, oil-portraited, Persian-rugged, and S’wanee-esque.

Canopied high across the atrium was a near-invisible net from which hung thousands of multicolored origami birds, swinging independently. It was a simple and stunning art project that, like so much of the school, was weird and beautiful and hypnotic. On the front desk sat a box of rainbow-colored squares of construction paper, with step-by-step folding instructions. The art project, titled “The Fallen Flock,” was an interactive memorial for US soldiers killed in the recent wars.

Cody sat on his stool and opened his laptop next to his iPad. Up on the mezzanine, several professors roamed the stacks and pulled out books and occasionally peeked down on him. Other than the hum of the air-conditioning, the place was silent. He pivoted around to the Widow Senex, chatting and laughing on the phone beyond the window. She caught him looking at her and dropped her smile and came loping to her door.

“You can study,” she warbled toward his general vicinity. “You can do your homework and study.” She spun her finger at him, and he pivoted back. Through the closed door, he could hear her muffled gargle-laughs on the phone. At least somebody made her smile.

On page two of his chosen paper on “The Purloined Letter”—the others were “snoozy,” as Banjo would say—the front door creaked, and a gaggle of students wandered in tentatively, as if lost. Several glanced over at him before beelining for the Reading Room. They sat at the tables and quickly got down to work. Moments later, more flooded in through the creaking door and fanned out across the library, upstairs and down. Within ten minutes, the library was bustling with newly conscientious studiers. Cody wondered if it had started raining outside.

“What does it take to get service around here?” purred a familiar voice, and Cody looked up to find Beth strumming her clear nails on the desk.

“What do you need?” he shot back, swallowing a tinge of embarrassment that his desk job had outed him as scholarship. He sensed that Beth didn’t judge.

“God, where to begin?” she mused. “A new roommate, for one. I mean, she’s sweet when she’s awake. But Geezus, I didn’t sleep a wink last night. Does yours snore, too?” Instant good news: roommate + snoring + last night = no Ross hookup.

“I have a single,” Cody said. “Just hall mates.”

“Swanky,” she said and then mimicked him exactly: “I’ll have to check it out sometime.”

“Do it.” Cody called her bluff, and she said, “Ha!” and shrugged.

Beth was from “Minnes-OH-ta” but deflected other questions, as she was intensely curious about Cody’s background and how he ended up at S’wanee. (“I’m from California,” he half lied, “but my mom lives in Jersey now.”) Under her bohemian surface was a poise and clearheaded intelligence that smelled like money and good breeding. They riddled one another with questions, like an icebreaker on a deadline, and she kept glancing over his shoulder as she responded curtly: “No, I’ve never been here either, not even to visit.”; “So how did you hear about this place?”; “What kind of scholarship did they offer you?”

“So what’s the deal?” she asked quietly, leaning closer over his desk. “Why’d they cancel class today? Nobody knows.”

“I got the same e-mail you did.” Cody shrugged, telling the truth.

“Huh.” She pulled back, suspicious. “Mysteeerious, right? You didn’t hear anything?”

“Nope. Nada.” More truth, technically.

“Huh,” she repeated. “‘Cause one of the girls in Tuckaway was jogging up near you this morning and said there was some commotion up there. Some…situation.”

It already seemed so long ago, a distant memory he had to reach for.

“No clue,” he said, finally lying outright, while aching to tell her everything.

“Mysteeerious,” she said again, reading his face, and then looked past him and said to someone else, “Okay. Okay…”

The Widow was rounding out the office door and shooed her away like a cat. “This is check-out only,” she scolded, and Beth said, “Got it. Sorry. See you around.” And out she slipped through the creaking door.

“This is check-out only, Cody,” she repeated to Cody, and he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Cody, my man!” Caleb startled him later, as he neared his fifth written page. “You work here, bud?”

Cody responded quietly, with the Widow on the loose.

“You check out those econ problem sets yet?” Caleb went on in his booming, fill-the-room voice. “We should do them together. It’s not a test. We can crowd-source. I asked.”

“Yes, you can study at the front desk together,” the Widow said after Caleb tracked her down when Cody told him they weren’t allowed to. “See?” Caleb turned to him. “It’s not a problem. It’s why we’re here.”

The Widow smiled at his forehead and nodded. She saved her smile for the telephone and Caleb. “Just quietly, please,” she pleaded, tamping down the air. “Quietly.”

Caleb pulled up a stool, and after one successful question decided they’d be study partners here at the front desk daily. Tool or not, Caleb was hard to resist.

“You figure out the lyrics yet?” Caleb asked. Their econ professor, in a clumsy stab at relevance, included a “Talking Heads” extra-credit question at the end of his problem sets. “‘This ain’t no party’? What’s that from?”

“‘Life During Wartime,’” Cody said. “I looked it up on the Internet.”

The Widow let him go at six, even though the library was still full, since today was just “training.” His normal schedule would be seven to ten weeknights and noon to five Saturdays, with Sundays off. It was a work-less job, just a study hall really, and it was all that was required of him for his free ride.

Halfway home, Cody realized he’d left his iPad behind. Sure enough, it was waiting safe and sound at the front desk. But now, just ten minutes later, the library was empty again, since it was dinnertime.

S
’wanee put its best face forward on the take-two first day of class.

Shapard Tower—clapper intact—clanged joyfully at eight thirty a.m. as the student herds migrated across the Domain in unofficial class dress, yet another S’wanee “thing.” Everyone was turned out, crisp and clean, out of respect for the teachers and the seriousness of their own academic journey, although Ross warned this would deteriorate rapidly after a few days and/or first round of laundry. “You’ll all be sloppy soon,” he promised. Pearl, back in mother-hen action after one day’s mourning, told Cody he could wear the coat and tie “as long you like, sugar. Really.”

Yesterday’s tragedy, perhaps because of the intensity of their attention or the resilience of youth, seemed ancient history to Rebel’s Rest today. And once the frenzy of the first week kicked in, eclipsing everything, no one mentioned it again.

Mondays and Wednesdays were literature and composition in Gailor Hall. On Fridays the section would break into smaller precepts to discuss and critique one another’s essays, which would then be submitted the following week. After lunch, two alternating professors in Snowden Hall took turns on “Topics in Western Civilization”; Skit coined it “The Dick and Nancy Show,” which instantly stuck.

“Which is which?” Banjo asked, loosening his tie as he lumbered toward McClurg Student Center for a pick-me-up. “Can you tell? I can’t tell.” The Shapard Tower Fun House riddled “Puff, the Magic Dragon” through the campus air.

Elliott manned the McClurg checkout line, his scholarship job, weekdays after class. S’wanee had an all-you-can-eat meal plan: Students and professors just swiped their ID cards, and money never changed hands. “I wouldn’t let you handle money either,” Banjo baited, as Elliott ignored him from his perch and waved him on. Between the sandwich station, the pizza parlor, the wok bar, vegan counter, and the home cooking line, McClurg was a bustling collegiate food court with students and professors—
lots
of professors, actually—scattered about the dining room, balcony, and outside terrace. It was an eat/study/social hub, day and night.

Early mornings before breakfast, Cody went running, sprinting, through the far reaches of the Domain. He ran down wooded Tennessee Avenue, the hilly, up-and-down stretch that branched off from the main campus; past the charming cottages where professors lived; past the smaller, modern, but matching-stoned Chapel of the Apostles and the nestled, self-contained enclave of the Graduate College. It flanked an open athletic field where, every morning, the surprisingly large, co-ed ROTC squad performed precision military drills.

Cody squinted and called out, “Hey, Huger!” but Huger was focused on his drills and didn’t hear him. Cody scanned the cadets for anyone else he knew, but they had switched directions and were drilling the other way.

Overhead, Canada geese migrated south, leaving behind their fellow noisy travelers who had pit-stopped in Abbo’s Alley and elsewhere on campus. One special morning, a mother deer and two fawns arched across the street in front of him and watched, quizzical and unsure, from the safety of the forest. A world apart, Cody thought, from the strip malls, traffic snarls, and polluted haze of East Brunswick.

Tennessee Avenue dead-ended in a gravel circle that ringed the massive white memorial cross in honor of fallen S’wanee boys from the Civil War through Vietnam. S’wanee was big on memorials. Fittingly, it loomed above Morgan’s Steep, the breathtaking lookout over the vast wooded eternity of the Cumberland Plateau. “Steep” was a misnomer: It was an open, jagged cliff with a straight drop down into a beautiful oblivion. A perennially muddy path to the right led downward to join the Perimeter Trail, a twenty-mile hiking loop around the Domain through its fabled caved, cliffed, and waterfalled wilderness. This was S’wanee’s Yosemite, and perhaps because Cody had seen it on the DVD, it already seemed intensely, strangely familiar to him. Someday, when he wasn’t late for class, he’d explore it all for real.

“I run Morgan’s Steep at night,” Caleb told him across the library desk. “We should run it together sometime.”

Tuesdays and Fridays brought Biology and Human Affairs, with Wednesday-afternoon lab in the just-opened Spencer Hall—the newborn pride and joy of the school. From the high-tech, digital white board, a white-coated professor hammered the white-coated Purple Hazers with the basic protocols of the scientific method for “investigating phenomena”—treatment versus control groups, and single-blind versus double-blind trials, which Cody thought sounded more like a trap than an experiment, although the professor insisted they were crucial to “eliminate bias” and “achieve the highest standards of scientific rigor.” The professor explained empirical and measurable evidence, formulation, testing, modification, and, most crucially, the importance of “replicating” and “reproducing” exact results on the road from “theory” to “scientific fact.”

As a point of pride, according to the monotone professor, S’wanee’s own research policy required twelve successful replications of any experiment before the results were published and distributed to the at-large scientific community for “peer review” and scrutiny. He called this policy the “dirty dozen rule,” stressing that S’wanee took science seriously and maintained a high bar.

Skit eyeballed the labeled glass jars of pickled and floating animal innards—which the professor termed “odds and ends”—stacked in shelves at the front and turned to lab partner Buzz in suspended-animation revulsion and horror. “No fucking way,” she mouthed silently. Even her silence sounded hoarse and husky.

“Science advances by accepting absurdities,” the professor droned on. “The history of science is that of proving the unbelievable very much true.” Banjo, to punctuate his boredom, dangled a string of drool from his slack jaw down to the lab table.

“Question everything,” the professor spurred them. “It’s the foundation of science, and of learning itself.” Cody was tempted to snap a picture of the sea of white coats to send to his Clinique-clad mother, but he kept his iPhone in its pocket prison.

“Dude, I copped a buzz in there.” Emerson laughed, waving off the formaldehyde stench as they filed out of the glass-walled lab front-and-center across from the building’s main door. “When do we start cutting shit up?” Bishop yelled, and Vail playfully shushed him. They were already familiar enough to finish each other’s sentences and keep each other in line, like a senior citizen couple.

One of the professors’ dogs, a wide-eyed pit-bull-looking thing, had gotten loose in the building, and a female research assistant scurried past them to corral it. “Here, Puck! Come, Puck!” she called in vain. Cody stood well clear of the stocky beast and thought the school should rethink its stray dog policy. Ross waved at his charges as he hurried down the hall and through a glass door. Between his psychology major and secret, don’t-jinx-it Order of the Gownsmen bid project, Ross seemed to live at Spencer Hall.

Along with their rigorous core curriculum schedule, freshmen were allowed, with advance permission, to “audit” certain upperclass elective courses like art, drawing, music appreciation, and theater. “Chick classes,” Banjo dismissed them, but Cody hoped to check out a few when his schedule settled down. “The music class is really awesome,” Sin told Skit at dinner one night. “They’re tackling Wagner, which is pretty controversial these days.”

“Did you hear me, Cody? Dude?” Caleb mock waved at him across the library desk one afternoon, on the third question of the day’s problem set. He was clicking the desk stapler energetically—a nervous, annoying tick that left a needless mess for Cody to clean up. “Yeah man, I heard you.” Cody nodded, although he hadn’t, and he wondered if the ringing in his ears, which came and went and was initially worse in the mornings and late nights but now pestered him all day, was a result of the loud music at Wellington Lodge, where Banjo and Elliott dragged him every night after work. WebMD said it was, at best, temporary inner-ear damage from loud noises or waxy buildup and, at worst, a rare, incurable affliction called “tinnitus” or maybe some awful type of brain cancer. Cody discounted the worst-case scenarios, but his ears were clean and loud music had never bothered him before.