S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller (25 page)

“Do you have a girlfriend yet?” his grandmother pried later over a baked apple, and Cody said, “Kinda.”

“Oh Cody, don’t get attached yet,” Marcie insisted, and then added quickly, “You’re too young. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”

Cody told them about the campus and the Signing Ceremony and his library job and the bonfire and the charms of Rebel’s Rest, and then mentioned the seven from his section who were already gone.

Marcie put down her fork. “What did you say?”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” she asked, pacing with her cigarette. “Outside!” his grandmother ordered, and Marcie growled, “It’s my house, old woman,” cracking the back door to stream her smoke into the cold.

“I’m calling the dean tomorrow,” Marcie said after Cody explained the details. “Why didn’t they tell us? Why do they keep this from the
parent
s?”

“Don’t call the dean,” Cody said, wishing he’d kept it to himself, and Marcie said, “No, Cody, I will do what I want. This is wrong.”

“It was a car accident,” Cody insisted. “And a suicide. That stuff happens everywhere.”

And it
did
happen everywhere, Cody had Google-learned. Since September, there had been suicides at the University of Colorado, the University of Kansas, Millsaps, Wheaton, Drake, DePaul, Butler, Trinity Lutheran, and two at Bennington. A Rutgers freshman who’d jumped from the George Washington Bridge had made national news.

Since September, there had been fatal car accidents at the University of Florida, Ithaca College, Notre Dame, Duke—at practically every big school near a road, even the Citadel. There had been alcohol-related deaths at NYU and Princeton and a suspected hazing fatality at Dartmouth. Cody’s professor was right: Mother Nature could be an aggressively Darwinian bitch.

“I’m still calling the dean,” Marcie said. “He told me to call with any questions or concerns, and I have
both
.”

Cody defended S’wanee often over the next two weeks, and there was plenty of time for shopping and dinners out and a day trip to the city to see the big tree—much bigger than the Quad tree it reminded Cody of—since Marcie had taken a leave from Macy’s during the busiest shopping season. “I’ll go back after Christmas,” she’d said. “I guess.” Cody got a Facebook alert that his high school class was meeting at the local Bowlmor Lanes, but he stayed home and couldn’t get comfortable in his new bedroom, and after enough time back in New Jersey, Cody started to get homesick for Rebel’s Rest.

He felt clearheaded from so much sleep and had started dreaming again at night, mostly of Beth, no doubt neck-deep in snow from the Minnesota blizzard on the news.

“Eat up!” his grandmother insisted. She’d inspected him often at first and said he looked “haunted” and made platter after platter and seemed relieved when his appetite returned, as had, apparently, Marcie’s, who had filled out ever so slightly.

“Lucky me!” Marcie cheered on Christmas eve, finding the coin in the round loaf that would bring her good fortune. “You always find the coin,” said his grandmother, who had baked the bread. “Lucky me,” Marcie repeated.

“Leave it till the morning!” his grandmother ordered as Cody started to clear the table. “Bad luck on Christmas eve.”

His mother gave him two cashmere sweaters and three pairs of khakis to replace the ones he’d lost at school, a tweed herringbone sport coat (“Nicer than the one they loaned you,” she insisted), and a thirty-six-inch LCD, which she’d have wall-mounted in his bedroom “before your next trip back.” “The PS3 was backordered,” she added. “It’s on the way.” If there was a new man in her life bankrolling all this, she was still keeping him under wraps.

His grandmother gave him a handmade leather wallet she had brought from Sofia, with a twenty-dollar bill inside, and a gold Seiko Automatic watch for his upcoming eighteenth birthday. “Every man needs a real wristwatch,” she claimed.

“So I spoke to your dean,” Marcie said. “He says your concerns are ‘unfounded,’” although Cody hadn’t expressed any. “He talks so funny; he uses funny words.”

“He said one student transferred to a different college,” Marcie said, “and another girl left to deal with a ‘personal situation.’ I can read between the lines there.”

“He said one very troubled girl did kill herself,” and Cody said, “That’s what I told you,” and thought, “
She wasn’t that troubled
.” “And that other car crashed in what he called…what words did he use? ‘Inclement and treacherous driving conditions.’” Cody said, “Yep,” and thought, “
The fog was lifting, the road was straight, there was no tree, and nobody knows what car they were driving
.”

“And he promises to keep the parents better informed of…oh, what did he say?… ‘Campus issues.’”
Typical dean
.

“He says your grades aren’t very good,” Marcie added carefully. “He says you seem distracted or maybe have just been partying too much. He says your scholarship is ‘in jeopardy.’ Is that true?”

“Cody, do you feel in danger there?” she probed, atypically maternal. “Is anyone trying to hurt you?”

“No, Mom.” He shook his head at the question. “No one’s trying to hurt me.”

“You know, Cody,” his mother said, inspecting him, “you don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.” And Cody said, “Why wouldn’t I go back, Mom?”

Of course he was going back. S’wanee was his
home
, at least for the next three and a half magical years. He wasn’t a recruit or outsider anymore. He had signed the book and was a permanent member of the S’wanee family,
his
family. And hopefully Elliott had used the break to relax and regroup and would spring back after what was, in hindsight, a rather stressful first semester. College was a transition, for everyone, and it required an adjustment before it would sail along smoothly, as Cody knew it would from now on. Cody hadn’t realized how exhausted his first semester had left him—and probably all the rest of them, too, what with the drinking and hangovers and studying and late nights and constant go-go-go and sensory-overload-excitement—until he came home and got plenty of sleep and was now increasingly restless and bored and itching to get back to the Domain.
His
Domain. After all, he was president of his section.

He was ready to hunker down during the two-week Reading Period before final exams, and he would up his grades and keep his scholarship, and maybe Elliott had just been talking slurry that night on the back deck, and not gibberish, like the poisoned students way back when, right before they went crazy and killed themselves. Hadn’t Cody talked slurry a few times before, according to Banjo, and he hadn’t gone crazy, had he? Weren’t they all sorta drunk on the last night of the semester before Christmas break, and wasn’t the music loud at the Lodge, which made Cody mishear whatever Elliott had mumbled out on the back deck before he wandered into the S’wanee darkness and then missed the van the next morning?

It was stupid (“Unwise,” Dean Apperson might say) to get distracted by all this other stuff—ancient-history newspaper articles, mushrooms, Ross—when he should focus on his studies. It was stupid, unwise, unproductive, he realized now, after the clarity of two weeks away, to think—
imagine
, really—that something evil and deadly was going down at S’wanee, or that Ross, his mentor, big brother, and first friend there, was somehow involved, as if following in the footsteps of whatever phantom student way back when, the one rumored to have poisoned the students with go-crazy-and-kill-yourself mushrooms as part of a research project to win his coveted gown, at least according to that journalist-wannabe editor who Cody hoped had picked a different career after graduation, he thought, as he got out curbside at Newark Airport. (“I’m so proud of you, kiddo!” Marcie said. “
Dovijdane
, Cody,” his grandmother wished, hugging him tight and close.)

And it was foolish, he knew, as he sandwiched into his coach middle seat, that his brain seemed like a kaleidoscope that someone else was turning.

E
lliott didn’t return after Christmas break.

“He’ll be back in the fall,” Pearl said. “Or so I’m told.” Cody nodded and said, “Okay.”

Reading Period was an amorphous part of the academic calendar, with students trickling back at will, and Rebel’s Rest was quiet and empty when Cody arrived.

Elliott’s luggage was gone from his unlocked, empty room, but in his rush to catch the next van, he had left behind his clear plastic Dopp kit in the bathroom mirror cabinet. Cody took out the toothpaste and then took out the dental floss and shaving cream and razor and nail clippers and turned the kit upside down. Out fell a tiny metal key that Cody grabbed before it fell down the drain.

It was a key for a tiny lock on an unlocked campus. It could have fit a luggage lock, but Elliott’s luggage was gone. It could have fit a bike lock, but Elliott didn’t have a bike, and no one locked bikes at S’wanee. It could have been for a file cabinet or small safety deposit box, like his mother kept her jewelry in, but Cody didn’t find either as he searched Elliott’s room, his closet, under his bed.

“Welcome back, Cody.” Ross was at Elliott’s bedroom door, and Cody was patting inside the closet walls for hidden panels. Ross closed the bedroom door. “We need to talk.”

“Elliott’s gone,” Cody said, standing up straight, and Ross said, “He lost his scholarship. We’re trying to reinstate it.”

“That’s too bad,” Cody said.

“I don’t want you to lose yours, too.”

“Me neither, Ross.”

Ross had found, while cleaning out his mail program over the break, the e-mail Cody sent to himself with the thesis proposal attached, when they accidentally swapped iPads during the Army-Navy football game. Cody had forgotten all about it. Until now.

“That’s theft, Cody. That’s stealing.”

“I’m sorry, Ross,” Cody said, not meaning it.

“It’s grounds for expulsion, if I turned you in.”

“I’m sorry, Ross,” Cody repeated.

“I found my document on your iPad. I deleted it. From your inbox, too.”

“Okay,” Cody said.

“Seriously, dude, you’re sorta on thin ice here anyway, you know? This would be the final nail, you know?”

“Won’t happen again.”

“We don’t want to lose you, Cody.”

“Hey Ross, do you have Elliott’s cell number?” Cody asked. “Or his e-mail?”

“Because we’re friends,” Cody said, when Ross asked why he needed it. “I want to call and see how he’s doing.”

“Okay. Would you ask him for me? Or should I ask him myself?” Cody said when a hesitant Ross told him he’d need the dean’s permission to release private student information.

“Because he left stuff in the bathroom,” Cody said, when Ross asked what he was doing in Elliott’s room in the first place. “I was checking if he left behind anything else, you know, because he left so suddenly. I was gonna send it to him. Because we’re friends, Ross.”

“Sure. I’m okay,” Cody said as Ross descended the stairs, eyeing him carefully. “Don’t worry about me, bud.”

Cody went to his bedroom and popped open his laptop, where he’d stored an extra copy of Ross’s forbidden thesis.

•   •   •

The S’wanee Call Project was a work in progress when Cody had freeze-frame/stolen it, and Ross had most certainly finished it by now. He’d divided the dense, single-spaced early draft into three sections (“Past,” “Present,” and “Future”—
not very original, Ross
), and the “Past” section was a brief history of university science experiments that had led to important breakthroughs.

Penicillin (University of Oxford), beta-blockers (University of Glasgow), synthetic insulin (University of Toronto, University of Pittsburgh), antiretrovirals (Harvard, MIT, UCLA). As Ross had already told him, S’wanee had a long history of successful experimentation and was instrumental in developing key ingredients in common sleeping, addiction, and antipsychotic meds. Schools worldwide raced against one another for the next breakthrough, and patent competition was fierce.

The thesis traced the history of a “highly classified” Cold War program called MKULTRA, which included university partnerships with the CIA to discover and test chemical compounds to sabotage any hypothetical enemy. These “quiet” partnerships tested LSD and a variety of “hallucinogenic botanicals” on thousands of “unwitting” subjects with “unpredictable” and “nonreplicable” results, which ultimately doomed the whole program. One particularly disastrous experiment occurred in 1951 in some French town called Pont-Saint-Esprit, in which 250 unsuspecting villagers went violently insane. These secret CIA programs were finally exposed and shut down in the mid-1970s by something called the Kennedy Hearings, which forced new laws forbidding future experiments without test subjects’ “expressed, written” consent.

Over thirty US universities had partnered with the CIA in these secret experiments. S’wanee made over seventy-five million dollars through these
down-low
government contracts in the 1960s alone, through experiments spearheaded and run by undergraduates.
Gowns all around!

In the last paragraph of the section, Ross lauded S’wanee’s “illustrious” history as a “new technology incubator.”
Suck-up
.