The Year of Disappearances (14 page)

She was rubbing an emery board against the knees of my new corduroy jeans. When I asked why, she said she was “distressing” the jeans to make them look “lived-in.”

“Why did you decide to come for the spring term instead of waiting for fall?”

Mãe and I had discussed how to handle such questions. “A girl disappeared in my hometown,” I said. “My parents decided it was a good time for me to leave.”

(Later, when I told her my best friend up north had been murdered, she seemed impressed. “Your life is so
dramatic,
” she said.)

Now she said, “Your mom’s beautiful.” Back at the trunk, she pulled out my metamaterial trouser suit. Mãe had relented and let me have it after I made a strong argument that I might need to turn invisible in my new environment. “This looks like something you’d wear to a job interview.”

“It’s for special occasions.” I watched her carry it to the closet and hang it up. I didn’t want that suit distressed.

“What does your dad do?” she asked.

“He’s a researcher.” I put socks and underwear into a bureau drawer. “He’s not around much. He sort of comes and goes.”

“I know all about that. My parents divorced three years ago.”

I took a large parcel from a box brought from the storage unit in Saratoga Springs, cut away sheets of bubble wrap, and lifted out my lithophane lamp. Its porcelain shade appeared unornamented, but when I plugged the lamp in and turned its switch, brightly colored birds emerged on the panels of the shade.

Bernadette said, “Ooh.”

“My mother bought it. It’s been by my bed since I was a baby,” I said, setting the lamp carefully on the table next to my cot. “If I woke up at night, I’d turn it on and talk to the birds. I had names for them.”

“What were their names?” Bernadette came over and ran her hand over the shade.

“Not telling.” I didn’t want her to make fun of me. The names had come from fairy tales; the dove was Cinderella, and the cardinal was Rose Red.

“At least you trusted me enough to tell me that you named them.” Her voice was wistful. I gathered that not many others trusted her that well.

When we went to dinner that night, Bernadette stood on top of the cafeteria table and said, “Announcement!” in a voice so loud the whole room went quiet.

“We’ve got a new one,” she shouted. “Stand up,” she said to me.

Close to a hundred students were sitting in the basement cafeteria, which smelled of cabbage and stir-fried vegetables. I didn’t want to stand up.

I stood up.

“This is Ari Montero,” Bernadette said. “My new roomie from Florida.”

Some people clapped, others made comments that blended into an indecipherable noise. Two or three whistled and howled, which I took as a compliment.

A boy with short blond hair said, “How long will this one last, Bernie?”

“Shut up, Richard.” Bernadette sat down next to me. “He’s president of the Social Ecologists Club,” she said. “Membership one and a half: Richard and his girlfriend.”

I didn’t ask which one was the half.

The next morning I took part in a brief orientation session. There were only three of us new enrollees, and our “facilitator,” a young man called Jack, said, “If this was fall term, I’d tell you to look to your left, and look to your right, and ask yourself which two of you won’t be here in four years. But with only three of you here, that felt kind of cruel.”

One of the other newbies asked, “Is the dropout rate that high?”

I didn’t hear Jack’s response. I was looking at my fellow newcomers, wondering which two of us would disappear.

Jack went over our class and work schedules. I’d already decided to register for courses in literature, philosophy, and physics, and the night before Bernadette had talked me into signing up for American Politics, a class she was taking. “The American Politics prof can be a bore, but we get to go on field trips,” she said. “You should sign up for Environmental Studies, too—that class goes on an overnight trip to the Okefenokee Swamp.”

“Maybe next term,” I’d said.

Jack told me my work assignment was with the recycling team. “The stables crew is full,” he said. “Everybody loves horses, nobody loves trash.”

I looked over the list of students signed up for the recycling team, lingering over the name
Walker Pearson.
I thought of the boy who jumped out of the pile of leaves. How many boys named Walker could there be at Hillhouse?

“I don’t mind working with trash,” I said.

My first week at Hillhouse went so fast I had no time to feel homesick. The literature and philosophy classes were my favorites from the first day, because the professors were bright and clearly loved teaching. My American Politics professor seemed bright, but she spoke tentatively and had a hunted look in her eyes that made me wonder about her personal life. My physics professor, on the other hand, acted utterly confident, but I soon found out that he wasn’t as smart as he thought.

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.