Marianna Baer - Frost

got here. I swear. I was just borrowing the hoodie.” She was

wearing a navy-blue sweatshirt of mine that she loved.

“Abby did tell me she was going down to borrow the

hoodie,” Viv added. “And I didn’t hear the sound of something

breaking.”

“David is here all the time,” Abby said. “Bringing her laundry

and stuff.”

“Why the hell—” Celeste began.

“I know David’s around a lot,” I said, “but I’m sure he

wouldn’t have knocked it over and just left it on the floor. And it’s

not like he’s here when Celeste isn’t.”

“So what are you saying?” Abby asked.

“Nothing.” I tried to keep my voice even. “Just that accusing

David isn’t helping.”

“Well, I didn’t do it,” she huffed.

“Then who did?” Celeste said.

“We’ve got some strong cross breezes in here,” I said,

glancing around at the windows, many of which were open.

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“You’re always complaining about them, Celeste. Maybe the vase

tipped on its own.”

“Right.” She used the tip of a crutch to send one of the dried

flowers skittering across the room. “You know, I didn’t ask to live

here. To break up your little party. So I don’t see why we can’t

just live and let live.”

Abby sputtered. “We can! You’re the one who accused me of

doing this.”

“Okay!” I said. “Enough!” I dumped my bag on my bed and

turned to Celeste. “If Abby says she didn’t do it, she didn’t do it.” I

turned to Abby. “David wouldn’t have done it.” Then to all of

them, “Do you guys realize how lucky we are? Instead of being in

some big, impersonal dorm, we have this beautiful little house.

But if you guys are going to act like this, it’s just . . . well, it’s going

to suck. Am I right?”

I made eye contact with each of them. They nodded

unenthusiastically.

“Good,” I said. Even though I was annoyed, I didn’t want to

leave it on this note. “And did you all get my message about what

I’m going to cook for the first Sunday dinner? Did it sound okay?”

More nodding. I seemed to be inspiring a lot of that tonight.

“I love your lasagna,” Viv said.

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“Okay. Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a

butt load of homework that I haven’t even started.”

After Viv and Abby disappeared upstairs, I squatted and

collected the shards; reaching the floor was tricky for Celeste with

her cast. No matter how the vase had broken, I didn’t blame her

for being upset. But couldn’t she have accepted Abby’s

explanation of what happened? It was as if she was trying to

make things more difficult here. I handed her the pieces in a

plastic bag and, after a mumbled thanks, she headed across the

hall to the little room. I swept up the flowers and dumped them in

the trash.

When I finally stretched out on the bed, exhausted, my head

sank into the pillow so heavily I thought I might never be able to

lift it up. For a few moments, I let the room work its magic,

tempting me into falling asleep right then, without even taking

my clothes off. But I was already stressed out enough by my

classes. No way could I afford to skip a night of homework. I had a

good three hours or so ahead of me. I dragged myself up and

started getting stuff out of my bag. As I rooted around the bottom

for a pen, my hand came across something I didn’t recognize. I

pulled it out, and saw the envelope that David had given me a few

weeks ago. Damn.

I knocked on the door to our little study room and then went

in.

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Celeste sat reading A Room of One’s Own. (God, if only . . .)

The pieces of the vase were spread out in front of her on her

desk. She looked up at me.

“I know it was your grandmother’s,” I said. “Do you want me

to try to fix it? I have Gorilla Glue.”

“It’s in way too many pieces.” She put down her book. “It

was in the middle of the room, Leena. Not right near the dresser,

where it would have fallen.”

“Maybe it bounced once, before it broke.” I’d seen mugs and

glasses do that, instead of smashing at first impact.

She picked up one of the larger shards and ran her finger

around the uneven edge.

“I want to keep our rooms locked,” she said. “From now on.”

I bit the insides of my cheeks. Locking the door in such a

small house seemed so aggressively unfriendly. Viv and Abby and

I had always gone in and out of one another’s rooms, borrowing

clothes, books, whatever. . . .

“I know you’re upset,” I said. “But I wish you’d trust me

about Abby.”

Celeste was quiet for a moment as she pressed the shard

into her fingertip, turning the flesh white. “There’s something

else,” she finally said. “The other day, when I was taking a bath,

there was this . . . knocking.”

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“On the door?” I said.

“No.” She shook her head. “I thought so, at first. I thought it

was you, so I said I’d be out in a bit. But the knocking didn’t stop.

Then I realized it was on the wall—not the door. The wall

between the bathroom and my closet. Like this.” She rapped the

desk three times. Waited a second. Rapped four times, then once.

An erratic rhythm.

My heart began thumping a little harder, as if responding to

her loud beats on the wood. “What was it?” I asked. “A noise in a

pipe?”

“No,” she said. “Someone was doing it. On purpose.”

“What? Who?” Was she saying Abby had done this?

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “It takes me forever to get out

of the tub with my cast. I finally hauled my ass out and made it

over there, and whoever had been there was gone.”

“I don’t understand. Why would someone do that?”

“To mess with me. Freak me out.”

Okay, she was freaking me out. “Who would want to mess

with you?”

“I just told you, I don’t know.” Her jaw tightened. “I knew

you wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t even want to tell you. But now,

with the vase . . . I’m sure it’s the same person. That’s why I want

to lock the doors.”

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I tried to think clearly about the best way to approach this

before answering. “I’m fine about locking the doors,” I said. “If it’ll

make you feel better, that’s not a problem. But I still don’t think

there’s any need to. I think the vase broke by accident. And since

nothing happened while you were in the tub, I’m assuming . . . I

don’t know . . . that it was some other noise you heard. Have you

lived in an old house before?”

“Not really.”

“Strange noises happen all the time,” I explained. “You’ll get

used to it.”

She pursed her lips. “But it sounded so . . . purposeful.”

“If someone really did want to mess with you,” I said, “that

would be a pretty weird way of doing it. Right? I mean, if I were

trying to freak someone out, I’d replace their toothpaste with

Preparation H, or fill their shoes with peanut butter or

something.”

“Fill their shoes with peanut butter?” Celeste said. “You’d be

a crappy freaker-outer.”

I laughed, a release of nerves mostly. “You know what I

mean. I wouldn’t be knocking on a wall. Or breaking a vase, for

that matter.”

She placed the shard she’d been holding back on her desk.

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

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“I’m sure I am.”

Feeling like I’d talked her off the ledge, I started out of the

room. The minute I was in the hall, though, I remembered why I’d

gone over to begin with. It took bulldozer force to make myself

turn back around. “Celeste?” I held out the small white envelope.

“David gave this to me at the beginning of school, and I totally

forgot to give it to you. I hope I didn’t screw anything up.”

She handed it back without opening it. “You should keep it,”

she said.

“Me? I don’t even know what it is.”

“The key to his room. Which makes more sense, for his sister

to have it, or his girlfriend?”

For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. David had a

girlfriend?

Then I clued in to her implication. “I’m not his girlfriend,” I

said.

“I see you guys together all the time,” she said. “I don’t mind.

I want you to get together. I told you that right on the first day.

Why else do you think I had him come over to help you hang

those shades the other week?”

Oh my God. “You did that on purpose?”

She smirked. “Just moving things along.”

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I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“How about this. I’ll hang the key on a nail, and then if David’s

ever locked out, he can know it’s here. That’s probably why he

gave you a copy, right?”

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll see who’s the first one to use it.”

I couldn’t get out of there soon enough. Back in the

bedroom, I lay down and tried to breathe away the tightness in

my chest and the ache that was beginning to pulse at my temples.

All of these stories she was constructing in her head! It was

just like when we were lab partners—the constant dramas—

except now I was one of the people involved. She couldn’t just be

sad that her vase had broken; she had to make it into a whole

mystery with herself as a victim. David and I couldn’t just be

friends; it had to be a clandestine relationship—orchestrated by

her! She thought everyone lived life as out of control as she did,

acting on every little emotion. Was she going to do this all

semester? Turn everything into more than it was?

Still, as I was having these thoughts, something tickled at the

edge of my brain. The knocking on the wall—that was nothing, I

was sure. But did I really think a breeze could have blown over a

ceramic vase?

I rolled onto my side, facing the window. Cubby stared at me

with her big glass eyes. I reached for her, brought her onto the

bed.

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When I was little, I knew owls were supposed to be wise, so I

made up this schoolmarmish voice for Cubby and would ask her

questions like she was a wooden oracle.

I think I convinced myself that when I spoke in Cubby’s voice,

my answers were wiser than they’d otherwise have been.

“Did you see how the vase broke?” I asked her now. “It blew

over, right?”

No answer.

“You must have seen it. Was someone in here?”

I looked deep into Cubby’s shiny black pupils.

No one, I made her say in her uptight, vaguely English accent.

The room was empty.

“Thank you,” I said, resting her back on the sill.

The room had been empty. Of course it had been. To believe

anything else was to be sucked into Celeste’s melodrama, and I

wasn’t going to let that happen.

112

Chapter 11

TWO DAYS LATER, sitting in my Gender Relations in

America seminar, the closer we got to the bell the more

distracted I felt.

“So,” Ms. Boutillier was saying from the other side of the

round table where the seven of us sat, “do you think the author

was ahead of his time? Or was he making a remark that was

designed to stir controversy and prove that women didn’t, in fact,

deserve the vote? Did you question his motives when reading?”

I kept my eyes on my text, as if giving her questions deep

thought. Really, I was thinking about David.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’d gotten in the habit of

leaving by the building’s side exit after my seminar. Usually, David

would be coming out of his history class at that same spot. We’d

walk over to the mailroom together, check our boxes, stop by

senior tea . . . I looked forward to it.

Today, I wondered if I should go out the main exit of Holmes

Hall instead. I hadn’t run into David anywhere yesterday—the day

after the vase incident—and I’d been thinking maybe it would be

better if I stopped going out of my way to see him. Just stay away

from the freaky Lazar vortex; remove myself from Celeste’s rich,

imaginative life.

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“Leena?” Ms. Boutillier said. “Did you hear those page

numbers for tonight?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Can you repeat them?” She did, with

obvious annoyance, and then the bell finally rang.

I slipped into my canvas army jacket, hoisted my bag over my

shoulder, and followed the herd, taking a left toward the main

entrance where I’d usually take a right. Then I stopped. David and

I weren’t doing anything wrong. We weren’t doing anything,

period. Why play into Celeste’s bizarre little game? Also, I wanted

to talk to him about what was going on in the dorm. I turned

around and headed to where I knew he would be lingering,

putting books into his bag.

We swung into step next to each other—my small, blue

Chucks next to his bigger, black ones on the shiny checker-board

floor. I imagined Celeste making some comment about the cute

couple-ness of it, felt her eyes on us even though she didn’t have

class in this building.

“How were the genders relating today?” he said.

“You know,” I said. “Hostile.”

He held the heavy wood door open for me and for a bunch of

other people. I passed by him out onto the steps.

“So, I hear there was trouble on the home front,” he said,

catching up.

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“Yeah.” I shivered—the sky was gray, the air was damp and

cold and bit at my cheeks. “I actually wanted to talk to you about

it.”

“Senior tea?” he suggested.

“Maybe somewhere more private?”

We were already heading toward the path to the mailroom. I

was thinking about a small lounge nearby that was usually empty.

I didn’t want anyone to overhear me as I talked to him about

Celeste.

“Actually,” he said, “I have to meet someone later at senior