Empress of the World (14 page)

“Ha!” says Battle, pulling my hair. We kiss.

Then I pull away. “You’re distracting me when I’m trying to give you a present!”

“Oh, excuse me.” Battle gets up and sits on the other side of the room.

I take a deep breath and say, “All right, so after you showed me the puppet that was Nick-with-a-K’s, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and everything you said about how you guys used to do puppet shows together, and I just thought, why doesn’t she have her own? I mean, obviously that one was Nick’s, so where’s Battle’s?”

Battle is frowning, but mostly that just means she’s listening intently.

“And then it hit me: of course you wouldn’t have it, because Nick would have taken it with him when he left. As kind of a reminder of you, a way he could take you with him, even though he was leaving you behind. And the more I thought about that, the more I thought: I want to make her a new one. I know it’s not like having Nick-with-a-K back, but it was just something I wanted to do for you, just, you know, because, and anyway, here it is. She is, I, um, call her the Empress. Empress of the World.”

I walk across the room and put the Empress into Battle’s hands. She came out really well, I think: the green velvet leggings made a beautiful dress, the head and hands actually don’t look mutated, and Battle’s hair is so gorgeous that there’s no way it could look anything but great. Of course, I didn’t braid it.

Battle is turning the Empress around in her hands, which are shaking a little, I notice. Wow, I didn’t think she’d be so excited. I feel a warm glow of accomplishment.

Then I notice that her shoulders are shaking, too.

“Stop—stop trying to explain me. I can’t take this,” Battle says through tears.

She holds the Empress out to me. “Please go,” she says.

“Battle, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it would upset you, I don’t under—”

“Please.”

I go.

“Explain this to me again. Why aren’t you and Battle speaking to each other?”

“She didn’t like a present I made for her,” I say helplessly.

“The one you used my leggings for? The one that for some reason, you won’t actually explain to me what it is? Was it some weird sex thing? And then she wasn’t into it, and she got mad?”

I shake my head. It suddenly occurs to me that when Katrina doesn’t know what’s going on, she makes up a story to make all the things she doesn’t understand make sense.

And
that I do the same thing.

And that
Battle doesn’t. Ever.

“This is the nastiest assignment I have ever had in my life,” I say. I have rubber gloves on. Ms. Fraser passed them out in class a few days ago. She said, “I don’t know why, but parents just seem to worry when you tell them that their children need to buy rubber gloves for one of their assignments.”

I am sifting through the contents of a medium-sized plastic Ziploc bag. I have ten of these bags. They contain samples from the contents of several different garbage cans, picked (by me) from different buildings around campus. Some of them are the kind of garbage cans that are just for cigarettes, and so mainly all they have in them is cigarette butts and sand. The other ones are worse. I’m saving them for last. I’m convinced that I’m going to find used condoms in them, or worse. I am supposed to note down the contents of each sample as precisely as possible.

Isaac and Katrina are watching me at my work, apparently fascinated, or maybe just wanting to procrastinate about whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing.

“Here you go, babe—have another sample,” says Katrina, offering me the butt from the cigarette she’s just finished smoking.

“I don’t want it! It’ll mess up my data!” I carefully set a Marlboro butt down next to one just like it. They both have the same color lipstick around the filter end, too—a possible correlation? I say, “Look at this guys: people who smoke Marlboros are more likely to wear really bright red lipstick.”

“Hon, Sherlock Holmes has got nothing to worry about from you—those are obviously two butts smoked by the same person,” says Katrina. “Look—you can see that the lipstick is lighter on the second butt, because some of it wore off on the first one.”

“Or it could be that the lipstick was lighter on the first one, and then she reapplied it before she smoked the second one. Never thought of that, did ya?” says Isaac.

“You can’t be sure it was a woman. Men wear lipstick sometimes,” I say, thinking of the skirt-wearing boy.

Isaac has picked up one of the other plastic bags and is starting to screw around with it. He holds it up and says, “Exhibit A,” trying to sound like a TV detective. He adds, “Ms. Lansdale, I think you’ll agree with me that this conclusively proves that our murderer is a chain-smoking transvestite.”

“Oh shit,” says Katrina. This doesn’t seem to be an appropriate response to Isaac’s comment, so I look up from my notebook to see if there’s something else she might be reacting to. That’s when I see them. It’s Battle.

And Kevin.

They’re holding hands, and Battle is laughing.

“Give me that!” I snap at Isaac. He blinks, then quickly hands me the plastic bag. I snatch up all the other ones from the ground.

Then I run, across the courtyard and away. I don’t stop, even though my breath is ragged and I’m crying, until I get close to the river.

I should have ripped open all the bags and dumped the garbage on their heads.

 

Katrina has been rationalizing for hours. I made her wait in my room with me until near the end of dinner before we went down, in case they were there. She says, “Sometimes people hold hands just because they’re feeling friendly, you know. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world as we know it.”

I pick up the straw that I got with my soda.

“Do you see this?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Do you recognize it?” I demand.

“It’s a straw.”

“Yes. It is also what you are grasping at for an explanation!”

I bite into my slice of pizza. My mouth fills with grease. “Makes me sick,” I mutter, and spit out the bite of pizza into my napkin.

“Well hon, if it does, there’s somebody you should be talking to about it, and it sure as shit isn’t me,” says Katrina.

“You mean the cook?” I ask. Katrina sighs.

“No, I do not mean the cook. I mean our friend Battle. I would just like to point out that all this trouble started at the point that you stopped talking to each other. There’s also the fact that you haven’t talked to me about what’s behind all this, and there’s a limit to the amount of help I can offer if you don’t tell me what’s really going on.”

“Katrina—I can’t. If you really want to know—and I want you to know, that’s not the problem—you’ll have to ask Battle, because it would be a betrayal of trust for me to tell you everything.”

Just like it was a betrayal of trust for me to make up my own little soap opera about what happened when her brother ran away.

“Well, I’m not going to talk to her for you,” she says.

“Did I ask you to?” I’m outraged. I rattle the ice in my glass, and then suck one of the cubes into my mouth. I bite down on it. It hurts my teeth. I keep chewing it until it dissolves and the water trickles down my throat.

Katrina throws up her hands. She says, “I give up. Look, I’ve got about a zillion hours of work to do before tomorrow morning. I’ll be in my room if you need me.” She gets up and leaves the table, abandoning her tray with the remains of her ranch-dressing-drowned salad.

I came to this program to study archaeology.

So goddammit, that is what I am going to do.

I unzip my backpack and take out one of my books.

After a minute or so, I’m suddenly flooded with panic. What if they decided to wait till near the end of dinner, too? So nobody would see them?

I have to get out of here.

I gulp the last of my Diet Coke and dump the tray in the garbage. Then I run back over for my backpack. I trip and hit my knee hard on a bench. It hurts a lot. I’ll have a giant bruise.

Good.

Okay, I’m outside the dining hall and I haven’t seen them yet. I should go back to my room using a different route than usual, in case they’re on their way right now.

There’s an elevator on the far left side of the hall. We never use it, but I found it once when I got disoriented on the way back from class.

I make a couple of wrong turns on the way to the elevator, and each time I turn a corner, my heart starts beating faster, until finally it feels like the big wooden metronome Ms. Edwards turns on sometimes during my viola lessons. “Allegro! Presto! Prestissimo!” And every time I see anyone coming down the hallway, I’m convinced for a split second that it’s them.

I eventually resort to the strategy I used in elementary school for deflecting insults. I get a book out of my backpack and read it while I walk, only looking up when I absolutely have to. It would help if I could summon up some interest in Chapter 8 of Discovering Our Past, “Understanding the Past: Cultural Processual Reconstruction,” but that’s a bit too much to hope for.

Finally, I get to the elevator, and I stand in front of it for a few minutes, grateful to have gotten to it unscathed. I’m just about to press the button to call it when the doors slide apart.

She’s got her back to me. That’s because she’s turned toward Kevin, who has his arms around her. Her head is tilted back.

They’re kissing.

The only thing I can think of doing is to put the book so close to my face that maybe they won’t recognize me when they get out of the elevator.

Kevin doesn’t see me, but Battle does. She stares, her eyes huge.

I step into the elevator, press “Door Close,” and sink down into the corner. I wrap my arms around my knees and my eyes begin to burn. I don’t want to make any sounds. It hurts my throat not to sob, but I clench my jaw and hide my face between my knees

After a little while, I get up and push the button for my floor.

I thought that everything that could conceivably suck already did, but I’m wrong. Ms. Fraser wants to see me, so I must be failing archaeology. I wonder what my problem is. After all, if I can’t get a relationship right, the least I should be able to do is learn about stratigraphy and systematics.

A blaze of freezing air conditioning hits me as I walk in, making goose bumps appear on my arms. I ask the guy at the desk where Ms. Fraser’s office is.

“Up the stairs and to the left; it’s the first carrel on the righthand side.”

I hadn’t even noticed there were stairs. But now that I know there are, I look up and see that there’s a whole other level, a mezzanine. You could do a pretty decent Romeo and Juliet balcony scene from it. Not that I have anyone to play that scene with, now.

Ms. Fraser’s reading the newspaper when I reach the cubicle. I clear my throat and say, “Hi.”

“Nicola! I’m glad to see you,” she says.

Glad? “You told me to come,” I say, realizing belatedly that this sounds rude.

“Yes, I did. I told you to come to my spacious office.” She extends her arms, and they touch the opposite walls of the cubicle. “But we don’t have to stay here. I thought we could go for a walk.”

I want to ask why, but she must have some kind of reason. Maybe she wants to show me some important thing about the soil here. “Okay.”

We clump down the stairs. She’s in front. There’s graffiti on the walls on either side of the staircase. I read some of it in passing.

“Zeppelin Rules—hey, there’s some data for future archaeologists,” I say.

Ms. Fraser laughs. “Indeed. And if the music doesn’t survive, they may well decide that there was a large cult devoted to an inefficient air travel vehicle.”

I smile, but since she’s in front, she can’t see.

At the bottom of the stairs, Ms. Fraser pauses and looks up at me. She says, “Nicola, the reason I wanted you to come see me is that I’m worried about you. You haven’t seemed yourself lately.”

This is the last thing I expected.

I cross my arms over my chest and shrug.

“It’s a hard class,” I say, with that sinking feeling I always get when I know I’ve just said something stupid.

“Yes, it is. But I don’t think that the class is what’s hard for you right now,” she says. “Let’s get outside into the sunshine.”