Authors: Sara Ryan

Empress of the World (17 page)

BOOK: Empress of the World

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I bet I can learn more by looking around than by watching Large Pink Dr. Francis while he pontificates. He’s been talking an amazingly long time without saying anything. So I shift my focus over to one of the grid squares where people are working–and freeze. That’s
Battle
over there!

I look again, and realize that no, it isn’t, it couldn’t be–Battle doesn’t have long hair any more. But this woman, whoever she is, has hair that looks just like Battle’s did at the beginning of the summer. She has her back to me, so I look at her for a few more minutes. Then she turns around, as though she’s seen me looking.

She’s a guy. A long-haired, blue-eyed, cute guy, who’s sifting dirt through a screen to find the smallest artifacts. He gives me a big smile and waves. Blushing, I wave back, imagining telling him, “I’m sorry for staring, but you look just like my ex-girlfriend from the back.”

Suddenly, what Dr. Francis is saying penetrates my consciousness. “I think we’ll be having an early lunch today so you all will be sure to have some time to interact with the team. Team, please show our visitors where they can find lunch.”

There’s scattered cheering among the people working, which gives rise to scattered cheers among our group. The guy who isn’t Battle puts down his screen and starts walking over to me. When he reaches where Anne and I are standing, he extends his hand and says, “Hey, I’m Doug, and you are?”

“Nicola,” I say. Not Nic. “And this is my friend Anne.”

Anne looks up from her notebook and smiles hugely. She must also think Doug is cute.

“Well hello, Nicola and Anne–congratulations on surviving that speech. Dr. Francis is a good guy, but you get him in front of a group of people and he just goes into fundraising mode. What you heard was just about exactly what he says to people who are visiting because they want to donate money to the project. I think he forgot you guys were coming today. Where are you from again?”

“The Siegel Institute,” says Anne. Doug looks confused for a minute, then says, “Oh yeah! I always forget that they host that at Prucher in the summer. Hey, you know, I went there for undergrad. I love Prucher Hall. Do they still have all those great trees in the courtyard?”

“Yeah!” I say, warming to Doug. “They’re totally excellent for climbing.”

Doug nods enthusiastically. “Oh man, I
loved
climbing those trees! The best thing was to climb one late at night and smoke a bowl–oops, should I be saying that to you guys?”

Anne and I laugh. “I guess your RAs weren’t really strict,” I say.

“Man, I
was
an RA, ”says Doug. “But it was a while back. Things are probably different now. It’s so cool that’s where you guys are from! Well, follow me over this way and I’ll show you our fine dining selections.”

Doug walks in front of us, and he looks like Battle again. It’s uncanny.

“I think he’s flirting with you,” Anne whispers. “Are you mad?”

“I look at her, confused. “I don’t know if he is or not,” I whisper back, “but why would I be mad?”

“Because he’s a guy!” Anne whispers more loudly.

“Oh! No, that wouldn’t make me mad,” I say.

Anne shakes her head. Obviously, I keep failing to act the way she expects.

Doug is leading us across the parking area toward a small white vehicle that looks sort of like an ice cream truck.

“O’Riley’s Food Service” is painted on one side in bright blue letters. “These guys come every day that we’re here. Their stuff’s not bad, but a lot of us bring our own lunches and keep them in the coolers over there.” He nods toward a spot over in the tall grass where there are several wooden picnic tables in addition to four large orange coolers.

“Were those here when you guys started?” I ask, pointing at the tables.

“No, they weren’t–one of the donors gave them. Dr. Francis was really angry, because we’re just going to have to take them down once we finish, and they don’t do us any good, any they cost a lot more than you’d expect. It’s nice to have somewhere to sit for lunch, but in the grand scheme of things it’s fairly gratuitous.”

Anne and I get in line for O’Riley’s Food Service while Doug gets his lunch out of one of the coolers. As we approach the front of the line, I see that it’s apparently run by the Mexican branch of the O’Rileys.

By the time we have our food, all the tables are filled. Doug says, “If you don’t mind sitting on the ground, there’s a nice shady spot over a little closer to the dig. Just don’t leave any garbage!”

The three of us walk over to Doug’s spot, which is underneath a giant oak tree. I sprawl out on my stomach, as does Doug. Anne sits cross-legged against the trunk of the tree.

“How long have you been doing archaeology?” I ask Doug, taking a bite of my tostada. It’s quite good, particularly in comparison to what the dinning hall likes to think of as Mexican food.

Doug rests his chin on his right hand and looks up as though the answer to my question is somewhere in the clouds overhead. “Uh. . .well, let’ see. Did my first dig back in undergrad, so that would’ve been . . . Jesus, I guess it’s ten years now.”

“You don’t look that old,” Anne says, and then blushes.

Doug laughs. “Thanks!” he says. He takes a banana, a Tupperware bowl, and a fork out of his lunch sack.

“Did you know for a long time that this is what you wanted to do?” I ask.

Doug shakes his head. “I got my undergrad in anthro, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. The first dig I went on, I got onto because I was dating somebody who was on it.”

“That’s so random!” I say. I don’t know if these are the kinds of questions Ms. Fraser wanted us to ask, but I’m very interested in Doug’s answers.

“Yeah, I know. Funny, isn’t it? If I’d known when I started how much lab work there is in proportion to stuff like this, I don’t know if I would have gotten into it. I might have been a forest ranger instead.”

I’m slightly appalled. “But aren’t you interested in the analysis?” I ask.

“Oh, definitely! But that doesn’t mean it’s fun to sit in the lab doing testing on soil samples, or spectrographic analysis on a pottery fragment. You have to be willing to put up with the scut work if you want to get into this.”

“Ms. Fraser was telling us that it’s kind of hard to get jobs,” Anne says.

Doug peels his banana. “It is. But it’s not that bad. What happens is that you get to know people, and then when they’re going to write up grants for projects, they let you know, and you get included in their grant proposal.”

“It seems like it’s a lot more about money than I thought it would be,” I say.

“Everything is, Nicola,” says Doug, taking a large bite out of his banana.

August 6, 11:42 p.m., My Room

Field notes:

positive thing since the end of me and battle:

1.
talking with anne on bus

2.
finding out about archeology from doug (who asked for my e-mail address)

3.
a couple of evenings with katrina before she got so obsessive about her giant programming project

4.
walking by the river with isaac, except for the weird kiss thing

. . . but none of these really signify. i’m walking around with a giant hole int the middle of my chest. i’m just trying to ignore it and hope that everyone else does too.

Nicola lancaster’s brain is:

the skin underneath a scab someone’s just ripped off. pink and raw and painful and likely to get infected.

problem w/this analogy:

skin underneath a scab isn’t capable of being stupid.

I just want to hide, and run away, and be anywhere in the entire world but wherever she is except that part of me still wants to be with her more than to be anywhere else.

talking to ms. Fraser was a good thing, i guess, but it didn’t change anything. maybe i’ll get a better grade because she feels sorry for me, but that’s it. didn’t bring battle back. didn’t strangle kevin with one of his guitar strings.

dominant feeling: anger, at self, this was supposed to be a summer class in archaeology, not some idiotic soap opera mess. [except that no soap operas would have a love affair between girls as a storyline, unless one of us died tragically in a car crash, and then the other one was comforted in her grief by some charming young man.]

damn it.

this isn’t helping.

I close my notebook. Perhaps, in honor of Doug, I should climb the big tree in the courtyard, though I have no bowl to smoke.

It’s chilly tonight, though. It doesn’t feel like summer at all. I’ll need my sweater.

I have my hand on the sweater before I remember what’s underneath it.

I remember I thought it felt like a rope. But is it enough rope to hang myself? God, Nic, stop being so melodramatic. I lift out Battle’s braid along with my sweater. I didn’t use much of it to make the Empress. She’s under the sweater, too.

I study archaeology. They’re artifacts.

I open my notebook again, and turn to a blank page. Since Battle left me, I’ve been playing my viola a lot, but I haven’t drawn at all, except for class. I put the mass of hair and the Empress on my bed, and begin to sketch them.

Really, all the braid is, is pattern. The subtle gradations of color, the way it catches the light, the curves created by the braiding. If I squint my eyes just right, I can forget it was ever attached to someone I love.

Except for that very faint scent of lavender.

Suddenly there’s a very loud banging on my door. “Open up, in the name of the law!” It’s Katrina.

“Hold on,” I say, picking up the braid and the Empress and tossing them back into the drawer. “Okay, come in, what’s up?”

“I’tell you what’s up, what’s up is that we are going to go commit an act of sabotage right now and ‘we’
does
in fact mean you
and
me
and
Battle, and I don’t care how angsty you feel, I am sick of dealing with your bullshit, you are going to go and get her right now, or else I will stand here and sing ‘Climb Every Mountain’ over and over and over again, until you go
insane
!”

“I thought you still had that massive programming project,” I say.

“Well! You thought wrong, little missy! I’ve left all that behind me! Carl Sutter the Evil Toad can just kiss my big fat hairy white
butt
!”

Her eyes are red-rimmed with dark circles under them, her hair is standing on end. Her “If I Had Known Grand-children Were So Much Fun, I Would Have Had Them First” T-shirt looks like she’s been wearing it for days.

“How long have you been awake, Katrina?”

She looks at her giant digital watch. “Thirty-seven hours, twenty-three minutes, and fourteen! fifteen! sixteen! seconds! Now it’seventeen! Why do you ask? Why aren’t you going to get Battle? Climb . . .. eeeee-vr’y moun-tain! Ford . . .. eeee-vr’y streeeeeem!”

I hear doors opening all up and down the hall. “Shut up!” someone yells.

“Would it be completely useless for me to ask you to calm down?” I ask.

“Yes! It would! That was perceptive! You! Are! So! Perceptive! That it’s! Amazing!” She sounds like somebody in a Lynda Barry cartoon.

“Katrina, are you on drugs?”

“No! I just get high on life! And America! Are you going to go get Battle or not? FO-LLOW EEEEV’RY RAIN-BOW!!”

Katrina can’t sing. At all.

“Shut up, just for a second! What’s really going on?”

“Nothing’s going
on
! I’m going
off
! Pow! Like a bomb!”

“Is this some bizarre strategy to get me to talk to Battle?”

“Oh, you, you, you, why does everything always have to be about
you
? Daaarr-ling, we don’t have much time! Carpe carpem!
Seize
the carp!”

“So why don’t you come with me to get Battle?”

“Because, silly—somebody has to get the supplies together! I’m off! Be at my room in ten minutes, with Battle, or I’ll come back here and start in on the John Denver!”

She flounces out of the room.

Now what?

Even if I was going to go along with this psychotic episode Katrina seems to be having, it’s past midnight. Battles’s probably asleep.

Guess you’ll just have to wake her up, then!
Katrina’s voice says in my head.

Well—what the hell. What do I have to lose?

It’s not like she can
leave
me.

Deus ex Katrina.

Just act natural, I think as I knock on the door, with my tell-tale heart beating loudly enough to wake Poe from the dead.

The door opens. She’s holding the book I gave her.

“Hi . . . did I wake you?”

She shakes her head. Her hair’s longer, almost to crew-cut length. She looks tired.

“Katrina wants us for something. She wouldn’t explain what. She’s been up for almost two days straight, and she’s pretty scary right now,” I sound astonishingly normal.

“All right.” So does she. “Let me put some pants on.” She stands in the doorway for a minute, obviously debating whether she should invite me in.

“I’ll wait.”

I look at the carpet. It’s dull gray with tiny black diamonds. Probably they picked it because they thought it wouldn’t show the dirt. I wonder how many diamonds there are per square foot.

“Okay, let’s go.” She’s wearing the jodhpurs that she wore the night we went to the woods.

Don’t look at
her
, doofus. Look at all those fascinating tiny black diamonds on the carpet.

The distance between Battle’s room and Katrina’s has never seemed so far.

I’m so relieved when get to her door that I don’t hear it immediately.

“All right, we’re here, what do you want us to do?” I call out.

“I don’t think she wants us to do anything. Listen,” says Battle.

BOOK: Empress of the World

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