The Black Hour (14 page)

She’d skipped right past Nathan to Nath.

I felt like a different person, the kind of guy people would call Nath. Nath—now that I’d heard it coming out of Dr. Emmet’s mouth, that’s exactly who I was. I practiced being Nath. Nath Barber, walking across campus. Nath Barber, holding the door of the student center for a couple of cute girls coming out, a backward look to see the flip side. Nath Barber, checking the lobby scene of one of the dorms like I belonged. Only a few guys sat watching something loud on the lounge TV. A girl leaned on her elbows at the front desk, thumbing furiously at her phone.

“Excuse me,” I said.

The girl looked up against her will.

“Hi.”

Her expression stayed blank. Be cool, Dr. Emmet had said. Probably she hadn’t realized how tall an order this would be. Nath Barber, playing it cool. “Hi, I’m wondering if you know how to—”

And then I realized I couldn’t ask what I was about to ask.

How did I find out which student had been roommates with the kid who’d unloaded a gun on a professor last year? The question alone would put me outside the reach of discreet and way on the other side of cool.

The girl glared. Her black hair grew in careful spikes against her forehead and cheeks. She looked like she was emerging from a mouthful of black teeth.

“Is there a campus directory? For students, I mean?”

The girl sighed. “They put one out every year. But it takes a while?” she said. “We only have the one from last year.”

“That’s it,” I said. I must have sounded too happy. She kept her phone close as she scrounged through a couple of drawers, never turning her back on me. At last she brought a slim booklet to the desk.

“Not supposed to let it leave the desk,” she said.

Be cool. I reached over and slid the booklet away from her. “I’ll just borrow it
here
, then.”

I pulled a stool over to sit across from her and opened the book between us. She dragged her own stool back from the desk and resumed tapping the phone, but with more muscle. Her friends would hear about me.

The directory navigated easily. Within a minute I’d located Leonard Lehane’s name, mailbox number in Quinton Hall, and the phone number he had used last year. Under the surveillance of the desk clerk, I took a notebook and pen out of my backpack and copied down the information. Then I turned to the B’s and found James Baker. Sure enough, he’d lived in Quinton Hall, too. He had a different mailbox number—I took this down in my notebook—but the same phone number.

I closed the directory and looked at my notes. Nothing to do but call. The desk phone sat inches from my hand. “Can I use the phone?”

I didn’t wait to be told the rules.

Someone answered on the first ring. “Yo.”

“Can I speak to James, please?”

“Who?”

“James Baker?”

“He doesn’t—oh.” His voice dropped. “I know who you mean. He’s third-floor. Got a single this year.”

A single room, as opposed to the troublesome doubles that most underclassmen lived in. A student who’d lived through his roommate’s suicide could probably count on some privacy the next year.

I thanked the kid and hung up.

I reached for the directory again and flipped through it until I found a campus map. The little buildings were color-coded and labeled; Quinton Hall was two candy-colored squares away from where I sat.

The girl didn’t look up when I slid the directory back across the desk. It occurred to me that she must have lived through Dr. Emmet’s shooting—well, not lived through it, since she’d probably been across campus or behind this very desk. Or under it, texting her last words.

I didn’t have the nerve to ask what it had been like. How would I ever be able to do field research?

I picked up my pack, thanked her, and struck out through the lobby to the front doors and back outside.

Campus was quiet, but not yet dark. Night classes were in session, but it was still too early for the revelers to be out. I hadn’t been at Rothbert long enough to know what the drinking week looked like. Maybe Wednesday was too early to start. I thought longingly of the tight booths at the Mill, where Cara’s thigh had brushed up against mine the night before. Cara, Julia, Ryan, even the guy with motorcycle boots—we’d piled into the horseshoe-shaped bench around a single table.

“Do you think she really needs that cane? I heard—”

“She got shot through the gut, man. That’s got to hurt.”

I’d said as little as possible, thinking of Dr. Van Meter’s advice. I only had to decide to pay attention. I studied each peer’s face as best I could. Ryan seemed bored. Cara tapped her foot under the table. Julia leaned forward on her elbows, fueling the fire. “Don’t you think she must have been banging that kid?”

She must have scored near-perfect on her graduate exams to get into Rothbert, but this was the best she could do.

But then Ryan turned to me. “Hey, what did she want from you?”

The conversation had turned from sleeping with the professor to my relationship with Dr. Emmet much too quickly. The rest of them went silent.

“I’m her grad assistant,” I said. They waited. “I picked up her cane for her.”

“That is so sad,” Cara said. “That poor woman.”

Dr. Emmet would’ve kicked her ass for saying so, but I liked Cara even more. They left me alone for the rest of the night. Somehow, I’d managed to pass some test I hadn’t signed up for. A different kind of entrance exam.

Or maybe they were all there right now, this time talking about me.

I found Quinton Hall with no trouble and went inside. When I couldn’t locate the stairs, I pressed the elevator button. A couple of students came to wait with me. I let them get into the car first, and one of them obliged by pulling out a key card. All I had to do was pretend to reach for my wallet, let the kid wave me off. “What floor?” he said.

“Three, thanks.”

I crossed my arms to keep from fidgeting, but the other students didn’t give me another second of attention. When the elevator stopped on the third floor, I stepped out as though I knew where I was going. When the doors closed behind me, I stopped and looked around.

If I belonged here, I would walk with purpose. Would I glance into rooms where the doors hung open? I started off, trying for casual, authoritative. Friendly. Trying for cool.

The hall was long and empty, most of the doors pulled shut. I could hear a few voices, a loud TV. The rooms I could see into were messy, unsettled. Still the first week of classes. These kids didn’t seem to know how to be so near one another yet. I started to feel nostalgic about dorm living. Until I remembered that, essentially, I still lived in one.

In one open door, a student sprawled across his skinny bed with a tiny TV propped between his feet. In another room, a guy leaned into his computer screen, his face lit blue. In another open door, a kid dangled from his loft bed, his phone to his ear.

No one stopped me or asked who I was. How easy was this? I thought of Leonard Lehane, hanging around the second floor of Dale Hall, no one asking him what he needed. What if I was someone with a grudge and gun? Bang, that kid loses his game. Bang, the guy hanging out of his bed falls to the floor.

I’d never even held a gun. That night, lost without Bryn, I’d been looking for a way out, but I’d had few options. The glint of metal in the cutlery drawer. Old cold remedies in the bathroom. I’d chickened out. Hands shaking so hard that the medicine cabinet door still didn’t hang right. Finding myself in the shaving mirror.
How could I disappear? I want to disappear.

I stopped. I hadn’t been sad, exactly. I’d been—mad. So mad that I couldn’t find the end of it.

If my dad was the kind of guy who owned guns, I might not be here. A gun would have worked.

The television voices led me to the end of the corridor, a room with its door open. As I got closer, I could see that the room wasn’t a bedroom but a lounge. A group of students played cards at a table in front of the far window. Their voices dropped when I came in. The air seemed electric, but it could have been my nerves. I’d pinned my hopes on flopping down in front of the TV to eavesdrop for a while, but the loud action sequences came from next door. This room had no TV.

Turning to leave, I noticed one of the students had a bright pink neck.

I plucked a magazine off a wall rack. The kid had his back to me, his head down, but I was convinced. It was James. I dropped into the least stained of the lounge chairs and turned a few pages.

“I’m not,” one of them said. I glanced over. James’s neck had gone violet. “I’m really not,” he said.

“We never said you were.” I couldn’t see the speaker past James, but he had a talk show voice, a soothing coo that made me edgy.

“That’s why you’re here, then, letting me win dollar poker?”

“We just dig you, James,” another student said. He didn’t seem to mean it. I peeked at them again. This kid seemed familiar: the way he slumped in his chair, his bored face. Another student from the 101 class, maybe. The guy on the other side of James leaned back and caught me watching. I turned back to the magazine but couldn’t focus. He seemed familiar, too. I’d only been in town a week. How many people had I even met, that they were all looking like someone I knew?

“Deal me out,” said the talk show host. He stood and stretched at the window.

“Come on,” one of the others said. “I’m down twenty bucks.”

“I’ll pay you twenty bucks to leave,” James said. “Each of you.”

“You heard the man,” the bored one said. “He knows his own mind.”

The guy at the window made a noise. The others stood and collected their things. James scraped the cards together. “I’ll go get some money.”

The bored one snickered.

“Let’s just call it even,” said the one at the window.

What was I doing? I flipped to the cover. A car magazine, of all things. I hadn’t learned anything, and I was trespassing. If I stayed much longer, I’d probably lose what little cool I had.

James said, “You guys can stop coming over—”

“Weren’t you going to give us a call?” the one at the window said, loud.

There was a pause in the televised violence next door. I glanced behind me, but they’d all gone. Only the talk show host, James, and me.

“You. Nathan.”

I turned. They were both looking at me.

“Nathaniel,” I said.

James’s face flowered red while I struggled with my memory until at last I placed the smooth-talking guy under the bronze statue with the genuflecting hand, handing me a baggie of magnets and pens. “Oh, right,” I said. “You’re the—”

James flinched.
Suicide watch.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember your name.” The other one, the droll one—he’d been under the statue that day, too, begging me to clear the table so he could go. I still had one of their pens in my backpack.

“Phillip,” the talk show host said. “And you’re in social work.”

“Sociology,” I said. James’s eyes shifted to the side uneasily. “Oh, hey. James, right? I just realized—aren’t you in my class?”

“I’m dropping.”

Phillip pulled his chair back out and sat. “Did you take on too much?”

“I have a shrink if I need to talk about my
feelings
,” James said.

“Are you dropping both sections of the class or only Dr. Emmet’s?” I asked.

James’s head whipped in my direction. I realized that I’d given away something I hadn’t needed to.

Phillip frowned. “Amelia Emmet?”

“The whole class,” James said. “It’s boring.”

“Seemed pretty exciting to me,” I said. “What with the teacher passing out.”

“You really shouldn’t be in that class,” Phillip said.

“No shit.” The kid’s face flared to magenta. “I’m dropping, I said.”

Phillip had been watching James, but now he turned to me, his hands clasped on the table. “Now what’s this about—fainting?”

“I just wanted to see her.” James spoke into his chest. “I won’t go back.”

“We really need to talk about your decision-making—”

“Shut the hell up, Phillip,” James said, lifting his chin so that he was loud and clear. He certainly did know his own mind. “I said I already have a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour friend. An
actual
psychologist.”