The Black Hour (15 page)

James apparently knew something of Phillip’s own delicate spots. Phillip’s mouth twitched with advice withheld. “Well. I’m here if you need me.”

“If I ever need you,” James said. “I might actually think about killing myself.”

“That’s the exact thing I’m supposed to report. But I won’t. I know you’re just saying it to—”

Hurt me.
I heard the words as though he’d actually said them. James snorted.

Phillip picked up his book bag. He seemed to want a parting shot. He took a deep breath.

“Good to run into you again,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea—”

“See you around,” I said.

“Fine. James, I’m here if you ever need me. Sincerely.” He stalked through the lounge, stopped to shove a handful of brochures into the magazine rack, and was gone.

James and I sat in the silence for a minute or two. I could still hear the TV and, past that, a couple of guys shouting and horsing around in the hall.

“Jesus,” I said. “What a jackass.”

“Me or him?”

I hadn’t won James over. “Him. What did you do?”

“You know.” He shuffled the cards into a Vegas dealer’s bridge.

“I don’t.”

“Dr. Emmet.” He set the cards back on the table. “I didn’t know she would freak out.”

“About you?” Now I saw it as James had. The poor kid. Was there any reason to keep him in the dark? But he seemed so glum and pink. “She didn’t freak out about you.”

“Why else?”

Actually, I wasn’t sure. We hadn’t talked about it. I wondered now if we ever would. In some ways, Dr. Emmet had pulled me closer, letting me see behind the curtain—but I didn’t know what I was seeing or understand it.

“I guess she was—overwhelmed or something. She got hurt last year, you know.”

James blinked at me. “I heard.”

“Sorry. I know—I mean, I guess it’s no secret that your friend—”

“He was no friend of mine.” James stood up. “Those dipshits made me miss dinner.”

He seemed so young, forlorn. Chubby. I hated to assume that food was important to him, but the evidence was strong. “Do you want to order a pizza?” I said. “I’ll treat.”

He looked me up and down, until I realized he was calculating his own assumptions. I must not have added up to much. “I’ll pay,” he said. “You probably need what money you have.”

James’s room turned out to be the room next to the lounge. When he opened the door, a giant flat-screen TV mounted to the wall exploded in sound: gunshots, screeching tires. James stopped in front of the screen, sniffed at the mayhem, and walked to a desk in the corner where a laptop glowed to life as soon as he touched it. The room was big for student living. Two beds were pushed together in front of the screen. A pile of clothes spilled out of the open closet door. A corner suite, the room had its own bathroom and a double helping of wide windows. The curtains had been pulled back to reveal the dark branches of a tree outside.

“Nice place,” I said.

“You know it’s a myth, right? That students whose roommates kill themselves get a single the next year? For free? Total lie. My dad had to back up the truck on this one.”

The trash was topped with an empty pizza box. I gestured toward it. “It’s OK if you’d rather have something else.”

“I get pizza all the time. The food here is awful.”

I’d only eaten a couple of meals in the dining halls—I ate ramen noodles most of the time—and I hadn’t found the food bad. James had different standards. Higher—except he’d seemed sad to miss food he’d written off as bad.

“Did you and Leonard order pizza a lot?”

“That was sloppy.”

“What?” But I knew what he meant. I was no—I couldn’t even think of a detective. Sherlock Holmes. Was that a real person? I was no Sherlock Holmes.

He held up a single finger, his cell phone to his ear. “Hey, Quinton three hundred-thirty. The usual.” He glanced at me. “Make that two usuals.”

I went to the window. The tree blocked most of the view James’s father had paid piles of money for. He couldn’t see the lake or the skyline of Chicago, any of the stuff from the brochure. Down below, a walking path led away from Quinton Hall and toward my apartment. Dale Hall peeked out of the trees, a light on in one second-floor window. If I hadn’t dropped Dr. Emmet at home myself, I might have wondered.

“At my old school,” I said. “The rumor was that you got a four-point-oh. Automatically.”

“For a roommate?”

“Yeah. My roommate was a dick. He never would have killed himself. He didn’t want to hold me back, though. If I had the inclination.” I felt as though I were doing lines from a script, but this was actually true. My freshman roommate was the one who told me the rumor.
If you kill yourself, I get on the dean’s list.
He hadn’t started a campaign or anything, but when he went on academic probation that winter, I knew what he was thinking.

“I already had a four-oh, and I’d have a single this year anyway,” James said. “I hated Leo. He could have saved himself the trouble.”

“You hated him?”

“Don’t get excited, Matlock.” James sat back in his chair and turned his eyes to the TV. “He shot himself. But yeah. He was a loser.”

James Baker had some nerve calling someone else a loser. What qualities would make Leonard—Leo?—unworthy of James’s friendship? “Was he poor?”

“I have no idea. Probably not—RB’s not for charity cases, is it?” He glanced at me, looked me up and down, shrugged. “Not usually, anyway. He cried.”

“He—cried? When?”

“All the time, I mean. He cried all the time.”

I’d assumed that Leo had emotional problems—you didn’t raise a gun to your own head without a certain level of anxiety—but this was news I hadn’t heard anywhere else. “About what?”

James finally glanced from the screen, surprised. “How well do you think I knew him? Jesus.”

“You lived with him—”

“For less than two months, man. Random freshman roommate assignment, I pull the short straw, and ten weeks of listening to him cry later, I’m that guy. Forever. I didn’t know him, and I didn’t want to.”

“Why did you switch to Dr. Emmet’s class?” I said.

He’d been pumping himself up, gaining against what little leverage I’d come in with. Now he faltered. “Coincidence.”

“Nope. Different class on Monday, but then your name shows up—”

“Fine. I wanted to see what she was about. Leo killed himself over her, right? I wanted to catch a glimpse before I dropped the class. Dropped both the classes. Man, it’s so
boring
—”

“Why do you think Leo killed himself over her?”

“That’s what everyone says.”

“Did he ever mention her?”

Something ka-boomed on TV. We both turned to watch a bus crash into a building. “That’s filmed in Chicago,” James said. “See that high-rise? Downtown on the river.”

“I haven’t been downtown yet.”

“You should go,” he said. I had a vision of James’s life just then. Things were both incredibly easy and incredibly difficult for him, but he didn’t care how anyone else lived. He didn’t like people enough to live with a roommate or to take a single class on how they lived and interacted. Leo, me, any other human. No one else was worth his notice.

“Did Leo ever mention Dr. Emmet?”

“Not to me. But I wasn’t his best friend.”

My pulse quickened. “Who was his best friend?”

“He didn’t have one.” James didn’t even glance up from the flaming bus. “As far as I could tell, he didn’t have any friends at all.”

I didn’t stay for the pizza. James hardly noticed I was going. No one stopped me on the way out to see who I was or what I was doing there, which was lucky since I’d lost track of the answers. Dr. Emmet would be relieved to hear that James had no ulterior motives. I had done the thing I’d offered to do.

But still, I felt as though I’d left something unfinished.

I found the stairs down to the lobby and my way outside. The path back to my apartment took me under James’s window, lit by the shaking white light of bus explosions.

After only a couple of steps toward home, I stopped. The last thing I wanted was to go up to my room and find Kendall there. To hear all the ways in which I failed his esteem today.

A breeze blew in from the lake. I turned that way, pulling up the collar on my fleece. The shore was mostly deserted, except for some girls walking in close formation, then a couple holding hands. The guy blinked at me, ready if I turned out to be a challenge. I hadn’t known how suspicious wandering in the dark could be. Were my clothes really that bad?

Rothbert’s land grant came to an abrupt stop at the lake’s edge, a twenty-foot cliff over a meager beach below. There was a dock somewhere, I’d heard. I peered over the edge. Darkness, a weak tide. One tiny slip, and how long would it take for someone to notice I hadn’t made it back?

The hairs on the back of my neck rose. What if? There was something attractive about it. Student missing. The police called. Prayer vigils and search parties.

I toed the edge of the grass, easing my weight over until I felt the ground give. My foot slid a few inches down the embankment, and I landed on my ass, fists full of long grass.

“Hey,” someone said. A jogger, strips of reflective material up his arms and legs. In the near dark, he looked like a stick figure. “Are you OK?”

“Me? I’m fine.”

He didn’t believe me, but why would he? I stood, dusted my hands off, and started back toward town, my pace picking up.

I cut through the neighborhood of old houses west of campus. The houses here seemed built out of the bedrock, tall and watching. Some of them were built luxurious, others severe and frowning toward the sprawling mess of the college. Windows glowed behind thin curtains. I caught a movement inside one house and wondered what it would be like to live there, to be in Willetson under another, permanent arrangement. To know that you had finally landed where you would stay.

A sudden memory came to me. My dad coming back from somewhere, opening the front door dressed in stiff clothes I’d never seen before. My mother waited to hear what he said, but I only wanted him to go away again. We’d been having a good time, my mother crawling with me under the fort we’d made with blankets and the cushions from the couch. My lips stung from a Popsicle. I hadn’t cared what my dad had to say. Now that I cared, I couldn’t recall what the verdict had been, what words my mother waited to hear.

When was this? When had my dad ever owned a suit? The longer I tried to pry the memory out, the deeper it dug in. I turned to look at another twilit house, imagining the welcome mats just inside, other families waiting for arrivals, other dads coming home with disappointment on their faces—

Not in the cards. That’s what he’d said. Whatever that meant.

The Mill was busy. Wednesday was not too soon to start the weekend. Most of the people crowding the bar and the tables at the front looked younger than I was, too young to be carrying legitimate IDs. A few of them even wore Rothbert-red shirts. No one cared. They had found themselves a boisterous, fun time here at the Mill, as dark and local as it had seemed to me yesterday.

I worked myself toward the bar in increments, rewarded at last when two girls sitting at the bar stood and left. I grabbed one of the stools and put my back between me and everyone else. The tremendous noise made me wonder if I’d stumbled into a different bar altogether, if I shouldn’t squeeze back outside and go home. Kendall would be there, but here I was crushed into a narrow room full of Kendalls.