The Black Hour (8 page)

Some of these people were likely here because they hadn’t found a job with their first degrees. Some of them might want to save themselves the trouble and go turn in an application at Macy’s.

But then I had to turn that thought inward and wonder if I wasn’t the one wasting my time. Hadn’t my dad as much as said so? Hadn’t I already been wrong about so much, including the moral character of at least one girl my age?

“In short,” said the professor, and we all snapped to attention because his voice rang of dismissal. “In short, methodology is the hook on which you should hang your cap.”

Whatever he said next, he said to his belly and shoes. The class sank back into their seats.

I’d been giving some thought to methodology in regards to my study of Dr. Emmet—although my problem at this point wasn’t how to conduct a study. I thought I could probably figure out how to study her if I knew what result I hoped to find. But that didn’t sound very scientific.

I raised my hand.

The professor stopped in mid-mumble and looked up from his gut. He seemed surprised that any of us were still in the room. “Yes, uh?”

“Nathaniel Barber, sir.”

“Professor Van Meter, Mr. Barber. Fine to meet your acquaintance.” His head nodded down but buoyed back up in time so that I also heard the next bit. “Do you in fact come from a long line of hair-trimming professionals?”

The class shuffled in their seats. The two girls glanced over, took a look at my hair. “No, sir. I don’t believe I do.”

“From a long line of sociologists, perhaps?”

My dad’s dad had been a farmer, but that hardly seemed the sort of thing I wanted to say to my entire class of cohorts on the first night of class. We had to study side by side for the next several years and compete with one another in ways I didn’t understand yet. “I suppose you could say that I have some field researchers in my family tree, sir.”

“A leg up, then, Mr. Barber. Now what could be troubling you so early in the semester?”

“I wondered, Professor, how you choose your method of study if you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

To my surprise, the rest of the class turned from me to Professor Van Meter to hear what he’d say.

He shook his head. “Dear Mr. Barber. The point isn’t necessarily to choose what you’re looking for, but to choose to
look
. If you choose to look in a way that is serious, consistent,
methodical
, and scientific, you will find. If you look with open eyes and open mind, Mr.
Barber
, you will find a line of questioning that you can
expand
and
explore
.”

This seemed wise and impassioned enough to applaud, but then I wasn’t quite sure what I’d learned. Except that it seemed I could start my study of Dr. Emmet at any place and time that made sense, even if I didn’t know what I hoped to discover.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Of course, of course.” The professor tucked his chin into his chest and was silent. When his head rose again, he said, as clearly as anything he’d said so far, “Class dismissed.”

As we gathered our materials, the professor stood, put his chin down, and left the room.

“Whatever you did and however you did it, do it again next week,” said one of the girls.

“What?”

The guy on the other side of me clapped me on the shoulder. “We’re done a half hour early, buddy. You can ask a question any time you like.”

“It’s quarter draft night at Nick’s,” one girl said to the other. They both had bronze-y blonde hair in ponytails. They looked like they’d been called in to audition for the same role. “You coming?”

She was looking at me. I had time to think about all the times I’d ever wished for a girl to look in my direction, all the times since Bryn had told me to drive back home that I’d wanted someone, too, so I could send a photo to Bryn of a different girl in a different bikini. I couldn’t think of what to say. Yes, as an answer, didn’t occur to me.

“I have to study,” I said.

“Classes just started,” the other girl said, and in her voice I heard the judgment that would stick. I’d missed my chance to be the guy who finagled a break for all of us by asking a question. That ship had sailed. Now I was the guy who read the book before it was assigned. These two qualities were mutually exclusive. In my head, I heard what Kendall would have said.
Your problem is you’re a shithead.

“I have—a special project,” I said.

The three of them all turned toward me. I hadn’t won the first girl back. She was the prettier of the two, shorter and curvier, and her eyes were wide and blue.

The other girl sneered. “I bet,” she said, her voice suggesting that my special project might involve nudie magazines and a box of tissues.

“Didn’t you just start the program, too?” the cuter girl asked.

I wished I hadn’t mentioned the project. I really was a shithead.

“Then how are you doing research already?” the guy said. He was tall, lean, and liquid in the joints, the kind of guy Kendall wanted to be but wasn’t. A surfer or a skateboarder in body, and a sociology major at heart? I wasn’t buying it. I wondered how many med schools he didn’t get into before ending up here.

“Did you get an assistantship?” said the girl with the blue eyes. I wanted her to keep looking at me, to try one more time to ask me to come with them.

“Yeah,” I said, gulping hard. “Yes. I’m assisting Dr. Amelia Emmet.”

She gasped. “That poor woman.”

“The one on the front page of the
Reader
today,” the guy said, nodding at me with something like approval.

“Didn’t her last boyfriend try to kill her or something?” the other girl said.

“It was her student,” the guy said.

“No,” I said. My voice a strange croak that shut them all up. “It was—I mean, he was a student, but not her student. That’s the really interesting part.”

But I had lost the cute girl again. She stared at me in horror. “What are you doing for your—project?”

Nothing I could say would rescue me. Everyone else in the class had gone, and the hallway beyond rang silent in the absence of their retreating steps. Maybe a lie would have sounded better, but I decided, without the thought I usually liked to put into things, on the truth.

“I don’t know what I’ll be doing yet.”

The girls exchanged glances and hurried to gather their purses and books.

The guy looked me up and down. “You might want to ask,” he said, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “Before it turns out to be something you’re going to want to kill her for.”

My second class of the semester would be Dr. Emmet’s. I wanted to be prepared. I was her assistant, wasn’t I? Well, I still thought I might be, even though I had no idea what that meant and hadn’t seen or talked to her since that day in her office.

I lay in my bed with my feet hanging off the end and reread the
Rothbert Reader
clipping from the day before. The story wasn’t much of a story. She was alive, which everyone knew, and she was back on campus. From the photo, if you were paying attention, you could tell that she hoped the photographer and perhaps everyone else in the world would drop dead. That was the only news—she was on campus, and, implied, maybe you don’t want to mess with her.

“Are you beating off to that?” Kendall called from his bunk.

“You’re such a juvenile.”

“Let me have it, then.”

“I need it for reference.”

“For reference, my dick,” he said. “I mean,
your
dick.”

“Stop discussing my dick, Kendall, or people will get ideas.”

The good thing about sophomores: they still cared what people thought. He shut up, flopped around in his bed for a while and, after a few minutes, began to snore.

He was still asleep when I came back from the communal bathroom down the hall. I dressed silently, then slipped out. Inside my backpack, the file on Dr. Emmet. Time to start my study.

I hadn’t seen the lake yet, but the path I chose through campus afforded a glimpse of the sparkling surface in the breaks between buildings and trees. I had selected Rothbert based on the faculty—
one
faculty member—and hadn’t even realized the campus bumped against Lake Michigan. But now the water seemed like a benefit directly from a brochure I hadn’t read. Kendall had already been to the beach to scout for girls. This was a good university—I hoped girls here hung out at the library.

The library. I stopped and searched around for a landmark, only to find that I’d walked all the way to the south entrance to campus. A larger-than-life statue of someone I didn’t recognize stood at the edge of the walk, his bronze hand gesturing benevolently. Somehow I’d already passed the library. I unhitched my backpack to find my map.

“Anything we can help you with?”

On the other side of the statue sat a table and three students. Behind them, a long bulletin board displayed the work of the student groups’ postering crews. The Christian group, the feminists, the ultimate Frisbee kids. I remembered this part of the experience, when students herded themselves into smaller and smaller groups. Frats, honor societies, film clubs, dance and improv troupes, mock UNs and student government.

One of the guys waved his hand. “Over here. Tough week?”

“No,” I said. “My week has been fine.”

“Look, take a magnet, will you? Stick it on your fridge.” The guy had a wide grin and slick hair like someone selling unwieldy kitchen appliances on late-night TV.

“I don’t have a fridge.” Anything I put in the shared kitchen would be fair game, I’d learned that much.

“Take a card then, at least. And a pen.”

“We have to pass this stuff out before we can stop sitting here,” another student said. This one had a bored face, a bored voice. He was slumped behind the table as though he’d been handcuffed there.

“Shut up,” the girl said.

“I have class at eleven-fifteen,” the unhappy guy said. “I have a deadline.”

I felt a little sorry for them and definitely a bit superior. I could skip it this time—the forced camaraderie, the buttons, the posters, the trying to make friends. I’d met Bryn by joining a writing group. She was a poet. Sort of. But that was a mistake I didn’t have to make this time. This time, I wasn’t a student. I was a scholar.

“Give me a card or whatever,” I said.

The salesman hopped up and gathered a handful of things from the table. “A button. Two pens. I’ll give you a magnet, too. Give it away to a troubled friend.”

I should have been flattered that he thought I had friends. In my imagination, a crew of friends grew up around me, and I was offended for them.

He dumped the loot into a baggie and held it out to me. “We’re from Psychological Services. You ever have a really bad day, you can call the number on the pen. And the card. And the button.”

Psychological services. The suicide watch, he meant. I hardly knew what that meant as a student organization, but I knew what it meant to need watching.

That night, after a twenty-four-hour round trip to have my heart broken, after Bryn—I hated myself for even remembering that night, but now I couldn’t stop it. How I’d searched the medicine cabinet of our house to see what options I had. How the steak knives we never sharpened had glinted in their drawer. How’d I’d wanted to tear myself to pieces, leap from the top of the house, anything to make the rush of fear and loneliness stop.

The guy tilted his head a millimeter. “You OK?”

He didn’t really think we’d share a moment here under this statue. This was a show for the others, who were starting to exchange glances.

“Sure. Do you know where the library is?”

“You a freshman?”

“
No
. I’m a graduate student in sociology.”

“Oh. Trudie’s majoring in psychology.” He waved for the girl.

“It’s not the same thing,” I said.

“I’m Phillip.”

“Great,” I said. Trudie arrived. She had pigtails. “Great.”

“Trudie, this is—”

“Nathaniel.” I wish I were the kind of guy who thought on his feet. Bram Stoker. Amadeus Mozart. Charlie Brown. Anything. Instead—“Nathaniel Barber.”

“Good to meet you,” Trudie said.

“I’m fine,” I said.

They both stared at me.

“I was just thinking about—maybe volunteering or something,” I said.

“That is such a
great idea
,” Phillip said. Trudie nodded like a trained monkey at his side.

“
Great
idea,” she said.

“I lead all the volunteer training,” Phillip said. “Just stop by or—”

“I’ll call.” By now I just wanted to get away from them.

“Great,” he said. “You have our number.”

“I do?”

His smile diminished a watt. The guy left alone at the table threw back his head and laughed.

Trudie turned on him. “Shut up, Win.” She flicked her hand at the statue. “You’re letting down the founding father.” He flipped her off.

“Oh, right,” I said. “I do. On the—magnet.” I raised the baggie, like a tip of a hat. “The library?”