Laura Kasischke - The Raising

She said, “Dad and I are taking Grandpa to Dumplings tomorrow. We’ll miss you.”

“Have a strudel for me,” Perry said. “I’ll miss you guys, too. Tell Grandpa hi.”

“Do you ever see Nicole Werner down there? I saw her mom at the grocery store the other day, and she said Nicole was liking school.”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “I see her all the time. She lives one floor down, and we’re in a study group. With our roommates. She’s fine.”

“Any other girls there, sweetie?”

Perry cleared his throat. “Well, there are a lot of other girls here, Mom.”

Perry’s mother laughed softly. “Ha, ha, smart aleck,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

Nicole’s roommate, Josie, flashed through his mind—the kind of girl he didn’t like. When she looked at you, she started with your shoes before deciding whether or not to bother with the rest of you. And why she was bothering with their study group, Perry didn’t know, except that maybe she was interested in Craig. Every one of her classes was something she’d already taken at the private high school she’d attended in Grosse Isle. She just rolled her eyes at her textbooks when she opened them, and said, “ This again.”

“No. No girls, Mom,” Perry said.

“Well, your mama loves you. Why would you need any girls?”

She laughed again, and Perry tried to laugh, too.

“I talked to Mary the other day,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Just on the phone. She called to say hi. See how you were doing.”

Perry snorted.

“Now, Perry, really. That’s the reason she called, and I can’t just hang up on her, you know. I feel sorry for that girl.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Yeah, well, what?”

“Yeah, well, she’s the one who dumped me, Mom. Shouldn’t I be the one you feel sorry for?”

“I would, Perry, if you weren’t down there starting your whole life when she’s up here, stuck forever, having ruined her own.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Well, I think we’ve had this conversation before, honey. I only told you I’d spoken to her because I thought you’d want to know.”

“I do. I did. It’s okay, Mom. How pregnant is she?”

“Four months.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right.”

Of course.

For three years , dating Perry, Mary had virtuously clung to her virginity, never wavering in her commitment to save herself for their wedding night. Within two months of dating Pete Gerristsen, though, she was having his baby whether Pete liked it or not.

The moon followed Perry all the way back to Godwin Hall, and caused him to cast a long foreshadow stretching so far ahead that it looked like a redwood or a telephone pole was meandering down the sidewalk. There was a smell to this town, completely different from the smell of Bad Axe. Carbon emissions maybe? Not that Bad Axe didn’t have cars and busses and trucks, but not centralized, like this. Not blocks and blocks of cars, parking garages, bus stops.

Perry had spent his whole life in Bad Axe, and even the summer camp he’d gone to, deep in the Hiawatha National Forest, had been within eighty miles of his own front door. He’d traveled, of course. A trip every year with his parents. Nova Scotia. Gettysburg. Washington, D.C. They’d gone to Mexico for spring break a few years before. But he’d never lived anywhere else. And, already, after only a couple of weeks in this college town, he was beginning to see how some of the ways he’d assumed the world worked everywhere were not the ways they worked at all.

Perry kept walking at a steady pace, following his own shadow until he’d crossed the whole campus and was back at the dorm.

“Hey.”

She was standing in the entryway of Godwin Hall:

Nicole Werner, wearing jeans and a dark, bulky sweatshirt. Her hair wasn’t in the usual ponytail, and looked uncombed, a bit frayed at the ends around her shoulders. He hadn’t recognized her as he walked across the courtyard, and had almost walked past her without noticing. A few other girls were sitting on the cement stairs. One was talking on a cell phone. Another was smoking a cigarette. They didn’t seem to be with Nicole.

“Hi, Nicole.”

She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, tilted her head, and said, “How are you, Perry?”

“Great,” Perry said. “You?”

She shrugged. Her shoulders looked narrower than he thought he remembered. In high school, she’d played volleyball, and he remembered being surprised, seeing her in her uniform in the gym one afternoon their junior year, that she was so muscular—not in a bad way, just sort of sturdy, sinewy, which he wouldn’t have expected from such a slender girl.

But tonight, on the front steps of Godwin Honors Hall, Nicole looked like a kid. Like a waif , he thought. And the baggy sweatshirt. What was with that? She’d been one of the best-dressed girls at Bad Axe High, which was saying something. You might think that in a small town like that, girls wouldn’t have much fashion sense. But the Bad Axe High girls, most of them anyway, did. They’d drive every weekend the two hours to Birch Run to go to the outlet malls, and come back wearing Calvin Klein and those other designers, looking like models, and Nicole had definitely been one of those. And up until now, when he’d seen her around campus, she’d seemed to be carrying on the tradition. Even when they were just meeting in the lounge for study group, she’d been in a neat blouse or sweater. One night, she’d even worn a skirt and sandals with heels.

Nicole wrapped her arms around herself. She looked down at her feet, which Perry was surprised to see were bare.

“I’m not so great, I guess,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Perry thought maybe she meant she had the flu or something. She looked like she had the flu, but maybe that was just the harsh electric light over the stairs.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m having adjustment issues,” she said.

“To college?” he asked.

She nodded, and made a puckery little expression with her lips. Perry hoped she wasn’t going to cry. What was he supposed to do if she did? He didn’t have a handkerchief on him, and he couldn’t imagine giving her his shoulder, or putting his arm around her. He’d have to just stand there like an idiot, saying stupid things, until she stopped.

Unable to think of anything else to say, Perry shrugged and said, “Yeah, well. It’s not like high school.”

“Not that high school was so great,” Nicole said.

“You always seemed pretty happy.”

“I did?” She looked up at him with what appeared to be genuine surprise.

“Well. I don’t know,” Perry said. “Weren’t you?”

“Well, I guess it was better than this,” she said, looking out at the courtyard of Godwin Honors Hall. “But I hated it.”

Perry snorted a little. He couldn’t help it. He pictured Nicole in that bright floral dress, accepting the Ramsey Luke Scholarship from Mr. Krug, then climbing the step to the lectern to deliver her valedictorian speech about the importance of being “first and foremost moral people.”

Nicole seemed to have heard the little involuntary sound he’d made, and her eyebrows sprang up. “What?” she asked, locking her eyes onto his.

Perry looked away fast, down at his own shadow stretched between them. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, running a hand over the top of his head. “It’s just that… well, you were the queen of the school, Nicole. You did everything , or won everything, or were president of it. What wasn’t to like?”

She let her arms drop to her sides. Her eyes seemed to be pooling with tears.