Laura Kasischke - The Raising

Up ahead, someone seemed to be swerving around. Shelly rubbed her left bicep with her right hand, holding the steering wheel with her left, and then changed biceps and hands.

She was solid. She was aching, but her arms were hard as rock. She was singing along with the radio. A country song about staying loyal to the U.S. of A. If you didn’t like it here, you could leave, the lyrics twanged—and Shelly’s brother’s black-and-white high school yearbook picture floated up out of the ten billion images in her unconscious.

He was smiling, getting ready to die in Vietnam.

Ahead, the red brake lights of the meandering vehicle seemed to be making elliptical dashes across the centerline, into the shoulder, back into the right lane, back over the yellow line. Kids, screwing around. Or a defensive driver avoiding something in the road. Too far ahead to worry too much about. Shelly was still singing along to the radio as she still rubbed her aching muscles. She was thinking of how tired she was of pretending to be everything she was not, and then wondering who she might be if she stopped pretending not to be what she was, when the car in front of her (fifty yards? Forty?) seemed to be plucked out of the moonlit darkness by a gigantic hand.

Gone .

Nicole Werner was standing outside the library shivering. She had a book pressed to her chest. She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. It was the last week in October, but it had been a weirdly hot, hazy day—the sky purple and fuzzy-looking behind the changed leaves—and although the sun had seemed far away, it had still managed to turn Craig and Perry’s dorm room into a sauna by two o’clock in the afternoon. They had a west-facing window.

Because it had seemed so much like summer, Craig, too, had left Godwin that afternoon in shorts and a T-shirt, but he’d been back to his room since then and gotten his jacket, which he was glad about, because as soon as the sun set, it felt like late autumn again. Obviously, Nicole Werner hadn’t been out of the library since the temperature had dropped.

“Hey, Nicole. What are you doing?” Craig asked when he reached her at the top of the steps. He’d already told Lucas to get lost.

(“Aw, man,” Lucas had said as Craig veered away from him, a clear diagonal cut across the Commons toward the column Nicole was leaning against. “You gonna dump me for that bitch?”)

Nicole looked up, and the light from inside the library fell on her flossy hair, which was pulled back in the usual ponytail but also looked mussed, as if she’d been rolling around in a stack of hay, or studying philosophy all night. Midterms had been over since the week before. Could she already be cramming for something else?

“I was waiting for Josie,” she said.

“Oh,” Craig said, trying not to display any particular reaction to the name Josie, but he couldn’t help taking a quick look over both shoulders to make sure she wasn’t there. “Here,” he said to Nicole. He took off his jean jacket and handed it to her. He would have preferred to step around and drape it over her shoulders (a gesture he felt certain he must have seen made by men in movies, since it wasn’t the kind of thing his father would have done for his mother), but he found himself unable to step into the circle of light in which Nicole Werner stood.

Nicole balanced her book on her hip with one hand, took the jacket from him with the other. “Thanks, Craig,” she said. “Wow!”

“I’m not cold,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. Instead of sounding chivalrous, now he sounded like he’d been looking around for a coat rack and had happened to run into her.

“Well, I’m freezing,” Nicole said, stuffing her arms into his jacket. “I was so stupid leaving the dorm like this. I guess I thought I’d be back for dinner, but then I got obsessed with this stupid paper, and ended up just eating one of those disgusting sandwiches out of the vending machine. I had no idea how cold it had gotten.”

“Yeah,” Craig said. “When’s your paper due?”

“Couple of weeks,” she said.

He couldn’t help opening his mouth and eyes in astonishment. “And you’re working on it already ?”

Nicole laughed, rolled her eyes, and then widened them, mimicking him. “ Yeah ,” she said. “College is hard for some of us, Craig. Just because you’re one of those guys who just sails through everything with no problems…”

Craig considered correcting her, but decided not to. He shrugged.

“Perry says you just sort of open your book, and close it, and you’re done. Believe me, I wish I could get away with that.”

Craig was ready to get this part of the conversation over with. He remembered the clammy handshake Dean Fleming had given him in Chez Vin that first night, and the few phony sentences the dean had managed to stammer out about how great it was to have his old friend’s son in the Honors College, pretending it was a coincidence. Since then, on the few occasions Craig had passed Dean Fleming in the administrative hallway, the guy had gone way out of his way to pretend he didn’t know Craig any better than any of the other students, and Craig felt pretty certain he was pissed he’d had to do that favor for his old Dartmouth pal.

“Well, I should probably study more than I do.” He dragged a hand across his eyes. Was he mistaken, or was the light getting brighter the longer it lingered on Nicole Werner’s hair and face? He inhaled, and said, “So, want to walk back to Godwin?”

“Like I said, I’m waiting for Josie. Want to wait with me?”

“No,” Craig said. Too quickly. For a second there he’d forgotten about Josie. “That’s okay.”

He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell and took a step backward, but Nicole said, “What about your coat?”

She sounded alarmed, as if he were about to walk off a plane without a parachute—but maybe she always sounded alarmed. He remembered the way she’d waved Perry over in the cafeteria one night. Perry! she’d said. I forgot to tell you! I went home last weekend, and I saw Mary. She said to say hi!

Perry had just grunted. He hadn’t even looked up from his tray. Whoever Mary was had seemed like a really big deal to Nicole, but when Craig asked Perry about it, he said, “Who cares?”

“Nicole seems to care,” Craig pointed out. “She made this Mary sound like a long-lost cousin, or somebody risen from the dead.”

“Well, Nicole always sounds excited.”

It had occurred then to Craig, again, that Perry was nursing some unrequited love grudge, but he also thought he had a point. Nicole, and girls like her, did usually sound excited, or alarmed, or semihysterical, when they weren’t. It was something about the hard vowels and the crisp consonants and the way most of their sentences ended with “you guys!” And sounding like a question: “I’m, like, so hungry, you guys?!” You’d think some girl was starving to death, but she might just mean she wanted to borrow some quarters for a roll of Lifesavers.

“It’s not a problem,” Craig said, still backing away. “I’ll get it from you back at the dorm.”

“Wow!” Nicole said. “Thanks so much, Craig. You’re so nice!”

“Sure,” he said, trying to smile like a nice guy but imagining his own mug shot on a sexual predator website.

Josie had not, it seemed, told Nicole about the other night. Maybe, he hoped, she wouldn’t. But why wouldn’t she? Briefly he’d held out some hope that she’d been so drunk she didn’t even remember the incident, but that hope had been dashed when he’d passed her in the courtyard on Sunday morning, and she’d stopped dead in front of him.