Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Why would I blame you?”

“Because I’m the one raising your kids, I suppose.”

Everything, even the sounds that came out of their toddlers’ mouths, was a minefield between them now.

She couldn’t say good-bye. Instead, she’d waited until they were busy with their plastic airplane spoons again to sneak out the front door, pulling it closed behind her without making a sound.

“I’m in love, man.”

Craig was sitting at the edge of his bed. It was a Saturday night, mid-November, and Perry had just finished writing a paper on Socrates’ belief that rational self-criticism could free the human mind from the bondage of illusion. He didn’t want to talk to his roommate about Nicole Werner.

“Great, man,” he said.

“I’m serious,” Craig said. “I know you think I’m an asshole, but—”

“Well, who’s to say an asshole can’t fall in love?”

Perry deliberately kept his back turned to Craig’s side of the room, hoping he’d take the hint.

“You’re not fooling me,” Craig said.

Perry couldn’t help it. He turned around. “Okay,” he said. “So, what is it I’m not fooling you about, Craig?”

“You’re in love with her, too. You’ve probably been in love with her since kindergarten or something. It galls you that I’m dating her. You’re going nuts.”

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said, leaning back, looking at the ceiling. “You’re so full of shit, Craig. You’d be saying that about anyone you were dating. You think the whole world’s just watching you, burning with envy. But you know what? News flash: We’re not.”

Craig snorted, as if Perry had confirmed his suspicions by denying them. It was one of the many, many infuriating things about his roommate. You could not win with Craig Clements-Rabbitt. You either confessed or you were lying.

“Look,” Perry said, and inhaled. “Even if I’d been madly in love with Nicole Werner since kindergarten, I’d have fallen out of love with her by the time I realized she was stupid enough to date someone like you—not to mention this sorority bullshit, which seems about as stupid as it’s humanly possible to get.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Craig asked.

Perry shook his head.

“Huh?” Craig prodded.

“Forget it,” Perry said.

“So she likes her sorority, Perry. I think it’s cute. You have to admit, she looks incredible in a string of pearls. And that was one helluva float they decorated for Homecoming.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. And you know so.”

“What happened to all your cynicism, man?”

“Well, then I fell in love with Nicole Werner. Just like you did, back in Bad Ass.”

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. “Why do we have to talk about this? Why do we have to talk at all. ”

“Because you won’t admit it to me, or to yourself. You’re in love with Nicole.”

Perry tossed up his hands. “Okay, Craig. Okay. If I ‘admit’ I’m in love with your girlfriend, will you shut the fuck up? Will that make you feel like a Big Man? Like the Big Campus Stud with the girl we’d all die to get our hands on?”

“How about you admit it first, and I’ll decide after that?”

“Okay,” Perry said, and cleared his throat, rolled his eyes heavenward. “Let me see. The first time I saw Nicole Werner in Mrs. Bell’s kindergarten classroom, clutching a crayon in one hand and a piece of construction paper in the other, I thought to myself, There’s the only girl I’ll ever love. I sure as hell hope she doesn’t end up dating my roommate in college, because then I’ll have to kill myself.”

Craig nodded. “I knew it,” he said.

“So, you’re going to shut up now?”

“No,” Craig said, and he went on to tell Perry about their date that night. Pizza at Knockout’s. Hours afterward at Starbucks, holding hands. A long walk across the Commons in a bright, sparkling snow. He’d walked her back to her room, and kissed her outside her door.

“Did I tell you yet that I’m in love?” he asked Perry.

“I think you might have mentioned that,” Perry said.

Craig knew it was a bad idea to walk by the sorority. He’d promised Perry he wouldn’t, and his father, and he’d managed to get through the entire month of September without doing so, without visiting any of the old haunts, except that one day he’d stood outside Godwin Honors Hall in September. Now, it was October.

Where had September gone?

Craig had simply sleepwalked through it, it seemed. He woke up in the mornings and realized that, somehow, he’d done his homework. He’d have only the vaguest recollection of doing it, but there it would be on his laptop: an essay on the Ptolemaic strategy waiting to be taken to the lab to be printed up. The notes he took in his classes were in his own handwriting, so he had to have taken them himself, but it was like that story “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” Craig just woke up and found all the work had been done, as if by elves, or some other self.

That morning he woke to hear Perry running water in the kitchen, nuking something. Through the other wall he could hear a thudding bass from the neighbor’s stereo. Outside, the masses of blackbirds that had taken to roosting in the trees outside their apartment windows were already cawing and squawking. The black arrow of one’s shadow passed over his window shade. He was going to have to get out of bed, he knew, and he knew that once he did that, he was going to walk by the Omega Theta Tau house.

“Pal,” his father had said on Saturday when he’d called. “You don’t sound right. Are you depressed? Are they harassing you there? Any problems? Memory? Et cetera?”

“No, Dad. No one’s harassing me. And, yeah, I guess I’m a little depressed. I wouldn’t be any less depressed anywhere else, though. And I think I’m okay in the head. As good as I’m going to be again, I guess.”

“You’re sure no one’s giving you a hard time?”

“No one,” Craig said, realizing, not for the first time, that maybe he’d hoped they would. Maybe he’d come back here hoping to be hounded off campus, ridiculed, killed. Where were the outraged sorority sisters? Why hadn’t they chased him down on the Commons and ripped him limb from limb? Had they forgotten about Nicole? Shouldn’t there be daily protests outside the administration building?

How could they have let Nicole Werner’s killer back in?

But Nicole’s death, it seemed, was last year’s news. He hadn’t overheard a word about it anywhere. If people recognized him, they didn’t show it. If his professors made the connection between Nicole’s death and his name, they kept it to themselves. Maybe back at Godwin Honors Hall there were still some flyers posted to the bulletin boards, or a memorial in the lobby or something, but there wasn’t anything else anywhere else on campus.

He dragged himself out of bed. He was packing up his laptop, pulling a sweatshirt over his grungy T-shirt, saying, “See ya later,” to Perry, and trying to get out of the apartment quickly enough that Perry couldn’t ask him where he was headed.

He was headed there. He hadn’t even glimpsed it, he realized, since that last night in March. Back then.

Back then, Craig had hated the Omega Theta Tau house and the way, each time he walked across campus to it, the front door would open for Nicole and swallow her whole. There was always some blonde standing in the shadows beyond the threshold, and the door would swing closed, and Craig knew he wouldn’t get her back until whatever party, or pledging, or tea, or secret meeting, or special election of floral arrangement committee members, or selection of the menu for the next Founders Formal that night was over.