Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“What I mean is,” he went on, “that guy doesn’t look like he belongs around here.”

Nicole slipped her hand through his free arm and leaned against him. Even through the layers of nylon and down feathers between them he thought he could feel the little thrill of her heart beating against his side. It was a Thursday afternoon, the time of the week they usually headed straight to Starbucks to linger, holding hands, with their cappuccinos and their unopened textbooks between them. He’d looked forward to it since going to bed the night before. But when they got to the corner of State and Campus Boulevard, Nicole stopped and said, “Craig, I can’t do Starbucks this afternoon. I told Josie I’d meet her back at our room. We have to start making tissue roses for the formal. We—”

“You have to start today ?” (Whining. He wished he weren’t, but he was whining.) “I thought the formal was in, like, three weeks.”

“No, it’s in four weeks, but you have no idea how many of these things we have to make. And Josie and I are it. We’re the only ones assigned to the roses, and there have to be at least five thousand .”

“What?” Craig literally stopped in his tracks at the absurdity of this. “Five thousand tissue roses?”

Nicole laughed and nodded. They’d gotten to the edge of campus, and the arm Craig was using to carry her textbook was cramped. He shifted the book to the other, and then stepped around Nicole, put his stiff arm around her shoulders, exposing his bare hand to the cold again—but who cared, since it was already completely numb?

“Five thousand ?”

“Yeah!” Nicole said, seeming to share his astonishment. “And it takes us like an hour to make a hundred. So far, we’ve only got, like, a hundred and ten.”

“What the hell is this?” Craig asked. “Some kind of indentured servitude? I mean, it’s not like they’re paying you to be in this sorority. Don’t they think you have a life?”

He was sincerely outraged, but Nicole laughed pleasantly, and Craig heard the sound of it echo off the brick wall of the Engineering Building a few feet ahead of them, like a lot of little bells.

“Craig, they think Omega Theta Tau should be my life!”

“Well, is that what you want, Nicole? I mean, do you want to be locked in a room making paper roses with Josie for the next four years?”

“Well, it’s always the new pledges who make the roses, actually, so next year—”

“Okay, not roses. Next year you’ll be baking crumpets or something. It’ll always be something.”

“Sorry, Craig.” He looked at the side of her face. The scarf was down around her chin now, and she was doing that pouty thing with her lips. At the bridge of her nose was the faintest bump—an adorable little glitch there that made it possible, Craig thought, to tell her apart from the two or three other completely perfect girls in the world. He was about to apologize for getting all worked up, but she brightened suddenly and turned to him. “You could help!” she said. “Josie would be fine with that. She suggested it anyway—getting some guys to come and work on it, if, like, we got some beer to pay them with or something. You could bring, like, Lucas.”

Craig felt the familiar sensation of sweat breaking out in a fine film under his arms, which happened each time Nicole brought up the subject of Josie, of his doing anything that might involve Josie—Josie joining them for a pizza, for instance. Or even when Nicole just said something like “Josie says to say hi.” Or the one time he almost lost his dinner as he and Nicole were stepping out of the cafeteria and there was Josie with her arm hooked through Lucas’s, both of them clearly stoned out of their minds:

“Hey, big boy,” Josie had said, waving at Craig with all her fingers up near her mouth.

“Josie,” Nicole had blurted out, laughing. “You’re totally stoned!”

“Yup,” Josie said. “Be careful, or I’ll jump your boyfriend’s bones.”

Nicole had playfully slapped Josie’s arm, while Craig started walking away as fast as he could. Nicole followed him, still laughing, and Josie called something else in their direction, but it was slurred, and Craig couldn’t hear it over his pounding heart, and after they’d rounded the corner, Nicole had stopped him, turned him to face her, and looked at him carefully.

Outside, the sun was setting behind the glittering lead-paned windows that looked out onto the Godwin Hall courtyard, and her eyes in that light seemed nearly fluorescent in their blueness—like the ocean in Belize, like the sky from the top of Mount Washington. “What’s with you, Craig?” she asked, suddenly terrifyingly serious. “And Josie?”

For a second, Craig couldn’t breathe, but he worked hard to hold her eyes as if he had nothing to hide. All these weeks he’d held on to some glimmer of hope (false, he could see now) that maybe Josie had told Nicole all about it, and Nicole didn’t care—or, at least, that she understood. He’d never had any evidence of that, he realized, and he had no reason whatsoever to believe that if and when Nicole heard about what had happened between him and Josie she wouldn’t dump him in a heartbeat. Especially now that they’d been seeing each other for two months and he hadn’t said a word.

“Nothing,” Craig said. It sounded ridiculous. His voice actually squeaked when he said it.

“Then why does she hate you?”

“What?” Craig tried to make his expression look like one of surprise.

“Why does Josie hate you?”

He tried to open his eyes even wider. “She hates me?”

Nicole burst out laughing. “Uh, yeah. You haven’t noticed?”

Craig shrugged.

“Well, you avoid her like the plague, so you know something . You quit coming to the study group even though you seemed so into it for a while. You never even walk by our room if she might be in there. Practically every time I even say her name you change the subject as quick as you can.”

His mind was blank. His mouth was open. Over the weeks, Craig had tried to think of a few things he might possibly be able say if this subject came up. Excuses. Lies. Or at least some kind of spin-doctoring. He’d tried to come up with some way to make it sound like Josie had been so drunk and insistent that night that Craig felt he had to do something or it would have hurt her feelings, which was pretty much true, except that he’d been completely happy to fuck her; it had nothing to do with being polite. But maybe if he could find the right words? Nicole, Craig knew, was pretty naive when it came to people and their secret sex lives. She was always astonished to find out that some unmarried celebrity was pregnant, or that Craig had seen some girl from her hall slip out of the room of some boy on his hall in the morning. (“They were probably studying,” she’d say in total seriousness, and then punch him hard in the bicep when he laughed.) It was possible, wasn’t it, that she’d believe whatever he said?

But here, now, actually confronted this way in the hallway near the cafeteria with Nicole’s beautiful eyes lit up in the sunset—all that pink and mauve pouring through the window panes, and her little half-smile, her head cocked like a chickadee, waiting—not only his mind but his soul went completely blank. She waited another long second or two, and then she shook her head. “ O- kay,” she said. “Uh, just forget I asked.”

He tried as hard as he could to read her face as it was closing down before him. Did she know? Did she know and not care? Did she not know, and if she did know, would she slap him as hard as she could and never speak to him again?