Laura Kasischke - The Raising

Jesus, Perry thought, it must take this girl four hours to get dressed every morning.

She chatted on and on brightly about what a drag it was to live on the third floor, and how, when her parents moved her in they’d had to lug all her stuff up the stairs because the elevator was broken.

“The elevator’s always broken,” Perry said.

“What floor did you live on?” Karess asked him.

“Fourth,” he said.

“What house?”

“Mack.”

“So, you knew him? Craig Clements-Rabbitt?”

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, and she was waiting for Perry at the door. There was a sign on it that read, FIRE EXIT, ALARM WILL SOUND, but everyone knew there was no alarm. Karess pushed her way through it, and out into the brisk late-morning air.

He considered lying, or saying nothing, but what would be the point? Karess was obviously curious enough about everything that she was going to find out one way or another. Perry’s name, Googled along with Craig Clements-Rabbitt , told that whole story. Except for a few things about his making Eagle rank, which had been in the Bad Axe paper, Perry’s Internet claim to fame was that he’d been Craig’s roommate and had said to a reporter for the local paper, “He’s not a murderer.”

“He was my roommate,” he now said to Karess.

She whirled around. “ What? You lived with him?” Her eyes were so wide he could see the little pinpricks of her pupils pulsing in the startling blue of her irises.

“Yeah,” Perry said.

“Well,” she said. She smiled. Her teeth were so white they seemed, like her incredibly blue eyes, more like fashion accessories than body parts. “The plot thickens.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it must have been pretty fucked up, your freshman year, living with a killer—”

“What?” Perry asked.

“A fucking murderer.”

“He’s not a murderer,” Perry said.

“Jesus,” Karess said. “You’re not still friends with him, are you? I mean, he killed his girlfriend.”

“He didn’t kill his girlfriend,” Perry said. “He had an accident, and his girlfriend got killed.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Karess said.

“Then you heard wrong.”

“I heard he was stoned and drunk, and he picked her up at her sorority because he was jealous of some older guy there, and even though she was screaming and pleading for him not to take her, he forced her into the car, and then he drove off the road at like a hundred miles an hour, to try to kill them both together. It was like some kind of sick love bond he thought they had. He wanted to die with her—and, so, like, she had no choice. And now she’s dead and he’s back here. Unbe liev able.”

Perry had to hold a hand to his forehead because, now that they were outside, the sun was shining blindingly over Karess’s shining head. They were in the courtyard, and students were passing them, talking on cell phones, stuffing protein bars into their mouths, ears plugged into their iPods. Some pink-cheeked girl squealed when she saw Karess and was about to hug her, but must have seen the serious expression on her face, so just wiggled her fingers, made a face, and kept walking.

With no leaves on the trees, no clouds, and the sun so distant in the autumn sky, there was nothing to absorb the light, and Perry felt his eyes filling up with tears. He turned around and started to walk away from Karess. “Are you crying?” she called after him, and grabbed his elbow. “God, I’m, like, so sorry .”

“I’m not crying ,” Perry said, but kept walking because he wasn’t so sure he wasn’t crying, and if he was crying, he had no idea why he was. He tried to walk fast under the archway to Godwin Avenue. It was always forty degrees colder under that arch than anywhere around it. Even when the temperature was ninety degrees outside, under that archway it was cool and damp. Someone had spray-painted the name Jean at the top of the arch, and Perry found himself stopping, putting his hand flat against the bricks, trying to catch his breath. “I’m not crying,” he said again, although he was even more blind now, having stepped from the sun into this darkness. He rubbed his eyes and said, “But you shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about. Where did you hear all this crap, about him forcing her into the car, and the death bond or whatever?”

“It’s true,” Karess said. She was standing so close to him that he could smell her breath. Cinnamon. “There was this, like, assembly for first-year women our second day in the dorm, and these sorority types came from Omega Theta Tau, and it was supposedly supposed to be this meeting about how to avoid getting into abusive relationships with guys, but mostly it just scared the shit out of us about living in the dorm where the dead girl had lived. They did this slideshow? Of Nicole? And told us how guilty they all felt because they all knew she was dating this stalker dude, Craig Clements-Rabbitt, who was always waiting for her outside the house and wouldn’t let her have her own life, and then he killed her, and they were all crying, and by then we were all crying, and then we went back to our rooms, and I heard later that these girls who were living in her old room did the Ouija board in there, and then I don’t know what happened, but I guess it scared the shit out of them, and they got a room change.

“ Nobody’s living in that room now. It’s all locked up. And those Goth girls with the Alice Meyers Club thing are always lighting candles outside of it and burning these smudge stick things, and it sets off the fire alarms, and they make little shrines that the housekeeping people throw away. It’s fucked up. And you were that guy’s roommate ?”

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. A kind of vertigo took over him—the archway seemed to shift, and suddenly he was feeling the weight in that white coffin again. The dead weight of a body sliding around inside.

Karess looked alarmed. She said, “Are you okay?” She took a step even closer to him, looking carefully at his face, and slid her arm through his. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a hot chocolate. I promise not to talk about this. Don’t cry.”

He looked at her.

“I’m not crying,” he said, and having to say it again actually made him laugh.

She laughed, too.

“I think you’re a really cool guy,” Karess said, pulling him out of the archway by the arm that she had locked into his. “I thought so the first day I saw you.”

The walk from her house to Starbucks seemed to take hours, but when Shelly looked at her watch, she saw that only fifteen minutes had gone by since leaving home and, now, passing the building that housed the Chamber Music Society. She willed herself not to look up at the window to her office, but she could feel the window looking down at her. She could feel her former self watching this present self walking by.

What might she have thought, say, six months before, if she’d been told of a woman who had a secure well-paying job at the university and had thrown it all away to have a sleazy affair with an undergraduate work-study student?

What would she have thought if she’d been told the way the woman had been caught red-handed in this affair—that she’d allowed a series of cell phone photographs to be taken of herself in bed with a nineteen-year-old sorority girl?

What would she have thought if she’d looked down now and seen this woman walking by, moving inexorably, but also as if there were heavy weights tied around her ankles and wrists, toward the place she thought she might be able to find this girl—this girl that university officials had warned her not to harass?