Laura Kasischke - The Raising

But apparently the landlord didn’t answer. The Cookie Girl had gone back into the other room, and Craig could hear her say to a machine, “This is Deb Richards? 326? Um, my neighbor is locked out? Can you call me back so I can let him know if you’ll come and let him back in?”—followed by a string of numbers: land lines, cell phone numbers, Craig’s apartment number, her apartment number. She came back into the living room, this time leaning on her crutch, and said, “I’m going to make you a cup of tea.”

Craig nodded.

“Look,” she said when she came back out of her kitchenette holding a microwaved mug from which a cloud of steam swirled, a string with a little Lipton flag hanging off the rim. “Look. I know you don’t know me, but I have to talk to you. I think I know what’s going on here—but first I have to ask you not to tell anyone that I talked to you about this. And that other thing? That I told you in the hallway? Nobody here knows about that, okay? I purposely came to a school two thousand miles away from where that happened, and I only told you because I’ve been listening to what people are saying about you, and I looked up this stuff about you on the Internet, and I feel like I can—relate, and now I have to tell you something else.”

Craig nodded again. He sipped from the tea without bothering to take the bag out or even bounce it around in the water the way he knew he was supposed to. The tea tasted like very hot water, and burned his tongue, but it also seemed like the best thing he’d ever put to his lips. The mug said FIELD DAY on the side. There was a little hockey stick under the words.

“They’re fucking with you,” the Cookie Girl (Deb?) said. “I know some of these girls. My roommate from Woodson Hall freshman year is an Omega Theta Tau, and whenever she has more than a couple of margaritas she starts to blab. Those girls have a plan to get you off this campus.”

Craig sipped from the mug again. He felt strangely and entirely at peace. Wrapped in this nice girl’s pink blanket. Sipping her tea. Her voice reminded him of his mother’s—his mother’s voice back when he was a child, when she used to speak to him quietly, enunciating every syllable. Deb Richards didn’t seem to understand that Craig already knew how much Nicole’s sorority sisters hated him, how they wanted him off campus. She seemed to think she would shock him if she spoke too quickly—either that or this was simply the most natural way to speak to someone you’d just found panting in his boxer shorts in your hallway, doubled over, flipping out.

Deb went on about how she’d overheard this or that, and how the father of the boy she had killed had stopped in his tracks at her hometown supermarket and shouted, pointing, “ That fucking bitch, that fucking little bitch, that fucking little bitch killed my little boy, ” so loudly and frantically that she couldn’t even leave the store because people were staring at her, and also screaming at her, and how a cashier even stood in front of her to block her way to the exit, turning all red, saying something about how she, Deb Richards, was the one who should be dead and, “ You’re gonna rot in hell you negligent spoiled brat, you’re gonna rot in hell every night of your rotten life and then for all of eternity in hell…”

Craig felt awful for her.

And it was so kind of her to feel awful for him, which made him even sadder that he couldn’t even pretend to be surprised at what she had to tell him. She seemed to think these were pretty big secrets. She told him that she felt pretty sure the Omega Theta Tau sisters had all kinds of plans to scare him, and torment him, and drive him out of here. Did he have any idea how vengeful girls could be? Sorority girls especially?

Briefly he considered telling her that, yes, he did know all about how much Nicole’s sorority sisters hated him, but that, no, it wasn’t Omega Theta Tau today. It was something else. Someone. It was Alice Meyers. She’d visited him, too. She was somewhere, and she knew Nicole. She and Nicole, it seemed, were together somewhere—sending postcards, making house calls, making phone calls. But he said nothing.

And then Deb Richards was tearing up, taking his hand, telling him everything would be all right, but he really should go to school somewhere else, that it was the only thing that had helped her, that it had saved her life to get away (although, to Craig, she looked as if she had that place with her, right there in the room and all around her, in her posture, in her face) and he had to at least consider it, because—

And then she said, “I know Lucas, too.”

“Lucas?” Craig asked.

“I met Lucas last year. He used to sell me weed once in a while. They’ve got it out for him, too, you know. I don’t know why. They think he sold you bad dope or something. Or, just that he let you borrow his car, and you were stoned, so—”

“I wasn’t,” Craig said, but he said it without force, having said it so many times he no longer thought anyone cared or believed him.

“They’ve got some bad thing going with Lucas, like you. My ex-roommate, she had this story she thought was hilarious about how he’d called the suicide hotline, and one of the Omega sisters who happened to be a volunteer on the hotline that night took the call and recognized the caller ID, and was really trying to talk him into killing himself. He was going on and on about how he’d been seeing ghosts and shit, and some girl who died like twenty years ago was haunting him, and this sorority bitch was just like, ‘Oh that’s so scary. I would just want to be dead if I were being haunted by a ghost. I mean, ghosts just choose people at random, but after that it’s like your whole life they follow you around. Do you have, like, access to a gun or anything, because that would help a lot…’

“And they were all just cracking up, waiting to read in the Police Beat in the newspaper that some college senior had shot himself.”

“Lucas?” Craig asked again.

He hadn’t thought about Lucas for a little while, and it suddenly dawned on him what all of this must have done to Lucas, too—and then he put the mug down on the table next to the couch and started to feel really bad, looking around (for help? For an excuse?) like Jesus, Craig, how many people’s lives do you think you can ruin in the course of your own? All he’d done for Lucas was one stupid phone call in the summer, from New Hampshire, when some of the pieces had fallen into place again. On the phone, Lucas had said nothing, really. He’d muttered, “Oh, man. Craig, Jesus,” a few times, and then, “I have no hard feelings toward you. But I gotta go. I really can’t talk about this, man. I hope everything works out, and I have to say, if I were you, I’d stay back there, you know. Go to school in Connecticut or something. Here, you know, it’s not cool right now. But maybe someday we’ll meet again. Peace, man,” and he’d hung up.

Lucas, shit. He’d ruined Lucas’s life, too.

Deb seemed moved to tears again, looking at the expression on Craig’s face, and she got out of her seat and put her arms around his neck, pulled the pink blanket more tightly around his neck, and hugged him, and Craig felt himself sag into the hug just the way he remembered sagging against his mother as a little kid, even when he knew she was pissed at him, because at least she was pretending she wasn’t.

And then he was back there, eyes closed, sobbing into his mother’s shoulder, soaking it, and saying things in a language he wasn’t even sure he spoke, and she was patting and patting him—Deb, not his mother, and crying, too. “Look,” Deb said, “just get in my bed and go to sleep. The sheets are clean. If the slumlord ever shows up to unlock your door, I’ll wake you up. In the meantime, just rest.”