Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” Josie said, her eyes narrowed to slits. A statement, not a question. “About the Events. I mean, it’s not really hazing, but if the Pan-Hellenic Council—”

“No,” Shelly said. “Of course not.”

“Thank you,” Josie said, but it was pure formality. “Especially after Nicole got killed, and all this bullshit with fucking Denise disappearing…”

“Denise?”

Josie waved her had and smirked. “Ran away or something. She was creepy. But people keep snooping around like we buried her in the back yard or something.”

It came back to Shelly from her research of the accident: the music school student who’d disappeared. “What happened to her?” Shelly asked.

“How would I know? But we can’t be blamed for psycho sisters running off. She should never have gotten in to OTT in the first place. She was the kind of trash that belongs in—” She stopped herself before naming Shelly’s sorority, and a ridiculous flush spread across Shelly’s chest. She blinked, and swallowed, and stood (chair legs scraping loudly and obscenely against the bare Starbucks floor), and said, trying to sound composed, “I should go now.”

Josie looked annoyed, and disappointed, as if she’d had more surprises in store, as if she were considering whether or not to let Shelly go—and they both knew that if Josie commanded her to sit back down, Shelly would have to, so she stayed where she was, standing before Josie Reilly, waiting to see if she would be dismissed, and Josie seemed to be considering this as she looked around the coffee shop, and then to the front door, where, it seemed, someone more interesting had just stepped in.

When Josie rose, Shelly saw her opportunity to say good-bye, and even found herself bowing a little, but Josie brushed past her, and said, “Sit down, would you? I have to say hello to someone, but I’ll be right back.”

What could Shelly do?

Slowly, but inexorably, she felt her weight, and the weight of Josie’s words, pull her into the chair as she sat back down.

Jeff Blackhawk drove with one hand on the steering wheel. He ate his Baconator with the other hand, kept his gigantic Coke between his knees, and Mira held his carton of large fries within reach for him. As he ate and drove, Jeff also kept up both sides of the conversation for them. It seemed that the difficulty Mira was having holding up her end had become apparent to him after he’d asked her about her childhood (the simple stuff: where had she grown up, what had her parents done) and she’d spluttered something about her mother being a housewife before she’d had to stop talking in order to stifle the sob she knew would be coming if she allowed herself to utter even one more word.

“I fucking hate this state,” Jeff said. “I grew up in West Texas, which everyone makes fun of, but I’ll tell you what—” He chewed on that and his Baconator for quite a while before he continued. “People know how to live in West Texas. You get yourself some land, no trees, for one thing. A trailer. Flat. Flat! And there’s the sky. It’s everywhere. ”

It occurred to Mira that Jeff Blackhawk’s poetry might be of the super-minimalist variety. He seemed to need a long time to find the words for what he wanted to convey, but when he did, they were the right words.

She could see his West Texas, although she’d never been to it. The trailer. The flat land. A bush far out in the distance. Blue. Blue.

“Here,” Jeff said, waving his Baconator at the windshield as if to erase the landscape. “Clutter. Junk. Nothing.”

He was nothing like Clark, Mira was realizing. Clark would never have used the word fucking in casual conversation, only in anger—and if he’d found himself having to go to Wendy’s for some reason, he would have ordered a chicken breast with lettuce and tomato. If he’d had to eat in his car, he would have eaten in the parking lot before driving off. He would never, ever , Mira felt entirely certain, have offered to drive a woman he knew distantly from work two hundred miles away to retrieve her children from her mother-in-law.

“How’s your research going?” Jeff asked Mira, but he didn’t wait for her to answer. “I’ve gotten even more interested in your subject, you know. So, sorry, but you might have some competition from me. Not that I can write prose, so you don’t have any competition there. But this whole thing, with the girl. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but a couple of years ago I dated a girl. She wasn’t my student”—he turned to look at Mira seriously here, and didn’t look away until she’d looked him in the eyes—“but she was a student, and she was in that sorority, the one Nicole Werner was in. Hoo. Did she have some stories! She got out when they wanted to put her in a coffin and raise her from the dead, and then they ostracized her so badly she transferred to Penn State. Now, there’s something for your sex and death book: sorority girls in coffins.

“She was an incredible girl, really. Hair like”—he swallowed the last bite of his Baconator, but it seemed to be going down with difficulty, as if crossing paths with the simile he was considering—“glass, sheet metal. I don’t date students usually, Mira. I’m well aware of my reputation, but it’s just a lonely man’s reputation, not a Casanova. I have a bad feeling, anyway, these days, that if I decided to cut a swathe through the female student population of Godwin Honors College, it would be more like a square inch than a swathe. But!” He held both hands above the steering wheel and said to the windshield, “There was a time ! Yes, indeed, there was a day in the life of a lonely man named Jeff Blackhawk. Indeed.”

Mira looked down at his knees. There was a grease stain on his jeans where he’d rested the burger between bites. She realized, then, that the scent that wafted around him in the hallways, the one she’d taken for some kind of masculine emission of heat, was the smell of this car, and Baconators. She resisted an urge to put her hand on the knee and pat it. It was not a sexual urge, and Mira felt certain that he would not have misconstrued it as a sexual gesture—but at that moment he did not have his hands on the steering wheel, and he seemed so excitable that Mira was a little worried they’d end up in the median if she made even the gentlest of sudden movements.

“Hi, Perry.”

“Josie.”

“Haven’t seen you around for a while.”

Perry couldn’t walk around her. She was standing directly in front of him and in front of Karess, who was standing beside him. The only place to go without knocking over one of the two of them was to crawl over a table at which two guys who looked like graduate students sat, passing a page full of calculations angrily back and forth between them, and he couldn’t do that.

“Yeah,” he said to Josie, and looked around her showily in the direction of the Starbucks counter, trying to make it clear that he was on his way past her, that he didn’t plan to linger here with her. But Josie had never been one to take her cues from other people. “Are you living with Craig?” she asked him. “Because that’s the rumor.” She glanced at Karess, head to toe, and seemed to dismiss her before turning back to Craig again.

“Why do you want to know?” Perry asked.

“Because I want to know,” Josie said.

“Look. Josie, I’ve—”

“Excuse me,” Karess said, sounding meekly polite as she squeezed between Perry and Josie. When she reached the counter she turned and gestured for Perry to follow, but he couldn’t, because Josie was still standing in front of him.