Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

“Let’s try it,” said Izzie.

Nat smiled. There was something about her that made him smile, smile right at her in a way he didn’t think he’d ever smiled at anyone else. But she didn’t smile back, didn’t even meet his eye for more than an instant before looking at Grace. Grace was looking at him.

Nat stopped smiling, was about to mention the furniture idea, when he felt a current of warm air flowing past his face. He glanced around, noticed a square metal grate high up in the wall opposite the bricked-in doorway. A big grate, but the wood around it was old and rotted. He got a grip on the bars and tugged. The grate came free in his hands.

Grace laughed, that excited little laugh of hers, full of pleasure. Nat took a candle, stood on his tiptoes, peered into the square hole. He felt the warm air-it fluttered the candle flame-saw down a tin-lined duct, perhaps just big enough for him to squeeze into. Standing the candle on the floor of the duct as deep in as he could reach, he pulled himself up and inside. Just big enough. He felt one of them giving him a little push from behind, heard them talking:

“Did something like this happen in those Alien flicks?”

“It was James Bond.”

But there was nothing frightening about this, and it didn’t require courage. Nat had already spotted a little pool of light not much farther ahead. He wriggled toward it with the candle in front of him.

The light came from above. Nat reached it, squirmed over onto his back, looked up through another grate. High above he saw a dark wooden ceiling, laid out in squares and decorated with carved scrollwork and bunches of grapes. It seemed familiar. Nat was trying to place it when he heard voices. He blew out the candle.

Silence. Then footsteps approached, two sets of footsteps, Nat thought, on a hardwood floor. A foot came into view above him, and another, shod in Birkenstocks with heavy socks underneath; the Birkenstock feet walked over the grate and out of sight. Then came two more feet, these in tassel loafers. A woman said, “I only want to do the right thing.” She stepped forward, a wiry woman with long hair, gray and frizzy.

The tassel loafers stopped, planted right on the grate. Paper rustled. The woman said, “Oops,” and something fluttered down, came to rest on the grate: a hundred-dollar bill. The tassel loafers shifted slightly, and the man wearing them stooped to retrieve it. His face, his furious face, came within two feet of Nat’s: Professor Uzig. He picked up the bill, thrust it at the woman. The footsteps, both sets, moved off. A heavy door opened and closed. Nat waited for a minute or two, heard nothing more, then pushed up the grate and raised himself into the ground-floor lounge of Goodrich Hall. Through the tall windows he saw the night sky, full of stars. The clock on the wall said 3:30. That wouldn’t have been his guess.

Nat slept through a dream in which he stood at the foul line, shooting one and one, with no time on the clock and his team down by a single point. He had actually lived such a moment in his senior high-school year against their big rival, Western Tech. But in the dream, he wore the red and white of Western Tech, instead of Clear Creek High’s burgundy and gold. He stood at the foul line bouncing the ball, bouncing and bouncing it, but never taking the shot. An uneasy dream made more so by the hardwood floor that looked like any other court but made cracking and splitting sounds with every bounce; still he remained inside it, sleeping through the ringing phone in the outer room-dimly aware of it, sleeping on. Sleeping on through biology class, the first class he’d missed, unaware of missing it, although as class time came and went the anxiety of his dream might have increased. Then someone’s lips touched his, and he woke up.

Izzie.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” she said.

“What time is it?” He tried to sit up; she rolled on top of him; was already in his bed.

Izzie gazed down on him. “Going somewhere?”

“Biol-” Nat started to say, but from the intensity of the light coming through the window, he knew it was too late.

“Biology-the science of living things, correct?” Izzie said; raising an eyebrow the way she did, her right eyebrow, questioning, mocking.

“Correct.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Why is that?”

“This counts for extra credit.”

“A — plus,” said Izzie, after.

After sex, but still under its spell. They lay in Nat’s narrow bed, the room quiet except for their breathing. Nat noticed that the period of their breaths seemed similar. He held his until her next inhalation, and inhaled at the same time. After that, they breathed in unison, a coincidence, of course, and maybe a bit sappy, but there it was.

“What’s that word,” Izzie said, the vibrations from her voice buzzing against his ear, “when bad beginnings have a good result?”

“Serendipity.”

“Then what happened to Wags was serendipitous for us.”

“Because he’s not around?”

“What else?”

Nat couldn’t agree; on the other hand, his scruples were dwarfed by the power of that us. It seemed to toll in the room, like a steeple bell at the beginning of a story.

“Or am I being too pushy?” Izzie said, sensing but misinterpreting his resistance. “Maybe you don’t want me to come here.”

“I do.”

“Then give me a kiss.”

He did.

From beyond came all the normal sounds of Inverness: voices raised across the quad, maniacal laughter in the hall, music from everywhere, someone’s barking dog. “Grace thinks this is like living in the projects,” Izzie said after some time.

“Do you?”

She thought. “I don’t know. Maybe not. Grace doesn’t really think so either. She’s got a big personality, that’s all.”

“It must be interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“Living two lives at once.”

She looked at him, didn’t speak. He leaned forward-he was on top now-his gaze on her whole face, then her eyes, then only one of them, then on those gold flecks in the iris, as though a really close examination of them would reveal everything about her. Her eyelid closed just as his lips touched her. The softest thing. He stayed right there. Had time ever slowed down like this for him before? He got the feeling that he and Izzie had entered a powerful circle of some kind, impermeable. Was this what all that poetry he’d had to study was about, all those novels? Maybe not, because something permeated the circle right away, at least his part of it: the image of Mrs. Smith’s and Miss Brown’s happy faces on the Fourth of July, an unwelcome image that let in unwelcome thoughts: the effort it had taken to get him here, the missed biology class. And Patti.

“What’s wrong?” Izzie said.

“Nothing.”

She opened her eyes-he felt the eyelid’s tiny struggle against his lips-and turned her head so she could see him. “You’re thinking about something.”

“No.”

“Is it Grace?”

“Of course not. Why would I be thinking about Grace?”

Izzie didn’t speak.

And Patti. Now messy memories from the Thanksgiving party threatened to spill out in his mind, but the most important, more important than how drunk Patti had got, or the way she’d vomited in bed that night, all over both of them, was the way he’d seen everyone back home, his old friends, changed. He was the changed one, of course. The cliche at the heart of so many coming-of-age stories, but that didn’t make them false. He would call Patti today. He’d changed. It was normal. Out of the corner of his eye, he was suddenly aware of her picture on the upside-down crate at his bedside. Something writhed inside him.