Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

He shone the flash. He was in a little square room with a dirt floor, nothing in it but a stool, a heavy old wooden stool-he’d seen a few like it over in storage-placed by the opposite wall. If you sat on it, he saw, you’d have access to a hinged flap in the wall. Freedy blew the dust off the stool, sat down. He opened the flap.

A tiny round hole: he put his eye to it. A spyhole! Amazing. He snapped off the flash.

What Freedy saw he couldn’t take in, not all at once. Candles burning, dozens of them, in a room-no, more than one room, there was at least another through a door at the back-a room straight out of a palace or castle. Music came from somewhere, horrible old scratchy music, not live. But there were live people in the room, live people from the present day, a guy and two girls.

Two girls. One sat on a couch near the guy, the other was standing in front of them. She, the blond one, said, “How do I look?”

She looked fucking incredible. So did the other one, the brown-haired one. Also fucking incredible. The girl at the bus station was pretty, but these two. Fox wasn’t the word. Freedy shifted his peering eye from one to the other, trying to decide which was better-looking, unable to make up his mind. Then the guy said something Freedy missed, and the two girls laughed. That kind of pissed Freedy off. He took a look at the guy-some kid, college kid, that he could break in two. Bust through the wall, break the college kid in two, take the girls back into that other room, where he could see some sort of weird bed, and fuck their brains out. Get them to do a few things together, and then- whoa, Freedy. Getting ahead of yourself, boy. He reached for his stash, took one little sniff, just to stay grounded.

When he peeked back through the hole in the wall, things had changed. They were all up, finishing their drinks, drinks a little lighter in color than Saul’s V.O., and blowing out the candles. The room went dark candle by candle. They went through the doorway to the other room, started blowing out candles there too. Freedy thought he could make out a rope ladder hanging down from above. One of the girls climbed it, then the other, finally the college kid, carrying a candle with him. They all went up the ladder easily, the college kid easiest of all, like he was an athlete or something, but that didn’t fool Freedy. He could snap him in half. Like Thanksgiving. Crack.

The college kid disappeared from view, and everything went dark. Completely black. That didn’t bother Freedy. What bothered him was the fact that the music was still playing, the woman with the strange, high voice singing on and on.

When Freedy got back home that night, his mood was mixed. The bad part was he hadn’t gotten into the science building. He’d found it all right, building 17 at the end of F, but from the other side of the door leading to the utilities room had come voices, maintenance guys working on some electrical problem. So no laptops, just a fax machine and a cordless phone with speed dial he’d grabbed from the lounge in 51. The good part, though, the very good part, was the strange place he’d found where F passed under N somewhere beneath building 68; and those girls. He’d worked in maintenance with guys who were lifers, sorry assholes, and no one had ever said anything about rooms, fancy rooms, under 68. But it existed, and those girls knew about it. That was so promising. Freedy didn’t know how exactly, or at all, just knew that it was.

He went in the house real quiet, what with the phone and the fax, past her bedroom, toward his bedroom at the end of the hall. The door was open and blue light leaked out. Freedy looked in, saw his mother, in that Arab getup, standing before the open laptop. He walked in behind her, but real quiet, stuck the phone and the fax under the bed before he spoke.

“Little Boy is home,” he said, reading the poem title right off the wall.

She jumped, actually got airborne, which was pretty cool, jerked around, said, “Oh my God,” holding on to her tits. “Why do you scare me like that?”

“I said hi. You just didn’t hear me, what with concentrating so hard on my laptop.”

Her gaze went to it. He moved closer to see what was on the screen, saw what had been there before:

To: Phil. 322

From: Prof. L. Uzig and all that.

Then her gaze was on him, that dark, stoned gaze, right into his eyes, like she was trying to see inside. “What’s going on, Freedy?”

“It’s for business purposes,” Freedy said. “I got it off Ronnie Medeiros for a song.”

“I didn’t know Ronnie took Phil three twenty-two,” she said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Freedy said.

After midnight, aboveground. Grace and Izzie left Plessey Hall to cross the quad, Nat continuing upstairs to his room, seventeen on the second floor. He stopped at the landing, looked out the window. Snow was falling, dark flakes blowing through cubes of light outside the dorm windows, through ovals of light under the Victorian lampposts on the quad. Grace and Izzie were about halfway across, both wearing ski hats with tassels, their gaits, their carriages identical, impossible to tell apart. One swept a handful of snow off Emerson’s bronze leg, flung it at the other. Then they were both running across the quad, chasing each other like little girls, and disappearing in the shadows; Nat thought he could hear their laughter, very faint. At that moment, with the laughter and all, he knew that everything was going to be okay.

It wasn’t that he was drunk-oh, maybe just a little from the cognac, much more from the fact of it being one hundred years old, and from the whole magical experience down there-but the realization that “everything” didn’t amount to much, so why wouldn’t it be okay? What was wrong? He made a short mental list. First came Izzie’s insistence on keeping their relationship secret from Grace. He would have to persuade her to change her mind. Her fear of Grace’s reaction was exaggerated, probably due to years and years of Grace’s dominance, now coming to an end. He reminded himself to learn the ending of the SAT story.

Second, there was Patti. She had to be told-no, he corrected himself-he had to tell her, and as soon as possible. First thing in the morning, even if it meant waking her: he would call Patti, tell her the truth. There was someone else.

Third, he had to catch up in biology. He hadn’t come all this way to miss classes. That was for tomorrow as well. In twenty-four hours he would be caught up.

There. He felt better, as he should have with only three problems in his whole life, the last one trivial; all solvable and solvable soon. Meanwhile, although he hadn’t really known what to expect at Inverness, any half-formed expectations had already been exceeded. He loved the place. Loved it, and knew he could do well. Not only that, but there were other kids from his town who could do well here too. He would make sure Mrs. Smith knew that when he went home for the summer. Mrs. Smith, and how she had brandished the Fourth of July special edition of the County Register at the sky: he understood her now.

Nat came to his door. A note was tucked under the brass 17. He opened it. A note written on economics department stationery, from his first-semester professor:

Nat-Your final exam grade last semester is being changed from a B minus to an A plus, a change that will be reflected in your course grade as well. I’ve reexamined your answer to the last question. I was looking for an analysis of capital and current account theory as it related to the hypothetical and since you didn’t give me that, I gave you zero. On reflection, and having conferred with several colleagues, I believe that your application of monetarist methodology is fresh, cogent, and quite defensible. Have you given much thought yet to your choice of major?