Marianna Baer - Frost

My heart began thumping a little harder, as if responding to her loud beats on the wood. “What was it?” I asked. “A noise in a pipe?”

“No,” she said. “Someone was doing it. On purpose.”

“What? Who?” Was she saying Abby had done this?

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “It takes me forever to get out of the tub with my cast. I finally hauled my ass out and made it over there, and whoever had been there was gone.”

“I don’t understand. Why would someone do that?”

“To mess with me. Freak me out.”

Okay, she was freaking me out. “Who would want to mess with you?”

“I just told you, I don’t know.” Her jaw tightened. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t even want to tell you. But now, with the vase … I’m sure it’s the same person. That’s why I want to lock the doors.”

I tried to think clearly about the best way to approach this before answering. “I’m fine about locking the doors,” I said. “If it’ll make you feel better, that’s not a problem. But I still don’t think there’s any need to. I think the vase broke by accident. And since nothing happened while you were in the tub, I’m assuming … I don’t know … that it was some other noise you heard. Have you lived in an old house before?”

“Not really.”

“Strange noises happen all the time,” I explained. “You’ll get used to it.”

She pursed her lips. “But it sounded so … purposeful.”

“If someone really did want to mess with you,” I said, “that would be a pretty weird way of doing it. Right? I mean, if I were trying to freak someone out, I’d replace their toothpaste with Preparation H, or fill their shoes with peanut butter or something.”

“Fill their shoes with peanut butter?” Celeste said. “You’d be a crappy freaker-outer.”

I laughed, a release of nerves mostly. “You know what I mean. I wouldn’t be knocking on a wall. Or breaking a vase, for that matter.”

She placed the shard she’d been holding back on her desk. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

“I’m sure I am.”

Feeling like I’d talked her off the ledge, I started out of the room. The minute I was in the hall, though, I remembered why I’d gone over to begin with. It took bulldozer force to make myself turn back around. “Celeste?” I held out the small white envelope. “David gave this to me at the beginning of school, and I totally forgot to give it to you. I hope I didn’t screw anything up.”

She handed it back without opening it. “You should keep it,” she said.

“Me? I don’t even know what it is.”

“The key to his room. Which makes more sense, for his sister to have it, or his girlfriend?”

For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. David had a girlfriend?

Then I clued in to her implication. “I’m not his girlfriend,” I said.

“I see you guys together all the time,” she said. “I don’t mind. I want you to get together. I told you that right on the first day. Why else do you think I had him come over to help you hang those shades the other week?”

Oh my God. “You did that on purpose?”

She smirked. “Just moving things along.”

I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “How about this. I’ll hang the key on a nail, and then if David’s ever locked out, he can know it’s here. That’s probably why he gave you a copy, right?”

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll see who’s the first one to use it.”

I couldn’t get out of there soon enough. Back in the bedroom, I lay down and tried to breathe away the tightness in my chest and the ache that was beginning to pulse at my temples.

All of these stories she was constructing in her head! It was just like when we were lab partners—the constant dramas—except now I was one of the people involved. She couldn’t just be sad that her vase had broken; she had to make it into a whole mystery with herself as a victim. David and I couldn’t just be friends; it had to be a clandestine relationship—orchestrated by her! She thought everyone lived life as out of control as she did, acting on every little emotion. Was she going to do this all semester? Turn everything into more than it was?

Still, as I was having these thoughts, something tickled at the edge of my brain. The knocking on the wall—that was nothing, I was sure. But did I really think a breeze could have blown over a ceramic vase?

I rolled onto my side, facing the window. Cubby stared at me with her big glass eyes. I reached for her, brought her onto the bed.

When I was little, I knew owls were supposed to be wise, so I made up this schoolmarmish voice for Cubby and would ask her questions like she was a wooden oracle.

I think I convinced myself that when I spoke in Cubby’s voice, my answers were wiser than they’d otherwise have been.

“Did you see how the vase broke?” I asked her now. “It blew over, right?”

No answer.

“You must have seen it. Was someone in here?”

I looked deep into Cubby’s shiny black pupils.

No one , I made her say in her uptight, vaguely English accent. The room was empty.

“Thank you,” I said, resting her back on the sill.

The room had been empty. Of course it had been. To believe anything else was to be sucked into Celeste’s melodrama, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

TWO DAYS LATER, sitting in my Gender Relations in America seminar, the closer we got to the bell the more distracted I felt.

“So,” Ms. Boutillier was saying from the other side of the round table where the seven of us sat, “do you think the author was ahead of his time? Or was he making a remark that was designed to stir controversy and prove that women didn’t, in fact, deserve the vote? Did you question his motives when reading?”

I kept my eyes on my text, as if giving her questions deep thought. Really, I was thinking about David.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’d gotten in the habit of leaving by the building’s side exit after my seminar. Usually, David would be coming out of his history class at that same spot. We’d walk over to the mailroom together, check our boxes, stop by senior tea … I looked forward to it.

Today, I wondered if I should go out the main exit of Holmes Hall instead. I hadn’t run into David anywhere yesterday—the day after the vase incident—and I’d been thinking maybe it would be better if I stopped going out of my way to see him. Just stay away from the freaky Lazar vortex; remove myself from Celeste’s rich, imaginative life.

“Leena?” Ms. Boutillier said. “Did you hear those page numbers for tonight?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Can you repeat them?” She did, with obvious annoyance, and then the bell finally rang.

I slipped into my canvas army jacket, hoisted my bag over my shoulder, and followed the herd, taking a left toward the main entrance where I’d usually take a right. Then I stopped. David and I weren’t doing anything wrong. We weren’t doing anything, period. Why play into Celeste’s bizarre little game? Also, I wanted to talk to him about what was going on in the dorm. I turned around and headed to where I knew he would be lingering, putting books into his bag.

We swung into step next to each other—my small, blue Chucks next to his bigger, black ones on the shiny checker-board floor. I imagined Celeste making some comment about the cute couple-ness of it, felt her eyes on us even though she didn’t have class in this building.

“How were the genders relating today?” he said.

“You know,” I said. “Hostile.”

He held the heavy wood door open for me and for a bunch of other people. I passed by him out onto the steps.