Marianna Baer - Frost

Well, if she had, then hanging the photo back up and ignoring it was the best thing I could have done.

THE NEXT MORNING, I pretended to be asleep when Viv came to get me for breakfast. I absolutely shouldn’t have missed bio—especially not an unexcused absence—but the only, only place I wanted to be was in my room. It was going to be one of those shockingly bright fall days, and the early sun shone in through the trees, filling the whole space with warmth. I liked knowing that if I was here, the room was safe. No one could come in except those rays of sunlight.

I lay curled up on my side with my comforter piled on top of me and tried to think about yesterday’s events without getting worked up. I needed to talk to someone about what was going on. But who? Not David, or Abby, or Dean Shepherd. Viv was a possibility, but she hated keeping secrets, and I’d have to ask her not to tell anyone. I was even considering my mother, when I had another idea. Trying not to get my hopes up, I looked at the clock and calculated…. Yes, it should be the perfect time. Without another thought, I opened my laptop and checked to see if she was online, then called.

I almost cried when Kate appeared on my screen, all the way from Moscow, wearing her favorite Violent Femmes T-shirt and playing with her ever-present wire mandala. Viv and Abby and I had talked to her occasionally as a group, but it was hard because of the time difference, and because she wasn’t online often.

“Leena Thomas,” she said with a smile. “You look like hell.”

The minute I started talking, it all rushed out in a waterfall of words, everything that had happened with Celeste and Abby and David from the beginning of the semester, so many things—I realized now—that I’d been keeping to myself.

Kate listened and nodded and kept up a steady rhythm with her hands, flipping the three-dimensional wire form into different geometric shapes. I could tell she was thinking hard because of how quickly her hands moved.

“It seems to me,” she said, “from thousands of miles away, that you’re tangling a lot of things all together. I don’t actually think there’s anything you need to be worrying about.”

“Really?” I said.

“The one thing you need to make a decision about is whether to tell anyone about the photograph, right?”

The weight of all the worries I had made it seem much more complicated than that, but I supposed that was the only actual decision to be made. “Right,” I said.

“Okay, I’m trusting that you can really tell it hit the wall hard enough to have been thrown. So, in that case, either … one.” She stopped playing with the mandala and held up a finger. “Someone snuck in the room and threw it to be mean to Celeste. Or two—” Another finger. “Celeste threw it herself, for God knows what reason. Right?”

“I guess.”

“You don’t sound sure,” she said. “Those are the only options I see. Unless you think a ghost did it or something.” She smiled.

“Don’t go all Viv on me,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Okay,” Kate said. “So let’s say we know it’s option one. Someone was mean to Celeste. The question is, should you tell her? How would she react if you did?”

No mystery there. “Freak out. Accuse Abby. Get even more paranoid.”

“So she’d get scared? Would anything constructive come from it?”

I imagined Celeste reacting and didn’t see it leading anywhere good. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Okay, so that solves that. You don’t tell Celeste.” Her hands went back to their rhythmic motions.

“But maybe we should be reporting it, to the dean or something?”

“It’s not like they’re going to fingerprint the frame and windowsills to figure it out.” Kate paused for a moment, her thick, black brows lowered. “You’re sure someone would have had to come in through a window? It seems so … unlikely.”

“The door was definitely locked,” I said. “And only me, Celeste, and David have keys.”

“David has a key?” she said, leaning forward. “You don’t think he—”

“No!” I said immediately. “Not to mention, he was with me.” A thought—David’s lateness to meet me at his dorm—flickered through my mind. But I forced it out. There was absolutely no way.

“Okay.” Kate sat back again. “So, about telling the dean or whoever. I don’t think you should. They wouldn’t investigate; all they’d do is ask Celeste who doesn’t like her. And we know the answer to that.”

“Abby.”

“Right. Now—”

“Kate, you don’t think there’s any chance she’d have done this stuff, do you?” I asked in a quieter voice. I knew the answer, just needed to hear her say it.

“Abby?” She screwed up her face, annoyed. “ Please . I can’t believe you’d even ask me that. Now, let’s take option two, which, from all you told me, is much more likely.”

Option two: Celeste threw the photo herself.

Kate continued, “If that’s the case, you’ve actually done all you can do. You already asked her what happened to the photo. If she did it herself and pretended not to know about it, maybe she was just embarrassed. In any case, there’s some reason she didn’t want to tell you, so …” She shrugged. “What else can you do?”

I sat for a moment and processed what Kate had said. Basically, she was saying that no matter what happened to the photo, I should let it go.

“But … I feel like I should be doing something ,” I said. “Take some sort of action. I don’t want to feel like there’s all this bad stuff going on in my room and I’m just sitting here all la-di-da.”

Kate stared down at her mandala for a minute. “Well, you can’t keep Celeste out. But you could lock the windows, too, I guess. With the doors and the windows locked, if it’s someone else, they won’t be able to get in.”

I nodded. Lock the windows. I could do that.

“You knew she’d be like this,” Kate added. “You told me right from the beginning, it’s always something. So maybe you need to just let her have her little dramas. You’re not your sister’s keeper. Or David’s sister’s keeper. Sit tight and ignore it as much as possible until I come flying home to you.”

“You have no idea how much I wish for that day,” I said.

We talked for a little while about other stuff, and then Kate had to go. Before she logged off, she said, “Oh, and Leena? Would you just jump David’s bones already?”

She was gone before I could respond.

On Mondays, I had a free period after Calculus and would help carry Celeste’s books to Rel-Phil. That afternoon, as we walked across the quad, the sky was blue and the air was knife-pleat crisp. Barcroft looked like a picture in a prep-school catalogue, students everywhere, lounging on the expansive lawn, playing Frisbee, taking their time getting to their next classes.

I felt so much better after talking to Kate. She was so logical and unflappable. I was going to take precautions—locking the windows and doors—but otherwise, it was out of my hands. I still felt angry that it was happening in my home, but at least I didn’t feel the weight of solving everything.

“Good day for KSM,” Celeste said. Kill, Screw, or Marry. Whenever we saw a group of three people—sitting together, walking together, whatever—we each had to pick one to kill, one to sleep with, and one to marry.

“Okay,” I said.

Students sat in clusters all over the wide marble steps of the chapel as we walked past. We’d just KSM’ed a group of freshmen when a new threesome sat down: Simone Dzama, Mr. Bartholomew, an English teacher, and David. My heart did a nervous jump at the sight of him; my body had a flashback to how it had felt on the roof.