is close enough.
“Did you see the guards everywhere?” Tim exclaims. “Totally pointless! On a night like this, either no one will see you or everyone will see you!”
“You could have said that about Homecoming, too, and Family Weekend.” Erin takes my cup and tries the punch. “Mmm, this is nice. Yvonne, do you want some?”
I have done my best to push Selena and her graffiti habit to the very back of my conscience, and except for five minutes on Thursday—when I considered writing her an email with a cryptic message like Three strikes and you’re out!—I succeeded. That is my deal with myself: three strikes and I’ll report her.
And then what?
The dome of the Observatory looms ominously above the glittering décor and the flames dancing in the yard. How could he? How could Hornberger seduce a girl who he knew was emotionally unstable? Worse, how could he get her pregnant? But then he may not know that Selena is pregnant. I could well believe that she has kept her condition secret from him. Her vandalism and the graffiti, not to mention her self-destructive behavior, are probably a kind of safety valve to let off steam. The problem is that as her pregnancy progresses and as the noose around Hornberger’s neck tightens, the pressure on Selena rises. I can’t imagine what she is going to do next. What can she do, really? I must talk to someone about her. I must talk to her; it is as simple and as uncomfortable as that.
And there is another reason for the weights pulling at the nerves in my stomach. It is two weeks since I saw Giles. Haven’t even caught sight of him from afar, or heard his voice round a corner in the hallway. Maybe he is doing both of us a favor by avoiding me, but I long for him with an intensity that is made up in equal parts of hopelessness, desire and shame. I know I am doing the right thing by not giving in to this. I just wish that doing the right thing did not feel as if I had amputated a limb.
“Oh, there’re Eugenia and Vern—and they look awesome!”
Eugenia and her husband have come as a fashionable couple from a twenties jazz club, and they do look absolutely gorgeous. After we have all complimented each other on our get-ups, Eugenia grabs Tim’s wrist.
“But we should toast you for having survived the first round! Plain sailing, Tim, in case no one told you yet. Impressive work! Here’s to three more slam dunks!”
And for once Tim keeps quiet and just smiles and blushes with pleasure.
The more crowded and festive the occasion becomes, the lonelier I feel. I want to ask Tim whether Giles isn’t attending tonight, but I don’t dare. I’m worried he would see the state I am in. How can one absence be so conspicuous? Among hundreds of faces and voices, the bells, the torches, the crackling fires, the music, the speeches, the sketches, the singing—
And then I see Selena. In a severe dark gown with a hooped skirt and lace at the throat, she looks more striking than I have ever seen her. Jane Eyre, pregnant with Rochester’s child. Instead of fleeing the place when she found out that he was seducing her into sin, she stayed and became his whore. It occurs to me that the graffiti may not have been directed at Natalie at all, or maybe it meant both herself and Natalie. She is holding a mug of something, and she is there with a group of other graduate students, but like me, she seems to be isolated by her thoughts, and like me she is staring up at the dome.
“I don’t believe that man!”
Erin’s choked exclamation comes at precisely the same moment as Selena’s face, rigid and expressionless before, registers emotion. I only have to follow her horror-struck gaze to detect Hornberger among the crowd. We are not the only ones to have seen him; a murmur of surprise, perhaps of disapproval or outrage, runs through the air.
“You gotta hand it to him,” Tim says. “He’s not floored by adversity.”
Erin fumes. “How dare he?”
“Look, look at Demers!”
Graham Demers, our President, at one point in his life worked for a high-ranking management consulting group, so he is wise in the ways of the world and not easily fazed, but it doesn’t need a reader of micro-expressions to see how dismayed he is at Hornberger’s—evidently unscheduled—entrance. But the pièce de résistance is, no