looking around.
“Just my phone.” Boris had texted: U CANT BELIEVE THE LAST FEW DAZE!!!
“Well, I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need something.”
Once he was gone, I rolled to face the wall and texted back: MGMGR? W/ KT BEARMAN?!
The answer came almost immediately: YES! ALSO AMBER & MIMI & JESICA & KT’S SISTR JORDAN WHO IS IN *COLEGE* :-D
WTF???
U LEFT AT A BAD TIME!!! :-D
then, almost immediately, before I could reply: G2GO, AMBR NEEDS HER PHONE
CALL ME L8R, I texted back. But there was no reply—and it would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.
iii.
THAT DAY, AND THE next day or two, flopping around in a bewilderingly soft pair of Welty’s old pyjamas, were so topsy-turvy and deranged with fever that repeatedly I found myself back at Port Authority running away from people, dodging through crowds and ducking into tunnels with oily water dripping on me or else in Las Vegas again on the CAT bus, riding through windwhipped industrial plazas with blown sand hitting the windows and no money to pay my fare. Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time: Hobie bringing me aspirins and ginger ale with ice, Popchik—freshly bathed, fluffy and snow-white—hopping up on the foot of the bed to march back and forth across my feet.
“Here,” said Pippa, coming over to the bed and poking me in the side so she could sit down. “Move over.”
I sat up, fumbling for my glasses. I’d been dreaming about the painting—I’d had it out, looking at it, or had I?—and found myself glancing around anxiously to make sure I’d put it away before I went to sleep.
“What’s the matter?”
I forced myself to turn my gaze to her face. “Nothing.” I’d crawled under the bed several times just to put my hands on the pillowcase, and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d been careless and left it poking from under the bed. Don’t look down there, I told myself. Look at her.
“Here,” Pippa was saying. “Made you something. Hold out your hand.”
“Wow,” I said, staring at the spiked, kelly-green origami in my palm. “Thanks.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Uh—” Deer? Crow? Gazelle? Panicked, I glanced up at her.
“Give up? A frog! Can’t you tell? Here, put it on the nightstand. It’s supposed to hop when you press on it like this, see?”
As I fooled around with it, awkwardly, I was aware of her eyes on me—eyes that had a light and wildness to them, a careless power like the eyes of a kitten.
“Can I look at this?” She’d snatched up my iPod and was busily scrolling through it. “Hmn,” she said. “Nice! Magnetic Fields, Mazzy Star, Nico, Nirvana, Oscar Peterson. No classical?”
“Well, there’s some,” I said, feeling embarrassed. Everything she’d mentioned except the Nirvana had actually been my mom’s, and even some of that was hers.
“I’d make you some CDs. Except I left my computer at school. I guess I could mail you some—I’ve been listening to a lot of Arvo Pärt lately, don’t ask me why, I have to listen on my headphones because it drives my roommates nuts.”
Terrified she was going to catch me staring, unable to wrench my eyes away, I watched her studying my iPod with bent head: ears rosy-pink, raised line of scar tissue slightly puckered underneath the scalding-red hair. In profile her downcast eyes were long, heavy-lidded, with a tenderness that reminded me of the angels and page boys in the Northern European Masterworks book I’d checked and re-checked from the library.
“Hey—” Words drying up in my mouth.
“Yes?”
“Um—” Why wasn’t it like before? Why couldn’t I think of anything to say?
“Oooh—” she’d glanced up at me, and then was laughing again, laughing too hard to talk.
“What is it?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?” I said, alarmed.
“Like—” I wasn’t sure how to interpret the pop-eyed face she made at me. Choking person? Mongoloid? Fish?
“Dont be mad. You’re just so serious. It’s just—” she glanced down at the iPod, and broke out laughing again. “Ooh,” she said, “Shostakovich, intense.”
How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as