pointed and asked questions. I found myself shaking my head and correcting her. She groaned and called herself stupid. I told her not to feel bad, it was a tough one. Her thin lips twisted into a satirical smile and she peeked through the sides of her glasses.
“Okay, smarty,” she said. “Let’s do the next one.”
As I led her through the proof, I began to get the feeling that she already knew the answer. Twice I made nervous mistakes and she was quick to fix them. I thanked her sincerely for her assistance, which just made her chuckle some more. The whole thing was making me feel dangerously relaxed. I glanced at Foley to make sure he still existed and that this whole day wasn’t a dream.
He was frowning in another direction. I followed his gaze and found Celeste sitting at a table, gabbing with friends. A few seats away, Rhino, demolishing food with his ponderous jaw. Next to him, Woody Trask, still cruelly separated from his girlfriend, cracking his knuckles over an ignored tray of food and staring directly at Heidi and me.
“What’s wrong?” Heidi’s finger hovered over a differential equation.
“No,” I said. “I mean, nothing.” I felt the focused heat of Woody’s concentration. “I should probably go eat.”
“Oh.” She sounded offended. “It’s not like Winter curves these things.”
She thought I was trying to protect my grade point? That was all wrong, but my tongue was inferior to the task of sorting it out. The chair coughed as I stood.
“Who are you looking at?” she asked. To my horror, she twisted herself around to search the cafeteria. I stumbled over the chair trying to extract myself from her table.
Heidi’s head whipped back to her homework. She removed her glasses and smoothed down her hair.
“Woody Trask is looking at me,” she said in hushed wonder. Whether this statement was meant for me to hear, I didn’t know or care. I tripped my way across the floor, my face burning, my chest stinging. I sensed something whip by my face. A mustard-slicked bun bounced off my chest. A brownie vaporized against the back of my head. I didn’t bother to check which of Woody’s lackeys had done the throwing. All that mattered was how Heidi’s kind eyes had lost all interest in me the second she removed those glasses. I dropped into place across from Foley and pointed my face at my cooling po’boy.
Almost immediately Foley’s tray screeched from the table. I looked up and met eyes that had gone dark and guarded. I wanted to say something. He didn’t know what this single lunch had meant to me—tonight when I carved the day into the side of the sink it would be more than just another line.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed. “You like getting kicked around? You want that shit to continue?”
“No,” I pleaded. “No.”
“I can’t help you if you ignore every fucking thing I say.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know he was watching, I didn’t know—”
“I’ll bring those CDs.” His formerly buoyant voice wilted with sarcasm and distrust. He peered down at me as he passed. “You got brownie in your bald spot.”
34.
NATHANIEL MERRIMAN WAS BURIED in Lancet County, Iowa, just south of the Minnesota border. Harnett and I arrived at about four in the afternoon. We left our tools in the truck and wandered together onto the main path. The Lancet County Cemetery had no fence, but we paused at the sign stating the house rules: no pets, no littering, closed at sundown. Nothing at all about digging up bodies.
Just enough daylight remained to make a pass of the plot. But as soon as we crossed the threshold I was deluged with memories of the suicide victim bloating in her pool of black liquor, and within instants I began specifying—
—golden specks of pyrite embedded in the stony path—
—the scabby contours of damp tree bark—
—shrubbery knotted in the shapes of hands, pitchforks, jester hats—
—ants squeezing from a hill like pus from a wound—
—and soon swirled within a heightened reality of such absurd levels that I began to totter. Harnett righted me by the collar and told me to look about solemnly as if I were hunting for a loved one’s grave. Eager for a good grade, I frowned and tossed my head in a frenzied search.
“Easy,” Harnett said. “You look like you’re having a seizure.”
The gravestoned horizon was an exposed jaw of foul teeth. We instinctively hugged a row of mausoleums, their barred doors allowing