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“God, no!”
“Charlaine Harris?”
“Who?”
We continued arguing as he helped me bring up all my books and files. It took three trips, at the end of which we were both breathing hard and drenched with sweat.
“Sheesh, it’s hot,” he said, wiping the sweat off his brow with a red bandana. “Would you like a beer?”
“At ten in the morning?” I asked.
“Now who’s the snob?” he asked, throwing his hands up and walking out of my office.
I unpacked my books and files in a snit of annoyance that turned gradually into an insatiable urge for a beer and then into regret for not having thanked Frank Delmarco for helping me carry up all those boxes. I went out into the hall to find his office. I followed the sound of laughter around the corner and saw, through an open doorway, the profile of a young, pretty girl sitting in an office chair next to a large desk. All I could see of the man behind the desk was a pair of Timberland hiking boots propped up on a stack of books, but I recognized Frank Delmarco from his booming laugh. The girl joined in his laughter, tossing her waist-length shiny hair over her shoulder and crossing her very long, very bare legs. I suddenly felt like I’d had enough socializing with my new colleagues for the day and decided to go home.
When I stopped back in my office to lock up, though, I found I had a visitor. A student—or maybe a student’s kid sister, she looked that young—was perched on the edge of the straight-backed chair next to my desk, her shoulders hunched over, her medium-length hair—which was the color of weak, milky tea—obscuring her face. When I walked into the room she flinched and looked up. Her eyes were huge and the same milky tea color as her hair.
“Oh, excuse me, Professor McFay, I hope you don’t mind me coming in…The door was open and it was drafty in the hallway.”
It was eighty degrees in the hallway but this girl looked as if she could be blown away by a summer breeze. The reasonher eyes looked so big, I saw now, was that her face was so thin.
“No problem,” I said, not sounding as if I meant it. I was tired and wanted to go home. “Office hours haven’t really begun yet…”
“Oh, I am so sorry!” She jumped up from her chair. She was wearing a soft blue peasant blouse that flapped around her rail-thin chest. This girl wasn’t just thin, she was undernourished. Anorexia? I wondered. “It’s just I come late to school and have not made the registration.”
I noticed her accent now. Eastern European, I thought. “It’s okay, please, sit down. I just wasn’t expecting any students today, but I’m new here and I don’t know the routine yet.”
“Me too. I am new, too!” She smiled. Her teeth had clearly not had the benefit of American dentistry, and the smile failed to brighten the pastiness of her skin. “I am…how do you say? Change student?”
“Exchange student,” I corrected her as gently as I could. She looked as if she might crumble under the slightest rough handling.
“Exchange student,” she repeated dutifully. Then she wrinkled her brow in confusion. “But that cannot be correct. Exchange means to trade one thing for another, no?”
I nodded in agreement.
“But I do not think Fairwick College will be sending an American student back where I am coming from.” She said this with such stolid gravity that I felt a little chill.
“Where exactlydoyou come from?” I asked.
She shook her head, making her lank hair whisk against her thin shoulders. I noticed the ends of her hair were split and damp—as if she’d been chewing them. “The borders change so often I hardly know anymore.”
When I’d walked into the room I had thought she looked younger than the average college student, but now, talking about her country, she suddenly looked much older. Wherecould she be from? I wondered. Bosnia? Chechnya? Serbia? But if she didn’t want to say which war-torn corner of Eastern Europe she came from, who was I to pry?
“What can I do to help?” I asked instead.
She gave me a snaggle-toothed smile and relaxed her shoulders. “I would like to take your class Vampires and the Gothic Imagination,” she said very carefully, as if she had rehearsed this bit. “But it is full.” She frowned, then smiled again (she was beginning to seem a little manic). “You are a very popular teacher! Everybody wants to take your class!”
“It’s my first semester here,” I reminded her. “So, it’s not because of me. The class is popular because vampires and the supernatural are popular right now. Is that why you want to take the class—because you liked theTwilightbooks?”
“I don’t know what thisTwilightis,” she said. “I read the description of your class. It says that the heroine of the Gothic novel confronts evil—within and without—and survives it. That is what I would like to know, how one survives a confrontation with evil.”
The girl was leaning forward, her hands clasped in her lap, her pale tea-colored eyes wide and glassy. Her pupils were dilated, the black swimming over the light irises as if something dark were rising up inside her. For a moment, looking into them, I thought I caught a glimpse of the horrors they had seen. A wave of cold, like a current in the ocean, passed over me and I shivered.
“Of course you can take the class,” I said, wishing there was something more I could do for this girl. “Do you have something for me to sign?”
After I signed Mara Marinca’s add slip I decided I had to go home to take a nap. All the energy I’d woken up with had drained away. Moving boxes up all those steps had really wornme out. I felt as if I’d had that beer Frank Delmarco had offered—several, in fact.
On my way out of the building, I ran into a woman struggling on the stairs with two boxes. The boxes were uncovered and filled with newspapers and magazines that kept slipping out so that she had to stop every few steps and restack them. The boxes themselves looked as if they were coming apart at the seams.
