Quoth the Raven(54)

Exactly what would get him where he wanted to go, he didn’t know, so he began to wander aimlessly through the crowd, looking into the blank masks that were presented for his inspection without much hope of recognizing any of the faces behind them. Somewhere near the center where the boy was performing, a tape player was pounding out what Gregor thought of as exercise-disco music. A boy to his left was using an ice pick to punch a hole in the bottom of his can of beer. As Gregor watched, he lifted the can high in the air, tilted his head back so that the bottom of the can was directly over his mouth, and pulled the flip-tab. A stream of beer shot down his throat and disappeared in thirty seconds.

Gregor began moving again. He had worked his way around in a half-circle to the best lighted place in the rectangle when he saw her, sitting alone on the bottom step of a short marble flight that led to the spotlit doors of a dormitory. The torso of her pumpkin costume seemed to have collapsed against her body. Whatever held it up and rounded it out on the girls in the middle of the quad was not operated for her. Her mask was pushed up over her head, flattening down her hair. Her gloves were off and lying in her lap. She looked so small and shriveled, Gregor almost didn’t recognize her.

Then she turned her head, directly into the light, and he saw it, through the tears and the chalky deadness of the white makeup plastered over her sickly pale skin: Chessey Flint.





3


GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER had the kind of shoulder women liked to cry on. He had never gotten into the habit of offering tea and sympathy to women he didn’t know. And yet, walking over to Chessey Flint, he really had no particular intention but to offer sympathy. He was aware that she might know where Jack Carroll was, and that that was important to him. He was aware that she had been in the dining room this afternoon, and that that was important to him, too. He just didn’t have any urge to ask her about any of these things while she was sitting all huddled up like that, all small and weak and sad.

He maneuvered his way around a tall boy who seemed to be dressed up as the Straw Man from The Wizard of Oz, thought about sitting down beside Miss Flint without a word, and decided against it. He stopped directly in front of her instead, and cleared his throat.

“Miss Flint?” he said.

Chessey Flint looked up, blinked a little at the contrast between the harsh light around her and the shadowed place his face was in, and said, “Oh. Mr. Demarkian. It’s you.”

“Would you mind if I sat down for a moment? I came out looking for your friend, Mr. Carroll. I haven’t found him and I haven’t found anything else, either. I seem to be lost.”

“It’s easy to be lost out here,” Chessey Flint said. Then she brushed at the surface of the step beside her, as if she had to clear it off for him, even though it was empty. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “Of course you can sit down. I’m just a little—out of it tonight.”

“I don’t think I blame you.”

“You mean because of this afternoon? I don’t blame me either. I don’t see how Jack can—” She waved a hand feebly in the direction of the crowd and shook her head. “He’s out there in the middle of it all, doing what he always does, just as if it didn’t matter. I asked him how he could go through with it and all he said was it was his responsibility.”

“You don’t consider that an explanation?”

“No, Mr. Demarkian, I don’t. I suppose you’re going to go all male and self-righteous on me and tell me I ought to, but I don’t. I don’t have much respect for feminists, but at least I’ll give them this. All that groaning and bellowing men do about how they have to be responsible even if it means putting their emotions in the deep freeze is just so much stupidity.”

“Does your Mr. Carroll have a great deal of responsibility? Is he going to be tied up all night?”

“Jack? No, Mr. Demarkian, not all night. It’s, what? About six thirty?”

“About that.”

“They judge the talent contest at seven. Then Jack hands out the trophy. After that, he’s free and clear for the rest of the night. If he wants to be.”

“Well, then,” Gregor said, “I hope he wants to be. I want to go up to the parking lot, to that shack where the tools are to fix the cars. Father Tibor said Mr. Carroll knew something about it.”

“Oh, he does,” Chessey agreed. “He’s a licensed mechanic. Jack knows a lot about a lot of things.”

“Do you like that?”

Chessey Flint didn’t answer. She had lapsed into a private reverie, chin propped up on the palm of her hand, sharp point of her elbow digging into the top of her knee. Gregor didn’t feel right about interrupting her, so he lapsed into a private reverie of his own. He couldn’t see through the crowd to the Minuteman statue, but he knew that the boy in white tie and tails must have stopped performing. Up until a little while ago, he had been able to see the green glow of the boy’s ghost wand poking up above the heads of the people around him. Now the air above that space in the center was occupied by nothing but the light of the lamps shining into it. Instead of cheering and clapping their feet, the watching crowd was laughing.