“Ken?” she said. “Ken, listen, I had some things, out on my balcony, some buckets.”
“Yes?”
“Well, you know how it is with me during Halloween. Half the campus has keys to my apartment. And it’s not like the buckets were important, if you know what I mean.”
“No.”
“No,” Alice said. “Well. Never mind. I was just wondering if you’d come up and borrowed them or something.”
“Borrowed them? Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know.”
And that, Ken thought, was the truth—she had no idea why she’d just asked him what she’d asked him. It was as if she’d had to ask him, just to make sure, but the making sure hadn’t brought her any kind of relief. This mood she was sliding into now was one he recognized.
She was tight as a wire.
2
IF THERE WAS ONE thing Chessey Flint hated more than any other, it was Jack Carroll in one of his decisive moods—and that was strange, because, in the beginning, she had loved Jack in his decisive moods. When she’d first met him, there had been something scary and secretly thrilling about seeing him that way, like the way it felt when she made herself ride the big roller coaster at Disney World, even though she was terrified of heights. Lately there had been an element to it she didn’t like. She kept feeling Jack was going to tell her something she didn’t want to hear or force her to do something she didn’t want to do. The only thing she could think of that would fit either description would be that he would want to leave. It was all she thought about anymore. She was beginning to be boring even to herself.
It was eleven o’clock at night, and Jack was standing in the tree just outside her dormitory window, bracing himself on a branch and stretching out his arms to help her climb through. This was the method they had devised to avoid having her come down to the foyer when they wanted to get together at night. It was silly in a way, because there were no curfews at Independence College and no parietal hours in the boys’ and coed dorms. If Chessey wanted to leave her room and spend the night with Jack in his, she had every right to do it. The problem was with how deserted Lexington House got after dark. Even with all the manic Halloween stuff going on outside, the corridors and common rooms were empty, except for the common rooms just off the foyer itself, which were full. That, Jack had told her, might actually make things worse. With all the confusion, it would be hard to keep security as tight as it ought to be, considering the way things had been going. Chessey hooked her small hands into Jack’s big ones and let him draw her to him, slowly, inch by crazy inch. She really was afraid of heights—terrified of them, in fact. The very idea that she was balancing on a thin branch four stories above the ground made her physically ill.
The branch was not so thin. Jack pulled her along it until she reached the place where a whole raft of branches came together to join the trunk, then wedged her tightly into the crook there until she felt safe. In the old days, he used to ask her if she felt safe. Now he didn’t seem to need to. He got her settled and then climbed back up to the crook where he liked to sit when they weren’t going directly to the ground. There was a mild wind blowing, flapping his black cape in the air and bringing them snatches of music from the quad.
“My cape is filthy,” he said. “I had Mr. Demarkian in the shed and he got filthy, too. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize about the cape.”
“All the way back to campus I kept thinking you were going to tear it off my back as soon as you saw it and throw it in the wash.”
“I’ve never torn anything off your back in my life.”
“I know.”
“I want to get out of this tree and back onto the ground and I want to do it right now. You know how I hate to be high up. You know it. How can you do this to me?”
“Chess—”
“Oh, don’t.”
Suddenly she was crying again, crying and crying, the way she cried when she was alone in her room and no one could see her. It made her so angry with herself, so damn furious, because it made her think she’d turned into one of her sisters. Emotions always on full alert and out of control, life always in a mess and headed for failure—what had she worked so damn hard for all these years if not to escape that? Jack was reaching out for her, but she didn’t want him to touch her. Chessey pushed herself out on the branch to get away from him, not really caring that she was suspended above nothing but darkness and air. She even closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself falling, into a void, forever, without ever touching ground.