The Headmaster's Wife(37)

“Room two seventeen,” the man said.

Gregor headed for the elevators with Mark still in tow. They were self-service elevators. That was a good thing because the few other guests in the lobby were looking at Mark very oddly, and Gregor didn’t blame them.

“I told you this was a nice place,” Mark said, getting into the elevator beside Gregor. He looked dubiously at Gregor’s case. “Would you like me to carry that? I always carry my mom’s suitcases, or I used to before she married Jimmy. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before.”

“That’s all right.” Gregor kept a grip on his case. Mark did not look capable of carrying anything for very long.

They got to the second floor. The elevator doors opened. They got out and walked down the hall, Gregor watching the numbers of the doors and moving slowly because Markseemed to be having a hard time moving. They got to room 217 and Gregor unlocked the door.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked Mark, even though he knew the answer to that one. Mark was not all right. He wasn’t even close to all right.

Mark came in behind him and headed across the room to the chairs near the window. He sat down and shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m actually having a pretty good day. Sometimes I can’t think at all, but it’s not like that now. I’m just so tired. And I’ve got a sore throat. And I’ve got work jobs.”

“Work jobs?”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “It’s—it’s sort of like detention. When you screw up, they give you work jobs to do to make up for the infraction.”

Mark didn’t look capable of making his bed, never mind doing something called “work jobs.” Gregor threw his suitcase on the bed and opened it. “You’re a mess,” he said. “Have you got any idea what you look like? What’s happened to you?”

Mark put his face in his hands. “You know,” he said. “I know what everybody thinks, and it isn’t true. I’m not taking drugs, unless you count caffeine as a drug, which I guess it is, but you know what I mean. I just can’t remember things. I keep losing things. I’ve lost my student ID twice, and I need that to get my allowance out of my student account. I just forget.”

Gregor came to the edge of the bed and sat down. “Mark, if you’re not on drugs, there’s something seriously and truly wrong with you. You need to be hospitalized or something. You’re—”

“I know,” Mark said. “I found this thing, we studied it in biology, called Huntington’s chorea. It fits perfectly. But it can’t be that because there isn’t anybody in my family with it. I thought maybe my dad, you know, might have had it, because he died so young maybe it just hadn’t shown up yet; but then one of his parents had to have had it, and my dad’s mom is still alive and she’s fine, and my dad’s dad died at sixty something and he never had it. So it can’t be that.”

“What does your mother say?”

Mark looked up. “I haven’t said anything to my mother. Well, I mean, yeah, I have, sort of. But I haven’t, you know, made a thing about it. It’s hard to explain. She thinks I look pale, so she got me these vitamins.” He rooted around in his coat and came up with a prescription bottle. He shook the last capsule onto his hand. “I’d better take this. I don’t think it does any good. And maybe they’re right, do you know what I mean? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just too stupid to be here.”

“You’re one of the least stupid people I’ve ever met in my life.”

“I’d have said I was smart enough before I got here, but I don’t know anymore. Do you know what I did last week?”

“No.”

“I got a zero on a quiz,” Mark said. “A history quiz. An American history quiz. It’s usually my best subject. And the other weird thing was that it was on the election of 1800: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. I read a book about it last summer. And I couldn’t remember any of it. I sat there and looked at the paper and none of it made any sense at all. And of course they think I didn’t study a damn, except that I did, and it just didn’t matter. My mind went completely blank. I got questions wrong on stuff I knew cold before I ever came to Windsor. Maybe it’s psychological. Maybe I just don’t want to be here.”

“Why don’t you leave then? I can’t believe your mother would insist on your staying if she knew you didn’t want to.”

Mark looked away. “That would be quitting. I don’t like to quit.”