“He’s probably around somewhere. He’ll be in for curfew. Just relax.”
“I can’t relax,” Sheldon said. “Peter isn’t relaxed. And you don’t have Mark staying in your apartment.”
Sheldon turned around and walked off. Cherie watched him go without regret. He was not one of her favorite people, and he was not the person she would have chosen to share a campus house with if she’d had the choice of who would get what apartment where.
She went into her own apartment, waited until Melissa came in after her, and closed up. It was only then that it occurred to her that what Mark DeAvecca really seemed to be most of the time was not stoned, but depressed, and that depressed people sometimes committed suicide.
Chapter Four
1
Somewhere in the world, there is sanity, Gregor Demarkian thought, sitting by his window looking out on the Main Street of Windsor, Massachusetts, while Mark took the longest shower in history. Windsor itself looked very sane—too sane, really, the kind of sane where people assume that everybody will naturally be “intelligent” about their “choices” and always choose not to engage in “inappropriate” behavior. There was a streak in him, Gregor knew, of the kind of rebellious teenager who wrecks his life just to make the locals tear their hair. It was interesting that it had only shown up in his fifties. When he’d actually been a teenager, he’d been very straight arrow and conscientious. On the other hand, the world in which he had had to be straight arrow and conscientious had not been like this one. None of his teachers would ever have talked about “choices” or worried about what was “appropriate.” If he’d acted like an idiot, they’d have told him he was acting like an idiot. If he’d done something they didn’t like, they’d have told him he’d done something they didn’t like, and why, and he’d have been free to tell them why he thought they were wrong. That was, he thought, the key. He got the feeling in places like Windsor that the game was rigged. For all the talk about choices, the people who ran places like this didn’t actuallybelieve in choice. “We teach students to evaluate all the options and make the choices that are right for them.” That was a line from the Windsor Academy material he’d gotten from the guidance counselor. He had a feeling it wasn’t true. In fact it was something worse than not true. If students were really supposed to evaluate all the options and to make their own choices, then some of them would choose to stay drugged to the gills most of the time, and others would have sex and maybe babies at fifteen, and others would drop out of the whole college admissions game and become carpenters. Gregor was fairly sure that neither the school nor the parents would put up with any of that. What was wrong, he wondered, with admitting that adolescents didn’t always know what was good for them, that they had to have their choices cut off, sometimes just to make sure they could make it through to the next phase of their lives? What was the point of pretending to an equality that you had no intention of allowing to exist? His old-fashioned school was more—honorable—than this, and in its way more respectful of him than this kind of thing could ever be. At least it had accepted him as a fully human being who had a right not to be manipulated.
I’m making all this up out of nothing, he thought, looking down on Main Street some more. There were too many cars. Traffic was barely moving. In spite of all the care that had been taken to make Windsor look like a real small town, there was no disguising the fact that it was a suburb of Boston. He really was making all this up. He knew nothing at all about Windsor or Windsor Academy. He was extrapolating not even from what he’d read, but from the feeling of unease it gave him. There were suburbs like this outside Philadelphia, too. They weren’t the best suburbs, where serious old money lived. Those places were as bald and un-apologetic as the worst of Philadelphia’s bad neighborhoods. The suburbs he was thinking of were the ones—
There was a knock on the door, and he went to answer it. The knock on the door was room service. A young womanwheeled a cart in and unloaded it on the small, round table near the window he’d been looking out of. He gave her a dollar and she thanked him in a cheerful, uncomplicated way that did a lot to calm his nerves. He checked the soup tureen and looked under the cover of the plate of sandwiches he had ordered. They were the oddest, most precious sandwiches he had ever seen, little bite-sized triangles, carefully composed. The roast beef had something that looked like horseradish on it, except that the horseradish had little flecks of green in it. The tuna salad had little flecks of green in it, too. He wondered where the recipes for this sort of thing came from. Maybe there really were people who took Martha Stewart seriously, even outside the SEC. He wasn’t making sense again. He wasn’t making sense at all. The simple fact was that places like Windsor made him angry in an elemental, primal way that could not be explained, or controlled, by reason, and he really didn’t know why that was.