The bathroom door opened and Mark came out, looking fifty times better than he had and trying, without much success, to dry his hair on a towel. Mark had a lot of hair—not because he’d left it long; he could have used a haircut—but only because he looked ragged, not because his hair was at his shoulders, but because it was so thick. Gregor had a memory of his mother saying that Mark didn’t need his hair cut so much as he needed it mowed.
Mark let the towel drop to his shoulders. “Sorry to take so long,” he said. “I zoned out a little.”
“What does that mean, ‘zoned out’?”
Mark shrugged. “Zoned out. I sort of lost track of time, and of where I was, that kind of thing. I’ve been doing it a lot lately.”
“You look a lot better than you did, and you looked very bad.”
“I know,” Mark said. He walked over to the table and raised the lids on the soup and sandwiches.
“Have a sandwich,” Gregor told him.
Mark reached in and took one of the roast beef withhorseradish. “They must get this place to cater for events over at school. They have these sandwiches all the time. The roast beef ones are good.”
“You could eat a little. You look thin.”
Mark swayed a little and then blinked. He put his hand on the back of a chair to steady himself and then sat down, abruptly, as if his legs had given way beneath him. “Sorry,” he said, “I’m just tired.”
“You looked dizzy.”
“I was dizzy. Am. Am dizzy. Sorry. It’s just that I’m tired, really. I can’t seem to sleep up here, or at least not much. I’m running on caffeine and adrenaline half the time, and even that doesn’t help more often than not. Thank you for coming up here. I needed somebody to talk to.”
“You used to be able to talk to your mother.”
“I can still talk to my mother. I just don’t want to at the moment.” Mark shook his head. “Not that I’m not going to have to,” he said. “She’s going to hear about this eventually. Then she’s probably going to ride into town in a tank and blow some things up. Did I tell you she really hates Windsor Academy?”
“No, but it doesn’t surprise me.”
“She came up for Parents Day in October and nearly brained my adviser with a plate. Not that I really minded much, you understand. My adviser makes my skin crawl.”
“Maybe you should get a new adviser.”
“It’s not that easy,” Mark said. “Look, the thing is, I’ve been up here since September, right? Okay, I don’t like it much, it was probably the wrong place, but, you know, anybody can do anything for a year. What’s the sense in cutting and running before the year is over? What’s the sense of quitting?”
“It’s not cutting and running to recognize the fact that you’re sick,” Gregor said. “And if you’re telling me the truth and you’re not taking drugs—”
“I am telling you the truth. I’d never take drugs. In the first place, I’m not stupid. In the second place, my dad would probably come back to haunt me. He made it through the sixties in college without ever taking a toke on a joint.”
“You know the lingo.”
“Everybody knows the lingo. And Michael—Michael Feyre, my roommate—he was the biggest dealer on campus. You have no idea.”
“There are a lot of drugs on this campus?”
Mark shrugged. “There are more than I’m used to. At Rumsey Hall you’d hear rumors about people sometimes, but I never actually saw anybody using the whole eight years I was there. Up here there are people who come to class stoned, and everybody knows it, even the teachers.”
“And they don’t do anything about it?”
“You don’t go accusing people of being drugged out if you can’t prove it,” Mark said. “Especially if their parents are wealthy and not averse to taking you to court. They do something if they actually catch someone with the stuff on them. Not otherwise.”
Gregor considered this. “If your roommate was a dealer, wouldn’t he have had the stuff on him, at least sometimes?”
Mark picked up the cover of the sandwich tray again and got another roast beef with horseradish. “Can I have one of these Perriers?” he asked. Gregor nodded, and Mark opened a small Perrier bottle and poured half the contents in one of the clear water glasses that had come with the tray. “The thing about Michael and his dealing,” he said, “is that we came to an understanding right away. Michael didn’t bring that stuff into our room—ever. He probably wouldn’t have anyway because of the searches—