The Headmaster's Wife(57)

Or maybe not. Mark found it hard to tell what his mother would and wouldn’t do.

He went into the bathroom and washed his face. He really was tired. He had that drained-of-blood feeling that made ithard for him to move. He didn’t have the panic he’d been living with for so long though, and the way the head fuzz had abated was truly miraculous. Not that it was entirely gone. He could tell he wasn’t functioning the way he remembered functioning before he’d come to Windsor, but for just this second he felt only ordinarily sick. He was also really glad that he’d had a shower. He didn’t like feeling dirty. At home he sometimes showered twice a day. He didn’t understand why, up here, he forgot about showering entirely, or remembered but felt too tired and confused to bother.

He went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Seven thirty must mean seven thirty at night. That meant he’d missed dorm check-in at five. That meant he was going to be in enormous trouble with Sheldon yet again. He was always in trouble with Sheldon for something. His room wasn’t clean enough. He didn’t socialize with the students in his own house enough. His clothes were a mess. Sheldon was one of the people on this campus he truly hated, but if he thought about it long enough, he had to admit that there were very few people—at least among the faculty and administration—that he didn’t hate. Except that “hate” was the wrong word, he thought. It was the word people used for what he was feeling, but it wasn’t the right one even so. It was more that there were people he felt in danger from. He had no idea what kind of danger or why it should be directed at him.

I’m acting nuts again, he thought. He got up and looked through the drawers of the nightstand and the table with the room service stuff on it until he found the complimentary notepad and a pen with the name of the Windsor Inn printed on it. He sat down and printed, very carefully, in block letters:


Dear Mr. Demarkian:

Hi. I had to go back to school. I missed first

check-in. I ate all yourfood. I’m sorry about that.

Can we meet tomorrow and talk? I get out of

classes at three.

Thanks.

Mark



He looked at the note and shook his head. Here was something that had not been changed by a nap in Gregor Demarkian’s room. His handwriting still looked like it belonged to a stroke victim. I wonder what the hell is wrong with my hands, he thought, and then, I wonder what the hell is wrong with my head.

He found his jacket and put it on. He put his note on the bed’s pillow so that Gregor Demarkian couldn’t fail to find it. Then he went out into the hall and down the stairs to the lobby and the street. He would have taken the elevator if he’d remembered there was one. He was still that tired. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Nothing did.

He went down Main Street more quickly than he’d walked for months, more quickly than he’d walked since Christmas vacation, when he’d actually started to feel a lot better after he’d been home for a week and a half. He thought about going directly to Hayes House—it was right there on Main Street, one of the houses that faced the town—but he didn’t have any coffee or Coke or Mountain Dew at Sheldon’s apartment, and he knew Sheldon resented the hell out of him whenever he asked to borrow what Sheldon himself had, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to stay awake long enough to do any reading if he didn’t get hold of some caffeine. As for Sheldon, it didn’t matter either. Sheldon was going to be no more angry with him for coming in at eleven than if he’d come in at eight. He might as well go to the Student Center and get some coffee in peace before he had to face Round Thirty-seven of the Great Dorm War.

He turned in at Lytton House, cut around to the side of it, and crossed the quad. Then he ducked between Martinson and Doyle and out onto the path leading to the Student Center. It was unbelievably cold. He remembered it being cold, but not this cold, not even the other night when he’d been wandering around in his fog. That was the night Michael died, which was something he didn’t like to think about but did. He found it impossible not to think about it. He wished he could read. Before he’d come to Windsor, he’d spentnearly all his time reading. Now he could barely understand the words on a page of a Terry Pratchett novel.

If he hadn’t been so tired, he’d have run. He tried to force walk, but that didn’t work either. His joints ached. He settled for pushing himself just a little to go just a bit faster, and then he was in the breezeway in the warm and he could see the big stainless steel coffee servers lined up against the back wall, standing on clean white tablecloths.