She hadn’t been able to eat. That was all there was to it. She hadn’t been able to sit still in that room and listen to everybody talking about Mark and the vomit and the convulsions and the possibility that Mark’s mother and stepfather would descend, a plague of locusts in their own right, to make a mess of the Windsor Academy campus and everything it stood for. She didn’t like the boy. In many ways she truly hated him. She thought he was the picture of everything a school like Windsor should refuse to have anything to do with. She still didn’t think they ought to talk about him like that when he had nearly died.
She’d come back to Barrett House and tried to make do on her own. For some reason she had no food in the house to speak of. She had a little cluster of grapes and some mineral water in the refrigerator. She had a bag of organic blue com tortillas on the counter next to the stove. She’d tried to eat the tortillas and been forced to admit, in no time at all, that they were completely awful. She had never gotten used to the food these people ate, the food she was supposed to eat now that she was one of them. She’d lost twenty pounds since coming to Windsor from the simple fact that she could not allow herself to be seen in public eating things like cheeseburgers, and half the time she couldn’t force herself to stuff down vegan tarts and organically grown beet saladno matter how hungry she was. What she needed to do now was to run into Boston to a diner where nobody knew who she was. That way she could eat french fries until she was sick and not have to explain herself to anybody.
She was just coming out of the quad-side front door when she saw the woman coming in from what must have been East Gate and start across the long, diagonal path in the direction of what Marta was sure would eventually be President’s House. She put aside her annoyance at the name—why call something “East Gate” when there was no fence for it to be a gate of?—and stopped to stare. There was really no way to mistake this woman, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t dressed in heels or covered with makeup the way she was on CNN. This was Elizabeth Toliver, Mark DeAvecca’s mother. She was walking very quickly. Marta had the impression that if she could have, she would have run.
Marta had no idea what got into her. She wasn’t a celebrity hound. Elizabeth Toliver wasn’t even somebody whose work she respected much. Marta felt propelled by forces beyond her control down the porch steps, into the quad, along the path most likely to intersect with Ms. Toliver on her way to whatever she was going to do at Peter Makepeace’s house. They collided at the quad’s center, the place where the center paths all came together. Ms. Toliver hadn’t been paying attention. She looked startled to see anybody else in the quad.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Excuse me.” Marta thought she sounded lame. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bother you. You’re Ms. Toliver, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Liz Toliver said. “I’m sorry I can’t stop to talk, but I have an appointment.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to bother you,” Marta said. “I’m Marta Coelho; I’m Mark’s history teacher.”
Liz Toliver stopped looking as if she were about to take flight. “Oh,” she said, “yes. Mark’s told me about you.”
It was a noncommittal line. Marta had the uncomfortable feeling that what Mark had told his mother was not good, but how could it be otherwise? She was getting used to thefact that when students didn’t do well, they blamed their failures on their teachers and not on their own lack of commitment to academic work.
Marta shifted to the other foot. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t mean to keep you. I just meant to say that I hope Mark is recovering from, well, whatever it was. They haven’t really told us much of anything, you see, except that it wasn’t a drug overdose. Food poisoning, somebody said in the cafeteria this morning.”
“Mark’s fine,” Liz Toliver said, “I just came from his room. He’s had a very quiet night. There doesn’t seem to be any chance of permanent damage from the incident last night.”
“Well, good,” Marta said. “I mean, he’s been so sick so often this term, hasn’t he? Much sicker than most students are, even in a bad winter. And that thing with the shakes, you know, and the tremors—”
“What?” Liz asked.
Marta blinked. “The shakes,” she said. “I told the infirmary about it. I thought they must have told you. He’d come to class and he’d have the shakes, and there would be sweat coming off his forehead in waves really. We do have a number of first-year students who have hygiene problems, but Mark was the worst I’ve ever seen. Although of course I’ve only been here this one year—”