Frost - Marianna Baer
got here. I swear. I was just borrowing the hoodie.” She was
wearing a navy-blue sweatshirt of mine that she loved.
“Abby did tell me she was going down to borrow the
hoodie,” Viv added. “And I didn’t hear the sound of something
breaking.”
“David is here all the time,” Abby said. “Bringing her laundry
and stuff.”
“Why the hell—” Celeste began.
“I know David’s around a lot,” I said, “but I’m sure he
wouldn’t have knocked it over and just left it on the floor. And it’s
not like he’s here when Celeste isn’t.”
“So what are you saying?” Abby asked.
“Nothing.” I tried to keep my voice even. “Just that accusing
David isn’t helping.”
“Well, I didn’t do it,” she huffed.
“Then who did?” Celeste said.
“We’ve got some strong cross breezes in here,” I said,
glancing around at the windows, many of which were open.
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“You’re always complaining about them, Celeste. Maybe the vase
tipped on its own.”
“Right.” She used the tip of a crutch to send one of the dried
flowers skittering across the room. “You know, I didn’t ask to live
here. To break up your little party. So I don’t see why we can’t
just live and let live.”
Abby sputtered. “We can! You’re the one who accused me of
doing this.”
“Okay!” I said. “Enough!” I dumped my bag on my bed and
turned to Celeste. “If Abby says she didn’t do it, she didn’t do it.” I
turned to Abby. “David wouldn’t have done it.” Then to all of
them, “Do you guys realize how lucky we are? Instead of being in
some big, impersonal dorm, we have this beautiful little house.
But if you guys are going to act like this, it’s just . . . well, it’s going
to suck. Am I right?”
I made eye contact with each of them. They nodded
unenthusiastically.
“Good,” I said. Even though I was annoyed, I didn’t want to
leave it on this note. “And did you all get my message about what
I’m going to cook for the first Sunday dinner? Did it sound okay?”
More nodding. I seemed to be inspiring a lot of that tonight.
“I love your lasagna,” Viv said.
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“Okay. Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a
butt load of homework that I haven’t even started.”
After Viv and Abby disappeared upstairs, I squatted and
collected the shards; reaching the floor was tricky for Celeste with
her cast. No matter how the vase had broken, I didn’t blame her
for being upset. But couldn’t she have accepted Abby’s
explanation of what happened? It was as if she was trying to
make things more difficult here. I handed her the pieces in a
plastic bag and, after a mumbled thanks, she headed across the
hall to the little room. I swept up the flowers and dumped them in
the trash.
When I finally stretched out on the bed, exhausted, my head
sank into the pillow so heavily I thought I might never be able to
lift it up. For a few moments, I let the room work its magic,
tempting me into falling asleep right then, without even taking
my clothes off. But I was already stressed out enough by my
classes. No way could I afford to skip a night of homework. I had a
good three hours or so ahead of me. I dragged myself up and
started getting stuff out of my bag. As I rooted around the bottom
for a pen, my hand came across something I didn’t recognize. I
pulled it out, and saw the envelope that David had given me a few
weeks ago. Damn.
I knocked on the door to our little study room and then went
in.
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Celeste sat reading A Room of One’s Own. (God, if only . . .)
The pieces of the vase were spread out in front of her on her
desk. She looked up at me.
“I know it was your grandmother’s,” I said. “Do you want me
to try to fix it? I have Gorilla Glue.”
“It’s in way too many pieces.” She put down her book. “It
was in the middle of the room, Leena. Not right near the dresser,
where it would have fallen.”
“Maybe it bounced once, before it broke.” I’d seen mugs and
glasses do that, instead of smashing at first impact.
She picked up one of the larger shards and ran her finger
around the uneven edge.
“I want to keep our rooms locked,” she said. “From now on.”
I bit the insides of my cheeks. Locking the door in such a
small house seemed so aggressively unfriendly. Viv and Abby and
I had always gone in and out of one another’s rooms, borrowing
clothes, books, whatever. . . .
“I know you’re upset,” I said. “But I wish you’d trust me
about Abby.”
Celeste was quiet for a moment as she pressed the shard
into her fingertip, turning the flesh white. “There’s something
else,” she finally said. “The other day, when I was taking a bath,
there was this . . . knocking.”
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“On the door?” I said.
“No.” She shook her head. “I thought so, at first. I thought it
was you, so I said I’d be out in a bit. But the knocking didn’t stop.
Then I realized it was on the wall—not the door. The wall
between the bathroom and my closet. Like this.” She rapped the
desk three times. Waited a second. Rapped four times, then once.
An erratic rhythm.
My heart began thumping a little harder, as if responding to
her loud beats on the wood. “What was it?” I asked. “A noise in a
pipe?”
“No,” she said. “Someone was doing it. On purpose.”
“What? Who?” Was she saying Abby had done this?
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “It takes me forever to get out
of the tub with my cast. I finally hauled my ass out and made it
over there, and whoever had been there was gone.”
“I don’t understand. Why would someone do that?”
“To mess with me. Freak me out.”
Okay, she was freaking me out. “Who would want to mess
with you?”
“I just told you, I don’t know.” Her jaw tightened. “I knew
you wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t even want to tell you. But now,
with the vase . . . I’m sure it’s the same person. That’s why I want
to lock the doors.”
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I tried to think clearly about the best way to approach this
before answering. “I’m fine about locking the doors,” I said. “If it’ll
make you feel better, that’s not a problem. But I still don’t think
there’s any need to. I think the vase broke by accident. And since
nothing happened while you were in the tub, I’m assuming . . . I
don’t know . . . that it was some other noise you heard. Have you
lived in an old house before?”
“Not really.”
“Strange noises happen all the time,” I explained. “You’ll get
used to it.”
She pursed her lips. “But it sounded so . . . purposeful.”
“If someone really did want to mess with you,” I said, “that
would be a pretty weird way of doing it. Right? I mean, if I were
trying to freak someone out, I’d replace their toothpaste with
Preparation H, or fill their shoes with peanut butter or
something.”
“Fill their shoes with peanut butter?” Celeste said. “You’d be
a crappy freaker-outer.”
I laughed, a release of nerves mostly. “You know what I
mean. I wouldn’t be knocking on a wall. Or breaking a vase, for
that matter.”
She placed the shard she’d been holding back on her desk.
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”
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“I’m sure I am.”
Feeling like I’d talked her off the ledge, I started out of the
room. The minute I was in the hall, though, I remembered why I’d
gone over to begin with. It took bulldozer force to make myself
turn back around. “Celeste?” I held out the small white envelope.
“David gave this to me at the beginning of school, and I totally
forgot to give it to you. I hope I didn’t screw anything up.”
She handed it back without opening it. “You should keep it,”
she said.
“Me? I don’t even know what it is.”
“The key to his room. Which makes more sense, for his sister
to have it, or his girlfriend?”
For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. David had a
girlfriend?
Then I clued in to her implication. “I’m not his girlfriend,” I
said.
“I see you guys together all the time,” she said. “I don’t mind.
I want you to get together. I told you that right on the first day.
Why else do you think I had him come over to help you hang
those shades the other week?”
Oh my God. “You did that on purpose?”
She smirked. “Just moving things along.”
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I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose.
“How about this. I’ll hang the key on a nail, and then if David’s
ever locked out, he can know it’s here. That’s probably why he
gave you a copy, right?”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll see who’s the first one to use it.”
I couldn’t get out of there soon enough. Back in the
bedroom, I lay down and tried to breathe away the tightness in
my chest and the ache that was beginning to pulse at my temples.
All of these stories she was constructing in her head! It was
just like when we were lab partners—the constant dramas—
except now I was one of the people involved. She couldn’t just be
sad that her vase had broken; she had to make it into a whole
mystery with herself as a victim. David and I couldn’t just be
friends; it had to be a clandestine relationship—orchestrated by
her! She thought everyone lived life as out of control as she did,
acting on every little emotion. Was she going to do this all
semester? Turn everything into more than it was?
Still, as I was having these thoughts, something tickled at the
edge of my brain. The knocking on the wall—that was nothing, I
was sure. But did I really think a breeze could have blown over a
ceramic vase?
I rolled onto my side, facing the window. Cubby stared at me
with her big glass eyes. I reached for her, brought her onto the
bed.
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When I was little, I knew owls were supposed to be wise, so I
made up this schoolmarmish voice for Cubby and would ask her
questions like she was a wooden oracle.
I think I convinced myself that when I spoke in Cubby’s voice,
my answers were wiser than they’d otherwise have been.
“Did you see how the vase broke?” I asked her now. “It blew
over, right?”
No answer.
“You must have seen it. Was someone in here?”
I looked deep into Cubby’s shiny black pupils.
No one, I made her say in her uptight, vaguely English accent.
The room was empty.
“Thank you,” I said, resting her back on the sill.
The room had been empty. Of course it had been. To believe
anything else was to be sucked into Celeste’s melodrama, and I
wasn’t going to let that happen.
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Chapter 11
TWO DAYS LATER, sitting in my Gender Relations in
America seminar, the closer we got to the bell the more
distracted I felt.
“So,” Ms. Boutillier was saying from the other side of the
round table where the seven of us sat, “do you think the author
was ahead of his time? Or was he making a remark that was
designed to stir controversy and prove that women didn’t, in fact,
deserve the vote? Did you question his motives when reading?”
I kept my eyes on my text, as if giving her questions deep
thought. Really, I was thinking about David.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’d gotten in the habit of
leaving by the building’s side exit after my seminar. Usually, David
would be coming out of his history class at that same spot. We’d
walk over to the mailroom together, check our boxes, stop by
senior tea . . . I looked forward to it.
Today, I wondered if I should go out the main exit of Holmes
Hall instead. I hadn’t run into David anywhere yesterday—the day
after the vase incident—and I’d been thinking maybe it would be
better if I stopped going out of my way to see him. Just stay away
from the freaky Lazar vortex; remove myself from Celeste’s rich,
imaginative life.
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“Leena?” Ms. Boutillier said. “Did you hear those page
numbers for tonight?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Can you repeat them?” She did, with
obvious annoyance, and then the bell finally rang.
I slipped into my canvas army jacket, hoisted my bag over my
shoulder, and followed the herd, taking a left toward the main
entrance where I’d usually take a right. Then I stopped. David and
I weren’t doing anything wrong. We weren’t doing anything,
period. Why play into Celeste’s bizarre little game? Also, I wanted
to talk to him about what was going on in the dorm. I turned
around and headed to where I knew he would be lingering,
putting books into his bag.
We swung into step next to each other—my small, blue
Chucks next to his bigger, black ones on the shiny checker-board
floor. I imagined Celeste making some comment about the cute
couple-ness of it, felt her eyes on us even though she didn’t have
class in this building.
“How were the genders relating today?” he said.
“You know,” I said. “Hostile.”
He held the heavy wood door open for me and for a bunch of
other people. I passed by him out onto the steps.
“So, I hear there was trouble on the home front,” he said,
catching up.
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“Yeah.” I shivered—the sky was gray, the air was damp and
cold and bit at my cheeks. “I actually wanted to talk to you about
it.”
“Senior tea?” he suggested.
“Maybe somewhere more private?”
We were already heading toward the path to the mailroom. I
was thinking about a small lounge nearby that was usually empty.
I didn’t want anyone to overhear me as I talked to him about
Celeste.
“Actually,” he said, “I have to meet someone later at senior
