Frost - Marianna Baer
it. Only if you feel comfortable.”
Gazing at me with those eyes, he could have asked me to do
just about anything and I would have agreed.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“And . . . the moratorium. It’s only one semester, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “One semester.”
Suddenly, that sounded very, very long.
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Chapter 15
I MADE IT BACK TO FROST HOUSE with forty seconds to
spare before sign-in, sweaty and breathing hard after running the
whole way from Prescott carrying the bag of laundry. As I
scribbled my name on the sheet, I noticed that Whip had signed
out only fifteen minutes ago. Not a development I’d be reporting
back to David.
I wasn’t quite ready to be inside, and definitely didn’t feel
like dealing with Celeste, so I dropped her laundry bag in the
common room and sat out on the porch in one of the Adirondack
chairs. I stared up at the sky over the trees and tried to bring
myself back to the roof. I didn’t want to worry, right now, about
anything that had been said. I just wanted to remember the
feeling of my side pressed against his. The warmth and solidity of
his arm, his torso, his thigh . . . The unmistakable reaction inside
me and on my skin. How could something so passive—just sitting
there next to another body—feel so good in so many different
ways? A sense of complete safety combined with that giddy
flitter-flutter that thrummed all the way to my toe tips.
“Someone there?” Ms. Martin called from her front
doorway.
“It’s me, Leena,” I called back. “Sorry. I’m here on the porch.”
She padded around the corner, wrapped in a bathrobe. “I
wanted to make sure it was one of you girls.”
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“Just me,” I said, standing. “But I’m going in now.”
I went inside, and when I tried to open the bedroom door
was surprised to find it was still locked. I got out my key and slid it
in the lock, pushed the door—
“Leena?” Celeste’s voice called out from somewhere. Not
the bedroom.
“Yeah?” I said, turning around.
“Can you . . . can you come in here?” She was in the
bathroom. Probably taking one of her frequent nighttime baths.
Figuring she had forgotten something—she had a hard time
getting out of the tub, and was always needing me to bring her a
razor or towel or something else—I tossed her laundry bag in our
room and went in. She was sitting in the bath, a thin layer of
bubbles covering the surface of the water. Her cast was propped
up on her special bath stool, in its plastic bag. Her other leg was
bent, her arms wrapped around it. There was something not quite
right about her face. Her jaw muscles were tense, her skin paler
than usual. She looked like she might be trembling.
“Are you okay?” I said.
She shifted positions slightly to show me: a bright red mark
seared the back of her left upper arm. I knelt quickly by the tub. It
was a burn. The size of a baby’s fist. Not blistered, but still
obviously painful.
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“What happened?” I asked.
“I . . . I was sitting here while the water was running,” she
said. “And I guess . . . I guess I bumped against the faucet. I don’t
remember. It happened so quickly, and then it hurt so much.”
“That’s from the faucet?” I said. “The water must have been
so hot.”
She shook her head. “I was trying to cool the bath down.
Only the cold water was turned on.”
“You must have turned the wrong handle.”
“I didn’t.” Then she said it again, louder. “I didn’t. I know
which handle I turned. This wasn’t my fault.”
The faucet couldn’t have burned her if it was running cold
water, obviously, but there was no point in me fighting with her.
What mattered was her burn.
“Let’s drain the bath,” I said. “And then you need to hold
your arm under a stream of cool water. I’ll cover the faucet with a
facecloth.” As I did, I found that the metal wasn’t hot at all. The
bathwater wasn’t especially hot either. How long had she been
sitting here? I didn’t ask, just handed her towels to wrap over her
legs and her shoulders, so she’d warm up. Her whole body was
shaking. “You should take Tylenol for the pain,” I said. For once,
she didn’t say no to my suggestion of medication. I left her for a
moment and went back into the bedroom.
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After getting a couple of pills from my stash, I happened to
notice that Celeste’s beetle photo wasn’t hanging in its usual
spot. This wasn’t so strange; for some reason, ever since that first
day, the frame had been prone to falling off the nail. But this
time, I didn’t see it on the bed where it usually landed either.
I wasn’t sure why this made the hairs on the back of my neck
prickle, but it did.
“Leena?” Celeste called.
“One second,” I called back. “Just finding the Tylenol.”
I quickly scanned the room and spotted the photo lying
awkwardly on the floor across from Celeste’s bed. With growing
apprehension, I walked over and picked it up. The photo itself was
fine. But one corner of the black frame had chipped badly,
revealing the lighter wood underneath the paint. Following an
instinct, I checked the wall. About two feet up from where the
photo had been lying, there was a black mark on the white
surface, where the corner must have hit.
The frame hadn’t been placed on the floor.
It had been thrown.
My body stiffened. What had gone on here while I was with
David?
“Leena?” Celeste called again.
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I set the frame on her bed, then returned to the bathroom
and handed Celeste the Tylenol and a glass of water from the
sink, an anxious thumping in my chest. “What happened to your
photo?” I asked carefully.
“Huh?” She took the pills and handed me back the glass.
“The beetle photo.”
“Did it fall again?” she said. “Can you grab my robe?”
“You weren’t in there when it . . . fell?” I said, letting her use
my arm for stability as she climbed out of the tub.
“No.” She slipped her right arm into her silk robe and held
the fabric closed in front, then twisted to look at her burn. “Do I
need to bandage this or something?”
“I’ll do it.”
I got supplies from my first-aid kit in the medicine cabinet,
my thoughts spinning. If Celeste really didn’t know what I was
talking about, did that mean someone had snuck in our bedroom
and thrown her photo while she was in the bath, or with Whip,
and she just hadn’t found it yet?
After applying antibiotic ointment to her burn, I tore off a
piece of tape and affixed gauze across it. She’d seemed so
vulnerable: sitting in the tub, all skinny and trembling. How would
she react if she knew that while she’d been in there, someone
had done that to her artwork? Would she accuse Abby because of
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the way they’d been sniping at dinner? I bit my cheeks and
wondered if maybe . . . maybe it would be better if I didn’t tell her
at all. At least, not now, while she was already shaky.
“There,” I said, smoothing down the final piece of tape. “It’s
not actually that bad, I don’t think. Just hurts.”
“Thanks,” she said.
I was on my way out when she added, “Leena? Don’t tell
David about this.”
For a minute I thought she meant about the photo. But, no.
Her burn. “Okay,” I said, not seeing any reason he needed to
know.
I shut the bedroom door behind me and sat on the bed with
the photo in my hands, studying the damage. Then—pulse racing,
knowing Celeste was right across the hall—I rummaged through
my bag for a black Sharpie and began coloring in the chipped area
on the frame. At first, the color was too brownish, but after a few
layers it built up to black. If I looked closely, I could tell there was
a variation in the surface; once it was hanging I thought it would
be okay, especially if she didn’t know to be looking for it.
After I was finished, I couldn’t even entertain the idea of
doing the homework I had left from the weekend. I went straight
to bed. As I lay there in the dark, all I could think about was who
would have done that to Celeste. The door had been locked; they
would have had to climb through a window to get in. They would
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have had to break in to our bedroom— my bedroom. Picturing it, I
couldn’t ignore the anger beginning to burn at the center of my
chest.
This wasn’t how Frost House was supposed to be. None of
it—the tension at the dinner, worrying about what was
happening here in the room. It was supposed to be a sanctuary.
I brought Cubby onto my chest, wishing again, like I had with
the vase, that she could tell me what she’d seen. If I didn’t know
what had happened, how could I know what to do to make it safe
again? I concentrated very hard on her eyes, trying to see the
answer.
It will never be safe while she’s here. Cubby’s voice was
inside my head, quiet.
“It’s not her fault,” I told myself.
Everything is her fault. She has to go.
I looked through the dark at Celeste’s side of the room: her
hat collection, her flamboyant wardrobe, the beetle photo . . .
and I wondered. One thing I knew was that she needed to be the
center of attention. Was it possible that she was doing this all
herself, so she would be the center of attention in the dorm? Was
that what I was trying to tell myself, by saying it was all her fault?
Maybe she’d ripped her own skirt, broken the vase, thrown her
own photograph. And just pretended to be the scared victim.
Well, if she had, then hanging the photo back up and
ignoring it was the best thing I could have done.
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Chapter 16
THE NEXT MORNING, I pretended to be asleep when Viv
came to get me for breakfast. I absolutely shouldn’t have missed
bio—especially not an unexcused absence—but the only, only
place I wanted to be was in my room. It was going to be one of
those shockingly bright fall days, and the early sun shone in
through the trees, filling the whole space with warmth. I liked
knowing that if I was here, the room was safe. No one could come
in except those rays of sunlight.
I lay curled up on my side with my comforter piled on top of
me and tried to think about yesterday’s events without getting
worked up. I needed to talk to someone about what was going
on. But who? Not David, or Abby, or Dean Shepherd. Viv was a
possibility, but she hated keeping secrets, and I’d have to ask her
not to tell anyone. I was even considering my mother, when I had
another idea. Trying not to get my hopes up, I looked at the clock
and calculated. . . . Yes, it should be the perfect time. Without
another thought, I opened my laptop and checked to see if she
was online, then called.
I almost cried when Kate appeared on my screen, all the way
from Moscow, wearing her favorite Violent Femmes T-shirt and
playing with her ever-present wire mandala. Viv and Abby and I
had talked to her occasionally as a group, but it was hard because
of the time difference, and because she wasn’t online often.
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“Leena Thomas,” she said with a smile. “You look like hell.”
The minute I started talking, it all rushed out in a waterfall of
words, everything that had happened with Celeste and Abby and
David from the beginning of the semester, so many things—I
realized now—that I’d been keeping to myself.
Kate listened and nodded and kept up a steady rhythm with
her hands, flipping the three-dimensional wire form into different
geometric shapes. I could tell she was thinking hard because of
how quickly her hands moved.
“It seems to me,” she said, “from thousands of miles away,
that you’re tangling a lot of things all together. I don’t actually
think there’s anything you need to be worrying about.”
“Really?” I said.
“The one thing you need to make a decision about is
whether to tell anyone about the photograph, right?”
The weight of all the worries I had made it seem much more
complicated than that, but I supposed that was the only actual
decision to be made. “Right,” I said.
“Okay, I’m trusting that you can really tell it hit the wall hard
enough to have been thrown. So, in that case, either . . . one.”
She stopped playing with the mandala and held up a finger.
“Someone snuck in the room and threw it to be mean to Celeste.
Or two—” Another finger. “Celeste threw it herself, for God
knows what reason. Right?”
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“I guess.”
“You don’t sound sure,” she said. “Those are the only options
I see. Unless you think a ghost did it or something.” She smiled.
“Don’t go all Viv on me,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Okay,” Kate said. “So let’s say we know it’s option one.
Someone was mean to Celeste. The question is, should you tell
her? How would she react if you did?”
No mystery there. “Freak out. Accuse Abby. Get even more
paranoid.”
“So she’d get scared? Would anything constructive come
from it?”
I imagined Celeste reacting and didn’t see it leading
anywhere good. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Okay, so that solves that. You don’t tell Celeste.” Her hands
went back to their rhythmic motions.
“But maybe we should be reporting it, to the dean or
something?”
“It’s not like they’re going to fingerprint the frame and
windowsills to figure it out.” Kate paused for a moment, her thick,
black brows lowered. “You’re sure someone would have had to
come in through a window? It seems so . . . unlikely.”
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“The door was definitely locked,” I said. “And only me,
Celeste, and David have keys.”
“David has a key?” she said, leaning forward. “You don’t
