by Dakota Rusk
I looked at her in surprise. So many of us had changed since freshman year; was it possible this girl had, too?
“Possibly,” I said. “But…now’s not a good time,” I added, remembering that Merri was in conference with Valery and the boys.
Her shoulders slumped; she looked suddenly deflated. “Well, that’s too bad. I had myself all primed and ready to humble myself, and now I have to put it off.” She shrugged and smiled.
“Not necessarily,” I said, feeling increasingly confident. I looked her straight in the face. “If you’re really so eager to make amends to someone, you can start with me.”
She blinked in surprise. “You?”
I nodded. “Didn’t you use to call me Merri’s ‘pet gorilla’?”
Again she put her hands in her face; this time she kept them there a few moments longer.
When she looked up, she seemed genuinely abashed. “There’s really no terrible thing I’ve done that isn’t common knowledge, apparently.”
“That happens,” I said, but without any pity in my voice. “It’s why most people choose not to do terrible things.”
She flinched, as though she’d been physically hit. “For the record, I only called you a gorilla once. And it was because I was angry and afraid and I wanted to hurt Merri. I didn’t mean it.” She drew in a breath, as if considering saying more, then continued. “To be honest, I was jealous of you.”
I might’ve been expecting that; it was exactly what someone in her position would say, to try to wriggle out of a shaming situation.
“No, really,” she said, as though sensing my doubt. “You were so brave, and so beautiful, and you were Merri’s friend. And I wasn’t any of those things.”
I winced. She was obviously fishing for compliments. Even so, I felt compelled to reply, “Someone who doesn’t think she’s beautiful wouldn’t dress the way you do.”
She batted her eyes at me, like I was some kind of suitor. “Well… I’ve come a long way toward self-acceptance.” She glanced back at the dorm. “But I’ve still got a long way left to go.”
“Come back later. I’m sure Merri will be glad to see you.”
She got to her feet and gave me a bright, sunny smile. “You’re very kind, all things considered.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shook her head briskly, so that her curls continued dancing for a moment after she stopped. “Oh, nothing personal; I just meant, because I don’t really deserve it.”
“Everyone deserves kindness,” I said flatly.
She gave me an inscrutable look, as though seeing me for the very first time. Then she leaned in and—to my astonishment—kissed me on the forehead.
“Blessings of the day to you,” she said, and she sashayed on down the walk.
I was still reeling from this unexpected intimacy when, a moment later, Donald landed on the bench next to me, as if he’d been launched there from a cannon. He was gasping…out of breath.
“Was—was that really her?” he managed to blurt.
“That was Rowell Ravencroft,” I said.
He shook his head in wonder. “Whoa, lassie. You really do know everyone who’s worth knowin’.” He jerked his thumb behind him. “I ran on ahead when I saw who you were talkin’ to. I wanted to be introduced, but couldn’t get here in time. Ntombi’s just followin’. We wanted to apologize about lunch. We texted, but you’re not answerin’, so we came on over to see if we can get you to forgive us for being such great scabby pillocks.”
I actually laughed; I was so worn out by these scenes, coming one right after another, that all I could do was go with it. “Of course, fine, whatever,” I said. “Anyone who wants forgiveness can just line up right here. I’m open all day.”
At that moment Ntombi arrived, also gasping for breath, and barefoot—carrying her high-heeled sandals one in each hand; she’d clearly doffed them in order to make better time. She snarled at Donald, “I asked you to wait for me.”
“No matter,” he said. “I still missed her.”
Ntombi shot a frantic glance at the sidewalk down which Rowella had traveled, then looked eagerly at me and said, “Was that really her?”
12
With the referendum out of the way, the ferment on campus subsided—to be replaced, like a splash of cold water to the face, with the reality of finals week, which was coming up fast. Students who previously had seemed to live on the commons, fighting off the chill November winds and nighttime frosts with the fire of their own angry outrage, now holed up behind their dorm-room doors, poring over texts and sipping cup after cup of scalding coffee to stay awake, while portable heaters warmed their feet.
My friends and I were no exceptions; we too had exams to pass. I saw less of Gerrid and Darius—and far less of Donald and Ntombi, who lived in a different dorm. I saw Merri every day, of course—we were roommates—but we were too mired in our studies to speak much. And when we did, I found I didn’t like what I heard from her; she had taken the failure of the referendum very hard, and blamed herself for it.
“The other Merri saved the whole multiverse,” she said once, while taking a break to sulk in bed with a bag of cheese-flavored popcorn. “I couldn’t even muster a vote.”
“Whining about it won’t change what happened,” I said. I’d decided I owed it to her to be candid; she was playing for pity, but if I coddled her—or worse, distanced myself from her—our friendship wouldn’t survive.
“It changes how you think of me, though,” she said; and for some reason the bits of popcorn kernel that had fallen onto her pillow repulsed me. It was like she herself was disintegrating—letting herself fall visibly apart in front of me. “Doesn’t it? You don’t have to lie to me.”
“I’m not lying,” I said, turning away so as not to have to look at her. “I’m telling you the honest truth when I say that your behavior is a kind of egotism. You’re taking the whole of the referendum and Parallel 17’s victory as being your battle to lose. No one else’s…just yours. You’re making yourself out to be the most important human being on campus.”
She snorted. “Well. No risk of that anymore.”
It was such a self-indulgent reply that I cut off the conversation right there.
But beyond my distaste for her behavior—I can see it now—was a deep-seated fear that maybe she was right; maybe she wasn’t like the original Merri, and all of us had given her too much authority, too much of our trust—and she wasn’t able to live up to it.
Maybe I was suppressing the notion that I didn’t really know this girl at all.
Making the situation even worse was Rowella. She eventually did have a private meeting with Merri, just a day or two after I’d spoken with her; and it seemed to have gone badly. Neither would tell me anything about it; but where Merri glowered about it and dropped loaded hints about what a terrible person Rowella was, Rowella chose to shrug her shoulders and dismiss the whole situation as unfortunate but irreparable. “I guess some people just aren’t meant to be friends,” she said with a resigned sigh. “Not in any parallel. Oh, well. It’s a big campus. We can certainly steer clear of each other.”
Because, in fact, Rowella was sticking around. She’d dropped out of Parallel U. just a few weeks into freshman year, but she would be rejoining as a sophomore after the winter break—having, it was decided, accrued sufficient credits at the college she attended in her own parallel.
But in the meantime she was the sole student on campus who had nothing at all to do; she didn’t have to worry about the upcoming finals. So she became a common sight, flouncing around the grounds in her big colorful skirts and occasionally a cape, her hair billowing behind her, sometimes annoying the gardeners by climbing into their flower beds and shrubberies and clipping, picking, and trimming—one time even bringing a spade with her, and a bag of garlic bulbs. (“It’s the best time of year to plant them,” she’d protested when she was ordered to stop; “you’ll see, come spring they’ll be so
big and juicy and sweet.” She couldn’t understand why anyone would object to students planting anything they wanted, anywhere they wanted.)
One of the other ways she amused herself was by attaching herself to me. She didn’t come to the room—she was as good as her word about avoiding Merri—but whenever I left the dorm to run a brief errand or to take some exercise to clear the cobwebs from my head, she seemed inevitably to find me and lure me away for a cup of tea and some revivifying gossip. I found, to my surprise, that I liked her; she didn’t lecture me or try to convert me, she just seemed to want to get to know me and have a few laughs. These were chiefly had at the expense of the boys she’d dated in her parallel—of whom there seemed to be a pretty alarming number.
“Oh, I wish I could show you Beagan,” she said once, as steam wafted up from her cup and partially obscured her lustful smile. “Beagan last summer, twenty years old and at the height of his powers! We don’t go in for cameras where I’m from, but even if we did, you wouldn’t get the full sense of him from a photo; you’d have to feel his heat—smell him, his animal musk, the way it rolled off that magnificent frame in tangy, magnificent sheets. Oh, he was beautiful. But—” Here she arched a single eyebrow. “—not the quickest of wits, was Beagan. I sometimes wonder how he got through a full day without…I don’t know. Forgetting to breathe, or something.” I laughed (of course I did; it was funny), which encouraged her to continue. “One day, we were…well, spending time together in a patch of heather, let’s just say…and he was very eager to press on to the next level. I sort of lazily pointed at a willow tree some two hundred yards away, and said, ‘If I made a deal with you, that I’d give in after you climbed to the top of that willow, would you do it?’—And he was up on his feet just like that, tearing through the heather, and then he was at the tree, climbing it—and twice the branches broke beneath him and fell, because, you know, willow branches are slender—but he persisted, and when he was as high as he could go he waved at me, and I waved back.
“And then,” she said, twirling her finger around the rim of her still-steaming cup, “he climbed down and thrashed his way back to me, panting and smiling, and sweating and—well, rampant—and I had to put a hand up to keep him from lowering himself onto me. And I said, ‘I didn’t say I would give in to you after you climbed it; I just asked, if I made the offer, would you take me up on it?’ Oh, Fabia…he was that upset with me. He sat down and actually cried.”
She grinned as she said this; she’d enjoyed being cruel—there was something feline about her, that way. But somehow it appealed to me; she was so different from anyone else I knew. She was so wonderfully, unapologetically herself.
When the sight of Rowella and me together became familiar enough for our friendship to be common knowledge, Donald and Ntombi, who were both star-struck by Rowella’s exoticism and fame, made it a point to seek me out more frequently—finals be damned—and soon we were a kind of irregular foursome. And in the hushed, harried, highly strung atmosphere of Parallel U. at finals time, that was enough to cause a sensation. Especially since most of the witches’ delegation had returned to Parallel 17 for the winter solstice, excepting Jocasta Foxglove, who’d stayed behind to undertake a media tour of the globe, promoting her vision for the university. When finals week finally arrived, she was in Japan.
Valery, for his part, was not only okay with Jocasta’s heightened profile, he was happy about it. After the P.R. disaster of the Terminus Institute, he was glad there was finally some positive press for the university—even if it was about magic being added to the curriculum. “We’re getting funding from outside sources now,” he told me one day when I went to see how he was doing (I was still haunted by the sight of him, hollow-eyed and ashen, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum). “Maybe we’ll actually see a day when the university can dispense with Terminus altogether, and be entirely independent.”
“But even if that happens,” I said, “it won’t be on your watch. Jocasta takes over as President next term.”
“You forget,” he said, trying to light his pipe with a lighter that refused to cooperate, “I never wanted this job; it was pretty much forced on me, and I’ve never felt at ease in it. I’ll be more than happy to step aside.”
So with the bulk of the delegation gone and Jocasta off being a media star, my new friends and I were suddenly the chief celebrities on campus. And I realized, with a kind of shock, that we’d replaced me and my other friends in that role. There had, in the past year, been two successive quartets who had become famous at the school, each one wildly different from the other. Somehow, I had managed to end up in both of them.And then things started going wrong.
The first blow came on the day of the Cosmology final. It was a killer of an exam; I barely completed it in time, and didn’t have much confidence that I’d done more than a passable job. It made me feel only marginally better that Donald, who sat adjacent to me, seemed to use the full ninety minutes to finish as well. I felt sullen and unhappy when the T.A.’s came down the aisle and collected the papers; and once these were delivered to Dr. Bernstein and he’d put them in his briefcase, we all shifted in our seats, anticipating being dismissed.
But he surprised us. “I’m going to beg your indulgence,” he said, “and ask you to stay in your seats a few moments longer.” There was a murmur of disappointment, almost of protest; even the T.A.’s appeared confused. But something about the implacable look on Dr. Bernstein’s face quashed any open revolt. We settled back in; Donald and I shared a brief what’s-going-on glance.
“This won’t take long,” he promised. “I just want to let you know what you’ve all missed by taking this course now, instead of next term.” He flipped open his laptop and an image projected on the overhead screen; it was a very crude woodcut print—clearly some centuries old—of a spirit emerging from a body on a bed, while witnesses looked on in awe.
“This is a scene of necromancy,” he said, pronouncing the word as though it tasted sour on his tongue, “which is the so-called ‘science’ of raising the spirits of the dead—or in some cases raising the dead themselves, bodily, from the grave—to speak to and confer with the living.”
He clicked over to another image. This one showed four arcane looking creatures, sketched in vibrant colors, but also pretty crudely rendered. “These,” he said, “are called the ‘elementals.’ What, you ask, does that mean? Well, apparently these are the incarnations of the four earthy elements—yes, just four—fire, air, earth, and water, represented here by Salamander, Sylph, Gnome, and Nymph. These are beings who, in addition to serving as avatars for the ostensible fundamental forces in nature, may also disguise themselves and walk among us, even fall in love, and either sire or bear children by human beings.”
He switched to another slide. There was an audible hiss of disgust, as this one showed an oozing, carbuncular mass, with hideous tentacles and wide, unblinking eyes looking out from its pockmarked skin, and several open mouths ringed with razor-sharp teeth. It seemed to float among a canopy of stars.
“This,” said Dr. Bernstein, “is Azathoth; he is, it seems, the king of a pantheon of primordial deities called ‘the Elder Ones,’ who are as old as time, and merely await the opportunity to consume the material realm and return the cosmos to its original state of screaming chaos.”
With gentle firmness he shut his laptop; the images went dark.
We waited, scarcely breathing, for what he would say next.
“These…concepts,” he finally said, his voice exhibiting only the slightest quaver, “and there are many more of them, I assure you…have been forwarded to me for inclusion in next term’s Basics of Cosmology syllabus. As you know, my interpretation of the term ‘cosmology’ is all-inclusive; at its base, as you have often heard me say, it is the study of everything.
“But it seems,” he continued, with some indication of struggle, “that I have been unfair to you in limiting my concept of ‘everything’ to those disciplines and ideas that are observ
able, provable, and demonstrable; that I have done you a disservice by hewing only to what can be objectively validated…what is knowable. When, apparently, I ought also to have been teaching you what can be imagined, felt, and feared.
“For this I apologize,” he continued; and his face looked like it might break clean in two. “For you must now walk out of this classroom, being schooled only in the light; how hobbled you will be, knowing nothing of the dark, of the abyss.
“The next Basics of Cosmology class,” he said, and by now his voice was a croak, “will be more fortunate. Envy them. That is all. You may go.”
I’d imagined everyone would immediately flee from the sheer, awful awkwardness of the scene; but in fact we all stayed riveted in place. We were seeing the first unarguable result of the passage of the referendum, and it was beyond anything any of us had ever bothered to consider.
As much difficulty as I’d had with Dr. Bernstein, my heart ached for him now. I raised my hand, and when he seemed not to see me—or to be unwilling to acknowledge me—I got to my feet anyway.
“You forget, sir,” I said, “there is an advisory board that will be determining which of the suggested materials will actually be included in the curriculum next term. And half the people on that board, at least, are rational, enlightened people.”
He stared at me blankly. “And half are not,” he said. “So, I may hope that…what? Some percentage of these atrocities will not be foisted upon me to share with impressionable minds? That I may ultimately be responsible for teaching, perhaps, only fifty percent of them?” He smiled grimly. “Thank you; but I think, for me, there will be precious little comfort in that.”
When we were finally out of the hall, Donald shook his head and said, “Hell’s bells! What do you suppose got into his breeks?”
For the first time, I was too angry with him to trust myself to respond.
It wasn’t until two days later that I heard—by rumor, spread through the grapevine like a blight—that Dr. Bernstein had gone home that night, and hanged himself.