Wildalone

  “The graduate students are an odd bunch,” one of the girls on my shift had warned me. “Most of them are nice enough, but some are so socially challenged it’s scary. Just ignore them. You don’t have to indulge anyone’s inept attempts to flirt.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like tacky pickup lines. Tonight, for example, the entrée is baked chicken. If you end up serving behind the food line, you’ll have to ask whether they want a breast or a leg. Which elicits some very weird responses from certain guys. Every single Wednesday! The same baked chicken—and the same guys and the same responses. It’s pathetic.”

  Luckily, busing trays didn’t involve a dialogue about body parts. A few students stayed behind to strike up a conversation with me. And yes, they were mostly guys, but all of them were genuinely friendly. The only question that felt borderline was the one about my accent—not because of the accent itself, but because being from Bulgaria acquired a different connotation when I was cleaning people’s plates instead of sitting at the table with everyone.

  Throughout the shift, constantly in front of my eyes across the vestibule, a grand piano hid under a cover. Princeton had many pianos, most of them in claustrophobic practice rooms or in common areas where the human hustle never stopped. This one was perfect: as soon as the dining hall closed at night, nothing would come between me and my music.

  Later that evening, I grabbed a few score sheets from my room and sneaked out the window. A short gravel path led to the golf course, where a pond separated the golf club’s property from that of Forbes and a fountain hummed its nostalgic splash out at the sky—the same sound I had heard the first night from my room. After the pond, one had to walk uphill, diagonally through the grass, toward the Graduate College and its Cleveland Tower, whose four white turrets poked through the silence, in a dreamy attempt to lift the entire building up into the air.

  There was an absolute, breathtaking peace—the kind you can only wish for but never quite imagine until you happen to be in the middle of it. Not a single leaf moved in the scattered trees. The full moon had polished every blade of grass in liquid silver, its own astonishing circle suspended low above the tower, big and palpable as if someone had rolled it over as close as it would dare to get.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Procter Hall could be locked, but it was. I turned to leave, resigned to the idea of having to play in the crowded Forbes lobby again—

  . . . when I heard steps. Loud and heavy. Echoing from a stone staircase whose spiral began right outside the dining hall and disappeared underground, in one of the many corridors of the Graduate College. A dark mess of hair was already popping out, followed by the rest of a stocky, middle-aged man in black overalls.

  “Good evening. Might you be a nymph, perchance?”

  A what?! I glanced toward the exit, wishing I had never left my room.

  “Profoundly sorry, did I frighten you?” His huge eyes kept blinking in my direction. “Of course I did, it being this ungodly hour and all. But please don’t mind my misguided humor. I sensed you needed help?”

  “Oh no, thank you. I was just leaving.”

  The eyelids finally froze as his stare fell on the music sheets in my hand.

  “If I may—” He reached past me and slid a large key into the lock of the dining hall’s entrance, turning it only once. “No lock should interfere when the night demands its music.”

  Something about his voice—a shade of laughter in its timbre—was strangely soothing. I asked if playing this late might disturb anyone.

  “Disturb? Not at all. Sounds don’t escape walls like these. Although I wish they did . . .” The sound of his own voice dissipated up toward the ceiling. “Happens only once in a few blue moons, a true nymph’s music.”

  “I am certainly not a nymph.”

  “That’s hardly for you to judge.” He scratched his head, pulling out a few stray leaves whose shape reminded me of ivy before he stuffed them into his pocket. “Embarrassing, to say the least. Yet the vegetation around here needs constant pruning. Part of the job ritual, really.”

  I tried not to laugh. What needed pruning—badly—was his head. Mane, eyebrows, beard, all merged in a cloud of cotton candy spun out of tar instead of sugar. Princeton seemed full of such odd-looking types: frumpy graduate students, disheveled professors, too busy or distracted to bother with the basics of grooming. It was the Einstein look. More than a century earlier, the quintessential Princetonian had proven that not only time and space, but also the looks of a genius could be relative.

  “So you are the invisible gardener? You’ve done wonders with this place.”

  A net of wrinkles caught his eyes as he started laughing. “I’m merely a janitor. Keykeeper. The tower, mostly.”

  “You keep the keys to Cleveland Tower?”

  “Someone ought to. Being up there at night is rumored to have tempted a soul or two into a plunge.”

  “Suicides? At Princeton?”

  My curiosity unsettled him. “Not anymore.”

  “When was the last one?”

  “The last—” He hesitated, either searching his memory or sifting his words. “It must have been long ago. Long before anything that bears resemblance to the present.”

  His answer confused me, but it was the only one I was going to get. With a nod toward Procter Hall, he reminded me that I had come here to play, not to discuss suicides with strangers.

  “Thank you for unlocking the door. I am lucky you happened to be passing.”

  “My deepest pleasure. By what name can I call you?”

  “Thea.”

  “Theia . . .” The new vowel slipped between the other two, as if a long missing sound had completed a musical harmony. His eyelids closed, imprinting it to memory.

  “And yours?”

  “It’s Silen. Like silent with a silent T.”

  He pulled an odd instrument out of his pocket (two flutes sharing a single mouthpiece), pressed it to his fleshy lips, and vanished down the staircase, leaving behind the trail of a melody whose hesitant, airy sounds had a vague resemblance to Debussy.

  Unable to shake off the feeling that I had just dreamed this man up, I reached for the doorknob. And this time it turned obediently, letting me into the vast silence of the dining hall.

  A FAINT EMERGENCY LIGHT ILLUMINATED the piano; the rest hid in darkness. Slowly, the music carried me—first to my home, to the living room where I used to play just like this, by myself, then to Alexander Hall and the silhouette I had seen there. Your Chopin is stunning. These words wouldn’t leave my mind, bringing back his voice and the few brief things he had said to me. I wanted to play for him again. And I began to imagine him, sitting a few feet away from me, listening . . .

  I must have been there for hours. My wrists were too drained to stay above the keys and my body felt incredibly, overwhelmingly tired. But I didn’t want to go back to Forbes, not yet, so I closed the piano and put my head down to rest a bit.

  When I looked up again, it took me a moment to figure out where I was—I had fallen asleep. Outside it was already dawn. Most of the darkness had lifted, and in its place a dense fog had fallen over everything.

  I headed back through the golf course, barely awake, lulled—even as I walked—by the air’s unexpected thickness.

  “Why are you trying to vanish so quickly?”

  The panic and the urge to run came a split second before the certainty that running could only make it worse: a guy had turned up next to me. Restless eyes. Tousled hair. Face still flushed from whatever he had left behind. Caught in my own thoughts, I hadn’t seen the figure approaching through the fog. But he had seen me. And now he was smiling at me, knowing—as well as I did—that we were far from the world. Alone. Invisible. That no one would hear a scream from the golf course. Not through the fog and not this early.

  Why are you trying to vanish? I had to say something. Anything.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because I am not about to let you.
”

  That smile again. I stepped back. Then two more steps. He followed, as if a hidden force drew him in my direction. It felt paralyzing to watch him move. He was flawless. All energy. Agile like a wildcat whose swagger marks the bounds of a new domain.

  “Are you afraid of me?” The thought seemed to bother him and he added, much more gently this time: “Don’t be.”

  Suddenly I recognized the voice. The silhouette. No longer hidden or obscured by shadows, moving through the white air with a resolve I hadn’t noticed in him before. We had finally met, my stalker and I. Not from afar, not in anonymous darkness, and not with museum security about to pop in any second. He was even more striking in daylight—beautiful with the dubiously perfect beauty of magazine spreads, the kind I could have sworn had been infinitely retouched, except he was now standing, disheveled and real, right in front of me. His face had an unnerving blend of strength and fragility. Intense, sinuous cheekbones. Full lips sending a chill at the faintest curve of a smile. Eyes an air-light blue that seemed easily wounded but likely could, just as easily, turn ice-cold in a flash.

  “I haven’t seen you in the fog before,” he said, still smiling.

  I hid behind a joke too: “Creatures like me come out only at clear dawn.”

  “Then why make an exception now?”

  “Maybe it’s a lucky aberration . . .”

  It was impossible to look away from that face. But I had already seen the rest of him, and was acutely aware of it. The strong, smooth neck. The bare chest, as his shirt hung open above the jeans. And his skin—fine, almost translucent, making him appear susceptible to harm yet also immune to it.

  “Your aberration seems to have caught me captive.” His eyes searched mine, as if expecting a reaction I hadn’t produced yet. “What are you doing today?”

  “I have class, then piano practice.”

  “Skip them. Spend the day with me.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Why not?”

  Because I don’t put my life on hold for complete strangers. I bit my tongue. “It’s not that simple.”

  “We can make it simple.” He glided his eyes over my face—their insistent blue—down to my lips as if he were kissing me already. I couldn’t react. Couldn’t move. My heart was about to fly out if he leaned in another inch. But he changed his mind: “Do you live in Forbes?”

  I nodded. A shadow slipped across his face.

  “I will wait for you at nine, by the Cleveland.”

  “Not today. Maybe if—”

  “I will wait for you.” His fingers brushed my cheek—barely, making sure I wasn’t a visual trick played on him by the fog. “I’m glad I found you.”

  Just as he had promised he would. But he hadn’t found me, hadn’t even looked for me. All he had done was run into me by accident.

  I cleaned my voice of reproach before the words came out, simply stating the fact: “It took you a while.”

  “Yes, too long. Almost longer than a lifetime.”

  Then he walked away into the fog.

  JEANS AND A GRAY T-SHIRT—THE usual for everyone else—had to do just fine. I was going to stop by Cleveland Tower and tell him that I couldn’t drop school on a moment’s notice. If he really meant to ask me out, the weekend was only two days away. But he didn’t seem the kind of guy who took no for an answer, so the last thing I wanted was to show up dressed for a date.

  “It’s an art, Tesh,” Rita had explained to me a few days earlier, while we were getting ready to go out (“it” being the tricky balance between glammed up and casual). “You need to look like a million bucks. But you also can’t have a guy think you are trying too hard.”

  “Guys can think whatever they want.”

  “Except one of them, right?”

  “All of them.” I couldn’t believe she was still dropping hints about the guy from the concert. “What is ‘too hard’ anyway?”

  “This—” She pointed to the far end of my closet, where I had hung a couple of party dresses. “LBD? I don’t think so. At least not for the Street.”

  “L what?”

  “Little black dress.”

  I added it to my mental stash of acronyms, next to BLT, which had come up at lunch that day. Her index finger glided through the hangers.

  “Ditto for any sparkle. Leather—maybe. But that’s about it.”

  “Which means half my clothes are practically useless?”

  “Sorry, but yes. This isn’t Europe, where people dress to the nines. You must give the impression of having just stepped out of the Gap, yet still look hotter than everyone else who’s doing it.”

  “So what do I wear then?” I was starting to sweat. Whoever said that dressing up for a party was half the fun clearly hadn’t dressed at Princeton.

  “Let’s see . . . Show me your jeans.”

  I dropped them on the bed: three pairs, probably not brands she knew.

  “The ones in the middle are too bland; you can use them for class. So either the dark wash or the skinny. I’d go with the skinny. It’s sexier.”

  “Does everyone really wear jeans all the time, even to parties?”

  “Pretty much.” She reached into the closet for a black tank top and a pair of high-heeled sandals. “Perfect! Unless, of course, you want to use your forty percent on the legs. With legs like yours, I think you should.”

  This time I was completely lost. She started laughing.

  “The killer equation: you never show more than forty percent of your skin. Jeans go with cleavage. Miniskirts need at least sleeves.”

  The art had started to feel like trigonometry. It still felt that way now, as I was about to head out to Cleveland Tower, with the same three pairs of jeans spread on the bed.

  Badass, I tried to convince myself, staring in the mirror to decide if black eyeliner would be overkill or not. Badass Bombshell.

  The clock above the bed ticked 8:40.

  I threw on the skinny jeans and, a few seconds later, was out the door.

  WALKING TO THE GRADUATE COLLEGE this early was like swimming against the current of a mountain rapid: everyone else rushed in the opposite direction, trying to make it to class on time. I had decided to skip the golf course and take College Road, to clear my mind before meeting him. It didn’t work. The long walk only made me tense. I told myself that he might not show up; that his urge to spend the day with me could have dissipated, together with the fog. But he was there, right on time. Just as he had been for the two Chopins.

  His effortless walk brought him over to me in seconds. I had never seen anyone walk like this: owning every move, as if he had absolute control not just over his body but over every inch of the world that surrounded it.

  “Good morning, creature.”

  “Good morning, captive.”

  “Me?” He leaned in, over my ear. “I’m about to take you away. That makes you the captive.”

  “And what does it make you?”

  “It makes me want to start your captivity right away.”

  I tried to look away from his face. To focus. To figure out a way to tell him that I couldn’t stay. That I was late for class already.

  “Let’s go.” He reached for my hand but I pulled it back.

  “Go where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  He took a keychain out of his pocket and an open convertible beeped from the parking lot by the tower.

  I was starting to see, yes. No wonder he acted as if he owned the world—just like those students Donnelly had warned me about, the ones who never served food to anyone. He had probably eaten at Procter Hall the night before. I might have even cleaned his tray without knowing. Now I was expected to drop everything and take off for a day, simply because a guy with a fancy car said so.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to leave.”

  “All of a sudden, just like that?”

  “I can’t skip school. I told you this already.”

&n
bsp; “You can’t or you don’t want to?”

  “Both.”

  “I see.” Not a hint of hesitation. “These games are cute, but I don’t play them. No need to put on an act with me. We both know school can wait.”

  “And you can’t?”

  “I don’t want to wait. I haven’t stopped thinking about you all morning.”

  All morning? I haven’t stopped thinking about you all week!

  “Do you even go to school here?” I had assumed he did, but most of my other assumptions about him were turning out to be wrong.

  “What if I didn’t?”

  “Then I can see why it’s not a big deal to you.”

  “Forget the why. Come with me.” He looked at my lips again—as before, without any attempt to hide it. “I’ll wait for the weekend if I have to. But I’d rather start being with you now. It doesn’t need to be the whole day, I can bring you back sooner.”

  His voice had softened. Or maybe it was those words—start being with you—that made me change my mind. They sounded like a promise. The kind of promise I had fantasized about ever since I saw him in Alexander Hall.

  He took my hand and headed back toward the car. It turned out to be a Porsche, black and shiny.

  “I didn’t realize my captivity would be so . . . high end.”

  He shrugged. “It’s just wheels.”

  A select few in Bulgaria drove expensive cars on the streets of the capital. My parents had such friends, and even some of mine received the occasional permission to borrow daddy’s pricey ride. Most of them loved to play coy—what impressed us ordinary humans was, of course, just “wheels” to them. But unlike anyone I had ever met who drove a car of this caliber, he sounded like he actually meant it.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Breakfast.” He opened the door for me. “It’s too far to walk, trust me.”

  Trust him? Based on what? But I ignored my fear and got in. Only the night before, I had spent hours at the piano imagining this very moment, and now had come close to ruining it. So what if I skipped a few classes? He was probably doing the same. Or skipping work—which was a bigger deal anyway.