Frost

by Marianna Baer

  “Maybe that was just an excuse,” Abby said, “because they didn’t want to spend the night with you.”

  “Very funny.” I rolled a bread ball and shot it at her. We were pretty much back to normal after our spat in the kitchen, but I could tell that she was still mad I’d compared her to Celeste.

  “What dorm are you in, Whip?” Viv asked.

  “He’s in Franklin,” Celeste said. “It’s a nice room. All new furniture. Really swank. I think the mattress is new, too. Good and bouncy. Not like the terrible ones we have here.”

  Whoa. I glanced at David. He was frozen, his fork halfway between his plate and mouth.

  “So, what type of ‘project’ are you guys doing?” Abby asked Celeste and Whip in a suggestive tone.

  “It’s for rel-phil,” Celeste said. “We’re each other’s gods.”

  “You’re what?” Abby said.

  “We each have to dress the other one as our idea of a god. Then take a photograph, write a paper about physical representations of gods, blah, blah. Whip’s going to be naked.”

  Whip’s eyebrows shot up. “Come again?”

  “My god does not wear clothes.” Celeste reached over and tugged the lapel of his blazer. “Especially not whale pants.”

  I was thoroughly amused by their interaction; but the look of horror on David’s face told me he wasn’t.

  Whip wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. But there’s no way I’m letting photos get out that might ruin my political career.”

  “Are you serious?” Celeste said. “That would be your objection? Oh, you are so getting naked. I already have this idea for body paint I want to put on you.”

  A loud clattering came as David reached to put his plate on the coffee table and somehow knocked off a tray of cheese and crackers.

  “Damn,” he said. “Sorry.” He began collecting the things that had scattered on the carpet.

  I stood up. “More lasagna, anyone? While I’m in the kitchen?”

  “Sure. Great food, Leena,” Cameron said, handing me his plate.

  “Leena’s my god,” Viv said to the room. “She can cook, build furniture, fix her car, and tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue.”

  “You’re so modest, Leena,” Celeste said. “You make it seem like you’re just another pretty, blond prep-school student.”

  “That’s nice,” Abby said, turning to Celeste with a laser glare.

  “What?” Celeste said. “I just meant that you’d never know she was so talented because she doesn’t talk about herself.”

  “As opposed to you,” Abby said.

  “That’s okay. I know what Celeste meant,” I interjected.

  “Who wants a cupcake?”

  “Damn right,” Celeste said to Abby, ignoring me. “I know I’m talented and ambitious and if I work hard, I’ll be successful. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that. Guys get away with bragging all the time.”

  “You don’t know,” Abby said. “Anything could happen.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” David asked.

  “Coffee?” I said.

  “What I said.” Abby crossed her arms. “Anything could happen that would mean Celeste isn’t some raving success.”

  “Look,” David said, “if you’re implying what I think you’re implying, that’s—”

  “I think she’s just referring to life’s unpredictability,” I said, my arms now loaded up with dirty plates to bring to the kitchen. “Abby, can you help me here? Please? I’m about to drop something.”

  In the lovely calm of Ms. Martin’s apartment, I took my time rinsing dishes and getting more food for Cameron. While Abby figured out the glass coffee-brewing contraption. I decided not to tell her to lay off Celeste, knowing that she was probably still feeling sensitive. The ironic thing was now that I thought about it, Abby and Celeste did have some similarities. Abby completely thought that she had the talent to be a successful professional actress, that stardom was hers for the taking. She’d only jumped on Celeste like that because she thought Celeste had dissed me.

  When we got back into the common room, the mood had completely changed. Viv was doing a dance like a football player in the end zone, saying, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah,” waving her phone in the air.

  “What’s up, Vee?” Abby said. “Some great-uncle die and leave you his fortune?”

  “Better,” Viv said. “I got a message from my mother. You know how we have that random Monday off in a few weeks?”

  “Curriculum Development Day,” I said, handing Cameron his refilled plate.

  “Yeah. Do you guys want to spend the long weekend in New York, sans parents? They’re going to be in Paris and totally offered us the house.”

  “Really?” I said. Viv’s family has an incredible town house that overlooks a huge park in Brooklyn. “If they won’t be there, who’ll write our chaperone letters?”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “Dad’ll write the letters. He doesn’t care about rules like that.”

  “Exdese!” Abby bounced up and down on the armchair as well as the ancient cushions would allow. “Truly exdese!”

  “Don’t get too excited,” Whip said to Celeste. “Viv’s house is in an outer borough. Not the city.”

  “Oh,” Celeste said. “I don’t think …”

  A series of darting looks passed among us as we all realized the awkwardness of the moment. Viv and I held eyes for a second.

  “Of course you’re invited,” Viv said to Celeste. “There’s plenty of room. And David, you should come, too. Cameron will be there so you won’t be totally outnumbered.”

  “Thanks,” David said. “I have to see whether I signed up for a Ride Club trip.”

  “If you ladies want to get out of the suburbs, I’ll be at my parents’ on the Upper East Side. You’re welcome to come visit,” Whip said. “I can send a car.”

  “You’re such a snob,” Viv said.

  “And what would it take to get you out to Brooklyn?” Celeste poked Whip on the shoulder. Her touch lingered.

  I sensed movement from my right and when I looked over, David was standing and reaching for his jacket. “I just realized I’ve got something to do,” he said. “Sorry. I totally forgot.”

  In amazingly quick time, he was out the door.

  Chapter 14

  AN HOUR OR SO LATER, dinner was over, Viv and Cameron had banished me from the cleanup stage, and the vodka in my head wasn’t helping me decipher what had happened. I couldn’t sort out who had been mad or offended and why, and what repercussions there might be, if any, not to mention what the hell was going on with Celeste and Whip. Or Celeste and David. And the trip to New York! God.

  I paced around my bedroom, picking things up and putting them down. When I walked by Celeste’s closet, I touched the doorknob. The next time, I let my hand rest on it, curving around the beveled glass. My hand turned and I heard the click of the latch and felt the door moving toward me as my arm pulled back. A shudder went through me as the air crept out.

  Stepping away for a moment, I peeked into the hall to make sure that Celeste and Whip were in the little room with the door shut. Then I closed the door to the bedroom and locked it from the inside. Following an impulse, I grabbed Cubby off the windowsill.

  I left the closet door open a crack so I’d have some light and so I’d be able to hear any movement from the hallway. I sat on the floor and shifted myself into the corner, partially covered by Celeste’s clothes, leaving a space for the wedge of light to stream through. I leaned my head against the wall and breathed in the cool, musty air.

  I held Cubby up and looked in her eyes, which were catching just a bit of the light. “That was quite a dinner party, didn’t you think?” I said to her.

  How on earth would I know? I said to myself in Cubby’s accent. I wasn’t even there.

  “Oh, right,” I whispered. “It got kind of messy. Boys, you know.”

  Boys, yes
. They can be dangerous.

  “But cute,” I said.

  All the same, you need to be careful.

  I ran my finger over her feathers, up and down the scalloped ridges.

  “It’s not like you have to worry,” I said. “You’re all nice and safe back here.”

  I’m not the one who isn’t safe.

  I didn’t like the voice she used when she said that. Of course, it was my voice. But at the same time, somehow, it wasn’t.

  The bird tweet ringtone of Celeste’s phone disrupted whatever tipsy weirdness I was indulging in. I quickly pushed myself up and out of the closet, brushing the clothes back into place and shutting the door securely behind me.

  Her cell lay on her dresser. David’s name flashed on the screen. I touched the glittery blue case and thought of him on the other end, pictured him shifting from foot to foot, the way he did, hoping the call would be answered. The tweets stopped.

  I put Cubby back on the sill, her eyes facing the window. For once, I didn’t feel like having her watching over me. Then I sat on my bed with my head in my hands. After a minute I stood, picked up Celeste’s phone, and returned the call.

  He answered right away. “Are you done with that jerk, or what?”

  “Oh, hi, David … it’s Leena. Not Celeste. Her phone was right here so …”

  “Oh. Hey. What’s up?”

  “Not much. I just wanted to see if everything was okay. You left kind of suddenly.”

  “Sorry about that. Just something I forgot to do.” He paused. “Is Celeste still with that guy?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Do you think I should come back over?”

  “Come over and … ?”

  “I don’t know. Distract her.”

  “I think she’s okay. You missed dessert. Cupcakes.” I checked the time. Still fairly early. “I could bring one over to you there. If you wanted.”

  There was silence on the other end. “Okay,” he finally said. “Sure, if you feel like getting out.”

  I glanced over at the door to Celeste’s closet. What had I been doing in there? “Yeah,” I said, “I definitely need to get out.”

  When I got to Prescott Hall, I phoned from downstairs for David to meet me to get parietals. He didn’t answer. I sat on one of the scratchy, yellow ochre couches in the lounge and called a couple more times, feeling progressively more idiotic about the foil-wrapped cupcake in my hands and the nervousness that had wriggled in my stomach on the way over. Obviously, we’d had a misunderstanding. Or had he changed his mind and was now just ignoring me?

  I was about to give up when I heard the groan of a door being pushed open. David appeared, carrying a navy-blue laundry bag Santa style, sweaty and apologizing. “I had stuff in the dryer,” he said, leading me down the hall to his house counselor’s apartment. “And I realized that if I got it now, I could have you bring Celeste her clothes. Took longer than I thought. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, not mad, just relieved.

  Prescott has none of the hominess of Frost House, and none of the stateliness of the larger brick dorms. Walking with David to his room after getting parietals, I cringed at the cinder-block walls, the fluorescent lighting, and the nubby brownish-orange carpeting spread everywhere like a fungus.

  “Home, sweet home,” David said, pushing open the door to a second-floor single.

  I guess I’d expected his aesthetic to be more like Celeste’s; the lack of decoration in his room surprised me. His comforter was plain black, his sheets and pillowcase light gray with white stripes. He’d hung nothing on the beige walls except a bulletin board, and the fungus carpeting had spread in here, too. Built-in plywood furniture gave the room even more of an institutional feel.

  I’d have had no idea David even lived here if it weren’t for the photos on the bulletin board: the same snapshot Celeste had of the two of them on the beach with their father, and one of David wrestling on a lawn with three young boys. There was also a large one of a smiling, long-faced woman hugging an enormous black dog. Otherwise the board was covered with notebook paper with ungainly mathematical equations using symbols I’d never even seen before.

  I handed David the cupcake and a paper napkin, and didn’t say what I was thinking—that I’d kill myself if I had to live in a room like this.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable.” He sat on the bed and began unwrapping the tinfoil.

  I didn’t know where to sit or what to do with myself—David’s desk chair had a pile of books on it and I wasn’t about to plop right next to him on the bed.

  Then I noticed a cardboard box on the floor with a bunch of silvery stuff inside. Spoons.

  “Hey!” I gestured at the box. “Can I look?”

  “Sure,” David said through a bite of cupcake.

  I picked it up and rested it on the desk, then began taking the spoons out and laying them next to each other. They were satisfyingly weighty, and all had the same handle design—a loop—but the bowl part was different. There were a few with different-size holes in the middle, one shaped like a small ladle, one with an inverted V-rest on the handle…. They looked handcrafted, but not in a bad way—like someone had put care into them.

  “These are so cool,” I said. “Why are they all packed away?”

  “You want me to bring them to Commons?” he asked.

  “You should have used one at dinner tonight,” I said, smiling.

  He finished chewing and wiped his mouth. “Great cake. Your lasagna, too. I’ll have to reciprocate sometime. I make killer Pad Thai.”

  “You cook?”

  “Last year, when I was home, my mom was working a lot, so I cooked all our family meals.” He tossed the aluminum foil in the trash and picked up his laundry bag. “Until my dad stopped eating anything I’d made, of course.”

  Oh, right. I hadn’t thought about that since he’d first told us, the day we met. Now, knowing how much he cared about his family, it seemed that much more awful—his father thinking he was trying to poison him. Something inside me crumpled, imagining how David must have felt.

  “All my paying jobs have been in restaurant kitchens,” he continued as he dumped the laundry on his bed and began sorting it into two piles. “Next year, I might just work at this place in New York where I know the owner, make some money.”

  “Are you applying to schools this year? And then deferring?” I realized that in all our conversations, we’d never talked about his college plans.

  “I don’t think so. It’s …” He kept his eyes on the laundry. “It’s complicated. There’s this professor I want to study with, but I’m not sure I want to go to school full-time, do all the required classes, you know. And the stuff with Pembroke won’t help me getting in.”

  “What happened there?” I asked, since he’d brought it up.

  “I plagiarized on a paper,” he said. “Stupid. I’d fallen really far behind because I was going home all the time. And I’d been caught before for something else, so I got booted.”

  “Something else?”

  “Illegal parietals,” he said, completely matter-of-fact, then looked over at me. “So, what’s the deal with this Whip guy? Has he been over to the dorm before?”

  “Not that I know of.” I turned back to the spoons, trying not to wonder about the girl he’d gotten busted with. “I assume he’s just there to work on the project.”

  “It was pretty obvious he wasn’t just there to work on the project.”

  David was right, of course. And I understood why he’d been upset at dinner—he didn’t want his little sister’s sex life shoved in his face. But, in the end, wasn’t whatever Celeste wanted to do with Whip her own business?

  “Whip’s not such a bad guy,” I said. “Unless it bothers you that he’s part of the old-boys’ club. I think every male in his family has gone to Barcroft and then Yale.” One of the spoons had some sort of dirt on it. I wiped it with my shirt.

  “Celeste tends to have r
eally bad judgment when it comes to guys,” David said.

  “Most of my friends have bad judgment when it comes to guys. Except for Viv.” I looked over at David and noticed he was tossing a pair of Celeste’s lacy underwear into her pile of clean clothes. For a brief second it freaked me out, but what else was he going to do? Of course, he washed her underwear when he did her laundry.

  “It’s different with Celeste,” David said. “Her decisions are … self-destructive. Look at that guy she picked this summer.” He shoved the pile of her clothes into a bag and set it on the floor. “She never listens to me about guys. But maybe … maybe you could say something.”

  “About Whip? What would I say?”

  “You’re the peer counselor,” he said. “I’m sure you can think of something.”

  “Yeah, but in peer counseling, people come to me,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable. “Honestly, I’d feel weird saying something without having noticed anything bad going on.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I get that.” And then, without explanation, he grabbed his jacket and keys off the desk and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Go?” Back to Frost House?

  He held the door open and herded me with a nod of his head. I followed him to the far end of the hallway and up two flights of a dim, concrete staircase until we reached a big metal door with a sign that said EMERGENCY ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND on it. Between WILL and SOUND someone had drawn a line leading to the scrawled word Not. And, sure enough, as David pushed the door open, no siren blared. He led me out onto the flat, expansive roof, the sky opening up above us. Dark and starry.

  “Wow,” I said, stating the obvious. “It’s beautiful up here.”

  He crossed over to a rectangular raised area, about the size of a small bench, then sat and patted the spot next to him. We barely fit on it together, so I had to sit with my body pressed against his. For a few minutes we were both quiet, staring up at the stars. I felt the crisp night air sneaking around my neck, and the heat off of David’s body seeping into mine, smelled the mulch of fall and his spicy scent.

  Eventually, he was the one to break the silence. “I thought going to school with her was going to be great,” he said. “But … in some ways, it was easier to be apart. Because I can’t always make everything okay for her. And even though I know that, I can’t help trying.”