by Diane Hoh
“Didn’t you recognize it?” Ian asked, overhearing her. “From high school chem class? Sulfuric acid. Smells like rotten eggs, remember?” Having said that, he left to help a thoroughly shaken Jess to the infirmary. Other people with bumps and bruises or bloodied noses followed.
Ivy, wiping her face with a tissue, joined Tobie and Danny. Tim was right behind her, his tuxedo trousers torn at the pockets. “Our clothes are positively ruined!” Ivy cried with disgust. “Ruined! I paid two hundred dollars for this dress. Now I’m going to have to burn it. It smells like something in a landfill.”
Tobie knew she was right. In spite of the cool, fresh air, the vile stench still clung to their skin, their hair, their clothes. “Where could it have come from?”
Danny shrugged. “Who knows? But if Ian’s right about it being sulfuric acid, I think someone should call the police.”
“The police?” Suze and her date, a tall, thin boy named Leon, arrived, wiping their eyes. “You think we should call the police?”
“Well, it couldn’t have been an accident,” Danny said. “There’s no chem lab in the Student Center. So my guess is, some nasty little amateur chemist rigged up a stink bomb and deliberately set it off.”
Tobie and Ivy stared at him with reddened eyes. “What are you talking about?” Tobie said, a strained expression on her face. “You think someone ruined the dance on purpose?”
Danny’s mouth was grim. “Can’t be anything else. I’m calling the police.”
By the time the police had taken everyone’s dorm and room number and stopped asking questions, the desperate need for a hot, leisurely shower drew them all back to their rooms.
A small fortune in formal wear made its way to the incinerators that night.
When Quinn awoke the following morning, Tobie was already awake, sitting upright on her bed, arms wrapped around her chest.
The first thing Quinn noticed was how red and swollen her roommate’s eyes were.
Oh, no. Tobie hadn’t had a good time? She hadn’t really wanted to go. Had almost turned down Danny’s invitation. It was Quinn who had urged her to accept, saying that Tobie didn’t get out enough. Which was true.
But now she’d had a lousy time. So would she be mad at the person who had pushed her into going?
She didn’t look mad. She looked … upset.
“What’s wrong?” Quinn asked. “I thought you’d be sleeping late this morning.”
Her eyes focused on the floor. Tobie didn’t answer.
“What’s wrong, Tobie? Didn’t you have a good time?”
“It was okay,” Tobie said then, lifting her head. “Until the last dance.” And she told Quinn about the filthy, disgusting smell.
“I don’t get it,” Quinn said when Tobie had finished. “A smell? What kind of smell? Where did it come from?”
“It was that rotten egg smell. Sulfuric acid. Remember chem class in high school? You must have used it. We all did. Only this was horrible, so there must have been a lot of it. It was in our clothes, in our hair, on our skin. I showered for an hour when we got back.” Tobie sighed heavily. “And we all had to burn our clothes.”
Quinn was stunned. “Rotten eggs?” She had imagined them all having a wonderful time. She’d felt bad, even angry, that she wasn’t a part of it. “Where did it come from?”
“No one knows yet. People think it was a stink bomb. The police are going to look into it.”
The police? The police had been called to Salem’s Spring Fling dance?
“Listen,” Tobie said wearily, standing up, “I can still smell that awful stuff, even though I never brought my dress into this room and I showered before I came back. I guess I’ll just have to keep showering and shampooing until I can’t smell it anymore.” She picked up a robe lying on the foot of her bed. “You should be glad you weren’t there, Quinn. It really was horrible.”
Looking frail and wan to Quinn, Tobie headed down the hall to the bathroom.
Quinn stayed in bed, trying to digest what she’d been told.
A smell had ruined the dance? A foul stench that had caused people to panic and run and people had gotten hurt? “Like a stampede,” Tobie had said, “in some old western.”
Crazy. Totally crazy.
Where would a smell like that have come from?
Quinn got up and went to the window. The whole campus would be buzzing about the dance’s disaster. It was Sunday. No classes. A beautiful, sunny, spring day. People would be gossiping, all right, but they’d also be sunning, and jogging, and gathering on the Commons, a grassy green area in the middle of campus.
She was suddenly anxious to get outside and find out if anyone knew anything more about the disaster that had taken place at the dance.
Turning, she hurried to the closet and pulled the door open.
And recoiled in revulsion at the odor that slapped her in the face. It was overpowering. There was no mistaking what it was. The smell of rotten eggs.
Her eyes began to water.
But … Tobie had said she’d burned her dress. That she’d never brought it back into this room. And she had showered and shampooed for an hour before she came back here.
Maybe she’d hung her jacket from last night in the closet. Throwing away a jacket as well as a new dress might have been too much for her. Or maybe her purse was in there, or the shoes she’d worn.
Whatever it was, it had to be taken out of the closet, or everything in there would have to be burned.
Gathering her courage and placing a hand over her nose, Quinn moved on into the closet. And realized very quickly that the odor was coming from her side of the closet.
It had been late when Tobie came in, and dark. She must have mistakenly hung her jacket on Quinn’s side.
Then a small kernel of uneasiness began to stir within Quinn. Because the fact was, Tobie Thomason never hung anything in the closet when she came home from anywhere. She never hung up anything, period. She was a dropper. How likely was it that she’d suddenly reformed last night of all nights?
By checking each article, Quinn was able to single out one garment as being the sole source of the odor.
It was a bright red jacket.
But it wasn’t Tobie’s. It was hers.
A favorite jacket, lightweight enough for warm fall days, but warm enough for cooler nights. She wore it often.
She hadn’t gone to that dance. So how could a jacket of hers possibly carry the disgusting odor of rotten eggs?
Impossible.
But this jacket had to have been at that dance, Quinn thought, yanking it off its hanger, holding it as far away from her as possible. Where else would it have been contaminated with that smell?
Still holding the jacket at arm’s length, she hurried to the door. Out in the quiet hall, she headed straight for the incinerator chute.
The jacket couldn’t have gone to the dance without her. She would have heard if someone had come into her room and taken it, wouldn’t she? Tobie had worn a pale pink dress, so she would never have borrowed a red jacket to wear. Her jacket, Quinn remembered, had been black.
Quinn opened the incinerator door and threw the red jacket down the chute. The stench wafted back up into her face, and her eyes teared anew.
She felt sick, but she wasn’t sure it was simply from the smell. Her favorite red jacket had left her room last night. And because she was Quinn Hadley, who had a sleeping disorder, she couldn’t be absolutely, positively certain that she hadn’t been inside that jacket when it left her room. And because she was Quinn Hadley-who-had-a-sleeping-disorder, she couldn’t be absolutely positive that she hadn’t gone to that dance.
What was worse was, if she had gone, she had no idea what she’d done when she got there.
Chapter 4
WHEN TOBIE CAME BACK from the bathroom, Quinn was standing at the window again, looking down on the Commons. It was beginning to fill up with people. There were tennis matches scheduled for that afternoon between the Salem tennis teams and mem
bers of a group of visiting alumni. A picnic was to be held on the Commons, and for those who liked neither tennis nor picnics, boat rides were available on the Salem River, behind the University.
“It doesn’t look any different down there,” Quinn commented when she heard the bathroom door open. “You’d never guess the dance was ruined last night.”
“Well, you’d know it in here,” Tobie complained. “I can still smell that stuff. I don’t get it. I have scrubbed and scrubbed and shampooed every inch of my scalp. And I burned my dress. But it still stinks in this room.”
Quinn, her back still to Tobie, flushed guiltily. The red jacket. Although it was gone now, it had been in the closet, probably for hours. No wonder the smell lingered.
“It’s warm enough to open the windows,” she said as she turned around. Avoiding Tobie’s eyes, she went directly to the closet and began yanking clothes off hangers. “Everything in this closet smells. If we open the windows wide and scatter our clothes around the room, maybe the fresh air will help.”
“Well,” Tobie grumbled, “I don’t understand why our closet smells. I didn’t hang anything in there last night.” But when she got close enough to the hanging clothing, she gasped. “Whew! You’re right.” She sighed. “I guess it’s just the kind of smell that gets into everything.”
When they had scattered their clothing around the room, Tobie shrugged. “At least now it’s not just my side of the room that looks bad. If anyone walked in here now, they’d think we were both slobs.”
Quinn waited nervously for Tobie to ask why the closet stank.
But Tobie, anxious to leave the room and get outside, continued to dress without asking any more questions.
She thinks it’s her, Quinn realized. Tobie’s convinced that because I wasn’t at the dance, she’s the one who brought the odor home with her.
I should tell her, Quinn thought.
But she didn’t.
Because before she could explain it to Tobie, she had to be able to explain it to herself. And she couldn’t. Not yet. She had no idea how the red jacket had picked up the smell of rotten eggs from a dance she hadn’t attended.
She hadn’t, had she?
Quinn tied the laces on her sneakers and thrust her straight, dark hair up into a bouncy ponytail. She never remembered her sleepwalking episodes. Someone always had to tell her about them. First, her parents and her younger sister, Sophie, and now, Tobie. “You were sleepwalking last night, Quinn.” She always had the same reaction: disbelief, and then dismay that she’d done something she couldn’t remember.
She did remember two episodes, because they’d ended badly. The first happened when she was fourteen and Sophie was twelve. They’d had a fight earlier in the day and hadn’t made it up. They’d gone to bed angry. Sometime in the middle of the night, Quinn had been jerked rudely awake by her parents pulling her away from Sophie’s bed where, they told her in shocked voices, she’d been pummeling her younger sister, using her fists.
The incident had terrified Quinn. She had never deliberately hurt anyone in her life, and she hated violence of any kind. She didn’t want to believe it was true. But the looks on her parents’ faces and the fear in Sophie’s eyes didn’t lie.
The second incident had happened two years later, at a summer camp where Quinn was a counselor. She had lost a tennis match to a girl she couldn’t stand, an arrogant, unpleasant fellow counselor. The girl had been insufferable in her win, laughing at Quinn and taking as an added trophy the boy Quinn had had her eyes on since they’d arrived.
A senior counselor had found her that time. According to him, Quinn had been crouched behind the girl’s cabin in the dark at two in the morning. Using a rock as a hammer, she was deliberately, methodically, destroying the very expensive tennis racket that had been left outside.
Although Quinn, abruptly awakened, hadn’t remembered why she was at the cabin or what she’d been doing, she had been sent home. That was when her mother had taken her to the psychiatrist. He had explained to Quinn then exactly what had happened, and suggested that she was simply acting out in her sleep anger that she was too timid to express openly when she was awake.
That was probably true. The Hadley household frowned on any kind of openly expressed disagreement. “Least said, soonest mended” was her family’s credo. She had learned it early.
Last night, hadn’t she been angry that Simon hadn’t asked her to the Spring Fling dance? Hadn’t she been angry that she’d missed one of the biggest formal dances at Salem?
How angry?
Quinn fastened tiny pale pink rose earrings in her lobes. Angry enough to leave her room in the middle of the night, wearing the red jacket? Angry enough to make her way across campus to the student center and …
And do what?
Rotten eggs … sulfuric acid …
She had been very good in chem in high school. She had especially liked the experiments. Combining one chemical with another and watching the resulting reaction had been fun. She hadn’t found the symbols or the equations confusing like a lot of kids had.
Yes, she had been very good in chemistry.
“We’ll have to do a load of laundry when we come back,” Tobie said as they left the clothes-cluttered room. “I used the last towel. Seems like we just washed towels, but there aren’t any more clean ones in the closet. I think we’re missing a couple. You haven’t left any in someone else’s room, have you?”
“No.” But … she had been wondering why, if she actually had gone to the dance in her sleep, her hair and her skin didn’t smell, as Tobie said hers had. The missing towels could explain that. Maybe she’d come home and showered and shampooed before going back to bed. And then maybe she had burned the towels in the same incinerator that had swallowed up the red jacket.
This is crazy, Quinn scolded herself as they stepped into the elevator. It smelled faintly of rotten eggs. What am I doing? I’m making myself nuts here, writing a whole scenario that probably never even happened. I’d remember walking across campus to that dance. I would.
But she hadn’t remembered punching Sophie.
Or wrecking the tennis racket.
Although there seemed to be food everywhere on campus, tables of it on the Commons, at the tennis matches, more tables down by the boat dock along the river, Quinn had no appetite. She ate nothing.
Simon and Danny Collier won the canoe race. Quinn stood off to one side, watching as Jessica Vogt and Ian Banion handed Simon his small brass trophy. Jess’s left wrist was in a white cast to her elbow.
Quinn found that frightening. People had really been hurt at that dance. Small wonder everyone was talking about it. And she had felt the gloom of it all day. Although the weather was warm and sunny, people seemed to be trying too hard to enjoy it. Smiles looked forced, and what laughter there was sounded artificial.
She wondered if Simon had gone to the dance. She hadn’t worked up the nerve yet to ask anyone. It would have seemed petty and self-centered to ask such a question following Tobie’s incredible story. It wasn’t important. What difference did it make if Simon had gone to the dance? He hadn’t gone with her and wasn’t that all she needed to know?
Still, if he had gone, she would be interested in his take on what had happened. Simon was incredibly smart, very aware. That’s what had drawn her to him in the first place. He had been in town at Vinnie’s one night, eating pizza with a group of friends. She’d passed by his booth just as he was giving his opinion of athletes using steroids and she’d been impressed by what he said. It wasn’t just that he was against it, as she was. It was the clear, objective, intelligent way he presented his arguments. He’d even managed to get a laugh or two.
She liked the way he looked, too. He was too thin, maybe because he was so tall, and his posture was terrible. But he had clear gray eyes, sun-streaked sandy hair needing a trim, and a strong chin. When he got the laughs he wanted, she had watched from across the room as his mouth curved into a satisfied grin.
She had introduced herself to him an hour later, when they’d both finished eating and he was standing at the jukebox alone.
It was stupid to keep avoiding him now. Or was it the other way around? Was he avoiding her?
Whatever. So they weren’t going out anymore. So she had no idea why. Did that mean they couldn’t even be friends? Simon was smart and funny and he’d been sympathetic about the sleepwalking when she’d told him. It had seemed wrong to keep something that important in her life from Simon.
She missed him.
Taking a deep breath, she strode over to the edge of the dock and, lifting her chin, said heartily, “Congratulations, Simon. Great race!” Ivy, standing nearby, smiled approval. Her dark eyes signaled, “It’s about time you took the initiative.”
Simon looked surprised. His face and arms were sunburned, so she couldn’t tell if he was flushing. But at least he didn’t run away. “Thanks. Danny’s dynamite with a paddle.”
“Don’t be so modest. You won the race together. That is a trophy you’re holding, right?”
Simon laughed. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
Ivy led Tim, Danny, Tobie, and Suze away, leaving Simon and Quinn alone together.
“Not very subtle, are they?” Quinn remarked. “So, did you go to the dance last night?” That was why she’d come over here to talk to him, wasn’t it?
“No!” He frowned at her. “Of course not.”
Of course not? What did that mean? Of course not as in, Not without you, I didn’t?
You wish, she told herself.
“Did you?” he asked.
The crowd began to disperse. They were standing alone on the dock, the sun beginning to slip toward the horizon. The day was almost over.
“No.” At least, she added mentally, I don’t think I did. “I thought if you were there, maybe you could tell me what happened. I mean, how you think it happened, and maybe why. It sounded horrible.”
Simon shook his head. “Beats me. I heard the police found a stink bomb with a timing device. Which means the person who set it off could have been anywhere when it happened — even out there dancing like everyone else.”