Pup hurried past her, clutching his towel. He grabbed his duffel bag and hustled back into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. He dressed quickly, cursing Brody and wondering how bad his back acne was that day and how much of it Maya had seen, and whether she’d had enough time to take a picture of it and send it to all of her friends.
When he came out again, fully dressed, his ribbon in the back pocket of his jeans, Maya and Brody were sitting together on one of the beds.
“What are you guys doing?” Pup asked. “Where’s Abrihet?”
“Where’s who?”
Pup sighed. “Abby.”
“Oh. She’s back in our room,” Maya said. “Why? Do you like her? I can totally talk to her for you if you want. I’m pretty sure she’s single.”
“Pup’s not interested in Abby,” Brody said. “He only has eyes for one woman.” He smirked at Pup and leaned back against the headboard. “Don’t you, buddy?”
Pup flushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do.”
There was a tense silence. Maya looked nervously back and forth between the two boys. “Am I missing something here?” she asked.
“Not at all.” Brody pulled up his Netflix on the shiny new iPad he’d extracted from his bag. “We’re gonna watch a movie. As long as it’s cool with Flanagan.”
“I don’t care what you guys do,” said Pup. “But Mr. Hughes will kill you if he finds out she’s in here.”
“So? You’re no snitch, right?”
Pup didn’t answer. He couldn’t tell if Brody wanted him to promise not to snitch to Mr. Hughes or to Izzy. After all, Brody and Maya were sitting close enough that their shoulders were touching, and the bottom halves of their bodies were concealed under the covers. Technically speaking, Brody wasn’t doing anything wrong. But also, technically, Brody was currently in bed with another girl. But even Brody wouldn’t dare cheat on Izzy with Maya Ulrich when Pup was right there to witness it. Even Brody couldn’t be that dumb. Right?
As soon as the movie began and Pup had perched himself awkwardly on his own bed, knowing he wasn’t wanted but refusing to get up and leave, Brody slid out from under the covers and announced that he was turning off the lights. Soon the room was nearly as pitch-black as the darkroom at school, except for the flicker from the iPad illuminating Brody and Maya’s faces. The screen was too far away for Pup to see it properly; but it didn’t matter because he’d seen the movie Titanic at least a thousand times. Instead, he opened up his notes app and typed out the title PORTFOLIO IDEAS!!!!
In the time it took for Jack and Rose to meet, fall in love, and have sex in the backseat of a Model T, Pup had only come up with one idea:
FAMILY?
It was at that point that he began to hear a rustling sound coming from Maya and Brody’s bed. They were both looking at the screen, but it was clear that neither was actually watching. Pup scrolled more determinedly. The rustling continued and Pup, against his better instincts, glanced over to see where it was coming from. When he saw the movement beneath the blankets he knew, suddenly and certainly, what was going on. He shoved his phone in his pocket and jumped off his bed.
“I’m going out for a walk,” he said, grabbing his camera and heading for the door.
“Cool.” Brody didn’t even glance away from the screen. “Bring us back some of those mini muffins from the vending machine, would you?”
Pup ignored this shameless request and slammed the door behind him on the way out, hoping it was loud enough for Mr. Hughes to hear.
Outside the hotel, the June air was warm and still. In one direction, green fields of new corn stretched into the darkness. In the other gleamed the lights of the university campus. Pup headed in the direction of the light. Music drifted from the open windows of apartment buildings, but the sidewalks were mostly abandoned—classes were out for the summer, and the town had the lonely feeling of an empty house after a party. He passed by a few quiet bars with neon beer signs hanging in their windows, and cafés where kids were hunched over laptops next to big white mugs of coffee. Walking without a destination, he turned down a dimly lit street lined with tall trees heavy with dark leaves, and he was so preoccupied with all the things rolling around in his mind—his photography portfolio, Brody brazenly receiving a hand job from Maya three feet away from him, Abrihet’s red dress and the way the sun had caught the light of her earrings in the hotel lobby—that he probably would have walked right past the house had his eye not caught the two white letters glowing on the dark bricks. But there they were, pale and floating against the dark facade, and it took Pup a moment to remember what they were and what they meant. Two squiggly looking letter Es that he’d seen on T-shirts flung on the floor of his bedroom a lifetime ago.
Sigma Sigma.
Patrick’s fraternity.
It was a large redbrick mansion with tall stone columns and a big lawn set back from the street. On one end of the sagging front porch, two guys in backward hats were sitting on folding chairs with their feet propped up on the porch rail.
“You lost, man?” one of them called, and Pup realized he’d been standing on the sidewalk staring up at those two letters for an inappropriate amount of time.
“No. Sorry.” He pointed. “This is—this is Sig Sig?”
The first guy, small and wiry, with round glasses and a tight gray T-shirt that clung to his stringy muscles, kicked his feet down and nodded. “That’s us. Why?”
“My brother was in this house. He lived here.”
“Who’s your brother?”
“Patrick Flanagan.”
“Wait a second,” said the other guy, who had a short, dark beard and a half-eaten piece of pizza in his hand. “You mean the guy who . . . ?” He exchanged a look with the kid in the gray T-shirt.
“Yeah,” Pup said. “Him.”
“Oh. Wow.” The smaller of the two, who was olive-skinned and handsome except for the spread of tiny pimples feathering his cheeks, stood up. “I’m Aidan, and this is Travis. Sorry for your loss, man.”
“We didn’t know him or anything,” added Travis. “We’re only sophomores. But we know the story, obviously.”
Pup looked up at the darkened front windows of the Sigma Sigma house. Everyone had been surprised when Pat announced at the beginning of his sophomore year at U of I that he was joining a fraternity. Pat just wasn’t a frat kind of guy. He was too tall, too skinny, too prone to daydreaming, too committed to his dorky biological and philosophical interests. Sure, he liked sports and parties, but not nearly as much as he liked the feeding habits of deep-sea marine life, the symbiotic associations of fungi, or the reproductive processes of plants. Besides, as their sister Noreen had pointed out at Sunday dinner, “You barely even drink!”
“Well,” Pat had admitted, “I’m sort of doing it as a favor.”
“A favor.”
“Yeah. Jack wants to pledge, and they won’t let him in unless I join, too. I went with him to rush week, just to see what it was all about, and apparently the guys at Sig Sig found my charms irresistible.” He grinned and bit into his garlic bread. “Personally, I can’t blame them.”
Neither could anybody else at the table. Jack Rinard had grown up with Pat, and even Pup, who was so much younger that all of his siblings’ friends seemed impossibly cool, found him obnoxious. He had mossy teeth and dandruff and he never stopped talking. It was perfectly understandable that the Sig Sigs wouldn’t want annoying Jack Rinard in their fraternity, and just as understandable that they’d be willing to put up with him if it meant they could get Patrick, too. Patrick had a quality all his own that made people want to be around him; the fact that he never tried to be anyone but himself probably had something to do with it. Or maybe it was simply that he was the nicest guy on the planet.
“Just do me a favor,” Annemarie had warned. “Don’t turn into some dumb musclehead.”
“Too late,” Pat said cheerfully. “I mean, yes, the brain is technically a
n organ and not made of muscle, but, some biologists compare its functionality to a muscle, because, like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. So, in that sense, I already am a musclehead—and the more I learn at college, the more ripped my brain is gonna get.”
“Isn’t he smart?” their mother said to no one in particular.
“Is that the reason why you wrote those fitness goals?” Luke snickered, but it was an affectionate snicker. “So the rest of your body can catch up with your big-ass brain?”
“What can I say?” Pat had said solemnly, winking across the table at Pup. “My body is a temple.”
“Hey,” Aidan said. “Do you want a beer or something?”
“No thanks,” Pup said. “I should probably head back.”
Just then, a third frat brother, baby-faced but mountainous in stature, dressed in khaki shorts and scuffed boat shoes, burst through the front door, a beer in each hand and a family-size bag of potato chips secured under his chin.
“Yo, Meatwagon,” said Aidan. “You remember the name Patrick Flanagan?”
Meatwagon looked up at Pup, dropping the bag of chips at his feet.
“Wait—you mean the dead guy?”
Travis winced. “Sorry,” he told Pup. “Meatwagon isn’t the most politically correct guy in the world.”
“Yeah, I know the name,” Meatwagon continued, cracking open his beer. “I only nearly crapped my pants when those senior assholes made me stay overnight in his bedroom. Patrick Flanagan—I’ll never forget that name! His goddamn ghost will haunt me til the day I die!”
This time, Aidan and Travis both winced.
“Wait,” said Pup. “You’ve been in his bedroom?”
“Meatwagon—”
“During pledge week! I know we’re supposed to tell you incoming freshies that we don’t haze anymore, but allow me to let you in on a little secret.” He dropped his voice to a theatrical whisper. “It’s a lie.”
“Wait,” Pup said again. “You saw his ghost?”
“Meatwagon—”
“Maybe I didn’t see it. But I sure as hell felt it. Patrick Flanagan was this guy in our fraternity who apparently died from this weird, rare disease. I want to say scarlet fever?”
“No. Dude—” Travis was now gesturing frantically, but Meatwagon was not to be stopped.
“No! You’re right, Trav. It was diphtheria. I don’t know. One of those Oregon Trail diseases. Anyway, after he died, they had to, like, quarantine the room so the rest of the house wouldn’t get infected. They cleared everything out of there, and these guys in hazmat suits came and sprayed the place down and shut the door, and the door stayed shut for probably a whole year, until one of the senior guys with a sick sense of humor decided it would be a cool idea to make pledges sleep overnight in there, because not only might you get some heinous disease—I want to say it was typhoid fever? Does that sound right to you guys?—but the room was also haunted, because this poor dude died in there. You want to talk creepy? I’m not a pussy or anything, but Jesus Christ, with these old-ass windows rattling in the wind and the lights turned out and this stain on the floor that was maybe blood, I was about to shit my—”
“He didn’t die in his bedroom,” Pup interrupted. “He died in the hospital.”
“How do you know, freshie?”
“Meatwagon—”
“Because he was my brother.”
“Your brother?” Meatwagon put his hands on his massive head and looked back and forth between Travis and Aidan, who were slumped in their chairs, glaring at him. “Oh god. Why didn’t you guys say anything?”
“He died of bacterial meningitis,” Pup went on. “There was no blood. You must have imagined that part.”
“Dude, I am very, very sorry.” Meatwagon placed his beer on the porch railing and stuck out his hand for Pup to shake. “I would like to extend my deepest condolences and express how large of a piece of shit I feel right now.”
“You sure we can’t get you a beer?” Aidan asked. “Or a piece of pizza? There’s some leftover Home Run in the kitchen.”
“Or mac and cheese,” Travis said eagerly. “We can totally go inside and I’ll make you some mac and cheese. I put frozen peas in it and everything, to make it healthy. Please, man. We all feel like shitheads. Let us do something for you.”
“Okay,” Pup said. “This haunted bedroom. I want to see it.”
14
PUP FOLLOWED AIDAN, TRAVIS, AND MEATWAGON through the front door of the fraternity house. Inside was a high-ceilinged foyer unevenly lit by a chandelier with mostly burned-out light bulbs. An Illini flag draped one wall, and the Sigma Sigma flag covered the other. In the air was the faint tang of old beer, sweat, microwavable food—the smell of boys living away from home. A huge front room stood to their left, with a bunch of ripped leather couches encircling a giant television like an altar.
“Usually it’s a lot more exciting around here,” Travis explained as he led Pup up the wide, winding staircase matted with brown carpet that led to the second floor. “Parties, meetings, that kind of thing. But most of the guys are home for the summer. Our house president checks in on us from time to time, but mostly it’s just the three of us until the fall semester begins. Me and Aidan got ourselves a summer gig with the student union, while Meatwagon here makes a living from giving blood and participating in studies with the Psych department.”
“Last week, I did a sleep study,” said Meatwagon. “I got paid fifty bucks for taking a nap! College, man!”
Aidan and Travis laughed while Pup followed behind them in silence, clutching his camera. The second floor was as narrow as the first floor had been wide-open. At the top of the stairs, two cramped hallways led in either direction, lined with fiberglass doors that were all firmly shut for the summer. The walls were white-painted, scuffed in places. There were no windows, just a buzzing line of fluorescent track lighting that gave everything a greenish cast. The scabby brown carpet muted their footsteps as they walked along toward the end of the hallway.
“Well, here it is,” Aidan said, stopping at a door near the end of the corridor that looked identical to all the others. “Room twelve.”
Pup’s heart was pounding and he didn’t know why. It was just a door that opened into a room where his brother had once slept, not unlike the door to his own bedroom back home. The Sig Sigs were the ones who had turned it into something sinister. He put his hand on the knob.
“Take all the time you need,” said Travis. He and Aidan and Meatwagon were already backing away down the hallway, either from fear or shame, Pup couldn’t tell. He turned his back to them and twisted the knob. It squeaked beneath his hand, the door creaked open, and he stepped into room twelve.
The light switch didn’t work, but the full white moon that hung in the sky outside the large rectangular window gave off enough light for Pup to see, and to take pictures, if he felt like it. The window was broken, and cracks spiderwebbed out from a huge hole in the middle. A large, smooth rock, about the same size as the hole, lay in the middle of the floor surrounded by shards of glass that glittered in the moonlight. The window had been broken a long time, Pup could tell, because the inside of the room smelled like the outside. Dried leaves had drifted in from the large oak tree outside the window into the corners of the floor and closet, and little scatterings of mouse droppings were piled along the floorboards. The walls were bare, pocked in places with nails where Patrick and his Sig Sig predecessors had hung their flags and pictures and posters. Two twin-size beds stood on either side of the window, stripped down to thin, sweat-stained mattresses on rusting aluminum frames. A wooden desk was pushed against the wall next to the door, bare but for a curved metal reading lamp. Pup flicked on the lamp, and to his surprise it still worked, illuminating a smooth layer of dust across the wood. He opened the desk drawer, and inside all he found was a single bent paperclip. He picked it up and slipped it into his back pocket next to his honorable mention. Then he got up and crossed the narrow room, his
shoes crunching the broken glass. He knelt in the doorway of the closet, attached his flash, and began to shoot: the moonlit broken window; the stained, stripped beds; the glass on the floor; the dust-encased desk. When he was finished, he sat on one mattress, then the other, because he wasn’t sure which one had belonged to Pat. He stretched out on the cold plastic that smelled strongly of mold. He closed his eyes and lay very still, waiting for something to happen.
At Pity Party, Sam Dad Suicide had once asked whether you could technically love someone who was dead.
“Of course you can,” Mrs. Barrera had scolded. “There’s no such thing as technical love. There’s only love. It’s a word that doesn’t need qualifiers. It can stand on the strength of its own four letters. Death is nothing compared to love. Death is a one-time thing. Love never ends.” Pup had wanted to believe her, but he was skeptical. Even if what she said was true, it didn’t make it feel any less one-sided. Sometimes Pup thought he loved Izzy because loving her felt the same as loving Patrick: a love that went unreturned, unnoticed, a dark wall that absorbed your light but never returned it.
“Are you here?” he whispered.
He was answered, as always, with silence.
15
AFTER HE’D SUCCESSFULLY SNUCK OUT through the back door of the Sigma Sigma house, evading Aidan, Travis, and Meatwagon and sparing himself from having to hear one more time just how sorry they were, Pup went through his self-care checklist. HALT! He could visualize the poster on Mrs. Barrera’s wall.
Are you:
Hungry?
Angry?
Lonely?
Tired?
Yes, he decided. He was hungry—he was already pondering what to buy in the hotel vending machine before heading back to his room—and he was also angry, lonely, and tired. But by the time he arrived back at the hotel, he’d decided that what he’d just learned about the hazing practices of the Sigma Sigma house was really not that big of a deal. First of all, those guys hadn’t known Patrick; he could hardly blame them for thinking of him as a ghost and not a real person. And why had Pup even expected to be shown a sign? Had he really been dumb enough to believe Meatwagon’s tale about the room being haunted? Besides, if Patrick was going to appear to him, it wouldn’t be in that awful abandoned frat-house bedroom. It would be at Wrigley Field, or out in the alley beneath the basketball hoop, or somewhere along the North Branch of the Chicago River, or any of the hundreds of other places they’d been brothers together. There was nothing of Patrick left in that room. So why did he even care?
Sorry for Your Loss Page 10