17

It was like she was afraid she was going to reveal herself.

Later that afternoon, Brian was down at the kilns, in the forest of heat. He was thinking about what the detective said, how similar the girl in the story was to the girl he’d met. Polly. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew that he couldn’t go back to that class. Were they trying to break him? Make him go crazy? Were they trying to embarrass him? Well, fuck that; he wasn’t going back.

Like she was afraid…

No.

…she was going to reveal herself.

Had Brian met the girl the detective was talking about, the one who’d gone missing-Deanna Ward-at the kilns that night? It was impossible. Why had the girl called herself Polly? Had Williams sent her to him to lie? Another one of his mind-fucks, another cruel twist. It was beginning to haunt him, to tear at him until he felt that he was going to be pulled into two directions by it, one Brian walking toward and one Brian walking away in fear.

What the fuck IS THIS?

He was making his mother another vase, even though she had a house full of them. The last time he had gone home he had found them in a little-used closet, dusting over and untouched. But still-it was the effort that mattered.

The Doors blared from the speakers that were mounted in the corners of the kiln room. The building was referred to on campus as Chop Hall, named for the Chinese American sculptor who was the head of the Art Department at Winchester. Dr. Lin was said to practice judo in the building when it emptied every evening, though Brian had never seen him do it. Thus the name “Chop,” the suggestion being that if your art was subpar Dr. Lin would have your ass.

Now Dr. Lin was assisting Brian at the kiln. Brian had the blowpipe and he was gathering the chips of color, greens and blues this time to match his current mood, one of those September hazes he always fell into before the term’s end. “Turn!” said Dr. Lin, and Brian spun the pipe and began to blow into it, pushing at the glass, bubbling it into a sphere of fiery orange.

The heat seared at his bare chest. He was covered in grime and sweat. The kiln roared and sucked in the air from the room. Brian found that he could scream, literally scream, when the process reached this point and no one would hear him.

“This is the end,” Jim Morrison sang above the roar, “beautiful friend. This is the end.”

When he had puntied up the vase, Dr. Lin left him. Brian tapped on the pipe and the thing stayed in one piece. There were no crazes or skeins running through it. And it was ugly, fierce, more mass than shape. It was perfect. He would call it Exodus: the act of leaving, of escaping en masse.

There were so many problems at home. Katie, for instance. She still called him most every night, sent him chintzy postcards from Vassar. She would sign every card LOVE YOU! and her aggression had begun to wear Brian down. The tyranny of distance. They had changed him, the nearly seven hundred miles separating Winchester and Vassar College. New York now felt like some distant land, a dreamy place that existed in the beiges and soft greens of Polaroid photographs taken in the 1980s. Since he had been away, his perception of home had changed, become more rigid and obscure. At times, he couldn’t even remember his mother’s face.

How many girls had there been? Ten? Twelve? It was hard to tell. Some of them he couldn’t remember. Some hadn’t mattered. A few of them, like the girl he’d met last weekend, the girl who had called herself Polly, hadn’t even made sense given the circumstances surrounding the hookup.

He thought of that girl now. She was why he had left class today. Williams was fucking with him, that much was clear. The girl was part of the professor’s ruse, part of the whole puzzle. Brian wouldn’t even have to tell Katie about her when he got back to Poughkeepsie, so he might as well mark her-this Polly-off the list. Anyway, nothing had happened between them. He could write Katie a letter and explain it all to her. Dear Katie, he’d write. You won’t believe what happened to me this weekend.

It would all be a joke. Yes, he’d kissed that girl. But Katie had kissed a boy last year, a boy named Michael, and Brian didn’t care. It happened and he’d gotten over it. Same with this, except…

Except what would Williams want to prove by doing that? What was he supposed to do with the information the girl had given him? The more he thought about it, the more pissed off he became. It was his private life that Williams was screwing around with, after all. Was Williams fucked up, some sort of psycho who liked to play with his students’ heads? Was he trying to expose Brian somehow, set him up, or possibly-

“House?”

Brian turned around and saw the guy he had seen that night in Chop. “That’s me,” he said.

“Were you in here last Friday?” the guy asked. Brian remembered: the guy had been drinking coffee; steam had come out of the cup in little wisps.

“I might have been.”

“Who was that girl you were with?”

“I have no idea. Just some girl.” Brian thought he knew where this was going. “Look, man. We were really drunk. I don’t even remember what I said. I-”

“I think I know that girl.”

“Oh yeah?” Brian was intrigued now.

“Yeah. She…It’s funny. This is going to sound crazy, but that girl is dead.”

Brian stared at the boy. “What are you talking about?”

“At least that’s what they told us. She went missing from my hometown a long time ago, back in the eighties, and when I was in school they found her remains out in California somewhere. Near San Francisco. Murdered, you know. Her family had all moved away by that time. But I swear to God, dude-she looked just like the pictures I’ve seen of her. But the girl you were with was…younger. It couldn’t have been her. The girl from my town would have to be almost forty years old by now. I wanted to stop her, you know, but she looked pretty upset.”

Brian, embarrassed, looked away. But then something else occurred to him. “Where you from?”

“Cale, Indiana,” the boy said. “Home of the Blue Hens. You know us?”

“No,” Brian said, thinking.

“Jason Nettles,” the boy said, putting out a color-streaked hand for Brian to shake. “Call me Net. Painting, with a minor in glass.”

But Brian had already drifted off. Those tumblers in his mind were falling into place, one by one by one.

Cale. Where the detective had worked. The detective had told a story about a missing girl. Could the girl that Brian brought to the kilns be connected in any way to the detective’s story?

Williams, he thought. Williams is planting it. Setting it up.

Before he knew it, Brian was jamming his shirt over his head and brushing past the other boy, on the way out of Chop and into the crooked world.