The St. Ambrose School for Girls(84)

Something hits the bridge of my nose and I look up. Rain.

Overhead, I hear the dimmed cacophony of the dorm meeting, the chatter of the girls as they assemble echoing throughout the parlor’s vast open space. I imagine Nick will bring everyone to order when it is time, and I picture Greta staring at him through a logjam of heads and shoulders. Does she think about screwing him in those moments?

I step farther out onto the lawn, crossing my arms over my jacket to keep warm, the rain collecting in my hair at the crown of my head. There is that big, beautiful oak tree about thirty feet from the parking area, its tremendous branches unfurling into a canopy that doesn’t reach the RAs’ cars, a lucky thing given all the leaves that are dropping. I duck behind the trunk because I am not going to that meeting, and my eyes rise to our residential advisor’s row of windows on the second floor. I see him walking around his apartment. He is putting on a baseball cap. I know the one. He told me he got it from his cousin who is a Cincinnati Reds fan.

When did his wife leave again? I wonder. Right after that dinner with his father? Does she suspect anything?

I think she does. I think that was what the drunken phone call was about.

I look away, as if Nick Hollis can sense what I have in my pocket, these panties he took off a fifteen-year-old while his spouse was away, these panties that are my leverage—if I only knew what to do with them. Who to tell. Who would believe me.

For some reason, I notice that Ms. Crenshaw’s car is not in the third and final space, the one farthest from the door. The lights in her apartment are off as well. Given that she is never late for anything, and this is a mandatory meeting, she must be either hurrying back at a dead run or dead from having run into a telephone pole on a slick road.

It’s probably not an accident. She strikes me as a too-careful driver, the kind who would create an accident while trying to avoid one. I’m ashamed of myself that I don’t care whether she is dying or just late, and then I don’t think about her at all. I’m too busy trying to find a way to use what I know and what I have. I knock on the doors of all kinds of hypotheticals, but each one of them is locked and none of my raps are answered—

All at once, I picture Ms. Crenshaw back on Mountain Day. I remember the look on her face as she sits on the picnic table next to me with her mound of coleslaw, forcing Nick Hollis into conversation. Even though he is married. Even though he is way out of her league. Even though he is clearly uninterested.

My eyes go to the pale blue Porsche. As usual, it’s backed into the center spot, its sloping butt toward me. Ms. Crenshaw will have to put her Toyota in that farthest spot, the one that is just out of the range of the security lights that shine down from the roofline.

I look up to the second-floor RA’s block of windows. They’re dark now. He’s left to go to the meeting.

I look at the Porsche.

And that’s when my brain clicks with my location and informs me what I must do. The indecipherable line of algebra I am in, with only its solution extant up until now, suddenly reveals its values as readily apparent, the answer to the missing piece so facile and easy that I can’t believe I haven’t seen it the whole time.

As I move forward toward Nick Hollis’s Porsche, I stick to the shadows, my black clothes disappearing me, especially as I pull the hood of my jacket up to cover my pale face. When I open his passenger side door, I duck down to stay out of the security lights, and I have to stretch my arm to put the panties on the seat.

Just before I shut things back up, I crank the window down four inches, and wipe my prints off the handle.

Like this is a murder scene.

The twist of pink silk glows like a gem on the caramel-colored leather.

Closing the car door, I back into the darkness like a ghost. Return to the tree. Hold my breath.

As the rain continues to come down, golden leaves fall through gnarled branches like One-Eyed Willy’s doubloons, good fortune on the ground at my feet, everywhere.

This is the thought that is going through my mind as the glow from a pair of headlights pierces the night, the double beams crossing my dorm’s rear lawn and penetrating the unruly foliage by the river—before swinging around and slashing at the tree I am hiding behind.

Ms. Crenshaw parks her car exactly where she must, in the last available space. In her inimitable way, she scrambles out from behind the wheel with all the elegance of a plumber, dragging along a pair of supermarket bags that clap her in the leg as she kicks her door shut.

She rounds the front of her car on the sidewalk in a rush, but she spares a glance at the pale blue Porsche. My heart pounds.

Do it, I will her. DO IT. You always do—

Ms. Crenshaw, with her two jangling bags, and her sloppy purse, and her flat, stringy, damp hair, keeps right on going.

She doesn’t stop to put up the window. She’s late. She’s distracted. Either she hasn’t seen the gap or she’s decided that on a night like tonight, with everything else that’s going on, she doesn’t care about protecting Nick Hollis’s vintage leather bucket seats.

Or perhaps her unrequited love has finally run its course.

She goes into the dorm.

I close my eyes and sag against the tree trunk. My mood sinks abruptly, sure as if a plug has been released and all of me is funneling out the soles of my sneakers. The black despair I feel is not just about Greta and Strots and Nick Hollis. It’s everything about me, from the blood flood in my dorm room to the no-win in Mr. Pasture’s office.