But Fauve just stares at me. “Maybe Miranda can tell us.”
Looking at the red silk, I flash to the three men. The red handkerchief blooming in the middling man’s pocket like a rose. Was Fauve in the pub last night? Did she see us? What do you know? I want to scream.
“Tell you what?” I say. Calm as you please.
“I imagine, Miranda, that you’ve been looking for these?”
These? Then I see what it really is. A thong of red lace. My thong. Balled up in the baggie like evidence. “I found these unmentionables on the stage floor,” Fauve presses.
The dean looks at my thong and immediately colors. He gazes down at his desk.
But Fauve is just getting started. “Miranda, do you happen to know who these belong to?” And I know she happens to know exactly.
I stare at Fauve. I smile. “No idea. Could be anyone’s. Any of the students’。 We change in and out of clothes backstage all the time,” I say to the dean. He nods quickly at his desk. Eager to grasp on to this, to anything.
“There you are,” he says. “Now—”
“Oh, I don’t think these belong to a student, Miranda.” Fauve smiles. “No, I can’t really picture a student shopping at Agent Provocateur, can you? It’s a pretty high-end lingerie shop. I doubt our students would be familiar with it.”
She turns to the dean for validation, but he’s staring at the thong now like he wishes he could make it disappear. Or turn it into a boat and sail away. Sail away from here.
“I thought I should bring it to your attention, Miranda. Though I’m sure that as a faculty member, you know far better than I that sex”—she pauses here, letting the weight of the word, of my crime, fall—“between faculty, or between faculty and staff”—another meaningful pause—“is absolutely prohibited on school grounds. And clearly these”—she holds up the thong-filled baggie now between her thumb and forefinger—“are evidence of illicit activity between adults in the theater. Which is school grounds. Where I know you and Hugo have been spending so much time lately.”
She smiles sweetly. Hideously. Willing me to crack, to break. But I won’t be broken. Jealous of me and Hugo. Her every cell seething with it.
“Fauve, what are you implying?” the dean cuts in. “Are you saying that you saw something… illicit… between Professor Fitch and Mr. Griffin?”
Fauve looks at me and flushes. And then I know. She absolutely fucking saw something. Skulked around the theater after her ridiculous music class. Lurked in the wing. Her periwinkle eyes widening at the unholy arch of my naked back as I straddled him among the falling stars. But she can’t admit it. The dean is practically purple with prudery at having been forced into this thong conversation to begin with. Fucking New England. She can’t bring this home without implicating herself, a Peeping Tom in the wings.
“Have you seen the two of them in the halls together lately?” she spits. “It’s obscene. It’s—”
“I don’t make it a point of going around following my faculty. Or my staff, for that matter,” the dean says.
Now she becomes aware of how terrible she looks clutching a bag full of my underwear between her fingers.
“If that’s all, Fauve? I really think Professor Fitch has had enough for one day. Quite enough now.”
CHAPTER 23
IN THE BATHROOM, I’m gripping the sink, gazing into the cracked mirror. Cells glittering inside me. Literally giddy with health. This lightness in my heart like a balloon that’s lifting, lifting my feet off the ground. I’m levitating again. Biting on my grin. Biting down so hard, I taste blood. The vital warmth on my tongue brings me back to myself. Three men in the mirror, I see, biting on their grins too. All settled, then. Isn’t it? The blood drips a little from our lips. We can fix that, can’t we? I pull a lipstick from my smiling-mouth purse. Fumble a little with the tube. Okay, so my hands are shaking. But we got away with it. We got away with it, didn’t we?
Just then the bathroom door opens with a creak. Stop smiling. Apply lipstick with an even hand. There you go. Russet Moon by Chanel. Such a gorgeous color. Such a rich red, the lady at the counter told me. Goes so well with your hair and your eyes.
Fauve appears in the mirror. She’s beside me at another sink. Fussing with her absurd hair cloud. Pulling some sort of tube of gloss from her cloth purse.
“Well that was some meeting, wasn’t it?” she says. Congenial now like a true coward. Like we were only just spectators to the same show. She never waved my own underwear in my face. The red silk is now nowhere in sight.