“That wasn’t what he was worried about.”
Nick is speaking softly, and I don’t know whether it’s because he doesn’t want to spook me like I’m a wild animal or if he knows what came through the wall that night when he was fighting with his wife.
“Sarah, I know that you have some… special circumstances… in your background.”
At this, I bolt up and start pacing around his apartment, my mind running at a thousand miles an hour. I picture myself paraded in front of the entire dorm in the common room, shown off as an example of how Ambrose takes care of the less fortunate, the less sane, my secret not just laid bare but promoted officially as a virtue of the institution.
“The administration wants to be sure you’re okay.” Nick gets to his feet, too, and casually goes over to the door. There’s a long shelf directly to the left of it and he moves some books around on the levels, but I’m not fooled. He’s going to stop me if I try to bolt. “We’ve called your mother and she’s on her way.”
“What?” I bark. “You can’t do that.”
Okay, that’s a stupid thing to say. They can do anything they want.
“We need to make sure you’re all right.”
I put my hands to my head. No, no, no, this is wrong. Enough with the green eyes and the Guns N’ Roses crap. “I have to go. I have to find my roommate.”
“Sarah, what you were thinking about doing…” He clears his throat, and as he turns and looks at me, his eyes are a little scared. Like he’s out of his professional depth, but really wants to help me. “That’s not the answer. Trust me. It’s not.”
Doing the math in my head, I figure the earliest possible time the school could have called Tera Taylor, undiscovered movie star, is maybe forty-five minutes ago because that’s when I left the CVS. It’ll take her at least that long to get herself organized to leave the house. She’ll have to change into one of her dresses and do her hair and makeup. She won’t know where her keys are. She’ll need to put gas in her Mercury Marquis because she drives around our little town on fumes. I have about three hours.
If they are shipping me out of here—which is likely not the wrong idea for my welfare—I need to get to Strots before she goes to the game, and I have about ten minutes, maybe fifteen.
“Can I go back to my room now?” I say.
“I just…” As Mr. Hollis—Nick—struggles for words, it’s clear that whatever training he received prior to becoming a residential advisor is wholly insufficient to handle the problem I represent. “It was just a game. It doesn’t matter who won or lost. No one blames you, okay? You did the best you could, and you almost caught the ball.”
I blink, his words making no sense at all. And then the syllables process. He thinks it’s about the loss yesterday? He and the administration think I’m killing myself over yesterday’s touch football game?
I want to laugh, and I very nearly open my mouth to set the record straight, to tell him that I meant to drop that ball, and given Greta’s expression as she lost, I’m quite satisfied with my choices. Hell, maybe the confession will get me off the hot seat. Except, no. I’m still stuck with the fact that Phil the Pharmacist was a rocket scientist who saw behind my okey-dokey façade and called the Ambrose equivalent of the cops on me. No matter what I say about that game, I was still caught trying to buy too many aspirin. I was still crying as I stood in front of the display. And I did present Phil with a valid prescription for a highly powerful mood stabilizer, one that they only put children on if they really, really have to, one that you have to take every day for it to work properly.
I am still insane.
Then it dawns on me. If I don’t accept the football-game-loss-as-trigger conclusion the grown-ups have come up with, I’ll have to explain the truth, and I will not betray Strots like that. Besides, none of this is about the fact that she kissed me. It’s the bad way I handled the moment and the trickle-down implications of my utter failure as a human being.
There’s a soft knock and my eyes shoot in its direction, focusing over Hot RA’s—Nick’s—shoulder. How did my mother get here so fast? Have I lost track of time again?
As Nick cracks the door, my eyes go to the analog clock on his stove, the one that is in the center of the dials that work the four coiled elements, like a pendant above the ornate collar of a blouse. No, I have not lost track of time. This cannot be my mother, so maybe it’s something worse. Perhaps it’s some white coats from a local psychiatric hospital about which I’m unaware, the orderlies coming to put me in a straitjacket and carry my trussed body out of Tellmer like a side of beef.
Except then I smell sweet perfume. Nick’s beauty queen, brilliant wife arriving early for the weekend? No, she would just come in.
He talks quietly, and then closes the door. Turning back to me, he leans against what he shut. “Sorry about that.”
There’s great pity on his face as he stares at me, and it’s sincere and unpatronizing. He does feel sorry for me, and not in the sense that I’m an irredeemable social misfit. He feels sorry for me because he’s peeked under my outer layers to the stinking mess beneath, and he wouldn’t wish what he’s discovered on his worst enemy.
The idea that someone, anyone, knows my secret here at Ambrose, and has not shunned me, takes the air out of all my plans, both of the Strots variety and the boiler room kind. I cannot say I am relieved. But I’m grateful.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you,” I say in a wobbly voice.
Nick shakes his head. “No one.”
As he makes this vow, I wonder if he knows that it’s Greta specifically I’m worried about. But it doesn’t matter. I believe him.
A wave of dizziness comes over me, and it’s so pronounced that I must grab on to something, anything, or I’m going to do a pratfall on his coffee table.
Nick lunges forward with the grace of an athlete and captures my body in strong arms. As he pulls me against him, I feel his muscles. I smell his clean soap. His clothes brush against my bare midriff as my shirt is wrenched up.
“It’s just the lithium,” I mumble as he guides me over to the sofa. “I took my pill twenty minutes ago.”
This is not magical thinking around the placebo effect. I’m very familiar with this specific kind of light-headedness, the vertigo coming on strong because I haven’t eaten in a while, the lithium’s been out of my system, and my emotions are playing with my blood pressure to begin with.
As he lays me out on his couch, I give myself up to the cushions and cannot look at him because this is too intimate for me to bear without blushing. Instead, I stare at his ceiling. There are beams that intersect the expanse, and they’re painted white to blend in. Every once in a while, there’s a hook screwed into them as if one of the RAs who lived here had a thing for hanging baskets of flowers or ivy. Except that can’t be right. The meat-locker-worthy seimicircles seem too hearty for that kind of job, and my mind toys with hypotheticals, a lackadaisical cat with a largely uninteresting toy.
Meanwhile, Nick is leaning over me like he wishes he had a medical background, like he isn’t sure what to do at all, and I’m surprised by the show of incompetence. He’s so attractive that I have ascribed to him broadly applicable superhero powers that he evidently doesn’t have. Then again, he’s just an English teacher at a prep school. Maybe if he already had his PhD, things would be easier for him in this situation.