Long May She Reign (36 page)

She could hear a lot of laughing and talking inside the common room—and lost her nerve. Only, that was pretty stupid. So, she made herself open the door.

A bunch of the guys were in there, along with Debbie and Natalie from the fourth floor. Gerard, Quentin, Khalid, and—unexpectedly—one of her agents, Jose, were having an intense battle of what looked like some dumb sci-fi combat game, while Debbie, Mikey, Andy, Natalie, and Dirk hung out on the stained green couch and the beat-up futon, giving loud advice and making less than flattering comments.

Dirk saw her and gave her a wave with his Coke bottle. “Hey, Meg. You looking for Susan?”

She shook her head.

“Oh.” He got up. “You looking for me?”

It felt sort of rude, but again, she shook her head.

“Oh,” he said, and looked puzzled.

Jose had also noticed her, and put down his game controller, resulting in the almost immediate demise of one of the clunky robot warriors on the screen. “Do you need anything?” he asked.

Jesus. They couldn't exactly make it much more obvious that she wasn't inclined to come down here and mingle. But she just shook her head.

“Okay,” he said, and gestured towards the game. “Sorry about that. I'm not actually—”

She nodded. “On duty yet. I know.” It would be nice if everyone in the room didn't seem so uncomfortable. “I just thought I'd, you know, come down and see what's going on.”

Everyone seemed to be making a point of
not
exchanging glances.

“So, sit down,” Andy said, breaking the silence, and moved over on the futon to make room for her.

She nodded, but lost her balance a little, and Mikey, who was the closest, grabbed her right before she would have hit the cushion with most of her weight on her splint.

He was gripping her by the waist, and he quickly pulled his hands away. “Uh—sorry.”

“No problem,” she said. “I mean, thank you for catching me.”

He nodded self-consciously, and as she lowered herself down, with him on her left, and Andy sitting on her right, she was all too aware the entire atmosphere of the room had changed, and that even the furiously competitive game seemed to have petered out.

Jesus, maybe she should just go back upstairs. “Keep playing,” she said, “okay?” She looked at Jose. “You, too.”

Jose nodded. In fact,
all
of them nodded, but it still felt very tense.

“Come on, Jose,” she said. “Just play already. This really
is
one of those pretend-I'm-not-here times.”

His nod was uncomfortable, but he returned to the group around the screen again.

“Uh, do you play?” Gerard asked politely.

She couldn't remember the name of it, but the game looked like one of the ones her brothers liked. Neal had talked her into trying out a few of their games during Christmas week, but—well, dexterity had been an issue. “I don't really know this one,” she said. “But, thanks.”

“You could give it a try,” Khalid said. “We'll help you out.”

From what little time she had spent with him so far, Khalid seemed like a good guy. Tall, medium-brown skin, and so preppy that he often wore loafers without socks even when it was snowing. For that matter, they
all
seemed pretty nice. Mikey was a big, broad-chested blond guy, who looked like a dumb jock, but was such a talented violinist that no one in the entry minded when he practiced at all hours of the day and night. Debbie was a hearty, cheerful Miss Porter's graduate who played field hockey, rugby,
and
lacrosse. Natalie, who was from Memphis and wrote for the
Williams Record
, was on the quiet side—and rumored to have a serious crush on happy, hyper Andy, who—according to Juliana—was entirely oblivious to this. And Juliana was convinced that Quentin had a big crush on
Natalie
—who was oblivious in her own right.

Oh, Christ, they were all waiting for her to answer. “I'm sorry, I'm not very good with a gamepad,” she said, motioning in the general direction of her splint.

“So, buddy up with me,” Khalid said, and then looked at Gerard. “Let's set up Slayer, and start her off with Ice Fields.”

Gerard shook his head. “No, Danger Canyon's more fun. Mikey, go down and get your stuff, and then we can all play, if a couple other people buddy up, too.”

Everyone seemed to be enthusiastic about this, and while Gerard started configuring a multiplayer scenario, the rest of them—except for Natalie, who had also never played before—explained the very complicated rules, the various weapons and vehicles, and so many different strategies and tips that she was lost within a matter of seconds.

But, it turned out to be fun. Totally confusing, but fun. There was a Red Team, and a Blue Team, and when Gerard asked her which one she wanted to be on, she said, “Which one do you
think
?,” and he laughed, and put her on the Blue Team.

They played Slayer, and Rally, and Capture the Flag, and rode around in Warthogs and tanks and hovercrafts, and everyone fired their weapons at everything in sight, and got killed a lot. She and Khalid had some trouble making coordinated moves on their gamepad, but the first time they successfully blasted away a Red Team member—Dirk and Natalie, also buddying-up—with their flamethrower, she was more pleased with herself than it was probably politically correct to be.

If she thought about it, the violence of it all probably would have bothered her—but the one time she
did
think about it, her reactions slowed, and the Warthog they were in flipped over. Besides, it was cartoonish, and silly, and entirely
not
based in reality. Not at all worth having a flashback of any kind.

They played for a long time, and people—including Jose, who went on duty—came and went, and nobody except for Gerard was keeping score. When the game finally wound down, as people started worrying about studying and getting some sleep, she still thought video games were profoundly stupid—but in an undeniably entertaining way. And she felt less like an unwanted stranger, which was a very good thing.

When she finally got back up to her room, after midnight, her right hand was throbbing, even though she had gone out of her way not to use it. So she covered it with a gel ice-pack, and stretched out on her bed to read Plato for a while. Then, she switched over to her psychology book, and studied until she was so tired that she was sure she would fall asleep the second she turned the light off.

Except that she didn't.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't seem to do more than doze briefly, because she was having lots of stomach-turning nerve pain in her hand. Sickening pain. And her knee didn't feel so great, either—probably because she had done the stairs, instead of taking the elevator. At about four, she gave up and went out to get some water, so she could take more ibuprofen. Maybe she could try to get Dr. Brooks to authorize a new prescription for something stronger. At the moment, she felt like
begging
for it.

The entry was very quiet now, everyone else asleep presumably, or, in some cases—most notably next door, judging from the sounds she kept hearing coming out of Juliana's room—locked in carnal embraces, and Martin was sitting behind the security table, with a thick book. He lowered it when he saw her, but she motioned for him to keep reading and limped to the bathroom.

Susan was already in there, one hand resting on either side of the sink on the left, staring down at a stream of running water swirling around the drain.

“Um, you all right?” Meg asked.

Susan looked up with a fatigue-dulled expression, then shook her head. “Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm just tired.”

Neither Tammy nor Susan had ever appeared in the common room during the game marathon. “Have you been up here this whole time?” Meg asked.

Susan shrugged, instead of answering.

Jesus. “Long night,” Meg said.

“Yeah.” Susan glanced at the door. “Don't ever tell her, but I've got a paper due tomorrow, and now I don't think there's a chance in hell I'm going to be able to finish it.”

The notion of which had probably never even crossed poor Tammy's mind. JAs were generally considered to be available to their freshmen, day in and day out, around the clock—and in Meg's experience, Susan never, ever indicated otherwise, no matter what else might be going on in her life.

About which, Meg realized, she didn't have a clue—and she was suddenly very curious. “You must get really sick of us sometimes,” she said.

Susan smiled, and shook her head.

Yeah. Sure.

Susan splashed some more water on her face, and then turned off the faucet. “Are
you
okay? It's pretty late.”

She wanted to whine a little about how much her hand was hurting, but she didn't. “I'm fine, just doing some studying,” she said. “Go write your paper.”

Susan nodded. “Yeah. Try to get some sleep, though, okay?”

Yes, ma'am. “Absolutely,” Meg said.

And if she couldn't, well—thank God for twenty-four-hour cable news stations.

*   *   *

SHE ENDED UP
being awake all night, but at least that meant that she didn't sleep through her classes. And, on the even more positive side, she didn't wake anyone up by screaming, either. When she saw Tammy, who was red-eyed and miserable, in the hall, she mumbled something about being sorry to hear it, whereupon Tammy shrugged and sniffled and sighed, and went back into her room and shut the door. Then, on her way outside, she ran into Susan, who looked like something of a zombie.

“You finish?” Meg asked.

“Eight pages of complete gibberish,” Susan said. “My professor's going to think English is my second language.” She frowned. “Possibly my third.”

Still, to Meg's way of thinking, eight pages of gibberish were preferable to eight entirely
blank
pages.

Juliana dragged her off to dinner that night with Mark, the still gently, but stubbornly, flirtatious Simon, and an Asian-American girl named Greer from Sage B who Meg barely knew, other than seeing her among the crowd at a couple of dorm-wide get-togethers and occasionally down in the laundry room. She seemed nice enough, though—an ethereal, take-as-many-dance-classes-as-possible type from San Francisco. Tammy came along, too, silent and sad, but reasonably game.

“I wasn't sure if I should tell you about this,” Juliana said, as the two of them left the dining hall together, with Tammy, “but—you know that there's all kinds of stuff about you on the Internet, right?”

“About me?” Meg asked. “Or Tammy?”

Tammy laughed, nervously.

Truth be told, though, she really didn't want to know if there were new creepy Web sites out there devoted to her. She had specifically requested not to be told about any of the details,
ever
, but she knew that the Secret Service and the FBI spent a pretty good chunk of time having Web sites taken down, and showing up on people's doorsteps to make sure that they very much appreciated the importance of permanently ceasing and desisting, and the dire consequences attached to failing to do so. But she was pretty sure that there were still plenty of doctored X-rated photos out there—her head pasted onto someone else's nude body and the like, as well as pages with long crazed rants about how it would have been better for everyone if the kidnappers had been successful in murdering her, complete with lurid details and hypothetical suggestions—and probably a fair amount of speculative and offensive fan fiction. She had a horrible feeling that there were many even
worse
sites about her mother, although she carefully never looked.

“I told your agents,” Juliana assured her. “There's no
way
I'd see something like that, and not let them know right away.”

Okay, but— “How did you come across it in the first place?” Meg asked. Christ, she hadn't gone and entered her name in a search engine or something, had she?

“Nothing weird,” Juliana said defensively. “Don't look at me like that. I just, you know, read newsgroups, and sometimes these terrible rumors show up about you.”

Ah, the plot thickened. Meg wasted quite a bit of time in newsgroups, and in various forums, herself. She relaxed. “Oh. You mean, you saw the one today about me not really going to college at all, but
actually
being hidden away at an unnamed drug rehab facility, in yet another attempt to save me from my many addictions?”

Juliana looked relieved. “Your agents already let you know about it?”

Meg shook her head. “No, I always read that newsgroup. It's pretty funny.” Scurrilous gossip galore, mostly about household-name celebrities and their romantic interests and sexual proclivities. And, call her shallow, but she found gossip entertaining—when it wasn't about anyone she knew well, and sometimes, even when she
did
know the person. The group regularly endorsed the theory that her mother was almost certainly a raging lesbian—or possibly heterosexual, but insatiably promiscuous and prone to twisted fetishes—or maybe entirely asexual and prudish—and that, long ago, her father had accepted a huge lump sum payment from the Vaughn fortune, in order to participate in a sham marriage, so that her mother could retain her political viability. Which made her—and Steven, and Neal—what?
Beard
children?

And she just happened to know a little secret about that particular rehab post. “Besides, my friend Beth wrote that one,” she said.

Juliana stared at her, and Tammy looked equally stunned. “You're
friends
with someone who would do that?” she asked.

“Doesn't sound like much of a friend to me,” Tammy said primly.

Well, they just didn't know Beth. “She wrote the one last week about seeing me working at a brothel in Nevada, too,” Meg said. “It's just her way of saying hello.”