Those Who Favor Fire (16 page)

“I didn’t either,” she said. “Now I’m not sure how I feel. But I need to know something, Paul.”

“Anything,” he said, as if she should have known this.

“How did you do on the history midterm last semester?” she asked.

“How did I what?”

“You borrowed all my notes, remember? You said you’d lost your notebook somewhere. So I gave you everything I had. Notes from lecture, from section, from the reading. Everything.”

“Of course I remember. You saved my life.”

“Did you make photocopies?”

“Yes. It would have taken me forever to copy everything by hand.”

“Who else saw my notes?”

Paul opened the car door and put one foot into the gutter. “What gives, Rachel? Why all the questions?”

Rachel turned in her seat so that she faced him. “I want to know how it is that you and six of your friends all wrote midterms that were identical to mine. At least in some respects. And close enough in other ways to make it look like I was cheating.”

“Oh my God, Rachel, did Greenway say something to you?”

“Look,” she said. “I already know that you guys cheated, but I want to know how.”

“Are you nuts?” Paul snorted. “If I say one word, those guys will kill me. I’ll be out of the fraternity, probably out of school.” He
looked at her and could not quite keep the smirk off his face. “There’s no way in the world that anyone can prove we cheated.”

It had taken Rachel a mere ten minutes to find Paul, but in those ten minutes she had come up against the truth. “Somehow, one of you guys got your hands on the exam questions last fall. And then, before the exam, you all prepared your answers. And you helped each other, of course. Shared your notes. Shared
my
notes.” Paul refused to look at her again. “But you were all too stupid to make sure you varied your answers. They were so much alike—especially with the Kissinger quote from my notes—that Greenway was immediately suspicious. And then you did the same thing during the final, only without my help. Didn’t you?”

Paul said nothing. Rachel waited. Then, suddenly, shocking her, “Get out of my car,” he said. “Every time I have anything to do with you I end up sorry.”

“So do I,” Rachel said when she was able. She suddenly found herself so tired of the whole thing, so weary, that she was barely able to open the door of the old car that had once given her a moment of freedom. It was the last time she ever spoke to Paul.

By the time she walked into Professor Greenway’s office the next day, Rachel had realized her mistake.

She told the professor about lending her notes to one of the seven, though she did not name Paul. She had decided to let him hang himself, as he had done before.

“So there’s the link to you,” the professor said, pleased.

She went on to suggest that the others had stolen the exam questions, although she did not know how they might have done so. And then she told him about her mistake, and theirs.

“At first I thought that they had memorized their answers, but then I remembered how similar all seven were. Nearly identical, you said. Especially the Kissinger quote, which they got from my notes. It didn’t seem possible that they could have produced several nearly identical answers purely from memory.” The professor watched her and did not interrupt. “They had to have collaborated on the answers and then actually written them out before the exam. Using my notes.”

“But how could they have prepared the answers ahead of time? Those exam booklets come in five colors, and nobody knows what color is going to be used until they take the exam.”

“They bought all five colors,” Rachel said. “You can get them at
the bookstore. And then they wrote out their answers in all five booklets and snuck them into the exam. And then, when they saw which color you were handing out, they just took out the right one and switched it with the blank booklet you’d given them. And spent an hour doodling. I can’t believe it. If they had spent all that effort studying, they wouldn’t have needed to cheat.”

“Sounds pretty far-fetched, but I suppose it’s possible. It would be easy to do something like that, trade booklets I mean, if they sat in the back. It’s a big class.” Professor Greenway sighed. “Any idea how they got their hands on the exam in the first place?”

No, Rachel said. She didn’t know how they’d stolen the questions. And that, Rachel thought, was that. She thought she’d heard the last of it.

For the next few weeks Rachel did little more than study. With savage determination, she fueled her mind, distinguished herself in the process, wrote an impeccable set of final exams, and began to pack her things.

On the day of her departure for Belle Haven, set to catch an afternoon bus, Rachel went to the refectory for a final lunch. She was meeting some of the friends she’d barely seen since the fall. She missed them, as if they had gone away somewhere, or as if she had. They were waiting for her when she arrived.

She had sat here with these people hundreds of times before, making jokes about the food, agonizing over deadlines and syllabi, gossiping, passing the time before class. Today Rachel just wanted to be away. She had always thought of these friends as people she would remember fondly once she’d graduated and gone her own way, but looking at their faces around the table, Rachel felt as if she were already remembering them, as if they were locked in her past and could not join her in the place she now inhabited. She tried to think of a way to explain this to them, to excuse herself from their chatter and find her way to the bus station, but then she looked across the table and saw her old friend Colleen pick up a shaker and pour salt all over the bowl of ice cream she had only begun to eat. It was a habit of Colleen’s, a wealthy girl from Connecticut, to break her perpetual diet with a forbidden sweet and then, before any real damage had been done, to thwart herself with a dose of salt.

Since Harry, since her parents’ death, since Professor Greenway had found her under the maple tree, Rachel had noticed a lot of things she’d missed before, or chosen to ignore. She had come to realize that
far too many of the students on this campus—these friends among them—had an extremely rigid view of the world beyond, one that was rarely based on actual experience or sincere investigation, and that they were comfortable with their assumptions. She had come to feel like a stranger here, more an outsider than she had felt on her very first day of school nearly three years before. But it was the sight of her old friend ruining her food that finally made Rachel scramble to her feet and shock them with the brevity of her good-byes.

She met Professor Greenway on the sidewalk outside the refectory.

“I’m glad I ran into you like this,” he said, leading her to a bench in the shade.

“I only have a minute, Professor. I’m going home this afternoon.”

“I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to say good-bye. I hope I’ll see you in one of my classes in the fall.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said.

“And I also wanted to tell you,” he said, as Rachel began to draw away, “that we finally found out how those boys were getting their hands on my exam questions. Stupid, really. We made things far too easy for them. But once we figured it out, it was just as easy to catch them.”

“Was it your secretary?”

Professor Greenway looked at her sharply. “She didn’t knowingly participate, any more than I did, or you either for that matter. We all made the mistake of being too trusting, too naïve. I’ve always left my exam questions in Nora’s in basket, and she’s always left a set of typed copies in my pigeonhole, both places right out in the open where anyone could watch for the chance to help himself. But this time we did up a second exam, on the sly. I used the second one. Which all six boys flunked. And you were right about them preparing their questions in advance. One of the six was so lazy that he didn’t even look at the exam. He simply handed in the blue book he’d brought with him. The right answers to the wrong questions. Such a waste. None of those boys bothered to study at all, probably didn’t go to lecture or read a thing all semester. We’ll be more careful in the future.”

“So will I,” she said.

And, once again, Rachel thought that was that. An end to things. And this time she was right, for she left town that afternoon just as she’d planned, with all of her things in one battered trunk and not a single loose thread to trip her up.

One week later Rachel stood in her kitchen, thinking of these things, while she prepared her supper. When she noticed the big bowl of salad sitting on the counter at her elbow she was surprised, for she could not remember making it. She felt oddly refreshed, purged, and intensely hungry.

Rachel wiped her hands on a clean dish towel, filled a hollowed-out green pepper with cold water from a jug in the fridge, and drank it down in one long swallow. The water was so cold that she felt it in her jawbone. Then she bit off a chunk of pepper, chopped the rest into bits, and threw them in the bowl. She tossed the salad and ate it much as an animal might: to sustain herself, without fanfare, nothing more.

After the salad she was still hungry, so she grabbed a mug of milk and a pan of brownies she had baked at three o’clock that morning and headed out the back door.

It was a beautiful May evening. The trees were finally in full leaf and the lilac in bloom. The sky was a shade of blue that winter cannot achieve: soft, deep, and variegated, like the eggs of some birds.

Rachel dragged a little cast-iron table over to her tree-slung hammock and arranged the milk and brownies where she could reach them.

“Ahhh,” she sighed as she sank back into the ropes. She heard her neighbors down the hill calling their children in for supper. She heard the infrequent passage of cars along Maple Street at the bottom of the hill. She heard the faint but invigorating clamor of geese, far above, straining northward. And, as she swallowed the last of a brownie and reached for another, she heard a screech of metal, a yelp of brakes, and, after a moment, a shout of consternation. Someone unfamiliar with Belle Haven had tried to drive something large over the narrow bridge that crossed Raccoon Creek. Rachel knew she would hear all about it the next morning when Ed delivered her mail. She grinned shamelessly up at the darkening sky, made a pillow out of her arm, and felt glad all over again to be back where she belonged.

        Rachel woke up early the next morning with the irrepressible notion that something unusual would happen before long. To her. Something she might not really notice or fully appreciate. Like a seed, something that would lead to a blossom of sorts, or a fruit. She felt strangely hollow and profoundly hungry. Her skin felt hot and flawless beneath the early-summer blanket. Although it was barely light outside, she was completely awake and felt so competent, so primed, that she craved conversation as much as food. So she sprang from her bed, threw herself into a cool shower, dressed in clothes she’d just laundered—every stitch—and strode out the door with omelets on her mind.

Angela’s Kitchen served the best breakfast in Belle Haven. It was clean, and its big ovens sent fragrant drifts clear out to the sidewalk. It was run by a woman who knew how to cook, how to feed people, and how to get along without a husband who was never coming back. Her nine-year-old son, Rusty, made her as happy as she had ever hoped to be. Every time she found a quarter lurking in the shadow of a coffee cup, she tossed it into the shiny metal bucket that sat beside the coffeemaker. So far she had emptied the bucket fifty times. No one ever stiffed Angela. Everyone in town knew she was saving the money for Rusty’s education.

“I don’t really care whether he gets it in a school or on the road,” Angela always said. “As long as he gets it.”

When Rachel walked into the coffee shop at seven o’clock that
morning, Angela had just pulled eight dozen cinnamon rolls from her great oven and the air was thick with yeasty steam. The smell of fresh coffee, cinnamon, and bacon made Rachel feel almost dangerously hungry, as if she would fight for her food if necessary.

“Well, bless my soul, if it isn’t ravishing Rachel.” Angela glanced at her watch, lit a cigarette, and waved the match at an empty stool. “Get your ass over here and tell me what has driven you from your bed at such an ungodly hour.”

“What ever happened to ‘Good morning’?” Rachel said, settling herself at the Formica counter. “I’m hungry, that’s all. And I’m out of bread and eggs. And your cinnamon rolls just happen to be slightly better than mine.
Slightly
.” She held up a thumb and forefinger so they were almost touching. “Now fetch me some coffee, please, before I lose my mind.”

A couple of workingmen sat at a corner table by the window, nursing their coffees and silently contemplating the sun. Otherwise, the shop was empty. Angela had already been working for hours, getting everything ready for the breakfast crowd, which would be on its way soon. She was a young but perpetually tired woman who looked too much like her mother and not enough like her son.

“You’re getting skinny, Angie,” Rachel said, wondering again what it would be like to have a sister. “Tell me you’re not on a diet.”

“Not on purpose. Actually, I think I’m onto something big. A new diet for mothers. It’s gonna make me famous, if I can get on
Donahue
or something.” She poured Rachel’s coffee, gave her some cream, and came around the counter to take a seat beside her. “I call it the Leftover Diet. You eat only what your kid leaves on his plate. It’s perfect if you’ve got a kid who eats all the fattening stuff, leaves bread crusts, vegetables, stuff like that. An inch of warm milk, crumbs in the bottom. Perfect. The only problem is that the longer I’m on it, the more I cook for Rusty. Last night I gave him this huge slab of meat loaf, scads of mashed potatoes and butter, a pile of lima beans. I ate so much I couldn’t move for an hour. Plus, if you’ve got three or four kids, the stuff they leave on their plates can really add up. But the idea’s spot-on. It’s gonna make me famous.” She put out her cigarette, drained her cup, stood up with a groan. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”