The Black Hour (38 page)

He was the best friend I’d ever had.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded and took his hand away. I remembered the heat of another hand and a kiss, no question in it but desire, hope. McDaniel’s hand on the back of my head. But the memory of that night with Nath quickly followed, bringing with it the shame of everything I’d done wrong.

“I’ll bring the manuscript in next week,” he said. “Nancy packed it away somewhere.”

“She’ll be glad to see the last of me in her house,” I said.

“She’s carving a place for herself into my bedrock. Trying to.”

“I have no doubt she’ll succeed,” I said. “She suits you. In the best way.”

“Thank you for that.” He had a charming smile. All of his smiles had belonged to me, once. Even those he bestowed on other people were the tell on how happy he was with me. Now I could see that he was happy with someone else. The sting was mild.

“As I was trying to say,” he said. “Night Sail is tonight. Tradition holds that you’ll be on my boat. This’ll be Nancy’s first year.”

“She wouldn’t want me there.”

“She’s an adult, too, Melly. Give her a chance. The others will be there, Joss, Corrine. They were all invited. Benjamin will preside, I’m sure.”

I didn’t need another chance to see Woo preen and parade. But Cor—I still hadn’t asked her about Leo Lehane standing outside our office. Joss would help us sort it out.

If—if I even wanted to sort it out. Either my exhaustion or the pleasure of finding Doyle’s office cozy again, his presence a comfort instead of an anxiety, rendered the question of my attack tiny and long ago. Did it matter? The kid was dead, and I was fine.

I was fine.

“We can pick you up at the not-so-secret tie-up at the rocks. Against official protocol, every year, they’ll be shuttling people out. You can swim, if I remember correctly.”

“No, thanks. To the swimming I mean.”

“You’ll go?”

I’d been on Doyle’s boat every year I’d been at Rothbert. Every year but one. “Last year—”

“We didn’t go out last year. We found individual pursuits. I believe I visited a sick friend.”

“In the ICU,” I said.

He smiled. One last time, just for me.

Leaning on the buzzer for the hotline headquarters, I eyed the doughnuts, yellow with age, in the vending machine. Not exactly an uplifting corner of the university.

I’d given myself every excuse not to bother with this. Nath was his own man, his own problem. I was not his teacher anymore.

But I’d already let the kid down. I’d let him down hard enough that he might actually hit the bottom.
Tell me you’re not worried about that kid.
Well, I couldn’t worry about him anymore. Time to turn him over to someone else.

I noted the literature rack, filled to the brim with the same brochure, the same plaintive face of need pleading from the front cover. I started tapping out Morse code on the buzzer. S—O—S.

The door opened, a young man in a too-big T-shirt peering out with dread. “Hope Hotline, how can I—” He stared, swallowed hard. “How can I—”

“Help me, maybe?”

“Aren’t you—I mean, are you the professor—”

“Are you the sheriff in these parts?”

He stumbled back to let me in. “Take me to your leader, huh?”

He had shoulders so thin they threatened to slice open his shirt. On his face, a goofy, expectant look. These were the kids who were supposed to talk their peers out of rash life-or-death decisions? “Sure, OK.”

The inside of the place told a different story than the lobby. Bright, cheerful. Beanbag chairs, really? I could see some lives being saved here. I eyed the coffee station—all the accoutrements, fancy-brand beans. All the budget cut talk around the university must not have filtered down to this little underground enclave.

The kid stood there, watching me. “Phillip’s in his office.”

I had expected the request to transmit to my alien friend by now, but we’d crossed wires. “Can I see him, then? Phillip?”

“Who is it, Zach?” came a voice.

“Professor, uh,” the student tried. “Dr.—”

A door to an internal office stood half-open. Phillip came to the door and had the courtesy to seem unsurprised to see me. I hadn’t recognized him the night he’d cornered Nath and I’d nearly talked the poor kid into going undercover as a troubled student. I gazed over the playground in front of me again. What a waste of time that would have been. Or had been—Nath’s time, because isn’t that what he’d gone ahead and done? And now he was a troubled student.

“Dr. Emmet,” he said. “Come right in.”

He let the door close behind us.

“Don’t you need to listen for the phones?” I hooked a thumb toward the slim window next to the door, through which I could see the pointy kid settling into a bean chair. “They don’t call hoping for your voice mail.”

“Zach’s got it.”

“One guy on the phones is enough? I guess that’s good news.”

“You don’t know about our heavy usage hour. Tonight after most of the town is in bed, we’ll have a couple more students on duty.”

“Did you say hour? Just the one?”

He waved me into a chair and sat opposite. “We don’t make light of it. It’s the pinnacle on which every day at Rothbert balances. If we get it wrong, if we tip one direction or the other, someone dies, the campus grieves, the town wonders what the hell is going on over here. Not to mention that a family somewhere is shattered. The university lives or dies on our watch.”

He seemed to be reading from an awfully dramatic sales brochure. Or a mythic poem he’d written to his own worth. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that—sentiment.”

“You’ve probably heard other areas of the university claim how important they are,” he said. “In our case, it’s true.”

The guy had a Napoleon complex, but then so did most of the research faculty, the deans, President Wolitzer. Me, some would say. “Here’s what I think, Phillip. You’re not going to be able to tell me what I want to know.”

“Depends on what you want to know. Maybe I’ll have all the answers.”

Why had a scared and lonely kid brought a gun to my office door? But I wasn’t so sure I needed that answer anymore. I thought of Leo’s mother in her tidy house in her tidy town, trying to smooth down the things she couldn’t understand. The things she had to live with shamed me.

Phillip Carrington-Wells
, said the little plaque on his desk. What a mouthful.

“What’s your training, Phil?”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Phillip. Sorry that my diplomas aren’t on display as proof of my value.”

“I might have set my diplomas on fire last summer, Phillip. I’m not sure. I just meant—what’s this place about? I’ve put your boilerplate invitation to students on my syllabus for seven years, but I don’t know what you do.”

“It’s on your syllabus? That’s great.”

“Every semester. Call the—” I’d forgotten where I was. I looked around for a clue.

“The Hope Hotline.”

No need to call the hope hotline on you?
I hardly knew where the memory came from, but it had a daiquiri taste.

“In the age of copy and paste, it’s pretty easy to do,” I said, but time had passed. What was I thinking of?

At last I placed it: Corrine, my first day back, worried that I’d pill and swill myself back into the hospital. A day that seemed so long ago, and yet I still felt as though I hadn’t fully stepped back onto campus. Still hadn’t moved back into my office. Still hadn’t crawled back into my life. I was truly misshapen, unable to fit back into the place I’d left.

“Thank you for spreading the word,” Phillip said. “Our goal is to make sure students know about us. Before they need us, of course. By that time—well, it’s too late.”

“You’ve made a nice go of it. Not to sound gauche, but you must run a busy operation.” I glanced toward the narrow window, catching the kid named Zach watching me. He popped up out of the beanbag chair and disappeared. “The university has been cutting to the bone on expenses, but it looks like Munchkinland down here.”

Phillip rolled his desk chair back a few inches. “University priority should be to keep the students
alive
, surely, before anything else.”

I hadn’t realized Rothbert students were so volatile. On the back shelf of my memory, I could barely reach a few big headlines from the
Rothbert Reader
over the years. Students who had problems they hadn’t been able to live with. Problems they didn’t know yet they could live with, if they just held on. I said, “I thought the joke was that our students came with their own entourage of servants for home, health, and happiness.”

His jaw loosened, the hint of a genuine smile. “They’re—insulated, aren’t they? They hardly know what they need until they need it.”

Phillip’s eyes flicked past me. I looked to see what had caught his attention. Another student nested in the bean chair, turned in profile with a coffee mug to his lips. He looked like the exact student Phillip had in mind: cocky, self-sure.

“Must be difficult to teach them anything,” Phillip said. I turned back to him to find him leaning over his desk on his elbows. “And sociology, especially. Rather esoteric. I heard one of your colleagues got a Rothbert Medal, though. That’s excellent news.”

Excellent news for Woo. I nodded, not sure what to say. Pretty sure I’d never get one of those now.

“I’m sure you were missed last year,” he said. “How long were you laid up?”

“Ten—” The fact caught in my throat. I still hated the time, gone. “Ten months, all told.”

“Well, I’m sure it was nice to hear from all your family and friends.”

The question of Phillip’s education hadn’t been resolved, and now I wondered if he’d been trained to throw knives by a blind circus performer. He was either a very bad or a very good shot. “A few novelty greeting cards weren’t worth the pain,” I said.

“No, of course. Of course not. I’m sorry.” His eyes cut to my lower body, my hand on the cane. His gaze was heavy, slow, methodical. “This may not be my place, but I hope you’re handling the pain meds carefully. They can be quite dangerous. A student just this week—”

“I’m fine.” Loud, final. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and looked. The guy outside the window had turned at the sound of my voice. He wasn’t another gape-mouthed alien but a smooth, smartly dressed young man. Someone who seemed like he had saved a few lives and might save more, given the chance. A young guy leaning over me—

The back shelf of my memory collapsed.

A hand, rising from the dark. A gun.

An explosion, the world rent in half. I’m off my feet, falling.

Then I’m a pile on the ground, the taste of metal in the back of my throat. Voices nearby, a scream, maybe my own. Gasping breath and a moan. Not mine. In a flutter of movement, the boy’s dark face, eyes behind glasses.

Oh no. Oh no.

The voices go quiet.

He’s next to me.
Oh no, oh no, no, no.
A long minute. A long forever.
Help
—but it doesn’t sound like any word.

A whisper.
I’m so sorry.

Nothing but sound and light and burning. When I open my eyes, a hand is next to mine, open like a flower.

She stands in the doorway, hand to her mouth. Her voice far away.

Is she dead?

The young man leans over me.

Let’s get out of here,
he says.

Cor.

Let’s get out of here, Cor.

I stood up, reaching for the desk for help. Phillip watched with raised eyebrows. “Are you OK?”

Thoughts detonated, one after another.

I was fine, and not fine. I didn’t know what had changed, but I could reach everything on that far back shelf. How had this happened?

The student.

I stepped into view of the bean chair again, but no one was in it. I went to the door and flung it open. He was gone.

Is she dead?

Let’s get out of here, Cor.

I crossed the room and pulled at the other door, leaving the hotline behind. The shelf was clear. I remembered everything.