Valentine (10 page)

“Yeah,” said Belinda as Cass smiled on. “An initiation.”

Thus, it had begun. . . .

At eighteen, Jill felt that she was a late starter in the development department. She was too tall, too thin, too flat-chested. Her hair was fairly long then, down past her shoulders, but to her it was dull and lifeless. Everything about her seemed wrong: a graceless conglomeration of sharp angles and plain features. She would stand before the mirror, staring at her face and figure, trying to will them through sheer concentration into some more interesting, more pleasing
mold. The fact that she was the only one who held this opinion did not occur to her. Her first semester at Hartley College was a protracted millennium of fear and uncertainty: she sat in the classrooms and wandered the campus, oblivious of the appreciative looks of the men and the envious looks of the women, never suspecting that her presumed mousiness existed only in her own imagination. She didn’t know that she was beautiful.

She missed New York City. She wrote long letters to her mother, who was still recovering from her recent divorce from Brian Marshall, and to her high school girlfriends at other colleges around the country. She missed the ballet classes she’d taken once a week for four years, and she lamented the fact that she hadn’t chosen a college that offered them. But her favorite high school English teacher, Mrs. Worth, had assured her that Hartley was the right place for anyone with her facility for writing. She had never entertained any serious aspiration to a career in dance: she wasn’t really that good at it. She’d known for a long time that she was destined to be a writer.

So here she was at Hartley. The first semester dragged on, highlighted only by her two English classes, world literature and creative writing. She kept mostly to herself, and she was not invited by any cliques, to say nothing of the various sororities and societies that made up the campus social scene.
The only group she joined was the English Club, an unofficial gathering of the brightest students who read a current book a week and came together on Friday evenings to discuss it. She would sit in the campus coffee shop with five or six others, her fellow misfits, listening as they droned on about Robert Stone and Toni Morrison and John Updike and Nadine Gordimer, acutely aware that everyone else was at parties and sporting events or roaming in herds through the nearby mall.

When that fall semester finally ended, she got on the train and went home for the intercession. Christmas was a drab and rather sad time that year: her mother was still not feeling well and her few New York friends were busy elsewhere. She sat in her bedroom those first two weeks of January, writing depressing poems and short stories. Toward the end of the holiday, she realized with genuine surprise that she was looking forward to going back to Vermont. The isolation of the college suddenly seemed more inviting, more appealing than the isolation of the apartment on Central Park West.

The second semester began more promisingly than the first. Once she returned to the college, Jill realized that she was tired of being alone, and she began to take more notice of the activity around her. She forced herself to interact more with her classmates, and she made an effort to sit with them in the library
and the cafeteria instead of seeking out the only empty table in the place. Some of the other students were friendly, and she got along well enough. But it was in this time that her attention was first drawn to the Elements, the three beautiful women who ruled the place.

She would watch them from a distance, studying their dress and makeup and mannerisms, trying to analyze just exactly what it was that made them so popular. She noticed that the dark-haired one, Belinda Rosenberg, had her hair cut attractively short in the latest fashion. One day in the cafeteria, she even went over to their table by the window, introduced herself, and asked Belinda where she got her hair done. Belinda told her—in exchange for a little “help” with the calculus homework she was hastily completing over lunch, minutes before it was due. The following Saturday, Jill went to the salon at the mall and had her own hair cut in Belinda’s style.

By that first week of February, when the Elements called her over to their table, she was only too eager to join them.

“He is
such
a creep!” Belinda exclaimed.

“Totally!” agreed Sharon, the blond ringleader. “Always leering at us. I swear, he stares at every woman on this campus as if she wasn’t wearing any clothes. He’s a complete gross-out.” She paused for
dramatic effect, then added, with a gleam in her eye, “And
we
are going to do something about it!”

Jill looked up from a calculus problem to stare at her new friends, wondering what they had in mind. It was now the second week of her tenure as an Element, and she was already beginning to wonder if joining them had been a mistake, She didn’t like the gleam in Sharon’s eye any more than she liked the general air of conspiratorial mischief that permeated Belinda’s dorm room. And two weeks of doing their math homework was beginning to wear. Had she been any other kind of girl—more poised, more sure of herself—she would have gotten up from her seat at the foot of Belinda’s bed and left the three of them to their own devices. Instead, she smiled halfheartedly around at them and waited for instructions.

The boy they were talking about, Victor Dimorta, was all they said he was, and more. She herself had recently had a run-in with him, dodging his clumsy, foul-breath advances in a suddenly empty classroom a few days before. The tall, skinny, pale young man with the acne scars pockmarking his face and the limp, greasy brown hair had attempted to engage her in conversation. When she’d smiled at him and edged toward the door, he’d taken her involuntary kindness as encouragement and tried to kiss her. The rough feel of his strong hands on her arms still sent a shiver through her. She pushed him away and ran
down the hall, her pounding footsteps eventually drowning out his desperate, rather angry cries.

“Wait a minute! I just want to talk to you. I didn’t mean to scare you. Jill?
Jill!!
”

Now, in Belinda’s bedroom, they were planning their revenge for that and several similar infractions.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” Sharon said as her fellow Elements watched her face in anticipation. “Belinda, this room will be perfect. I want candles, incense, red lightbulbs in the lamps—we are talking complete and total whorehouse, dig?”

“Faboo!”

“Okay. Cass, you’re in charge of the video. I want this place totally bugged. You’ll be in that closet over there, filming.”

“Do you really think—?” the essentially good-hearted redhead began.

“
Don’t
interrupt me!” came the quick retort. “You film. Period! B’lin, you set the stage.”

“Sure,” Belinda said. “And what are
you
contributing, Sharon?”

The beautiful blond girl slowly smiled. “My dear,
I
am the bait! And we, ladies, are going to take care of Mr. Victor Dimorta—Mr. Victory Over Death!!—once and for all! That’s what his name means in Italian, you know. ‘Victory over death.’ Can you believe? Fifty million gorgeous, sexy Italian men in the world,
and we get the only dud! But we are going to fix his wagon, make no mistake!”

There was silence in the room as the other three contemplated this. Then, swallowing hard and at last finding her voice, Jill whispered, “What about me?”

Sharon turned at last to the shrinking violet at the foot of the bed.

“Oh, my dear!” she said, a wicked smile brightening her lovely face. “
You
are the most important—forgive the pun—Element! I most definitely have big plans for you.
Most
definitely!”

It was a valentine card, all pink and lacy white. She was charged with delivering it to his desk during creative writing class. The three senior girls didn’t have any classes with him, as he, like Jill, was a freshman. That, she would later decide, was one of the reasons they had been so eager to have her “join” their group. That, and the calculus.

But there was more. The day before she gave him the card, she was to stage a little one-act play for his benefit. The Elements had chosen another freshman girl from the class for this purpose. The girl—her name was Tammy, of all things—was only too happy to go along with it, as it afforded her the vicarious thrill of hanging out with the coolest women on campus. Jill and Tammy were summoned to Belinda’s room and instructed by the older girls, repeating the
lines over and over until everyone was satisfied that they would play the scene perfectly.

The day before Valentine’s Day, Jill and Tammy had carefully positioned themselves a couple of rows in front of Victor in the classroom, pretending they weren’t aware of his presence. Before the professor arrived and class began, they went into the routine.

“Oh, yes!” Jill cried as Victor slid into his seat. “Can you believe it? Victor Dimorta! Sharon Williams has the hots for him! For days now, she’s hardly talked about anything else!”

“Wow!” Tammy gushed, suppressing a conspiratorial giggle. “I think he’s dreamy! But, of course, Sharon is the most beautiful woman on campus. I bet he likes her: all the guys do.”

“They sure do!” Jill agreed. “But she only likes him!” She leaned toward Tammy then, as instructed, careful to keep her whisper perfectly audible. “She said she’s going to give him a big surprise for Valentine’s Day!”

The other girl’s eyes widened. “Oh? What? Tell, tell!”

“Shhh!” Jill admonished, giggling. “I’m not sure what it is, but she says he’s going to love it!”

The two girls laughed together some more as the professor came in. Moments later, Jill turned around for a glimpse at Victor Dimorta. He was staring right
at her, grinning from ear to ear. She blushed and looked away.

The next day—Valentine’s Day—she walked right up to him at his desk and handed him the envelope. She blushed again as he grinned at her and tore it open. Inside the card, under the syrupy poem from the card company, was a brief, succinct message in Sharon’s elegant hand:
Simmonds Hall, Room 407, 11:00 tonight. Just you ‘n’ me, Victor. Be there. Sharon
. Jill hadn’t seen the card until that moment, and she only got a brief glimpse before he quickly closed it and returned it to the envelope. Noticing the triumphant gleam in his eye, she hurried away.

She didn’t know that it was actually she, Jill, of whom Victor dreamed, for whom he longed, with whom he was obsessed. If she’d known that, she would never have delivered the message. She would never have approached him at all.

The hierarchy of students on any college campus is well defined. It is simply a matter of descending order: seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen. The fact that Jill had not immediately stopped to question why the three most powerful senior girls would want her in their clique illustrated how much she longed to be part of a group. But later, when she finally got around to analyzing it, the harsh reality became clear.

Jill was being groomed for the role of slave. The
three women had been looking around for a likely candidate, and their eyes had fallen on her, the quiet, rather dull freshman girl who envied them enough to stare at them in the cafeteria and emulate their hairstyles. What fun, they must have thought. What a laugh it will be to have a plebe, a gofer, our very own lackey. An errand girl to do our homework. Our message delivering. Our bidding . . .

Their bidding, as it turned out, was to ensnare their prospective victims, the lower forms of life who would provide momentary amusement by serving as the butts of their jokes. They’d obviously performed similar pranks in the past, but their plan for Victor Dimorta was certainly their most elaborate. Jill would later wonder if they were actually planning to go as far as they did with this one. She doubted it: even these three, callous and cavalier as they were, would never have deliberately endangered themselves.

Later, when she thought about the Elements at all—less and less in her remaining years at Hartley College—she tried to understand them. She knew from her experience with her stepfather that some people are simply evil, and that trying to justify or even analyze their actions was an exercise in futility. But this did not seem to apply to Sharon and Belinda and Cass. She began to think, rather, that they were a living example of the harmful side-effects of boredom. As a group, anyway: individually, the three
women were seemingly quite different from each other.

Sharon Williams was the evil one, Jill decided, if any of the three could be described that way. Twenty-one years of being rich and privileged and beautiful had taken their toll. She was a rich blonde from southern California, where everyone seemed to be rich and blond. Jill imagined that her high school years had been one long party, going to dance clubs and windsurfing and rollerblading with the children of movie stars. Her parents would probably be over-eager and overindulgent; some powerful, attractive couple who spent entirely too much time and effort and money on their little darling. It wasn’t difficult to figure out who ran the Williams household.

Belinda Rosenberg was the go-alonger. The third of four Rosenberg children, she would not have had the exclusive attention of her father, a surgeon specializing in heart ailments, and her mother, who was active in her synagogue in Buffalo and the president of two charitable organizations. Belinda would have grown up in the shadows of the two older siblings. She was the type who always found a Sharon Williams to attach herself to, and she would cheerfully allow her friend to be the leader.

Of the three, Cass MacFarland was the enigma. Jill knew the lovely Scottish redhead had grown up in some nice town in New Jersey, but she knew little
else. Cass never mentioned her parents, though Jill knew they were around somewhere: she would later see all three women’s parents, briefly, at their graduation. She had an older brother, whom she obviously adored, as she always seemed to be on the phone with him or writing long letters to him. She was very quiet, Jill noticed, almost unusually so. The single time Jill and Cass had been alone together, at the table in the cafeteria, Cass had barely spoken. Jill had asked her about the brother, but the other girl had merely shrugged and murmured something about his no longer being connected to the family. Jill often wondered why Cass tolerated her friends when she seemed somehow kinder, more considerate than they. But perhaps she only imagined this because she and Cass had something in common: both of them wanted to be writers. Even then, in college, Cass was already working on a novel. This made her, in Jill’s eyes, the most glamorous of the three.