Chapter 12
The morning after Shannon learned her lab report was missing, she called her mother to check in. Arietta answered with a false happiness in her voice. “Hi, honey,” she said. “How are you?”
Shannon felt a shiver run down her spine. “I’m all right,” she lied. “What’s up there?”
“Nothing much, really,” Arietta said. “Oh, I met up with a few Nantucketers last night. Women who live here on the island more or less full-time.”
Shannon lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling, allowing relief to wash over her. This meant that her mother wasn’t alone. This meant that she was making friends.
“That’s incredible,” Shannon said. “What are they like?”
“Oh, they’re nosy.” Arietta laughed. “But everyone wants something to gossip over, right?”
Shannon sighed inwardly. “Sure. I think you’re right.”
“But it was pleasant enough,” Arietta said. “The food and wine were fantastic. Hilary Salt was the woman who threw the party. She comes from wealth, but wealth beyond your father’s wildest dreams. Her mother was that actress. Helin?”
Shannon had never been up on her film knowledge, so she pretended to know who Hilary Salt’s mother was and said, “Wow. That’s crazy.”
“I suppose so.” Arietta sounded tired.
“And how is it going with Dad?” Shannon asked in a meek voice.
“Your father’s fine,” Arietta said. “I think he likes seeing the ocean every day. It does us both good.”
Over the next ten minutes, Shannon pestered her mother with more questions about her comfort in Nantucket, whether she was eating enough, and whether she needed Shannon to come back to the island to check on things.
Arietta insisted that everything was fine.
Shannon knew better than to believe her.
But just now, she had things to tend to here.
She had to redo her lab and secure a High Pass grade (at the very least!).
After getting off the phone, Shannon packed her things and walked the fifteen minutes to the lab.
On the way, she considered the steps of the experiment, practicing them in her head so that everything would be seamless when she had the various tubes and solutions and pipettes before her.
But when she reached the lab, she yanked at the door to find it was locked.
A sign off to the left read: CLEANING - CLOSED TODAY AND TOMORROW.
Shannon groaned. She’d wanted to rectify this mistake as soon as possible. But this was the only lab on campus, and she wasn’t authorized to use any other lab. She was stuck.
Rather than mope, Shannon called Russell to tell him what was up.
“Let’s get brunch,” Russell suggested. “I just ran ten miles, and I’m starving.”
“Why on earth are you running that much?” she gasped.
“I don’t know. I think I’m trying to run away from my problems,” Russell said with a laugh. “That, and I’m terrified to run into Mimi soon. It would be great if I could look better, not worse, when we first meet. You know?”
Her own looks hadn’t occurred to Shannon. She’d hardly considered running into Cole at all and was suddenly grateful to the universe for not giving her that harrowing situation. She supposed she’d been through enough.
Shannon met Russell at their favorite brunch spot, which served five-egg omelets slathered with cheese, stacks of blueberry, raspberry, and chocolate chip pancakes, sensational French toast, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.
Shannon ordered unlimited coffee, bacon, and eggs, while Cole opted for a stack of pancakes, eggs, and sausages.
He’d just washed his hair and his face, and he couldn’t stop smiling for some reason.
Shannon guessed it was all the running endorphins.
“Want to see something?” Russell asked.
Shannon laughed. “Sure.”
Russell went through his backpack, then tugged out a folder that held twenty or so photographs. He set the stack of pictures on the table and beamed. The one on top was of an older woman from another time, dressed in a shiny pink dress.
“You’re still doing that!” Shannon said, laughing.
“I just started back up,” Russell explained. “And there are some doozies in there.”
All the way back in undergrad, Russell had become amazed at the things people threw out.
Because people were always moving in and out of apartments and were usually students who needed secondhand items, they often put unwanted items in boxes by the side of the road.
There, you could take someone’s perfectly okay toaster or a lamp and put it on your bedside table.
Maybe there were books you’d always been meaning to read, or art supplies that you could use to start a new hobby.
But sometimes people threw out old photographs—and this boggled Russell’s mind more than anything.
Slowly, Shannon flipped through the photographs, feeling as though she was dropping into someone else’s world.
The older women from maybe the eighties were represented several times, usually in bright dresses, but there were also other people, teenagers and maybe their parents, situated around birthday cakes or lounging at lakes.
“I love putting together the story of their lives,” Russell said earnestly.
Shannon smiled and set the stack back in his folder. “It’s a good collection.”
“I just can’t imagine who would want to throw out their memories like this,” Russell said.
Shannon considered her grandmother, who’d lost her memory and any concept of love she’d had for her children and grandchildren. “Memories lose their meaning, I guess,” she said.
Russell crossed his arms over his chest. He seemed not to know what to say.
After their massive breakfast, Russell and Shannon decided to go for a walk through campus.
It was a beautiful day, almost June, and sunlight filtered through the green leaves, giving everything a magical glow.
As Russell talked happily about a television show he was in the middle of, some comedy-thriller that Shannon had vaguely heard about online, Shannon considered the fact that she and Russell were spending a lot of time together.
They were both single for the first time in ages, and, she supposed, they didn’t have anyone else.
She hoped Russell wouldn’t get the wrong idea about what they were doing.
Shannon was no longer brokenhearted over Cole, not now, after what had happened to her father.
Sometimes she tried to imagine what Cole was up to, how his new relationship was going, and whether he felt guilty for cheating on her.
But more often, she thought about her mother and her father, about how twenty-five years of marriage could be drained in an instant, about how medical emergencies can destroy all best-laid plans.
When she and Russell rounded the corner by Durfee Hall, they nearly ran headfirst into Dina and a tall, brooding man several years older than she was. Shannon had never seen him before.
“Oh!” Dina’s eyes widened. “Shannon, hey.”
Shannon kept her face expressionless. She had no idea why Dina had been wanting to talk to her so much lately. The memory of that strange coffee together left a bad taste in her mouth.
“Hey,” Shannon said. She let her gaze flit over Dina’s male friend’s face. His eyes were dark and strange and buggy. She supposed she shouldn’t have imagined Dina with anyone normal. But she didn’t think this particular abnormal guy even went to Yale.
“I, um. I heard what happened,” Dina said, her nostrils flared.
Shannon gaped at her. Russell shifted beside her, as though he wanted to pull forward.
“With your experiment,” Dina said.
Shannon’s ears rang with surprise. How on earth could Dina have learned about Shannon’s missing experiment? Unless Dina had “disappeared” the experiment herself.
Shannon thought back to undergrad, when Dina had snuck into her room, stolen Shannon’s research, and used it to get into Yale grad school.
She knew how low she would stoop. But the problem with this was that Shannon had no idea what Dina could gain by ruining Shannon’s reputation.
Unless it was just something she was doing for fun?
“Yeah. It disappeared from the professor’s mailbox,” Shannon said darkly. “You don’t know what could have happened to it, do you?”
Dina widened her eyes. “Oh! No. I have no idea.”
The guy beside her offered a crooked smile. Shannon felt the tension between the four of them tighten. Her gut told her something was very wrong.
“Hey, man,” Russell said, extending his hand. “I’m Russell.”
The man shook Russell’s hand with such strength that Shannon saw Russell wince. “Pleasure,” the man said, but he didn’t offer his name.
Shannon realized she needed to get away from these people as soon as possible. She made a vague excuse about having to be somewhere, then ducked ahead, praying that Russell would follow her. Eventually, she heard him shuffle after her. When she felt him beside her, she broke into a run.
“Man, Shannon. I don’t know if I can run anymore today.” Russell laughed.
But Shannon couldn’t slow down. She stretched her legs out, long and fast, till they started to scream with pain.
When she reached the edge of campus, she stopped, gasping, and glanced back across the long stretch of green grass.
She could no longer see Dina nor her weird friend.
Just behind her, Russell stopped and gasped for breath, then raised his eyes to hers.
“That was odd,” he said, his shoulders shaking.
“You don’t think Dina had something to do with your experiment going missing, do you? ”
“It’s nothing I can prove,” Shannon said quietly. “But Dina has had it out for me for years. I don’t know why.”
Russell considered this. “Do you think she’s jealous of you?”
Shannon shrugged. It had never occurred to her that anyone was jealous of her.
Shannon had always kept to herself. She’d always studied hard, pushed herself, loved Cole as well as she could, called her parents, and made sure to check in with her sisters.
Her life was a series of schedules, logistics, and trying to keep up with everything she wanted to be.
“More people are jealous of you than you know,” Russell offered finally.
“That’s hard for me to believe,” Shannon said.
Russell laughed softly. “You’re one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met,” he said. “I think you might be the only person who doesn’t know that about yourself.”
Shannon wrinkled her nose. “Cole cheated on me. I can’t be that great.”
Russell stopped laughing at once. “He cheated on you because he knows you’re better than him. That’s how these things usually go.”
Shannon didn’t know what to say. The sweat from her run felt cold on her upper lip. She pulled her eyes away from Russell’s urgent ones, then turned away. It felt like too much.