Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
There was no relief from it, not that day, not the next. It was a thunderstorm that refused to break. He thought often of
a summer heat dome, the air pregnant with a suffocating warmth and a liquid weight, lightning flitting along the horizon,
and everything still, waiting for the storm to erupt at last and tear open the sky in cannonades of thunder.
Arthur saw that tension in the others. He walked to the campus with Van, whose face was whey colored and eyes glassy, and
who often made it halfway to his classes before realizing he was carrying the wrong books. He saw it in Allie and Donna. Allie
seemed to have lost her hairbrush and went around with her cornsilk hair stirred into a staticky, weightless tangle. Sometimes
she would begin to tunelessly hum “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Whenever Donna noticed what Allie was doing she would scream at
her to shut up—would scream so loudly, with such hostility, it made everyone jump. Arthur saw it in Gwen too. He often turned
up at The Briars in the late afternoon, when Gwen could usually be found doing her homework at the kitchen island. Gwen shot
him a look as he walked in, the same look every day, a glance that expressed dismay and anxiety.
That look said: Nothing yet, still nothing, how long until we know what happened, how long, and how are we supposed to wait?
He would hug her while she sat on her stool, her face pressed hard to his chest, and the slightest tremor in the hands pressed to his back.
Only Colin seemed his usual self—and Arthur wasn’t even sure about that.
Colin seemed more distracted than usual and had become compulsive about straightening things, moving books and papers so they aligned with the edge of his grandfather’s desk, adjusting throw pillows so they sat neatly on the couch in the study.
It went on and on—the not-knowing, the terrible not-knowing. They began meeting in the student center for Jell-O Pudding Pops
and desultory games of Trivial Pursuit. The Briars wasn’t always the best place for them anymore. Gwen’s mother had noticed
the mood and begun jabbing at them with irritable, suspicious questions: Why are you all as jumpy as cats?
and You better not be doing drugs, you five, my daughter looks up to you.
Getting together on campus meant doing without Gwen, which Arthur didn’t love.
But Colin counseled it was for the best.
“Arthur,” Colin told him, tenderly, “you are a terrible, nervous liar and none of us can bear to see you even in the same
room with Arlene Underfoot. We’re doing this for you, because we love you, and we all want Gwen to hurry up and take your
virginity.”
“Arlene,” Arthur muttered in reply. “I was wondering about her first name.”
Colin was best at the Science and Nature categories, Arthur couldn’t be stumped by any of the Art and Literature problems,
Donna was strongest at History, and Allie, whose father had been an All-American, seemed to know everything about Sports without
the slightest interest in the subject. Van alone refused to care—he said the pursuit of the trivial went to the rot at the
core of America’s consumer culture—and played primarily to make his sister lose her shit.
“What is America’s number-one pain reliever?” he read off one card.
“Tylenol!” Donna shouted.
“Wrong!” Van shouted back. “America’s number-one pain reliever is the fat blunt I have to smoke to get through another one
of these fucking games.”
Donna had her arm cocked back to throw a fistful of dice at her brother when Gwen came looking for them. The moment Arthur
saw the look on her face, he sprang out of his chair. She was waxen, eyes bright and stunned. That would’ve been enough to
alarm him but was secondary to the bigger shock: she had sought them out on campus, a place he had never before seen her.
His first thought was, It’s the King, she’s seen the King, he couldn’t get Jayne Nighswander because she slipped out of range, and he’s pissed, he’s
boiling, he wants us to pick someone to die in Jayne’s place. He wants one of us now. The idea was like a swallowed shard of glass. They were all rising from their chairs by then. Allie came around the table
to give Gwen a hug. He noticed then that Gwen had a letter in one hand, folded into thirds, but as Allie embraced her, she
dropped the sheet of paper on the game board. Arthur saw the header, Rackham College, and some of the tension went out of him. She wasn’t here about the King after all—she was here because they had rejected
her, of course they had, and it had been stupid of him, stupid and even a little cruel, to get her hopes up. He was so sick
of being wrong.
But he was seeing the letter upside down and Donna wasn’t. She took one glance, stepped around the table, and gave Gwen a
hard swat on the ass. “You clever bitch. I knew they’d take you.”
Arthur turned the letter around to read it properly. Words jumped out at him: “honored,” “extraordinary,” “proud addition
to our student body,” “family of faculty rate, provisional on academic excellence.” Then he was up, standing on his chair,
holding his fists over his head, shouting loud enough so everyone in the student center was looking at him.
“The glorious goddamn Gwen Underfoot just got into the ninety-eighth best small liberal arts college in America!” he shouted.
“How do you like that, Rackham?”
This announcement was met by a scattering of derisive cheers.
Van said, “Oh, baby, we are going to get you so drunk tonight, you’re going to need to apply for a scholarship to Alcoholics
Anonymous.”
Arthur jumped off the chair and Gwen found her way into his arms.
“It turned out all right,” she said into his neck. “And now I get to be one of you.”
“Oh, sweetest,” Allie said. “You think you needed to get into this dump to be one of us?”
Arthur kissed the top of her head.
“Look at that,” he said. “Sometimes the good guys win.”