It was easier to say good-bye to Mãe than to my father. I bent over his head, noticed the one unchanged part of his face—his eyelashes, long and thick and black—then quickly kissed his temple and pulled away. It was the first time I’d ever dared to kiss him.
I spent the first few days back on campus hunting down my professors and making up the assignments I’d missed. The work went fairly quickly, since my dorm room was no longer a beehive. Friends didn’t come and go at all hours. Even my roommate had deserted the room.
Bernadette had moved in with Jacey, it seemed. She didn’t tell me herself; Jacey did.
“I’m sorry, Ari,” Jacey said, playing with one long blond braid. “She says it’s too spooky in that room.”
It seemed spooky even to me, without Bernadette’s threads and shells and feathers. I spent as little time there as I could.
Whenever I saw Bernadette, in class or in the cafeteria, she looked away. The first time I went up to her and said, “How was your break?”
She drew back and turned slightly, as if to minimize her exposure to me. In a low voice, she said, “Please leave me alone.”
I hadn’t expected that.
Jacey told me a few days later, “It’s not you, Ari. She says it’s just that people around you tend to die.”
If Walker knew about Bernadette’s feelings, he never mentioned them. He turned up my first night back. I was walking alone on the path from the cafeteria to the dormitory when a white luminous sphere about a foot in diameter bobbed out of the shrubs alongside the path. The thing hovered, then moved toward me.
Was I startled? Yes, for a moment, before I spied, beneath the sphere, a black cloth suspended in the air by two black-gloved hands.
“Hello, Walker,” I said.
“I am a zombie trapped inside this ball.” Walker made his voice high, squeaky.
The word zombie did startle me. After a few seconds, I said, “Zombies don’t sound like that.”
He ignored the comment. “If you kiss the ball, the zombie will be freed.”
Somehow he made the sphere rise and move toward me. It was a pretty good trick. I couldn’t see any strings.
Walker made squeaky zombie sounds.
“Okay,” I said. I stepped closer to the ball. “Let’s free the zombie.” I pursed my lips.
The globe and the cloth both vanished. In the darkness, Walker’s lips touched mine.
For seconds, our mouths were disembodied entities doing a dance in midair. His lips were soft as a violet. (Yes, I had kissed more than one flower. It’s the best way to practice.)
For seconds, I heard nothing, saw nothing, felt only his lips pressed against mine. Then something inside me sprang into being, as if a small flame ignited, rose, spread through all my nerves and into my lips, and then crossed into his.
The kiss ended. It was still the same night. We stood on the same path—Walker wearing a black hood with holes for his eyes and mouth, I saw now. The sound of faraway laughter made him pull the hood off. His hair was tousled, his eyes reflecting light from the globe. He’d dropped the cloth that had concealed it.
“Amazing,” he said. “You are amazing.”
I lacked the strength, much less the desire, to contradict him.
After that, we were a couple. Walker and I held hands (clumsily, wearing gloves) between shifts at the recycling center. We walked back from the cafeteria to the dorm with our arms around each other. We studied together, in the lounge—actually studied, eyes on books, each of us savoring the tension that kept us from touching—so that when we did touch, the sensations were indescribably intense.
What I felt was wild. It went deep and made me dizzy—pleasantly so, nothing like the vertigo of before—creating a sweet laziness that bathed me in a sense of well-being, temporarily dulling the wildness. Maybe it was the new tonic I was taking. Maybe I was in love. Whatever it was, I felt charged with life, fully aware of each passing moment.
When our American Politics class met, Walker and I made efforts not to look at each other, with limited success. I caught Bernadette watching us more than once, trying to figure out what was different.
Meanwhile Professor Hogan spoke in her strident yet unconfident way about third parties. “Even though we can argue that the two-party system has become muddled at best, corrupt at worst, most interest groups realize that working within the two parties is the only real path to power?” Her voice rose at the end of sentences, making them sound like questions.
Walker yawned. His teeth were small and even, pearl-like. Bernadette caught me staring at his mouth and wondered how far things had gone between us. When I looked over at her, she turned away.
“In American politics, third parties have sometimes played a corrective role? They’ve raised issues that the traditional parties avoided because the issues couldn’t generate social capital?”
Walker and I glanced at each other. A slow shiver climbed my spine.
“Ariella? Please define social capital for us?” Her large, dark eyes looked hunted, like a deer’s.
Professor Hogan didn’t like me. Even if I hadn’t been able to hear her thoughts, I could have read her feelings in the tone of her voice and her body language. It wasn’t anything I’d done or said—what prompted her hostility was that I’d dropped Professor Evans’s physics class. She was having an affair with Evans, and they enjoyed talking about wayward students when they were in bed together. Yes, I’d listened to her thoughts.
“Ariella?”
“Social capital is a term for concerns that promote cooperation between two or more individuals.”
“Er—yes?” she said. “And can you give us an example?”
I was trying to think of an example when Walker said, “You know, social capital is just words. It’s jargon.”
Professor Hogan turned her deerlike eyes on him. “It’s language used by social scientists like me to describe a behavioral norm?”
“But it’s jargon. If you’re talking about relationships based on earned trust, why not say trust? If you mean common interests or reciprocal favors, why not say that? To me, social capital makes fairly simple things sound complicated.”
Virtually every student in the room agreed with Walker. Bernadette looked at him as if he were a hero. I thought so, too—not because he’d come to my rescue and deflected the professor’s attention. He’d had the courage to say what I thought, but didn’t dare express. I didn’t mind abstract terms in my philosophy class—they were appropriate there—but used to describe American politics, they seemed grandiose expressions of a kind of wishful thinking: that politics were governed by scientific principles. The little I’d read about politics suggested that science had nothing to do with it.
The class time ended before the debate could go further. But Professor Hogan had the last word.
“Next month, when we go to the Third-Parties Caucus in Savannah?” she said. “Then you’ll see social and political capital in action?”
On the weekend after spring break ended, Walker took me on the picnic he’d promised.
Over the unofficial Hillhouse uniform—jeans and a T-shirt—I threw on a cardigan made of cashmere, lavender pink. Dashay had given it to me during our short-lived Yule celebration. I’d never worn pink before, and the sweater made me self-conscious at first, but the color flattered my complexion, made me seem to blush. Vampires never blush.
We walked to the orchards adjoining campus, Walker carrying a large canvas tote bag. The peach trees were in bloom. The breeze drifted their light pink petals and wafted their faint, sweet perfume, which made the air as exotic as incense.
Watching Walker spread a blanket on the ground made me think of Mysty, carrying a blanket to her last date with Jesse. I felt goose bumps on my arms.
“What’s wrong?” He fell onto the blanket, rolled onto his back, propped himself on his elbows—all in one movement.
I rubbed my forehead and tried to clear the memory, let myself live in the moment, savor the sheen of spring in the tree blossoms, the powder-blue sky, the fragrant air. “Such a beautiful day,” I said.
“You’re beautiful.” His North Carolina accent made the compliment sound natural, not hokey, the way it looks as I write it down. Words take on new meanings when they’re spoken. “When I was growing up I used to dream about meeting someone like you.”
I sat cross-legged on the blanket. “What do you mean—someone like me?”
He moved closer to me and lay on his back. “Someone mysterious, and beautiful, and smart. The girls I grew up with, they were all right. Some of them were very pretty. And some were smart, too. But I kept dreaming about meeting someone special, someone enigmatic.” He pronounced the word slowly, as if he liked its sound.
“You must have been in love a hundred times.” I heard my own voice, and for the first time it reminded me of my mother’s Savannah drawl. I was flirting, I realized.
“A couple.” His silver-blue eyes were the color of topaz. Our encyclopedia at home had plates of gemstones, and I’d studied them, fascinated by their range of colors. I wondered if anyone had ever made photographic plates of human eyes. They seemed even more variegated than gems.
“Five, actually,” he said. “Six if you count a blind date. That time I was in love for all of two hours.” Suddenly he reached toward me, touched the amulet that hung from my neck. “What’s this?”
“An Egyptian cat.” I told him cat amulets were linked to the Egyptian goddess Bastet, who transformed herself into a cat with an all-seeing eye in order to protect her father from enemies. “Amulets are designed to protect travelers.”
He placed the cat back against my neck. “Enigmatic,” he said again. He sat up, reached into the canvas tote, and pulled out a bottle of rosé wine and two glasses.
We sipped the wine, light and floral as the air around us. We ate strawberries and tomato sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. For dessert we had meringues—stale clouds that melted and vaporized in our mouths. Walker had taken as much care with the food as he did with his magic tricks.
When we’d finished eating, I lay back against the blanket next to him. For a while we both watched the sky. Walker said, “Ever wonder what makes it blue?”
I knew why the sky appeared to be blue—the color was an effect of Rayleigh scattering. Air molecules disperse the blue wavelengths of visible light more effectively than longer wavelengths, such as red. But to say that would have broken the mood.
“It’s the same reason the Blue Ridge Mountains look blue,” Walker said. “It’s called Rayleigh scattering.”
“I know about light scattering,” I said. “I thought you’d come up with something more poetic.”
“What could be more poetic than Rayleigh scattering? Without it, we’d be looking up at black space.”
I thought of my telescope—I’d left it back in Sassa—and then my mind leapt to the night Mysty disappeared, to the moment when I blacked out.
“What’s the matter?” Walker leaned over me, his face full of concern. He had luminous skin, tinted sand-brown by the sun. I would never have skin like that, I thought. “Are you thinking about that friend of yours?”
I nodded. Then I realized he meant Autumn, not Mysty.
“It’s been rough on you.” His hand touched my hair, pushed back a strand. My scalp tingled. Then we were kissing.
Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity.” I will never be a poet; I can’t recollect my emotions in tranquillity, because the moment I think of them, the emotions recur, every bit as strong and overwhelming as they were that day in the peach orchard.
We kissed until our mouths hurt, and then we kissed more. My lips felt swollen. My blood surged, and I heard my heartbeat, loud and fast, against Walker’s chest. My eyes were closed, but, when we pulled apart to breathe, I opened them. The first thing I saw was Walker’s neck, pale, arced above me as he tipped back his head. I would be lying if I didn’t admit to having a sudden strong urge to sink my teeth into his skin.