“Just as far as the bus stop at the Green,” the blonde said.
“Mind if I walk with you?”
“Not at all.”
“Great. I’m kind of nervous of walking over the common by myself tonight.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” the brunette confided when Izzy joined them. “Everything feels a little weird after what happened the other night.”
Izzy looked back at the library steps, but they were still empty. Where had he gone? Hopped over the wall into the vegetation that grew on either side of the steps? But then why hadn’t she heard him moving in the bushes?
“You’re telling me,” she said slowly.
Her nerves felt all on edge and she realized that she wasn’t at all tired anymore. Or hungry. The strange encounter had stolen both her fatigue and her appetite. She was never so glad to be in her apartment as she was that night, even if Kathy was out for another hour before she returned home as well.
“Oh yuck,” Kathy said after Izzy related what had happened to her. “You’re giving me goose bumps.”
“Do you think he was dangerous?” Izzy asked.
“Jeez, that’s a hard call. But let me assure you, I would’ve done exactly the same thing you did.
There’s no way I would’ve stuck around to find out. Uh-uh.
“No, of course not,” Izzy said thoughtfully.
Kathy had to shake her head. “Oh, ma belle Izzy. Don’t start romanticizing it.”
“I’m not. It’s just ...”
“Just what?”
Call me John. Not “my name is John.”
“I don’t know,” Izzy said. “I guess I just felt like I knew him from somewhere.”
Kathy sprawled out on the cushions under the window and laced her fingers behind her head. “Let’s see now,” she said. “You said that he didn’t strike you as either threatening or shy—right?”
Izzy nodded.
“Well, then how did he strike you?”
Izzy had to think about it for a moment. “Odd, I guess,” she said finally.
“And maybe a little lost. Like he was a stranger, still trying to get his bearings.” Kathy started to play an imaginary violin until Izzy threw a pillow at her. “Be serious,” Izzy said.
“I’m seriously glad you took off when you did,” Kathy told her. “I’m just not all that keen on hearing you mooning over this guy. You don’t know anything about him except that he hangs around outside the library, giving people the willies.”
“If it was all innocent—”
“And he can make a good exit.”
Izzy sighed. “I suppose. But I can’t help but wonder if the reason it all seemed so weird is because of what happened to Rochelle. I mean, everybody’s been feeling weird lately.”
“And no wonder.”
“But if what happened to Rochelle colored something that was perfectly harmless—”
“Oh please,” Kathy said. “You don’t even know what he looks like. Maybe he was hiding in the shadows because he’s got a face like a toad.”
“You like toads,” Izzy pointed out.
“This is true, but for themselves—not as a frame of reference for a potential boyfriend’s features.”
Izzy’s face went red. “I never said—”
“I know, I know. Just do me a favor. The next time you talk to him, do it in a crowd.”
“If I get the choice.”
Kathy nodded. “If he’s as interested in you as you are in him—hold on, let me finish,” she added as Izzy started to protest, “then you can be sure he’ll be approaching you again. And if he’s got any kind of smarts whatsoever, he’ll do it at a more appropriate time, like the middle of the day when there’s lots of people around. If he doesn’t, my advice is: run.”
“Advice duly noted and to be followed,” Izzy said.
“Good. Now ask me about my night.”
“How was your night?”
“Borrrring,” Kathy said. “Alan and I went to a poetry reading at The Stone Angel and I honestly didn’t think we’d get out of there before our brains had turned to mush.”
“I thought you guys liked poetry.”
“We do. But this wasn’t poetry. It was more like—” Kathy grinned suddenly, “—posery.”
After two years of being roommates, by now Izzy was used to the way Kathy liked to coin words.
“Which means?” she asked.
“They were more interested in the way they looked—in being ‘poets’—than the content of their work. Except for this one girl—Wendy something-or-other. I didn’t quite catch her name and she left before I had a chance to talk to her. She was good.”
They stayed up a little while longer, talking over a pot of tea before finally calling it quits around midnight. When Izzy finally fell asleep that night, she didn’t dream of ruined paintings, but of a shadowy figure who stayed out of the light and called himselfJohn. She woke up wondering when, or indeed if, she’d ever see him again, not at all sure that she was even looking forward to another encounter with him in the first place.
XI
But Izzy didn’t have to wait all that long to find out how she’d feel. The next morning as she was coming down the lane toward Rushkin’s studio, she spied John again, a lean shape in a white T-shirt and jeans, lounging against the stone wall a hundred yards or so farther down the lane on the far side of the coach house. She hesitated briefly, then continued past the coach house, coming to a sudden halt when she was a half-dozen yards away from him. She’d stopped more from shock than from any fear of his harming her.
He smiled, but looked a little uncertain as to his welcome.
“Hello, again,” he said as the long moment of silence continued to stretch out between them.
All Izzy could do was stare at him. Last night’s feeling of familiarity had returned in a rush, but it was no longer vague. She knew those broad, flat features, those dark eyes, that spill of long black hair.
“This is so weird,” she said finally. “You look exactly like the guy in the painting I just finished yesterday.”
Right down to the small silver earring shaped like a feather that dangled from his left earlobe. The resemblance was so uncanny she couldn’t suppress a shiver.
“Really?” he said. “I’d love to see it.”
Izzy turned to give the coach house a glance, then brought her gaze back to her companion’s handsome features. “Maybe some other time. My teacher doesn’t much care for visitors.” She paused, still off-balance, still trying to sort through what she was feeling. To cover her uneasiness, she added,
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Then why don’t you wear some warmer clothing?”
He shrugged. “This is all I have.”
“Oh.”
She still couldn’t get over the way he was exactly like the painting. It wasn’t that he bore a resemblance to the young man she’d used as a basic model for the pose rendered on her canvas; no, he was exactly like the man in her painting.
“There’s a used clothing place on Lee near the corner of Quinlan,” she found herself saying. “Rags and Bones. I was in there the other day and they had some really cheap jackets, you know, for like under five dollars.”
He smiled. “I don’t have any money, either.”
Izzy remembered an article she’d read in The Newford Star recently about the abject poverty on the Kickaha reserve. God, and she thought she had trouble paying her tuition and making her rent. Here was someone who couldn’t even afford a warm shirt or jacket.
“Um, I guess you’d,” she began, hesitated, then started again. “Would you be insulted if I spotted you the money to get yourself one?”
“That depends,” he said.