It was just madness, though it did help her to understand Michael a bit more (and, to a lesser extent, Sam), who wore their patriotism like both a badge and a shield. A false history can do that to you.
And if suffering through the indignity of that experience wasn’t bad enough, the boy sitting beside her for those one hundred and fifty minutes of revisionist drivel kept “accidentally” brushing his hand along her thigh. She’d intentionally sat in the back of the lecture hall, a few rows behind Brent, so that she could keep the entire room in her vision at all times. It was set up with stadium seating, but the two doors into the hall were at the bottom of the room, on either side of the lectern stage, so from her vantage point in the back Fiona would be able to take out anyone who might wish to do Brent harm long before he or she laid eyes on him.
So Fiona found a seat next to a boy in a light blue Oxford shirt, with combed and parted Republican hair and a fair complexion. The kind of boy she presumed called women “ma’am” and men “sir” and probably grew up in a city like Savannah, Georgia, and was filled with Southern courtesy and wouldn’t try to look into her purse and thus wouldn’t have questions about why she was on campus with a chrome-plated Glock.
She sat down beside him and he smiled at her wanly-the kind of smile she’d expected him to give her. A gentle declaration that she was, indeed, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but also that she was so far out of his league that he’d just let her know, by showing his perfectly white teeth, that he’d be no bother to her at all.
For the first ten or fifteen minutes of the dreadful lecture, the boy beside her bounced his left hand off his knee as if to a beat in his head. It was annoying, but far less annoying than listening to Sam chew, for instance. And then Fiona felt a slight… nudge… on the middle of her right thigh. She looked down and saw that the boy’s pinkie was touching her; she scooted over a bit.
“Pardon me,” the boy said quietly and without even turning to look at Fiona.
“No problem,” Fiona said.
Then, five minutes later, he did it again and Fiona scooted again.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said. This time he turned to look at Fiona and flashed a more active smile. He got his eyes involved. “Listening to him drone on makes me jumpy.”
“No problem,” Fiona said, because she truly empathized with the boy.
“I haven’t seen you in here before,” he said.
“I’m just sitting in,” she said.
“Cool,” he said.
Thirty minutes later, Fiona felt a bit more pressure on her leg and looked down to see that the boy was essentially resting his pinkie and his ring finger on her thigh.
“You have really soft legs,” he said. “I thought I was touching my chinos.”
Fiona leaned toward the boy and the boy leaned toward her, taking up most of the middle distance with what Fiona now discerned was far too much cologne. Polo or something else meant to make nineteen-year-old girls swoon in their Dress Barn rompers.
“If you touch my leg again,” Fiona said, “I’m going to dislocate your fingers.”
“Dislocate,” he said and gave her that smile again. “I like that word. I’m sorry. I’ll move them myself if you like. You don’t need to dislocat e them.”
Fiona got the sense the boy didn’t know what “dislocate” meant, since he was still trying to flirt with her. Another failure of American education. She’d be happy to show him the word’s precise meaning.
A few minutes later, Fiona felt a tapping on her knee-this time it was clear that it was intentional. Fiona decided to give the boy the benefit of the doubt that he wanted something from her and thus was tapping her with a purpose. Maybe he needed a pen? Some paper? A punch to the neck?
“Yes?” Fiona said.
“You smell really great,” he said.
“It’s called sweat.”
“Then your sweat smells like lavender and freshly cooked beignets.”
Some people, really, didn’t deserve the gift of speech.
“I am trying to concentrate, if you don’t mind,” Fiona said, because she just didn’t want to create a scene in the lecture hall. She might overreact and cause a compound fracture and no one wanted to see that. Plus, she didn’t want to be splashed with blood.
“Would you like to get a beer sometime?”
Did no one have common decency anymore?
The boy had left his index finger on her knee, so Fiona reached down and very casually sprained it by shoving her thumb in between the last joint and the fingertip. The boy let out a little yelp and then immediately shoved his finger into his mouth and scurried out of the classroom. The professor still never looked up.
The rest of the class went well enough, provided Fiona kept focused on any potential assassins and not anything having to do with whatever manifest destiny was, since the professor had managed to jump a hundred years to discuss some other trivial American policy and how it was originally tied to these violent separatists, though he didn’t use those words. The fool.
Now, as she and Brent went in search of what he deemed “the best rice bowls, like, ever” for lunch, Fiona kept being accosted by young men with flyers promoting different off-campus events, all of which boiled down to wonderful opportunities to get drugged and raped in the comfort of a beer-soaked fraternity house.
“Do you ever go to these parties?” Fiona asked. She handed Brent a flyer for a Sigma Upsilon party called the Pimp and Ho Ball. “No,” he said. “They don’t invite guys.”
Well, that made sense. Little else about the day had. While she’d sat in the classroom, Michael had texted her about Big Lumpy’s death and the potential for bugs in Brent’s room and possibly even in his computers-he and Sam were dismantling the ones left at Madeline’s-and informed her that she should avoid going to his dorm room at any cost, not that that was something high on her list of desires, anyway. And he also told her about the conditions of Brent’s inheritance, which could be both dangerous and ludicrous. Michael didn’t want her to tell Brent about Big Lumpy’s death or his conditions until they were away from the school, since they didn’t know who might be listening in. Any college kid could be one of Yuri’s people for all any of them knew and Fiona should treat any and all of the university’s thirty thousand students as suspects.
Great.
And then he’d texted her again just a few minutes ago to tell her that they had a black-tie event to attend that evening and to find Brent appropriate clothing for it, as if she was his accommodating yet exceptionally hot aunt or, well, whatever. It was just another piece of an increasingly odd puzzle. Her main goal now was to keep Brent safe, but unfortunately that didn’t extend to his food choices, apparently.
Brent finally found the haute cuisine he was looking for-it wasn’t much more than a trolley with a man cooking rice in a wok over a Bunsen burner-in front of the Otto G. Richter Library and now that he had his food, it was like the kid turned on for the first time all day. He was making observations about the people walking by, asking Fiona what she thought about the history class (“Egregious,” was Fiona’s reply).
“Can I ask you a question?” Brent said. They were sitting across from each other at a small cafe table that overlooked a fountain surrounded by grass.
“That depends,” Fiona said. “Is it going to be some sort of disgusting come-on?”
“No,” Brent said. “I don’t think of you that way.”
“Why not?” Fiona wasn’t aghast. At least not entirely.
“You’re more, like, I don’t know, motherly, I guess.”
The rules for what constituted justifiable homicide were nebulous, but Fiona surmised that any man telling a woman she was motherly counted. “Go ahead,” she said.