Being in Dr. Welkes' class was weird.
Half of the students weren't there, and most of those who had shown up were like zombies or drug addicts: glassy-eyed and staring, movements lethargic and skin pale. The professor himself seemed out of it. He attempted to continue on as though nothing had happened, and though he'd no doubt given this same lecture on the Anasazi many, many times, he stumbled over his words, got lost in his thoughts, let sentences trail off with no resolution. It was as if they'd all been damaged or affected by their experience in some deep indefinable way and were no longer able to function in the normal world.
She felt the same way herself.
She wondered if the cop did, too.
Angela realized that she had no idea if news had leaked out to the general population, if the policeman had filed a report, if a journalist covering the police beat had picked up on it, if there were stories in the newspaper or segments on the TV news. She'd been living in her own hermetically sealed environment, and since no one from the outside had contacted her, she did not know what was going on in the real world.
The class seemed to last forever, and when Dr. Welkes dismissed them early, there was a rush to escape from the room. Angela had chosen a seat near the door today and as a result was one of the first people out. Not wanting to see, talk to or be with her fellow students, she hurried to the far end of the corridor and took the stairs down instead of the elevator.
Her next class was political science, but she decided to skip it, and having nowhere else to go, she found herself in front of Edna Wong's desk in the university's housing office, sobbing as she described Chrissie's sudden shift in attitude and the racist echoes of Winston's unprovoked attack.
The housing administrator was sympathetic, understanding, all of the things Angela had expected her to be, but unless she was mistaken, there was something else present as well, a knowledge of what had transpired, an awareness of events that went beyond what Angela had told her.
Edna leaned forward. "I'm not supposed to ask this, so this is off the record and I'm going to deny I ever said it." She shot a quick glance toward the closed door. "Are they all white? Your roommates?"
Puzzled, Angela nodded. "Yes."
"I thought so."
"Do you think that has something to do with it?"
"Maybe, maybe not," the old woman answered cryptically. "It's too early to know."
"Too early?" This was getting stranger by the second.
The housing administrator did not directly respond but appeared to change the subject. She, it seemed, had heard about the fateful field trip to the recently discovered tunnel, and she asked Angela to explain what had happened in her own words. "Be honest," she said. "Tell me everything, no matter how unbelievable it sounds."
So she did, even telling the old lady about the corpse hand grabbing her and the subsequent spreading of the black mold.
Edna expressed no surprise, simply nodded.
Suddenly, Angela was not sure she wanted to be here.
"What is your ethnic background? You are Hispanic, correct?"
Angela nodded, blushing, though there was no reason for her to be embarrassed.
"Interesting," Edna said. Then she smiled brightly and put a hand on Angela's. The tears and despair were gone now, replaced by wariness and curiosity. This wasn't going at all the way she'd thought it would. "We don't have any housing available at the moment, dear, but even if we did, I'd ask you not to leave for a week or so anyway. I'd like you to ... keep an eye on the situation. Do you think you could do that for me? You're my first priority if housing becomes available, and believe me, I'll keep my eye out for you and let you know if anything comes up, but until then if you could monitor what goes on, without subjecting yourself to any uncomfortable situations ..." The housing administrator's voice trailed off.
Angela nodded, though the thought of returning to Babbitt House created knots in her stomach. In her mind, she saw black mold spreading from apartment to apartment as each of the residents waited in the hall to call her a stupid brown bitch.
The nod turned into a shake. "No," she said, and it felt weird putting her foot down like this with someone so much older than she, someone in a position of authority. "I can't."
Edna smiled sympathetically. "I understand, dear. I understand completely. And I would never make you do something that you didn't feel confident about." She swiveled in her seat, punched a key on her computer. "What I can do is try to arrange a swap. It's been a few weeks-there are bound to be complaints in here, people who don't get along with their roommates. Maybe I can find one who'll be willing to switch with you."
Angela felt even weirder about that. She couldn't justify putting someone else into her situation. After all, the mold was still there, spreading, infecting people.
She was living in a goddamn science fiction story.
"Shouldn't we ... call somebody?" she suggested. "Something's going on there. Maybe the police are already working on it-I don't know-but there have to be some professors here, microbiologists or something, who would be interested in studying my bed-sheets, who might be able to do something about it."
"They can't do anything," Edna said, and the certainty in her voice once again made Angela think that the old woman knew more than she was telling. She felt cold, and thought that perhaps she ought not to have been as open as she had been.
The housing administrator's phone rang, and Angela took the opportunity to leave. "I have to go," she said, standing, grabbing her books.
"Wait a moment," Edna said.
But Angela didn't wait. She gave a quick wave, then was out the door and hurrying down the corridor. She strode past the front desk and out of the housing office, grateful to be out in the open air. Back in California, it was still summer, but here in Flagstaff the air was tart and tangy, something she found refreshing.
She needed to call her parents, e-mail her friends back in California. She needed some grounding. Part of her was thinking it might be time to just pull up stakes and head home, forfeit her scholarship money, find a part-time job for the next three months, then transfer to East Los Angeles Community College for the spring semester. But she'd worked too long and too hard to get where she was, and she'd never been a quitter. Just getting out of her neighborhood and going off to college had been a battle-a battle most of her peers had lost-and she wasn't about to let a few horror-show special effects send her scurrying back to the safety of the familiar.
Was this the way people in monster movies rationalized their behavior? Was this why they always acted so stupidly?
She wasn't acting stupidly, Angela told herself. She was being brave.
Outside of the building, she saw the student who had asked whether she was going on the field trip to the tunnel, the one who hadn't shown up. He'd been in class today, but she'd been distracted and hadn't paid much attention to him. Although now that she thought about it, he was one of the few who hadn't seemed dazed or scared or completely out of it. He and the other students who hadn't come.
"Hey!" he called, catching sight of her. "Wait up!"
She did. Out of curiosity more than anything else.
"What was with that class today?" he asked as he reached her.
She looked at him. She still didn't know his name, and she doubted that he knew hers. There was something irritating about his assumed intimacy, yet at the same time she was grateful for it, thankful to have human contact that was not ... weird.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't believe I know your name."
He grinned. "Derek," he said. "Derek Scott. And you're ... ?"
"Angela Ramos."
"So, Angela, what was with that class today?"
He was still smiling, which meant that he was curious but not worried, and she wasn't sure how much to tell him. She was acutely conscious of how crazy the whole thing sounded.