In a high corner of the room, Rebecca feels calm and brave, her legs dangling from the top bunk. Somehow, Caleb is sitting beside her.
“What a shitty day,” he says to her. He speaks softly—only she can hear.
She nods. She is aware of the warmth of his leg beside hers, the tilt of his head near the ceiling.
“It really was,” she says.
She will try again tomorrow, she thinks through the buzz of the drinking, to make things right with Kara’s roommate—what was her name again? Mei? No one, she realizes then, with another ping of guilt, has thought to invite Mei into this room.
Down below, the blender hums, a long clattering of ice.
Try this, they all say to one another, again and again, plastic cups passing from person to person, every mouth taking a sip. Shot glasses are used and reused.
The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours.
Finally, the party ends. It ends the way their parties always do, with a knock on the door and the voice of the R.A., just three years older than they are, and skilled at not actually seeing any alcohol.
“Okay, guys,” he says through the door. “That’s enough.”
They drift, then, out into the hall, the fluorescent lights buzzing from the ceiling, as they sway toward their rooms, one by one, or two by two.
Rebecca is floating alone toward her room, a few steps behind the other girls, when she feels someone’s breath in her ear.
“Come on,” says Caleb. He takes her hand in his.
How surprising it is, the sudden intertwining of his fingers with hers, and the smell of him near her, his gum and his soap, the flat clear joy of getting picked.
“We can talk in here,” says Caleb. He pushes open the fire door, and leads her into the stairwell.
The door swings shut behind them and slices away the light and the noise of the other kids, leaving just the two of them there, in the dark and the quiet, a boy and a girl sitting side by side on the same cold stair.
The other girls think Caleb is too skinny, but to Rebecca, he is tall and lean. There is something intelligent in the sharpness of his features, a kind of efficiency, like good design.
She waits for him to speak.
From his pocket, Caleb produces a bag of M&M’s.
“Want some?” he says.
The stairwell is so quiet that even the crinkling of the bag of M&M’s seems to echo against the walls. He pours some into her hand.
They sit this way for a while, not talking. She isn’t sure how to do this. She can hear the crunch of M&M’s against his teeth.
“I feel so bad that I didn’t talk to her parents,” she says, finally. “I didn’t know what to say to them.”
Caleb tosses an M&M down the center of the stairwell. Ten floors down, a satisfying ping.
“People never know what to say,” he says.
She has heard a rumor that Caleb’s brother died when he was young.
They talk awhile longer, drunk and dreamy. She can feel the Kahlúa in her head, a pleasant drifting. Everything around her, the dim lights and the rusted railings and the faraway sound of something dripping—all of it seems suffused with meaning, as if the whole night has been transformed already into memory.
There are things she wants to talk about, to tell him about all the rules she lived by back home, about no movies and no makeup and not going to regular school, about learning algebra with her brothers at a kitchen table, while her mother struggled with the home-school guides and her father tried and failed to start an orphanage. But she says none of these things in that stairwell. Instead, she leans silently against Caleb’s shoulder, as if she can communicate her thoughts through different channels, like the warmth of her arm against his.
Caleb keeps dropping M&M’s down the stairwell, as if they’re sitting at the edge of a real well, wishing on stones.
“People don’t know what to say,” says Caleb, “because there’s nothing you can say.” She feels a telescoping into his past. “There’s nothing to be said.”
Already, she can hear her older self telling this story one day, years into the future, the terrible thing that happened when she was young, that girl Kara in the dorm, the second month of freshman year, her first glancing disaster. The whole event is racing away toward the past.
As they watch the last M&M fall through the air, they bump heads. When they look up, faces close and shadowed, they begin to laugh. Caleb touches her hair. It’s happening. A kiss. His mouth tastes like chocolate. Their teeth touch; she never knows if she’s doing it right. His hands rest on her hips. His fingers skim the skin of her waist, and she can feel him shaking slightly as he touches her, his nervousness more endearing than confidence. And this seems like a beginning, this here, the start of everything. She is warm with a furious hope, the elation available only to the very young.
The girls sleep late, heads hurting from Kahlúa. They wake, one by one, to pee or for water, or to swallow the Advil they keep beside their beds or only to pull the curtains shut against the morning light, squinting in the sunshine of yet one more cloudless day.
Then they climb back into their beds.
Soon, they are dreaming the vivid dreams of shallow sleep.
It is around noon, the girls later agree, that something extraordinary happens: their dreams begin to follow a similar plot, to swirl around the same subject, one distinct sound. All at once, the girls dream that someone, somewhere, is screaming.
It takes a few seconds for their eyes to open, for the noise to coalesce into a story: someone really is screaming.
In the hall, the girls find Caleb—in boxers, no shirt. They can see his ribs rising and falling beneath his skin as he shouts out into the hall. It is possible that none of these girls have ever seen true panic on a boy’s face before.
It’s Rebecca, he is saying. He is motioning toward his bed, where her curly red hair is spread out on his pillow. It’s Rebecca, he says again, something is wrong with Rebecca.
4.
What a terrible thing going on at the college—this is the way the people of Santa Lora talk about it in the aisles of the hardware store and the supermarket, or as they walk their dogs in the woods. Have you heard what’s happening at the college? they say to their neighbors over fences, and in the bleachers at the high school, as if the college were an island apart from the town, its gates impenetrable, even by germs.
A sleeping sickness. That’s what the local reporters are calling it. One girl is dead, another unconscious, both from the same dorm floor.
There is a drought fanning out all across California. No rain in ninety days, and they are behind already from the year before. No one has ever seen the lake in Santa Lora sit so low or the sandbars rising in the middle like dunes, the old docks standing dry, fifty feet from the water’s edge.
It’s the worst drought in a hundred years. Or longer, some say. Five hundred, maybe, or more.
But the weather, this weather: it’s glorious. Six weeks of sunshine in a row.
It does not seem possible to suffer in weather like that, as if beauty were a spell that could ward off death, but they know the grapes are dying in the valley below, and their lawns are going browner by the day, parched by the same sun that is warming their porch swings long into October.
And yet, somehow, the disbelief holds: it does not seem possible in weather so pleasant for an eighteen-year-old girl to die.