“Hi,” said the policewoman. Polly had talked to a man. “Thanks for coming in. You’re at Magdalene?” I nodded. “The porters tell me there was a little party Tuesday evening.”
“Oh, totally,” I agreed. “I saw Nick collecting his mail and invited him over. He needed a break.”
“Was there any alcohol at this party?”
“Just some beer. I think he only had one.” He wasn’t drunk, if that’s what she was implying. He didn’t need to be drunk to do what we did.
“When did he leave?”
“He stayed in my room for a while.” I smiled.
“How long is a while?”
“I guess half an hour.” Long enough, is what I meant. “He had to see his supervisor.” It was important to explain why he hadn’t stayed over.
“Richard Keene? No, he didn’t.”
“What?”
“We’ve spoken with Dr. Keene. They had no interaction on Tuesday night.”
I know that Nick saw him. He went around to O building and didn’t come out.
“Why would Dr. Keene lie?” I asked.
She leaned back. “Why do you think Dr. Keene would lie?”
I held on to the seat of my chair with both hands.
“I guess he wasn’t in. But Nick went to see him.” And didn’t come out from around the front of the building for at least forty minutes. After forty minutes I went to bed.
“We’ll investigate the discrepancy,” she said. “Did Nick go to a lot of parties?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe he did. Maybe this was a normal thing for him. Maybe lots of girls put their faces there.
“What did you and he do for half an hour?”
She was asking everything backward. She was supposed to have asked that before she told me that Nick hadn’t really gone to see Dr. Keene.
“Like, we talked and stuff. About… school.” I shook my head. That was stupid. Why would we talk about school? But she believed me. She didn’t even try to get it out of me that we hadn’t talked at all.
“Do you know Polly Bailey? Was she at this party?”
“No!” I said.
I let them take my fingerprints, like they were doing with everyone who knew him well. “For elimination purposes,” this policewoman said. That’s right; someone had trashed his room.
My prints wouldn’t be there. I’d never been in his room. Whenever I went over to the Chanders’ house, we’d sat in the kitchen. I’d never even been upstairs.
By the time I learned about Polly being sick in Nick’s office-and when-it wasn’t really a surprise at all.
Since he’d lied about needing to see Dr. Keene, and lied about liking me, and lied about whether I’d done it right and if it felt good and if I mattered, maybe he’d lied about everything. Maybe he hadn’t tried to smooth anything over with Gretchen. Maybe, instead of calming down her freak-out over the handwriting thing, he’d urged her on, picking apart my index line by line…
Never mind. I had to try. I had to get it done. I had to get paid.
She wasn’t even in. And Harry was away for a bird competition, which was actually kind of perfect. I have my own key for just this kind of situation, and I thought, Great, no distractions. But Gretchen had moved the photos. The whole box had been put away somewhere. Maybe she’d taken them someplace to get scanned or preserved, but I thought it was really rude to not have told me.
I’d set aside two hours to be there. I turned on the computer. What else was I supposed to do? It’s not like she’d left me the ability to do my stupid job. I looked at some sites that I like and just felt really frustrated. Then I flipped through her bookmarks a little. Why not?
Polly thinks it’s wrong that I looked at what was on Gretchen’s computer sometimes, but I didn’t even do it on purpose. It talked to me and that’s literal. The first time it happened I freaked out. But then I got used to it, and it was like having a conversation. I’d press buttons and it would say stuff. It was funny.
One time when Gretchen had been using the computer, and I waited my turn out in the hall, I’d heard her. I wasn’t really paying attention, but I noticed it spell out “brussels1958.” I thought that was funny. I realized it was her password. It recited a series of numbers too. It was the password to her bank account. It’s just funny to pay attention to stuff like that. One time I watched a friend of mine dial her locker combination and freaked her out for weeks after by putting stuff in there. Nothing mean, just funny, like stupid toys from the dollar store. It just makes sense to pay attention in life.
So, when I was alone in Gretchen’s house, with absolutely nothing to do-which wasn’t my fault-I logged in. I just wanted to see how much she had. The checking account was normal; the investment account was enormous. Big to me anyway. Not like what had been kicking around Silicon Valley when I was a teenager, but still, it was a lot.
The thing is, I needed money for things, stupid things. Shampoo and food, stuff that I would have charged if I hadn’t hit my limit. It’s not like I could make it to Christmas. I was supposed to get a check today, and even then it would take time to clear. Now I’d have to wait even longer.
Since they had so much, it didn’t seem any big deal to take a little from the cash in the top drawer. Just three twenties. Queen Elizabeth looked at me all judgmental until I crinkled her into my pocket.
Polly’s mother was arrested on Day Seven. I was back at Gretchen’s house one last time, trying to not have a fight with her. “What do you mean you told Nick to ‘dispose’ of them? What does that even mean?” I’d come one last time to try to finish with the photos, and they were gone. Just gone. She’d gotten rid of them.
“I’m suspending the project. You may return the house key. I’ll get you your check. Harry!”
He was in the kitchen. His hands were covered with flour.
“What did Nick do with them?” I demanded. “You can’t just-”
That’s when the doorbell rang. Polly was hysterical, which isn’t really surprising. We knew by then how she’d reacted to Nick touching her. Who knew how she’d cope with anything else?
Everyone forgot about my check. Only Polly mattered.
They forgot about my key too.
“It’s one thing to use a girl because you’re just so in the moment overwhelmed by her. It’s something else to make her finish someone else’s job. After that, he was gone. And good, you know? Why would I want him to come back?” I told Dr. Keene everything, not about money but about Nick, to shock him.
He winced, then looked over my shoulder, as if the “Building Stones of Britain” were really, really interesting. We were in the basement gathering area under the Sedgwick Museum. My art stuff was spread out over utilitarian tables. The walls were covered with rock samples, every one a slightly different color. They were apparently a lot more interesting than me.
I’d volunteered to make models for a special exhibit at the Sedgwick: “Creatures of the Burgess Shale.” Apparently the Cambrian period, which was way before dinosaurs, had far weirder creatures than most people know. The students who’d studied these fossils in the seventies had given them hilarious names, like hallucigenia. I love the seventies. I would have looked awesome with Farrah Fawcett hair. I have this friend who’s fat who spends all her weekends at Renaissance Faires because the dresses look good on her. I think if I could be an original Charlie’s Angel on weekends, I’d do it.
It felt good to be making art again, not just talking about it. I was making these outsized abstractions of these creatures that were wacky in the first place. No one knows what color any of these things were, so I was free to really go for it. They needed to be paper pop-outs so kids could make their own spiky hallucigenia, or marrella, which is like a shrimp wearing elaborate headgear, or wiwaxia, which looks like Mercury’s winged helmet. With glue and pom-poms and feathers too. Anything to make the kids like science.