“Another guy was chasing him,” Grainne whispered to Ed and Flor. “He said he never thought the other guy would hit a girl…”
“So I am in favor of Dayang’s proposal,” Marie concluded. “All others in favor of Dayang’s proposal, raise your hands.” Day raised her hand, as did Flor, Grainne, Willa, and Theo. Theo said she was only coming along to make sure they did it right.
—
DAY FOUND Hercules Demetriou sitting at her usual desk in the library. Rather than talk to him she went to his usual desk, which was unoccupied, and set up her laptop there. He looked over at her three times; she looked over at him once. Just once, and he came over. Argh, was it that pitifully obvious?
He drew a chair up to her desk and leaned on the corner of it. Everything about him was dark, delicious, fluid — that gaze especially. If she moved her arm just a little it’d touch his. There was an envelope in his hand.
“Listen, I heard you like John Waters,” he said.
“I do,” she said. “So?”
His sister ran a cinema in Stockwell… he described it as “pocket-sized.” Big Sis had given Hercules two tickets for a screening of Female Trouble, and…
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Are you finding it hard to believe that a girl wouldn’t want to go and see a film with someone as amazing as you?”
He drew back, but didn’t retreat. Instead he subjected her to a deeper look. The first to break the gaze would lose, so she didn’t blink. “I was just finding it hard to believe that a John Waters fan wouldn’t want a ticket to Female Trouble,” he said, then dropped his gaze, laughing a little. “Here. Take two.” He put the envelope down in front of her and went back to his desk.
Then he came back: “Dayang, can I ask you something?”
Oh my God. “If you must.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Here?”
“Here, to this university.”
She thought of Professor Chaudhry, one of the professors who’d interviewed her, and how he’d said he liked the connections he could see her making in her mind, and the way that she tried to tend them so that they thrived. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. Usually it was “Aren’t you overthinking things, Day?” But a gardener growing thoughts — she liked that.
Hercules tired of waiting for Day to answer him: “Didn’t you want to see who else was here?” he asked. “I know that’s part of the reason why I came. It’s the reason why I go to most parties.”
Parties? She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “OK… same.”
“So,” he said. “I’m here. You’re here. You find me off-putting at the moment, but why don’t you try treating me like a person? You might like me.”
“Bettencourter,” she said.
His eyebrows shot up and he said: “Ah.” Not an enlightened “ah.” If anything he was more puzzled.
“It’s Lent term. Aren’t you supposed to be looking for someone to bring to that dinner of yours?”
The penny dropped. “You’re a Homely Wench, aren’t you?”
“And proud.”
He gathered up his things and left the library, shaking his head and muttering something she didn’t catch. Day took the cinema tickets out of the envelope and texted the date on them to Pepper:
Female Trouble in London yes or yes??
YESSSSSS
—
THE BETTENCOURTERS were well-read in various directions; that’s what their bookshelves said about them, anyway. Plenty of stimulating-looking books, less than 10 percent of which were authored by women. The substitutions were made by torchlight, as nobody thought it was a good idea to switch on the house lights at four a.m. and risk some passing Bettencourter coming round to see if any of his brethren was up for another drink. (The keys to the rooms of the house were on a hook beside the light switch in the entrance hall, so the girls peeped into the Bettencourt Society drinks cabinet too. It was more of a walk-in closet than a drinks cabinet, a closet vertically stocked with hard liquor from floor to ceiling. There were even little ladders for more convenient perusal. Day had never seen anything like it.)
Flor, Day, Willa, Marie, and Theo unloaded their rucksacks and filled them again with books from the Bettencourt shelves. Not having read any of the books she was taking, Day made her exchanges based on thoughts the titles or authors’ names set in motion. She exchanged two Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin’s short stories for John Cheever’s, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado for Dany Laferrière’s I Am a Japanese Writer, Dubravka Ugrešić’s Lend Me Your Character for Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder for Capote’s In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle’s The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James. She stopped keeping track: If she kept track she’d be there all night. But she left with what looked like a quality haul, and so did the others. The Wenches had their noses in books that were new to them for weeks. They waited for some challenge to be issued from Bettencourt headquarters, but none came forth. The boys didn’t seem to have noticed that their library had been compromised. Maybe a drink swap would have been more effective.
—
FLOR AND BARNEY of the Bettencourters really seemed to be becoming ever more of an item; it was gross, but the Wenches acted as if they didn’t mind so as not to encourage a Romeo and Juliet complex. Besides, Theo summed up what all the Wenches were feeling about the Bettencourt book haul when she looked up from the pages of Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic Is Calling You and said resentfully: “They have good taste, though.”
—
HERCULES DEMETRIOU didn’t show his face at the Female Trouble screening. That didn’t matter; there was popcorn and Pepper and so much divine and diabolical mayhem onscreen, plus Cookie Mueller telling it exactly like it is: Just ’cause we’re pretty everybody’s jealous!
“Were you expecting to see someone?” Pepper asked her, as they walked out of the cinema. “You kept looking round.”
She lied that she’d been watching the audience. It was a plausible lie because she was the kind of person who watched audiences.
—
HERCULES WAS WAITING on the staircase that led up to her room, his legs stretched all along the step, his feet jammed into two slots in the banister. He was reading one of the books Flor had left at Bettencourt headquarters: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. When he saw her he scrambled to his feet and hit his head on the stone ceiling. She felt his pain, so she patted his shoulder as he went by; he took her hand and followed her up the stairs until she came to a halt.
“What?”
“Is this yours?” he asked, holding up the book.
“No.”
“But you’ve read it?”
“Yup.”
“It’s great, isn’t it? It sort of rocks you… reading it is sort of like reading from a cradle hung up in the trees, and the trees rock you with such sorrow, and as the volume turns up you realize that the trees are rocking you whilst deciding whether to let you live or die, and they’re sorry because they’ve decided to smash you to pieces…”
“But then you’re put back together again, in a wholly different order…”
“And it hurts so much you don’t know if the new order will work.”