teacher, came in. Todd let out an inaudible sigh. Trailing behind her was Alex.
“Hi, Todd,” Alex said. “What’s going on?”
“Ethan’s sketching me,” he said. “What are you doing here?” As he said it, he remembered: Alex was in the intermediate studio art class. He knew he needed to treat her more civilly.
“Ms. Hedge is looking at my portfolio,” she said.
The art teacher came over and stood behind Ethan, appraising his work. “It’s coming along well,” she said, smiling at Todd.
Ethan mumbled a response Todd couldn’t hear. Todd loved how intent he was on his work, how he didn’t want anything to intrude.
“It’s so nice of you to pose for your friend,” Ms. Hedge said to Todd, giving him a knowing look. He was crazy, mooning over Ethan like this. He looked over at him, bent over his sketch pad, brow creased in concentration, cowlick of hair touching the frames of his glasses. He was nothing like the guys Todd had grown up with; they were masculine, tough. Ethan was the type of boy who would have been picked on, who would have spent his entire adolescence buried in a book. But Todd liked that he wasn’t the same as the other guys at Berkley. Todd didn’t want to be different himself, but in Ethan, he admired the quality.
Why did Alex have to be here? It was as if she knew his every movement, every nuance of his day. Alex hadn’t altered her schedule to avoid him since he had broken up with her; she had adhered to his even more stringently. As he kept one eye on his ex-girlfriend, her pert ass encased in a pair of designer jeans, feet shod in a pair of trendy hiking boots (as if she would ever go hiking), he hated that she was in the studio.
Ethan announced that he was finished, and Todd could take a look. It wasn’t a bad likeness, though Todd was bothered that his expression was curled into a permanent frown, brows narrowed, wrinkles visible on his forehead. “I look confused,” Todd said. “Why did you do it that way?”
“I don’t know.” Ethan shrugged. “I just drew what I saw.”
Over the past several weeks, Ethan had continued sorting through Hannah’s library whenever he had a free moment, though he was easily distracted. He had started reading snippets from her book collection, looking at the opening pages, author photos, acknowledgments. It reminded him of one of his favorite things he used to do when walking home after school, stopping at a used bookstore on University Avenue and browsing for hours through the shelves. Unlike those books, whose anonymous owners Ethan would never know, Hannah’s books carried stories of their own that went beyond the words on their pages. Dozens of her volumes had the name Hannah McClellan written in the upper right-hand corner of the first page; in some, the last name McClellan had been crossed out and replaced with Reinard, which had then been crossed out and replaced with McClellan. Curiously, several volumes of French children’s books were labeled with the name Bertrand Reinard. One of these, a copy of Le Petit Prince, had a photograph tucked into it, a color snapshot of a boy sitting in a restaurant, the type of photo one takes for fun, not planned or posed. Ethan immediately recognized the boy in the picture as the one from the mantel. He wanted to know more about the names, about the photograph.
One afternoon, Ethan stood in the doorway of Hannah’s study and held out the photo. “What should I do with this? It slipped out of The Little Prince.”
Hannah was typing away at her laptop. She turned toward him and looked at the photo he was holding up. An expression of alarm crossed her face, but she quickly composed herself. “Oh dear, I was wondering where that went,” she said, without offering any explanation. She carefully took the photo from him and put it in a desk drawer. He felt, in the look she had given him, as if he had done something wrong, as if it were inappropriate for him to be handling the snapshot.
Ethan wished he could ask her who the boy was, but he knew from her reaction that she didn’t want to tell him.
The following Saturday was the annual Halloween dance. As soon as Ethan arrived at the dining hall, he cursed himself for not having picked out a costume. When he ran into Todd, his friend scrutinized his jeans and sweater and promptly dragged him back to the dorm so they could rummage through his closet.
Todd was dressed as Zorro, the Masked Man, complete with a hat, long cape, rubber boots, gloves, and a mask. As they entered Todd’s room, its rancid guy smell hit Ethan, a mixture of sweat, mildew, and Right Guard. Perhaps Todd did the same thing as Kevin Bradshaw, spraying his dirty shirts with deodorant instead of washing them.
“I have an old mask in here somewhere,” Todd said. He seemed a bit wobbly as he rifled through his closet; Ethan wondered if he was drunk. “We’ll get a cowboy hat from Cren. You can go as the Lone Ranger. We’ll be a team, Zorro and the Lone Ranger.”
Todd headed out the door to the room of George Crenshaw, a beefy young man from Texas.
“I won’t be able to wear my glasses with that mask on,” Ethan said, but Todd was already gone. He never went anywhere without his glasses, not even running. He supposed he could get by without them for one night.
Once Ethan was suited up, the two of them went back to the dining hall. Todd led Ethan into a circle of guys and girls dancing. They moved along with the group, engaging in the sort of low-commitment gyrations that were popular at Berkley dances; no one was specifically connected with anyone else, everyone was moving with the crowd, as if they had all been swept into a collective frenzy.
After about ten songs, Ethan was hot and tired; he was grateful when Todd motioned for them to go to the snack bar. He bought a large cup of soda and took it to their table.
“Sit next to me,” Todd said. Concealed by his cape, Todd pulled a small airline bottle of vodka from his pocket. He took a gulp of the soda, and then poured the bottle into the cup, swishing it around. After taking a sip, he passed the cup to Ethan, who took a swig of the antiseptic formula, the alcohol burning his throat.
“Why didn’t we do this at the dorm?” Ethan whispered.
“I had some at the dorm already. I couldn’t find you then.”
The two finished off the drink together and went back out to the dance floor. Enveloped in the music, Ethan was drifting. In his mask and cowboy hat, no one could recognize him. Buoyed by the vodka, he didn’t need to worry about anything: college applications, girls, his mother and her disease.
As Ethan danced in a daze, he noticed a cute girl dressed as a fairy. Though his vision was blurry, he was pretty sure it was Alex Roth. He wanted to talk to her, so he moved a little closer.
She looked his way, and he smiled. Her glittery wings flapped at him.
He gave a half wave. “Do you like the music?” he shouted. The deejay was playing Abba.
“What?” she said.
“Do you like the music?”
“It’s okay.”
Now he was standing next to her, swaying back and forth in tandem with the organza folds of her costume. He was dancing well, or at least he thought he was. He could smell the sweet mixture of her perspiration and body lotion.
“Do you want to get something to drink?” he asked. Since when did he ask girls if they wanted to come to the snack bar with him?
“I’m okay dancing,” she said, giving him a saccharine smile.
Of course Alex Roth wouldn’t want to go to the snack bar with him. He didn’t know how to act around someone like her; though he was fascinated by Alex, she scared him. She was popular, she was from Greenwich, she played sports. They had the art thing in common. But that wasn’t enough, was it?
Ethan looked up and saw he was standing directly below the portrait of Louisa Berkley that hung above the dining hall’s walk-in fireplace. He couldn’t make out the image clearly, but he could tell from the light flashing on it that he knew it from somewhere. He remembered: the photo on Hannah’s mantelpiece. At first he imagined Louisa Berkley staring down at him, smirking