Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [80]
She held out her hand for the bottle of ether. “Come on. Just tell me what I have to do.”
Geoff let her have the bottle. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a rag. “Just pour some on, hold it up against your nose, and inhale.”
Tragedy did as she was told. Adam was going to freak when he came back to find her all fucked up. He was supposed to be babysitting, he was supposed to be in charge! She doused the rag in the clear, toxic liquid and held it up to her nose. Closing her eyes, she inhaled again and again, allowing the heady pulse of it to consume her.
The Grannies took up their instruments.
“It’s a fucking blizzard!” Wills yelled before banging out the first few bars of a very up-tempo song that may or may not have been by the Grateful Dead.
Tragedy closed her eyes, falling into a blissed-out sort of trance. Every hair on her body vibrated intensely. Or maybe it was the raccoon coat, coming back to life.
“Are you okay?” Sea Bass asked.
“We told you ether was nasty,” Damascus chimed in.
“You don’t know what it feels like,” Tragedy gushed, her eyes still closed. She could hear the kittens scratching away on the other side of the barn wall. She could hear the sheep milling around by the fence. She tipped the bottle back onto the rag and held it against her nose once more, loving the sharp clinical rush as it tore away at her nasal passages. Scratch, scratch. Baa, baa. Scratch, scratch. Baa, baa.
She opened her eyes. Outside, the landscape was a bright, fuzzy white like a white angora sweater. All those hours she’d spent poring over travel guides, imagining what it would be like to climb mountains in Nepal or dogsled in Alaska, and now her own backyard was completely spectacular and foreign. Geoff’s face loomed in front of her, his hollow eyes gaping out of their sunken, hungry sockets. He stuck up his bony thumb in silent solidarity. Or maybe he said something that Tragedy couldn’t hear.
Mesmerized by the whiteout, she stumbled out of the barn. White snowflakes drifted down from the sky and nested on her eyelashes. The sheep stamped and stared at her through the fence. They should have been brought in hours ago.
She held out her hands. The snowflakes screamed as they fell out of the sky and melted on her bare skin. The yard was already blanketed in snow. The house was a ghostly blur. Everything was white, white, white.
“I’m going out there!” she cried, making a run for it. She dashed across the yard, behind the house, and into the woods beyond. It was colder than she realized, and darker in the woods. Whorls of ice pelted her bare skin and skittered over the thick fur of her coat. All around her the tall trees swayed and shivered, leafless and unfamiliar. She’d roamed these pathless woods almost every day of her life, but tonight she couldn’t see a thing. What a joke it would be if she got lost.
19
The average freshman course load at a liberal arts college such as Dexter looks something like this: Geology 101, The Romantics, English 100, Creative Writing: Poetry, Music Appreciation. An English midterm examination would involve two essays and four questions to be answered in a brief paragraph, such as, “Who wrote the lines ‘When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,/Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,/And think that I may never live to trace/Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance,’ and what did he or she mean by them?” There would be an additional grammar section with witty, impossible questions, as in, “Write an ironic hortatory sentence in iambic pentameter using a gerund, a phoneme, and a conjunction. Please use proper punctuation.” The Geology exam was all memorization, including the lab portion, which would require the identification of fourteen species of rock. Studying for Music Appreciation was almost pleasant. An entire night of Mozart, Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven concertos played at low volume while you slept and you were bound to be able to distinguish them in the morning.
Shipley sat at her desk in her dorm