Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [84]
“Mom is going to kill me,” she muttered, retracing her steps.
Adam would probably get home first anyway. He’d bring the sheep in. And if Storm was hungry enough she’d yowl her head off till he heard her. Tragedy could pay him back tomorrow by making his favorite peanut butter and jam yule log. But first she had to find a path out of the woods.
It was nearly 2 A.M. and still snowing hard. The haunting notes of Taps drifted underneath the door, the efforts of an ROTC student who had recently taken up bugling. Shipley lay under the sheet with her head on Adam’s bare chest, drifting in and out of sleep. Adam was wide awake. How could he sleep? He felt like he’d just been born. He was finally alive!
“When you were a kid, what did you want to be?” he asked. “I mean, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
Shipley was just drifting into a dream. She was so tired, but she wanted to talk to Adam too.
“A train conductor,” she responded drowsily.
Adam laughed, his rib cage jostling her head. “Seriously?”
“I loved the sound when they punched your ticket,” Shipley told him with her eyes closed. “Greenwich is only a forty-minute train ride from Manhattan. I used to take the train into the city with my mother to go shopping. Saks, Bendel’s, Bergdorf. Afterward we’d walk up Fifth Avenue next to Central Park. Mom liked to look at the buildings.”
Adam waited for her to continue.
“I didn’t really want to be a train conductor,” she admitted with a yawn. “I always thought I’d get married and have two little girls and live in one of those buildings on Fifth Avenue. They’d go to Sacred Heart so they could wear those adorable uniforms with the red-and-white-checked pinafores.”
“Uh-huh,” Adam murmured encouragingly. He had no idea what she was talking about. “Go on.”
She inched closer to him so the top of her head was in the crook of his neck. Her hair smelled like seawater. “I have no idea what I’m going to do when I grow up. I guess I could be a poet,” she mused. “Professor Rosen likes my poems.”
“What else?” he prompted.
“What else?” She opened her eyes briefly and then closed them again. “I have this brother…,” she said, her voice trailing off as she fell back to sleep and into her dreams.
Her ice cream was dripping onto her skirt. The steps of the Met were crowded with tourists and schoolgirls. Only a few feet away from her a group of them sat smoking and gossiping.
“Here, use this,” her mother said, handing her a Kleenex. “Don’t forget we’re meeting your father for dinner at seven.”
A uniformed doorman pushed open the door to the green-awninged building across the avenue. He raised his white-gloved hand, his lips curled around a silver whistle as he hailed a taxi. A cab stopped, the doorman opened the door to the building, and out strolled Tom, wearing black Ray-Ban sunglasses and the same plain white T-shirt, black pants, and old tennis shoes he’d worn in the play, minus the blood. He looked like a movie star. No, he was a movie star.
Now she was kissing Tom and he didn’t smell like chemicals, he smelled like Ivory soap, and his skin was so soft and—
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Orange lights flashed through the window as the staff of Buildings and Grounds plowed Dexter’s section of Homeward Avenue. The sky was the pinkish gray of near-dawn and it was still snowing, although not quite as heavily. It was almost six o’clock in the morning. Adam was still awake. The bugler, who’d been practicing all night, burst into a rousing reveille.
“I don’t know,” Shipley said sleepily, picking up half from her dream and half from their conversation a few hours before. “I probably shouldn’t have gone to college in Maine.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Adam brushed his chin against her hair. “If you hadn’t gone to school in Maine, you wouldn’t have met me,” he remarked pointedly.
The plows moved on down the road and the bugler paused for breath. For a moment the room was silent. Then a gunshot rang out, ricocheting off the windows and sending chills up their spines. The bugler recommenced his