Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [91]
“Anybody home?
“Tragedy, you here?” he called, striding down the hall to her room. As usual her bed was made with perfect hospital corners. The floor was spotless. A neat stack of books far beyond her years sat on the desk. Advanced Latin. Calculus II. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Tender Is the Night. Chaos Theory. Fodor’s Greece. Michelin’s Brazil. Her collection of Rubik’s cubes adorned the bureau. One of the windows had been left wide open and snow had collected on the sill. It was freezing. He walked over and tugged the window closed, brushing the snow onto the floor. From where he stood there was a clear view of the driveway and the lawn. Except for the path he’d just taken from the end of the driveway to the front porch, and the dozens of tire tracks that looped around the yard, the eighteen or so inches of new snow was immaculate and untouched. No new footprints led from the house to the barn, where Tragedy should have gone that morning to hay the sheep. In fact, the sheep were standing out in the snow by the fence, baahing like crazy. He shivered violently and went into his room to put on a sweater.
Everything in his room was just as he’d left it too—bed hastily made with clothes pushed underneath it, desk chair askew. He whirled around and dashed downstairs again. Four pairs of green-gold cat eyes stared up at him from out of a towel-lined cardboard box beneath the kitchen table. Storm, the gray mother cat, got up and stretched, then leapt out of the box and trotted over to her empty bowl on the floor beside the woodstove. She meowed plaintively.
“All right, all right,” Adam told her as he rummaged around in the cupboards in search of cat food. Where the hell was his sister anyway, he wondered, growing increasingly annoyed. After he’d fed the cat, he put on his good Sorel snow boots and went up to the barn to hay the sheep. The barn door stood open. He flicked on the light. The three spent kegs lay on their sides like abandoned carcasses. Plastic cups littered the floor like bones. He climbed up the ladder and threw two bales of hay down from the hayloft and carried them out to the snowy pasture. The sheep baahed eagerly when they saw him, crowding around the fence and butting their heads against their neighbors’ woolly sides. They attacked the bales hungrily before he’d even cut the twine.
He watched them eat for a while, wondering what to do. How could he enjoy his feeling of elation at having spent the night with Shipley, his first real love, when there was no one there to share it with? Had Tragedy gone home with someone? Was she just out for a walk? Or had she finally done it this time, had she finally run away?
Back in the house he dialed Uncle Laurie’s number and examined the contents of the fridge while the phone rang. Save for a piece of leftover shepherd’s pie and an uncooked ham, the usually well-stocked fridge was strangely empty. There weren’t even any grapes. Ravenous, he glanced at the counter, searching for the familiar containers in which Tragedy stored her daily baking endeavors. Nothing.
“Hello, this is Laurence,” Uncle Laurie finally answered. Ellen’s younger brother was the head of the History Department at the public high school in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He’d graduated from Columbia, cum laude.
“It’s Adam. I was just calling to ask…to tell my parents something.” All of a sudden he wished he hadn’t called. If Tragedy was really gone, there was nothing they could do about it except wait for her to come back.
“They’re on their way, son. They only just left,” Uncle Laurie told him. “How are you, anyway? How’s college?”
Adam closed the refrigerator and looked out the window at his car. “College