Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [100]
The shame dogged her all the way back to her dad’s house, which was empty and cold and quiet. The Philadelphia winter had frozen her favorite quiet spot, the garden out back. There was nowhere left to go but school. Two expensive cab rides later, she was at the airport and flying back to campus, wishing she could erase the past week. Once home, she curled up next to her apartment’s heater and tried to sip coffee and read, but all she could think about was Bobby and how she would never do something this stupid again.
So now it was morning, Sunday morning, and she had the day to kill. Bus was due midafternoon.
But the bus never came.
By evening the news was spreading around campus: a charter plane had crashed in the Nevada desert just outside West Wendover, killing twenty-four people. All Leland University students coming back from a holiday service project building new housing for the impoverished.
Students were smoking on the lawn, some holding candles, some crying. Everyone looked dazed. A series of conflicting emotions washed over her. There was relief that Bobby hadn’t traveled by air—in fact, she’d once laughed when he said he’d never traveled by air. Like, ever. She was also in shock at the idea that she might have known someone on that plane. Worried that Bobby still wasn’t back yet—and that was mixed with guilt. Maybe he’d heard somehow. Heard how she really spent her Christmas vacation, and now he’d never be coming back.
Come on, Bobby. Where are you?
Just before midnight someone had cobbled together a list of names; they used the copy machine in the union building and started to circulate them. A page was pressed into her hand as she walked past the lawn. She glanced down, bracing herself for familiar names, and…
No.
Not possible.
Not even remotely possible.
Julie punched the combination—24, 3, 15—into the metal buttons on the outside of Bobby’s door, turned the knob. The room hadn’t been occupied for two weeks and smelled like it. Julie scanned the room for the culprit. Someone had tossed a half-eaten sandwich into the plastic wastebasket. There was the usual assortment of Pepsi cans covered in cigarette ashes. Bobby’s roommate Pags used them as impromptu ashtrays while he sat cross-legged on the floor and listened to Cure albums nonstop. Smoke and decaying meat—one hell of a combination. Julie covered her face with a sweater sleeve, pitched at least a dozen Pepsi cans into the wastebasket, then carried the wastebasket to the end of the hall and dumped it. Though she wasn’t sure why she bothered. Neither of the occupants of this dorm room was ever coming back.
What Julie couldn’t understand—and what kept the grief frozen, at least temporarily—was the mystery of Bobby being on that plane. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near a plane. She assumed he’d been home, working part-time with his Dad to make up the tuition difference. He wasn’t off building houses for the poor. Hell, Bobby was one of the poor, basically putting himself through an expensive Ivy.
Why was he on that plane?
Maybe there was a clue somewhere on Bobby’s desk. Shoved into the corner, near the window, it was a gentle mess, covered in papers, notebooks, paperback editions of novels. He was an English lit major, and this past semester he had taken a course called War Literature—as he put it, “All about being fundamentally depressed down to my soul twice a week.” Secretly, though, he loved