Insofar as Theo’s bomb threat was a gambit to get the rest of the school day off, its success was only partial. Under strict teacherly supervision, students were shepherded en masse to the nearby Stuyvesant Square Park, where we were separated by grade and forbidden to leave. In our enforced proximity to classmates and teachers, Nell and I couldn’t even discuss what had happened. For two hours she and I stood in the senior crowd and shivered, taciturn, in the February chill. The initial assumption was that it was a fire drill, and collective frustration mounted as time elapsed past the standard ten or fifteen minutes. There was widespread speculation of a real fire. Then whispers began to circulate, and the frustration began to turn to alarm: “The cops are here.” “You mean the fire department?” “No, the NYPD. A bunch of police cars just showed up.” After an hour or so, students were informed of an unspecified “emergency situation” and encouraged to telephone their parents for permission to go home early. As on 9/11, I convinced Trudy to let me go home with Nell rather than attempt to contact my own parents. It was with great relief that Nell and I separated from the crowd at last.
As soon as we were safely out of earshot, walking east toward First Avenue, I said, “I wonder who he did it for. For whom he did it, rather. Do you think he was showing off for Christopher? Or was he trying to impress you and me?” A third possibility—that he’d done it for me alone—I held tenderly in my mind but didn’t dare say aloud.
“Or does he just do crazy shit for no reason?” said Nell.
This chastened me into silence. Over the last few weeks I’d begun to worry that Nell’s interest in the Marble Faun was waning—or, worse yet, that she was beginning to look askance at mine. Perhaps my obsession with Theo had become excessive even by her standards. As we walked side by side up First Avenue, hands stuffed in coat pockets and heads bent against the cold wind from the East River, I mentally cast about for words to prove that my interest in Theo was purely intellectual, not heterosexual. There was nothing I could say, I thought, that wouldn’t sound like doth-protest-too-muchness. For in truth I was electric with ecstasy over Theo Severyn, so depraved and deranged, my ice-cold little Marble Faun. My imagination ran wild with the Faunfic potential of what he’d just done, and what else he might be capable of doing.
We arrived at Nell’s building and stepped into the elevator, a small rickety thing whose metallic smell filled me with half-remembered dread. As the elevator creaked its way upward, Nell said, “It’s funny having you over again. It feels like there’s a huge disaster happening, even though I know everything’s fine.”
I was relieved to find my mind in sync with hers after all. “I was just thinking the same thing,” I said. “I feel like I’ll look out your window and see some unspeakable horror.”
There was no unspeakable horror to be seen from Nell’s apartment, apart from the well-used litter box in the bathroom. I tried not to look at it directly as I used the toilet. I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror and willed myself not to think of what I’d told Jimmy Frye about my previous visit here. I suddenly wished I were someone else.
I remember that Nell and I ordered a pizza but, still full from our Joe Junior brunch, left most of it congealing before us in its greasy cardboard box on the coffee table. I remember that Nell guiltily slammed the pizza box shut when she heard her mother’s key in the door. I remember that Nell’s mother greeted us not with concerned questions about the school evacuation, as I’d expected, but with a radiant smile. In her hand was a large, thick envelope.
“Special delivery!” she sang out, and offered it to Nell. “You should have seen it crammed into that little mailbox slot! It was rolled up so tight, I think I broke a nail trying to pull it out.”
Nell appeared stricken. She took the envelope gingerly, angling it away from me so as to hide the return address. “Um,” she said. “Maybe I should open this later.”
Nell’s mother clapped her hand playfully over her own mouth in a theatrical Oops! gesture. “Sorry,” she stage-whispered, and I simultaneously understood and didn’t understand. Had it not been mid-February, too early for such things to arrive in the mail, I wouldn’t have been so slow to recognize what was known in the parlance of the college application process as “the fat envelope.”
Quickly, before Nell could stop me, I snatched the envelope out of her fingers. She protested and yanked it back, but not before I’d spotted the logo on the return address.
Smith College.