At two o’clock the next morning when they hoped everybody would be asleep, Elizabeth opened the door to the room a small way and stuck her head out into the hall.
“All clear?” Sylvia asked. Her right hand, tucked into her pocket, gripped the key to the Outdoor Adventure Club’s equipment shed. The only other person who had one was faculty advisor to the club Gloria Buchanan, and thinking about her brought up the questions all over again for Sylvia. Was Elizabeth as surprised as she was that they were actually going to do this thing?
But Elizabeth was already out into the hall. Sylvia followed, rounding her shoulders, stooping low.
The hall was brightly lit as Eudora Easter insisted: In an emergency, we don’t want to be stumbling around in the dark looking for the light switch. The two girls tiptoed in that glaring light, carrying their sneakers in their hands past the closed doors of their dormmates’ rooms and through the front door into the darkness outside. Avoiding the lighted path, they forgot to put their sneakers on until a few steps on the dampness of the not-quite-frozen lawn alarmed them. They stopped and crammed their feet into the sneakers, bending down to tie them as fast as they could, then hurried on, seeking the darkest way. The campus was alien in its silence. It seemed to be holding its breath.
The gymnasium loomed before them in the dark. The equipment shed was on the far side, affixed to the back wall at the edge of a parking area. They ran down the side of the building and then around the corner into the parking lot and stopped. Ahead, the shed was in a bright pool of light, shining down from lamps on the gymnasium roof. No sane burglar would dare step into that light, and there was no way of knowing when the security patrol car would come by here on its rounds.
“You didn’t know about the lights?” Elizabeth whispered. She left the rest unsaid: You live here. Your own mother’s the head.
Sylvia was embarrassed. “How would I know? I’ve never had to be in the shed after dark.”
“Well, you still want to?” Elizabeth said.
“Do you?”
Elizabeth hesitated.
“Come on! We have to decide. We stand here much longer, the sun will be up.”
“All right, here goes!” Elizabeth ran toward the light. Sylvia sprinted past her and got there first. The shed was painted white. The light bounced off it. Any brighter and they would have to squint.
Sylvia reached in her pocket for the key to the padlock. It caught on the pocket’s lining as she tried to withdraw it. “Hurry up!” Elizabeth whispered. Sylvia tugged hard, and still the key wouldn’t come out. She reached across her hips with her other hand and with both hands in her pocket, ripped the key out, tearing the cloth. She held the key up triumphantly to Elizabeth, a wisp of cloth dangling from it like a tiny banner.
“Look what I found!” she announced, giggling.
Elizabeth stared at her for a second; then she giggled too.
Sylvia poked the key into the padlock. It wouldn’t go in. “I got the wrong key!” she whispered.
“No you don’t. It’s upside down.”
“Oh!” Sylvia turned the key right side up. It went in easily. The padlock snapped open. She pulled the door open. It made a loud scraping noise. Sylvia giggled again, turning to face an imagined audience. “Thanks for making me president of the club.” Holding up the key for everyone to see. “It makes it so much easier to steal things from it.” She put the key back in her pocket. Elizabeth shoved her chest and Sylvia entered the shed backwards. Elizabeth followed.
If the security guy came by, the first thing he’d see was the open door, so they pulled it shut, and now they were in the pitch dark, totally blind. “Turn on your cell phone light,” Sylvia said.
“Oh shit, I forgot it! You too?”
“Yeah, me too!”
Elizabeth opened the door partway again to let the light in. “Some burglars we are!”
Sylvia knew where everything was stored. It didn’t take them long to gather one of the new down jackets, which Elizabeth donned so it would look like hers if anybody saw them, and a wool cap, and a pair of gloves, which she put in the jacket’s pocket. She grabbed a pair of larger boots, there for when a male teacher helped Gloria and Sylvia lead an adventure. She took off her sneakers and stuffed them into the top of her jeans beneath the down jacket to hide the bulge, and put on the boots for the same reason. Then she saw a first-aid kit and a Swiss Army knife in a box of tools, and put those in the jacket pocket too. They left the shed, snapped the padlock closed, and escaped the pool of light, heading across the campus toward the river and the homeless man, relieved to be in the safety of the dark.
A hundred yards later, Sylvia stopped running. “Wait. I’ve just thought of something.”
“No you haven’t! Keep going.”
“Thermal underwear. He’ll need that too. Why didn’t we think of it?”
“Maybe because we were in a hurry?”
“I know right where it is.”
“Oh no. We’re not going back, are we?”
“You wait here. I’ll be right back.” Sylvia grabbed the key out of her pocket, turned, and sprinted back toward the parking lot, holding the key at the ready. Again, the light bounced off the shed and into her eyes. She poked at the lock with the key, missed the slot, and dropped the key on the ground. Panicking, she picked it up and poked at the lock again, but the key was upside down again and wouldn’t go in. She inverted it, took a big breath, and, forcing herself to slowness, slid the key into the lock and turned, but the lock resisted. She turned the key the other way and at last the locked popped open. She let out her breath, put the key back in her pocket, and entered the shed, once again leaving the door open for the light, and went straight to where she remembered the thermal underwear was stored in cardboard boxes on shelves in the back.
They weren’t there. Somebody had moved them. Or maybe she remembered wrong? She felt her panic rising again, sure the security guy would come and catch her. She told herself to leave. Right now! The down jacket, the wool hat, the gloves, the boots were enough. But she felt a stubbornness rising too, and so she looked on all the other shelves and saw the boxes piled one on top of the other in a corner of the shed. Just as she opened the box on the top of the pile and began to pull out one of the suits of thermal underwear, she heard a car entering the parking lot. She left the thermal underwear halfway out of the box and lunged toward the front of the shed pushed and the door shut and was instantly in absolute darkness again, totally blind.
She stood still so as not to make a sound. Through the thin plywood walls, she listened to the car approach—its door close—footsteps—and then she realized the padlock was still open. It was hanging on the door fixture in the gleaming light for the security guy to see.
In the pitch dark, she moved her hand across the door until she found its hinges and then moved up against them, so if the security guy pushed the door open, it would shield her from view. When he stepped far enough into the shed, she’d slip behind him and out the door, and sprint away into the darkness.
The footsteps stopped. She guessed he was deciding whether to close the padlock—because someone had forgotten—or to push the door open and enter the shed and look around. Then the door swung open, making the scraping sound and flooding the inside of the shed with light, and his shadow played weirdly in front of him. She put her hand on her side of the door, resisting, hoping he would assume it was the shelves preventing the door from opening all the way. She could hear him breathing just inches away on the other side of the door. His shadow grew until it was huge, its bottom half silhouetted on the back wall, its top half, after bending at right angles, on the ceiling. In one more second, he’d take another step and she’d slip behind him. If he turned and looked behind the door, she’d duck below his arm.
But the door swung away from her hand, his shadow backed out of the shed, the door made the scraping sound again as it closed, and she was so relieved she almost sat down—but then she was blind again, listening to the metallic rattle of the padlock as the security guy reinserted it through both fixtures and snapped it shut. The key is in my pocket! I’m locked in! She heard his retreating footsteps, the car door shutting and the car driving away.
Then, seconds later, footsteps and a whisper in the blackness. “Syl? You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. What took you so long?”
“Whew! I thought he’d taken you away.”
“He might as well have,” Sylvia said aloud. There was no point in whispering anymore.
“What? He took the key!”
“No, it’s right here in my pocket.”
“Whew!” Elizabeth said again. “Can you slide it under the door?”
“Are you kidding? There’s no space. I can’t see any light.”
A silence. A slight rattling of the door. Then: “Fuck! You’re right.”
“So what are we going to do now?” Sylvia said.
“We’ll have to get the other key.”
“How?”
“I think you know.”
“Oh shit!”
“Exactly.”
Another silence. “Elizabeth?” Sylvia said.
“I’m still here. I was just wondering. Should I go straight to Gloria Buchanan because she’s got the other key, or your mom first?”
“Oh God, I don’t know. Straight to Gloria, I guess.”
“You sure?” Elizabeth asked, and when Sylvia didn’t say anything: “Okay. Gloria. You’ll get out sooner.”
“And the other key’s right here in my pocket!”
“Yeah, I know, I know. But why worry?” Elizabeth said. Her footsteps faded away.
In the blind dark, Sylvia couldn’t find anything to sit down on while she waited and thought about how different it would have been if the security guy had arrived while they were still trying to get into the shed, before they stole anything. They would have thought fast and said they were too restless to sleep and so they decided to take a walk and were cold and they just wanted to borrow some warm clothes until they went back to the dorm. The consequence for being outside of the dorms after lights out would be something mild, probably not being allowed to leave the campus for the rest of the semester (except for athletic trips), and a letter home to the parents, absurd in Sylvia’s case. Or if they did confess why they were going to steal the stuff, people would say it was just a dumb way of being kind and generous. Seniors should know better. Thank God we caught them before this went any further!
The desire to help a helpless person. That’s the reason we did it, she and Elizabeth were going to say, now that they’d been caught. You have a problem with that? To do something about homelessness in the richest country in the world. It was too late to do anything about slavery and Jim Crow—or killing the Native Americans—or the fucked-up war in Iraq. She heard in her head how self-righteous that would sound, how comic, and the little pulse of justification she’d felt melted to nothing. She waited and waited and waited.
At last, footsteps. It didn’t sound like two people. Of course! Gloria would order Elizabeth back to her room and come by herself.
“Guess what?” It was Elizabeth’s voice!
“What? Gloria let you come back? Where is she?”
“A Swiss Army knife. I just happened to put it in the pocket of this down jacket and there it was. I’d forgot I’d stolen it. It’s got a screwdriver. I’m going to take the hinges off.”
“The hinges off!”
In the pitch black, the door moved in its frame, then the sound of the screwdriver engaging with the screws and the sound of their turning and then, after another forever, a space bright with light, as the door hung only from the padlock. Sylvia squeezed out of the shed. She could barely see in the sudden brightness. She and Elizabeth were actually not going to be kicked out of the school! She wouldn’t have to face her mother! She felt a rush of love for Elizabeth.
Who was already pushing the door back into its frame. Suppose I’d been the one to see the Swiss Army knife and put it in my pocket? Sylvia thought. It would have been just as useless inside the shed as the key was. But Elizabeth had been sharper and had seen it first.
Elizabeth finished a minute later. “Let’s get out of here!”
They moved across the campus, keeping to the darkest shadows. When they got away from the buildings onto the athletic fields, they began to feel safe. The night was windless and the black dome above them filled with stars. They entered the trail in the woods. Soon there was the sound of the river, and a few minutes later, its dank and fecund smell.
As they neared the lean-to, Elizabeth insisted they go very slowly and make no sound. “We don’t want to wake him up,” she whispered. Sylvia agreed, though she didn’t say so. If the homeless man would figure out who had brought the gifts, she’d be content, at least for now, but she didn’t say that either. They left the stuff beside the food that was already there and put a rock on top of the jacket to keep it from blowing away. There was no sign of rain to wet the down jacket, the gloves, the wool hat, the boots, the Swiss Army knife.
Finished, they moved backwards, facing the lean-to. They could barely see it in the dark.
Just as they reached the same screen of bushes they had hid behind before, they saw his dark shape crawl out of the lean-to and stand up. He swiveled his head toward them, obviously searching for the source of the sound he must have heard. It was too dark to see his face. Neither girl breathed. Above their heads, pine branches trembled in the breeze. At last, he swiveled his head away, knelt down again, and crawled back into his lean to.
The girls turned, tiptoed away, then walked, then, when they were sure he couldn’t hear them, started to run.
SAFELY HOME, ELIZABETH said, “Don’t worry, he didn’t see us.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if he had, he wouldn’t have gone back into his lean-to.”
“What would he have done?”
“Who knows?” Elizabeth said.
It wasn’t until they were in their beds just before dawn that Sylvia realized they’d left the thermal underwear in the shed. “All that for nothing!” Elizabeth said, and promptly fell asleep. Sylvia did too, a few minutes later. This time she didn’t dream.
CHRISTOPHER DREAMED THE tall, thin girl visited him, appearing near the doorway of his lean-to, backdropped by stars. He went out of the lean-to to meet her. What do you want? she asked. Who do you want me to be for you? He didn’t know how to answer her. So he went back into his lean-to, got back into his sleeping bag, and pulled its hood over his face.
Then she went away.
In the morning, he woke up starving. He hadn’t eaten since the day before yesterday. Hunger hurt less than shame. Why not just stay in the sleeping bag until he starved to death? Yes.
But he imagined the girl and her friend coming back along the river to find his rotting flesh melting into the fabric of the sleeping bag, and he got the familiar whiff. There was more shame from that than from begging.
So, instead, he crawled in his skivvies and T-shirt out of the sleeping bag into the autumn cold and went outside, shivering, to take a piss, watching it steam against the ground. Then he came back into the lean-to and grabbed his thin cotton shirt and his jeans, almost worn through at the knees, and his sneakers, whose soles were getting thinner and thinner, and brought them outside where he could stand up without having to stoop way over and put them on; and when he was dressed, still shivering, he went back into the lean-to to get the HOMELESS! sign. He couldn’t find it. Where did he leave it? Maybe outside? He came out again and walked all around the lean-to and still couldn’t find it, and then it occurred to him he didn’t need it anyway. Everybody knew.
He was cold. Half the leaves were gone from the trees. It must be almost November. But he wasn’t homeless. He’d built the lean-to. Just like Uncle Ray would have: high enough to stand up in it if he stooped way over, and wide enough for his sleeping bag and clothes. And he had food. She’d brought food. She and the other girl. He’d left it where they’d put it because he was sure they brought it to mock him. But then why didn’t he hear them laugh? Maybe they didn’t. He went over there to get the food, still shivering.
The down jacket was on top. A rock on top to keep the wind from blowing it away. He picked up the jacket and put it on against the cold. In the pocket he found gloves, a hat. He put those on too.
He picked up the boots and carried them into the lean-to and stored them in a corner for when it snowed. Then he came back out and gathered up the cans of food, the lighter, the Swiss Army knife, and carried them back to the lean-to and stored them in a different corner. Then he went back and carried the grill to his firepit and placed it carefully on the surrounding rocks, like a bridge. There was too much here for just one girl to carry. She’d brought her friend. Friends, he corrected. Friends. Not just one.
He took a can of corned beef hash and his axe outside into the gray November air. He built a very little fire with very dry wood so it would make very little smoke, and opened the hash and put a small amount of it on the side of his axe blade and laid that across the grill to fry. The burning wood, the frying hash was the smell of Uncle Ray’s place on Osgood Pond.
And he was warm.
THE NEXT SUNDAY was cold and windy and the sky was gray when Sylvia and Elizabeth walked to the village to see if the homeless man would still be begging. They didn’t see him near Rose’s where he’d been before. They walked to the outskirts and looked in the McDonald’s. He wasn’t there either. They walked back to Rose’s Creamery, where they both ordered hot fudge sundaes so it wouldn’t be obvious what they were really there for, and Elizabeth struck up a conversation with Rose behind the counter about what a great location the Creamery was in for doing business, where everything was so nice and so clean and safe, into which she managed to insert a question about the whereabouts of “that guy who begs.” Rose answered she had no idea, making it clear with a shrug that she didn’t care, and reported that he hadn’t been around for at least a week. “Well, that must be a relief,” Elizabeth said, failing on purpose not to sound sarcastic.
They finished their sundaes quickly and went outside where they could talk. “So he must be eating the food,” Elizabeth said.
“It looks that way.” Sylvia said. “We better bring him some more.”
Elizabeth sighed and they stared at each other.
They walked straight to Stop and Shop and bought two shopping bags of food with the rest of both of their allowances and carried them back to the school. They’d hide them under Elizabeth’s bunk for a few days and then carry them down river. “I can’t believe we’re still doing this,” Elizabeth said.
“Well, then why are you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because you are and I’m like that guy who hanged himself to keep his best friend company.”
“No. We’re doing it because he’s hungry, that’s why. Besides, how do you know it was a guy who hanged himself?”
Elizabeth didn’t answer. In this most feminist of places, she’d concede the last word to Sylvia: yeah, it could have been a woman who hung herself. Plus, she was doing this to keep Sylvia company. But she wasn’t about to say the homeless guy reminded her of where people, including her own parents, might not be homeless now, but who knows when? Meanwhile, they shop in pawn shops and dollar stores and hope the next tornado doesn’t blow their world away. Where Elizabeth came from, Sylvia wouldn’t be allowed to be half white, half Black—even if her mom ran a hundred schools all at once. She’d be one hundred percent Black, living in the part of town that has a red line around it. Elizabeth wasn’t about to explain this—not even to Sylvia. She didn’t want anyone to label her the self-pitying poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who appears so often in prep school novels. That was nowhere near original enough for Elizabeth. No, she was the girl with the tattoo on her ankle: an oil rig with an X over it, who only wore socks when it was very cold.
A few minutes later, they were back on campus. She was missing said socks very much. The wind had increased. It smelled like snow and blew into their faces, causing their eyes to water. “I can’t wait to get inside and take a hot shower,” Elizabeth said. “Even the trees look cold.”