Best to stay in Madison. The Holten folks had paired Emma, on full scholarship (which translated to smart and weird but poor), with Mariane, a Jewish exchange student from London who was big into decorative art. Seeing as how Emma worked glass, that was all good. So she and Mariane would eat Chinese and see a movie, which, apparently, Jewish people all over the world did on Christmas. Maybe chill with a couple Beta boys at the university, drink beer, eat Christmas brats. Binge on X-Files and Lost and watch the Badgers get slaughtered in the Rose Bowl. All-American, Wisconsin stuff like that.
She could use the time to throttle back, too. Head over to the hot shop and work a pendant design she’d mulled over for months: a galaxy sculpted in miniature from glass, encased in glass, yet small and light enough to wear around her neck. When she mentioned her idea, the gaffer cracked, Maybe we’ll start calling you Orion, like that cat. She’d laughed along with him and the other glassblowers, but Men in Black and that cat’s amulet had given her the idea in the first place. Not everything had to stay make-believe.
So that was the plan, anyway—until that asshole Kramer called her to his office, shut the door, and said, “Ms. Lindsay, we need to
3
HAVE A LITTLE chat about that last assignment.”
“Okay,” Emma says. She watches Kramer withdraw a mug of steaming Mighty Leaf green tea from his microwave. A little alarm is ding-ding-dinging in her head. He hasn’t offered her any. Not that she minds: green tea tastes like old gym socks, and the Mighty Mouse brand, no matter how swank, probably does, too. For him not to offer, though, she must be in deep doo-doo. “Is something wrong, Professor Kramer?”
“Is … something … wrong?” Kramer gives his tea bag a vicious squish between his fingers. He sets, he chucks; Mighty Mouse goes ker-splat against the far wall. On a corner of Kramer’s desk, a radio mutters about the continuing investigation into a young girl’s gruesome discovery of eight …
“ ’Orrible murders and ghastly crimes,” Kramer grates in an angry, exaggerated cockney, and stabs the radio to silence. “These screaming twenty-four-hour news cycles are as bad as Victorian tabloids.” He fires a glare through prissy Lennon specs. “Well, yes, you might say there’s something wrong, Ms. Lindsay. I’m trying to decide if I should merely flunk you out of this course, or get you booted out of Holten, despite your circumstances. Just what kind of game do you think you’re playing?”
She’s so flabbergasted her jaw unhinges. “P-Professor Kramer, wh-what did I do?”
In answer, Kramer jerks open his desk drawer hard enough to make the pens chatter and yanks out a sheaf of paper-clipped pages, which he tosses onto his desk. “You might have gotten away with this … this rubbish if I was any other instructor, but I’m writing a book on the man, for God’s sake. No one except researchers is allowed access to this material. What, did you think I’d simply ignore this? Time to wake up, Ms. Lindsay. I’m not the headmaster, I don’t care about your sad little history, and I’m sure as hell not your bloody psychiatrist. Now I want to know where you got it.”
She has no idea what he’s talking about. Her eyes fall to the first page:
WHITE SPACE
A Short Story
by
Emma Lindsay
Lit. Seminar 058
“Got it?” She swallows. “I wrote it.”
Kramer’s ears flare Coke-can red. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. Where did you get this? Did you download it from a pirate site?”
She’s getting a very bad feeling about this. Oh boy, is that possible? No, don’t be silly. The guy’s dead. “I-I don’t know what you’re t-talking about, sir.”
“You want to play it that way? Fine.” Kramer tweezes out a single sheet. “Take a good, hard look at this and then convince me why you shouldn’t be expelled.”
This is not happening; this is a nightmare. Tears threaten. Shit, don’t cry. She does what Kramer wants—and as her burning eyes trip over the watery letters and spaces of one word, then jump over white space to the next word and the next and the next, it’s as if an invisible fist has wrapped around her throat and begun to squeeze.
So how long would it take? There had to be a way to figure it. Maybe he should’ve stripped the clothes, but then what? Couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen solid, and some things wouldn’t burn: snaps, buttons, zippers. And didn’t nylon melt? He thought it did, and there’d be the stink.
And didn’t how long really depend on how bad you wanted something? How much you were willing to risk? Sure. So, clothes or no clothes, if you were a wolf or coyote and starving because Wyoming winters were hard and game, scarce … and there was dinner lying right there? All that easy meat?
A wolf would strip that body to bones in no time.
A wave of unreality washes over Emma. A sudden headache spikes right where it always does, under that lacy cranial plate the doctors screwed into place between her eyes so her brain wouldn’t bubble out. (When the doctors had first shown her the plate, she’d thought, Great, the perfect accessory for every occasion.) The pain is blinding, and she shuts her eyes against the sudden tilt as the world seems to slump and run like superheated glass.
“Right. Wasn’t that interesting, Emma? I thought it was. And now let’s listen to yours, shall we? You’ve no objection if I read while you follow along?” Kramer asks, but it’s one of those rhetorical questions a person knows better than to answer. As Kramer drones, she stares at words and sentences that, up to five seconds ago, she thought were hers alone.
There had to be a way of calculating how long it would take. There must be rules, like physics or math; there were variables to take into account. Temperature, of course, but also the clothes. Maybe he should’ve stripped the clothes, but then what? He couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen solid, and burning wouldn’t work because zippers, snaps, buttons didn’t burn and Gore-Tex melted.
Didn’t how long depend on how hungry you were? How badly you wanted something, and how much you were willing to risk? So if you were a coyote and starving to death because the snow was deep and the Wisconsin winter, hard—and then you stumbled on something that couldn’t fight back? Meat that was free and for the taking?
God help him, but he knew: a coyote would strip that body in no time.
“Other than your substitution of Wisconsin for Wyoming?” Kramer drills her with a look. “You see my problem.”