Student Body (Nightmare Hall) Read online

  The nurse sighed. “Well, you’re certainly not going to be able to tell by looking at him. The doctors would never let you see him now, and be grateful for that. You wouldn’t want to.”

  I had to clench my teeth, hard, to keep from shaking.

  “Still,” she went on, “it’s imperative that he be identified. His family has to be notified, and we need to know his medical history. If you could give me a description of your friend—height, weight, hair and eye color, that sort of thing—it might help.” She took a piece of paper from a notebook on her desk and, pencil poised in the air, looked at us expectantly.

  Bay gave her the information, and Eli added, “He has a large, dark mole over his right eyebrow.”

  The nurse looked at him. “Not anymore, he doesn’t,” she said brusquely.

  I felt my knees give, and clutched at the desk for support.

  She apologized immediately. “I’m sorry. I should have been more tactful. What I meant was, serious burns, such as this victim’s, erase any identifying marks such as moles or birthmarks or scars. That’s all I meant. I didn’t mean to upset you. What is your friend’s name?”

  “Michael,” Nat said. “Michael Sinclair. His parents live in Fairlawn, New Jersey.”

  The nurse held up the piece of paper. “Let me take this in to the doctors and see if the description seems to match. No one else has come forward asking about the fire victim, so he could be your friend. Wait here.” She disappeared through a set of double swinging doors.

  We didn’t sit on the hard blue plastic chairs while we waited. We paced. Up and down the quiet, white-tiled corridor, our shoes making almost no noise. We paced back and forth silently, waiting for the nurse to return and tell us something we didn’t want to hear.

  The urge to run was overwhelming. I wanted to turn and dash for the elevator and descend quickly and smoothly to the lobby, where I could run outside and all the way back to the campus. That way, I wouldn’t have to hear what she said when she returned.

  But I didn’t run. Running wasn’t going to get me out of this one. I could run all the way back home to Rochester and it would still be with me. We were all in it together, me and Nat and Eli, Bay and Mindy … and Hoop. Especially Hoop.

  So I stayed where I was. But I continued to pace. My shoulder bag made a soft, whispering sound as it swung, repeatedly brushing against my green suede jacket.

  The nurse was gone for days, months, years.

  When she finally returned, the expression on her face was grim. She signalled to us to return to the desk, then she sat down and looked up at us. “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “We believe it is your friend. And,” she glanced at Eli and her voice was kind, “the mole is still there, just as you said. It was the only part of his face that—” she stopped, shook her head, said, “well, never mind that now.”

  “Can we see him?” I asked when I found my voice.

  She shook her head. “No, I’m afraid not. You won’t be able to see him for quite some time.”

  “Is he going to make it?” Nat asked.

  “We won’t know that for a few days. With burns, the danger is of infection, since the skin, which is our protective coating, has been burned away.”

  Eli went bone-white.

  “You should just go home,” the nurse added, shuffling a sheaf of papers. “We appreciate your coming in, but there’s nothing more you can do here. We’ll notify your friend’s parents, and I’m sure they’ll be grateful that you told us who he was. You can call here anytime to get an update on his condition. Just ask for me, Nurse Lovett.” She lifted her head to give us a half-smile, and then focused her attention on her paperwork.

  We’d been dismissed.

  And we really hadn’t learned anything. We still didn’t know how seriously Hoop had been burned, although we knew it was bad. We didn’t even know if he was going to live.

  But we weren’t going to learn anything more now.

  We walked around the corner to stand by the elevator. “I have to see him,” I said in a low voice. “I can’t go home until I’ve seen Hoop.”

  Bay nodded. “Me, either.”

  “Lovett can’t sit at that desk every single second,” Nat said. “And we know where Hoop is. He’s behind those double doors.”

  “Tory,” Eli said to me, “you don’t want to barge in on those doctors while they’re still working on Hoop. From the way the nurse talked, that’s not something you want to see.”

  “He’s already been in there a long time,” I argued. “They must be almost done by now. By the time that nurse leaves her desk, Hoop could be sleeping in one of the beds back there. We could just sneak in, take a look to see for ourselves that it’s him, and then sneak back out again. It’ll only take a second.”

  Because I wasn’t the only one who wanted to see with my own eyes that Hoop was alive, no one disagreed, not even Eli. We decided to wait it out, keep a surreptitious eye on Nurse Lovett, and sneak into ICU at the first opportunity.

  Our chance didn’t come for over an hour. Nurse Lovett was so involved in her paperwork, I thought she’d never leave. Didn’t she drink coffee? Didn’t she ever go to the bathroom? Wasn’t she thirsty? I was so tired, I felt like I might topple over at any second and end up in a hospital bed myself.

  Finally, she sat back in her chair, stretched for several seconds, then she stood up. She walked down the hallway and disappeared into a room at the far end.

  “Let’s go!” I hissed, and we all crept around the corner and through the swinging double doors.

  I don’t know what I’d expected. I’d never been in an Intensive Care Unit before. A group of doctors, maybe, busily working on Hoop? Or, if the doctors were finished with him for now, maybe there’d be a row of beds lined up side by side, each with a nurse in white in attendance.

  It wasn’t like that. We walked through the doors and into a large, softly lit, quiet, white area divided into half a dozen windowed cubicles, each with a bed in them. There was no one at the desk in the center of the room.

  “There!” Eli whispered, pointing, “the room right beside the nurses’ desk.”

  When I looked, I didn’t see how Eli could tell anything from where we stood. All I could see was someone of Hoop’s size and bulk lying in a bed. But since the other cubicles closest to us were empty, we all moved apprehensively toward the one Eli had pointed out.

  When we got there, we stood peering in through the glass at the figure in the bed.

  It didn’t look like Hoop. But then, it didn’t look like anyone. Completely swathed in white bandages, hooked up to tubes and wires and machines, it lay in the bed unmoving, like an electronic mummy.

  It didn’t look like a person. And it didn’t look alive.

  It certainly didn’t look like Hoop.

  We stood there, not speaking, just staring.

  “It’s just a body,” Nat whispered finally, her hands pressed against the glass. “That’s all it is. Just a body.” She turned away from the window. I had never seen such sadness on her face. “They said he was alive, but he’s not,” she added dully. “That’s not alive.” Then her face crumpled, and she cried softly, “What have we done?”

  Her words echoed inside my head, making me dizzy. Although Nat was the only one to say it, I knew we were all thinking the same thing.

  What had we done?

  Chapter 6

  “LOOK,” BAY SAID WHEN we got outside, “can we end the guilt trip right here, please? It was an accident. It’s not like we started that fire on purpose. I’m as sorry about Hoop as anyone, but it was just bad luck, that’s all.”

  Nat made a sound of disgust. “Bad luck? Bad luck! You’re calling what we just looked at upstairs, that … that thing … bad luck?”

  Bay spun on his heel and strode to the car, shaking his head. I ran to catch up with him. We stood beside the Bus. I touched his hand. “Nat’s upset. We all are. No one’s blaming you, Bay. We were all there, at the park.”

  “Yeah, but I
was the one who insisted on the fire.”

  “We could have stopped you, and we didn’t.” I reached up and put my arms around his neck, hugged him. “We can’t make ourselves crazy over this. What good would it do Hoop?”

  Nat and Eli arrived. I waited for Nat to say something to Bay, smooth things over, but she didn’t. She just climbed into the backseat and huddled silently in a corner.

  “Bay’s right about one thing,” I said when we were on our way back to campus. It was very late. The fire’s distant glow had disappeared from the sky, and the streets of Twin Falls were empty. “We can’t walk around campus with our heads down and guilt written all over our faces. We’re going to be suspected as it is, just because we’re Hoop’s best friends and it’s likely we would have been with him. It’s okay to let people know we’re upset, because they’ll be expecting that. But if we so much as even hint that we were in the park tonight, we can kiss Salem University and our futures good-bye.”

  “I’m worried about Mindy,” Bay said as we left the heart of Twin Falls and headed for the open highway. “She’s going to be really shaky. She’s nuts about Hoop, we all know that. You add that to the guilt she’s going to feel when she finally does see him, and we’ve got trouble on our hands. What if she tells?”

  “If Mindy feels the need to confess,” Nat said dryly from the backseat, “we can just tell her to give her mother a call. A quick conversation with Mrs. I-Was-Miss-Cotton-Ball will remind Mindy that a beauty queen’s crown has never been plunked down upon the head of a convicted felon.” Nat laughed without humor. “As far as we know, anyway.”

  “I still think you should talk to Mindy,” Bay said to me. “Make her see what’s at stake here. And keep her away from Hoop if you can. Seeing what we saw tonight could totally unhinge her. Tell her he’s recovering nicely but that he’s not allowed visitors, and she’ll have to be patient. And in the meantime, we need to follow our regular schedules as much as possible. We can’t let this throw us.”

  I nodded. We were passing an off-campus dorm not far from school, an old, red brick house sitting high on a hill overlooking the highway. Nightingale Hall, an off-campus dorm. The kids at school called it Nightmare Hall because, according to the stories, some very weird things had happened there. I believed the stories. Nightmare Hall looked like the kind of place where very weird things might happen, especially this late on a moonless night. Tall, gnarled oak trees stood guard over the house, casting ominous shadows across the rolling lawn, and there were no lights on inside.

  Ian Banion, the campus radio announcer who had told us a body had been discovered in the fire, lived there. Maybe that’s why he’d been able to deliver that horrible news so matter-of-factly, so professionally. Maybe living at Nightmare Hall had taught him that horrible things do happen.

  Had it also taught him, I wondered as the house disappeared from sight, what to do when horrible things happened?

  “You should talk to Mindy first thing in the morning,” Bay urged. “Before she has a chance to go to the hospital.”

  I agreed.

  For the second time that night, none of us said good-bye when we separated at the car. I guess we were too lost in our own private misery. But it bothered me that we were all so anxious now to get away from each other. And I knew why. It’s not very comfortable being around people who know your worst secret.

  I didn’t sleep at all, and I know Nat didn’t, either. I heard her tossing and turning all night long.

  Saturday morning, I called Mindy first thing. If she saw with her own eyes that Hoop was now nothing more than a body shrouded in white, she’d freak. And if she freaked, anything could slip out of her mouth.

  If that happened, we were doomed.

  “No visitors,” I told her firmly when she answered the phone. “It’s for Hoop’s sake, Mindy. He’ll get better faster if we let the hospital staff take care of him and don’t get in their way.”

  “But I have to see him,” she protested.

  That’s because you don’t know what you’d be seeing, I thought. If you did … “We saw him,” I said. “And I can tell you that he’s being taken care of.” That was true enough. “We’d just get in the way if we hung around the hospital. I think you should just do what you always do on the weekend, as if none of this had ever happened.”

  “What I usually do on the weekend,” Mindy burst out, and I could hear tears in her voice, “is hang out with Hoop!”

  I swallowed hard. “Why don’t we go to the mall,” I suggested.

  I didn’t have anything to do, and I felt sorry for Mindy. Also, it seemed to me that anything would be better than being on campus. I didn’t feel like running into people who’d want to talk about what had happened to Hoop.

  “You never go to the mall with me, Tory. You always say I take too long to shop.”

  This was true. I’m not much of a shopper, and Mindy could take hours selecting a pair of black pumps. “Well, I’ll make an exception today. Maybe I can talk Nat into going with us.”

  From her bed, Nat shook her head vigorously. There were faint purple shadows under her eyes. She looked very tired. But I knew I probably did, too.

  “Yes,” I said firmly into the telephone, “I will definitely drag Nat along. Meet you outside of your sorority house in thirty minutes. Be ready, Mindy. I don’t want to have to wait.” Her sorority sisters knew Hoop. They’d be ready with questions for Nat and me, questions about last night that I knew we couldn’t answer. The faster we got away from the Omega Phi house, the safer I’d feel.

  “I’m not going to the mall with you and Mindy,” Nat said stubbornly, lying back down in bed. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to lie here all day and see if I can erase the image of Hoop lying in that bed like some petrified Egyptian mummy.” She lifted her head and looked at me with anxious eyes. “You don’t really think he’s going to make it, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, moving to the closet to grab a pair of jeans and a sweater. “But we are going to the mall with Mindy. We have to keep her occupied. I don’t think I should have to do that all by myself. In fact, I think Bay and Eli should have to come along, too.” I turned away from the closet to face Nat. “We’re all in this together, Nat, and that’s the one thing we can’t afford to forget. So get dressed while I call Bay.”

  When she didn’t move, my voice hardened. “I mean it, Nat! Get up!”

  She did. She was furious, and gave me a look that could melt nails, but she got up, and she dressed, and she left the room with me to meet Bay and Eli. They hadn’t wanted to come, either. Eli said, incredulously, “You want to go to the mall now?” But when I pointed out that I alone wasn’t Mindy’s keeper and that they had as much to lose as I did if she talked, they reluctantly agreed to a mall trip.

  It turned out to be not such a lousy idea. Away from campus, away from the medical center, away from any reminders of our friend, Hoop Sinclair, we were able to pretend, for a little while, that we’d forgotten about the fire. We teased Mindy about her tendency to waffle for half an hour between a bright red lipstick and another only half a shade lighter. We played pinball in the arcade, and if Bay was slightly off his game, we pretended that was only because he was hungry. To keep pretending, we actually went to the food court and ordered pizza, which lay on our paper plates uneaten while we talked about absolutely nothing.

  I was the one who suggested that we all go into the tanning salon with Mindy, who went every week to refresh her glow.” I made it sound as if it could be fun. Mindy was delighted that we were going to join her, something none of us had ever done before. But the truth was, I was afraid that if we left her alone, she’d start spouting her misery to someone in the salon. Maybe tanning salons were like beauty salons, where customers poured out their life secrets like shampoo from an open bottle.

  The minute I was inside, though, I regretted my decision. The tanning machines were lidded capsules, self-contained silver boxes on legs, each in a small cubicle with a
long, black curtain as a door for privacy. You had to climb inside and close the lid to get your tan.

  The capsules were like coffins.

  “I’m not getting inside one of those,” Nat declared as Mindy made arrangements for all of us at the desk. “Forget it. I’m claustrophobic. Besides, a tan is nothing more than skin damage. Why would I deliberately damage my own skin?”

  Eli shuddered, clearly thinking of Hoop’s skin under those white bandages. But he said, “We won’t be in them that long. Ten minutes, tops. Just keeping Mindy company. How much damage can you get in ten minutes, doctor?”

  But Nat was adamant. “Too much. I’ll just sit out there in the lobby and read outdated fashion magazines. Don’t complain to me if you overdo and end up looking like lobsters. You’ll get no sympathy from me.” She turned and retreated to the lobby.

  The attendant explained to the rest of us the safety features of the tanning machines, how this latch worked and that little gizmo flipped sideways, and then she showed us how the controls worked. When she thought we had it all down pat, she gave us clean, white wraparound towels to wear, and left us, each with our own separate cubicle and silver-lidded box.

  “Watch the timers,” Mindy warned us before getting into her own tanning machine. “Especially you, Tory. You’re so fair-skinned. Don’t fall asleep or anything, or you’ll be sorry.”

  I had no intention of falling asleep inside the silver coffin, even though a nap would have felt good. I was very, very tired.

  I drew the curtain on my booth, undressed, and, wrapped in my towel, climbed into my capsule. I set the timer carefully for only ten minutes, just long enough to take away my guilty pallor. Then I closed the lid and my eyes, and warned myself not to doze off. Even if I did, the timer would buzz when the ten minutes were up, waking me.

  There was a dim, rosy glow inside the box, and I found it soothing. The surface I was lying on was firm, but not uncomfortable, and I felt my skin warming gently under the lights. A tan in March might be nice, after all, I decided. I’d look good with a nice, healthy glow. Maybe the fatigued, guilty look would go away and I’d look vibrant and very much alive. And innocent.