“Jim, you know who this is. You know I still love you. Lily loves you too—”

“Who is this?” demanded Hawthorne. The woman’s voice wasn’t Meg’s. It was higher than Meg’s voice. He was sure of it.

“Jim, why are you fucking that girl? Don’t you see that you belong to me—”

“Who are you?” demanded Hawthorne. He saw Hamilton Burke attentively leaning forward. Hawthorne realized he had shouted into the phone. Slowly, he returned the receiver to its cradle. As if from very far away, he heard the woman’s voice still talking.

—

The kitten was orange-colored and sleeping on a folded blue towel on Jessica’s lower bunk after having drunk half a small container of cream. Its stomach was puffed out and it purred quietly. Jessica stroked it very gently in order not to wake it. She wasn’t sure if it was a boy or girl and so she was thinking of a name that would do for either. Already she had rejected Candy Stripe and Tiger and at the moment she was leaning toward Lucky since, after all, she had saved it from being run over by a car or worse. Jessica had been walking along the side of the road and there it had been—mewing and unhappy, no more than a foot from the pavement. She had saved the kitten’s life, she was positive. And so she thought Lucky would be a good name. After all, every marmalade cat in the world was named Tiger. Jessica had picked it up and carried it back to school. At the Dugout she had bought the cream, and the rest, she thought, was history. Now it was shortly past noon on Tuesday—lunchtime, but Jessica didn’t plan to go to lunch. She had better things to do.

Earlier that morning Jessica had been running away. She had had enough of Bishop’s Hill and these crazy people. Had she really fucked that old headmaster? She didn’t think so. On the other hand, the whole evening after drinking tequila with LeBrun was pretty vague. Maybe she had fucked him. But she was pretty sure it hadn’t happened, even though the sweatshirt she had been wearing had completely vanished. And it was no secret that she’d had a shitload of tequila—its aches and pains still seemed to be elbowing their way around her gut, nothing at all like the kitten’s stomach, which was still pure. The kitten wasn’t old enough to fuck up yet, and in any case, cats were just cats. For instance, you couldn’t blame Lucky for drinking so much heavy cream that he looked ready to explode.

No, Jessica didn’t think she had fucked anybody, although the other kids were all talking about it and so were the teachers. Even LeBrun. “Got some, right?” he’d said to her. “Cleaned the old guy’s clock. Ha, ha, ha.” Not a real laugh but a sarcastic noise. The pig. So Jessica had a perfectly good reason to be upset—then she got the call from Tremblay that sent her right over the top. He wanted her not to come home for Thanksgiving but to stay at Bishop’s Hill with the other kids whom nobody cared shit about, kids whose parents didn’t want to see them.

“I just think it would be a bad idea,” Tremblay had said over the phone.

“But why? I want to see Jason.”

“I don’t want to deal with it, that’s all. Your mother’s not well and it’s hard for Jason to get settled down.”

“Is Dolly drinking?”

Tremblay didn’t respond, which answered Jessica’s question well enough. She could almost see him leaning back in his black leather chair in the den, staring up at his golf trophies. “I just don’t want you here. I don’t think I can trust you . . .”

“Please, Tremblay, you said I’d be able to come . . .”

“I’ve already made up my mind.”

“Then let me talk to Jason for a minute.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Our deal was for you to stay away and not bother anybody.”

“But you said Thanksgiving would be all right.”

“I said maybe. It’s just not convenient at this time.”

“Have you been messing with Jason? Let me talk to him.”

“He’s perfectly all right. And if I were you, I’d watch my tongue.”

After hanging up, Jessica had broken three windows, but she was careful not to let anybody know who had broken them and she hadn’t cut herself. Then she’d heard that that old guy—Evings—had killed himself; she didn’t really know him, but once he had asked her if she was happy and she’d told him that what the hell, she was okay, and Evings had said, “Well, we can’t ask for much more than that, can we?” Jessica neither liked him nor disliked him but she didn’t want him dead. She didn’t want anybody dead except Tremblay. And she almost felt hurt by Evings’s death. She almost took it personally, as if he had done it to make her feel even worse. So she had decided it was time to clear out, plans or no plans.

As for LeBrun, he frightened her, making her drink the tequila and dance and go over to the headmaster’s, where she did God knows what. She didn’t see why he had made such a big thing of doing it, like it was more than a joke. He still said he would help her rescue Jason. Actually, he seemed eager, but even his eagerness frightened her. So she had put some stuff into her backpack and left. She still had her money and maybe she could rescue Jason by herself. But every step she took down the road made her increasingly nervous. That chubby cop from Brewster had passed twice, and the state cops had gone by and the rescue squad’s ambulance, and she knew very well that every single one had stared at her and wondered what she was doing walking along the side of the road. She didn’t have the nerve to stick out her thumb and hitchhike. She realized that she would never be able to get away from Bishop’s Hill by herself, that she needed LeBrun’s help after all. It was then that she found the kitten. If she had ignored it, if she had just kept on going, the kitten would have been killed for sure. And so Jessica had come back.

Now she was getting ready to write to Jason and tell him about the kitten, how it seemed to love her already and purred extra loud when she scratched its neck. And she would tell him that she wouldn’t be able to come at Thanksgiving, that Tremblay wouldn’t let her, but that didn’t mean the rescue was off, because one day in the next four weeks it would happen. LeBrun had promised. When Jessica had come back to her dorm room a little after eleven, some kids had seen her and they might have seen the kitten, although she had tucked it under her coat. Students weren’t allowed to have pets. She’d already been told this ten times. And so Jessica was half expecting a visit from Mrs. Grayson, the housekeeper, or Ruth Standish, who was in charge of Jessica’s cottage. And if either one of them tried to take Lucky away from her, she would scream holy hell.

It was only ten minutes after that, when Jessica was already writing her letter to Jason, that there was a heavy knock on the door. Jessica ignored the noise, of course, but the kitten stirred in its sleep. Carefully, she drew a corner of her blanket up over its marmalade body. Then she heard a key in the lock. Jessica hated passkeys, unless she had them—they were a total violation.

The door opened and there stood pudgy Ruth Standish with her face arranged in an annoyed pout. Jessica tried to imagine her dancing topless and the thought made her laugh. Behind Miss Standish were several students, probably the ones who had told her about the kitten and who now were feeling virtuous.

“Why didn’t you open the door?”

“I didn’t feel like it.”

“Do you have a cat in here?”

“It’s none of your business.” Jessica remained on her bunk with her knees up and her sweatshirt pulled down over them to her ankles.

“Of course it’s my business. Having a pet violates school regulations. Give it to me this instant.”

It was then that Jessica began to scream. She didn’t care that she woke the kitten. She didn’t care if she woke everybody alive.

Downstairs in the common room, Scott McKinnon was sitting with some other students in the ten minutes between the end of lunch and the beginning of classes. Scott would have liked to be someplace smoking a cigarette but he had no cigarettes and no money and no one would lend him a cigarette, even though he almost always paid them back. Scott was talking about Evings’s suicide with Ron French, Adam Voigt, and Helen Selkirk, Jessica’s roommate. The others tried to talk about it as if it were nothing out of the ordinary but Scott knew they were shocked. Even Scott was pretty shocked, though he’d had an uncle who had committed suicide because he had cancer. Offed himself—Uncle Bob had offed himself. But there had been nothing wrong with Evings that anybody could see, except that he was old and ugly, and that didn’t seem like a good enough reason. Ron French didn’t see how a person could just back out, as he put it, just call it quits. And Adam thought it might have had something to do with Jessica and how she had been caught in the headmaster’s rooms and maybe she’d been involved with Evings as well, even though Evings was a fag, because it surprised you what some people would do. And Helen Selkirk had no opinions at all but she thought the whole business was a shame.