Student Body (Nightmare Hall) (4 page)

If only we’d gone dancing at Johnny’s instead, or to the Sigma party, or to Vinnie’s for pizza. If only we hadn’t cooked hot dogs. If only, if only, if only …

I’d said the same thing when my friends in high school drove their car into a freight train. I’d said, If only they hadn’t been drinking, if only they hadn’t taken
that
road, if only I’d been with them, maybe I’d have made them take a different road, one without a railroad crossing. If only, if only, if only … and now, years later, here I was, thinking the same thing again.

I felt stupid. Hadn’t I learned anything at all since then?

When we got to our room and threw ourselves down on our beds, Nat switched on the radio, the dial set, as it always was, to the campus radio station.

Before I could yell, “Please don’t do that! They’ll just be talking about the fire and I don’t want to hear it,” the voice of Ian Banion, a friend of ours, began speaking. His deep, authoritative voice resonated in our room with a blood-curdling statement.

“This just in. Although rangers fighting the blaze at the state park west of campus had initially believed the area to be free of visitors when the fire began, we have just received word that a body has been discovered at the scene.”

Nat and I bolted upright at the same moment.

“Fire Marshal Edmund Cervantes is unwilling to speculate at this point as to whether or not the victim might be a student at this university. Our reporter was informed that Cervantes was on his way to the scene and would notify the administration if warranted. A reporter from this station is on the scene and will notify us as soon as the identity of the victim is known.”

“No,” Nat breathed, her face a sickly gray.
“No.”

“The fire is now believed to be under control. Cervantes has told our reporter that it is too early to assess the damages in terms of acreage destroyed or dollar amounts. We will have more on this story in fifteen minutes. Stay tuned.”

“Turn it off!” I screamed from my bed, “turn it off!”

Nat switched off the radio. Her eyes were bleak as she looked over at me. “Hoop?” she whispered. “You don’t think … you don’t think it could be Hoop, do you? I mean, Boomer said …”

“No,” I whispered back, “It can’t be Hoop. How could it be? He’s at Sigma house.” I shook my head vigorously. “No, no, it’s not Hoop, it’s
not
!”

But I had this awful, clammy feeling in my chest. And the expression on Nat’s long, narrow face said that she had it, too. Because there hadn’t been anyone else at that park when we got there except the six of us. We hadn’t heard a sound, hadn’t seen any sign of other visitors.

And Mindy hadn’t actually
seen
Hoop at the Sigma house.

I had always liked Hoop a lot. Like Mindy, he was no genius, and he had a notoriously bad temper, often losing it on the basketball court, but he was good-hearted. He was the only one of us who didn’t sweat college. He was attending because he hadn’t wanted to quit playing basketball after high school, so when Salem offered him an athletic scholarship, he took it. He seemed fairly confident that he had a good chance at playing professional ball and since that was the only thing he wanted to do, his education so far consisted of only the easiest classes.

I wondered sometimes what he would do with his life if he didn’t make it in the NBA. Mindy had this lovely fantasy of winning a string of beauty pageants, spending a year or two travelling and becoming famous, and then returning to wherever Hoop happened to be playing ball at the time, and marrying him. Of course he would be famous by then, too. They would buy a mansion, probably in South Carolina somewhere near her mother, have two-point-four beautiful, gifted children, and live a lifestyle suited to the Rich and Famous. They would be two of The Beautiful People.

But now …

“What should we do?” Nat whispered, clutching her comforter to her chest. “We should do something.”

I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I sat on my bed feeling as if someone had just hosed me down with ice water. The thought of Hoop dying in that fire was more than I could stand. Hoop burning? His skin on fire, his honest, open face, his hair, too … the image made me physically ill.

I lurched from my bed and ran into the bathroom, where I threw up every last trace of our picnic in the park.

When I came back into the room, a wet washcloth in my hands, Nat was just hanging up the phone. “He’s not dead!” she shouted, jumping up and down. “The fire victim isn’t dead!”

I collapsed on my bed. “What?”

“That was Bay on the phone. I called him to see if he’d heard that they’d found a body, and he corrected me. Said it wasn’t a body, after all. He said they just came on the radio and said that the fire victim was still alive, after all. Barely. But alive.” Some of Nat’s natural color had returned to her face. “You made me turn off the radio too soon, Tory. We should have kept listening.”

I tried to take in what she was saying. “Have they identified the person yet?” I asked, my heart pounding crazily.

She shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

“I’m going to call the Sigma house and find out if Hoop is there. I can’t stand not knowing another second.”

I called Sigma house.

Hoop wasn’t there.

And the person I spoke with was very annoyed, because Hoop was a Sigma and he was the game’s hero, and yet he hadn’t even bothered to celebrate at their party. No one had seen him since the game. “Went off with some friends of his,” Hoop’s frat brother grumbled. “No one here knows exactly where, and he isn’t back yet.”

I asked to speak to Boomer, who had told Mindy he’d seen Hoop, but when he finally came on the line, he not only didn’t remember ever seeing Hoop at the party, he didn’t remember speaking to Mindy, either.

I sagged against the wall, the telephone still in my hand, even though Boomer had already hung up.

“He’s not there, is he?” Nat demanded. “I don’t believe this! How could he not be there? Where
is
he, then?” She lifted her head and stared at me, the bleak, desolate look returning to her eyes. “Tory,” she said softly, “what are we going to do?”

B
EFORE NAT COULD ASK
me again what we should do, there was a knock on our door.

I answered it with my heart in my throat because I expected to see a police officer standing in the hallway. I found Bay and Eli standing there instead. They looked a hundred years older than they had when we’d sat on the fountain wall on the Commons earlier that day making plans for the evening. Setting fire to the park hadn’t been discussed as an option.

“He’s not dead,” Bay said abruptly, brushing past me and on into the room. “Did Nat tell you that guy they found in the fire isn’t dead?”

Eli followed Bay into the room, took a seat on the floor beside my desk. I closed the door and went back to sit on my bed with my knees up, my arms encircling them, my head down. “Yes. Of course she told me. Then I called Sigma house.” I lifted my head to look directly at Bay. “Hoop isn’t there. Hasn’t
been
there. They don’t know where he is.”

“Oh, for pete’s sake!” Eli burst out, “who are we kidding? Can we please quit tiptoeing around this and admit that it was Hoop they found?”

Nat gasped. “You don’t
know
that!” she cried.

“Yes, I
do.
And so do you. We all do. Boomer was wrong about Hoop being at the party, and we all know it. Mindy probably knows it by now, too, which is why she didn’t answer her phone when I called just now. She’s trying to deny it. But it’s there. And we can’t pretend it isn’t. The first thing we have to deal with,” Eli added firmly, “is that he hasn’t been identified. We have to let someone know his name, so his family can be notified.”

“Are you really that sure it’s him?” Nat asked him in a forlorn voice. “We shouldn’t tell them it is if it isn’t. I mean, couldn’t it be a hitchhiker, or a jogger out for a run, or someone walking his dog? It could be, couldn’t it?”

Eli’s gray eyes were full of skepticism. “It could. But that’s about as likely as it being a leprechaun who’d been hiding under a toadstool. I mean, if that isn’t Hoop, then where exactly do you think he might be right about now? He’s not with us. He’s not at Sigma house. And he isn’t with Mindy, or she’d have called us. So what do
you
think the chances are that Hoop wasn’t the person found lying in those burned woods?”

Silence. After a minute or so, quiet tears began spilling down Nat’s cheeks. She didn’t bother to wipe them away.

“So, what do you suggest, Einstein?” Bay said, looking at Eli. “If we tell someone that’s our friend Hoop lying in a hospital bed, they’ll ask how we know, won’t they? And what do we tell them then?”

Eli didn’t answer, just shook his head and stared at the floor.

But after a minute or two, Nat said softly, “We could say he was alone in the woods.”

All three of us stared at her.

She flushed, but she didn’t look away. “We could say we had an argument with him and he left us to go running in the woods. Everyone knows he has a temper. And everyone knows he ran a lot in the park. We could say that when he didn’t come back, we got worried, and started looking for him, and then we heard about the fire, so we thought it might be him. We could say that.”

I was nodding. The important thing right then was to let someone know Hoop’s identity. “Maybe that would work,” I said. “That way, we could tell them who he is without admitting that we were with him. And saying that we’d had an argument would explain to Hoop’s other friends why we weren’t with him in the park. That’s the first thing they’re going to ask. They’re going to say, ‘Where were
you
when Hoop got trapped in that fire?’”

Bay was nodding, too, and chewing on his lower lip.

“You’re forgetting something,” Eli reminded us. “Hoop isn’t
dead.
Probably unconscious, maybe even in a coma. It sounded pretty bad on the radio. But he’s not dead. If he recovers, he’ll be able to tell someone what happened. He’s not going to lie about who was with him at the time the fire started. Why would he?”

“Because we’d do the same for him, and he knows it,” Nat countered. “As long as he’s lucid when he comes to and isn’t drugged out or something. If he’s thinking at all, he won’t hang us out to dry. Hoop wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t like that.”

We realized at the same time Nat did that she’d used past tense. Her face drained of all color and tears welled up again. “I mean,” she stammered, “isn’t. He
isn’t
like that. Besides, Hoop may not be as smart as Eli, but he’s not stupid. He’ll realize right away that if he tells the truth, he’ll be in as much trouble as we are. Good-bye scholarship, good-bye college, and most important, good-bye basketball forever, except on a playground somewhere. So in a way, we’re protecting
him
as much as we are ourselves.”

“What makes you think,” Eli said slowly, “that if we tell that story, and the cops buy it, that they won’t hang Hoop for the fire? According to you, he was in the woods alone. And there was a fire. You want him to take the blame?”

“Eli,” Bay said, “you surprise me. You’re supposed to be the genius here. But even I can figure out that the fire marshal must have found the remains of our campfire by now. Why would a lone runner stop to build a campfire?”

Eli thought for a minute and then said stubbornly, “He wasn’t wearing jogging clothes. They’re not going to think that’s weird?”

“That’s because he wasn’t
planning
on a jog when he met us,” Nat said patiently. “He only went running because he lost his temper and was furious with us. So, of course he wasn’t wearing running shorts or shoes.”

“I still think it’s risky,” Eli said. But we could tell he was weakening. “What about Mindy? Think she’ll go along with it?”

I nodded. “Yes. She will. We’re not saying anything bad about Hoop, or blaming him for anything.” I stood up. “I think we should go to the hospital right now and see if they’ve found out who he is. If they haven’t, we have to tell them.”

Bay and Eli stood up. “Maybe they already know,” Bay said, hope in his voice. “That way, we could just turn around and leave without having to say anything at all.”

“That wouldn’t work,” Nat said. “The minute they know who he is, the police are going to start asking questions around campus. Like who Hoop’s closest friends are, for instance. The police will come knocking at our doors to find out where we were tonight. It’ll be better for us if we mention the argument right now,
before
we’re asked. Make sure that everyone knows we weren’t with Hoop.”

I looked at Nat with a mixture of admiration and revulsion. How easily and well she adapted to the nasty business of hiding information. Then I almost laughed aloud, at myself. “Hiding information?” Didn’t I mean “lying?” Something I had once been very, very good at. I had never realized Nat had a talent for lying, too.

Bay drove us to the Twin Falls Medical Center in town. It seemed as we rode up in the elevator to the Intensive Care Unit that anyone looking at us could tell we were guilty of something, as if we had the letters GUILTY splattered in red across our chests. None of us said a word. And we were all walking so carefully, almost tiptoeing.

That wasn’t guilt. It was fear. We were all terrified of what we were going to find when we got to the ICU.

What we found was a tall, heavyset nurse with gray hair and glasses who told us briskly, “Oh, that burn patient is still being worked on, and from what I saw of him when they brought him in, he won’t be seeing any visitors for a long time.”

She peered at us from behind her glasses. “Do you think you might know the victim? He hasn’t been identified.”

I spoke up first. “We think he might be a friend of ours. He was running in the park when the fire broke out.”

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.