Book of Days

by E.A. Week

Home for a week before her senior year of college, Sarah broods over the past—family, friends, and that guy in the black cloak. Prequel to "Semi-Charmed Life."

Title: Book of Days

Author: E.A. Week

E-mail: E. at gmail dot com; also on LiveJournal as eaweek.

Summary: Home for a week before her senior year of college, Sarah Williams broods over the past—family, friends, and that mysterious guy in the black cloak.

Category: Labyrinth

Distribution: Feel free to link or rec this story anywhere, but please drop me at least a brief e-mail and let me know you've done this.

Feedback: Comments are always welcome! Loved it? Hated it? Post a review; send me a PM or an email, and let me know why!

Disclaimer 1: Copyrights to all characters in this story belong to their respective creators, production companies, and studios. I'm just borrowing them, honest!

Disclaimer 2: The story title is shamelessly stolen from Enya.

Disclaimer 3: This story is rated M for language, sexuality, and mature themes.

Disclaimer 4: This story contains a lot of mundane details. I find this sort of thing interesting, but not everyone will.

Sunday, August 30, 1992

The US Airways shuttle banked in a lazy circle above the Greater Rochester International Airport. Sarah Williams peered down through the tiny window, hungry for a glimpse of the city, but at this height, everything sprawled out in miniature beneath the brazen glare of the late summer sun. Even Lake Ontario seemed insignificant from this perspective.

"Don't go jumping out," a voice to her left chided.

Sarah turned to the woman seated beside her. "Pardonnez-moi?" she asked, clamping her mouth shut too late. "I mean, excuse me?"

The woman laughed, eyes vanishing into crinkles. "You looked ready to jump out. Are you on your way home?"

"Yeah, I spent the last year in France," Sarah said. "As if that wasn't completely obvious." She was still thinking in French, but she must be more eager to get home than she'd realized—her brain and body in two different places.

The pilot's smooth, assured voice came over the PA system and announced the final descent into the airport. Sarah checked her seatbelt, although she'd fastened it and checked it a couple of times already. She wiggled: God, her ass was numb from all this sitting. There had been the train ride from Avignon to Paris, the flight from Paris to London, where she'd visited her mother for a week. Then there had been the flight from London to New York, followed by a four-hour layover at JFK. She could have had her father meet her at the airport, but Sarah hadn't wanted to spend endless hours trapped in a car with Robert while they fought their way out of the city, to say nothing of the marathon drive upstate. So she'd opted for a flight from New York to Rochester. The trip itself wasn't very long, barely ninety minutes, an airborne hop across the state, but the last leg of any journey always seemed the longest. Sarah felt like she'd been in transit for eons.

The pressure on her ears increased to the point where she could barely hear anything, and then, with a rumble and a thud, the plane's wheels hit the tarmac, and the jet taxied along the runway, slowing gradually as it approached the terminal. Sarah heaved a sigh, stretched her legs, and hoped the airline hadn't lost her luggage.

(ii)

She spotted Robert almost right away and waved at him; he crossed the terminal, waited for a couple of other travelers to get around him, and swept up Sarah in a warm if awkward hug. They hadn't seen each other for a year, but that didn't spare their conversation from its usual banality.

"Hi, sweetie," Robert said, taking her carry-on bag.

"Hi, Dad," Sarah responded.

"Good flight?"

"Yeah, just about ten hours longer than I wanted."

He laughed. "You hungry?"

"No, I'm fine. I'll wait for dinner… I want to get back on Eastern Time." What Sarah really craved at the moment was coffee, but that was the last thing she needed. Her mind still had that cotton-candy lightheadedness, as if her very thoughts were moving in blurry slow-motion. She was glad Robert would be driving.

"Well, let's get your bags."

They wandered down to the baggage claim area without saying anything else. Sarah loved her father, but sometimes having a conversation with him was next to impossible. They did best, perhaps not surprisingly, when they had something specific to discuss. Small talk, ordinary day-to-day stuff, often left them tongue-tied and staring at their feet or into middle distance.

Sarah ducked into the nearest restroom—the change in pressure always hit her bladder like the proverbial ton of bricks—and when she came back out, the luggage still hadn't appeared. She took a better look at Robert, from whom she'd inherited her height and frame. His hair, she noted, was now definitely more salt than pepper. Both her parents had dark hair, and both had begun graying early. Sarah harbored no delusions that she would not follow in their footsteps, though she hadn't spotted any errant silver threads. Yet.

The PA system crackled, and a disembodied voice announced the immanent arrival of the luggage from Sarah's flight. The light flashed, the alarm barked, and the conveyer belt began to move. For the next quarter-hour, she and Robert were occupied keeping their eyes on the parade of bags and suitcases, sparing the need for further conversation. Sarah had just begun to feel nervous when her enormous suitcase came into view, followed a moment later by her equally gigantic backpack. Sarah had tied to their handles a couple of cheap neon scarves—not that they needed anything to make them more visible.

"Did you bring Avignon home with you?" Robert joked, hefting the suitcase.

"I wish," Sarah laughed. She shrugged into her backpack, which was so heavy she could barely stand up straight. "I hope the car's not too far away."

As they trudged out to the parking garage, Sarah caught a dim glimpse of her reflection in a glass window, hunched over and travel-weary. She looked like she'd been gotten lost hiking in the Alps and had made her way back to civilization only after numerous misadventures.

(iii)

Sarah fell asleep, a heavy, torpid state of unconsciousness, as soon as Robert's old Volvo was on route 390. She jerked awake in time to see the exit to the New York State Thruway fly past the car windows, then her head lolled, and she dropped once again into exhausted blackness. The sensation of the car slowing brought her back to the surface of awareness: they were exiting the highway at route 251. Sarah dozed until the car came to a full stop: they were making the right-hand turn onto route 65, Main Street in Rosebriar Hollow.

At one time, they would have followed Main Street to their home downtown, but since the fire, they'd been living in a new development, out in the wooded suburbs. Sarah hated this tony enclave, "Happy Hidden Woods," as she'd dubbed it back in high school. She hated the lack of neighborliness, hated the elitism of each house sitting like a castle on its vast acreage, hated that the family house was above all else Irene's, hated that she'd never truly belong to it. More than anything, she hated that it wasn't her childhood home, the beautiful Victorian in which she'd grown up.

Instead of driving into downtown, Robert made a left turn, away from the town center, and after passing through a residential area, another left. Houses became more and more sparse, separated by fields and patches of woods. At a remote intersection, Robert turned right. Trees swallowed up the Volvo like a dark green tunnel. Sarah, fully awake now, stared through the foliage, but in summer the houses were completely concealed from view. Only the occasional glimpse of a driveway betrayed the presence of human habitation. Some of the more affluent families had even erected gates at the end of their driveways. Why don't they just build a moat? Sarah often wondered. Irene, thankfully, had not gone to those lengths.

Sarah had never known anyone who lived in this area. Parents in Happy Hidden Woods sent their children to private schools, not to the Rosebriar Hollow public schools, certainly not to Mendon Regional High. Once in a while, when Sarah had been downtown at her father's office during tax season, a woman would come in with her children in tow, and Sarah would know where they lived based on nothing more than their appearance. The mothers would be tall, thin bordering on anorexic, with Nordic blonde coloring. In winter they would wear long, elegant wool dress coats, often fur-trimmed, and their children would wear expensive ski jackets with lift passes dangling from the zippers, like badges of status and privilege. The mothers and the children would look not at Sarah, but through her, like she wasn't even there.

She remembered being horrified when Robert had told her that he and Irene were house-shopping in this neighborhood. Surely there must be some suitable house for sale in the downtown area. But Irene evidently had viewed the destruction of the Victorian as her opportunity to move up the social hierarchy, and she'd seized that chance with long, lacquered fingernails. The old house had burned down in October. The family had been moved into its new home by Christmas.

The Volvo slowed and made a right-hand turn onto a secluded driveway. Rubber tires crunched over the gravel. The trees loomed in close, arching over the driveway, blocking out the sun and sky. At least it's cooler, Sarah thought. The temperature at the airport had been over ninety degrees Fahrenheit, the heat made worse by steam-bath humidity. Happy Hidden Woods, though, was shady and cool. The driveway ended at an immaculately manicured lawn, the shrubs and hedges trimmed with surgical precision. Robert touched a switch on the dashboard, and one of the garage doors opened. Sarah rolled her eyes: the garage doors at their old house had opened manually. Oh, the horror!

The garage door rumbled shut behind the car, and they made the seamless transition from one cocooned bubble to another. Robert's old maroon Volvo pulled in alongside Irene's late-model forest green Toyota. In the third bay sat Sarah's VW Rabbit, and she bounced over to give it an affectionate pat.

"How's it running?" she asked.

"Great," said Robert. "I take it out at least once or twice a week. I had the oil changed last week, and the registration's up to date."

"Thanks," Sarah said, feeling a bit of mean-spirited glee. The VW was ten years old, and she knew Irene considered it an eyesore. Robert's rectangular Volvo was even older than that, almost twenty, but he could see no point in trading in a car that was in excellent condition and still ran like a top. Sarah knew Irene would keep exerting subtle pressure—like water wearing away stone—until Robert finally caved in and bought something newer.

Father and daughter hefted Sarah's bags through the breezeway into the house. "Bonjour, ma femme," Robert called. "Sarah est là!"

"Ohmigod, stop it, Dad," Sarah laughed. "Your accent est horrible."

"The world traveler returns," Irene smiled, sweeping over to plant a dry kiss on Sarah's cheek. They managed a neat, civil hug. "You must be exhausted."

"Completely," Sarah told her. "My head still doesn't know what time zone I'm in."

"Well, get your things upstairs, or you can take them right into the laundry room if you want. Dinner's on the table."

"Thank you," Sarah responded. She turned around, taking in the changes to the living room. She'd been making bets with herself about how much redecorating Irene would have done over the past year, and she was surprised to see how little had changed. The furniture was still the same. The living room, with its large stone fireplace and cathedral ceilings, was one room in the house Sarah actually liked. Skylights overhead let in daylight—a rare commodity in the snow belt—and central air conditioning kept the house comfortably temperate. There had been no AC in the house downtown: Robert would not even allow window units, saying they ruined the exterior line of the house. When they'd moved, Irene had insisted on central air.

Sarah noticed one change that blared at her like a fire truck's horn on a quiet afternoon. Over the mantelpiece hung a large, beautifully framed photograph, a family portrait. Irene and Robert, dressed in Sunday-best clothes: she was sitting in a plush velvet chair, and he was standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder. Curled up on the floor, flax-colored head resting against Irene's knee, was Toby, dressed in an adorable little-boy suit.

"When'd you have that taken?" asked Sarah, nodding her chin toward the fireplace.

"This past spring," Irene beamed. "We had it done as a present for my parents' anniversary, and I had an extra print made for the house."

"It's beautiful," Sarah remarked, somehow managing to sound sincere. Irene's parents were retired; they spent most of the year in North Carolina, where her father played avid golf, and the hottest weeks of summer at their stately, fabulous Rochester home. When the old house burned down, Irene's parents had loaned her and Robert money for the down payment on the new construction. They'd also loaned the family money to replace their clothes, since they'd escaped the burning house in nightgowns and pajamas. Sarah had no doubts that everything had been paid back in full once the insurance money came through—Robert was the most financially assiduous man on the planet—but she still hated feeling like she was somehow still in debt to Irene's parents.

Robert shot her a swift, slightly pained look, and with a too-forced smile said, "We'll make room for your senior picture, when you have it taken."

Sarah said easily, "Class pictures… one more thing on my to-do list."

Irene said, "There's a pile of mail on your bed, including some things from Oneida. Maybe registration?"

"Yeah, I still need to sign up for courses." Sarah looked around. "Speaking of the little imp, where is he?"

"He's out with his friends at the water park," Irene said, glancing at her dainty sliver of a watch. "He should be home soon."

Sarah hefted her carry-on bag. "I'll take this upstairs," she said. "Dad, can you get those monsters into the laundry room?"

"Will do," Robert said.

The staircase wound around one side and swept up into a dramatic balcony that overlooked the living room. Down the hall to the right was Sarah's bedroom, large and spacious, tucked into a corner overlooking Irene's garden, the velvety lawn, and beyond that, a dense thicket of woods. Birds flitted into and out of birdfeeders in the back. Sarah had a large closet, built-in bookshelves, and her own bathroom.

"Oh, wow." Sarah stopped short, staring. "You redecorated."

"I hope you like it." Irene bustled over to the window to draw back the curtains. "You like green and blue, don't you?"

"Sure," Sarah responded. Her initial décor had consisted of dusty pink and orchid, the accents in sage green, and a strip of wallpaper trimmed with fireflies. Sarah had chosen the color scheme in a sentimental tribute to her destroyed girlhood bedroom, and she knew Irene had hated it for that very reason. Now the walls glowed a soft pearly white. The lavender carpet had been replaced with something thick and dark blue. The curtains, duvet, and even the sheets were all a mix of blue, teal green, and white. Sarah had to admit it was attractive, but she disliked having this change made without her consent or even her knowledge.

"It's nice," she said, unwilling to quarrel with Irene over something so trivial. And really, what did it matter? Sarah was only a couple of steps away from being out of this house permanently.

"We did the bathroom, too." Irene flicked on the light, showing that the glowing white paint had not been confined to the bedroom walls. The shower curtain, the rugs, the towels: all in midnight blue, teal green, and white.

"Wow." Casting about for something specific to remark on, Sarah fingered one of the hand towels and said, "They're so soft."

"They're very absorbent." Irene sounded pleased, though maybe a touch suspicious, that Sarah had fallen into line with so little fuss. "I already washed them to get the lint off."

So, in other words, they can't be brought back, Sarah thought.

"Thanks." Sarah returned to her room and began to sort through the pile of mail.

"Dinner's in five minutes," Irene said.

"Sure," Sarah responded, trying not to glare at her stepmother's back as she puttered out of the room.

(iv)

"Sarah!" Toby tore through the house like a small whirlwind, launching himself at his older sister. "Sarah came home!"

She laughed, picking him up and hugging him. "Toby Jingles!" She set him down quickly, noting with a pang that he had grown almost too tall and heavy for her to lift.

"Mike's mom took us to Water World, and I went down the big slide!"

"That's great," Sarah told him, smoothing down his still-damp hair. The last time she'd taken Toby to Water World, he'd still been small enough for the baby slide. He was taller now, reed thin, hair white-blond. The overall effect was that he'd transitioned from little boy to just plain boy. In Sarah's mind he was still a toddler, about three years old. She searched his face for signs of physical resemblance, hoping he'd take after Robert. But so far, Toby was like a small male clone of his mother. He and Sarah might not even be related.

"Come on and sit down," Irene said, steering Toby over to the dining room table.

Sarah would have preferred to eat in the kitchen, but even for a casual meal, Irene used the dining room. Everything here had been chosen to suit Irene's personality: the creamy wallpaper with its pale green pattern, the china cabinet full of her grandmother's antique dishes, the furniture, the Oriental rug under the table. Sarah had not had input into any of the house décor, apart from her own bedroom. The overall effect wasn't unattractive—Sarah mostly found it glacial and impersonal, like a furniture showroom—but it served as one more reminder that this was Irene's house—hers and Robert's and Toby's—but not Sarah's.

On one wall hung a tasteful framed photo from Robert's and Irene's wedding. On another was a photo of Irene with Toby, who'd been about two at the time, an enlargement of a wonderful picture Robert had taken outdoors in the springtime, down at Rosebriar Creek. There were a couple of nice pieces of artwork. Any stranger sitting down to eat in the dining room would not even guess at the presence of another child in the family.

After the fire, family and friends had made copies of lost photographs to give to Robert and Irene as gifts. While every single photo couldn't be replaced, many had, including all of Sarah's school pictures. But Irene had taken advantage of the move to the new house to subtly re-craft the family's iconography. The biggest picture of Sarah in the house was her formal high school senior portrait, which hung in the living room. The rest of the pictures were mostly small, informal photographs, placed in strategically innocuous spots around the house—on shelves and tables, in out-of-the-way corners, as if Irene did not wish to advertise Sarah's presence in the family too obviously. Indeed, in most of those pictures, Sarah was either by herself or with Robert, so that she almost seemed more like his niece than his daughter. There were two nice pictures of her with Toby, and there was one picture of the four of them together, taken on the front steps of Garrett Hall at Oneida when Sarah had first started college. Sarah found it telling that those three photos were down in the finished basement, carefully out of the sight of any visitors to the house.

While Toby chattered about his excursion to the water park, Irene handed around a large dish of salad. For beverages, there were tall, icy glasses of pink lemonade for everyone except Robert, who drank iced tea. Irene and Robert had a modest wine collection in the basement, but they reserved alcohol for formal dinners. After the salad, Irene brought out the main dish: ham and vegetable quiche for the adults, macaroni and cheese for Toby.

When Sarah could get a word in edgewise around her voluble younger brother, she told Robert and Irene about her last few weeks in France. There wasn't a lot to say: her exams had gone well, and Sarah had taken a celebratory excursion to Italy with her friends and boyfriend. She discreetly edited out the fact that she and Jean-Claude had shared a bed during that expedition. She mentioned her week in London but said nothing about her mother. In their turn, Robert and Irene told her about their trip in July to Montana. The conversation wound down over dessert: chocolate mousse. Sarah savored each tiny spoonful: Irene certainly knew how to cook—Sarah had to give her that much.

While Irene cleared the table, Sarah showed her father some photographs of the medieval church excavation she'd worked on, and he made intelligent remarks about the period when Avignon had been the seat of the popes. By then, Sarah was yawning with every second or third word, and the elegant clock was chiming 8:00 PM.

"I need to get to bed," Sarah laughed, standing.

Toby, who'd been playing in the living room, plastered himself around her. "Read me a story," he begged.

"Not tonight, Toby Jingles," she said, using her old nickname for him, which she knew irritated Irene. "Tomorrow night, okay?" She kissed his forehead and held him tightly: her most tangible reminder of the Labyrinth, an adventure he of course could not remember.

"Okay," he pouted.

Irene said, "Bath time for you, young man."

"Nooooo," Toby wailed, but his mother marched him by the scruff of his neck up the stairs. Sarah knew all protests would stop once he was in the water with his rubber ducky; then the challenge would be getting him out.

Back in her room—grateful for the quiet and privacy—Sarah finished sorting through her mail, discarding the junk and making notes on the things that needed tending, first and foremost her fall course registration. Then it was into the shower, to rinse off the grubby travel residue.

She was sitting in her chair, wrapped in her terry bathrobe and combing her hair, when there was a tap on her door.

"Come in," she called. Robert slipped into the room. "What's up?" she asked.

"I'm sorry about the picture," he said without preamble.

Sarah blinked. "The thing in the living room?"

"Yeah—I came home one day, and there it was. I asked if we could take it down, or at least move it to another room, out of consideration to you, and Irene didn't take it so well."

And you didn't have the balls to back her down, Sarah thought, but she kept her expression somewhere between neutral and sweetly surprised.

"It's okay," she told him, toweling her hair and tugging out a few more tangles. She winked. "Just hang my college picture on the front door or something."

He barked a short laugh. "When are you getting those done?"

"This fall," Sarah responded. "All the information's right here." She picked up a thick envelope and handed it to Robert. "They'll start setting up appointments in September, probably once the leaves turn. It's not cheap—even the most basic package is like two or three hundred." Oneida seniors usually had their class portraits taken with the university's stunning architecture or splendid natural scenery as a backdrop. Sarah was already toying mentally with the places where she'd like to have her own pictures done.

"Don't worry about it," Robert said, taking a quick glance down the price list. "We'll get the deluxe package."

"Dad, that's crazy." The deluxe package included a large, framed portrait and a number of smaller photos as well, and the cost was well over six hundred dollars.

"I want a good-quality picture we can put in the living room, and enough small pictures to send around to the family. Besides, your mother will want one."

Sarah laughed, "Yeah, I'm sure she'll find somewhere for it, now that Jeremy's inherited the old heap."

Robert looked pained, as he always did at the mention of Sarah's mother—especially if that included a mention of Jeremy, Linda's long-time boyfriend.

"How's she doing?" he asked after an awkward moment had passed.

"She's doing good," Sarah told him, untangling another section of her hair. "Still working, even though she doesn't really have to." Jeremy's father had died, leaving him a pile of money and a beautiful home in Wiltshire; Sarah had stayed there over her Christmas holidays. Linda had already been behaving very much as the lady of the manor, although she and Jeremy mostly divided their time between Jeremy's London flat and Linda's apartment in New York City, where she performed in plays and had guest roles in the occasional soap opera.

"She'll be on stage forever," Robert said. It hurt and embarrassed Sarah to know a part of her father would always be in love with Linda. Irene must certainly be aware of this; it might explain her antipathy toward Sarah, and her subsequent territorial decorating decisions.

From down the hallway, came Irene's muffled voice. "Robert, Toby wants goodnight kisses."

"All right," he called back. And to Sarah, "Night, sweetie."

"Goodnight, Dad," she smiled, but stuck out her tongue at the door when he'd gone. She wondered why she'd been so acquiescent, why she hadn't made a scene, crying and screaming and hurling invective at her stepmother. Mostly, she thought, because it wouldn't change a thing. The portrait of Robert, Irene, and Toby wouldn't budge from its place over the mantel, and Robert was too milquetoast to insist it be taken down—or, God forbid, insist that a proper family portrait of all four of them be taken.

With the tangles combed out, Sarah went back into the bathroom to blow dry her hair. The dark mane was so long now—she made a mental note to have it trimmed before she left for Oneida. Senior year, senior year. The words drummed into Sarah's mind. She'd been able to forestall senior jitters as long as she'd been in France and unable to make any plans or decisions, but now she was back in the States, the future directly ahead of her. At this time next year—not even a full year, just nine short months—Sarah would be graduating from Oneida, and she knew she didn't have much time to decide what to do after that. Find a job? Attend graduate school? Attempt both? Sarah knew one thing: she could not count on living in this house after graduation for any length of time.

She slid between the sheets of her bed, wiggling against the smooth cotton, smelling the crisp newness of the linens, and reached over to switch off the bedside lamp.

Stop worrying, she told herself. For crying out loud, you haven't even done your laundry yet. The thought had barely crossed her mind before darkness loomed up, and Sarah surrendered to blissful oblivion.

Tuesday, September 1, 1992

"Irene, I'm going out for a few hours," Sarah announced.

"Should I plan on you for supper?"

"Yeah, I'll be back by then."

"All right." Irene returned to her sewing machine, and Sarah bounded out to the garage.

She rolled down the car's window, even though the day was stifling, defiantly refusing to run the VW's air conditioner. The breeze across her face felt wonderful after the bottled-air environment of the house.

She was finally starting to feel like herself again. Monday, she'd slept until almost ten o'clock and had spent most of the day doing load after load of laundry and sorting through the clothes in her room, bagging up stuff to be given to charity, and making a back-to-school shopping list. My last one? she wondered. Did graduate students do back-to-school shopping? Scary to think that in a year, she'd find out. By the time she stopped feeling so torpid, the day was almost gone. In the afternoon, she'd drawn out her registration materials and had begun to think over her courses for the fall semester.

Even Irene had asked, in a perfectly friendly tone, what Sarah planned to take.

"My independent study," Sarah told her, preferring not to use the scary word thesis. "Plus the advanced seminar in art history." Both of those classes would be overseen by Victoria Hammersmith, her advisor. "An advanced German lit course. I'm trying to decide on a fourth course."

"No more Latin?" Irene asked.

"No, I'm all set with Latin," responded Sarah, feeling miffed that Irene remembered these details of Sarah's academic career. Sarah had picked up Latin fairly late—at the time, she'd assumed she was going to major in medieval studies, and so she'd crammed accelerated Latin courses into her summers, finally achieving a good working grip of that noble, ancient language, enough to get her through a doctoral program in medieval art history. She remembered telling her own mother about these plans and Linda's horrified reaction.

"Latin! Couldn't you take something a little less stuffy? How about Italian—it's so much prettier."

"I might major in medieval history," Sarah had told her. "You need Latin for that."

"Well, don't get so lost in your books you never come out again," Linda had said. "Don't you have a boyfriend yet?"

Even now, Sarah heaved a sigh, shaking her head. Her mother just didn't understand, and it irked her that Irene showed more interest in—and actively encouraged—Sarah's scholarly ambitions. Of course, that enthusiasm was in its own way self-serving: anything that would get Sarah out of the house met with Irene's unreserved approval.

Sarah shook herself out of the past, making the right-hand turn into downtown and pulling into the municipal parking lot, just as the tower clock in the big Congregational church struck noon. She shouldered her pocketbook and strode across the quiet street to Fiorentino's, a nice Italian bakery and sandwich shop, where she was meeting her friends for lunch.

Downtown Rosebriar Hollow was almost deserted, and the few cars that dotted Main Street sat sullenly under the dense, stifling heat of late August. This week before Labor Day, it seemed the town's entire population was on vacation. Sarah worked up a sweat just crossing the road, and escaped gratefully into the air-conditioned sanctuary of the restaurant.

"Are you by yourself?" the hostess asked with a smile. Sarah spotted a pair of what looked like local businesswomen, sitting at a table near the window. In a booth at the rear of the dining area was a young couple and their two kids—tourists passing through. Otherwise, the place was empty.

"I'm waiting for my friends—there'll be three of us," Sarah responded.

"Okay."

Sarah plunked down on a small bench near the door, glancing at her watch. Ruth and Stacey were both running late. She shuffled through the envelope of photographs she'd brought with her from her year abroad. The smiling faces of her friends in Avignon now looked like the faces of strangers, and even Jean-Claude looked like someone Sarah had never met. Impossible to believe that only a week ago, they'd all been hanging out together, speaking French, drinking wine, enjoying Provençal cuisine. A week ago, she'd been making love to Jean-Claude every night. She'd never see him again, and Sarah felt shocked by how little sorrow she'd experienced at their parting, like a book she'd read, enjoyed with all possible relish, then had set down on a table and forgotten about.

Still, it would make a good story, and Sarah found herself looking forward to the envy of her friends, neither of whom had gone abroad for junior year. Speaking of her friends, where were they? The minute hand of her watch slid down to 12:10. Sarah stood and poked her head out the restaurant door. The sidewalk lay empty. She let the door fall shut and plunked back down on the bench again. She squirmed. Hunger gnawed in her stomach.

At 12:15 she began to wonder if she'd gotten the wrong day. No, it was Tuesday. Noon on Tuesday at Fiorentino's. When Sarah had received her last letters from her friends they'd both agreed on this date, time, and place.

At 12:20, she went up to the counter and put in an order for a coke, a BLT, and some fries. She sat with her back to the counter, watching the door. Ten minutes later, the waitress came over and set down Sarah's order. She ate as slowly as she possibly could. By now it was almost 12:45, and Sarah knew that either she'd gotten the day wrong, or her friends had stood her up. She ordered a lemon gelato for dessert, spinning out another ten minutes. At last, with nothing else to do, Sarah paid her bill and left.

She fumed in the parking lot for a moment, then drove over a couple of streets, to Ruth's house. Sarah had been in classes with Ruth Klein since middle school, but they'd never had more than a passing acquaintance until senior year, when Ruth had joined the staff of the high school's arts and literary magazine, which Sarah had helped found as a sophomore. Ruth's father was a dentist, and his office occupied the first floor of the big old Victorian, the same vintage as Sarah's childhood home.

She knew right away nobody was there. The small paved lot in back of the house, where patients parked, was empty and forlorn. Sarah walked around to the side door and was just about to ring the bell when the door opened, and a middle-aged woman stepped onto the porch. She seemed astonished to see Sarah.

"Hi!" she said. "Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Ruth," Sarah told her.

"You didn't know? The entire family's away for the week."

"I had plans to meet Ruth today, and she never showed up." Even to her own ears, Sarah's voice sounded whiny and petulant.

The woman pulled shut the door. "Well, there's nobody here," she said. "I work for Dr. Klein, and the office is closed this week. I'm taking in their mail and watering their plants. I wouldn't have to do that if their daughter was around."

"Do you know where she is?" asked Sarah, trying to strike an adult tone of voice.

"I think she's somewhere with her college friends," the woman answered. "Dr. Klein said something about her hiking in the Pacific Northwest. He would've told me if she was coming back this week."

"Okay," Sarah answered.

"I'm sorry," the woman said, her expression kind. "Look, give me your phone number, and if Ruth turns up, I'll let her know you came by."

"Thanks," Sarah responded, fumbling into her purse for a notepad and a pen. She wrote her name and phone number on the paper. The woman took the slip and tucked it into her pocket.

"Have a nice day," she said.

"Yeah, you, too," answered Sarah, climbing back into the VW. She drove through the steaming mid-day heat almost to the other side of Rosebriar Hollow. This was a neighborhood of newer houses, a suburban development that had expanded out from the town's center during the sixties and seventies. Unlike the large Victorians, the "grand old dames" that dotted the downtown area, these were modest ranches and capes and saltboxes, some well-maintained, some running to shabby. Sarah spotted kids splashing around in swimming pools, adults in bathing suits sunning themselves on decks and porches.

Stacey McCalla lived in one of the older and smaller houses. The third of five kids, her parents had divorced when she was in middle school. Her mother, a nurse at a hospital in Rochester, had raised and supported the family almost single-handedly. Stacey was a small girl with a trim, athletic build, and Sarah recalled that as a kid she'd been a better-than-average gymnast. But Mrs. McCalla had lacked the funds to send her daughter for more advanced training, a quiet grief that Stacey had once admitted to Sarah.

They'd been casual acquaintances since elementary school—socializing in class but never outside—until sophomore year, the autumn after the Labyrinth, when Sarah had returned to school fired up with crazy confidence, feeling that she could accomplish anything, that no task was too daunting for her. She'd thrown herself into both her schoolwork and her social life, determined to forge stronger connections with her classmates. Stacey, mature and introverted, had been a natural compatriot. She'd been the first person Sarah had roped into starting a student-run literary and arts magazine.

Sarah parked the VW on the street, noting there were no cars in the driveway: Mrs. McCalla must be at work. Trying not to get her hopes too high, she rang the front doorbell.

A few moments later, the door opened, revealing a skinny sandy-haired boy in shorts and a t-shirt. Sarah could hear the tinny sound of voices from the television. The boy blinked in obvious surprise and asked, "Whassup?'

"Tommy?" Sarah laughed. It was the second of Stacey's two younger siblings.

He grinned. "Oh, man, it's you? Sarah, right?"

"Yeah, Stacey's friend. Is she around?"

He shook his head. "Nah, she's in that beach place."

"Beach place?" echoed Sarah. "Where's that?"

"Uh…" She could see him struggling to remember. "You know, that place they're always evacuating when there's a hurricane?"

"I think that covers most of the East Coast," Sarah chided gently. "I know she was working in Washington this summer. Was it Virginia, maybe?"

"No, um… it has a funny name. I forget the state it's in. It's like, I dunno, the Outer Rim or the Outer Reaches or something."

"The Outer Banks?" asked Sarah. "That's in North Carolina."

He snapped his fingers. "That's it," he said. "Some friends she made this summer invited her there, I guess."

"Did she leave a message for me?" asked Sarah. "We were supposed to get together today."

"Nope… she hasn't even been home. I mean, she was supposed to be home last week, but she called Mom and told her she was going to the Outer Beach instead."

"Do you know if she's coming back before Labor Day?"

"Dunno," he said. "I think maybe she's going straight to Brimmer from there."

Sarah didn't bother to correct his pronunciation of Bryn Mawr. She pulled out her notepad and pen, scribbled a brief note with her phone number, and said, "The next time she calls, can you or your mother give her this message?"

"Sure," said Tommy.

"Thanks," Sarah said. "You must be, what, almost in high school now?"

"Yeah, I'm starting this year," he grinned. "Lisa's a junior."

"Wow," Sarah laughed. "Time flies." She remembered when Stacey's sister Lisa had still been in middle school, and when Tommy had been a kindergartener in footie pajamas. Like Toby. "Have a great year," she said.

"Sure, thanks."

"Please don't forget to give that message to Stacey."

"Will do," Tommy said. He vanished back into the house.

(ii)

Sarah drove in aimless circles after that, cruising around Rosebriar Hollow, unwilling to go home and admit to Irene that her two best friends from high school had blown her off seemingly without a second thought.

Eventually the VW took her, almost of its own volition, past the town line, past strip malls, scrubby lots full of ragweed and goldenrod, tracts of suburban homes, and fields of corn grown taller than Sarah, eventually taking her onto the grounds of the Mendon Regional High School.

The cliché about everything looking smaller when you came home couldn't have been more apt. The school, once so vast in Sarah's mind, was shrunken, diminished. She cruised up the main entryway and into the administration parking lot, then around back to where the students parked. Both lots were utterly deserted, tufts of grass growing up through cracks in the pavement. The school building looked dilapidated under the unforgiving sun, the doors closed, windows blank. Sarah remembered vividly starting high school as a freshman, how enormous the school seemed compared to her middle school. She could bring to mind the visceral confusion, bordering on panic, the sense that she'd never learn her way around, and how just getting from class to class felt like an insurmountable task.

She parked the VW and got out, grimacing at the heat, which came up in baking hot waves from the asphalt, as well as from the sun overhead. Out of curiosity, she tried the nearest door: locked, of course. The teachers and custodians surely must be back at some point this week to get the place ready for the school year, which began after Labor Day, but maybe the staff had already come and gone for the day. Sarah checked her watch: it was almost three.

She wandered along the length of the wall, peering in through windows, trying to locate even one familiar landmark. This was the science wing, the tall stools now piled atop the black laboratory counters. The bulletin boards and chalkboards were empty and blank. Sarah frowned, going from window to window: was this the room where she'd had chemistry junior year? No, that had been up on the second floor. Maybe this next room had been where she'd taken biology lab. Sarah realized with a pang that something that once had seemed so vitally important to her—the location of a particular classroom—was now a blur, lost in the hazy, indistinct past.

She left the wall and strolled across the lot, up the grassy slope to the athletic fields. Here was the outdoor track, and further down, the tennis courts. In the distance lay the playing fields where student athletes would practice: football, soccer, field hockey. The fields were deserted; if any of the teams had pre-season practice, they weren't here now. Sarah kept walking, heedless of the heat and the sweat that ran down her sides. She'd never been much of an athlete, but she'd done well at some of her gym classes: tennis when the weather was good, cross-country skiing in the winter, volleyball on the indoor courts when it rained. Sarah walked the entire length of the hot-topped path, staring down at the cracked pavement, the brown grass. The tennis courts were empty; who would play in this heat?

The path ended where the building curved around, and there was the gym, the wing jutting out from the main body of the school. If Sarah focused hard enough, she could will herself back into her teenaged body, remember what it felt like to run out of the gym on a crisp October morning, tennis racket in hand, dashing up this hill with Stacey to claim the best court. Thirty minutes of volleying the fuzzy yellow ball would follow—they could never keep score accurately and would fabricate numbers when the indifferent gym teacher checked up on them.

"Forty-love," Stacey might say, her face completely straight. They'd lob the ball back and forth while the teacher watched, inevitably declaring Stacey the winner of the game or set. Then the teacher would leave, and the two girls would dissolve into giggles.

Sarah wondered about the kids who were attending the school now. Were the same gym teachers still here? It hadn't been that long. Sarah realized that in the time since she'd been gone, three generations of Mendon High students had graduated, and now there would be nobody left at the school who was there when Sarah had been a student. The kids who'd been freshmen—she'd known some of them through tutoring and student activities—when she was a senior, the last vestiges of Sarah's time at the school, had graduated the previous spring.

Sarah circled around the gym, which brought her back out to the front of the building. Here, along this sweeping U-shaped drive, the yellow school busses would pull up, disgorging their loads of students, and at the end of the day, the busses would pick them up again. Sarah had not forgotten her bus number—that, at least, she remembered—the 78 bus, the one that went to downtown Rosebriar Hollow. For three and a half years she'd taken that bus—the same route Ruth's house was on. For her final six months at the school, Sarah had driven from Happy Hidden Woods to the school; the independence should have pleased her, instead it had seemed only an emblem of something precious that had been irretrievably lost.

In the center of the U, on a small stage of grass, sat a statue of Rodin's The Thinker, presumably there to inspire the students' intellectual ambitions. For a good portion of the kids at Mendon High, largely the children of white, middle-class families, the ideals represented by the statue went without saying; academic achievement and social mobility were bred into them from nursery school. Most of the kids at the school went on to college, and the students in Sarah's immediate cohort had gained admission to some of the most prestigious universities in the country.

Dripping with sweat now, Sarah took refuge in the shade near the main entrance. She tried a couple of the front doors: all of them locked. She peered through windows into the corridor, but there was nothing to see beyond blank walls and gray floor tiles. Struck by sudden weariness, Sarah plopped down onto a nearby bench. She stared at her legs—shapely and eternally white: many generations of English and Irish ancestors pretty much guaranteed Sarah would never have a suntan. Still, her skin tone was nice—pale, but not pasty. Her feet in their chic sandals were pretty, and Sarah had painted her toenails a lively shade of fuchsia. She'd worn black shorts that showed off her trim figure and an elegant, silky blouse. Her jewelry was subtle and gold: necklace, earrings, a slim chain about her wrist. Everything she was wearing was now sweat-soaked and beyond anything but the clothes hamper.

She scowled, thinking how artfully she'd prepared for the lunch with her friends, everything calculated to inspire admiration and maybe a little—okay, a lot—of jealousy. Sarah felt like her mask had been ripped off, leaving her naked and exposed. Why the hell did I try? she wondered. I'm still the same dweeb I was when I started high school seven years ago.

It was her very dorkiness, of course, that had caused her to bond with Stacey and Ruth in the first place. Stacey didn't have a lot of money; her family wasn't poverty-stricken, but they hadn't enjoyed the luxuries of more affluent families—certainly nothing like the people who lived in Happy Hidden Woods. She was an intelligent girl, though, and had eventually gone to Bryn Mawr on almost full financial aid.

Ruth's parents had plenty of money, but she came from a Jewish family so conservative that they wouldn't let her wear short-sleeved shirts to school, not even when the weather was hot. That in itself wasn't unusual—the greater Rochester area had a thriving Jewish community—but Ruth was short and solid; she perspired a lot; she wore glasses. She'd cultivated an air of indifference, proudly solitary, never reaching out to any of the other kids—later, Sarah realized, as a pre-emptive defense against scorn and rejection.

Sarah recalled when her friendship with Stacey had changed: when Stacey, on a lark, had tried out for the field hockey team junior year. By senior year, she was good enough to play varsity, and she inevitably began making friends with the other girls on the team. Around the same time, Sarah had been looking for a co-editor for the literary magazine, after her previous co-editor had graduated. Somewhat to Sarah's amazement, Ruth had volunteered and shown herself more than competent. After the fire, it was Ruth who had offered to have Sarah stay with her until the new house was ready, Ruth who'd offered a comforting shoulder when Sarah had cried her eyes out. Ruth had even expressed sympathy about the move to Happy Hidden Woods.

Sarah knew it was petty, but she felt like Stacey had never fully understood about the fire—certainly she would not have offered to have Sarah stay with her. Logistically, it would have been impossible: at the time, Stacey's older brother was living at home, commuting to SUNY-Geneseo, sharing a room with little Tommy. Stacey herself had to share a room with her sister Lisa; there were no extra rooms in the house. Ruth's parents had been able to offer Sarah a room with a private bath. Still, Sarah felt like she'd never gotten much sympathy from Stacey, and perhaps for that reason, she'd drifted away from Stacey and bonded with Ruth.

Ruth had had a rocky start to her collegiate career. She'd gone to Brandeis, dutifully, her father's alma mater, but had transferred after a year to Stanford. The last time Sarah had seen her, she'd been astonished at the change: Ruth had lost weight, shed the conservative clothes in favor of a more modern wardrobe, exchanged the glasses for contact lenses, and had restyled her hair. She'd seemed in a much better place, socially and emotionally.

Stacey had thrived in the all-women's environment at Bryn Mawr, where she'd played for the field hockey team, double-majored in economics and politics, and was already looking at law schools. Sarah had last seen her a year ago: they'd gone out to eat and seen a movie, and had sat up most of the night in the finished basement at Sarah's house, talking. It was the closest Sarah had felt to her friend in years, and she'd been looking forward to renewing those ties.

Gee, I guess you're really important to both of them, Sarah sneered at herself. Neither one could even be bothered calling the house and leaving you a message. She was struck by a sudden irrational thought: had Irene deliberately withheld messages in order to drive a wedge between Sarah and her friends? No, that wasn't her style—she was always happy to get Sarah out of the house.

Aware of the passing time—and her complete physical isolation—Sarah jumped up and strode out to the main walkway. Maybe it was the way the heat rose, shimmering from the hot top, but she thought she glimpsed someone in the distance, rounding the far wall.

"Hey!" Sarah took off at a sprint, running alongside the wall of the arts wing. When she rounded the corner, of course, nobody was there. Her car sat in the student parking lot: she'd made a circuit of the entire school building. Sarah doubled over for a moment, gasping from the exertion.

After she caught her breath, Sarah peered into some of the lower-level windows of the art classrooms, but discovered only more stools piled up on top of benches, empty bulletin boards, empty shelves that during the school year would hold student work and supplies. The art studios for the more advanced courses were on the second floor. Sarah glanced up at those windows, struck by the ferocity of her yearning: to go back, even for one day. Not that she longed for the awkwardness of adolescence, or the complete dependence on her parents. She liked being an adult. But those days had held a carefree pleasure of which Sarah had been unaware at the time. Most of the future had been still comfortingly far away; Sarah's greatest concern had been to achieve the best possible grades in her classes.

Her logical brain recognized that this wasn't really true. She'd worried about a lot of things: the battery of standardized exams that began in sophomore year and didn't end practically until graduation; the often Byzantine college application process; her social standing in the high school pecking order; her lack of a steady boyfriend.

Still, there had been many happy afternoons spent in those upstairs art studios, painting or drawing or casting pots on the pottery wheel, learning how to spin and weave. The young, bohemian-chic teacher who'd taught the fibers courses, Ms. Cassidy, had taken a particular liking to Sarah. Together they had pored over textbooks showing photos of the Bayeux Tapestry, and Ms. Cassidy had suggested Sarah create her own tapestry for her senior project. The melding of the creative arts and European medieval-renaissance history had deeply appealed to Sarah. The resulting three foot square tapestry depicting Henry VIII surrounded by miniatures of his six wives and Tudor heraldic devices had drawn raves from the art faculty and had won Sarah a prestigious award at graduation.

It was Ms. Cassidy, also, who had suggested medieval studies as a possible major when Sarah had still been a sophomore, and Ms. Cassidy's encouragement had prompted Sarah to add Latin to her already impressive academic credentials. After starting college, Sarah had written quick notes to her favorite high school teachers to let them know she was faring well and to thank them for their guidance. Ms. Cassidy had written back a few times, thrilled to learn about her protégée's progress. But after freshman year, they'd stopped communicating, and Sarah now felt a twinge of guilt.

I should write to her again, let her know about last year, tell her I'm graduating next May, Sarah thought. Then she wondered why she was doing all this, why this sudden moronic nostalgia for a school she'd enjoyed but had been more than happy to leave behind. You can't go back, Sarah told herself. She wondered if she were already prematurely mourning her departure from Oneida, where she'd known some of the happiest times of her life. Stop it, she told herself. You haven't even started your senior year yet, and you're already moping.

Sarah heard something, an odd sound she couldn't identify, and she stepped back from the wall, glancing up and down the length of the building. It occurred to her that anybody could be in the school right now, looking down at her from one of those windows, and she wouldn't be able to see them because of the way the light fell. Had that sound been a door closing? A bit of debris blowing about? But the day was airless, not a gasp of wind. There were no cars besides Sarah's to be seen, although that didn't mean the school was unoccupied.

Sarah turned and hurried across the student parking lot, which now felt like a desert. She realized her mouth was parched: she hadn't had anything to drink since lunch, and she'd been sweating profusely. By the time she reached her car, she was light-headed from heat and thirst. Sarah turned her key in the ignition, wondering in a brief burst of panic what she would do if the car didn't start: the nearest store or gas station was easily five or six miles away, and Sarah didn't think she could walk so far in this heat. But the VW started with no difficulty, and Sarah locked the doors, switching on the air conditioning full blast. She pulled out of the parking lot and cruised down the main drive, but she didn't breathe easily again until she was out on the main road, back where the presence of other people could be seen and felt.

(iii)

When she got home, she was relieved to see Irene and Toby were both out, her father not yet home from work. Sarah first went to the kitchen for a tall glass of cold lemonade, then up to her bedroom. She checked the notes from her friends. The letter from Stacey had arrived in late July, in response to one that Sarah had written earlier in the month.

I'd love to get together, Stacey wrote, her letter neatly typed. I can't wait to hear about France—it sounds like you're having a blast over there. DC has been hotter than hell—I love my internship, but I'll be glad to get back upstate. The internship ends August 28, and I'll be home by Sunday, so I can definitely do lunch on Tuesday. See you then!

Ruth's letter had come only five days before Sarah had left Avignon for London, a handwritten scrawl on three pages of light blue stationery, the envelope postmarked in Seattle, where Ruth had been spending the summer.

I'll be home for the last two weeks of August to visit Mom and Dad, do laundry, get stuff together before I fly back to Stanford. I can't wait to show you pictures from Seattle—I'm going to look around here for grad school, or maybe work in the city for a couple of years. This place is amazing. I think you'd love it! Anyway, I'll meet you at Fiorentino's on Sept 1, and we can compare notes. It's been forever! Love, Ruth.

Sarah tossed the letters onto her desk, satisfied she had not mixed up the day or location, but still miffed that both of her friends had blown off their lunch date without explanation. Weary and sweaty, Sarah trudged into the bathroom for a shower.

She debated lying to Robert and Irene about what had happened, then decided it was silly and pointless to fabricate some story. It was her social life, not theirs, so why should they care whether Sarah's friends stood her up or not? But as it turned out, there was no need: at dinner that night, neither Robert nor Irene even asked Sarah how her day had gone, and Sarah volunteered no details.

Wednesday, September 2

The formal and semi-formal dresses in the windows of Gantos beckoned to Sarah, and she wavered before veering into the shop and heading straight for the racks of finery. Already she held several shopping bags, everyday clothes she'd need for the new school year, and a bag full of cosmetics and toiletries from the RX Place. She really didn't need to spend any more money, but she'd completely forgotten about formal attire. Senior year had two or three dressy events on the calendar, culminating with the Senior Ball in May.

Sarah rummaged through the racks, shaking her head: everything was strapless, or decorated with oversized bows or flowers. Just what every woman needs, Sarah thought. A gigantic flower right on her ass. She debated how many dresses should she buy. Should she get something full-length and formal now, or wait until the following spring? A sheath? A mini-dress? Something with a cocktail-length skirt?

Sarah decided she didn't have the energy to try on full-length gowns. The senior ball was nine months away—plenty of time to find a suitable dress. She thought back to her high school prom gown, which Irene had sewn, after Sarah had been unable to find anything off the rack that fit her womanly body. Since then, she'd lost weight, and her figure had assumed its adult proportions. Scary to think I still had some puppy fat on me back then, Sarah thought. She grabbed a couple of short dresses and ducked into the changing room.

With a surprising lack of fuss, Sarah settled on a simple black sheath, the straps wide enough to wear one of her own bras, the fabric matte rather than shiny. It looked good, and Sarah already had a pair of silver dress sandals and a matching clutch, prom accessories still in good condition. Bravo, she thought wearily, pulling out her credit card one more time.

On the drive home, Sarah wondered if she would be able to find a date for the events to which she'd wear the black dress. Probably—attracting male attention had never been any kind of challenge for Sarah, usually requiring little more than a winning smile and a snug jersey. With only a bit more effort, she could almost certainly find a steady boyfriend for the year. Instead of filling her with the pleasure of anticipation, the prospect seemed tedious instead. Why? Sarah wondered. She'd started dating Jean-Claude with no compunctions whatsoever.

She thought of Joshua, her first bed partner, during that golden, endless summer between high school and college. Every time they'd made love had felt like a huge momentous occasion. But with Jean-Claude, sex had been so unremarkable, removed from the rest of her life—maybe because she'd always spoken with him in French, maybe because she'd been in another country, with no friends or family members to observe or pass judgment, maybe because she'd known the affair would end in a year and she would have no obligations to Jean-Claude other than a graceful farewell. Like an affair in Las Vegas or on a tropical cruise, there were no expectations of anything beyond mutual pleasure. She thought of all the things she'd planned to tell her friends about him: his parents named him after Jean-Claude Killey. He was so amazed I was learning Latin! He could cook the most fantastic meals on a tiny hot plate! Sarah scowled, changing lanes so abruptly that another driver honked in complaint.

And those had been her only two sexual affairs; at twenty-one, that felt downright prudish by Cosmopolitan standards. Sarah had had plenty of opportunity for other relationships, especially once she'd started college, but any time a guy at Oneida had pressed for more than one or two dates, Sarah had backed away. She told herself she would love to have a boyfriend, but that she'd never met anyone she'd liked enough to pursue seriously. Sarah pressed down on the accelerator, glaring at the road: you know perfectly well why you don't want a steady boyfriend. Or, rather, she did, but only if the relationship came with an expiration date.

The voice of reason in her mind said, Look, you won't even be twenty-two until December. What's the rush? If you go to grad school, you might meet someone more interesting than college guys: more mature, more mentally compatible. You're a long way from dying an old maid. Just chill out, and someone will come along when you least expect it.

But that other voice in her mind, the voice Sarah thought of as the Evil Cynic said, Yeah, right! Every guy you meet is just not going to measure up to your fifteen-year-old notion of the perfect man. No one ever will. You're going to die old, alone, and unhappy, because you already spurned the one man you wanted most. You had to reject him in order to defeat him. So guess what, Kid? You're going to be miserable and sexually unfulfilled for the rest of your life. This was followed by a vision of herself in thirty or forty years, gray-haired, living alone in an apartment full of books, drinking tea with a couple of cats in her lap.

"Oh, shut up," Sarah grumbled out loud. "I am so not going to end up like that!"

Yeah, right, Kid, the Evil Cynic said. Keep telling yourself that.

A driver behind Sarah honked angrily, and she changed lanes to let him get past. Then she exploded, "Oh, fuck!" as she went flying right past her exit.

Thursday, September 3

Sarah woke up, blinking and staring at the ceiling of her bedroom. She turned over and stretched, heaving a loud sigh. Maybe due to her inner dialogue of the day before, she'd spent much of the night dreaming about Jareth. She could recall nothing specific, only that he'd been there, just out of sight, as she'd wandered the tangled paths of the Labyrinth. A surge of horny longing welled up in her, and she debated masturbating, but that would only relieve the physical itch. The yearning for love would not be so easily gratified. And she knew from experience that once the orgasmic euphoria wore off, she would be left feeling even more low, as frustrated as ever.

This is ridiculous, she thought. You can't have him, Sarah. Even if you could, would you want to? He'd mess with your head in no time flat.

Any more than I'm already messed up? she wondered.

She knew a Freudian would have a field day with this a case like this. Jareth no doubt represented a father figure of the deep Id, and that Sarah's obsession with him represented a fear of losing the security of childhood, or perhaps a desire to surrender her autonomous self to an all-powerful male authority figure. A Freudian would trace back to the divorce of Sarah's parents her inability to form a permanent, mature adult bond. No doubt there would be some gobbledygook about the lack of a mother, a true female role model, to say nothing of her resentment of Irene—Irene, who had borne Robert the all-important male child, Irene who had usurped Sarah's place as the alpha female in Robert's life.

But that was psychologically too pat. Sarah did genuinely want to meet someone, fall in love, marry, have children. Maybe not right now, but definitely within the next five or ten years. She acknowledged that she was a fussy customer, and finding her life mate would probably take time. She never would be one of those women who would settle for anything wearing trousers, but that hardly meant she was doomed to a life of spinsterhood. Certainly she had no wish to surrender her independence and free will to anyone, no matter how attractive, seductive, or sexually magnetic he might be. That would still be servitude; even velvet chains would chafe.

Sarah folded her arms underneath her head, listening to the muffled sounds of birdsong outside the window. Daylight filtered around the blinds. It was Thursday. Today, the new freshmen would arrive at Oneida, a cavalcade of cars and mini-vans pulling up alongside the Frosh Quad, the four dormitories where first-year students were housed. Sarah imagined it: the nervous excitement, the anxiety of meeting a new roommate, the physical labor of getting carloads of luggage up to a dorm room, all while chatting with other students, trying to remember names, make friends, make good first impressions.

She'd gotten along tolerably well with her freshman roommate, but they'd had little in common and had quickly settled into different social circles. In an introductory psychology course, Sarah had met Raelin Bourke, her best friend at Oneida. They'd sat next to each other at the first lecture, and Raelin had loaned Sarah a pen when the one she was using ran out of ink. Two days later, they'd found themselves in the same lab section. Raelin was a studio art major. With Sarah majoring in art history, they were both eligible for housing in Riley Residential College, a living community for majors in the arts. They'd roomed together sophomore year. While Sarah had been in France, Raelin had spent the year at the Parsons School of Design. They'd both be living in Riley again for their senior year.

And then it'll be over, and I'll never see her again.

God, why did she have to be so morose about everything? Maybe it was the weather—the forecast kept promising relief from the oppressive heat and humidity, but every time Sarah checked the weather reports, the cold front seemed to be stalled out somewhere over Manitoba. Even inside Irene's climate-controlled palace, Sarah could feel the hot, sticky weight laying over the house like a ton of wet cotton.

She thought again of the new freshmen, this time with a stab of envy. She wished she could be among them now, with four years still ahead of her, rather than almost behind her. Sarah grimaced. First you want to go back to high school, then you don't want to leave college—wow, you're really going retro, aren't you? Peter Pan, much? Maybe this explained the appeal of graduate school. A Ph.D. would take years to complete—seven years at least. By the following September, she might well be ensconced in another college or university, another bubble of cozy security. And if she pursued a career in academia, she'd never have to leave school.

Still, a doctoral program was very different from an undergraduate degree. Sarah would have to find some kind of work, teaching or doing research, to provide practical experience. She would need to attend academic conferences, make professional contacts in the field, immerse herself in that world.

I can do it, she thought. I've done everything else.

Sure she could—but did she want to?

That, Sarah mused, is the million dollar question.

She threw back the bed covers and padded into the bathroom. Time to get moving—she had an appointment to get her hair trimmed that morning, and she'd promised to take Toby to the movies in the afternoon.

Friday, September 4

Irene came in from her morning errands and handed a small bundle of mail to Sarah. It turned out mostly to be a lot of junk, plus her most recent bank statement. She carefully searched the mail, as she'd been doing since Tuesday, for any correspondence from her friends, even a postcard. But there was nothing.

One of the items was a continuing education brochure from Rochester University. Sarah sat at the kitchen table, flicking through the pages of newsprint, until one course offering made her pause and groan out loud.

"What?" asked Irene, putting groceries into the pantry.

"Oh, nothing. There's this GRE prep course at Rochester—it just reminded me I'm gonna need to take the GRE this fall for my grad school applications."

"What about Oneida? Do they offer prep courses?"

"I don't know if I'll have time. Actually, I could take the one at Rochester if I wanted—it's kind of a cram session over Thanksgiving."

"How many days?"

"Friday and Saturday," Sarah told her. "Eight hours both days. Friday is the math review; Saturday's the verbal review."

"So, sign up for it," Irene encouraged.

"It's a lot of sitting," Sarah grumbled. "And like half my freaking vacation."

"Do you need the review?" asked Irene.

"Yeah, for math especially," answered Sarah. Her last math class had been a freshman year statistics course. "Most of the exam's geometry and algebra—it's not like calculus or anything. The verbal test is easy, but I need to brush up on the math—I haven't done that stuff since high school."

"When's the exam?"

"I'd have to call ETS, but I think there's one in September and one in December. I remember some of the seniors taking the one in December. Some of them took it in September so they could take a subject exam in December." Sarah prayed she would not need a subject exam.

"Well, the timing is good," said Irene. Her sandals tapped against the expensive flooring as she put milk and eggs into the refrigerator.

"Yeah." Sarah stared glumly at the brochure, irritated by this reminder of yet one more thing she would need to tackle. Not that it should be a huge deal—she'd always done well on standardized exams, one of the things in which she took pride. Her SAT scores had been almost perfect, and she'd aced so many Advanced Placement exams that she'd actually started Oneida with sophomore standing. Avoiding a lot of intro-level classes had meant she'd had time for more advanced classes in her major.

God, I'm such a dork, she thought.

"How many days do you have at Thanksgiving?" Irene asked.

"Five," Sarah told her. "Wednesday through Sunday. Do we have any plans for the holiday?"

"Not yet," said Irene. "Would it be easier for you if we did something here, rather than go visiting?"

"Actually, yeah, that'd help a lot."

Irene said, "I'll talk to your father, and we can plan to have company here. We haven't hosted Thanksgiving in a while. Maybe it'll be our turn this year."

"Thank you so much," Sarah said, astonished once again by Irene's willingness to help out with her educational endeavors. With a glance at the clock, she said, "You mind if I make a long-distance phone call?"

"Not at all."

Sarah went into her father's small home office and sat at his desk, where she picked up the phone and asked Information for the ETS office in New Jersey. It looked like she was going to have to take the damned review course after all. It wasn't just the lost vacation time that Sarah resented. She was almost certain to have a pile of homework to complete over the break. She thought of her Tuesday schedule. Her only class was the German lit course, which ended at 2:30. She could leave Oneida as soon as class ended and drive straight home. That would give her Tuesday night and all day Wednesday for homework. If Irene and Robert hosted Thanksgiving at the house, that would give Sarah some time on Thursday as well. She could be back at Oneida by noon on Sunday, which would give her all afternoon and evening. Sarah knew the prep course was doable, but it would require the discipline of strict time management.

So much for getting together with Stacey or Ruth, she thought mournfully. But then she reconsidered: I could still go out with them Saturday night, if I'm not completely wiped.

There was a click, and the sound of a phone ringing: Sarah wrenched her attention back to the matter at hand.

(ii)

The phone call went well, and within ten minutes, Sarah was signed up for the general exam in December. There was no subject exam for art history, one less thing to worry about. Resolutely, she clipped the registration form out of the continuing education flyer and filled it out with lines of her neat printing, signing up for the GRE prep class. She wrote out a check for the fee and tucked the whole business into an envelope.

"I'm gonna run this downtown," Sarah told Irene. "Then I'm going swimming. I'll be back by dinner."

"All right," Irene said. "Keep an eye on the weather. They're forecasting thunderstorms."

"Yeah, I will." Sarah shouldered her purse and a small tote bag.

Outside, a thin layer of scummy, almost yellowish clouds covered the sky, and the humidity was unbearable. Sarah didn't try to fuss with the car windows: she ran the AC all the way downtown. She parked in the municipal lot and dropped her registration form into the mailbox in front of the post office. Then she crossed the road and walked down half a block to the community swimming pool. She was soaked with sweat and felt half-dead by the time she got there.

At the front entrance, a teenage girl sat collecting money. A sign on the door announced that after Labor Day weekend, the pool would be closed for the season. The woman in front of Sarah was arguing about it.

"Are you kidding me?" the woman said. "You guys can't stay open another week?"

The girl shook her head. "No, it'll be too cold after this weekend."

"It's ninety degrees!"

With a laugh, the girl said, "No, it really will be too cold."

"Incredible," the woman said, heading for the women's locker room. Sarah paid her two dollar entry fee and followed the woman inside.

"Will it seriously be too cold?" the woman asked Sarah. She was about twenty-five, tall and athletic-looking. She wore her blonde hair cropped stylishly short. Sarah envied how good the cut looked on her; she would never have the nerve to cut her own hair so short.

"Yeah," Sarah responded. "I mean, the weather's supposed to change tonight. You'll be amazed how much cooler it is by tomorrow. By the time Labor Day's over, it'll be way too cold to swim outside." She pulled out her bathing suit. "Besides, the kids'll be back in school, so there's really no point in keeping the place open."

"I guess not," the woman said, stripping naked, her unselfconsciousness as shocking as her spiky short hair. She slithered into a one-piece Speedo swimsuit.

"Are you from around here?" asked Sarah.

"From Maine, by way of Boston," the woman said. "I'm doing grad work at Syracuse right now, but I've been house-sitting in town all summer."

Sarah laughed. "You can't swim outside in upstate New York after Labor Day. I know it's hard to believe right now, but we'll be wearing sweatshirts by Monday."

The woman made a face as she pulled a cap and goggles out of her bag. "Where I come from, we swim in the Atlantic practically until October."

"Brrr," Sarah shuddered. Then she asked, "So what are you in grad school for?"

"Human development," the woman answered. "I'm in their doctoral program. Classes don't start 'till next week." She stuck her feet into a pair of flip-flops and threw a bright orange towel with the SU logo over one shoulder. "The last gasp of freedom."

Sarah turned her back slightly as she got into her bathing suit, hauling her breasts up into the top. Right now, she was as thin as she'd ever been, mostly the result of walking everywhere in Avignon—incredible what a difference not having a car made—but she still had a D-cup bust. She couldn't wear the type of Speedo the blond woman had on, not without making a burlesque spectacle of herself. Sarah had a Jantzen suit with extra support in the top, the whole thing overall more modest than she would have liked. For the beach, Sarah had a black bikini that turned heads; she'd seen men do double- and triple-takes when she walked past.

Rosebriar Hollow's municipal pool was grand, fifty meters long, the kind of luxury the town's affluent tax base could provide. In the early mornings, a local swim club worked out there. In late afternoons, they'd return for another three hours; Sarah couldn't imagine it—five hours a day, six days a week. In the middle of the day, the lane lines were rolled back so that kids could play in the shallow end, their parents—mostly stay-at-home moms like Irene, and the occasional vacationing dad—lolled on deck chairs, soaking up the sun. In the deep end, lane lines across the width of the pool created an area for adults to swim laps.

Down at the shallow end, the kids splashed and shrieked. Only three other adults were using the lanes, two swimming competently, one elderly man doing some bizarre variation on the elementary backstroke, looking like a beetle on its back. Sarah took a lane next to the tall blonde woman, who had already put on her cap and was adjusting her goggles with quick, expert tugs. In a mesh bag beside her, she had a kickboard and a pull buoy and a pair of short fins, and she was consulting a typewritten workout inserted in a plastic sandwich bag. Sarah envied the woman's degree of ambition.

The blonde woman slid into the water, pushed off the wall, and struck out into the lane with long, easy strokes. Sarah sat with her feet in the water, tucking her long hair up inside her swim cap, watching until the blonde woman reached the end of the lane and executed a superb flip turn, spinning over like a chair, her legs bent at a perfect ninety-degree angle. Sarah made a disgruntled face: she'd never fully mastered flip turns during her childhood swimming lessons. She knew how to somersault in the water, but something about figuring out exactly where to time her turn so that she'd hit the wall just right had been more challenging. She'd also hated the pressure of kids swimming up behind her and feeling like they were going to collide with her if she didn't get into and out of the walls fast enough.

She put on her goggles, took a deep breath, and pushed herself off the edge of the pool. The cold water was biting, despite the heat of the past week, and it discouraged lingering. Sarah took off with a fast crawl stroke, trying to get her blood moving. She recalled her swim-lesson days, getting into this pool in June when the water felt as cold as glacial run-off; the worst bit had been hanging out in the water, shivering while she waited for the instructor to finish telling the kids what to do. The water in August wasn't much warmer, even though it had been sitting under the sun all summer long.

At last she warmed up and settled into a comfortable groove, cruising up and down the lane at a not-too-challenging pace. In the lane next to her, the blonde woman completed two laps for every one of Sarah's, her strokes enviably efficient, her turns crisp and fast and sharp as a scalpel. She didn't just swim back and forth: she was clearly doing particular exercises, kicking and pulling and doing one-armed drills. She also did sets where she would sprint explosively fast, then swim more slowly for a couple of laps, then sprint again. In particular, Sarah envied the woman's butterfly: she remembered all too well the difficulty of that stroke.

The repetitive motion settled Sarah's mind into a comfortable lull, and her thoughts drifted back to the past, to the days when Robert would bring her here for lessons. He would sit on the deck making awkward small talk with the other parents, and when Sarah got out of the water, he would hand her a towel and tell her how well she'd done. Sarah had a sudden, new appreciation for how lonely Robert must have been during the years between Linda and Irene, how difficult it must have been for him to socialize as a single father.

Swimming made her think inevitably of Joshua, his thatch of sun- and chlorine-bleached hair, his almond-shaped eyes. They'd met at Syracuse the summer before Sarah started college. Her first two summer Latin classes had been at Rochester, but when Sarah had outgrown what they offered, she'd turned to the summer program at Syracuse. She'd sublet a room in an apartment near campus, and that had been her first real taste of college life, taking classes and enjoying the freedom of being on her own. Josh had been a fellow student, another medieval enthusiast, and he'd invited Sarah to join a local chapter of the SCA.

A competitive high school swimmer, Josh had coaxed Sarah into the main university pool and also the city's outdoor municipal pool, no warmer than the one in Rosebriar Hollow. She remembered watching him work out, falling in love with his long, lean, sun-golden body. Even now, she grinned thinking of his reaction when she'd asked him if he was going to swim at the University of Southern California.

"Are you kidding?" he'd guffawed. One of the things Sarah liked about him was his utterly unfiltered mirth, the way he would bust out laughing, heedless of what anyone else thought. When he'd caught his breath, he'd said, "The USC Trojans? Man, those guys'd eat me alive." He'd then gone into a long, rambling dissertation about the USC swimmers who'd qualified for US national teams. Sarah loved his dorky enthusiasms; it had been one of their bonding points.

Liberated from parental scrutiny, dating him had been a novel experience. Sarah didn't think she would have slept with him if she'd been living at home. They'd both been lucky to have apartment-mates who weren't around much. The opportunity could not have been more perfect, and after only a few dates, Sarah had let Josh know, without mincing words, that she wanted him to end her virginity. It had been a mutual first, which had surprised her at the time, but now not so much—Josh had been good-looking, but in an odd kind of way, and underneath his happy-go-lucky exterior, rather shy. Their first few sexual encounters, Sarah had had to take the initiative almost completely. She smiled into the water, remembering how she'd had to coax him to take a turn on top. What an absolute doll he'd been. She recalled that their first time hadn't even hurt that much—maybe the effects of the adrenaline—though she'd been sore, deliciously sore, the next day.

Sarah tried to will herself back into the skin of that girl: carefree, sensual, basking in the hormonal glow of new sex. Definitely one of her very best summers: long, warm days, her mind bent on intellectual inquiry, the smug thrill of mastering the finer points of a difficult language. Long, lingering afternoons in the library or the language labs, perfecting grammar and memorizing vocabulary. Long, lavender evenings with Josh: wandering around campus together, going to SCA meetings (Sarah had been a standout in archery), going to movies. Long, warm nights spent in each other's arms, learning each other's pleasures.

Two things surprised Sarah in hindsight: one, that she'd parted from Josh at the end of August with so little grief. Much like her parting from Jean-Claude three years later, it was just something she'd known would happen and which she accepted. She and Josh were going their separate ways—to college on opposite coasts. Their affair had been marvelous, but neither expected it could continue. She'd never seen or heard from him again.

The second thing, of course, was that she'd had no serious boyfriends for two years after that. Every time she'd been tempted, she'd drawn back. Maybe what she really wanted was to be able to have sex without anyone from her everyday life knowing about it. That thought gave Sarah some pause: was she really so prudish? So self-conscious? Why should she be? It was 1992. Lots of people had pre-marital sex. She knew Irene would disapprove, but she didn't think even Robert would honestly care, so long as the sex as fully consensual and Sarah was using birth control. Obviously Sarah's friends and classmates wouldn't give two hoots to hell whether she was screwing around or not, and those closest to her would probably be happy to see her in a steady relationship. So why the reluctance?

She knew why. In the furthest recesses of her mind, where truth could not hide, Sarah knew that none of those men, not even Josh and Jean-Claude, were really what she wanted.

She glided into the wall, pausing for a rest. In the next lane, the blonde woman was resting also, drinking from a water bottle.

"You're good," Sarah told her. "I'm jealous."

"Thanks," the woman responded.

Sarah found herself asking, "Did you go right to grad school from college?"

The woman said, "No, I worked for a while. I taught English in Japan for a year. I did some tutoring and was an intern at a magazine in Boston. My minor was in theater, so I did some work with an improv troupe."

"Pretty eclectic," Sarah said.

"Yeah, I was trying to decide what I wanted. I'm glad I didn't go into a Ph.D. program in American lit, which was Plan A. All those little jobs made me realize: you know what I really like? Personal narratives. The stories that frame people's lives. We all have them."

No kidding, Sarah thought.

"So, I applied for a program in developmental psych, and my thesis is on how kids develop their personal narratives as they grow up."

"That is so cool," Sarah said enviously. "I'm in my last year at Oneida now, and I'm trying to figure out if I wanna go straight to grad school or not."

"There's no right answer," the blonde woman said. "I know plenty of people who went straight to grad school, and people who went after like ten or fifteen years working or having kids. You wouldn't believe the people in my program in their thirties or forties. If you're not really ready, don't rush."

Sarah said, "Part of it is I've killed myself learning like three different languages, and I'm afraid I'll lose them if I don't keep using them."

The woman asked, "What languages?"

"French, German, Latin," Sarah told her. "I'm doing medieval art history."

With a low whistle, the blonde woman said, "Wow, that's impressive. I have no idea what the field is like, but yeah, you might want to go right away. The last thing you'd want is to have to re-learn Latin."

"I just got back from a year in France," Sarah went on. "So, all this future stuff's been on hold, and now I have to deal with everything at once. I'm gonna spend half my Thanksgiving break in a GRE prep course, and I have to take the exam in December."

"Yeah, that's one of those things you can't put off," the woman said. She took another drink of water. "The review course is a great idea. The first time I took the GRE, I bombed. So I took a prep course, and my math score went up like 200 points."

"That's awesome," Sarah responded. "Now I don't feel so bad about losing half my vacation."

"It's so worth it," the woman said. She looked at her watch, one of those funky waterproof sport watches. "Gotta finish my workout," she laughed.

"Okay—thanks for all the info," Sarah answered. She pushed off the wall again, continuing her workout before the chill of the water set in. The conversation had made her feel less anxious. When she got back to Oneida, she decided, she would meet right away with Professor Hammersmith, her advisor, and talk about possible graduate programs. Sarah had always found that big tasks were less daunting when she broke them into a series of steps. First she'd meet with Victoria. Then she'd call for information on the programs Victoria recommended. She'd fill out the applications, write her essay, take the review course, take the GRE, and with luck, she could have all the applications in the mail by Christmas. Then it would just be a matter of waiting.

Energized, Sarah powered through the rest of her workout. She even felt crazy-daring enough to try a flip turn, and after a couple of abortive efforts, with water up her nose, muscle memory kicked in. It wasn't so difficult after all. Sarah wondered why it had always seemed intimidating in the past.

When she finished, the blonde woman said, "Not bad on the turns. You just want to tuck your chin onto your chest—you'll spin faster. And keep your arms closer to your sides, and try to get a smidge closer to the wall."

"Can you watch me?" asked Sarah. "Tell me if I'm doing it right."

"Sure, give it a try."

Sarah swam out to mid-lane, turned around, swam back in, and somersaulted at the wall, keeping her chin tucked and her arms close. The blonde woman was right: spinning in this position was easier and faster. When Sarah's feet touched the wall, her legs were in exactly the right position for a powerful push-off, enabling her to glide halfway across the pool before she had to surface for air.

"Good job!" the blonde woman shouted, and Sarah swam back to the wall, feeling like she had suddenly developed a super power. "Did you watch any of the Olympics this summer?"

"Not really. I watched more of the winter games, cos they were in France this year."

Just then, one of the life guards started blowing her whistle and waving her arms. Sarah realized a bunch of kids in team suits and caps were on the deck, talking and warming up. At the shallow end, a few of the swimmers were helping the life guards drag lane lines across the water.

"It's four o'clock already?" Sarah pulled herself out of the water, grabbed her towel, and followed the blonde woman into the locker room. "I'm Sarah, by the way."

The tall blonde gave Sarah a strong, wet handshake. "Janet," she said.

Sarah rinsed off under one of the showers. Janet. That had been the name of a woman she'd roomed with when she'd spent a summer at Boston College. By the end of her freshman year at Oneida, Sarah had needed an advanced Latin course, which not even Syracuse could provide. At BC, she'd found herself in with an interesting group of seminary students and classics majors. She'd rented a room in a lovely house in Chestnut Hill, and Janet, one of her house-mates, was a grad student at the college. Sarah recalled her as serious and scholarly, but exactly the type of woman Sarah didn't want to become. Janet ate the same food at the same time every day; she dressed in neutral colors; she exercised diligently; she read every issue of The New Yorker from cover to cover. Sarah remembered Janet's long, plain face, the mousy brown hair parted on one side and pushed behind her ears, the neat wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose.

The blonde woman was nothing like that other Janet, but they were both grad students, both scholarly, both swimmers, both from Boston. Sarah remembered the vision of her future self: gray-haired, tea-drinking, surrounded by books and cats. She shuddered.

She was still drying off when Janet shouldered her bag and said, "Have a great year… good luck with everything."

"Yeah, you, too. Thanks so much!"

Janet strode out, and ten minutes later, Sarah followed behind, wandering back down to the municipal lot. The church clock was chiming three-thirty—still too early to go home. Sarah stood beside her car, restless, not knowing quite what to do. She tossed her bag into the VW and decided to have a stroll around town.

(iii)

Rosebriar Creek wandered through the town, a series of picturesque little waterfalls and lazy pools, flowing after several miles into the Genesee River. A park had been developed around the creek downtown, crossed at various points by pretty stone bridges. In good weather, swans glided over the surface of the ponds. Further downstream sat a gazebo, where concerts were held in the summer. Acres of rosebushes filled the park, some of them scions of the wild roses that had given the creek and the town their name. In June, the formal rose garden came alive with blossoms whose heavenly scent had wafted through Sarah's bedroom windows when the wind had been right.

June also was the prime month for weddings, and every weekend, the vintage cars and limousines would line up along the creek. Wedding-watching was something of a town pastime, and Sarah had grown up envying the brides in their white finery, sighing over the attendants in whatever color happened to be trendy that season.

In August, of course, nobody was getting married; the weddings would pick up again in September and October. The roses were long past, and the weather was often like this—wretchedly hot. Sarah wandered over the footpaths and stone bridges, trying to find the place where she'd performed her one-woman show of The Labyrinth to poor, dear Merlin. Was it this patch of grass over here? Or that one? Sarah turned around, frowning, trying to pinpoint the exact spot, but like so much else, the memory had faded. She tried to recall the words of the play, Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered…. Her copy of The Labyrinth had burned along with the rest of her belongings.

As a child, Sarah had spent her summers performing with a youth theater group called the Scotland Hill Summer Players. For several years she had pestered the group's director, Mrs. Shepherd, to stage a production of The Labyrinth, but Mrs. Shepherd had refused because there weren't enough roles in the play for everyone in the troupe. Besides, the language was too archaic, too difficult to memorize, for American children in the early 1980s.

Still, Sarah's summers with Scotland Hill had been happy times, glimmering memories that the arrival of Irene and then Toby could not tarnish. In her last couple of years with the group, Sarah had had starring roles in the summer play, and she'd been so happy and proud to perform on the stage of Mendon High School, especially when her mother had been in the audience.

Those days, like everything else in Sarah's life, had come to a wrenching end. Mrs. Shepherd maintained a hard and fast rule about the group's membership: kids could not participate past their fourteenth birthdays. She would sometimes make exceptions for kids whose birthdays fell during July and August, but otherwise, once students were old enough to be out of middle school, she deemed them too old for Scotland Hill. Sarah, with her December birthday, had no chance of being grandfathered in for another summer. A couple of times she had run into Mrs. Shepherd in the grocery store or downtown and had tried to sweet-talk her way back into the group, perhaps as a counselor or junior director. Mrs. Shepherd had held firm, suggesting that Sarah instead look into arts camps if she wished to pursue acting.

What a disaster that had been! Sarah had auditioned for several prestigious summer theater programs and had been rejected by all of them. The summer between middle school and high school, she'd gone to an arts camp in the Catskills for eight weeks. In one of those adolescent ironies, Sarah had enjoyed everything about the camp except its actual theater program. She'd loved swimming in the camp's crystal-clear lake. She'd learned how to ride horseback, how to shoot with a bow and arrow. Her painting and drawing had won raves from the camp's art director.

But Sarah had hated the plays, which had been her very reason for attending the camp in the first place. Every year, the camp mounted three productions: a Shakespeare play, a musical, and a drama. The summer Sarah had attended, the program had included The Tempest, Our Town, and Oklahoma!. She'd auditioned for roles in all three plays, and the closest she'd gotten to the stage had been the chorus in Oklahoma!. She'd found herself on the costume crew for Our Town and on the scenery/ props crew for The Tempest. How frustrating it had been to stand in the wings, watching all those other kids recite their lines, convinced she could have done better than any of them. Sarah had returned home in a foul mood, vowing never to return to the camp again.

The following year, Sarah had attended a day camp closer to home, and that had been another miserable experience of backstage toil while other kids reveled in the glory of the spotlight. When the program ended, Sarah had returned home and immersed herself in The Labyrinth, spending days acting out the play in her bedroom, or when she could escape from the house, right here in this park. She'd been fifteen and rebellious, too old for childish pursuits, too young for adult pastimes, too aware of her own beauty, full of sexual yearnings she could barely understand, let alone express. A dangerous, heady mixture. And then Robert and Irene had asked her to babysit Toby when they went out for their anniversary…

Too weary to continue, Sarah dropped onto an ornate stone bench and stared through bleary eyes around the park. Nothing had changed, except maybe some landscaping. Like everything else, it seemed smaller. But all the little landmarks that had once been so precious to Sarah, so vitally important—this park had been her refuge, her adolescent fiefdom—had blurred into the indistinct past. Sarah tried to tell herself that this was good: it meant she'd gotten on with her life, grown up, moved on, but if that were the case, why did she feel so morose?

Surely it must be a combination of things: senioritis, post-France letdown (other students had warned her she'd feel this way when she came home from her year abroad), and of course, the oppressive weather. Fear of the future played its part: she felt she was shortly to hurtle into the unknown, as if she'd been plunked into a car with steering and a set of vague directions, but no brakes. The car would keep going: Sarah would have to steer it properly or crash.

After that summer, Sarah had mentally divided her life into two epochs: Before Labyrinth and After Labyrinth. A few years later, her life would be divided again: Before Fire and After Fire, but somehow her adventures in the Labyrinth seemed much more significant. She ruminated over everything she'd accomplished After Labyrinth, every test passed, every milestone achieved, every conquest notched. But why? What had been the purpose of all that if, at the end of it, she was still miserable?

Sarah wondered, not for the first time, if the real reason for her driving ambition had been to thumb her nose at Jareth, to prove she could shake off his influence. She was better than the spoiled, petulant, immature brat he'd lured into his maze, and so she'd set about proving that with every ounce of energy and determination she possessed. She'd done everything possible to break his hold over her—mentally, emotionally, sexually—but if she couldn't shake off this funk, she might as well be a prisoner in the blackest oubliette.

A single drop of cold water struck her knee, and Sarah glanced up. The thin scummy layer of clouds had thickened into mass of charcoal gray. Sarah hopped to her feet, striding through the park and back to her car. Out of nowhere, a breeze sprang up, and the leaves on the trees began to turn over. The promised change in weather had at last arrived.

Sarah drove around the town center, then deliberately aimed the VW down the street where the old house had been. She slowed as she went past the site—that, of course, she would never forget—studying the house that had been built there, a modern construction with a Victorian façade, unlike Sarah's old house, but similar enough to blend in with the others in the neighborhood. Sarah expected another swell of melancholy, but she didn't feel much of anything; it was just the site of a house where she had once lived. Sarah pressed down on the accelerator and turned the car back toward Main Street. She cruised past the block of red-brick early twentieth century buildings where her father's office was housed, past the big library, where she'd spent endless childhood hours reading, daydreaming, and later volunteering, finally turning onto the road that led out of town.

On the way home, she asked herself if Jareth would be able to find her again. She snorted at the absurdity of the idea, but she couldn't help wondering. She'd moved to the new house, then gone to college, then to France… if he wanted to find her, would he be able to? Then she wondered why it mattered. Should it? Did she still possess the power to summon him, even though she was no longer a child? Would she dare to try?

The wind had picked up, blowing debris across the road and rippling through the fields of weeds and corn. It wasn't raining just yet, but large drops of water would hit the windshield from time to time with a heavy splat. Once Sarah was in Happy Hidden Woods, the trees blotted out all light, and she flipped on the VW's headlights.

For once she was glad of the automatic garage door opener. The door had just rumbled shut behind her when the storm broke. Thunder exploded overhead, and rain hammered down on the roof of the house. Irene looked relieved when Sarah walked in.

"Just made it," Sarah told her. Another crack of thunder shook the house, and white-hot lighting flashed outside the windows. "It's right over us. Is Dad here?"

"In his office." Irene was bustling around the kitchen, getting dinner ready.

Toby came upstairs, looking wide-eyed and a little scared. Sarah boosted him up in her arms and hugged him. "Listen to those big boomers," she said.

There was another concussive blast of thunder and lighting, and the rain poured down with unabated fury.

Robert wandered into the kitchen. "Thank God the weather's breaking."

Conversation over dinner that night was near-impossible due to the almost incessant thunder. Sarah felt grateful that she wasn't out driving on the interstate in this maelstrom. Back in the old house, she'd have been waiting to see if the power failed. Out here, it didn't matter. About a year after they'd moved to Happy Hidden Woods, they'd lost power during a winter ice storm. Service hadn't been restored for almost two full days, during which time they'd bunked out by the living room fireplace and subsisted on peanut butter sandwiches. Sarah had returned from college on her next vacation to find a large generator had been installed in the back yard. Irene wouldn't tolerate that kind of nuisance again.

After dinner, the rumbles of thunder grew quieter and further apart, and the intensity of the rain eased up as well. Sarah rinsed out her bathing suit, then took a long shower, washing the chlorine out of her hair. She'd just finished blowing it dry when she heard Irene's voice calling to her.

"Sarah—phone call for you!"

Elated, Sarah grabbed the bedroom extension, wondering whose voice she would hear—Ruth's or Stacey's.

"Heya, chica!"

"Raelin?"

"The one and only."

"Where are you?" asked Sarah.

"Still at home—leaving for The Castle on Sunday. What about you?" "The Castle" was their pet nickname for Riley Hall.

"Me, too." Sarah didn't say she was counting the minutes until her escape; she could never shake the suspicion that Irene listened in on her phone calls. "I'm so psyched to see everyone again."

"Is the weather crazy there?" asked Raelin.

"Not now, but it was a couple of hours ago," Sarah responded.

"Yeah, the storm hit us like a freight train and didn't stop 'till the last half-hour. I think one of our neighbor's trees came down."

"It was pouring buckets here, but it's just sort of normal rain now." Sarah wished they could talk about something less inane.

"So, how was France? Did everything finish up okay?" Raelin asked.

"Yeah, it all went great. I spent a week in London with my mother, and I got back here last Sunday." Had it really been that long? "I've been hanging out—there's really nothing to do, and it's been too hot and humid to even think."

"You ready for senior year?"

"Just barely." Sarah told her about her graduate school conundrum and the GRE review course.

"See, that's the thing," Raelin teased. "You're all like, 'Ohmigod, I'm so stressed and I don't know what to do!' and then you lay out this plan like an army general."

Sarah laughed. "I just put on a good show. So how's your summer been?"

"Super!" Raelin told Sarah about her summer internship with an ad agency in New York, the classes she'd taken, the dates and fun times she'd had. After two hours' conversation, someone in the background started yelling for Raelin to get off the phone.

"That's my sister," Raelin apologized. "Her boyfriend's supposed to be calling. See you Sunday!"

"Yeah, see you. Bye!"

When she hung up, Sarah felt happier than she had since her plane had landed at JFK. A friend—a real friend. The phone call from Raelin snapped Sarah out of her funk, reminding her that she wasn't a dweeb or a loser, she was an intelligent, beautiful, accomplished young woman with a bright, promising future ahead of her. Sarah curled up in bed, reading until she began dozing, then switched off her lamp and fell into an untroubled sleep.

Saturday, September 5

She awoke in the gray dawn on Saturday, listening to the steady drumming of rain outside. She got out of bed and peered out the window. The back yard and garden lay drenched, every bit of vegetation gleaming faintly with water. Sarah glanced at her clock: six-fifteen AM. Ugh! She padded in to use the toilet, then climbed back into bed and fell asleep again, glad she didn't have anywhere to go.

By the time she woke up again, it was almost nine, and the heavy rain had tapered off to a light patter. She washed, pulled on shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals, and went downstairs for breakfast. At the table, Robert was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, dressed in a neat, dark suit. Sarah could hear the faint sounds of Irene blow-drying her hair. When the blow-dryer switched off, Sarah could hear the music and exaggerated voices of Saturday morning cartoons coming from the rec room in the basement.

"Will you be okay?" Robert asked.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," Sarah responded. "You guys'll be home by dinner, right?"

"Assuming the funeral is over by noon and the lunch finishes up around two-thirty, we should be home by four. Irene said something about getting fresh corn for dinner tonight."

"Works for me," Sarah laughed. "Want me to make one of my infamous desserts?"

"Why not?"

Irene came tippity-tapping down the stairs in her high heels, clad in a figure-hugging yet conservative beige linen dress, a demure navy cardigan over one arm. Her navy and cream spectator pumps and navy purse coordinated marvelously with the outfit—completely appropriate for a funeral in summer, and yet also advertising Irene's social status. Sarah didn't know whether to feel admiration or annoyance. Maybe both.

Robert drained his coffee and stood. "All set?"

"Will you be all right, Sarah?" asked Irene. "There's leftovers in the fridge if you need something for lunch."

"Sure… Toby and I won't starve."

Irene slid a piece of paper across the table to Sarah. "That's the number of the funeral home and the number of the restaurant, if there's any problems."

"Thanks. See you tonight."

Irene and Robert headed out to the garage, and a moment later, Sarah heard Irene's car start. She smiled into her coffee cup: naturally, Irene would not want to be seen in the ancient Volvo, even at a funeral for one of Robert's former business associates. Sarah waited until she was sure Robert and Irene wouldn't be making any last-minute returns to the house, and went to the head of the basement stairs.

"Toby Jingles, do you want chocolate chip pancakes?"

He shouted up, "YEAH!"

Twenty minutes later, they were both ensconced in front of the big color television, plates of gooey chocolate pancakes in their laps. Sarah watched more cartoons that morning than she had since childhood—none of them remotely familiar to her, but she nevertheless laughed hilariously at the parade of animated hijinks.

At noon, she collected their dishes and suggested, "Wanna play Fort?"

Toby responded with the sugared-up excitement of Christmas morning. Sarah went upstairs and came back down with a pile of blankets and pillows, and they created an elaborate series of walls and dens and foxholes. Then they pretended to be defending their research outpost against an attack of rampaging dinosaurs (Sarah had read Jurassic Park the previous year, and she hoped Irene would let Toby see the movie when it came out the following summer). After nearly two hours of this, Toby was yawning and rubbing sleepy fists into his eyes, so Sarah arranged the pillows and blankets into a bed so he could take a nap.

While he slept, Sarah tidied up the kitchen and put their dishes into the dishwasher. Irene had left a basket of clean sheets in the living room, so Sarah put those away in the upstairs linen closet. The door to Robert and Irene's room stood ajar, and Sarah peeked inside, making a face at how large it was, how ostentatious the furniture. You could roller skate in here, she thought. Irene's parents had given her and Robert a large crucifix as a housewarming gift, and it hung on a wall where it would be visible from their bed.

Do they really look at that thing when they're having sex? Sarah wondered, then immediately halted the train of thought: she did not need a mental image of Robert and Irene having sex. Ew! Still, it irked her that Toby was being brought up Catholic, and that Robert would probably convert one day, if he hadn't already. She knew he attended Mass with Irene on Sundays; as with everything else, Irene would wear him down. Not that Robert had been a terribly observant Episcopalian, but it still annoyed Sarah that he would not even make a stand on religious conviction.

She sighed and wandered past the spare bedroom that Irene had converted into her craft room. In here, Irene had sewed Sarah's prom dress, a breathtaking confection of winter-blue satin with a sheer, iridescent overskirt. Sarah still had the gown in her closet, swathed in clear plastic, and she went in to look at it now. Down in the rec room, there was a photo of her in this dress, her hair in a striking up-do, her makeup, manicure, and pedicure all professionally done, a corsage of tiny white roses on her wrist. Her date for the event had been a boy who worked on the literary magazine. Sarah lifted the plastic so she could inhale the marvelous scent of the heavy dress satin, which even now smelled new, more intoxicating than the most expensive perfume. Sarah loved the smell of satin, the distilled essence of special-occasion happiness.

She let the plastic drop back down, feeling that familiar sense of both irritation and admiration: that Irene could create something so lovely—and it had been so generous of her to make Sarah's prom gown when she could find nothing suitable in any shop—and yet, the very act of creation had been self-serving. Step by step, Irene had been ushering Sarah into the future and out of the house, away from the family. Still, no matter her ulterior motives, it was a beautiful dress, and the evening of the prom had been magical, one of Sarah's fondest senior year memories. Not a bad ending to a year that started with the house burning down.

Determined not to slide back into her funk of yearning and nostalgia, Sarah went to her room, threw her large suitcase onto the bed, and began packing with single-minded, ferocious energy. When the big suitcase was stuffed to bursting with clothes, she filled a couple of smaller pieces of luggage, then she loaded her backpack with notebooks, folders, pens, three-inch floppy disks, and other items for the desk in her dorm room. By then, the gray cloud cover had cleared, the sun was shining in a blue sky, and the tree branches outside were swaying back and forth in the breeze. Sarah opened one window and inhaled, delighted at the change in the air. The wind carried into her room the sweetness of late summer, seasoned with the pungent spice of early fall.

Inspired, Sarah went around the house, switching off the air conditioning and opening all the windows. Within moments, the stale air had been replaced with the marvelous, honest scents of trees and grass. Sarah pulled a key ring off its peg in the kitchen and went to open up the rooms over the garage.

A miasma of new paint and carpeting hit her the moment she opened the door. Sarah blinked and stepped into the great room, switching on the overhead light. This small apartment, a suite of rooms over the garage, had still been unfinished when she'd left for France. Now the whole place had been kitted out: expensive appliances, handsome furniture, plush carpets, elegant wallpaper and curtains. Even the light fixtures and countertops looked new. Were Irene and Robert planning to rent this out? Sarah had been home a week; why hadn't they shown her the work they'd had done, or even mentioned it?

Sarah went into the master bedroom, which had been decorated in chocolate brown, china blue, and cream. Sarah could smell the newness of the furniture: a king-size bed, a large chest of drawers, a pair of nightstands, an easy chair. Her black eyebrows pulled together in a fierce scowl: blue, brown, and cream were the favorite decorating colors of Irene's mother. Sarah went through to the master bathroom, finding it well-stocked with new towels, toilet paper, hand soap. The shower was one of those glassed-in contraptions with a low entry, hand bars, and a seat inside, designed for the elderly and the handicapped. Similarly, the toilet sat higher than standard models, a handrail alongside it.

Sarah went back out to the great room, turning around in slow circles, taking in every detail. She opened a kitchen cabinet at random, finding it full of beautiful new dishes that coordinated with the rest of the décor. On the granite countertop sat a new coffee maker, a new toaster, a new blender, all unplugged, but clearly ready to go. Sarah strode from corner to corner of the apartment: the second bedroom, the half-bath, every closet. The evidence pointed overwhelmingly to one conclusion: Irene was planning to have her parents move in: the apartment was like a miniature version of their home in Rochester. The great room, combining kitchen, living room, and dining area, would be perfect for entertaining. The bedroom and bathroom were designed for people with mobility limitations. The apartment had a separate entrance from the garage, so Irene's parents would even have privacy.

Sarah switched off the lights and locked the door, returning the key to its peg in the kitchen, making sure it hung the exact way she'd found it—Irene would notice such a detail. Then she leaned against the kitchen counter, staring out one of the windows, her mind awhirl.

The redecoration of her bedroom made sudden new sense. With the conversion of the apartment, Irene had lost guest space in the house, so Sarah's bedroom, with its attached bath, would become the new guest room. Irene's parents were getting too old to maintain the ark in Rochester; their kids—Irene had three brothers—were grown up and married with kids of their own. Irene's parents must be planning to live year-round in North Carolina… except during the hottest months, when they'd return to upstate New York and live with their daughter's family.

No wonder she wants me out of the house, Sarah realized. She guessed that the house in Rochester had been put on the market this summer; very possibly, it was already under agreement. Irene had been spending a lot of time on the phone lately, her voice always kept too low for Sarah to make out more than a few words, her tone businesslike. She was planning to have her parents come live with her, perhaps three months of the year. And Robert, ever the coward, had not mentioned one word of this to Sarah. She knew he wouldn't, not until everything was a fait accompli—when it would be too late for Sarah to protest. That, more than anything, told Sarah how much Irene's creature he'd become.

Next summer, Sarah thought. By the time she graduated Oneida, Irene's parents would be living in this house—well, not in the house, but in an apartment attached to it. They'd be over here all the time, visiting with Irene, eating with her and Robert and Toby, entertaining their friends. And Irene's parents hated Sarah, from their perspective the base-born product of their son-in-law's embarrassment of a first marriage. Linda, alas, had been in magazines and tabloids frequently enough so that her romantic history prior to Robert—an extensive history at that—could be readily pieced together. Exacerbating the situation, Irene's family was Irish Catholic; Linda's family was Anglican with roots in Northern Ireland.

Sarah's agony over the future returned to her with a fresh bloom of panic. Whatever path she chose after graduation, she would have to find a way to get out of this house.

There was a thump, and Toby came bounding up the stairs, wide awake after his nap. "Can I ride my bike?" he asked.

"Sure, just stay in the driveway," Sarah told him. They went out to the garage, and Sarah opened up a couple of the big doors. Toby grabbed his bike and wheeled out into the driveway.

Back in the house, Sarah retrieved the pillows and blankets from the rec room and tidied up. She took a moment to study, on one wall, her senior year tapestry, which Robert had proudly framed and displayed.

"Don't you want it for your dorm room?" Irene had asked Sarah with a smile. "You worked so hard on it." But Robert, in a rare moment of paternal assertiveness, had insisted the tapestry remain in the house. On a shelf to the left of the work sat a framed photo of Sarah standing beside her masterpiece, proudly holding the prize for best senior artwork. On an identical shelf to the right sat the trophy itself, engraved with Sarah's name and the year 1989. Of course, Irene would not allow it in the living room upstairs, but even having it on display in the basement rec room represented a victory for Robert.

Sarah knew Irene hated the tapestry not only because it represented a triumph for Sarah, but because of its subject matter: Henry VIII was the king whose marital exploits, after all, had paved the way for the Protestant Reformation in England. Sarah had copied famous portraits of Henry and his wives for the tapestry, but had she made Anne Boleyn look a shade too much like her own mother, beautiful Linda? And did plain Jane Seymour bear too striking a resemblance to Irene? Sarah laughed under her breath. Good God, she'd never even noticed until now.

Full of energy, she went back up to her room, dumped the contents of her laundry hamper into a basket, and lugged the basket down to the basement laundry room. When her clothes were churning away in a froth of suds, Sarah went upstairs, where she indulged in the luxury of Irene's well-appointed kitchen, slicing up fresh strawberries and baking three tins of shortbread biscuits. When those were done, she washed the sink and counters: all that remained was beating heavy cream and sugar into whipped cream, which she could do later.

She went outside to check on Toby, who was riding around in circles, singing the theme from Sesame Street to himself. Sarah felt sorry for Toby, who—unlike her—had never known the simple childhood pleasure of playing on a street full of kids. All his play dates had been carefully arranged and supervised by Irene and his friends' parents. He'd attended a private kindergarten and would be starting first grade at a Catholic school next week. Sarah felt angry that Irene was depriving the lad of the ordinary random serendipity of childhood: the unexpected adventures and friendships and chance encounters that gave life its richness and texture. Toby would grow up to be like all the other rich brats in Happy Hidden Woods, viewing even middle class families as alien and beneath his contempt.

Sarah sat on one of the retaining walls, watching him.

"Toby Jingles," she called out, "do you remember the goblins?"

"Yeah!" he said, trying to pop a wheelie with his bike.

"You do?" Sarah's heart gave a lurching thud against her ribs.

"Yeah… Mike was a ghost, and this year, I'm gonna be Spider-Man!" He pretended to flick a web from his wrist.

Sarah exhaled. Toby thought she was talking about Halloween.

"When you were a baby," she said, "the goblins kidnapped you, and I had to solve a huge maze to get you back. The Goblin King was keeping you prisoner in his castle."

Toby gave up on wheelies and settled for zooming across the driveway as fast as he dared. "And then T-rex attacked the castle, and we got away! Rwarrrr!"

Sarah laughed, but inside her, something died. Toby didn't remember. The adventure in the Labyrinth was a game to him, a part of childhood make-believe that in a few years would be left behind for the cool sophistication of adolescence. One thing was for sure, Sarah could not imagine that in sixteen years' time, Toby would spend any week of his life as she had spent this last one, moping over a past to which he could never return. He would simply not have the imagination or the emotional capacity for nostalgia, for introspection. Irene would see to that.

(ii)

As promised, Irene and Robert returned home at 4:30; Sarah heard the garage door rumbling as she set the dining room table. Robert appeared first, carrying a large paper bag full of ears of corn, golden-brown silk tassels spilling out at the top.

"Ooh, those look good," Sarah said, taking the bag from him. In the kitchen, she filled Irene's largest pot with water and set it on the stove to boil, then called, "Toby Jingles, come help me husk this corn!"

In the end, Toby only husked a couple of ears, removing the greens one leaf at a time, but he nevertheless beamed with accomplishment. The corn was plump, the kernels golden-yellow, still smelling of summer fields and warm sunshine.

While they were working, Irene came downstairs, now changed into everyday clothes, and set about preparing the chicken. With the corn husked, Sarah beat cream and sugar into an enormous bowl of whipped cream; she and Irene could work together in the large kitchen with surprising harmony. While the chicken sizzled in an electric skillet, Irene chopped vegetables for a salad.

The dinner could not have been more marvelous. Irene had opened the windows and the French doors in the dining room, letting in the crisp evening air. The corn had been cooked to tender perfection, the flavor enhanced with generous pats of butter. The chicken dish was one of Irene's specialties, the meat simmered in a homemade salsa of apricots, pineapples, onions, and peppers. The vegetables in the salad had come from the same farm stand as the corn. Everyone ate until they were stuffed and groaning. Toby played while the adults sat around drinking and chatting, then Irene cleared the table while Sarah got the desserts ready. The strawberry shortcake was pronounced "sensational" by Robert, who ate two servings, and even Irene looked impressed. The entire meal was suffused with an emotion Sarah rarely associated with family dinners: happiness.

After helping Irene clean the kitchen, Sarah tended to the last of her laundry, took a shower, and settled down in her room for the night. Too wired for sleep, she tried to read for a while. Robert had a subscription to Time, so Sarah flopped down on her bed with the most recent issues, trying to catch up on current events in the States. She felt mortified to realize she knew more about the political machinations of the Medici in the fifteenth century than she did about the current US government. She flicked through the glossy pages, trying to absorb details about the upcoming presidential election, but she found most everything she read depressingly mundane, lacking in color or excitement. Even after speed-reading four issues, all she'd really gleaned was that the governor of Arkansas was running against the president.

Sarah tossed aside the magazines and drew from one of her bookshelves the first volume of Lord of the Rings, which she hadn't looked at since before France; she had to blow some dust off the binding. This had been one of Sarah's favorite stories as an adolescent, and she always enjoyed returning to the landscape of Middle-Earth. But this time, she found her attention wandering, and before Frodo had even left the Shire, she'd thrown down the book in frustration. Maybe she was more tired than she'd realized. Sarah checked her clock and realized somewhat to her astonishment that it was almost midnight. Feeling sheepish, she went in to use the bathroom and then crawled wearily into bed. She smiled as she fell asleep, dreaming of her college friends, Riley Hall, Oneida—the one place she felt truly at home.

Sunday, September 6

She awoke at eight to a room full of daylight and the sound of birds singing. Sarah leapt up and out of bed, buoyed by a surge of adrenaline. The next two and a half hours passed in a blur of breakfast and last-minute packing. Sarah rolled the VW out of the garage and into the driveway, and Robert helped her load the heaviest bags into the trunk. Sarah darted up and down to the laundry room, folding her last articles of clothing into her overnight bag.

"Do you want lunch before you leave?" Irene asked, ever practical.

"No, I'll grab lunch on the road," Sarah responded, unwilling to halt her forward momentum. If she stopped to eat now, she'd never get out of the house.

"All right then." Irene and Sarah exchanged the same neat, civil hug they'd shared the previous Sunday, and Sarah swooped down to embrace Toby.

"Have fun in school, Toby Jingles," she told him. "Remember, you're a big first grader, now." He beamed and preened.

Robert followed Sarah out to her car. "Do you have everything?" he asked. He had that fluttery, anxious look he always got when Sarah was leaving. "Do you have enough money?"

Sarah gave him a hug. "Sure, I'm fine." Robert had given her a check that morning, and he deposited funds into her college bank account every month. His largesse sometimes made Sarah feel guilty: other kids had to work for their spending money.

"Let me know if you need more," he said. "I know you have books and things to get."

"Sure," Sarah told him. She kept her voice down. "So, when are Irene's parents moving in?" She nodded toward the apartment over the garage.

Prefacing her question with a long, drawn-out preamble would have given him time to marshal defenses and excuses and rationalizations. She knew the non-sequitur was a sucker punch, but at least it would guarantee a more honest answer.

"Did Irene tell you?" he sputtered.

"No, I was up in the apartment yesterday, and I saw the work."

Face mottled red with guilt, Robert said, "Nothing's definite, but Irene wants everything ready, just in case."

"Are they selling their house?"

"It's been on the market since April," Robert said. "They're hoping someone will make an offer this fall. If it doesn't sell by Thanksgiving, they'll take it off the market until next spring. It's a big, old, expensive place that needs a lot of upkeep, and the economy isn't great right now."

"Okay," Sarah responded, keeping mental fingers crossed that the house wouldn't sell until her own plans were settled. "I can't see living here if they move in. You know they can't stand me, Dad."

"This is still my house, and you'll always be welcome here," Robert said. But there was no conviction behind his words. "Anyway," he faltered, "it's a separate apartment."

"They'll be here all summer," Sarah countered. "They'll be using the garage, sitting out on the patio with Irene, coming over for dinner. It's not like I could avoid them for three months."

With a helpless shrug, Robert said, "It's still a ways off. They're going back to North Carolina in a few weeks."

"Okay." Sarah fidgeted with the strap of her purse. It seemed she could hear the ticking of a vast, cosmic clock. Maybe a year, maybe more, but sooner or later, Irene's parents would be under this roof. No matter Robert's reassurances, Sarah knew she would find the situation unbearable.

"Well, I need to get going." Sarah held out her arms, and Robert gave her a conciliatory hug.

"Take care," he said. "Don't worry about all this too much."

"No problem." Sarah reached into the car and started the engine. With one final hug for her father, she hopped behind the VW's wheel and steered the over-laden vehicle down the driveway. Her last glimpse of Robert was in the rear-view mirror as he waved goodbye. Out on the road, Sarah popped one of her favorite cassettes into the car's stereo and cranked up the volume. Once free of Happy Hidden Woods, she felt like she could breathe for the first time in a week. The car hummed along the back roads into Rosebriar Hollow, where she could hear the faint sound of the tower clock striking eleven. Sarah blew a kiss to her hometown, sleepy beneath the mellow late summer sun.

Five minutes later, she'd picked up route 65, following the road north as it skirted around the western edge of the Mendon Ponds County Park, watching the landscape of her childhood roll past. By 11:30, she was cruising through the tollbooth and taking her ticket, then opening up to full speed on the Thruway, traveling east, toward Oneida and freedom.

(ii)

The longest part of the drive to Oneida was the hour-plus stretch along the Thruway. Sarah cranked the radio to top volume, singing along to a mix of American pop songs and music she'd picked up in Europe. By 1:00, she was leaving the highway at route 34; she paid her toll and steered the VW down the secondary highway. There was a sandwich shop in Weedsport that Sarah liked, and she took a gamble that the place was still there, pleased to find the restaurant in business, changed very little from her last commute to college.

After a leisurely lunch and a bathroom break, Sarah got back on the road. She loved route 34, which dropped down between two of the state's famous Finger Lakes. With every mile, Sarah mentally ticked off landmarks: towns, roads, highways, each one bringing her closer to her destination. She'd run out of cassettes to play and now drove along with the windows down, the breeze blowing her hair about. At last, an hour after lunch, Sarah reached the city limits of Oneida.

She could have cried from happiness as she cruised past beloved haunts: grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, each one like an old friend welcoming her home. Traffic grew heavier: families were bringing their children back for the start of the new school year. Sarah grinned through her open window at people she didn't even know, feeling like she could have hugged any random stranger from the sheer joy of being back. And then—sooner than she expected—there was the giddy rush when she turned onto University Avenue and the VW began its crawl up the steep hill.

She didn't follow the hill all the way up, but made a left-hand turn onto Oneida Road. This wound around the side of the hill, crossing over one of the region's spectacular gorges. Sarah's heart leaped as the VW circled around the back of the hill, dipped down into a hollow, and up another rise. And there, to her right, sat Riley Hall, a red-brick castle, shining like Camelot beneath the September sun.

She swung the VW into the curving drive, parked, and dashed up the front steps, waving at a pair of unfamiliar students, who gave her startled half-smiles in return. Inside the dim entryway, she blinked, letting her eyes adjust, then found the table where a couple of student volunteers were handing out room keys. While she waited in line, she looked around the common rooms, soaking in the lovely, musty scent of the old building, listening to the sounds of laughter and student conversations, absorbing the sensation of being home. Like everything else, Riley seemed smaller now, but Sarah felt even this perspective could not diminish her happiness.

"Williams," she told the students when she reached the front of the line. "First name, Sarah. I'm a senior."

The girl dug through the small brown envelopes stacked behind the letter "W," finally tugging out one with Sarah's name on it. She crossed off Sarah's name on a corresponding list and surrendered the envelope. Two keys clinked inside: the key to the outer doors, and the key to Sarah's dorm room.

"Room 604," the girl smiled. "Lucky you!"

Sarah dashed out to her car, opened up the trunk, and began dragging her luggage up the stairs. When everything was unloaded, she moved her car to the student parking lot across the road. Back inside the dorm, she had the unenviable task of schlepping everything up the tower stairs; the elevator only went as far as the fourth floor. The fifth and sixth floors were in the building's central turret, two rooms per floor, perhaps the four most coveted single rooms on the Oneida campus. The previous spring, a graduating senior had been Sarah's proxy in the housing lottery, and she still remembered the adrenaline jolt of receiving Marianne's letter in the mail.

You hit the jackpot, Marianne had written. When we went to draw room numbers, I pulled lucky seven. Nobody pulled one through six, so you had first dibs. You said you wanted a room as high up as possible, so I signed you into 604. Enjoy the view! I have a feeling getting your stuff up the stairs will be less fun.

Carrying a couple of small bags, Sarah sprinted up the stairs to the top of the tower. Out of breath, hands shaking, she unlocked the door to 604. Inside, she stood turning around in circles, darting to the big double swing windows, the tall panes of glass separated by a mullion, savoring the view out over the emerald green grass that sloped gently down to the woods. Sarah undid both latches and wheeled open the windows, inhaling the delicious breeze, staring out across the campus, the trees, the rolling hills in the distance. She could hear the musical sound of water rushing through the gorge. She shuddered all over with the thrill of living so high up. This was her room—her room!—for the entire year. She spun around in circles, laughing: she would be the princess in the tower she'd always yearned to be.

An hour later, after more backbreaking trips dragging heavy luggage up four flights of steps, Sarah felt less like a princess and more like a pack mule. She sat on the edge of her cot, wiping sweat off her face, wanting nothing more than a shower and a nap. But she had to unpack. She checked her watch, reminding herself she had to pick up Raelin at the bus station at five-thirty. She had barely an hour, so she hopped to her weary feet and got started. But by the time she had to leave, she hadn't put a dent in the pile, and she realized with a groan she still had to get her things out of basement storage.

(iii)

Sarah spotted Raelin right away: tall, skinny, light brown complexion, wavy black hair twisted up in a towering topknot. She carried a backpack over one shoulder and was hauling a large suitcase behind her. When she spotted Sarah, she shrieked out loud, dropped the suitcase strap, and bounded over to embrace her friend.

"Ohmigod, you look amazing!" Raelin said. "I love your hair! And your toenails! How've you been?"

"I'm so tired," Sarah laughed. "I've been schlepping crap up the stairs all afternoon, and I haven't even been down to the basement yet."

"I tried to warn you," Raelin laughed. "Remember? The view's nice up there, but I'd never live on a floor without an elevator." Sarah was too stubborn to admit her friend had been right.

They dragged Raelin's luggage out to the parking lot and loaded it into the back of the VW.

"So, how was everything at La Casa Williams?" Raelin inquired, buckling herself into the passenger seat. "You were there, what, a week?"

Sarah waited until they were out of the lot and moving in traffic before she started talking. For the entire drive to Riley, she poured out her frustrations to her friend. When she recounted her discovery of the in-law apartment over the garage, Raelin made an angry, disgusted noise in her throat.

"Are you kidding me?" she exclaimed. "Oh, man, you poor thing!"

"Yeah," Sarah laughed shortly. "It's gonna be loads of fun at the house once Irene's parents are living there. I don't care what Dad says—he has no damn spine. Irene and her parents would make my life miserable, and he wouldn't do anything."

At the dorm, they got Raelin's bags upstairs, then went in search of dinner, eschewing the dining commons in favor of a Friendly's on the outskirts of town. Over burgers and fries and ice cream sundaes, they swapped stories about their past year's adventures, filling in the gaps between their letters. Night had fallen by the time they drove back to campus, and Sarah's blue funk of the past week had mostly dissolved. She was so happy to have her friend back, someone who listened to her, understood her, believed her, and didn't trivialize her fears.

The two girls helped each other get their things out of storage, and Sarah groaned when she realized her musty sheets and towels would need to be washed. She dragged everything to the laundry room, only to realize she hadn't bothered getting any quarters or even buying laundry detergent before she'd left home. She mentally cursed all those days when she'd been laying around feeling sorry for herself and neglecting the most basic of errands. And Monday was a holiday: the banks would be closed.

Raelin had blessedly had more foresight, and she produced from her pocketbook a roll of shiny new quarters and from her luggage a jug of Woolite. Within minutes, every machine in the laundry room was humming and thumping. Sarah stumped on weary legs back up to the sixth floor and unpacked until it was time to go transfer her wet linens into the dryers. By the time everything had finished drying, the hands on Sarah's watch had slipped past midnight. Too exhausted to properly make up her bed, she threw a clean sheet on top of the mattress, wrapped herself in a blanket, and fell into black slumber.

Monday, September 7

Monday morning, the Riley dining room opened, and Sarah enjoyed the luxury of breakfast in her own dorm. Afterwards, she returned to unpacking. By noon, she'd folded and put away her sheets and towels, transferred her clothes from suitcases into the bureau and closet, and set up her desk. She'd located her box of thumbtacks and pinned a couple of posters up onto the walls, making the impersonal space feel more like home. When Raelin collected her for lunch at noon, Sarah felt like she was at least making progress.

After they ate, though, the sense of ennui and despair began creeping back. For one thing, the sky, so bright that morning, had clouded over, and Sarah could taste rain in the breeze that blew in through her windows. For another, she still had no fewer than eight storage cartons to unpack, most of them full of books and folders from her first two years at the college. For no reason that Sarah could identify, she just didn't have the energy to sort through them.

Maybe later, she thought, and left the dorm for a walk around campus, hoping the fresh air would improve her mood. She ventured into the student post office, staffed by an indifferent student worker who gave Sarah the key to her new mail box. Sarah checked the cubby, but it mostly contained colorful announcements. The only items of substance were printouts of Sarah's class schedule and her degree audit—another reminder of her senior status and pending graduation. She stood in the post office, scanning over the audit, which noted the courses she'd taken, the requirements she'd fulfilled. Sarah mentally checked things off: distribution requirements, the college multicultural requirement, the physical education requirement. All she had left to complete were the requirements of her major.

Her course schedule consisted of her independent study, plus three classes: the senior seminar, the German lit class, and a special topics history course being taught by a visiting professor: "Byzantium: East Meets West." Sarah had chosen it because she thought it would compliment her major, and it met only once a week, on Wednesday afternoon. She'd studied the Byzantine empire in her other classes, never in depth, but Sarah had no doubts she'd probably ace the course with her eyes closed. The thought depressed her horribly.

On her way back to the dorm, she swung into the IT office, also staffed with student workers, and had her email account reactivated. She left the office and drifted across campus, feeling much the same as she had three days earlier, wandering around Rosebriar Hollow. The campus now teemed with students, some scurrying at a near-run, others meandering with no clear destination in mind, some with the wide-eyed look of newcomers, others with the relaxed stance of seasoned veterans. Like me, Sarah thought. She wondered about those other kids, some roaming about singly or in pairs, others in larger groups. She tried to imagine their inner worlds, their secret hopes and fears. She reminded herself that all freshmen would eventually be seniors, and then alums of the university. Time turned for everyone.

Her feet seemed to take her of their own volition between a couple of buildings, down a pathway, and into the lower portion of the vast university amphitheater. Generations of Oneida graduates crossed this stage every May, and plays would be performed in good weather. Sarah recalled a memorable, raunchy production of Lysistrata from her freshman year. She climbed the steps and hopped up onto the stage. She imagined herself performing before an audience, perhaps in something by Shakespeare: Oh, for a muse of fire!

The very notion was ridiculous. Sarah could still remember the sting of those summer arts camps, auditioning for plays, the pained or glazed expressions in the eyes of the counselors evaluating her body language and line readings. Their heads would briefly lean together, then Sarah would be given a tight smile and told, "All right," before the next girl was called onto the stage. Later, there would be the announcement of the cast, Sarah's name nowhere in sight, and the encouraging support from the counselors running the backstage crew. There had been too many resentful mornings painting backdrops or building sets, too many afternoons sewing other kids' costumes, too many evenings helping the stars of the show get their makeup on straight.

Sarah thought again and again of her mother—perhaps not the most gifted of actresses, but possessing enough charm and charisma to earn a living. Somewhere in one of her storage boxes, Sarah knew there were framed photographs from her high school graduation: two photos in a hinged pair of frames. In one, Sarah stood with Robert, wearing her cap and gown and her Honor Society tassel, holding her diploma. Irene had taken the photo. In the second, Sarah stood with Linda, the photo having been taken by Jeremy.

She snorted, remembering the party back at the house, the only time all four adults had been together socially. Irene's tight mask of formal politeness had not shifted all evening, but her eyes had kept darting from Linda to Sarah, her gaze full of worry and resentment. Robert in his turn had kept up avuncular good spirits, but there had been no mistaking the sad looks he'd given his first wife, and his barely-concealed resentment of Linda's lover, Jeremy. Sarah had smirked at the almost-visible thought balloons over Robert's head, as he'd gazed at the weedy, tweedy Englishman, wondering what on earth Linda saw in the man. Sarah remembered Jeremy smoking on the patio outside, holding court with the other exiled smokers, the pariahs that Irene would not allow to indulge their habit in her house. Judging by the laughter and the tinkling of ice in glasses, nobody had felt like they were missing out on much. Sarah had envied them, not their black lungs, but their worldly, complacent adult sophistication.

Sarah gazed out across the stage, up into the rows of seats. When had her plans for a career in academia taken hold? When it had become only too apparent that she had neither the aptitude nor the disposition for acting? Sarah fingered the envelope that contained her degree audit. Proudly, perhaps defiantly, she had resisted the urge to sign up for college theater classes, although Oneida offered a slew of them, and God only knew, there were enough budding actors and actresses living in Riley Hall. Sarah had had no wish for a repeat of her summer camp experiences. If she decided indeed to pursue a doctorate in art history and a career in academia, Sarah had at least the assurance it was something for which she had the talent.

She thought of the adults in the house that night and shook her head. She wanted, above all things, to avoid a relationship that felt second-best. Linda had been passionately in love with a married man who had refused to divorce his wife; as a panacea, she'd thrown herself into the disastrous marriage with Robert. Robert, in his turn, had been thoroughly bewitched by Linda, then devastated when she left. Sarah suspected that Irene loved Robert dearly but hated that part of him would always belong to his first wife. So many people, so discontented! Everyone wanting something they couldn't have and settling, not entirely happily, for something else.

A raindrop fell on Sarah's head. Another cold front was coming through, with better weather behind it. She hopped down the stairs and dashed up the main aisle of the amphitheater, dashing for Riley before the downpour started.

Tuesday, September 8

By Tuesday morning, the sun was shining. Sarah's bad mood had blown out with the rainclouds, and she bounded out of bed, full of energy and optimism. After breakfast she hung up two more posters, but still could not find the mental wherewithal to sort through her boxes of possessions. She knew she should at least unload and organize her textbooks before buying her books for the fall semester, but noontime found her standing in a long line at the college bookstore, shifting from one impatient foot to another while her arms grew ever more weary under the load of a half-dozen large, hardcover volumes. God, why did art history books always have to be so huge? Back in her room, the boxes of textbooks from her prior classes were still unpacked. Sarah tried not to think of them.

Adding to her foul mood, she missed the campus shuttle outside the bookstore and so had to carry the heavy load over a mile back to Riley, sweating under the bright September sun. In her room at last, she dumped the pile onto her desk with an almighty thump, then collapsed onto her bed and lay glaring at the ceiling. She needed to get lunch, but she was too tired and sore to move. She let her eyes close. When she blinked awake, the light in her room had shifted, and she sat up, staring at her clock in dismay: two-thirty. She'd been sleeping for over an hour, and the Riley dining room would be closed by now.

Cursing, Sarah grabbed her handbag, visited the bathroom, and went back outside; after a seemingly interminable wait, the campus shuttle trundled along and bore her back to the main campus, jammed in with a phalanx of sweaty youngsters, many of whom looked entirely too juvenile to be college students. Oneida's main dining commons in the student center was open all day, and in the impersonal cafeteria, Sarah got a tray of food and wedged into a seat at the end of a table full of chattering underclassmen. Sarah hated eating by herself; she especially hated eating with people she didn't know. She gulped down her sandwich as quickly as possible, then dumped her tray. She grabbed a plastic spoon on her way out; she could eat her yogurt as she walked.

By now the campus was crawling with students and parents, and cars were lined up along every roadway, parked along every strip of curbing, some even resorting to parking on the grassy dormitory lawns. Like worker bees in a hive, parents and students traipsed back and forth between cars and dorms, dragging large pieces of luggage and carrying armloads of cartons, lamps, stereos, TVs, and microwaves. Orientation workers stood out in bright red t-shirts, giving help wherever it was needed.

The late-arrivals were back in full force, students who liked to put off everything until the last moment, and they crowded every service the campus offered. Sarah went to re-active her dormant checking account and found the lines twenty deep at each teller's window. An hour later, she left the bank, having completed her business, but still fuming over the wait. She swung into the little convenience store near campus to pick up some necessities—she still hadn't bought laundry detergent—and was stuck in line for another twenty minutes. The two girls ahead of her were alternately snapping gum and shrieking with laughter over something stupid; Sarah could feel the three hulking, athletic guys behind her ogling her ass and angling to get a look at her tits. To distract herself, Sarah thumbed through the most recent Rolling Stone, but all she could discern was that Peter Gabriel and R.E.M. had new records due to be released within the month. After Sarah rang out, she could not sprint away from the store quickly enough.

Waiting for the campus shuttle, Sarah thought, Classes start tomorrow, and that's about the last thing I feel like. I'd like to kill someone and then sleep for a year.

When the three meaty jocks showed up at the bus stop, leering at Sarah, nudging each other, guffawing, and making quick, rude gestures with their hands, she decided she'd had enough. She slipped away from the shuttle stop, into a crowd of students, and between a couple of campus buildings. A quick look back over her shoulder confirmed the guys were not following her. At least the three jocks were not likely to be residents in Riley. A student athlete in Riley was about as rare as a flamingo in Antarctica.

On the main quadrangle, she veered into the language office in Garrett Hall, where she put in her name for tutoring hours. Kids on work-study had preference, but once the semester was underway, hours would open up for other students as well, especially around the times of midterms and finals. Sarah, with her proficiency in three languages, was a sought-after tutor, and she could always use the spending money, to say nothing of the practical experience.

Back outside, she paused, knowing she still needed to set up an appointment with her advisor. She should not delay getting started on her thesis—independent study, she corrected herself; it wouldn't technically be a thesis until her proposal was formally accepted by the Honors Committee. She wouldn't see Victoria until the following Monday, when the senior seminar met. Sarah knew she could procrastinate until then. For a few moments, she stood waffling, then forced herself over to DiCiccio Hall and up the stairs to the art history office on the fourth floor. To her vast and embarrassed relief, Victoria Hammersmith was not there. Sarah found some paper, scribbled a quick note, and taped it to her advisor's door. With luck, she could forestall the meeting for a few more days.

Her feet felt marvelously lighter as she descended the stairs. On the first floor level, Sarah paused, then continued down to the basement. In an unobtrusive corner room, she was pleased to find her favorite computer cluster still there, the room unlocked, all the terminals unoccupied.

She set down her grocery bags and took a seat, logging in and opening up her email account. She had a message from Robert (guilty, guilty—she hadn't even called him and Irene to give them her new phone number), a couple of generic start-of-term announcements, and two other messages: one with a Bryn Mawr email address and another from Stanford. Stacey and Ruth!

She opened the message from Ruth first.

Hi Sarah,

I am SO sorry I completely forgot about having lunch in town last week. Blame it on hormones! I was hiking in Olympic National Park (me! hiking!) for a couple of weeks. I totally wasn't planning on the trip, but—drumroll, please—I met a guy in August. A real sweetheart, too. And I'm having actual, honest-to-God, real-life sex with him. Yes, S-E-X, the kind that would probably horrify my uptight Victorian good-girls-keep-their-legs-crossed parents. The past month was a blur. I'm at Stanford now, but talking to him by phone every day (he's a grad student at the U of Washington)—he's already bought plane tickets to come and meet the rentals at Thanksgiving. Gulp! That should be interesting. He's agnostic, but he's completely open to converting to Judaism, if it'll make the rentals happy, and he says Jewish kids are a-okay with him. (Yes, we're already talking marriage and kids; it's happening THAT fast!) I can't believe it—how did I ever get this lucky?

Anyway, I completely forgot we even planned to get together till I called to check in with Mom and Dad, and Dad said his secretary gave me a note from you, and then it was like, "Oh, shit!" I'm so, so sorry, and I hope you'll let me make it up to you either at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Can you come over at Thanksgiving and meet Brian? I think you'll really like him.

I'm so in looooooove it isn't funny, and my brain feels like strawberry yogurt right now, so sorry if this is incoherent.

Ciao, Ruth

Good grief! Sarah thought, re-reading the email. She made a sour face. Ruth with a boyfriend? She'd never even dated in high school, and had to be set up with a date for the senior prom with a son of her parents' friends. Not fair, Sarah grumped to herself. Now she would have to sit in the Kleins' living room with Ruth and her boyfriend, making a polite pretense of happiness for Ruth—which part of her was, quite genuinely—but inside being eaten up with jealousy and resentment.

Sarah next opened the email from Stacey.

Hey Sarah,

Hoo boy, I'm in the doghouse now! Mom called and gave me your message. Oh, man, I'm sorry. I'd written our lunch date in my planner when I was still working. Then I got a chance to spend a week in the Outer Banks with some people I met on my internship. I took one suitcase with me. I packed up everything else and shipped it to Bryn Mawr… including the planner. It's on the desk next to me right now, with the lunch date in big letters: Tuesday, September 1. Oops! Oh, well, I hope you and Ruth at least had a good lunch and laughed at how stupid I am!

This was followed by a row of smiley faces. Sarah exhaled a loud, wounded sigh.

Anyway, classes start tomorrow and I have a ton of crap to do, so I'm going to sign off now. Write back and please tell me you're not too mad! Maybe we can hang out at Thanksgiving or Christmas?

Stacey

Sarah drafted a scathing reply, letting her friends know she'd been stood up by both of them, but in the end she deleted the angry verbiage. She sent separate messages to both girls, saying it was okay, that she wasn't mad, that she'd only been home a week, an uneventful week at that. She didn't let on that both of them had stood her up; that would be too humiliating. Sarah mentioned the Thanksgiving break GRE prep course and said she might have some time on Saturday evening for socializing. She told Stacey that Ruth had "big news" and suggested emailing her for the details. She emailed Robert her new phone number and promised to call him later. Then she logged off and dragged ass out to the nearest bus stop: bad enough she'd missed lunch in Riley; she didn't want to miss dinner as well.

(ii)

Sarah had been determined to finish unpacking that night, but at dinner, she and Raelin fell into conversation with some students who were planning to have an informal movie night. One of the videos they'd rented was the Kenneth Branagh-Emma Thompson film Dead Again, which had been released during Sarah's year in France. She'd loved Branagh's adaptation of Henry V and had been dying to see his new film, so instead of unpacking, she sat with the other students in the second-floor TV lounge to watch the movie. Afterwards, a couple of the kids announced they were hungry, and Sarah joined their excursion for ice cream at one of the student-run cafes; what with the post-film analysis, she didn't return to her room until after midnight.

She lay on her side in bed, staring at the bulky dark shapes of the unopened boxes, struggling to still her restless thoughts. The movie had stirred a notion that had lain quiescent in her mind for some time, but which she now brought out to the light of day and examined. Did people really have soulmates? Was there one person everyone was destined to be in love with forever, whether a relationship with that person worked out or not? If a romance ended badly or tragically, would the lovers in question simply be reincarnated into new lives, fated to re-enact their relationship until they finally got it right and could be together for all time?

She grimaced, not sure if she liked the idea that even now, she might be in the throes of resolving some kind of relationship crisis with Jareth. How many more lifetimes would she have to suffer through before her deepest desires were fulfilled?

Oh, stop it, she told herself wearily, then fell asleep before she could argue with herself any further.

Wednesday, September 9

Sarah woke up on the first day of classes, staring at the large window, a dim square of pre-dawn light, unsure for a moment of where she was and how she'd gotten there. Realization flooded in, displacing the confusion: she was at Oneida, in Riley Hall, and today was the first day of her senior year. The beginning of the end.

She turned her gaze away from the window and froze. Jareth sat at the foot of her bed.

She said nothing, unable to breathe for a moment. He didn't speak either, but the gaze of his strange, mismatched eyes burned into hers. He wore only a loose-fitting shirt and hose, which had the odd effect of making him seem at the same time more human and more otherworldly. He reached out a long hand and gently stroked her bare calf.

Sarah sat upright, threw aside her bedcovers, and drew him into her arms. Somehow, all her thinking about him and yearning for him must have conjured him into reality. Sarah didn't question how it had happened, kissing Jareth with all the fervor of pent-up longing. He eased her down onto her back. Sarah grabbed his shirt in her hands, yanking it up over his head and tossing it onto the floor. He slipped off her nightshirt and let it fall. Beneath it, she was naked.

Sarah lay back on the pillow, arching her spine, offering herself. Jareth kissed his way down, caressing, squeezing, nibbling, sucking. She opened her legs, crying out when he pleasured her with his mouth. He kissed her thighs, her calves, the sensitive places behind her knees. At last Sarah sat up, helping him remove his boots and hose, then he clambered on top of her, and Sarah guided him inside her. They moved together with the fluid ease of long-time lovers, as if they already knew each other's bodies, and the pleasure was astonishing. Sarah wrapped her arms tightly around Jareth's shoulders, her legs around his waist, pushing up against him, every fiber of her being bent toward ecstasy. Faster they went, more vigorous, more intense, until release came with a dizzying rush and a surge of wetness. Sarah shrieked with pleasure, digging her fingernails across Jareth's back—

—and then woke up, trembling and sweating, throbbing between her legs, still unfulfilled.

Goddamn, Goddamn, why did it have to be a dream? Why did it always have to be a dream? Why, for once, could it not be real?

Sarah gnashed her teeth with frustration, sitting up and staring around the room. Unwilling to start the first day of classes in a state of aching horniness, she retrieved her favorite toy from its hiding place in her sock drawer. Back in bed, she stripped naked—might as well do this properly—and switched the vibrator onto its lowest setting. This model had replaced one lost in the fire: Sarah liked it because it was small and sleek, unremarkable in appearance. She wondered, not for the first time, if Jareth could still see her dreams, if he could watch her from afar. The thought was both frightening and exciting. Sarah indulged in a fantasy of him watching her, longing for her, but unable to possess her. The image it created in her mind intensified her state of arousal.

Sarah spread her legs wide and used the vibrator to masturbate, imagining that it was Jareth teasing her clitoris with his fingers and tongue. Years of wanking in her parents' home and college dormitories had taught her to pleasure herself in almost complete silence; only the sound of quiet gasps slipped through her teeth. The fantasies about Jareth were always lurid, saturated with dark red and purple colors. In some, he chased her through the Labyrinth, finally capturing and taking her forcefully on a bed of moss or beneath a hedge of roses. Sometimes he was in her bedroom, at other times they would be together in a field or a glade. This time, they were in a dark, mysterious room somewhere, lying on plush cushions, in a room draped with silk and damask. The vibrator did its work, and Sarah gasped with release.

She indulged in her favorite fantasy: he was pursuing her through the twisting corridors of his castle. Sarah wore the silvery-white gown of her ballroom hallucination; Jareth wore his glittery blue jacket, his face half-concealed by a mask. Sarah ran in terror, trying to find an escape, but knowing the futility of it, knowing only one fate could possibly await her. At last Jareth caught her, dragging her into a room with a lavish four-poster bed. He pulled her arms up over her head, wound a ribbon of red satin about her wrists, and tied her to the headboard, pulling her arms taut and forcing her back to arch up, exposing the generous curves of her cleavage. Jareth buried his face between her breasts. While he kissed and nuzzled and licked, he drew up the skirts of her gown, beneath which Sarah wore nothing. Jareth opened the front of his hose: in her dreams, his cock was always huge, turgid. He forced apart her legs and went down on her; in Sarah's mind the vibrator became his flicking tongue, his nibbling teeth.

When she was half-crazed with dread and arousal, he pushed back her knees—Sarah did the same to heighten the fantasy—and thrust into her swollen, wet folds. In this fantasy, Sarah was always a virgin, and she cried out at the pain of him piercing her maidenhead. Hot rivulets of blood ran down her thighs, staining into red blossoms on her pure white gown. At first there was only horror, but with the powerful, rhythmic thrusts, pleasure joined the pain, desire overwhelming fear, until Sarah was writhing beneath Jareth and crying out with a need that could no longer be contained or denied. Sarah orgasmed in waves, each more intense than the last, gasping and mouthing Jareth's name.

She dropped the vibrator and sagged down into the mattress, sweaty and trembling, but at least physically gratified. Unbidden, the thought of the three jocks from the previous day came to her, and she scowled at their intrusion into her fantasy, thinking how they probably would love to see her like this, a pornographic image made flesh. Well, they never would: they could all go fuck themselves. Or each other, she sneered. But Jareth… oh, yes, she wanted him to watch, wanted him to see, wanted him to know, but never, ever to have. There was power in that, in her ability to withhold. She thought of what it would do to him, how it would destroy him, to see her spread-legged, her genitals engorged, public hair saturated and glistening, to watch the faint jiggling movements of her large breasts, to see her tight, hard nipples pointed up at the ceiling, to watch her face as she climaxed, to see her mouthing his name, to know she was dreaming about him. To know she wanted him but that she would never, ever succumb.

Yes, she wanted Jareth to see. She wanted him to know what he was missing.

(ii)

Somehow, Sarah made it through breakfast and her Wednesday afternoon class, the Byzantine history seminar, with a composed demeanor. She ate dinner with her friends in Riley that night, chatting easily about everything and nothing. Raelin was full of excitement about the season premiere of Murphy Brown, which she said was going to lampoon the vice-president's criticism of single-parent families. Sarah nodded and laughed, trying to look as though she knew what the hell Raelin was talking about.

Sarah had planned to get a head start on her homework so she would not become swamped with work later in the semester. After dinner, she sat at her desk and diligently perused the first two chapters of her history textbook, taking careful notes on lined paper, but she went to bed that night unable to recall a word of what she'd read and not sure if she even cared.

Epilogue

From her window on the top floor of the high tower, Sarah gazed down at the goblins cavorting in the grassy courtyard below. Small, tall, reed-thin, round, some with horns, others with leathery wings. Very faintly, she could hear their shrieks and cackles and laughter. Goblins. Always goblins. She studied their faces: lewd, lascivious, merry, grotesque, fearsome.

A warm breeze gusted past the open windows, ruffling the ivy leaves: green, mostly, but autumn's cold fingers had begun to lace the verdant foliage with threads of gold and orange and crimson. Sarah shivered; despite the warmth of the day, winter's approach could not be denied.

As she watched, a tall, slim male figure appeared, a long black cloak swirling about his black boots. Pale hair fell around his shoulders. At a gesture from the man, the goblins ceased their unruly activity and settled down—as much as goblins ever can. The man turned, sweeping with his cloak, and the goblins followed him out of the courtyard as if he were the Pied Piper. The emerald grass looked sad and bare, the sunny day empty and bereft.

Near Sarah's ear, a bird hooted softly.

The End