Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell Read Free Book Online

him.
    â€œI like it,” he answered seriously.
    â€œShirley told me about a Bennington student, a girl who disappeared into the mountains,” I said then. “She went for a walk by herself one afternoon and never came back, no one ever found her. I’ll show you her picture, the articles from the paper.”
    He shook his head; nobody had mentioned Paula Welden to him.
    â€œOh, it was years ago, Fred. Still, it makes you think, all those mountain trails leading god knows where. Nobody knows what happened to her.” I sighed. “But Shirley says the students are pretty.”
    He shrugged. “They’re okay.”
    I was still so happy. I had Fred. My world was safe. “Just okay?”
    â€œDon’t be ridiculous, Rose. I didn’t do anything.”
    We were two houses away from the Hymans’ place, and Fred started walking faster—striding, really—on his much longer legs. “I meant,” I began to say, but didn’t finish. He turned left, into their driveway, and I paused, watching him, but then I kept walking straight, without him, up the hill another few houses, and through the back gate to the college, so that I could see for myself what my husband had enjoyed that day. When the road split, one large building off to the side and the main campus before me, I thought about my direction. Right turns were the order of the day, I told myself,and strolled past a big barn and over a footpath to the little duck pond and then down into the thick of the dormitories.
    Someone had told me—I think Barry the night before—how the Bennington College campus was purposely designed so that no building was easily accessible from another. Entryways did not line up; paths were deliberately several degrees off the direct route—the idea was that nothing would ever be too easy, no excursion possible without conscious thought.
    On the face of it, the dormitory buildings appeared to my inexperienced mind to represent simple privilege in its most concrete form. One pretty colonial mansion after another, a parade of Taras down a well-maintained, nicely landscaped drive. And the girls, blowing cigarette rings as they walked, their kohl-outlined eyes and lean dancers’ bodies and cleverly embroidered coats and bright stockings and cheerful knitted caps. Bohemian entitlement embodied by one after the other. We were the same age, those girls and I, but it didn’t feel that way to me. We were the same age, but none of them knew what it was to be poor, nineteen, and pregnant. They were too bright, too hip, too extraordinary to be tethered to so banal a fate.
    Nobody on the dormitory road said hello to me, not the girls arm-in-arm chattering loudly, nor the ones pointedly strolling alone in poetic abstraction, nor the ones paired off with portly professorial types, chins stretched upward like birds hoping to catch morsels of predigested worm. In this world, I was invisible. If I stuck out, it was as someone not worth remembering.
    Nonetheless, I moved slowly past each building on the campus,looking for some particular sign, some marker I would know when I saw it. Eventually, I gave up and headed back down the hill, but I told myself I would return soon, look around again. I am not the smartest woman, far from it, and yet I have a certain instinct for danger.

Five
    T HE BOY WAS WAITING in my room when I went up at the end of the evening. Exhaustion had pulled me from the lively conversation on the porch; my limbs felt heavy and tired as I climbed the stairs. He was propped against my pillows in the dark, playing his guitar.
    Soft lemon light from the hallway dappled the floor. He sat up as I entered, lowered his feet off the bed, lifting the guitar with him so that he could continue strumming. Piles of our not-yet-stowed clothing sat on the single armchair. He nodded with a friendly, egalitarian air. “I wanted to ask. I bet you sing.”
    â€œI’m very tired,