The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai Read Free Book Online

their faces, she was transported back to that day when they first formed their club.”
    He moved on to his descriptions of each girl. By the time he got to Cece (“She was the crazy one of the group,” the others uniformly read. “She even showed up at school once wearing her brother’s army jacket as a skirt!”) he was punchy and decided he’d venture into new territory. “Crazy old Cece,” he wrote, “had started a business of writing poems on her friends’ hands. She charged ten cents a line and had already made enough for a new pair of earrings!”
    And so of course it would happen to be this particular day that Miriam knocked softly behind him. He managed to close the computer window, but not the books. He swiveled, hitting his knee on an open drawer.
    “I’m on a quest,” she said. She held out a small, orangish-red piece of glass. “I’m searching for absolutely anything in this color.”
    “Let’s look.” He led her quickly into the bedroom. Of course there was nothing orange, and now he was just staring at the unmade bed. Doug knelt to examine the stack of books under his nightstand. He rifled through his own laundry basket, hoping not to be faced with the dilemma of dirty boxers in just the right shade. He moved to Zee’s dresser—as if she’d ever let Miriam use her jewelry—but Miriam was gone. He found her back in the study, in his desk chair.
    “I used to love these!” she said. She was holding Candy Takes the Cake . “God, these have been around forever!”
    Doug sank to the floor, where all he could do was laugh. “Don’t you want to know why I have them?”
    “I figured it wasn’t my business. I was looking for orange covers, but I see they’re library books. Is this . . . research for the monograph?”
    “Oh, Christ. Yeah. So. The monograph is apparently titled Melissa Calls the Shots ,” he said. “Number 118. I’ve never done this before. It’s just for the money.”
    “I’d hope so.”
    “You’re the only one who knows. Zee would kill me for not working on Parfitt. There is an actual book I’m neglecting. A serious book.”
    “You don’t call this serious? Listen: ‘Lauren might have forgotten a lot of math that summer, but one thing she learned was this: She would never take the Terrible Triplets camping again.’ That’s poetry!”
    He stood and swiped at the book, but she held it out of reach. “Please don’t say anything.”
    “We’ll make a deal. Get me something orange, and promise to let me read your Parfitt thing and this thing too. It’s hard to sit on such juicy gossip.”
    Doug found her an orange bank-logo pencil and an orange ad page from The New Yorker , and he suggested she might scan the storage room downstairs for seventies-vintage upholstery.
    He couldn’t concentrate after that. He spent the rest of the morning vacuuming ladybug carcasses from behind the furniture.

14
    Z ee knew Sid Cole would be out to dinner with the provost. And she guessed correctly that he’d fill the time between his late class and the seven o’clock reservation with the office hours he always complained were unnecessary for summer students. He sat snacking and grading and growling at any hapless teenager who dared disturb his peace. Zee stuck her head in to ask if he had any papers she could recycle for him. The man had famously refused the college-issued bin and threw everything from root beer bottles to old issues of PMLA into the black can under his desk. He smiled up at her, his mouth full of pretzel.
    “You are a hardboiled egg, Zsa-Zsa. A hardboiled egg.” Last spring he’d started amusing himself by supplying ridiculous endings for her initial, as if he’d never seen her full name on articles and campus directories.
    She made three more trips down from her office and past his second floor one, returning from the student snack bar with a newspaper, then a coffee, then a brownie. By six forty-five his was the last light on, and by six fifty he had