“Let’s just say I want to come back down. It didn’t feel meaningless.”
Corliss paused. “Serendipity?”
“Maybe,” Mayfair said. “Or maybe I’m just desperate to get out of myself, and he looked like another way under the fence.”
Neither Corliss nor Donna replied. They walked to the fence in silence.
As they made their way through the woods and the rear entrance of Spindrift, Corliss paused again. “I never thought of it that way, exactly. Like you, I didn’t have a joyful youth and actually had anxiety every morning on my way to school. I suppose I’ve been looking for a hole in the fence for a long time.”
“Isn’t that a bit over the top?” Donna asked. “A bit too dramatic?”
“Is it?” She loo
ked at Mayfair.
“Not for me. You know what I fear the most right now?” Mayfair asked them.
Donna shook her head. “There’s a list from here to the Atlantic, I suppose,” she said.
“No, for me only one thing tonight.”
“Which is what?” Corliss asked.
“That I’ll go back under the fence and down the hill tomorrow night, and he won’t be there,” she said. “It’s not a feeling I’ve had about anyone lately.”
“The hungriest eat poison the fastest,” Donna said.
“We’re all so full of wisdom,” Mayfair muttered. “We’ll have to rewrite Alexander Pope’s warning that a little learning is a dangerous thing. In our case, it’s a lot of learning that’s dangerous.”
Corliss nodded. “Don’t let Dr. Marlowe hear you say that. She’ll have a nervous breakdown.”
Laughter was a welcome relief, but after that, they walked in silence again until they were inside the building.
“Let’s not get caught coming out of here together,” Corliss said. “Don’t go right to your room, either. Make it seem like you’re coming from somewhere else or had another purpose.”
“Pity we’re not really evil,” Donna said. “We could give law enforcement quite a challenge.”
“We’d give everyone that,” Mayfair said, “not just law enforcement.”
They timed their exits. Donna went to the library, Corliss to the science lab, and Mayfair to the lounge area. After an appropriate delay, each made her way to her room. Mayfair, who got into a conversation with Kelly Boson about the moral implications of DNA implants in in vitro fertilization, was the last to reach her room. Neither Kelly nor anyone else who saw Mayfair, for that matter, had made a comment about her new clothes. She didn’t want their opinions to matter, but suddenly their indifference mattered.
When she got into bed, she lay there staring into the darkness. After Alan Taylor had let her down and made her ashamed of her own feelings, she thought it would be impossible to feel any interest in or excitement about another man. She had analyzed herself until she was tired of looking at her own image in a mirror. In her heart of hearts, she had no real expectations for this little escapade with Corliss and Donna. There was some new delight in breaking a cardinal rule at Spindrift, but nothing more to anticipate. Except for what she had done with her stepsister’s teacher, she had never violated a commandment, whether at school or at home. It offered her no self-satisfaction, and most of the time, if there was some regulation against something she wanted to do, she found a legal way around it. There was always something she was able to think of, some weakness in the armor.
Despite what she had told Corliss and Donna, she really didn’t expect they or she would do this again. If she had any expectation for it, it was that it would prove boring a second time. Buying clothes was fun because it was different from buying clothes with her stepmother, but that was as far as she had expected they would go. She wished she could believe in fate and destiny, just as Corliss had suggested. Meeting Leo did seem serendipitous. If Corliss hadn’t seen that coyote go under the fence, they might not have challenged one another to go off the grounds, and if they hadn’t done that, there would be no chance even in an infinite universe for her to have met someone like him.
Could she believe in something so intangible, something that had no empirical evidence to support it, an event that couldn’t be shown to be true in a laboratory and something that depended so much on inexplicable feelings, almost magic? Deep in her heart, she wanted to believe it.
I’m behaving foolishly, she thought, just like some of the airheads at my previous school I won’t go back there tomorrow night. Why bother?
Convinced, she turned over to go to sleep, but when she closed her eyes, despite herself, all she saw was Leo smiling at her. The image had her tossing and turning most of the night.
• • •
Neither Corliss nor Donna spoke to her about it before lunch. When she saw them in the morning, it was as if she had imagined it all. She wondered if they had talked about it without her and had decided to pretend none of it had happened.
Finally, at lunch, Corliss made an announcement. “Neither Donna nor I think we should go back to the mall. Analyzing it from all angles, we concluded there’s no positive result for you or for us. The chances are probably slim that this Leo guy will be there, and even if he is, what percentage is there in anything meaningful happening? He’s a drifter, and I don’t mean like us.”
“This was supposed to be our little experiment,” Donna added. “We thought having all our observations would make anything that happened different. We’d weigh the pros and cons so that none of us would do anything foolish.”