Distemper Read Free

apropos of nothing. “I mean, don’t you think about it? What exactly happened
     to her?”
    “I try not to,” Emma said.
    “Well I’ve been thinking about it a lot, wondering how he grabbed her or whatever, you know.”
    “How very morbid.”
    “No, I know what she means,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it too—trying to decide whether she did something stupid, drove
     around with her car doors unlocked maybe.”
    “Or hitchhiked,” C.A. said. “Or let the wrong guy into her apartment to read the meter.”
    “Or parked next to a van,” I said.
    “Good God,” Emma said. “Do they teach this sort of thing in high school?”
    “Try sixth grade,” C.A. said.
    “Dreadful country.”
    “So you’ve remarked,” I said as Marci came back in. “What’d the cops say?”
    “Half my first-year anatomy class called to ID me. A couple of people from tap class too. Which is pretty stupid since they
     know I was alive and well as of last Sunday.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “No.” She sat back down on the couch and one of her three cats jumped heavily from the arm onto her lap. Marci didn’t even
     notice, which is quite an accomplishment since Frank—a black-and-white tuxedo cat named after Sinatra—is fifteen pounds if
     he’s an ounce.
    “Come on, what did the cops say?” Steve prodded.
    “That there’s nothing to worry about.”
    “So there you go.”
    “They said there was no reason to believe it wasn’t… what did they call it? ‘An isolated incident.’ And her looking like me
     was just a coincidence, and I’m not inany danger, and anyway I wasn’t the only girl on campus who got misidentified.”
    “That should make you feel better,” I said.
    “Yeah, but it doesn’t. I guess I… I don’t know. Sympathize with her more.”
    “Perfectly natural. You’d be crazy if you didn’t. But you know what? Pretty soon they’re going to catch the guy and send him
     someplace where he’s dating guys named Spike. You’ll see. It’ll all be over in a couple of days.”
    I was trying—and let’s face it, failing—to sound tough. But the truth was that the whole situation got to me, like it got
     to all of us. I’d seen death before, up close and personal, but it didn’t make it any less frightening. The dead girl in the
     snow was about our age, could have fit right there in our living room. The thought of her made us feel both stronger and more
     fragile. More than anything, she made us think about how lucky we were just not to
be
her.
    We stayed up absurdly late that night talking about it, maybe a little bit scared to go to sleep because of what we might
     dream. And we might have stayed just a little bit scared if there hadn’t been another dead girl, then another and another.
     And we might have had more midnight talks, thinking of the whole business in the third person, if I hadn’t found the second
     body myself.

2

    I T WAS A S ATURDAY NEAR THE END OF M AY, JUST OVER SIX weeks after the chemistry professor’s ski trip from hell. I’d picked up my mountain bike from its spring tune-up the night
     before and gotten out the door at nine; my housemates were all still unconscious or snuggled up with whoever they’d gone to
     bed with. In upstate New York, May is not to be confused with summer (sometimes it can’t even be confused with spring), and
     I was wearing my heavy Vassar sweatshirt and a pair of biking tights. I’d only recently traded halfhearted jogging for halfhearted
     mountain biking, and it was the first ride of the season. My muscles were flaccid from not enough time on the Lifecycle over
     the winter, so even though I’d promised myself twenty miles I knew within two minutes that I’d be lucky to do ten. Since we
     live downtown in the flats between three hills, I had exactly one choice of where I could head without doing some serious
     uphill. I wound my way on back roads until I got to Route 13, thekind of fast-food and chain-store strip that hulks at