Frost - Marianna Baer

The bird tweet ringtone of Celeste’s phone disrupted

whatever tipsy weirdness I was indulging in. I quickly pushed

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myself up and out of the closet, brushing the clothes back into

place and shutting the door securely behind me.

Her cell lay on her dresser. David’s name flashed on the

screen. I touched the glittery blue case and thought of him on the

other end, pictured him shifting from foot to foot, the way he did,

hoping the call would be answered. The tweets stopped.

I put Cubby back on the sill, her eyes facing the window. For

once, I didn’t feel like having her watching over me. Then I sat on

my bed with my head in my hands. After a minute I stood, picked

up Celeste’s phone, and returned the call.

He answered right away. “Are you done with that jerk, or

what?”

“Oh, hi, David . . . it’s Leena. Not Celeste. Her phone was

right here so . . .”

“Oh. Hey. What’s up?”

“Not much. I just wanted to see if everything was okay. You

left kind of suddenly.”

“Sorry about that. Just something I forgot to do.” He paused.

“Is Celeste still with that guy?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Do you think I should come back over?”

“Come over and . . . ?”

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“I don’t know. Distract her.”

“I think she’s okay. You missed dessert. Cupcakes.” I checked

the time. Still fairly early. “I could bring one over to you there. If

you wanted.”

There was silence on the other end. “Okay,” he finally said.

“Sure, if you feel like getting out.”

I glanced over at the door to Celeste’s closet. What had I

been doing in there? “Yeah,” I said, “I definitely need to get out.”

When I got to Prescott Hall, I phoned from downstairs for

David to meet me to get parietals. He didn’t answer. I sat on one

of the scratchy, yellow ochre couches in the lounge and called a

couple more times, feeling progressively more idiotic about the

foil-wrapped cupcake in my hands and the nervousness that had

wriggled in my stomach on the way over. Obviously, we’d had a

misunderstanding. Or had he changed his mind and was now just

ignoring me?

I was about to give up when I heard the groan of a door

being pushed open. David appeared, carrying a navy-blue laundry

bag Santa style, sweaty and apologizing. “I had stuff in the dryer,”

he said, leading me down the hall to his house counselor’s

apartment. “And I realized that if I got it now, I could have you

bring Celeste her clothes. Took longer than I thought. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, not mad, just relieved.

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Prescott has none of the hominess of Frost House, and none

of the stateliness of the larger brick dorms. Walking with David to

his room after getting parietals, I cringed at the cinder-block

walls, the fluorescent lighting, and the nubby brownish-orange

carpeting spread everywhere like a fungus.

“Home, sweet home,” David said, pushing open the door to a

second-floor single.

I guess I’d expected his aesthetic to be more like Celeste’s;

the lack of decoration in his room surprised me. His comforter

was plain black, his sheets and pillowcase light gray with white

stripes. He’d hung nothing on the beige walls except a bulletin

board, and the fungus carpeting had spread in here, too. Built-in

plywood furniture gave the room even more of an institutional

feel.

I’d have had no idea David even lived here if it weren’t for

the photos on the bulletin board: the same snapshot Celeste had

of the two of them on the beach with their father, and one of

David wrestling on a lawn with three young boys. There was also

a large one of a smiling, long-faced woman hugging an enormous

black dog. Otherwise the board was covered with notebook paper

with ungainly mathematical equations using symbols I’d never

even seen before.

I handed David the cupcake and a paper napkin, and didn’t

say what I was thinking—that I’d kill myself if I had to live in a

room like this.

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“Thanks a lot,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable.” He sat

on the bed and began unwrapping the tinfoil.

I didn’t know where to sit or what to do with myself—David’s

desk chair had a pile of books on it and I wasn’t about to plop

right next to him on the bed.

Then I noticed a cardboard box on the floor with a bunch of

silvery stuff inside. Spoons.

“Hey!” I gestured at the box. “Can I look?”

“Sure,” David said through a bite of cupcake.

I picked it up and rested it on the desk, then began taking the

spoons out and laying them next to each other. They were

satisfyingly weighty, and all had the same handle design—a

loop—but the bowl part was different. There were a few with

different-size holes in the middle, one shaped like a small ladle,

one with an inverted V-rest on the handle. . . . They looked

handcrafted, but not in a bad way—like someone had put care

into them.

“These are so cool,” I said. “Why are they all packed away?”

“You want me to bring them to Commons?” he asked.

“You should have used one at dinner tonight,” I said, smiling.

He finished chewing and wiped his mouth. “Great cake. Your

lasagna, too. I’ll have to reciprocate sometime. I make killer Pad

Thai.”

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“You cook?”

“Last year, when I was home, my mom was working a lot, so I

cooked all our family meals.” He tossed the aluminum foil in the

trash and picked up his laundry bag. “Until my dad stopped eating

anything I’d made, of course.”

Oh, right. I hadn’t thought about that since he’d first told us,

the day we met. Now, knowing how much he cared about his

family, it seemed that much more awful—his father thinking he

was trying to poison him. Something inside me crumpled,

imagining how David must have felt.

“All my paying jobs have been in restaurant kitchens,” he

continued as he dumped the laundry on his bed and began

sorting it into two piles. “Next year, I might just work at this place

in New York where I know the owner, make some money.”

“Are you applying to schools this year? And then deferring?”

I realized that in all our conversations, we’d never talked about

his college plans.

“I don’t think so. It’s . . .” He kept his eyes on the laundry.

“It’s complicated. There’s this professor I want to study with, but

I’m not sure I want to go to school full-time, do all the required

classes, you know. And the stuff with Pembroke won’t help me

getting in.”

“What happened there?” I asked, since he’d brought it up.

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“I plagiarized on a paper,” he said. “Stupid. I’d fallen really

far behind because I was going home all the time. And I’d been

caught before for something else, so I got booted.”

“Something else?”

“Illegal parietals,” he said, completely matter-of-fact, then

looked over at me. “So, what’s the deal with this Whip guy? Has

he been over to the dorm before?”

“Not that I know of.” I turned back to the spoons, trying not

to wonder about the girl he’d gotten busted with. “I assume he’s

just there to work on the project.”

“It was pretty obvious he wasn’t just there to work on the

project.”

David was right, of course. And I understood why he’d been

upset at dinner—he didn’t want his little sister’s sex life shoved in

his face. But, in the end, wasn’t whatever Celeste wanted to do

with Whip her own business?

“Whip’s not such a bad guy,” I said. “Unless it bothers you

that he’s part of the old-boys’ club. I think every male in his family

has gone to Barcroft and then Yale.” One of the spoons had some

sort of dirt on it. I wiped it with my shirt.

“Celeste tends to have really bad judgment when it comes to

guys,” David said.

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“ Most of my friends have bad judgment when it comes to

guys. Except for Viv.” I looked over at David and noticed he was

tossing a pair of Celeste’s lacy underwear into her pile of clean

clothes. For a brief second it freaked me out, but what else was

he going to do? Of course, he washed her underwear when he did

her laundry.

“It’s different with Celeste,” David said. “Her decisions

are . . . self-destructive. Look at that guy she picked this summer.”

He shoved the pile of her clothes into a bag and set it on the floor.

“She never listens to me about guys. But maybe . . . maybe you

could say something.”

“About Whip? What would I say?”

“You’re the peer counselor,” he said. “I’m sure you can think

of something.”

“Yeah, but in peer counseling, people come to me,” I said,

feeling a little uncomfortable. “Honestly, I’d feel weird saying

something without having noticed anything bad going on.”

He nodded. “Yeah. I get that.” And then, without

explanation, he grabbed his jacket and keys off the desk and said,

“Okay, let’s go.”

“Go?” Back to Frost House?

He held the door open and herded me with a nod of his

head. I followed him to the far end of the hallway and up two

flights of a dim, concrete staircase until we reached a big metal

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door with a sign that said EMERGENCY ONLY. ALARM WILL

SOUND on it. Between WILL and SOUND someone had drawn a

line leading to the scrawled word Not . And, sure enough, as David

pushed the door open, no siren blared. He led me out onto the

flat, expansive roof, the sky opening up above us. Dark and starry.

“Wow,” I said, stating the obvious. “It’s beautiful up here.”

He crossed over to a rectangular raised area, about the size

of a small bench, then sat and patted the spot next to him. We

barely fit on it together, so I had to sit with my body pressed

against his. For a few minutes we were both quiet, staring up at

the stars. I felt the crisp night air sneaking around my neck, and

the heat off of David’s body seeping into mine, smelled the mulch

of fall and his spicy scent.

Eventually, he was the one to break the silence. “I thought

going to school with her was going to be great,” he said. “But . . .

in some ways, it was easier to be apart. Because I can’t always

make everything okay for her. And even though I know that, I

can’t help trying.”

“You’re such a good brother,” I said, melting a little at how

vulnerable he sounded. “She’s lucky.”

He gave a brief laugh. “Don’t think she’d agree.”

“She would.”

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“You know . . .” He shifted forward, leaning his elbows on his

knees, and turned his face toward me. “I’ve been feeling kind of

bad about something.”

“What?”

“The other week, I didn’t mean to say your parents aren’t

good parents, or anything like that. I think I was, well, being kind

of protective of you .”

“Oh,” I said, remembering that he had sounded judgmental

about them. “That’s okay.”

“No it’s not. I’m not your brother.”

“I wish you were,” I said.