Chapter III: A Moonlit Masquerade
I spent two nights a week at the school newspaper, a windowless room in the basement of the campus center convinced it had its finger on the pulse of the globe. I had started in September as a simple news writer but quickly obtained a position as assistant editor when my predecessor went down for underage drinking and resigned in disgrace. I only took the job at the urging of my mother, who cited my monthly articles in the high school paper on such esoteric topics as the Polar Plunge and senior prom as evidence of some deeper calling. Additionally, she declared, it was never too early to start building a resume, comprehending nothing of my personal and professional aspirations. I applied anyway. After what my father had done to her, I couldn’t tell her no.
I despised the newsroom, especially the cavemen over in sports and the caffeinated fanatics from my own section with same tired refrain of objectivity as the path to truth. The comeback thriller and the bombshell revelation never stirred me. AP Style never could. Yet here I sat, at an old black Dell monitor, editing an article about the latest Student Government battle, and wishing I had some Fireball.
“Victor.”
I looked up. Shelby, the news editor, was standing over me, holding a printed sheet in her hand. She was a junior, pale, with a pointed nose, six feet easily, wearing a conservative Cape Cod hoodie, her ponytail tied back through a faded Sox cap: a plain New England girl of undeniably Irish stock. Her eyes, though, were otherworldly: Aegean, ambitious, asking.
“Victor.”
“Yes?”
“This article. Your article. On the Thompson renovation. Oxford commas all over the place.”
I sighed. I had finished the article on the engineering building upgrades an hour before the deadline, firing off a few last-minute emails to professors for quotations and inventing some of my own from students: dry, pragmatic types supremely excited to soon sit in a classroom with functioning heat.
“I see,” I said. “I left them in for the sake of symmetry.”
“It’s wrong. You know it’s wrong.”
“It’s protest.”
She rolled her eyes. “And this quote—by the sophomore, Adonis Sterling—about the ‘restorative effects of warm air’—sounds fake.”
“He’s Canadian.”
“I don’t like it. Cut it. And fix the commas. You know better.”
She tossed the article onto my desk, each third comma circled in angry red ink, and swaggered back to her desk. Why she still edited by hand, I didn’t know.
The library was the tallest building on campus at thirty floors, a looming rectangular monolith of red brick smack in the center of the grounds. Every night I wasn’t at the paper I would go to its lobby cafe and get a cup of hot coffee and take the elevator all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor, where I would set up shop at a desk by the window, a secluded spot at the edge of some scarcely wandered stack.
During a normal school night there would usually be just a few other students on the same floor. On Friday night, my favorite time to go, there would be maybe one other person. Tonight, however, it was Halloween, and not a soul haunted the shelves except me.
I sat on the eastern side, gazing out at the five brown towers of Southwest and the smaller dorms clustered at their feet. The residential area housed close to half the student body and was the birthplace of the university’s Bacchanalian reputation. I shivered to think of the debauchery undoubtedly unfolding down there during this grand game of pretend.
Still, the view was my favorite on campus—especially at night, looking out at the dorm lights lit intermittently against the dark facades. I liked to imagine the life behind each lamp—the guy or girl or roommates or best friends or lovers at this very moment in time. Was it a single girl with an energy drink studying for an exam? A group of guys “Beerio Karting” as Jake and Tom had shown me last weekend? Or was it a group of friends—Cassie’s group, even—pulling on their costumes, putting back wine, and posing for Instagram pictures in the dorm hallways, in anticipation of an unprecedented night out—their first college Halloween.
I pulled my eyes away from the window and looked back at the laptop in front of me, its keys faded, Word document on the screen. I had been writing about Christmas. Not the euphoria of its youthful incarnation but the most recent Christmas—last Christmas—my first holiday with a lover and my mother’s first without my father in twenty-four years. He’d left in the summer for a woman seven years older than me.
I was trying to get the kiss right, the first kiss on our first date under the lights of Our Lady of La Salette, a national shrine in some Providence suburb known more for its dazzling Christmas lights display than the Marian apparition to which it was devoted, some farm in France where Mary appeared to two shepherd children and tearfully begged them and their people to turn back to God.
Sarah was looking up at me as we stood underneath an oak draped in giant bulbs of color and I knew what she was waiting for. The previous month had passed by in a blur. It began with a post from her on my Facebook wall, a “Truth is” in which she confessed that although she had never spoken to me in Spanish class, she thought I was cute. A day later I was waiting outside when class ended to walk her to her next one. The text exchanges soon followed—morning, noon, and night—every last memory and monotony transmitted between us: tedium, trauma, truth. We bonded fast. I had made the courtship official just yesterday with a Christmas card in her locker inked in flirtatious verse and an invitation to spend with me a romantic evening beneath the lights. She accepted with a joyous cry and embraced me in a charged hug, knocking me into the lockers. She held me like that for a long time.
Now I was under the lights and she was looking up at me with her mittened hands in mine and the soft rain was falling and her body hovering and I knew that this moment must be the climactic one but when I leaned in to kiss her I faltered.
I slammed my laptop shut. Maybe that’s what I deserved for writing about Christmas on Halloween. Maybe only the devil was in town tonight and there was no point in fighting him. I took a long look out at Southwest, now soaked in stone white by the waxing gibbous. In the distance I heard a scream, then several. It was nearing ten and the celebrations were almost certainly in full swing. I put my laptop and notebook in my bag and rode the elevator back down to the ground floor. Outside the air was cold.
I decided to go the long way back to my room, down the path beside the field hockey fields that approached Southwest before I was forced to turn. Right at the edge of the field was a grandiose view of the first two weathered towers, Washington and Jefferson, raised high over campus and the valley surrounding it—sentries of a storied land. I was close enough now that I could see shuffling figures in the windows, outlined against the yellow glows. I couldn’t tell if the shadows were drinking or dancing or doing nothing except for the few rooms whose drawn blinds betrayed the green and red lights blinking behind them. The hill that climbed to my dormitory came up on my left. I went straight.
The path cut sharply through the bushes before spitting me out onto the main cobblestone walkway, a hundred yards from the looming Washington Hall, smack in the middle of Southwest. Out of the darkness smaller dorms materialized around me, and with them, bodies. Staggering, howling, cackling bodies that swarmed down the sidewalk and through me on and onward to the Uber, the bus stop, the frats and the bars. They broke over me like waves, none of them themselves: firefighters, nurses, cops, cowgirls, construction workers and sacrilegious nuns laughing and smoking and pushing each other and taking long swigs from plastic water bottles, shouting at the spectators in the windows, the spectators shouting back.
The energy was palpable—alluring, even—whether it was the pull of the herd or the almost-full moon I couldn’t tell. I considered stopping to tie my shoe so that I could turn around and walk with them for a brief moment but soon realized that was an impossibility considering the jacket and backpack and cup of coffee in my hand. Tom had asked me repeatedly in the lead up to Halloween what I was going to be—he even told me we could take his car over to Target and peruse the shelves. I said I preferred the type of Halloween that ended with a big bucket of candy, and that—
“PIZZA BOY.”
It was the devil in a red leotard, that same bold blonde from a lifetime ago. She was sitting on a concrete wall underneath some low hanging trees, legs crossed, smirking, next to three other girls: an underdressed referee, a demur disco girl, and a banging black cat.
I didn’t recognize her at first.
Thigh-high boots, fishnet tights, black eyeliner and a black corset bodysuit, curled hair, crimson lips, two pointed ears and a choker around her neck.
I had searched for her, pined for her, written about her and replayed that rain-soaked bite in my head over and over and over again, before finally admitting to myself as the bus pulled away from the pizza shop that I was chasing a ghost. Now here she was in the flesh: a creature of the night that had crept across my path once more. I couldn’t let her slip away again.
“Cassie,” I said. “Hello.”
“Oh my God, hey,” she said. “Vinny!”
“Victor,” I said.
“Right! Yeah, Victor. How are you?”
“Afloat,” I said.
She nodded. “Do you live down here?”
“No. I was just going to the dining hall.”
“The dining hall is closed,” the referee said sternly. It was the same girl who had held the umbrella that first night. Their friend, Ashley, was the disco girl.
“Oh,” I said. “I must have lost track of the time. I see you ladies are celebrating.”
“Yeah,” Cassie said, “we’re going to a party.” She paused. “Are you doing anything tonight?”
“I’m going home right now to change and put on my costume,” I said. “And take some shots before seeing where the night takes me.”
“Oh, nice! What are you going as?” She asked. I didn’t have an answer and I couldn’t just throw one out, either. A costume choice, even a fabricated one, would reveal something. But was it something that I wanted her to know?
“A shepherd,” I said, playing it safe.
“That’s unique. I like it. I’m a cat, you’re a dog.”
“Why’d you pick cat?” I asked, deciding to probe deeper.
She looked down at her disguise then back up at me with a teasing smile. “Honestly, it was last-minute and I figured I’d at least look hot.”
“You do look hot,” said the referee.
“Indeed,” I said, and they all giggled invitingly.
“What are you drinking tonight?” Cassie asked.
“Something hard,” I said. “What about you?”
She held out a plastic water bottle. “Dragonberry Bacardi. Take some. Then we’re even.”
I stared at the bottle gripped in her hand with the long black nails; when I took it from her my hand shook from its sheer proximity to a place her lips had touched. I uncapped it as the four sets of eyes watched me. I would pour it into my mouth from afar to play it safe. The vodka was flavored and would go down easy. After that I’d make my move.
I tilted my head up and tipped the bottle toward my mouth. A perfect stream spilled from the bottle’s ledge toward my mouth until it landed on my tongue and I ejected it all over the ground, out of my mouth and through my nose. I turned away from the girls and gagged twice. I could hear them laughing.
“Are you okay?” A voice rang out from the group, it might’ve been Ashley.
“I’m good,” I said, whirling back around, my eyes watering from the burn. I handed the bottle back to Cassie and took a long, unflinching swig. The group laughed. I decided to take advantage of the good vibes.
“If you want—Cassie—I could escort you to the party. It’s spooky out here tonight.”
She frowned. “Oh, that’s so sweet, thank you. But we’re actually catching an Uber.” She looked down at her phone. “Oh, fuck, he’s actually here.”
“Shit,” said the others in unison, and the three of them hopped off the rock wall and started jogging toward the street: the referee, the devil, and the disco girl.
Cassie stepped back onto the path, the heels of her thick boots echoing off the cobblestone. She tossed her hair back and her bare shoulders caught the moonlight. “It was nice seeing you. Have fun tonight.”
“I will.”
“Sorry about the Bacardi,” she said, and disappeared into the dark again.
I didn’t want to follow them so I sat there for a few minutes on that same stone wall, watching the crowd. After ten minutes I began the walk back to my dorm in a daze, thinking only of my bed. Tom was out but the room had been the site of a lively pregame: a folding table squeezed between our two dressers covered in solo cups, an ash tray still smoking on the window sill, purses and makeup supplies spilled across Tom’s desk and my own.
I immediately went to the fridge and was relieved to find a half bottle of cold Fireball. I twisted off the cap and took a long gulp, then crashed face first into the covers.
I woke up in the late morning to Tom half-hanging off his bed, sword by his side and patch still over his left eye. His eyes flicked open when he heard me stir.
“Fuck.” He said, feeling for his phone. “Holy shit. Fuck. Sorry about the mess, bro. I was gone before I left the room.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“How was your night?”
“Unlucky,” I said.
“I told you, you could’ve been part of the pirate crew. Booty everywhere last night.”
He found his phone beside him on the mattress. Squinting, he punched in the passcode.
“What?” He said.
“Who’d you text this time?”
“No, no,” he said. “Nothing like that. Have you checked your phone?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t know where it was.
“An alert from the campus police. Some girl is missing. Last seen leaving a party on Sunset Avenue, distressed, probably drunk. Investigators are concerned for her welfare and seeking information.” Tom got out of bed and sat down at the edge of mine. “Pretty hot,” he said. “I hope she’s okay.”
He stuck his phone in my face and I beheld a screenshot from Instagram posted the night before, its imperiled subject baring her sharp teeth and claws against a backdrop of white brick: Cassie in a black cat suit, the leather tight against her skin.
.