Monday, Monday: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook Page A

the shooting had never occurred and Shelly had come back home on vacation.
    One day a girl she had played volleyball with in high school brought her a Time magazine with a cover picture of a stocky young guy in black-rimmed glasses. Shelly thought it was just a magazine until she saw the heading MADMAN IN THE TOWER. She felt as if something had grabbed her by the throat. He was sitting with a dog on a bench and reading a newspaper. “I’ll read it later,” she told the girl, and put it away.
    After her parents had gone to bed that night, she got the magazine out and sat among old sneakers in her closet to read by flashlight, flipping past pictures of Luci Johnson’s wedding and an article on race riots before she found the story. In one photograph, he was seated at someone’s breakfast table beside a potted plant. There was a diagram of the UT campus littered with red and black stick figures, the red ones spread out flat, with their names written beside them. These were the dead people. The females were drawn in triangular dresses to distinguish them from the males. The figures in black were hunched as if they were crawling. Shelly stared at the one near the hedge, who was supposed to be her. Inside the square made by the hedge, not far away from the flagpole, was the stick figure supposed to be Jack. In real life, he’d been shot later than she was, but here he was on the same flat, timeless plane, hunched over the same way. Beside him, the boy in the grass was drawn in red.
    So, she thought. That boy is dead. She remembered his surfer shirt and how he had bled from the throat, and recalled the sounds he had made. Closing the magazine, she looked at the picture of Charles Whitman on the bench with his dog, and studied his hands and how he held the newspaper, and imagined his finger pulling a trigger.
    One morning her mother drove her back to Austin to see the orthopedist who had operated on her arm. The tower seemed to grow taller as they drove closer to town. When they were close enough to see the clock face, her mother said, and not for the first time, “You know we don’t have to come here. We could go to a doctor in San Antonio.”
    Shelly told her she wasn’t afraid of coming to Austin. But this wasn’t exactly true. And she kept her eye on the tower.
    When they were back in Lockhart, her mother went to the grocery store, and Shelly attempted to fold laundry. The cast was heavy and made her clumsy, and her arm sweated into the gauzy interior, intensifying the swollen, claustrophobic feeling. Stitches under compression bandages tugged at her breast. She spread the blouse flat on the bedspread and worked to smooth it out and fold the sleeves, but it puckered at the shoulders and she couldn’t anchor it. She got on her knees and tried to pin it down with her chin, then yanked it up and flapped it around and threw it onto the floor, where it lay in a wrinkled heap on the carpet. Eventually she picked it up and sat on the bed awhile, holding the wadded shirt and staring down at the laces dangling from her tennis shoes. She had not been able to tie them. The window unit made grinding noises.
    She wanted to cry, but had done enough of that. She was dizzy from the medication. Her mother was still at the grocery store, her father at work. She sat on her bed with a National Geographic from two years ago, leafing through the story about the Peace Corps.
    Bolivia. Tanganyika. Gabon. Turkey. Sarawak. Ecuador.
    There were lots of pictures. She had looked at them so often the pages were wrinkled: Volunteers in Bolivia vaccinating a little girl against smallpox. Trainees on an obstacle course—rappelling, rock climbing. It would be a long time before her arm would be healed enough to manage something like that. Eventually, though, it would, and she would make sure she was ready. Only one person in four who applied was accepted for training, and not all the people who trained would be chosen to go abroad. But if anything