Mr. X by Peter Straub Page A

“First she said there wasn’t any guy. Then she said, oh, she forgot, a stranger came up and asked for directions. Then she cried. She didn’t want me to notice, and to tell you the truth, I was a lot more interested in what you’d have to say, because Star wasn’t about to tell me anything at all. But it wasn’t you, so I made a mistake. Obviously.”
    “I guess so,” I said.
    My flight was announced, and Phil pulled me into an embrace and told me he was proud of me. Laura’s hug was longer and tighter than Phil’s. I told her I loved her, and she said the same to me. I surrendered my ticket, stepped into the mouth of the jetway, and looked back. Phil was smiling and Laura was staring at me as though memorizing my face. I waved goodbye. Identically, like witnesses being sworn in at a trial, they raised their right hands. Other passengers swept forward in a confusion of ski jackets and carry-on bags and urged me down the jetway.
10
    Middlemount closed around me like a fist. In the week before finals, I sank deeper into the old pattern, rushing under metal skies between classes, the meal job, and the library, often falling asleep with my churning head on an open book. Sometimes it seemed as though I had passed from one frozen night into another without the intervention of daylight; sometimes I looked at my watch, saw the hands pointing to four o’clock, and could nottell if I had missed some badly needed sleep or a couple of classes and an appearance before the pots and pans.
    On the first day of finals I had the English and French exams, history on the second day, then a day off, chemistry on the next, and calculus on the final day. Through Monday and Tuesday I can remember coming into the bright classrooms, taking my seat, getting the blue books and the exam sheets, and thinking myself so far behind that I was incapable even of understanding the questions. Then the words began to sink in, the darkness to lift, and soon, as if more by radio transmission than by thought, coherent sentences declared themselves in my mind. I took dictation until the blue books were filled, and then I stopped.
    On Wednesday night I fell asleep at my desk. Raps at the door jolted me awake. When I opened it, I was startled to see Simone Feigenbaum, a girl from my French class, standing in front of me, dressed, as always, in black. Simone was from Scarsdale. She smoked Gitanes and was in the Bob Dylan–Leonard Cohen crowd. The thought that she probably wanted to borrow a textbook evaporated as she flowed in and put her arms around me. In the midst of a lengthy kiss, she pulled down my zipper and reached, with a sly, comic bravado, within.
    My clothes windmilled away, and hers flew off over her head. We toppled into my narrow bed.
    Instantly, Simone Feigenbaum was zooming over, under, alongside my body, her breasts in my face, then her stomach, then her buttocks, then her face was in my face and both of us were working away like pistons until I seemed suddenly to turn inside out. Her breasts nudged my face and I got hard without ever actually getting soft and we did everything all over again, only slower. And so on, repeatedly, until my thighs ached and my penis was waving a limp white flag. I was eighteen, and a virgin besides, technically speaking.
    Around six in the morning, Simone slipped out of bed and into her clothes. She asked if I had an exam that day. “Chemistry,” I said. She produced a vial of pills, shook one into her hand, and dropped it on my desk. “Take that fifteen minutes before you go in. It’s magic. You’ll amaze yourself.”
    “Simone,” I said, “why did you come here?”
    “I had to make sure I screwed you at least once before you flunked out.” She opened the window of my ground-floor roomand jumped down into the crest of snow between the dormitory and the path. I closed the window and slept for a couple of hours.
    I swallowed the pill on my way to the exam. Another bright classroom, another menacing