The Black Hour by Lori Rader-Day Page A

sure he was gone, then opened my desk drawer and returned the photo to the wall. It was my half of the bulletin board, and I didn’t really expect too many girls to be trooping through. Not for me. Not for him, either, since he was kind of a dick.
    Of course that was the kind of guy girls liked. Better than they liked me, at least.
    I reached deeper into the drawer, took out the file I’d kept for the last year on Dr. Emmet’s attack. Below it lay another photo I’d have liked to hang up: my girlfriend, Bryn. My ex-girlfriend, actually, in her bikini on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. She didn’t fill out the bikini all that well, and sunglasses hid her eyes, probably her best feature. She’d sent the snapshot to me while we were separated by a half-dozen states, and it had set me on fire. She lived down south, starting her first job, while I was in Indiana, in my dad’s house, waiting to hear from Rothbert while I printed stories from the web and trimmed articles out of newspapers mail-ordered from all over Illinois, giving myself the creeps, to be honest. I should have left it that way. The surprise trip down to see her turned out to be a mistake. The message Bryn had left out of her letter was that she’d already met someone else but hadn’t broken up with me, because of my mom.
    I liked to think of myself as a thoughtful guy. On the drive home that very same night, I’d had plenty of time to think about what I had learned. About her, about me, about life. You can’t help who you love, wasn’t that right? She couldn’t help loving the other guy, and I couldn’t help loving her. I couldn’t help how angry I felt about my mom and how her death was mucking up my life. While she was sick, we’d watched a thousand hours of old black-and-white detective movies under an old green knit blanket with frilly edges. She was sick at home for a long time. Without her, I took to watching the news and developed a fondness for all the bad news going on in the real world. After the funeral, I’d pulled the old blanket toward me to watch TV. The yarn had taken on all my mom’s smells—her perfume, her medicine, her decay, her death. On the back of the couch it would stay. We could never move it. All of this was forever.
    I couldn’t help how much I hated being inside my own skin, how desperately I wanted to cut myself open and let whatever was inside free.
    I replaced Bryn’s photo in the drawer and took up the folder of clippings on Dr. Emmet. By now I’d wrung all the information from them I was likely to get, but still I sorted the pile. By timeline. By depth. By publication. Looking for the connections, making notes.
    Sliding the clips around on my desk, I wondered what Dr. Emmet would say if she knew how much interest I took in her situation. If she knew that I had applied to Rothbert only after I’d heard about the shooting. That I had turned down a better financial aid package at another university to come here and study with her. To come here and study her .
    I was sure she’d tell me to find another assistantship.
    I was sure she’d tell me to go to hell.
    I reached for my scissors and, taking my time, trimmed the article from Kendall’s paper to add to my file.
    Someday, I hoped, I’d figure out what all of this meant and, maybe, what it meant to me.

My first class session as a graduate student was methodology—study methods, use of statistics, field research strategies. I sort of got a hard-on just thinking about it all.
    But the professor turned out to be a thousand years old and kept dropping his chin to his chest as though we’d just witnessed his last breath. And then the chin would pop up again, half of what he had been saying lost in a mumble, and we were stuck there for at least a few more minutes.
    A couple of cute girls sat next to me. I could already tell they weren’t my type.
    My type—as though my type didn’t eventually take up with someone who was more her type.
    These girls