Tim came back with a suntan and a two-month lease on the Hotel Catalina in Zihuatanejo, an isolated spot north of Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast. Fitz had to look it up in the atlas at the library and then, wasting time when he should have been studying, he found an old National Geographic article illustrated with photos of scalloped white beaches, coconut palms and a scatter of beach huts roofed with palm fronds—palapas—running up and down the shore just above the tide line. A fishing village—that was what the article called it. Very remote, very tranquil. The fishermen came in each evening to sell their catch and people gathered there by the shore, drinking beer, strumming guitars, grilling shrimp and lobster over an open fire. He’d never been to the tropics, never even been to Florida, and he couldn’t help lingering over the pictures, wondering what it would be like to walk those beaches to the sound of monkeys and parrots in the trees, to swim, snorkel, lie there on a towel and watch the sun vanish in the sea while sipping a—what?—rum and Coke. Or no, a margarita—wasn’t that what they drank down there?

He gave Tim exactly two days to reacclimate and then stopped by his office after classes on Tuesday, coming up the stairs to the strains of a radio playing bossa nova—Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, the hottest thing going—and voices, the usual voices, raised in merriment. Tim, who’d missed a week of classes and should have been contrite about it or at least pretending to be, wasn’t holding office hours—he was holding a party. Fitz smelled Fanchon’s perfume before he rounded the corner and saw her sitting there cross-legged on the floor in a pair of shorts and a yellow blouse identical to the one Joanie had been wearing at the Good Friday party. Which meant Joanie must have borrowed it for some reason—dressing up? Trying on clothes as if she and Fanchon were sorority sisters? Or maybe Joanie had spilled something on her own blouse, maybe that was it. Or—and here a sudden image of Joanie and Fanchon, naked and locked together, kissing, grinding, flitted in and out of his head.

Fanchon glanced up. She had a bottle of beer in one hand, a paper cup in the other. “It’s Fitz,” she cried out, “and not a minute too soon!” The shorts were very short. She was wearing sandals, as if it were mid-summer, and she’d painted her toenails. “Look who’s here,” she called, leaning into the interior of the office on one arm so that her near thigh rose at an angle from the linoleum, the flesh reddened where it had been pressed to the floor.