“I see Miss Lester is one of your prize students, too?” Professor Ranji looked me up and down, then back to Dr. Timberland with eyes full of warning.

Dr. Timberland was disconcerted. He glanced at me from the corners of his eyes, and thought I didn’t see him press his thin lips together to suppress a laugh. I lifted the silver chain out from between my breasts and nibbled on the tiny Christ.

“Why don’t you both come for breakfast? Tomorrow is Saturday, there are no classes. Oh, do come??”

“No, but thank you anyway,” refused Professor Ranji politely, “I shall have breakfast with my wife and children. How ’bout stopping over, Stan?”

“Is your wife’s cooking so great?” I challenged.

Professor Ranji excused himself, lowered his head and dragged his heels to his dusty jeep. When he stepped inside, he did so slowly, straining his face. Before he drove past us, he gave Dr. Timberland another warning stare and uttered, “Bon appétit.”

“What was that supposed to mean?” Dr. Timberland asked me irritably, fanning the dust that had risen to his face.

CHAPTER 20

Hunger kept me from sleeping that night. It started out as the hunger that calls one to the refrigerator in the middle of the night, then it grew, it attacked my guts, my sanity. I felt the cross on my breast, a tiny spot of cold. I kicked off my blanket, pulled my dress up over my legs, stepped into my red shoes.

An occasional owl looked down at me from the electricity lines with wide eyes. The streetlights were my only friends, helping me feel I had a right to be out, sentinels whose job it was to help me along the way. I walked on the side of the road without looking at the stars. I knew where I was going.

My feet left prints on the ground, the great island of the heel, the strait to the archipelago. How big they had grown, the feet with which I trod the earth, without my noticing. My footsteps led to a particular mobile home in a particular mobile home park, in front of which was a particular square of grass.

The sun rose over the earth’s edge like a Cyclops’ eye, a red spot gazing down at me. I stared into it. The red eye heated my tissues, flowed in my body like red wine. The window was open. I only opened it wider, inch by inch, and slid myself inside, head first. I found myself in a dim, narrow kitchen which smelt of cat litter, medication, old people and urine. I landed on a glass bowl of lukewarm water. The cat rubbed itself apologetically against my leg until I went to pet it, and it unexpectedly attacked my fur dress. I stood up in haste, knocking a few bouillon cubes off the plywood board that served as a worktop and was coming loose at the wall.

I only had to cross a room to get to the bedroom. It was small, dim, and smelt of sleep, stale and faintly sulphurous. Dr. Timberland was sleeping soundly, a sleep without the sound of breathing. I recognized the bottle of sleeping pills on a wobbly round table next to him. The sticker read Miss Paulina Craft. There was only one long oval pill left, half white, half red. I pulled the blinds up a bit to see better, and slowly lowered his sheets.