Quinn Read online

  “It’s good for you. Cleans the pores,” Quinn said.

  “But I don’t like to perspire.” Van slowed to a trot as Stanley intercepted them.

  “Hello, ladies,” he said, draping an arm across Van’s shoulder. He and Van were almost the same height, but Stanley’s bulk and lumbering gait made him seem bigger. Quinn was shorter than either of them and bobbed up and down next to Stanley’s shoulder.

  “What’s with you, ants-in-the-pants?” he asked.

  “Gotta check the mail. Save me a seat?”

  “They probably haven’t even sorted it yet,” Van said.

  “Thanks for bringing me my books. See you in a minute,” Quinn said, and she dashed off toward the student union, hair flying.

  “Forgot her vitamins this morning,” Stanley muttered. Van snuggled against him as they made their way toward McLane Hall.

  By the time Quinn slipped through the doors, Dr. Buxby was well into his lecture. Van signaled to her, and the professor stopped in midsentence to watch Quinn navigate the long legs of the Robinson twins and plop down next to Van.

  “Uh, Miss Mallory, are you quite comfortable now?” he asked.

  Quinn nodded, unperturbed. “Yes, thank you.” Her cheeks were flushed from the brisk air and exercise rather than from embarrassment. “Sorry I’m late.”

  The classroom was a small amphitheater with fifty seats rising in graduated tiers. Dr. Buxby paced back and forth at the front. He wore his three-piece pinstriped suit with the red paisley handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket in three perfect points.

  “We’re, uh, sorry too, Miss Mallory, because I am certain you would have enjoyed Mr. Ingraham’s, uh, remarks regarding Catherine Earnshaw.”

  “Pithy, I’m sure,” Quinn said.

  “Excuse me?” The professor cocked his head at her.

  “Miss Mallory has a lisp,” drawled a voice toward the front of the room.

  There was a ripple of laughter as Quinn sought out the shaggy head and angular body of Will Ingraham, who sat, or rather, lolled, in his seat, long legs stretched out comfortably into the aisle.

  “Correct me if I misquote you, Mr. Ingraham,” the professor said, then addressed himself to Quinn. “Mr. Ingraham, uh, defends Catherine’s behavior, viewing her, uh, passionate refusal to, shall we say, renounce Heathcliff as an act of, uh, courage, a symbolic revolution, if you will, against the rigid hypocrisy of her time.” He paused to let his words resonate, then glanced at Will again. “Do I catch your drift, Mr. Ingraham?”

  “More or less,” Will said.

  “Well, Miss Mallory?”

  “I’m sorry I mythed it,” Quinn replied.

  Dr. Buxby paused to let the snickers subside, then went on, “You don’t mean to say you concur with Mr. Ingraham’s assessment.”

  “On the contrary,” Quinn said.

  Van put her chin in her hand. “Oh, Lord, here we go again.”

  “Catherine Earnshaw was no revolutionary. She was anything but a free spirit. She lived under the absolute tyranny of her glands.” Out of the corner of her eye Quinn caught sight of Will Ingraham’s legs as he very deliberately crossed one booted foot over the other. He inclined his head in her direction as if loath to miss a single syllable. She smiled in admiration at his gift for communicating such profound rearview arrogance with such minimal effort.

  “She vacillates between her sexual passion for Heathcliff,” Quinn continued, “and her greed for prestige and money as exemplified by what’s-his-name, Edgar.”

  “I assume that Miss Mallory prefers the virtuous Jane Eyre,” Will said, no emphasis on the word “virtuous.”

  “Jane refuses to compromise her belief in what’s right for anybody, even the man she loves.” She felt her voice rising.

  “So she abandons Rochester because she’s too weak to buck polite society. Nice lady,” he said.

  “That is not what I said.” Quinn leaned forward now, fist clenched. “You’re missing the point. People just can’t do what they damn well please. They have to set up standards for themselves and have the guts to live by them.”

  Will turned around now and looked at her. His eyes were blue, lids almost half-mast, lazy. “That sounds like something Jane would say.”

  Quinn glared at him. “Thank you,” she said. Will shook his head slightly, as if to say he thought she was getting pretty worked up about all this. “Well,” she sputtered, “I’m not saying I don’t believe in freedom. Everybody should have freedom, especially to love …”

  “That’s a relief,” Will said with a quick grin.

  There was a murmur of laughter, and Quinn stared at him furiously. “You are very smug.”

  He tilted his head to her in apology. “Sorry,” he said. “Cheap shot.”

  “Children, children,” Buxby said, clearly delighted with the exchange. “Let’s not allow our, uh, literary enthusiasm to create factionalism in the classroom, pleased as I am that our, uh, assignments have made such a, shall we say, personal impact. We shall confine ourselves to the issues at hand. Now, Mr. Hartley, I want you to, uh, contrast for us, if you will, the imagery in the two novels.”

  The rest of the hour Quinn found her mind drifting. She watched out of the corner of her eye as Stanley’s hand fell casually to Van’s knee and crept halfway up her thigh. Van’s face seemed impassive, but Quinn noted the flush on the usually pale cheek. When the bell rang at last, jolting her from her daydreams, Quinn waved Van and Stanley off, promising to meet them at dinnertime. She dawdled collecting her books. Suddenly she realized that she was delaying until Will Ingraham had left the classroom. She’d had no intention of walking down the corridor with that complacent smile burning a hole in her back.

  Chapter 3

  Quinn’s room in the women’s dormitory was moderately neat, due to the day’s cleaning binge. Each month, exactly twenty-four hours before her period arrived, Quinn became ferociously tidy. She folded clothes, straightened drawers, sorted socks, dusted surfaces with maniacal energy. The urge disappeared the following day, not to return for another four weeks. By the time she was fifteen, she had learned to take full advantage of her compulsion or the piles of books, clothes, souvenirs, and half-eaten Hostess Twinkies would collect underfoot until the next time around.

  She had livened up her cubicle with warm colors—a bright patchwork quilt on the narrow bed, a secondhand rocking chair that she had fitted with yellow pillows, and beside the chair a straw basket that held three giant paper flowers—red, yellow, and orange. On the linoleum floor were three bath mats from Woolworth’s bargain table—again, red, yellow, and orange. The walls were decorated with posters: John Kennedy barefoot on a Cape Cod beach; Ike and Tina Turner in concert; and a travel poster of County Kerry, Ireland. All were unframed but carefully attached with hidden circles of masking tape. At the bottom left-hand corner of the Kennedy poster drooped a wilted white carnation, taped there to commemorate the first anniversary of his death.

  Quinn sat at her desk by the window, ostensibly committing to memory the postulations of Totem and Taboo. Her right foot tapped rhythmically against the floor as she absorbed the marked-up pages.

  Perched precariously on the edge of the desk was a portrait of her parents. Their features, fuzzy and idealized, faded into one another with varying shades of beige—except for the eyes, both pairs identically blue there, although, of course, her father’s were actually hazel. Quinn had gazed at the picture so often she imagined she had blurred the outline of their faces by staring at them so much.

  Her yellow Magic Marker squeaked as she highlighted another paragraph. All but five sentences were illuminated with the bold transparent track. Sighing, she tossed the book on the desk and stretched. Her eyes shifted to the drawer. She stared at it and then, after a quick glance over her shoulder, opened it cautiously. She removed an envelope, extracted from it two type-written sheets that were stapled together, and began to read.

  Quinn was
halfway down the first page when Van entered the room. She approached the desk unnoticed and reached down curiously to examine the papers that appeared so absorbing. Quinn jumped up with an exclamation, stuffed the pages into the envelope, and held it behind her back.

  “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Van said. “What’s that?”

  Quinn’s face had begun to redden, but she summoned enough composure to slide the envelope back into her desk. “Nothing,” she said casually, closing the drawer. “You just surprised me, that’s all.”

  “Letter from home?” Van pressed.

  “Yeah.”

  Van peered closely into the flushed face. “I don’t believe you.”

  Quinn watched Van’s eyes fix on the drawer.

  “You wouldn’t,” Quinn said.

  Van’s body was stiff and she held her breath.

  “You’re much too inhibited, Vanessa.”

  Van lunged for the drawer and yanked it open. Quinn yelped and grabbed at it, but Van had got there first. She backed away, holding the letter above her head. Quinn stretched desperately, but Van was just tall enough. She waved the envelope back and forth out of reach.

  “I don’t believe you did that. I’ll never trust you again,” Quinn protested. “It’s a federal offense, interfering with the mail.”

  “I’m not going to read it. I just want to see who it’s from.” Van peered at the return address. “Chris Hartley? Hey, is this what the recent mailbox obsession is all about?”

  Quinn slumped down at her desk, defeated.

  “I want to read it. May I?”

  Quinn looked at her balefully, then shrugged. Van began to skim the pages. She made no comment, only raised her eyes once to glance at her friend’s defiant face. When she had finished, she sat still for a moment, then said, “Are you going to report this?”

  “What for?”

  Van dangled the letter gingerly between two fingers as if it were on fire. “This is one sick boy.”

  “Oh, that’s not his own stuff. He copied it all from secondary sources.”

  “Which, an Abnormal Psych textbook or The College Man’s Rape Manual?”

  “Mostly the Kama Sutra, I think,” Quinn said.

  Van sat down on the bed. “You mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “Yeah, I do. But since you bullied your way into it, I guess I might as well. That letter was commissioned.”

  “Commissioned,” Van repeated dully.

  “Look, I’m going to be twenty-one years old in a few weeks and I’m probably the only virgin in the senior class.”

  “That may well be true.”

  “I can’t graduate like this.”

  “What would people think?” Van said.

  Quinn continued, her voice extravagantly patient, as if she were talking to a feebleminded child. “I don’t want just anybody to do it, do I? It has to be the right person.”

  “Chris Hartley is applying for the position of your deflowerer?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “You’re crazy,” Van said.

  “I knew you’d say that, which is exactly why I didn’t tell you. And if you mention this to a living soul I will personally remove your toenails.”

  Van shook her head. “What’re the conditions of this contest, or whatever it is?”

  “Well, the rules called for something original,” Quinn answered. “I hope the other guys read the instructions at least.”

  “Just how many are there?”

  Quinn reached for her Religion notebook and flipped it open to the last lecture’s notes. Silently she pointed to the list she had penciled in the margin. The names and their descriptions had been heavily embellished with doodles, but Van could still make them out.

  CHRIS H.: maternal instinct

  JERRY L.: body beautiful

  PHIL S.: wiseass

  MYRON S.: intellect

  JACK W.: good jokes

  BOB K.: gentle soul

  Van looked at Quinn in silence for a moment. Then she said, “Did you ever consider availing yourself of the free student-counseling service?”

  “Are you kidding? What would I do with a shrink?”

  “It might help.”

  “Help what? I don’t need help. I need Marvin the Magnificent. I’m going to get him.”

  “But Quinn …” Van’s forehead was wrinkled with the effort to explain. “It’s kind of … bizarre, don’t you think? To go about it this way?”

  “I think it’s eminently practical.”

  “I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  “You have no faith.”

  “Can’t you see? It’s like … coupling by computer. Mail-order sex. You’ve got this thing about control, and it isn’t something you can control. Or ought to, anyway. People fall in love by accident.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I really get the feeling you’re involved in a classical search for the ideal father figure.”

  “Oh, can it, Freud, for God’s sake. Quit analyzing me.

  Van fell silent.

  “Until you butted into this I was having a lot of fun,” Quinn said. Van looked so pained that Quinn’s face softened and she held her hand out placatingly. “Hey, listen, it’s just that it’s time for me now. It’d be okay if we could put Stanley through the mimeograph machine, but there’s no way. Can’t I have someone, too?”

  Van held her hair coiled into a twisted mass on the top of her head. Now she sighed and released it, letting it fall silky and dark past her shoulders. She stood up, headed slowly for the door, and turned to look at Quinn. “Listen, you’ll keep me posted?”

  Quinn nodded.

  Van hesitated for a moment, then said good night and closed the door carefully behind her.

  Chapter 4

  Jerry Landring’s room was a mess. Every conceivable surface was littered with something—football uniforms, soccer uniforms, sweat shirts, sneakers with cleats, sneakers without cleats, helmets, kneepads, and jockstraps. At the moment the chaotic atmosphere of the place was augmented by the presence of six young men who sat or flopped wherever space permitted. Jerry stood barefoot on his rumpled bed and scratched on a chalkboard that hung shoulder-high from a tired-looking nail. The others watched intently as a pattern resembling a tennis tournament scoreboard appeared. Six names were listed on the left-hand side: Bob, Chris, Jack, Myron, Phil, Jerry. From a bracket directly to the right of the names two lines projected, upon which were written the names Chris and Jerry. Then, from another bracket, one line extended, where Jerry now drew a large question mark.

  “So,” he said, finishing off the question mark with an emphatic dot.

  “I took mine right out of the Kama Sutra. I don’t know why she didn’t like it,” Jack said.

  “Oh, no. You didn’t tell me that,” Chris Hartley moaned. He sat on the floor beside the bed with his hands clenched around bent knees. “I used some stuff from the Kama Sutra.”

  “Not very subtle, guys,” Phil remarked from his perch on the windowsill.

  “She should only know how subtle my prick is.”

  “Shut up, Jack,” Chris said. His voice was brittle, and there was a sudden silence.

  Finally Jerry said cheerfully, “Don’t despair, Chris. It’s fifty-fifty now.”

  Chris looked up at Jerry’s athletic body and handsome face. “How much longer is she going to keep us waiting?” he asked anxiously.

  “The Virgin Quinn will no doubt take her own sweet time,” remarked an amused voice. Everyone turned to see Will Ingraham leaning against the doorframe. “Jesus, Jerry, this place looks like an armpit.”

  “Smells like one, too,” Jack muttered.

  “So who’s going to win the Irish Sweepstakes?” Will asked, nodding toward the chalkboard.

  “I’m ecstatic to report that Mr. Chris Hartley and yours truly,” Jerry said with a small bow, “have attained the status of semifi
nalists.” He pronounced semi as if it were sem-eye. “In a few short days one of us will be the proud possessor of the gold medal.”

  “How do you know it’s gold?” Jack asked.

  “Maybe you’ll get a brass ring instead,” Phil remarked.

  Chris shot Phil a malevolent glance and said, “I just want to know why it’s taking her so Goddamn long …”

  “Maybe a light went on in that weird head and she decided to back out,” Will suggested.

  “She wouldn’t!” Chris exclaimed.

  “No, probably not,” Will said. “She set the rules, she’ll go through with it if the winner brings along his pet boa constrictor.”

  “If Chris wins, he’s got one built in,” Jack said.

  Everyone laughed, even Chris. When he was pleased, the tense line of his jaw relented, softening into a child-like curve.

  “Good luck,” Will said. “Especially to the winner.” He disappeared from the doorway. Phil’s high-pitched version of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost floated down the hall after him: “Oh, Heeeeea-th-cliff …”

  Chris got up quickly and left the room. When he finally caught up with Will, Chris grabbed his arm a little too hard.

  Will spun around, frowning. “What the hell are you—”

  “Sorry,” Chris panted. “Jesus, you’re fast … Look, this is a little embarrassing … there’s a favor. See …” He stopped to take a breath and patted Will’s arm tentatively where he had fastened on to it. “You okay?”

  Will nodded, curiosity replacing his irritation.

  “You’re good in English,” Chris went on. “I mean, you really have a mind. Original. Could you … I mean, I’d pay you. I gave Quinn Mallory this thing and it’s no good, and I know Jerry’s going to win if I don’t hustle.” Will looked puzzled, and Chris shook his head in frustration. “Look, I’ll give you fifty bucks to do something really great for her. But it has to be right away. Tonight …”

  Will interrupted him. “Hey, listen, Chris, I can’t do that.”

  “Please. Jerry doesn’t give a damn. She’s just another piece of ass to him. I really care. I never even dared ask her out and then I got her letter about the contest, and I’ve really got a shot at it …”