Free Monday, Monday: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook Page A

your beans?”
    She pushed the bowl toward him, and he ate the green beans and started into his chocolate pie while she tugged her sweater back on. “Is that paint under your nails?” she asked him.
    He looked at his nails. They were cut to the quick, but no matter how short he cut them, he couldn’t prevent the blue paint stains from collecting under the edges.
    “I’m just getting you back for the Jell-O I had on my mouth,” she said. He noticed a fleeting smile. “So I take it you’re still painting?”
    “When I can.”
    “Landscapes? Portraits?”
    “Objects,” he said. “Rocks. Chairs. Windows. For practice. If you’ll walk over to the art building with me I’ll show you. A couple of my students are using tempera.”
    “You’re teaching?”
    “Just a freshman foundation course.”
    He carried their trays and returned to the table for his jacket and book bag and Shelly’s books. Shelly was still seated.
    “Can we go down Twenty-fourth Street instead of across the plaza?” she asked him.
    He pulled his jacket on. “You don’t ever cross the plaza?”
    “Twenty-fourth Street is just as close,” she said.
    “No it isn’t.” He sat back down. “Are you planning to avoid the plaza forever?”
    “For three more years.”
    “Very funny.”
    “Actually, I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to walk across it.”
    “How about now?”
    She frowned.
    “Come on.”
    “Do you cross it a lot?”
    “A couple of times a week,” he said.
    “Does Jack?”
    “He does. Look, I bet it won’t be as hard as you think.”
    Finally, she agreed. But in the corridor, her feet dragged. “I don’t want to be out there when the bells ring.”
    He checked his watch. “We’ve got ten minutes before they ring. And we can get across in a few seconds. We’ll walk a straight line along the front of the building and over to the East Mall.”
    They exited into mottled sunlight and an autumn breeze tumbling leaves through the courtyard. Bevo, the Longhorn mascot, was tethered to an orange livestock trailer parked at the curb on the Drag, next to a Peace Corps booth, his student handlers, in orange shirts, allowing people to pet him. Nearby, a girl with a placard for SDS sat in an open plywood shack that was covered with antiwar slogans and paintings of bombs falling on villages, and an old man plucked a banjo, shouting obscenities at people who stopped to listen. He shook his banjo at a dog chasing a Frisbee. A banner tugged in the trees like a sail, announcing that In Cold Blood author Truman Capote would be reading at the Student Union.
    The tower was obscured at first by the roof of the undergraduate library, but it emerged into view as they stepped away from the Student Union. Shelly’s heart started to knock in her chest, and she was glad for the canopy of branches partially blocking the view. Still, she could see the tower rising above her, and she couldn’t shake off the ominous sense that it could see her as well.
    A student wearing a Colonel Sanders mask and a Mae West inflatable vest approached and handed Wyatt a pamphlet, then moved on, swinging his satchel.
    “What’s the pamphlet?” Shelly asked.
    He opened it. “It says ‘Join the Shadebourne Twink.’”
    “What’s the Shadebourne Twink?” She didn’t want to keep walking.
    “I don’t have a clue.”
    Everything about the day was different from that day over a year ago when she had started across the plaza. She reminded herself of this. The weather was different. The air was chilly now, not hot. Clouds that looked like mounded scoops of ice cream traveled across the cold blue sky, shoved along by the breeze. And she would be walking from west to east, very close to the building, not diagonally across the center of the plaza from the opposite direction.
    “You’re sure your watch is right?”
    “I promise.”
    When she started walking, her legs felt heavy. Off to the right, the flagpole rose from the concrete base. She didn’t look at