Free The Architecture of Fear by Kathryn Cramer, Peter D. Pautz (Eds.) Page A

other time, when she had something worth talking about.
    Besides, Robbie had always gotten along too well with her parents for her to tell him anything about the riots that he might pass on to them. She'd better write him when she wrote her mother, tell them both about how peaceful everything really was and how much the papers were exaggerating what was going on. Coming from him it would be more convincing than if she just put it in the letter to her mother.
    A bird was singing in the tree outside. She opened the window carefully—though the stained glass seemed sturdy enough—but the bird flew away before she could get a look at it. With the window open she could see the tree was a locust tree, with a weathered wooden bench beneath it. The sun glinted off strings of multicolored plastic beads some previous tenant had hung from the branches nearest the window.
    She finished dressing and went out to explore the yard. Off to the right she found an abandoned shed with the roof falling in. In a neglected flower bed behind the house was a concrete birdbath full of stagnant water and an overgrown chunk of yellowish limestone with a grotesque imp's face carved in it. Somehow the abandoned aspect of everything made it all that much more picturesque, more private. Her own secret garden.
    ***
    She looked around the neighborhood and, from a little corner grocery, bought herself enough food to fill up Isobel's tiny refrigerator, then spent the rest of the day straightening up the apartment, repositioning chairs and tables, moving things out of cupboards and dressers to make room for her own stuff, carefully stacking the portfolios and loose drawings away exactly as she found them. She glanced inadvertently at one or two of them, but tried to put the rest away without looking at them, out of some obscure sense that if she examined them without permission she'd be invading Isobel's privacy.
    The Sorbonne was closed when she went to register the next morning, surrounded by the uniformed soldiers with their Roman centurion helmets and plastic shields that had been chasing the rioters the night before. Two girls she heard speaking English told her the students had shut the school down and were occupying the Theatre de l'Odeon, a few blocks away. She went there to look, but one glance inside at the chaos and all the people making incomprehensible speeches was enough to tell her that there was no one there she would have wanted to meet, nothing there for her.
    She didn't really care if the Sorbonne was closed or not, but if her parents learned she wasn't going to school they'd yank her back to Downer's Grove and family dinners and Saturday nights parking with Robbie because there wasn't anything better to do. She had to find some other school before her parents found out. Anything, just so that she could convince them to let her stay in Paris until the Sorbonne started again.
    Maybe Marcelo could help.
    She disliked him as soon as he opened the door: emaciated, with long greasy black hair, skin-tight black jeans and some sort of pointy gray suede boots with buckles, the top buttons of his tight black silk shirt open to display a hairy chest and the fine gold chain he wore around his neck, heavy tasteless rings on his fingers. An ageing hippie gigolo, probably closer to forty than to Liz's twenty-two.
    But when he realized who she was his smile transfigured his face and made him suddenly seem almost boyish, and when he invited her in, in his broken, heavily accented English, so much worse than Isobel's, his voice was warm, with only a trace of petulance to remind her of her first impression.
    The apartment was small but neat. Marcelo apologized for not having been able to meet her when she'd arrived. He seemed so genuinely pleased to see her that, even though she still found him as physically repulsive as ever, she began to see a little of what must have made Liz like him.
    When she explained her problem with the Sorbonne he told her about the