Free Flight by Neil Hetzner Page A

larger by its penumbra of
combed out, frizzy, red hair, bobbed back and forth with
excitement. Her little black soutane button eyes sparked.
    Controlling herself, Prissi asked, “What do
they think happened?”
    “The ‘they’ who are supposed to do the
thinking in, and for, this hallowed institution probably aren’t
thinking. What they’re probably doing is emitting excuses as fast,
big and stinking as pigs’ farts and dishonoring our sacred honor
code by conjuring up a thousand ex post facto gigs for your missing
swain to show he has been a bad seed, a bad apple and a Bader
Meinhof ne’er do well.”
    Since Prissi was used to missing half of
Nancy’s allusions, she sniggered because she knew she should, then,
felt badly that she had given in to Nancy’s cruelty.
    “No one knows anything?”
    The serious tone of Prissi’s question caused
Nasty Nancy to tack away from her intended course. She looked at
her friend’s concerned face for a long pause, considering what it
might mean, before responding.
    “Supposedly, he ate breakfast and that was
the last time he was seen. Since it happened on a day without
classes, when he wouldn’t be missed for awhile, it looks like it
was planned. The mystery is whose plan. His…dash for freedom, or….”
Nancy paused and tried to wriggle her eyebrows, an action which
conveyed more the look of someone with Tourette’s Syndrome than the
portentousness she was aiming for. “…something more malign. Why
someone from a family that rich and with so many enemies didn’t
have private guards is hard to fathom.”
    “He told me he had to fight his parents about
that. He didn’t want guards. He just wanted to be normal.”
    “Then he should have done something about
that sun-seeking nose of his and, of course, the trillions.”
    Rather than chance an argument, Prissi
brushed Nancy off by insisting that she needed to finish her
problem set. Nancy spun around. With her halo of red hair, blunt
shape and butt swaying walk, Nancy reminded Prissi of a sea anemone
in a tidal pool as she churned her way out of the room.
    Once Nancy was gone, Prissi allowed herself
to be overwhelmed with guilt.
    Since that evening three days before when she
had shared her dining hall table with him, Prissi had had three
conversations with Joe. Two of those, one late and the other later
on Saturday night after she had returned from the Bissell
dedication, had been short, angry and awkward. Joe had been iced
that Prissi had gone to Bissell. He saw it as both a betrayal of
their friendship and an act of sycophancy. Their third
conversation, held the following day, had lasted for more than two
hours and had been very different.
    That chance conversation happened because
Prissi Langue had secrets other than eating candy in bathroom
stalls and filching shampoo. She also adored what she herself
called CRNs—cheesey romance novels.
    Prissi had been wandering around the
antiseptic little village of Waterville on a Sunday afternoon a few
weeks after she first had arrived at Dutton. It had been a typical
New England early autumn day—80 degrees, windy, the grapy smell of
kudzu perfuming the air. Even though she loved the school, loved
her teachers and loved the challenge of what went on in the
classrooms and labs, Prissi frequently was intimidated by much of
went on outside the classroom. On that particular afternoon,
instead of sitting in her room working through why she felt
inferior to her classmates, or couldn’t easily make friends, it had
been easier to run down the hill to the village.
    She had lazed along Waterville’s narrow
canted sidewalks window shopping its small shops, coveting clothes
that she knew never would look good on her, and admiring jewelry
she couldn’t afford. She drank an iced pom and wolfed a
ridiculously small piece of chocolate mousse cake. She was on her
way back to campus, dawdling to draw out her return, when she
noticed the small, square-shouldered Waterville Library.
    Although