The Raising E-Book

Laura Kasischke

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 788

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

death. In Godwin Honors Hall, the walls are draped in black. The college is in mourning for Nicole Werner, a blonde and beautiful prom queen who died in a car crash last semester. She was a prized member of the Virgin Sisters, the most powerful sorority on campus. obsession. Nicole's boyfriend Craig was at the wheel that night. He has no memory of the crash, but he is plagued by guilt. For as winter sets in and the nights darken, Nicole's death dominates college life - and then the hauntings begin. suspicion. Craig's roommate, Perry, doesn't believe in ghosts. He always thought Nicole was as manipulative as she was charming, and refuses to be swept up in the hysteria. But when he and his fellow sceptics join forces, he too sees Nicole's spirit in the crumbling college halls...

Leseprobe

THE

RAISING

LAURA KASISCHKE is a US bestseller and a multi-award-winning author. Two of her novels have been made into films, including The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman. She teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, where she lives with her family.

First published in the US in 2011 by HarperCollins

This edition first published in the UK in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Laura Kasischke, 2011

The moral right of Laura Kasischke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-85789-154-9 eISBN: 978-1-84887-198-4

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WON 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Bill

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

THE

RAISING

Contents

Prologue

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

Part Two

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

Part Three

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

Part Four

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

Part Five

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

Part Six

107

108

109

110

Prologue

The scene of the accident was bloodless, and beautiful.

That was the first word that came to Shelly’s mind when she pulled over:

Beautiful.

The full moon had been caught in the damp bare branches of an ash tree. It shone down on the girl, whose blond hair was fanned around her face. She lay on her side. Her legs were pressed together, bent at the knees. She looked as if she’d leapt, perhaps from that tree or out of the sky, and landed with improbable grace. She was wearing a black dress, and it was pooled around her like a shadow. The boy had already climbed out of the smashed vehicle and crossed a ditch full of dark water to kneel by her side.

He seemed about to take her in his arms. He was speaking to her, pushing her hair out of her eyes, gazing into her face. To Shelly, he did not appear panicked. He seemed stunned, and rapturous with love. He was kneeling. He was just beginning to slide his arms beneath her body, to cradle or lift her, when Shelly came to her senses long enough to honk the horn of her car. Twice. Three times. He was too far away to hear her no matter how loudly she might shout, but he heard her honk her horn, and looked up. Startled. Confused. As if he’d thought that he and the girl were the last two creatures on earth.

He was far from Shelly, on the other side of the rain-filled gash, but seemed to wait for her to tell him what to do, and Shelly was somehow able to tell him, as if they could speak to one another without bothering to speak. As if they could read one another’s thoughts. (Later, she would consider this. Perhaps she hadn’t spoken to him at all, she’d reason, or maybe she’d been shouting and hadn’t realized it.) However it had happened, Shelly managed to tell the boy, calmly, so he would understand, “If she’s injured, you don’t want to move her. We need to wait for the ambulance.”

This was the one thing Shelly knew about accidents, about injuries. She’d been married for a few years to a doctor, and that detail had stuck.

“The ambulance?” the boy asked. (In Shelly’s memory his voice was clear and close. But how could it have been?)

“I called them,” Shelly said. “From my cell phone. When I saw what happened.”

He nodded. He understood.

“What happened?” he asked. “Who was that? In the car without headlights? Why—?”

“I don’t know,” Shelly said. “You ran off the road.”

“Help,” he said then—a statement, not a cry—and the bare monosyllable of it was heart-wrenching. A cloud passed over the moon, and Shelly could no longer see him.

“Hey?” she called, but he didn’t answer.

She turned off the engine. She opened her car door. She took off her shoes and waded carefully into the ditch.

“I’m on my way,” she called. “Just stay where you are. Don’t move the girl. Don’t move.”

The water was surprisingly warm. The mud on the soles of her feet was soft. She slid only once, climbing up the opposite bank—and that must have been when she cut her hand on some piece of chrome torn from the wrecked car, overturned ten feet ahead of them in the road, or on a shard of broken glass from the windshield. But Shelly didn’t feel it at the time. Only after the twin ambulances had flashed and wailed away from the scene would she notice the blood on her hands and realize that it was her own.

When she finally climbed out of the ditch and reached the boy and girl, the cloud had passed, and Shelly could see clearly again:

The boy was lying down beside the girl now, his arm wrapped around her waist, his head at rest in her blond hair, and the moonlight had made them into statues.

Marble. Perfect. Rain-washed.

Shelly stood over them for a few moments, looking down, feeling as if she’d stumbled onto something secret, some symbol in a dream, some mystery of the subconscious revealed, some sacred rite never intended for human eyes, but which she had been singularly and mysteriously invited to see.

Part One

1

There was a sad landmark on every block of that town:

The bench they’d sat on, watching the other students walk by—with their backpacks, short skirts, iPods.

The tree they’d stood under during a downpour, laughing, kissing, chewing cinnamon gum.

There was the bookstore where he’d bought the collection of poems by Pablo Neruda for her, and the awful college sports bar where they’d first held hands. There were the pretend-Greek columns that pretended to hold up the roof of the Llewellyn Roper Library, and Grimoire Gifts, reeking of patchouli and incense and imported cloth, where he’d bought the amber ring for her—set in silver, a globe of ancient sap with a little prehistoric fruit fly trapped in it for eternity.

And the Starbucks where they went to study, and never opened a book.

Craig’s father cleared his throat and slowed down at an intersection when a girl in tight jeans, flip-flops, and a low-cut tank top walked in front of the car without even glancing over. She was nodding her head in time to something she was hearing through the white wires plugged into her ears. Craig’s father looked over and said, in a voice thick with emotion, “You okay, buddy?”

Craig nodded solemnly, straight ahead, and then looked over at his father. They both attempted to smile, but to someone seeing it through the Subaru’s windshield it might have looked like two men grimacing at one another, each gripped suddenly and simultaneously by chest pains or intestinal discomfort. Sun slid through the car windows in the slanted, distant way of a bright day in early autumn; obviously, their side of the planet was tilting away from the sun. The girl passed, Craig’s father stepped on the gas, and the car moved through the green shade of the huge, leafy oaks and elms that lined the road through campus, and which had been greeting new and returning students to the university for nearly a hundred and fifty Septembers.

“Take a left here, Dad,” Craig said, pointing.

His father turned onto Second Street. On the corner a girl with an old-fashioned bike was stomping at the kickstand near the curb. Her hair was so blond it glowed. It was the kind of hair that Craig had always distrusted—too seraphic, almost God-fearing—on girls.

Until Nicole.

But this girl at the curb with the bike was nothing like Nicole.

This girl had seen too many music videos, and was trying to look like one of the straggly, anemic blondes dancing behind the band. Her hair was greasy. Her nose was pierced. Her jeans sagged down over the sharp blades of her hipbones. She was the kind of girl Craig might have dated for a few weeks back home. Back then, before Nicole.

“Take a right now, Dad,” he said.

His father slowed down on narrow King Street. It was still cobblestone, somehow. Some strange nineteenth-century leftover. (Had they simply forgotten to pave it?) The tires of the Subaru rumbled over the stones, and the rearview mirror rattled.

Here, on King Street, the trees made a canopy overhead, and the houses sagged with their decades at the edges of the sidewalks. These decrepit mansions must have been, at one time, inhabited by the town’s elite; Craig could picture women in bustled skirts, men with handlebar mustaches and bowties, rocking on the front porches, being brought glasses of lemonade by servants.

But it was a student slum now. The thudding bass of someone’s stereo served as a heartbeat to the whole block. Couches sat on the porches and on the lawns. Bikes appeared tossed into piles, leaning into each other, locked up to wrought-iron fences. There were hitching posts for horses at the ends of the driveways, most of them painted the school’s colors: crimson and gold. Two shirtless guys standing several lawns apart threw a football between them with what seemed like malicious force, while a girl in a bikini on a lawn chair watched it fly back and forth in front of her. Against the sky that football looked like the pit of some piece of bright blue fruit.

“It’s this one.”

Craig’s father slowed down in front of the house, which had once been painted white but had weathered to gray. There were ten mailboxes beside the front door—the number of apartments—and there was Perry.

Good old Perry.

How long had he been standing there, waiting?

Eagle Scout. Altar boy. Best friend.

The realization of that fact filled the back of Craig’s throat with something that tasted like tears. He swallowed. He lifted his hand to wave.

Perry was wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates cap, a clean T-shirt, and khaki shorts. New tennis shoes? Had his mother ironed that perfect crease in the shorts?

Perry saluted—sadly, ironically, the perfect gesture—and Craig’s father’s chuckle sounded vaguely like a sob. “There’s your pal,” he said, and pulled up to the curb, and Perry strode solemnly over to the car, yanked open the passenger door, and called in, “Hey, asshole, welcome back,” and then bent down and looked past Craig to his father. “How are you, Mr. Clements?”

Dependable, presentable, sociable Perry. Just profane enough. Just polite enough.

“Great, Perry,” Craig’s father said in a voice full of gratitude and relief. “It’s really good to see you.”

Craig and Perry’s apartment was on the third floor. Perry had picked it out for them back in July. “It’s not the Ritz,” he said as they climbed the stairs behind him. “But it has indoor plumbing.”

Craig’s father carried a box of books and a tangled mass of USB cords. Perry had Craig’s duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a trash bag full of sheets and pillowcases over the other. Craig carried his laptop, towels, and another trash bag—boots and shoes and his down jacket—up a narrow staircase carpeted in dust and dirt, to the left, past the closed doors of two other apartments. One of the doors had a whiteboard nailed to it and I went to Good Time Charlie’s! meet us! written in purple Magic Marker on it, a big smiley face for the o in to.

“This is us,” Perry said, nodding at number seven. He pushed open the door with his sneaker.

“Great!” Craig’s father said again, stepping in behind Perry, exclaiming it so loudly that his voice echoed off the bare floors and walls, sounding even more falsely bright the second time.

The apartment was, of course, immaculate. Perry had moved in a few weeks before, having worked as an orientation guide for new students over the summer, and he’d obviously done his thing—swept, dusted, arranged a collection of books in alphabetical order on the narrow bookshelf next to the couch. Craig carried his things through the dark little kitchen with its freshly scoured sink, past Perry’s bedroom, to his own, and stood in the middle of it.

A bright whiteness. The windows looked freshly washed—something Craig felt pretty sure their slumlord hadn’t done—and the bed was made in crisp-looking blue sheets, a plaid bedspread.

“My mom did that,” Perry said, nodding at the bed, “and that,” he added, nodding at a bouquet of daisies in a clear vase on a scratched-up plywood dresser. “I like you, man, but not enough to buy you flowers. Yet.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows in the way that only Perry could, and Craig felt what might have been a chuckle start in his chest, but he suppressed it, just in case it might turn into something else.

“Well,” Craig’s father said, clapping both guys on the back at once. “This looks great!”

The year before, his freshman year, Craig’s whole family had rolled onto campus together to bring him to Godwin Honors Hall. Craig’s father had been laying on the horn the whole way through town, startling pedestrians and causing the drivers of the other vehicles to swivel their shocked faces at the Subaru. “Don’t they teach people how to drive in the Midwest?” he had growled.

Craig’s mother had just stared out the window, taking it in. Her silence made her dissatisfaction with the place palpable—a kind of thick green mist filling up the car. “It’s pretty,” she’d said, tapping her finger in the direction of the library’s ridiculous faux-classical columns, as if it weren’t the most damning praise she was capable of giving. Beside Craig in the backseat, Scar maniacally twiddled at the Game Boy in his hands, breathing heavily through his mouth as if he were alone at the control panel of a spaceship that was about to spin out of control.

Finally Craig’s father pulled the car up to the curb right under a sign that read, NO PARKING HERE TO CORNER, and asked, “This it?” as if it might not be, despite the name chiseled into the stone above the entrance, GODWIN, and the crimson-and-gold sign posted near the gate, GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the banner strung between two trees in the courtyard, WELCOME TO GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the student standing outside with a poster board sign that read, GODWIN HONORS HALL.

“I think so,” Craig said.

Godwin Honors Hall was the oldest building on campus, and looked it. It was the campus’s only “Living Learning” facility, a dorm in which selected students slept, ate, and attended classes all in one building. On a campus that covered two hundred and fifty acres, if you were allowed into the Godwin Honors Hall program, it was implied by the brochure materials, the farthest you would ever have to walk was to the library, and you would never have to take a class or share a meal with any non-honors student for your entire four years at the university.

The whole thing had started as an experiment in 1965—a way, mainly, for some hippie activists to keep the decrepit building from being torn down, Craig would learn later—the proposal being to create a private little liberal honors college (Oberlin? Antioch?) right there at the dead-center of one of the country’s biggest public universities. It would appeal, they’d implied, to students who didn’t want to get lost among the unwashed hordes.

Or who’d applied to Oberlin and not gotten in.

To Craig, it had sounded claustrophobic, a rat-in-a-maze kind of experiment that should have failed by 1966 due to rat insanity, but his father had insisted that the prestige of getting into the program would confer some sort of magical properties on Craig’s future. And once Craig got his acceptance letter, which had shocked them all, the subject was closed for discussion.

The windows of Godwin Honors Hall were of the tiny diamond-paned variety, one or two of them cracked, glittering in the sun. The heavy wooden doors—gouged and shellacked, gouged and shellacked—shone with the sad decay of having been abused by thousands of students for a century and a half. The tiles of the entranceway were blood red and cracked, chipped, ice-picked away in places and sloppily replaced in others. Inside, there was the smell of mildew and disinfectant. A guy leaned against a wall of mailboxes, wearing a baseball cap on backward and a football jersey. He might have taken a long soaking bath in stale beer that morning. Someone had spray-painted, misspelled, the great philosophical advice “KNOW THYSEFL.” Scar tapped Craig on the shoulder and mouthed the now-familiar and maddeningly annoying joke: “It’s not Dartmouth.”

Four flights up, through a maze of old carpet and blasted rap music and flyers taped to cinderblock warning the residents about STDs and inviting them to church jamborees and library orientations, they dead-ended at Craig’s room, number 416, opened the door, and found Craig’s roommate sitting at one of the two desks, reading a textbook of human anatomy.

That was Perry, back when Perry was a stranger.

His hair was shaved down to a millimeter of his scalp, and he was wearing khaki shorts and a fluorescent orange T-shirt that looked brand new, but which Craig would learn later wasn’t (Perry’s mother starched his T-shirts, per Perry’s request), that read, EVENT ASSIST, on it in alarmingly large black capital letters. What event? What assist? Craig would also learn later that this was the standard T-shirt worn by Perry’s Scout troop when they helped out in the parking lots of state fairs and Civil War reenactments. He just liked to wear it, whether he was assisting any events or not, and at the moment, it struck Craig as disorienting.

“Hello!” Perry said, closing his book.

“Hey,” Craig said, and then, “I guess I’m your roommate,” shrugging, feeling noncommittal, but Perry stood up quickly and offered his hand to Craig, shook it firmly, and then went around the room shaking the hands of each of Craig’s family members—even Scar, shaggy bangs falling across his face, who stood openmouthed before this new breed of human being. Had Scar ever seen a person under the age of twenty-five shake another person’s hand, except on television, or as a joke?

Had Craig?

“Welcome,” Perry said, and then, without a hint of irony, gesturing around, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”

They all looked at the room at once:

Four bare walls, a dustless linoleum floor, two closets with doors closed. Perry’s bed was made. (A green comforter. A pillow in a plaid pillowcase.) Where was the mess?

“Where are you from?” Craig’s mother asked Perry in a tone that suggested she fully expected Perry to admit that he’d been assembled in a laboratory, or that he’d grown up on the moon.

“Bad Axe,” Perry said, as if everyone would be familiar with “Bad Axe.”

“No way,” Scar said, sounding sincerely astonished.

“Yeah,” Perry said. He held up his hand and pointed at his thumb, as if that might explain something. “What about you?”

“New Hampshire,” Craig’s mother said. “Via Boston,” she added, as she always did, and Craig’s father stiffened, as he always did—but Craig could tell, by looking at Perry, that none of this meant anything to him.

Now, obviously, a year later, Perry had given Craig the better room in the apartment. The closet was large, and the window faced the backyard instead of the street.

“Don’t you think?” Craig’s father asked. “I mean, that it’s a great apartment? A lot better than the dorm?”

“Yeah,” Craig said, trying hard to sound appreciative. “It’s great.”

“We were pretty lucky,” Perry said. “Leaving it so late. It’s got a good view.” He walked across Craig’s room to the window and gestured out. Craig and his father followed, looked down into the backyard, where two girls of the bed-head-and-belly-button-ring variety were lying in bikinis on towels. Glistening in the sun. Their hipbones seemed to glow under their tanning skin. Craig looked away fast. His father and Perry looked at him, and then both cleared their throats at the same time.

“So. Shall we get something to eat?” Craig’s father asked. “Before I head back to New Hampshire?”

“You’re going back already?” Perry asked. “We can put you up for a night, Mr. Clements. Or for as long as you like.”

“No. No,” Craig’s father said, shaking his head, making the expression of someone who’d just been offered a lifesaving drug but who didn’t want to bother anyone to go to the cupboard to fetch it. Clearly he wanted to escape. “I really need to—”

Perry nodded, pretending Rod Clements had finished the sentence with something that explained it—although Craig knew that there could be nothing his father needed to get back to New Hampshire for so fast. His father was a writer. He was in the middle of writing a one-thousand-page sequel to his last novel. He hadn’t sat down at the computer to work on it since Christmas.

Craig knew precisely why his father wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. If there was anything Rod Clements couldn’t stand, it was to see anyone he cared about suffer. Even as a child, Craig had intuitively understood that it would have been easier for his father to shoot him, like a racehorse, than to drive him to the hospital screaming in pain with a broken leg.

It had happened once—the broken leg—and Craig’s mother had done the driving, Craig’s father insisting that he should drive behind them, separately, just in case her car broke down, and even in his writhing agony Craig had picked up on the sneer of contempt his mother shot at his father’s back as he trotted away from her car, huge sweat stains spreading out in the armpits of his gray shirt.

This time, Craig knew, his dad would probably drive a couple of hours east, as quickly as he could, and take a room at a Holiday Inn.

“That’s a lot of driving, Mr. Clements,” Perry said. “But, okay.”

For the bite to eat, they went to the fanciest restaurant in town, Chez Vin. Chez Vin was where the Clements-Rabbitts had dined as a family the year before, overdressed and exhausted after their long drive, the four of them shoulder to shoulder at the hostess’s podium as Craig’s father announced to the toothy redhead that they were meeting a friend.

“Oh!” she’d said. “You guys are here to meet Dean Fleming!”

Craig’s mother rolled her eyes behind the hostess’s back and mouthed “you guys” to Scar. She’d been complaining about this phrase since they’d passed through Ohio, where, at every gas station and fast food place, someone addressed them as “you guys.” At a 7-Eleven in Dundee, Michigan, when the ponytailed twenty-something at the cash register chirped, “How are you guys today?” Craig’s mother had finally snapped and said, “Do I look like a guy?” She’d gestured toward the family she obviously thought looked far more dignified than they were being given credit for, and said, “Are we guys? What’s this you guys thing?”

Craig had turned with his Tic Tacs and hurried out the electric doors into the parking lot as quickly as he could, listening to the girl at the register giggle in panic. Hopefully, she thought it was a joke. Hopefully, Craig’s dad would get his mother out of there before she disabused the poor girl of that.

But, that first night at Chez Vin, standing at the hostess’s podium, Craig had looked away from his mother, away from Scar, and away from the redhead, and had stared hard at the side of his father’s face while registering for the first time that his father’s friend from college, the one they’d come to meet for dinner, this friend from way back, was the dean of the Honors College—the incredibly selective honors college they’d all been so astonished that, “with your low-achiever grades and unambitious test scores,” Craig had been so lucky, so honored, to get into.

“What?” his father had said to Craig, sensing his stare and turning around with both his hands up, as if to prove that there was nothing up his sleeve.

This year, the hostess was an older woman, who nevertheless said, “Hi, you guys,” to which they all three nodded as she directed them to a corner table. Only Perry had bothered to wear a long-sleeve buttoned shirt and dress shoes. They ate all the bread in the basket before the waiter arrived with their mineral water. Craig’s father and Perry talked about weather and the relative merits of certain kinds of mountain bikes as Craig watched the candle at the center of the table surge and recede—now a perfect diamond shape, now a teardrop, now a fluttering fingernail followed by a crescent followed by a dog tooth followed by a burning vertical eyelid.

Perry,” Craig’s father said later, in front of the apartment house, pressing both of Perry’s hands in his own as the boy bid them farewell, “I’m so glad Craig’s—”

“Craig will be fine, Mr. Clements,” Perry said.

“Son,” Rod Clements said, turning to Craig, “I—”

“Be careful driving, Dad.”

They stood in the middle of the sidewalk. A few feet away from them a couple kissed with abandon under a dead streetlamp. A sad foursome of ugly guys parted around the couple, and then around Perry, Craig, and his father.

“Love ya,” Craig’s father said, and clapped Craig to him, patting him hard on the back.

“I love you, too,” Craig said.

They held the embrace for at least three seconds, long enough for Craig to notice, just beyond his father’s shoulder, hanging above the couple kissing, far over the place where the streetlamp should have been shining, the moon, which appeared to be made of either solid rock or the softest of human flesh, floating in an ink-blue sky.

2

Shelly Lockes called the newspaper after the first article, full of inaccuracies about the accident, came out, and although the reporter to whom her call was forwarded assured her that he would “set the record straight on the details of the accident as reported in our paper right away,” no corrections ever appeared.

After that, Shelly asked to speak to the newspaper’s editor, and her call was passed on by a receptionist, who said, “Well, he doesn’t take calls from the public, but this person is one of our editors, and she could speak to you.”

On the phone, this person sounded like a child:

“You mean, like, you were the first one at the scene of the accident?”

“Yes. I was. Why hasn’t anyone spoken to me? My name’s part of the public record. The paramedics and the police took all my information. I’d like to correct the record.”

The editor stammered a bit before she said, “Wow. Okay. Well, I’ll have someone call you this afternoon.”

No one called, and the next day, again, there was a front-page story that described how the girl had been found in a “lake of blood” in the backseat of the car. How she’d been thrown there by the impact. How she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. How she’d already bled to death before the ambulance arrived, and that she was unrecognizable. That her face had hit the front windshield, and then the rear window. That her roommate had identified her at the morgue from the black dress and jewelry she’d been wearing that evening, and that the boyfriend who’d been driving the vehicle was found hours later wandering down a rural road, covered in his girlfriend’s blood.

The newspaper said that medical professionals could only wonder at how he’d managed to stumble so far with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, a closed-head injury, and a ruptured spleen.

But Shelly Lockes had been there.

She’d called the ambulance herself within minutes of the accident. She’d waded through a ditch full of water and stood above the boy and girl. The girl had been thrown into the grass. She was not in the car. The light of the full moon had been plenty bright for Shelly to see it all—and she knew for a fact that the only blood at the scene had been her own.

The gash to her hand.

Admittedly, it was a nasty gash. She’d needed stitches, and bandages, and if she’d ever played handball or mandolin, she’d probably never be able to play again. The scar still surprised her every time she looked at it. How had she not felt the cut when it happened? It wasn’t until she was in the Emergency Room, holding it up, wrapped in her own sweatshirt, that her hand had started to hurt like hell.

But it had not created a “lake of blood.”

There had been no lake of blood.

“Maybe they’re all like this,” her friend Rosemary suggested. “Maybe every goddamn article about every event in the local newspaper is completely made up, but we don’t know because we didn’t witness most of them. ‘A lake of blood’ sells a lot more newspapers than no blood.”

The next article described the “first person at the scene of the accident” as a middle-aged woman who came upon it hours after it had happened, and made a call to 911 but left the scene before the paramedics arrived, and could not be reached by police. After that article, Shelly called the newspaper and the police.

“Not one word of what’s being reported is accurate. This needs to be looked into. For the record. There are implications here, for all of us.”

The officer in charge of the case assured Shelly that he had all her information, that her help with this was invaluable, that he himself would contact the newspaper and make the correction. But he also said, “It’s a rag, you know. I wish I had a dime for every time they slaughtered a story. I’d be a very rich man.”

The managing editor of the paper promised Shelly that a correction would appear the next day: “We have so many sources of information, ma’am. I’m sure you understand that with so much effort put into each story by so many people, mistakes can and do occur.”

Shelly waited for the correction—scoured the next week’s newspaper, every day—and never found it.

3

Her name’s Nicole Werner,” Perry told his roommate, whose mouth was open, staring at her. Perry was hoping that if he distracted him with information, Craig would close his mouth and quit leering. “Her whole family’s from Bad Axe, for generations. She’s got about four hundred cousins. Our elementary school was called Werner Elementary.”

“Farm slut?” his roommate asked. “Dumb blonde?”

“She was our valedictorian,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he felt. He had no particular stake in Nicole Werner per se, but everything Craig Clements-Rabbitt had said about everything since spreading out his high-tech sleeping bag on his bare mattress in their dorm room on move-in day had been either annoying or infuriating.

“Huh. Valedictorian? I thought that would have been you, Perry-my-man. What the hell happened?”

“She was the better student.” Perry nodded with what he hoped looked like sincerity, not bitterness.

There’d been, certainly, a period of bitterness. Nicole Werner, in addition to being valedictorian, had also gotten the Ramsey Luke Scholarship—the first time in Bad Axe High history that it hadn’t been given to the president of the senior class, which had been Perry. But Perry had told himself that they couldn’t really give the Ramsey Luke and the E. M. Gelman Band Scholarship to the same student, and he’d clearly been the leading candidate for the latter.

They were in the cafeteria. It was the end of their first week in Godwin Honors Hall. Craig was eating chili piled so high with chopped onion that every time he put his spoon in the bowl, onions fell onto the laminate table. “What do her parents do?”

“They own a German restaurant in town. Dumplings.”

“They make dumplings?” Craig let his spoon hover over the bowl for a moment, as if this were a bowl of absurdity itself. He shook his long dirty-blond rock-star bangs out of his face by whipping his face to the left—a kind of cool twitch Perry had seen on VH1 more than a few times.

“No,” Perry said. “The restaurant’s called Dumplings.”

Craig snorted loudly and leaned back in his chair. This was routine for Craig as far as Perry could tell. Everything about the Midwest was one big joke to Craig Clements-Rabbitt—the food, the trees, the names of the streets, the girls.

“It’s the most popular restaurant in Bad Axe,” Perry said, again sounding, and wishing he didn’t, as if he had some personal investment in this. Craig opened his mouth as if at news too astonishing to believe. Perry looked away, shaking his head.

One might think, from his attitude, that this Craig Clements-Rabbitt came from a huge city, but when pressed for the details it turned out that the town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in was, if anything, a bit smaller than Bad Axe.

“But it’s not the same,” Craig had said, sounding weary already, as if the whole subject would be too complicated to explain and he dreaded the task. This had been the first night in their shared dorm room, while they were still attempting to be polite to each other. Craig had left his duffel bag unpacked at the foot of his bed, and rolled out the technologically advanced sleeping bag onto his mattress. It was made of some sort of metallic material that even Perry, with a great deal of outdoor-gear expertise from the Boy Scouts, didn’t recognize. No pillow.

“The town I live in is small,” Craig said, “but nobody’s from it. Everybody’s got a place there because they work on the Internet, or only have to travel to Boston or New York every couple of weeks. Or they’re independently wealthy, or they retired early. Except for a couple of people whose parents work at the ski resort. I guess they’re sort of like small-town kids. But not really.”

Perry imagined a few hundred families like Craig’s: Mothers in slim beige skirts, rolling their eyes. Fathers in corduroy jackets and jeans.

In fact, while Rod Clements had been wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket earlier that day, he’d also been wearing bright green Converse All Stars and a couple of hemp bracelets around his wrist, as if he were in middle school, while the little brother, Scar, already looked like an old man, if old men had ponytails. The kid’s face had appeared chiseled in stone, as if he hadn’t laughed or frowned in his whole life—and although Perry had not yet asked Craig why his brother was called Scar, he felt sure there was some story behind it. Perry had only been in the company of the Clements-Rabbitts for an hour before they’d managed to share several seemingly amusing stories about Craig.

(“Oh, Perry,” Craig’s mother had said, “I hope you can adjust to living with our son. We knew he was different when he was only three years old and asked, in all seriousness, if he could have for his birthday his own agent.”)

And the family.

(“Remember that time,” his father had asked, looking around the dorm room skeptically, “when we thought we were renting a cottage on the beach in Costa Rica and it turned out to be a storage shed?”)

“Dumplings,” Craig repeated, trancelike, as he watched Nicole Werner cross the cafeteria. She was carrying her tray ahead of her as if it had something radioactive on it. Perry knew her well enough, after thirteen years of sharing classrooms with her, to know that Nicole was walking that way because she knew she was being watched, and she didn’t particularly mind it. Her ponytail was swinging behind her like an actual pony’s tail, the palest of blond, just like the hair of all the other Werners—except Etta Werner, who was Nicole’s grandmother, a nice old lady who lived down the block from Perry’s family and who always had on hand the most incredible homemade cookies you could imagine. Her hair was pure white.

“She looks like a milkmaid.”

Perry didn’t respond to this. He supposed it was intended as an insult. He might not have been Nicole Werner’s biggest fan himself, but he couldn’t help feeling protective. For one thing, he was pretty sure any insults Craig Clements-Rabbitt was going to think up for Nicole—hick, nerd, etc.—would eventually come around to him. When Perry had asked him about his last name, the hyphen, Craig had rolled his eyes and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a hyphenated name before. Are the womenfolk in your town allowed to vote yet?”

In truth, Perry hadn’t ever known anyone with a hyphenated name.

“I have two parents,” Craig had said. “A Clements and a Rabbitt.”

“I thought your dad was the Clements,” Perry said.

“So you have seen hyphenated names—enough to know that my parents are so hip they decided to put my mother’s name last.”

Really, Perry hadn’t figured that out himself. A guy on their hall had speculated that Craig’s mother was actually R. E. Clements, because of the order of the names. His girlfriend had said, “No way. Have you read those books? No woman would write anything so stupid. That’s testosterone-inspired schlock.”

“So,” Craig said, plunging his spoon into the chili, spilling more onions around the bowl, “in this town of yours, this Bad Ass, do all the girls look like that?”

“Like what?” Perry asked.

“Rosy-cheeked? Sunny blond? Strong but slender limbs? Big hooters?”

Perry thought about this for a minute, and then said, quite honestly, “Pretty much.”

“Fair enough,” Craig said. “So, when you go with your family to this”—he waved his free hand in the air—”this Dumplings, do you see Nicole Werner there?”

Perry had to think again, but then remembered that, yes, she’d started working as a waitress the summer before last. She was there, it seemed, mostly on Friday nights and some Saturday afternoons, moving quickly from table to table in her bustley skirt and frilly top. But usually his family went to Dumplings on Sunday, after church, with Perry’s grandfather, who loved the sauerbraten, and although Perry saw Nicole in church, he never saw her at Dumplings those afternoons. Sundays must have been her day off.

“What’s the uniform like?”

Perry described it. The wide blue satin belt. The—what’d-ya-call it?—peasant blouse. The pinstriped skirt.

“Oh, man, stop.” Craig put up his hand and shook his head. “You’re going to make me come.”

Perry cleared his throat, and when Nicole looked over at him and gave him her usual polite (apologetic?) smile from across the cafeteria, Perry could feel himself blushing from his Adam’s apple up.

How’d you get so fucking idealistic, man?” Craig asked one night a few weeks later, after their relationship had become openly hostile. Perry had come back from the library once again to find his roommate lying on his back in bed on top of the covers (he’d rolled up the high-tech sleeping bag he’d arrived with and put it in the closet), wearing boxer shorts and headphones. He had a paperback open on his bare stomach, a novel his father had published a few years ago and which, according to Craig at least, had been a big hit. Brain Freeze, by R. E. Clements. A lot of the other students in the Honors College seemed to know who Craig’s father was, and not to hold him in very high regard, but Perry had never heard of him.

It was an achingly beautiful autumn. Clear and dry, skies so blue day after day that somehow it was possible to see the moon hanging there above the library, as if all the atmosphere had been scoured away. And the brightness of the changing red and gold and russet leaves of the big trees that lined Campus Ave seemed more like cinema than nature in so much light.

“You should see Dartmouth,” Craig had said to him one morning as they walked down the staircase to breakfast. “Dartmouth was founded before there was even a dirt path hacked through this state.”

Perry had heard about Dartmouth from Craig already a couple of times, and he’d already asked the obvious question, to which Craig had answered, “Because I couldn’t get into Dartmouth. It’s a real college. At Dartmouth I’d have gotten a real roommate, too.”

“Fuck you,” Perry had said, not for the first or last time.

“Thanks,” Craig said, “but I’m not horny right now.”

It had never crossed Perry’s mind to go to college anywhere but here. All the smartest kids from Bad Axe had come to this university over the decades, and only three of them had gotten in this year—Perry, Nicole, and an obese girl named Maria, who played the harp and hadn’t spoken a word to anyone except the school psychologist, as far as Perry knew, since eighth grade, when her mother had committed suicide.

His parents, both of whom had gone to a smaller university closer to Bad Axe, were nearly beside themselves with pride. His father had painted the big cement squares of their patio crimson and gold a couple days after Perry got his acceptance letter. “This is the big time,” he’d said. “You did it, kiddo.”

It was hard for Perry to imagine an older, more formidable looking college than this—the library’s enormous pillars, the gold trim around the ceiling of Rice Auditorium, the leafy Commons with its marble benches. What could Dartmouth have that this school didn’t?

“It’s selective,” Craig had said. “It’s private. Not a jock-ocracy,” waving his hand around at the walls of their room.

But for Perry, this was like a dream of being in college. The heavy books with their translucently thin pages. The gregarious professors and the unsmiling ones. The fat columns of the library, and the crammed stacks of books inside it.

The smell between those narrow walls of books was, Perry felt, the smell of rumination itself. Decades of reason and reflection. He checked out books that had nothing to do with the classes he was taking, just to be able to bring the heft and the scent of them back to the dorm with him. A Handbook of Classical Physics. A History of the Anglo-Saxons.

“Huh?” Craig asked. “How’d you get like this, man—all romantic about it all?”

“I don’t know, man,” Perry said, dragging out the man in imitation of that East Coast accent. “How’d you get so fucking cynical?”

“Native intelligence. Born with it,” Craig said without missing a beat. He never missed a beat. He had a whole encyclopedia of comebacks on the tip of his tongue at all times.

“Is it a burden,” Perry asked, “being so much better than everyone else? Or is it pleasing?”

“I’m so used to it by now,” Craig said, “I really couldn’t say.”

Perry sat down on his own bed and unzipped his backpack. You could have drawn a line straight down the center of the room. Every time some piece of Craig’s laundry or a magazine or a discarded protein bar wrapper inched over onto Perry’s side, he carefully pushed it back over to Craig’s side with his foot.

“Your mom called,” Craig said. “I told her you were out trying to score some heroin, but you’d be back in an hour or so.”

“Thanks.”

“Here,” Craig said. “You can call her from my cell in the lounge if you want some privacy.” He tossed the phone, slightly larger than a matchbook and just as thin, to Perry. It had been a source of endless surprise to Craig Clements-Rabbitt that Perry didn’t own a cell phone and was dependent on the antique mounted to the wall of their room. Craig did not, himself, even know their phone number, and had only touched the telephone in the room to take calls for Perry.

“Thanks,” Perry said. He took the phone, stood, and closed the door behind him.

Mom?”

There was no one else in the second-floor lounge, so Perry lay back on the blue couch, careful to keep his shoes from touching the cushions.

He and his mother talked about his classes, his grandfather, his father’s business—a lawn mower shop, the best one in town—and about the weather, which had been beautiful. The leaves in Bad Axe had changed dramatically already, she said, and were starting to fall, and she joked that she supposed she was going to have to do the raking now, with Perry at college.

“I can come home for a weekend,” he said, “if I can get a ride.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother said. “We can handle the leaves. You just get good grades.”

Perry was an only child—except that there’d been another, a sister before him, who’d died at birth, a baby his mother had never once spoken of to him. The only reason Perry knew about her was because his grandmother, when he was nine, had decided Perry needed to know.

Since he’d been a toddler, Perry’d had an imaginary sister whose name was Mary.

He was getting too old for imaginary playmates, his grandmother told him one day, and God knows what it must be doing to his parents, listening to him in his room, talking for hours to that imaginary girl. Unlike the other adults in Perry’s life, Grandma Edwards pulled no punches just because he was a child. She was the one who’d told him that his grandfather had been an alcoholic, and that his Uncle Benny took after him, a slobbering drunk, and that’s why he was never invited for Christmas dinner. She was the one who would, eventually, tell him that she herself was dying of bladder cancer, not “recuperating” in the hospital, as his parents had said.

So Grandma Edwards took him to the grave—a flat, shining stone engraved with “Baby Girl Edwards,” and a date that meant nothing to Perry—and that very day, his imaginary friend Mary had vanished, as if the imaginary could die as easily as the actual. Perry almost never thought about her again, except on the rare occasion that her translucently pale skin would come back to him, and the way her soft, cool, imaginary hand had felt on his, guiding it across a piece of paper, teaching him how to draw a dinosaur.

And the scent of her hair—that red tangle of curls—like warm earth.

I love you, Mom,” Perry said before hanging up.

“I love you, Perry,” his mother said.

“Tell Dad I love him.”

“He loves you, too.”

A few more good-byes, back and forth, and Perry snapped Craig’s snazzy cell phone shut, rose from the couch, and headed back. A few students passed him on the way—strangers, but strangers he recognized now from the hallways, from the cafeteria. One guy, with wire-frame glasses, Perry recognized from a class, although he couldn’t remember which one. They nodded seriously, politely, to each other.

The stairwell was empty when he got there. He could hear his own steps ringing around him, and as he climbed to the fourth floor, he suddenly was struck with a terrible grieflike longing for his mother, home alone in their two-bedroom bungalow. What would she do now that their phone call was over? Call her own mother? Watch television?

And there was grief for his father, too, still at the shop. He might be trying to fix something, or sell something, or schedule some kid to work on Saturday now that Perry was gone.

He thought about his grandfather, too, sitting on the bench in the hallway of Whitcomb Manor, already looking forward to Sunday, when Perry’s parents would pick him up to go to Dumplings.

And then he was feeling sorry for the whole town of Bad Axe. The drugstore. The pizza place. The brick façades of the few, desperate businesses downtown. The strip malls at the edge of everything. The cemetery with its little flags and flowers stuck into the soft, green ground. The women at Fantastic Sam’s, staring out at the parking lot, waiting for someone with too much hair to come inside.

Homesick. Now he knew what that was. And as soon as he stepped out of the stairwell, eyes fogged with emotion, Perry realized how stupid he was being, and rubbed away his ridiculous, homesick tears. Sentimental crap. The only other Eagle Scout from his troop in Bad Axe was already in the Marines, sent off to Afghanistan. That guy had something to get teary about, not Perry.

A girl in a miniskirt rounded the corner of the hallway, laughing hysterically into her cell phone. She didn’t even glance at him. When Perry rounded the corner himself, he saw that the door to his dorm room was open, and someone was standing in it.

And then he saw who it was.

The bright blond ponytail. The perfect posture.

Nicole Werner.

She turned when Perry came up behind her, and she said, “Hi!” in that voice so bright and girlish it sounded like it was coming out of a piccolo.

“Hi,” Perry said back, sounding like a party pooper in comparison, but who could compete with Nicole Werner when it came to congeniality? He saw Craig, still in his boxer shorts, no shirt, standing a few feet in front of her.

“I came by to see, you know, how it’s going,” she said to Perry, but glanced back at Craig as if trying politely to include him in the conversation. “You know, see if you’d want to set up a study time . . .”

“Oh. Yeah,” Perry said. He’d forgotten. They’d talked about this back in Bad Axe—after they’d both gotten their acceptance letters, but before she’d been awarded the Ramsey Luke. They’d said they’d keep up the ritual, the weekly study marathons. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged.

Craig caught Perry’s eye then, and Nicole looked from Perry to him. “You’re welcome to join us,” she said to Craig.

Craig nodded, appeared to consider it, and then said, “That would be helpful. I could use the support, you know, to keep up the good study habits.”

Nicole nodded. She’d obviously missed the false note, and the fact that Craig Clements-Rabbitt was half-naked, having been lying in bed with an iPod and Brain Freeze at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night. “Great!” she said. “So, now we just need a time and a place.” She whipped her academic planner out from under her arm in a flash, and slid out a pen conveniently tucked into her ponytail. She stuck the pen in her mouth as she scanned the pages of the planner.

“I’m free anytime,” Craig said.

Perry rolled his eyes.

4

Maybe her students thought she was deaf. They could chase her down a hallway for half a mile calling out, “Professor? Professor?”and it did not occur to Mira to turn around.

Professor?

That couldn’t be her.

But here she was, a professor at one of the largest universities in the world. They called her a cultural anthropologist, as if that were an occupation. She was an “Expert on the Treatment of Human Remains in Preliterate Civilizations”—the way her father had been an Insurance Salesman, or her mother, a Homemaker.

She was thirty-three, the mother of two-year-old twins, the wife of a Nice Guy who happened to be content in the role of Stay-at-Home Dad. She’d gotten her Ph.D. with honors and kudos and special awards: a Fulbright to Croatia, and even the unheard-of Guggenheim for a graduate student. Her dissertation, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins: Fear, Fantasy, and the Cults of Death, had been published by a major academic press just a few months after she’d finished it. There’d been positive reviews in the specialized journals, and even a quick notice in a newspaper or two because of popular interest in her subject.

So, why, when they called out, “Professor!” did Mira not assume they were calling out to her? Why, day after day in that place, did she feel like such a fraud?

Because, perhaps, she was a fraud?

Mira Polson had ridden into her position as an assistant professor at the Honors College on the merit of that first book, and the “promise” the college saw for her future publications. That was three years ago, and now she was two years away from her tenure review, and there was no doubt—the department chair had made sure she had no doubt—that she would not receive it, and would not be kept on at the university, if she did not publish a book between now and then. And, so far, in the last three years allotted to her by the university to write and publish that book, Mira had produced nothing beyond some scrawled notes on a legal pad—notes that had become, in the year and a half since she’d scrawled them, illegible even to her.

And if she did not get tenure, then what?

Then she would be far worse than a fraud. She would be an unemployed expert on an obscure subject with two toddlers and a husband to support.

This Mira had considered as she closed the apartment door behind her and headed off to Godwin Honors Hall, trying not to listen to the twins scream after her, or to Clark’s impatient shushing on the other side of the door. It took every ounce of fortitude she had to keep walking down the hall toward the stairs.

They had been sick in the night. No fevers, but both had barfed over the sides of their cribs around two o’clock in the morning, Andy taking his cue from Matty, as he usually did when it came to vomiting. They had apparently gorged themselves on Doritos while Mira was at a department meeting the evening before. Clark had been dead asleep when she got home, although it was only nine o’clock.

“The twins sleep, you sleep,” their pediatrician had advised at their two-year checkup when Clark complained that the twins were still waking up once or twice in the middle of the night. Clark had been doing that anyway—sleeping when they slept—as far as Mira could tell, but after the pediatrician’s advice, Clark had made a religion of it. Sometimes he even slept while the twins were awake. Mira would come home to find him out cold on the carpet in the living room beside the playpen while the twins stood inside it, shaking the cushioned edges like bars on a prison door.

They were healthy, active, curly-haired boys who spoke to one another in a rapid chatter that, when she was being irrational, Mira thought might be some linguistic or genetic remnant of her Eastern European forebears in their blood. When they asked for milk, it was milekele; “bye-bye” was gersko; “mama” and “papa” were meno and paschk. Sometimes Mira caught herself wishing that her grandmother was still alive to translate. Even more irrationally, she’d gone to the Llewellyn Roper Library in the summer to look up the words for milk, good-bye, mother, father, in Romanian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and cross-referenced them to everything—Latin, French, German, and all the dialects—to find, of course, nothing that indicated that her twins were actually speaking a foreign language.

Of course.

Walking away from the library that day—its stiff neoclassical columns pretending to hold it up—Mira had felt silly, at best. Slightly insane, at worst. So, less insanely, she consulted medical books and websites, but when she asked their pediatrician if the twins might be experiencing some kind of language development delay, he’d laughed and said, “You professors all think your kids should be delivering lectures a few months out of the womb. Look, if they’re still babbling in a foreign language this time next year, we’ll explore the possibilities. But I’m telling you, they won’t be.”

Clark was becoming more and more frustrated these days by the twins’ refusal to speak his language, and Mira knew it was because he was the one at home day after day while she was doing research, going to meetings, teaching. He was exhausted most of the time, wired up with manic energy the rest. There were dark circles the size of half-dollars under his eyes, and in the last three years he’d gone from the horniest man she’d every met—hard inside her again before he’d even pulled out—to the kind of guy women called radio talk shows about: I wonder if my husband’s having an affair; he hasn’t wanted to have sex for the last three months.

An affair might have occurred to Mira, too, if she didn’t know exactly how Clark spent his days, and how impossible fitting anything extra into them would have been. The twins woke at 5:00 a.m., and did not stop having needs or making demands in their foreign language until 9:00 p.m. If she didn’t have class, Mira would get up with them in the morning and let Clark sleep. But when she did have class, which was most days, he’d be the one stumbling and swearing out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Mira would roll over and pretend to be asleep—even on the occasions when Clark seemed to take forever to wake up and roll out of bed—although her whole body would be screaming as she listened to the twins cry out. Their cries, always the same (Braclaig! Braclaig!), made it impossible to know whose attention they were demanding, but Mira felt certain they were calling for her. It made her feel as if an alarm clock were rattling inside her chest, sending vibrations through every nerve and into every nerve ending of her body.

There were so many nerve endings.

The year before, in the fall, she and Clark had gotten a babysitter and gone to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Natural History Museum in the city.

Dead bodies.

Her specialty.

It was why Clark had thought to buy the tickets. A birthday present. “Right up your alley,” he’d said, holding them up.

Except that these weren’t historical dead bodies. Folkloric dead bodies. These weren’t the kinds of primitive embalmings Mira studied. Instead, these were plastinated, dissected corpses, standing right in front of the viewer, filleted and splayed. A dead guy was set up on horseback, holding his own brain in one hand and his horse’s brain in the other. Another was lobbing a basketball into the air, all his muscles on display, stringy and red. There was a corpse reclining in front of a dark television set, and one kneeling in prayer, literally holding his heart in his hands. The worst, the one that haunted Mira for weeks afterward, was the pregnant woman lying on her side like a centerfold—nothing left but tissue and bone and a net of blood vessels, but still with her baby floating eerily in her womb.

Maybe it was because Mira was a cultural anthropologist and had never had the vaguest interest in biology or physiology, but standing in the moving line of gawkers at the Natural History Museum that day, all of them together shuffling past that woman and her child (both of whom looked unborn and undead at the same time), Mira had urgently wanted to know how that woman had died. The brochure they’d been handed when they turned in their tickets insisted that the people who’d donated their bodies for the exhibit had requested anonymity, had donated in the interest of science, and that to reveal the mundane details—age, race, nationality, dates, and circumstances of their deaths—was to muddy the waters, lessen the message of the exhibit, which was to show the human body in all of its glorious detail.

Bullshit, Mira thought. The only