Read Online Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik - Free Book Online

maneuver her into asking us to stay for dinner. These meals were always weird and uncomfortable and never-ending. Mr. Amory, a handsome man, pretty, in fact, prettier by far than his not-so-pretty wife though not quite as pretty as his very pretty son, would pay excessive attention to Nica. From behind a pair of round, black-rimmed glasses, which somehow emphasized his good looks rather than obscured them, he’d watch her, stare openly. Then the questions would begin, too many of them with him hanging too eagerly on her replies. He’d invite her to borrow his cue if she and Jamie and I were going to play billiards, his desk if we were planning to study, his raft if it was warm enough for us to swim. Once he even invited her on a trip he and Jamie were taking to Maine the following weekend to hunt bobwhite quail. Mrs. Amory would observe these exchangesfrom the other end of the table with eyes that were coolly detached or coolly amused—coolly something. Then she’d start in on Nica with questions of her own, mostly falsely sympathetic ones about our mom, asking how she was doing, saying how difficult her job as a high school teacher must be, how difficult both my parents’ jobs, putting up with ungrateful adolescents all day, what noble work it was and yet so unappreciated, and how she could never do it herself.
    Though she barely noticed me—I don’t even think she knew my name, referred to me only as “dear”—I was the one she upset with these interrogations. They’d leave me shaking with anger and hurt. Nica, on the other hand, was totally unfazed. Would always answer politely, without sarcasm or hostility, never responding to the queries’ spiky subtext, staying right on the placid surface. Actually seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. Amory more than anything else. “It can’t be fun being her, Gracie,” Nica would say to me in the car afterward as she lit a cigarette, “uptight, everybody around her wanting to be someplace else, her husband especially.” Then Nica would do an impression of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest that was very bad but made me laugh anyway. Usually she’d talk me into stopping at the McDonald’s on Albany Ave. on the ride home. We’d split a McFlurry or a hot fudge sundae. The eggnog shake, if it was near Christmas.
    I watch Mrs. Amory’s straight-backed form until it’s out of sight, disappearing inside Great House. The dull thud of the closing doors releases me from my stupor, and I continue on my way. As the concrete path turns into marble in front of Burroughs Library, I stop, dig an elastic out of my bag. When I’ve finger-combed my hair into a ponytail, I pull open the glass doors, step through them.
    I step through them again two minutes later, only from the opposite direction. A crisis has arisen—burst pipe, bungling maintenance man, leak above the rare books section—and when Mrs. Sedgwick,the head librarian, has dealt with it, she’ll deal with me, she said. She said, too, that in the meantime I ought to go see Mary Ellen Lefcourt in Payroll, get started on my paperwork.
    So I’m going.
    I’m sitting in the Business Development Office on the second floor of Perkins, my I-9 and Direct Deposit Authorization forms neatly filled out and on the coffee table in front of me. Mrs. Lefcourt is still in her office with her nine o’clock, even though it’s nearly ten now. To kill time, I’m browsing through a copy of the Staff Handbook, learning all about the proper protocol for reporting falsification of expense vouchers, when I hear voices rise up in anger—one voice, actually, male, young-sounding—rise up and die down almost immediately.
    I crane my neck to see where it came from and notice a door at the end of the short, offshoot-type hallway. The sign outside it reads GLEN FLYNN, DIRECTOR OF FACILITIES . A second later, Mr. Flynn himself appears, a nervous-looking guy