February 5
“Beautiful!”
Jefferson sat on an old metal stool with his feet hooked over its rungs. He and the stool were the only paint-free objects in the empty Penn State art room.
Nonnie stepped back, cocking her head at her unfinished work. “Think so?”
She’d already done six poster-sized watercolors, each protesting Wrightley’s projected new factory. Nonnie was determined to show Shenango’s people just what the new industry would displace: switchgrass, violets, blue jays and yellow sun, crows on purple thistles, red-winged blackbirds, Indian’s paintbrush, Queen Anne’s lace—her pictures were more powerful than any slogan.
She stuck a paintbrush behind her ear, adding ochre to her blue spikes. On the floor at her feet a teacup sat beside a matching cup of dirty watercolor water—fortunately she picked the right cup and took a sip.
“How’s it going over at Nerd Hall?” she asked.
Jeff had spent that afternoon moving his belongings from Redwood Common to a room at the student dorm. No one except housekeeper Mrs. Gosnell saw him leave the Common. Everyone at Nerd Hall saw him arrive.
“‘Hey, ‘ow ‘bout a spot o’ cricket, old bean?” Patrick greeted him with a very bad British accent, yanking a lacrosse stick from one of Jefferson’s packed boxes.
“Wrong sport, dude,” Jeff said. “Better give me that before you hurt yourself.”
The Nerdites had pineapple pizza in Jeff’s honor, and they smeared only peanut butter on his toilet seat instead of his “ending up” with the glue that welcomed most newcomers.
“It’s great over there,” Jeff told Nonnie. “Except I kind of miss Boo.”
“What about Pansy?”
“I don’t think she’s sure of me yet. I tried petting her a couple of times, but she won’t get close. Think she holds my business connections against me?”
“None of us holds that against you, Jeff. But when are you gonna join our side? Having you with us would speak volumes.”
Jeff got off the stool and walked across the bare floor to the old steam radiators that lined the classroom wall. Pulling back a cracked window blind, he looked down at the Shenango River’s viscid water flowing four stories below. Buildings that had long ago lost their purpose huddled near the river’s edge, as if yearning to cross over to some better place. Jeff felt that Nerd Hall, in a hundred different chaotic ways, was a better place than Redwood Common. But he was still a visitor, a nonmember; he didn’t really belong.
“Nons, don’t ask me to turn my back on my family,” he said, his eyes on a half-lit, faded billboard struggling on a sagging rooftop.
She opened her mouth to reply but the voice Jeff heard was Nathan Zimmeroff’s.
“I was just down at Burp’s and guess what?” Zim stood in the doorway, camera slung round his neck, his black bangs tangled in his black glasses. Actually named “Burt’s”, Burp’s was Shenango’s cheesiest bar.
“Zim’s got a thing for photography,” Nonnie explained the camera to Jeff. “He’s pretty good, too.”
Zim said, “Dane Spangler was down at Burp’s talking to Carlee, that new waitress. Man, was he wasted! He kept saying he saw a ghost up on Long View Road. Says the new plant site is haunted!”
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