There were four passengers left aboard the bus, and only two of us—myself and a man with a pronounced limp—stood to disembark at the Scofield station. The porter handed down our luggage, and the other man left immediately with his pull-along bag, dragging his bad leg behind him, aiming for the lone car in the parking lot.
I stood with the duffel bags that contained everything I owned in the world, my gaze following the porter’s gesture to the pay phone at the end of the platform.
“Maybe you can call a taxi, if you don’t have someone meeting you,” he said, although his voice was hesitant, rising in a question. We hadn’t passed any taxis in town.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, not wanting to concede helplessness already. As the bus pulled away, I hauled my bags one at a time up to the platform, plopping them beneath the closed ticket window. Fishing a few quarters from my wallet, I set out to investigate the payphone. If there was no taxi service in Scofield, I’d try the college. And if no one answered there, what would I do? I could call Mom back in Kansas, where she and Gerry Tallant were probably sitting down to dinner, thrilled that I was out of the picture and that they had the place to themselves. It was a horrible idea, one that belonged to my life as a teenager, not an independent college student. How could my mom help from fifteen hundred miles away?
Twenty yards out, I saw that the payphone was broken, its coiled metal cord dangling without a receiver.
Well, shit.
The night had quickly descended into late-summer darkness, the air humid and thick with insects that dive-bombed my face. I circled the station, weighing my options. In Woodstock, I would have hailed a passing car, because I was likely to know the person who stopped—someone whose kids I’d gone to school with, someone who had worked with Dad or managed a booth at the fair with Mom.
The phrase You’re not in Kansas anymore burned in my brain. Hah, a bad joke.
An older-model Honda passed on the road, tailpipe rattling. I wondered if the driver had seen me, or if I should have tried to flag down the car. Too late now.
Suddenly, the urge to pee, which I’d been battling since we crossed into Connecticut, became insistent. With the bus station closed, my only option appeared to be a secluded space behind a commercial-sized trash container. I heard the Honda’s clunky tailpipe again while I was zipping up and cursed myself. Someone could be rooting through my bags right now, making off with my clothes and books and my beloved afghan with the red, white and blue Chevron stripes, not to mention my wallet and driver’s license and the painting I’d taken off the refrigerator, the oversize stick figures of Dad and Mom and me. I zipped and broke into a run.
A man in jeans and a black T-shirt was leaning against the Honda, smoking a cigarette and not looking in my direction, as if he’d been there forever and his being there was in no way connected with me. I stopped next to the platform, catching my breath. It startled me when he spoke, as if he might be addressing a third, unseen person.
“You know, any one of the local creeps could have come by and made off with your stuff.”
“Are you one of the local creeps?” I asked.
He dropped his cigarette, grinding it beneath the toe of a scuffed Doc Marten. “I am the local creep.”
I laughed despite myself.
“Actually, the city of Scofield has hired me to enforce its public urination laws, which is a common problem with our—” he hesitated, looking at me pointedly “—vagrant population.”
Conscious of my unwashed hands, I jammed them into the pockets of my jeans. “Guilty,” I confessed, blushing bright red.
He grinned. “So. Not from around here?”
I shook my head. “Kansas.”
“That’s what I thought. Well, not Kansas, specifically, but I knew you were from somewhere in the Midwest.”
“I have that Midwest look about me, do I?”
He gave me an appreciative up-and-down glance, taking in the greasy blond hair I’d pulled into a ponytail, the teeth I hadn’t brushed since that morning, somewhere in Ohio. I was wearing a baggy T-shirt—I always wore baggy T-shirts—but I felt his gaze linger for a moment on my chest. “Yep. Corn-fed goodness,” he said.
I looked past him, out toward the road, trying to figure out what came next.
He cleared his throat. “Isn’t there anything you want to ask me?”
“Like what? Your name?”
He dipped at the waist in a mock bow. “Joseph P. Natolo, at your service. Actually—I thought you might need a ride.”
“Well, yeah. I’m a—”
“A student at Keale,” he finished. “That’s not exactly rocket science. Come on, let me load you up.” He grabbed one of my duffel bags, mock wincing at its weight. “What did you do, pack your library?”
I hesitated, watching him cram the bag into his trunk, already cluttered with loose shoes and clothes and fast food bags spotty with grease. “Do you work at the college?”
He took the other bag from my grasp, his hand brushing mine. “Would you believe I teach cultural anthropology?”
“No,” I said.
He laughed. “Good for you, Midwest. Being gullible is never a good thing. No, I’m just Scofield’s one-man welcoming committee.”
The trunk was so full, he had to lean his weight against it before we heard the telltale click. He looked at me. “Well? Come on.”
* * *
Joe’s car smelled faintly of pot, although an evergreen air freshener dangled from the rearview mirror. I belted myself in, heart hammering beneath my rib cage to warn me this was not my brightest idea. Outside my window, the scenery was a dark blur of open meadows divided by wooded areas, dense with trees. I rested my fingers on the door handle, planning an emergency exit—stop, drop and roll.
Joe glanced at my hand. “Seriously, I’m not a psycho. I was driving by and I spotted you there, and I figured you needed some help.”
I gave him a weak smile. “Thanks.”
He pointed at a rectangular green sign that appeared in front of us and receded in the side mirror: Keale College, 3 Miles. “See? We’re heading in the right direction.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled as he laughed. “Could have fooled me. So let me ask you this. What’s so horrible about men, anyway?”
I half turned in my seat. “When did I say men were horrible?”
Joe rolled his eyes. “Please. You come all the way from Timbuktu or wherever just to go to a school where there are no men, except the odd janitor or history professor. What’s that all about?”
“It’s not about hating men,” I said, my mind searching for one of the phrases from Keale’s brochures. “It’s about empowering women.”
Joe shook his head. “Why would anyone want to deprive themselves of this?” He raised a hand from the steering wheel and made a circle in the air, meant to encompass the two of us.
I snuck a sideways glance, trying to determine Joe’s age. At least as old as me, maybe a few years older. Still, there was a confidence to him—the way he’d tossed my bags into his trunk without getting my explicit permission, his easy, flirtatious jokes. He seemed decades more sophisticated than the boys (men, really, although they didn’t seem to have earned the title) I’d known in Woodstock. I cleared my throat. “So, do you go to school around here, too?”
He shrugged. “It’s been a few years now.”
It wasn’t clear if he was referring to