“The age thing is a little skewed, you might say,” Dr. Cho said. “Why not have younger representatives? But younger vampires tend to focus on learning how to live, not how to make judgments about others. And in the end, age isn’t important, anyway. Wisdom and experience are what count.”

I thought of Cameron, and I wondered how important his age might prove to be.

“So the Council has the power to make the Nebulists stop their ambassador program?”

“Not power in the sense you mean it. They don’t try to force anyone to do anything.” Cho braked hard and made a decisive turn off the main road.

“I hope that you’re past the good-versus-evil battleground way of thinking about conflict,” she said. “It’s archaic. Resolving problems demands delicate negotiations that are premised on mutual respect. If the Council considers an issue and takes a position on it, their judgment is communicated throughout the vampire world. It carries enormous influence. It has the clout of tradition behind it.”

We were entering the Hillhouse campus now. I stopped thinking about big issues and turned to my own problems. How would I face Walker? What would I say to Bernadette? I suddenly wished the drive weren’t over. I wanted to tell the doctor my sorrows.

Dr. Cho stopped the car abruptly. “Ari, go and write your papers. Don’t worry about the Nebulists now. I’ll contact the Council and report all you’ve said. Okay?”

“Thank you.” I felt relieved knowing that someone was doing something to help Mysty and the others.

“And I’ll let you know the second I get the lab reports on the water samples.” She got out of the car as I did and walked around it to give me a hug. “Meantime, better not drink the water here, either. Stick to Picardo. It’s safer.”

I expected awkwardness. I even anticipated an ugly scene. What I didn’t expect was to find Bernadette back in our room, sitting on the carpet, sewing.

“Oh, hey, where’ve you been?” Her eyes had the now familiar glazed look.

“I had some personal business,” I began, but she wasn’t listening. In her head she was humming a tuneless little song—dah dah dah dah, dah dah dah dah, dah dah dah dah.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Me? Oh, I moved back.” She finished a line of stitches and bit off the thread with her teeth. “There,” she said, admiring her sewing. “Walker’s sleeve is good as new.”

“I thought you moved in with Jacey.” The mention of Walker brought back the image of the two of them in my hotel bed.

“It didn’t work out.” Her tone was nonchalant. She stood up and threw the shirt toward a chair. It fell on the floor. She giggled.

I looked at the calendar over my desk. Three weeks until the last class, and then exam week. Afterward I’d go back to Tybee. My father would be well again—better than well—and I’d tell him everything, everything that had happened, and he’d make sense of it all. He’d know what to do. And my mother would be able to rest, and the three of us would—

“Ari, Ari, we’re going to happy hour at the Anchor downtown. Come with!” Bernadette stood up and danced across the carpet, tripping over her feet, collapsing onto her bed.

The Anchor was a townies’ bar that served Hillhouse students grudgingly, knowing that most of their IDs were fake. “No thanks,” I said. “I have a paper to write.”

After she left, the room filled with golden stillness. I picked up the clothes she’d discarded on my bed and desk and tossed them onto her bed. Then I opened my laptop, sat down, and wrote the first half of my American Politics paper.

On the way to dinner that night, I saw Jacey. Her hair was unbraided, and it spread over her shoulders like a cape.

She came up to me, looked hard at my eyes, touched my arm as if to be sure I was real. “Thank goodness,” she said. “Ari, when you didn’t come back with the others, I thought you’d been disappeared. Like your friend.”

“I went to visit my family.”

We took quick short steps down the incline that led to the cafeteria. I tried not to see the shrubs where, less than a month before, Walker had first kissed me. But I did see them, and I remembered.

“Thank goodness,” Jacey said again. “The others came back all weird—except for Richard, and he was weird before, but in a different way. Walker and Bernie and Rhonda, they’re high all the time.”

“I noticed.”

We jumped over the low stone fence that bordered the paved path below us. No one followed the paths at Hillhouse; everyone devised shortcuts through the landscape.

“Walker doesn’t do Walker things anymore. You know, magic tricks and juggling and singing and playing guitar. He acts all spaced out.”

I missed my old Walker, suddenly.

“Rooming with Bernie drove me crazy.” Jacey had to take two steps for every one of mine. “It was hard enough before, when she acted depressed and critical and mean. Now she’s Ms. Mellow. What she says doesn’t make sense. She seems to get worse every day.”

I stopped walking and faced her—looked down into her face, more accurately. “Jacey, will you trust me if I tell you something?”

“I trust you,” she said. “You were the only one brave enough to spend the night with me in the swamp.”

“I think that what’s going on with Bernadette and the others is just as strange as what happened that night.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she made them even smaller as I spoke.

“They’re taking stuff that makes them pseudo-mellow. Have you heard of V?”

“Half the campus is on V,” she said. “Bernie offered me some two days ago.”

“Did you try it?”

“I can’t handle drugs,” she said. “I tried to smoke pot once and I gagged.”

“Anybody you care about, tell them not to take it.” But even as I said it, I doubted anyone would listen to her.

We entered the student union. The stairs to the cafeteria were crowded. Jacey and I made our way downstairs and went through the line, setting plates on our trays. At the end of the line, she pulled a glass out of a rack and a bottle of Orion Springs water from a bowl of ice.

I grabbed the bottle, put it back, and set the glass under the milk dispenser instead. “Don’t drink the water,” I whispered. “Trust me.”

We were seated at a long table, eating, when I realized: How do I know the milk is safe?

As I wrote my assignments and went to class, part of my mind focused on class work. The other part watched students around me disengaging from academic life. Few went to class. The library was deserted.

The duppification of America. Malcolm’s phrase began to haunt me. I couldn’t tell if I was a paranoiac or a prophet, and I hoped I wasn’t either.

Even Professor Hogan had changed. Her voice and posturings were less brittle now, although her tone continued to rise at the end of each phrase. She’d been born to ask questions, it seemed.

“Where’s your paper, Walker?” She’d worn the same skirt to class for a week.

“I’m, you know, working on it.” Walker didn’t shave anymore, but the stubble on his face wasn’t yet a beard. He grinned at Professor Hogan, and she said, “Whatever?”

Then Walker said to me, “How’s it going?” His blue eyes were glassy.

“It’s going,” I said. This version of Walker didn’t attract me in the least.

The professor called on two more students, then seemed to lose her train of thought. “Make sure you’ve all registered to vote?” she said.

Another activity I was too young for, I thought. Unless I used my fake ID to register. Unless I lied again.

Dr. Cho called my cell phone a day or so later. The Sassa spring water was pure. The Tybee tap water contained chlorine and the usual trace elements. “Nothing to worry about,” she said.

But the bottled water was loaded with the same opiates found in V.

“How can that be?” I said. “Isn’t the quality of bottled water monitored?”

“Yes, the FDA is supposed to monitor it.”

Is the Food and Drug Administration doing its job? I began to feel like a conspiracy theorist, or like Autumn, who’d found the existence of UFOs more credible than the government’s claims to the contrary.

“Orion Springs is a fairly new company, based in Miami,” Dr. Cho said. “Council is aware of the situation. They may call you to give testimony.”

“Where are they, anyway?” I asked.

“They move around.” Her voice sounded clipped, as if she were busy. “Have you talked to your mother? Your father is recovering nicely. He took his first walk on the beach yesterday.”

“That’s good news.” I still felt wary about calling Mãe. But if someone was monitoring my phone, they certainly heard an earful that night.

When the call ended, I made a vow to talk to Bernadette about taking V, although I doubted it would do any good.

But Bernadette didn’t come home that night. I went out into the main lounge area, littered with students. She wasn’t there, either.

Richard and his girlfriend (she wasn’t in any of my classes, and I never did learn her name) sat in front of a television set, watching a hockey game. He waved me over.

“Jacey says you’re telling people not to drink water,” he said.

“Bottled water can be risky,” I said carefully.

“Bottled water, tap water—it’s all risky.” He leaned forward, his fuzzy hair catching the light from the TV. “Who knows what the government puts in our water? The Social Ecologists Club has been on to that issue for more than a year. You ought to come to our next meeting.”

“I’m not much of a joiner,” I said, and excused myself.

I walked through the corridors on all three floors of the dorm, looking into the rooms with open doors. Then I gave up on Bernadette. Why should I care where she spent the night? So long as she showed up eventually. So long as she didn’t completely disappear.

Chapter Eighteen

The next two weeks passed before I knew where I was or what I was doing. Our professors suddenly elevated their expectations and demands. When I thought I couldn’t read or write another word, I read another book and wrote another paper.

This, it turned out, was the Hillhouse tradition: low pressure on students all semester coupled with certainty that their self-motivation would drive them to produce first-rate results by semester’s end.