Obedience by Will Lavender Page B

Flaherty, in the Kingsley.
    She said, “I went back to Cincinnati. My father was waiting for me that night, watching television. He held me and I went to sleep, and at some point he must have carried me to bed. I woke up the next morning and decided to change things, to change my life. I went to a therapist. The therapist urged me to go back to school, and I did. That’s how I ended up at Winchester studying behavioral psychology, and in my second semester here I had a class under Ed. The rest, of course-well, you know the rest.”
    It took all of Dennis’s strength not to say a word. He wasn’t even sure what he should say, but he knew there was more there. He knew that Elizabeth would go on if he wanted her to. But he just lay there silently, eyes closed, waiting for her to tell him that it was finally over.
    Afterward, she drove him back to the Tau house. It was early evening, a muddy twilight spreading across the campus. The Dekes were marching to the dining hall, the Sigs were out on the yard in their suits and ties, dates on their arms in glittering formal dresses, and the art kilns down the hill at the edge of Up Campus were glowing as they did every night at this time. She dropped him off at the corner of Winchester and Crane, so that the Taus would not see them together. She did not say good-bye; she didn’t need to. There was nothing more that needed to be said between them. It was just something that had happened, and now it was over.
    When he was back in the room, he thought about all she had said. Mike. Pollyanna Pet Foods. Her father waiting for her when she got home, and how he had carried her to bed. The way she had told him her story, as if she were…as if she had rehearsed part of it. As if it were somehow an act.
    Dennis opened Word and began to type. He had a theory about Polly, one that had been given to him by Elizabeth Orman. It was really indubitable: he would be ready for Professor Williams.

14
    Mary was thinking about Professor Williams’s teeth. They were yellowed and crooked and too short. She hadn’t noticed them when she was close to him, or rather she hadn’t acknowledged it if she had, but now those teeth were all she could think about. How he had grinned at her.
Stay.
Not so much a request as it was a command. His eyes amused and knowing. Testing her.
    In
City of Glass,
Quinn was sitting outside the old hotel by then, watching and waiting for Stillman to come out. It was the dawn of his obsession. He was about to lose control, Professor Kiseley had told them in class that week. Things were about to go off the deep end for Quinn.
    But what about Mary? How was she doing? She wasn’t about to go off the deep end like Quinn, but she…she wasn’t doing well. Because of her insatiable need to figure the thing out, to understand Williams and his methods, she had allowed herself to become-what had he said about that scientist, Milgram, that day in class? She had allowed herself to lose herself in the class. She couldn’t go out without wondering if she was missing something. She couldn’t do anything without thinking of Williams. He could do anything now, bend the rules any way he wanted, and she would follow the game.
    Now the danger, the adventure she had been craving when the class started was beginning to wear on her. She knew she had to find a way to scale it back, to tone it down, to chill out, as her mother would say. Or…
    Or what? Or she might turn out like Paul Auster’s Quinn? Or she might lose herself completely to Williams and become so obsessed with solving his puzzle that she would be able to do nothing else? Because that’s what it was about, wasn’t it? The need to solve it, to figure it out. To rest her mind.
    Just like Dennis. She had gotten the single room not because of trust issues, she knew now. No, she had gotten the single room because she needed that time alone to maybe understand why he had dumped her. It was hard for her to be around anyone except for