There are some mistakes which are made because men are wicked, and some because men are stupid, and a surprising number because men are only in a hurry.
The Tall Girl had discovered this before she had been a month at Benedictine College, though she might not have put it so definitely. She would have said, if asked, that people on a college campus were always looking at one thing while speaking to another. They looked at the sky while speaking of homework, at a clock while speaking of friendship, at a sandwich while speaking of philosophy, and at you while speaking of somebody else. They were all in motion; and in such a world one identity could be dropped and another picked up almost as carelessly as a scarf.
It was one of the peculiarities of Benedictine that it was at once a very small place and a very endless one.
A man might say, with some truth, that everybody knew everybody there. Another man might say, with equal truth, that he had gone a whole semester seeing only the same thirty faces and had not the faintest notion who populated the rest of the campus. There were corridors that repeated themselves in memory like a refrain, stairwells that smelled of old varnish and wet wool, little lounges with chairs too comfortable for scholarship and too public for privacy, and paths between the buildings where, in the wrong light, any figure at a distance became almost allegorical. A Benedictine student was forever meeting acquaintances whom he had never formally met and recognizing strangers whose names he did not know.
The Tall Girl was crossing one of these paths on a windy afternoon in March, with a blue notebook under her arm and a paper cup of coffee that she regretted buying, when a girl in a green sweatshirt hailed her with bright and immediate certainty.
“Hey,” said the girl. “Are you in my French class?”
The Tall Girl stopped. “No.”
The other girl laughed as if this were a joke.
“No, really.”
“No, really,” said the Tall Girl. “I’m not.”
The girl blinked once or twice, as if the Tall Girl had done something personally inconvenient.
“But I saw you there.”
“That would be impressive,” said the Tall Girl, “because I don’t take French.”
Now the girl laughed in a different way, uncertainly, as one laughs when a floorboard sounds less solid than expected.
“Well,” she said, “somebody exactly like you.”
“I hope she’s doing well.”
The girl grinned, apologized, and went off toward another building with that speed peculiar to people who have been proved wrong but do not wish to linger long enough to understand why.
The Tall Girl continued on her way, smiling a little. She told the story that evening to her roommate, who laughed at once.
“That’s the third time,” said her roommate.
“The third time what?”
“The third time somebody’s said there’s another you.”
The Tall Girl set down her cup. “There is not another me.”
“There is according to campus mythology.”
Her roommate was sitting cross-legged on her bed amid books, a blanket, two pens, and an orange she seemed in no hurry to peel. She had the practical face of a person born with common sense and made a little impatient by the lack of it in others.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Someone in the dining hall asked if you were the girl from theology discussion. Then somebody at the coffee place asked if you were in some club table thing. You weren’t there for either one.”
The Tall Girl frowned. “Why did you not tell me this?”
“Because it was funny.”
“It still is,” said the Tall Girl, though not quite so certainly.
Her roommate pointed at her with a pen. “And because you have one of those faces.”
“One of what faces?”
“One of those faces people decide they know.”
“That is not flattering.”
“It’s not an insult either. You look like you belong somewhere. That’s enough for most people.”
The Tall Girl thought of this while unpinning her hair. The room looked as most college rooms do: both temporary and terribly permanent. The cinderblock walls had accepted the command strips and posters with the same mournful resignation with which they had once accepted some other girl’s photographs and some other girl’s little string of lights. Outside the window the campus was going dark in patches, as if evening had been spilled unevenly over it.
“Maybe I do have a double,” she said.
“Good. Send her to your 8 a.m.”
But the thing stayed in her mind, not as a fear exactly, but as a pin remains in a sleeve. It was too small to be painful and too sharp to be ignored.
The next day she heard of it again.
It was after lunch, and she was coming out of a classroom with two other girls and a boy who spoke with tremendous authority on subjects he had begun learning last Thursday. He was in the middle of explaining something about a philosopher he had not understood, when a young man descending the stairs broke off, looked straight at the Tall Girl, and said cheerfully:
“Did you get the notes from Dr. Lambert yet?”
“No,” said the Tall Girl.
“You said yesterday you would.”
“I did not.”
The young man halted on the step below them and looked honestly puzzled.
“In the library,” he said. “By the window. You said you’d email them.”
“I was not in the library yesterday.”
He stared. Not rudely. Merely with the intense annoyance of a man whose facts have suddenly revolted.
“No,” he said slowly, “it was you.”
“I assure you,” said the Tall Girl, “that if it was me, I should remember promising you notes.”
One of the other girls laughed, but the young man did not.
“This is weird,” he said. “It was definitely you.”
He went away still half turning back, as if to catch her at the trick of becoming somebody else the moment his head moved.
The Tall Girl resumed walking, but no one took up the philosophical argument. There is no force so destructive to bad conversation as the intrusion of a good mystery.
That evening she saw a girl from her residence hall in the laundry room, where all women are made democrats by the spectacle of socks. The girl nodded and said, “Hey, I liked what you said at the campus ministry thing.”
The Tall Girl said, “Thank you,” out of politeness and surprise.
Then she added, “What did I say?”
The girl paused with a basket balanced on one hip.
“You know. About how Lent is harder when everybody performs it.”
The Tall Girl felt, not frightened, but suddenly cold. It was not the sentence itself. It was, if anything, too much like something she might indeed have said.
“I never said that.”
The other girl laughed. “Okay.”
“No,” said the Tall Girl. “I mean it. I wasn’t at the campus ministry thing.”
This time the laughter died faster.
“Oh,” said the girl. “Then that’s... strange.”
“Yes,” said the Tall Girl. “It is.”
When she came back upstairs she found her roommate reading on the bed and eating pretzels with an air of patient industry.
“It happened again,” said the Tall Girl.
Her roommate lowered the book. “French?”
“Worse.”
“Spanish?”
“Apparently I am now discussing Lent with strangers.”
Her roommate put down the pretzel bag. “All right. That’s upgraded.”
The Tall Girl sat in the desk chair and folded one long leg beneath the other.
“I begin to dislike this,” she said.
Her roommate nodded. “Good. Because I already disliked it on your behalf.”
The Tall Girl looked up. “You knew before I did.”
“I knew it was odd. I didn’t know it was... this.”
“This” was difficult to define. Nothing had happened, and yet something had happened repeatedly. She had not lost money, reputation, or sleep; but she had begun to feel that some invisible hand was signing her name in rooms she had never entered.
Her roommate said, “Maybe we should ask around.”
“Yes,” said the Tall Girl, with more energy than the proposal deserved. “Yes. That is obvious. We should have done that already.”
“Fine. Tomorrow. We’ll begin your criminal investigation.”
“It is not criminal.”
“No, but it is Benedictine. That’s often nearly as dramatic.”
The inquiry began the next day in exactly the wrong spirit, which is perhaps the spirit in which all true inquiries begin. They began amused.
The Tall Girl stopped two girls she recognized from the dining hall.
“Has anyone ever told you there is another me on campus?”
One girl said at once, “Yes!”
The other said at once, “No—well, maybe.”
“Helpful,” said the Tall Girl.
The first girl said, “I think I’ve seen her.”
“Where?”
The girl thought. “Around.”
“Where around?”
“Near the abbey once. Maybe by the science building?”
“What did she look like?”
The girl opened her mouth and then closed it.
“Like you,” she said.
“That is precisely the difficulty,” said the Tall Girl.
Another student was more confident.
“She has your hair,” he said.
“My hair is hair.”
“No, but long. And sort of—”
He waved his hands in the air in a gesture intended to describe shape and only succeeding in describing surrender.
Another said the other girl wore glasses.
The Tall Girl did not wear glasses.
Another said no, definitely not glasses.
Another was certain she carried a red backpack.
The Tall Girl had never owned one.
Another insisted the mysterious girl had a laugh exactly like hers, though he admitted after some pressure that he had never heard the Tall Girl laugh except, possibly, once from the far end of a hallway.
By supper they had collected a little heap of impressions so vague and confident that they resembled a witness stand made entirely of fog.
Her roommate spread the findings on the table between the salt and pepper as if they were physical objects.
“So,” she said. “She has your hair, your height, your face, glasses, no glasses, a red backpack, no backpack, and possibly your voice.”
“And she studies French, theology, and whatever else happens to be convenient.”
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
“There is good news?”
“The good news is that no one is actually observing anyone.”
“That is very bad news.”
“Yes,” said her roommate. “But at Benedictine it may count as realism.”
The Tall Girl smiled despite herself. Then the smile faded.
There was something humiliating in it that she could not have explained. It was not vanity. She had no desire to be stared at more accurately. But one does wish to be recognized with at least as much care as one’s winter coat.
“What if,” she said slowly, “there really is a girl who resembles me?”
“Then she is probably having the same conversation with her roommate.”
This possibility restored her for a moment. She pictured another tall freshman somewhere on campus explaining, with equal irritation, that she had never been at some meeting, never said some sentence, never promised some notes.
The picture might have remained comic if it had not been altered an hour later by an encounter outside the library.
She was going in as a boy came out. He held the door for her and then did not let go of it.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m sorry if I offended you.”
She looked at him in surprise. She had never seen him before.
“I don’t think you have had the opportunity.”
“In the student center. Yesterday.”
“I was not in the student center yesterday.”
He gave a quick uncomfortable laugh. “Right. That’s what you said then too.”
She stood still.
“What,” she asked, “did I say?”
He shifted his books under one arm. “It was nothing. I just asked if you were going to the Friday thing.”
“What Friday thing?”
“I don’t know what it was. Some event. You acted like I was bothering you.”
“I was here yesterday afternoon,” said the Tall Girl. “In the library. Until dinner.”
He frowned. “Then who was I talking to?”
“That,” said the Tall Girl, “is a question in which I am becoming professionally interested.”
He stared at her, uncertain whether he had been invited into a joke whose rules he did not understand. Then he mentioned the place and approximate time. She thanked him and went into the library with a mind no longer merely pricked, but engaged.
It was one thing to be mistaken in passing. It was another for a stranger to think he had spoken to her at length.
When she returned to the room that night she did not sit down, but stood by the window while her roommate watched her with that look of sympathy practical people reserve for those who have at last admitted the weather is bad.
“Well?” said the roommate.
“Well,” said the Tall Girl, “someone now thinks I was rude.”
“That is intolerable.”
“It is also false.”
“Which makes it more intolerable.”
The Tall Girl turned from the window. “It must stop.”
“You say that as if you’re issuing a papal bull.”
“I may be.”
Her roommate shut the book. “Then what’s the plan?”
The Tall Girl hesitated.
It is one thing to say that a thing must stop and another to know where to lay one’s hand upon it. She could not very well post notices reading HAVE YOU MISTAKEN ME FOR MYSELF? REPLY AT ONCE. Nor could she march into every classroom and demand an inventory of all girls over five feet ten.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But I think the problem is not resemblance.”
“What is it then?”
The Tall Girl was silent a moment.
“It is certainty,” she said at last. “They are all certain. They are uncertain only when questioned.”
Her roommate considered that. “So people decide too fast.”
“Yes. But on what?”
Before her roommate could answer, someone knocked at the open doorframe.
Both girls looked up.
A young man was leaning there with one shoulder against the jamb, as if he had arrived not by walking down a dormitory hall but by becoming part of its architecture. He was neat without being formal, composed without being stiff, and he wore on his face the faint expression of a man who had long ago discovered that other people would always either underestimate him or overestimate him, and found both useful.
The Tall Girl had seen him before, though not enough to know him. She knew only the sort of knowledge by which one recognizes a recurring figure in a landscape: the man at the edge of a crowd, the one who says very little until he says something memorable, the one around whom certain energetic girls seemed to orbit as if by social astronomy.
“Yes?” said her roommate.
The young man inclined his head.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but the door was open and the conversation impossible not to overhear.”
“That is generally how doors work,” said the roommate.
A flicker of amusement crossed his face.
“I only meant to say,” he continued, looking now at the Tall Girl, “that the difficulty is likely not facial resemblance.”
The Tall Girl looked back at him directly.
“What difficulty?”
“The imaginary twin. The phantom French scholar. The counterfeit theologian. Whatever title campus legend has assigned her.”
“You know about this?”
“I know a great many things,” he said, “because people insist on telling them to me. It is one of the heavier burdens of college life.”
Her roommate said, “Do you have anything useful to add?”
“Yes,” he said pleasantly. “People do not recognize faces as well as they imagine. They recognize outlines, habits, context. A height. A turn of the head. A coat. A confidence. Then they insert a name.”
The Tall Girl said, “Who are you?”
“Cassian Rook.”
He said it as if it did not matter, which is one of the ways men make their names matter.
The Tall Girl had expected some degree of self-consciousness and was mildly annoyed to find none.
“And you know this because?”
“Because everybody knows it, if he pays attention. Most do not pay attention.”
Her roommate folded her arms. “Are you saying there is another girl?”
“I am saying there may be twenty,” said Rook. “But that is almost irrelevant.”
The Tall Girl said, “If it is irrelevant, why are people so certain they have seen me?”
“Because certainty is a habit, not a conclusion.”
He looked around the room with calm curiosity, as if taking note of the posters, the books, the cup on the desk, and perhaps storing them away for future use, though the Tall Girl could not have said why she thought that.
“Most people,” he went on, “do not see others. They see their own expectation meeting an outline at speed.”
Her roommate said, “That is a very irritating sentence.”
“Many true sentences are.”
The Tall Girl had the uncomfortable feeling that he was not speaking to them precisely, but arranging ideas in the air and letting them choose whether to walk into them.
“If you know so much,” she said, “perhaps you know who she is.”
Rook smiled then, but not generously.
“My dear Miss—”
He stopped.
“Or perhaps,” he said, “you would prefer not to be identified incorrectly.”
She did not smile.
“I would prefer,” she said, “an answer.”
“And I would prefer,” said Rook, “better coffee in this building. Yet here we both are.”
Her roommate gave a little snort.
Then he grew serious again, or rather less amused.
“You are looking for a person,” he said. “You should perhaps look first for a pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“Who mistakes her for you. Where. At what distance. In what light. After what assumption has already been made.”
He pushed himself lightly from the doorframe.
“That is, if you wish to find her.”
“And if I do not?” asked the Tall Girl.
Rook looked at her with that same unreadable steadiness.
“Then she will continue,” he said, “to live a very active life in places you have never been.”
He nodded once, almost formally, and went away down the corridor.
For some moments neither girl spoke.
Then the roommate said, “Well.”
“Yes,” said the Tall Girl.
“I dislike him.”
“Yes.”
“Do you dislike him because he is wrong or because he is right?”
The Tall Girl considered this with some care.
“I do not yet know,” she said.
Outside, the bells began to ring the hour. They came through the window faint and cold and exact, like marks on a page. The campus beyond the glass was full of moving figures, crossing under lamps, entering doors, vanishing into passages of yellow light. Any one of them might have been known, unknown, mistaken, remembered, or invented. The whole place seemed suddenly crowded not only with students, but with impressions of students; with stories attaching themselves to silhouettes; with names looking for bodies to inhabit.
The Tall Girl stood very still.
Then she went to her desk, opened her notebook, and wrote at the top of a clean page:
THE OTHER ONE
Under it she wrote:
French class.
Library.
Campus ministry.
Student center.
Friday event.
Who saw her?
What exactly did they see?
Then, after a moment, she added one final line:
Cassian Rook knows something.
She laid down the pen.
“This has become ridiculous,” said her roommate.
“No,” said the Tall Girl quietly.
And because she was beginning, at last, to feel the outline of something larger than a mistake, she added:
“It has become a case.”