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Chapter One

1955

The mountain at night was pitch dark. The twin beams from the headlamps would advance a few feet and be annihilated, and only the motion of the bus striving upward indicated that you were not at sea, and only the dispersion of stars in the sky marked off what lay around you as a mass and not an infinite void. His first time up this road from Nashville the bus had put him off in the middle of nowhere and nothing and its tail lights winked out around a bend before the driver thought twice and backed up. The small lights reappeared. When the bus was alongside again the door swung open and the driver pointed into the featureless blackness. "That way," he said. Chuck had still been standing at the side of the road with his suitcase hanging from one hand and his overcoat over one arm, and this was the petrified figure that Mrs. Reston, the vice vice chancellor's housekeeper, found at the door to the vice vice chancellor's house forty-five minutes later. You would not have known that the motionless person had just walked two miles straight uphill with a steady and terrified step and only the slight paleness of the gravel reflecting the stars to direct him. To Mrs. Reston he seemed to have dropped into the pool of porch light from outer space. She showed him inside and unclamped the hand from the suitcase's handle and unbent the arm from beneath the drape of the overcoat, and gave him some tea in the kitchen.

Mrs. Reston was annoyed with the bus driver for not having explained things more clearly. It would seem like a failure of hospitality, in her opinion, unless a person knew that the gravel drive up to the vice vice chancellor's was too steep and shifty a purchase for the lumbering bus and even most cars. They'd go skittering right off the edge. As far as hospitality went, she was ready. She had been ready for his arrival for days and had been waiting with a pot of tea and her embroidery basket and a pile of Silver Screen back issues for hours.

She gave him his tea in the kitchen, in order to impart the idea that he was not a guest, but a boy being welcomed home. This tactic, based on years of experience with free-floating, frightened young men, fell securely within the realm of which she was the mistress, and she would have done it even if the vice vice chancellor had not been away for the weekend. But she was glad that he was. "You must be tired after such a long trip," she said. "I'm going to keep you down here a quick minute because I've been so anxious to meet you, but then I'll take you right up to the guest room. There's the one nice thing about the vice vice chancellor's being away. You can sleep late. Otherwise I'm very sorry he's gone. Oh, my goodness, you look so tired! Are you going to perish?"

He shook his head and smiled. He was somehow not capable of speech.

"How many hours was your trip?"

He took a long time to answer this question, so long that although she was never quick to judge, and so unflaggingly optimistic in all situations that the vice vice chancellor had once complained to her about it, the horrible thought crossed her mind that he didn't speak English at all, that he had faked his letters the way some boys faked their grades. And then he said, in a voice that snagged on its own exhaustion, "Eighteen hours and--" He wanted to add something, to answer her kindness as well as her question. "And we stop to take fuel in Alaska."

"Alaska! First time in this country and you've already been to Alaska. I don't think I will ever see Alaska in my life. Was it beautiful?"

This did not seem the word. It had been a gloaming, purple and vast. Past the end of the world. But he didn't have these words, either. He nodded, and nodded again when she said, "You poor thing. Let me put you to bed."

It was a tidy but comfortable room, with a high bed and a lamp on the table that was already lit. Mrs. Reston turned the bed down and patted it briskly. He stood helplessly by. All the distance he'd plowed through, and her one simple gesture disabled him. He followed her back to the door.

"Sleep late," she said, turning away.

He shut the door after her, and looked down at the knob. Then he opened and shut and reopened it. She was already far down the hall.

"Excuse," he called.

"Yes dear?"

"If I have to lock." He twisted the knob.

"But you don't. It's all right. We don't lock our doors here."

"Ah. Thank you."

He shut the door again and sat on the bed. Then he lay back on top of the covers, and pushed off his shoes with his toes. The shoes were too large, like the suit and the coat.

After a while he sat up, undid the knots in his shoelaces, and set the shoes beside each other on the floor. He lay down again and tried to find sleep. The thought of the door filled him with shame, because he could not accept the lack of precaution as a sign that he was safe.

The Foreign Student
A Novel. Copyright © by Susan Choi. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Foreign Student: A Novel by Susan M. Choi
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