16

I finish reading Graeme's journals and switch off the computer. I go to bed, the book and the relocked compact disc buried in my backpack I don't want anyone to see them. Before I turn out the lights, I get rid of the sandwich so Adrian won't feel hurt.

I hear him come in, and watch through slitted eye-lids—silver moonglow through open curtains silhouetting him—as he pauses beside me. The careful rhythm of my breathing must satisfy him because he moves away quietly, settling himself for the night. He's never asked about the day of the funeral. I don't know what he has assumed. I only know he offered friendship (comfort), and I accepted it I wish I could tell him what really happened—what I read in the journals. But if he knew the truth of what I'd done to Graeme, could he still bear to know me, let alone think of himself as my friend? He said he didn't hate me, but he didn't know.... I meant to tell him everything then (to push him away with the others), but I couldn't.

I stare at black-and-white patterns on the inside of my lids, abstract designs that shift with the steady rumbling of his snores. I play the journal entries over and over in my mind, yearning for morning, for escape. Graeme struggled so hard in the end, but apparently he couldn't force Kyle to be someone he couldn't be himself, any more than I could paint a convincing portrait that flattered someone I knew was vicious inside. What did he end up writing in his novel, then?

When dawn brushes the sky outside my window, I rise silently and ease toward the door, carrying the pack with Graeme's book.

"Can't sleep?"

I freeze, then slowly turn around. In the pale light I see Adrian lying in bed, hands clasped behind his head. So I hadn't fooled him.

"No." My tone is a warning (plea?) to leave it at that.

He doesn't "What was in the envelope?"

He sees too much with that uncanny insight of his. But we're not in the dreamlike darkness now, and I don't want to discuss it (Graeme) with him. I think of the uncorrected page proofs. "Proof of guilt" I say shortly.

Instead of rising to the bait he simply asks, "Can I help?"

That's right I think bitterly. It's all so easy for you—the wise, all-seeing roommate—the friend who understands (forgives) everything—the composer who lets everyone listen to his music—

"I don't know," I retort "Can you weigh in and help prove me guilty?"

All he replies is, "Guilty of what?"

Murder, I want to scream at him, but that would betray too much (betray Graeme's trust). It occurs to me that I've never said anything about Graeme to Adrian—never spoken about the sketch he saw me make, any more than I ever said anything about the night of Graeme's funeral. Adrian, I suddenly realize, wasn't at the funeral.

"Destroying Graeme Brandt," I practically spit out at him.

At last his composure slips—before I know he's in motion, he's sitting upright in bed. "How could you possibly be responsible for anything to do with Graeme Brandt?"

I glare at him. "Come off it—you saw the way I sketched him. You were so pleased that it wasn't anything like as flattering as the way I drew you!" Which I know is a he—because the sketch of Adrian was true (is still true), not flattering. Ashamed of the he, I look at his desk and see the sketch still hanging above it I stride across the room, determined finally to rip it down, but Adrian is there before me. His long fingers wrap around my left wrist as I reach for the paper.

"Don't!"

Rachel said that, too. Adrian stands before me, instead, looking defenseless in his sleep-rumpled undershirt and shorts, but he's stronger than Rachel, stronger than I ever suspected, and I can't reach past him.

"You are not responsible for anything that Graeme Brandt did," he says evenly, "but you are responsible for what you do here. You said that drawing was a gift. Don't take it back. Please."

For a moment I strain against him, but his grip is too strong. When I drop my arm he lets me go (and I wish he would hold me, instead—I wish it were dark again). When he speaks, his tone is unemotional, neither the teasing lilt nor the comforting voice of the night "You drew him as a mirror. How could that destroy him?"

I can't meet his eyes. "Graeme believed me. I told him he was nothing but a lifeless mirror—I told him he was dead, and he believed me."

Adrian doesn't say anything for a moment. Then he asks, again, "What proof was in that envelope?"

I stare down at the mottled tan dorm carpet. "Something Graeme left for me," I mutter, not wanting to explain the locked disc. "And his last book."

"Graeme arranged to tell you that you had destroyed him before his heart attack?" Adrian asks, his tone disbelieving. "I mean—it's monstrous that he should plan to reach out from beyond the grave in order to blame you for—for whatever he did." He shakes his head. "And you just accept his saying you're guilty?"

I look up, furious at his outraged incredulity. I want him to know the truth—I want him to know what I did—I want to push him away as absolutely as I've pushed everyone else away (but—everyone else chose to turn on me, didn't they? I didn't choose to push them away—I wanted to belong with them. Or did I really want to be alone all along?) Before I stop to think, I say, my voice harsh, "It wasn't a heart attack. He made it look like one, but he killed himself, all right? He saw my paintings, and he killed himself!"

Adrian's eyes widen and he takes a step back from me. Good—now you hate me, too—now you'll leave me alone, like all the rest.

As I jerk open the door I think I hear him call my name, but I must be imagining it I'm out of the dorm and running. Not my studio. I go to the roof and sit propped against the parapet siding, remembering Graeme sitting cross-legged on the gravel beside me. A different morning. (But I had still run away from everyone—from Adrian.) I open the book and look again at Graeme's dedication to me. I take a deep breath and read.

Hours later, I close the book If I'd never read his first novel, I think this one would have moved me even more, but it would never have brought me to Whitman, because I would have known the author could never answer my question. But where do I go from here?

It's too late to throw the envelope into the trash, unopened and unread. Too late to decide I can't unlock the disc and read Graeme's secret files. Too late to pretend I never cared about Graeme's legacy, his brilliant books, and his ruined hope. I've reawakened (pushed Adrian away, like everyone I dare to let get close to me). I can't turn back the clock to become yesterday's ghost, alive only in his world of paint I want to run downstairs to my studio and lock the door and forget Graeme's book as I managed to forget everything else (the dead look in his eyes on the roof, the pain in Rachel's voice as her kaleidoscope shattered), but I never really forgot I only went into hiding, painting stillborn life studies for fools like Mr. Wallace, blindfolding my soul the way I silenced my speech.

Now, painfully, my mind is thinking again, prodding the scars, telling me flatly that I can't go on pretending there's no world (no Rachel, no Alona, no consequences to pay for the pain I've caused) outside of my studio and the unspoken lies that made Adrian befriend me (not anymore—not now that I've put the truth into words that even he had to hear). Painfully, I touch the textured paper cover on the book I just finished reading. People like Graeme live outside my studio, in that world. And he tried so hard....

In Graeme's book, Kyle wanted to break the mirror, to stop being only what people like his brother and classmates and teachers wanted him to be, but he couldn't He couldn't work out who to be, so he kept trying to create a role for himself, but none of them fit He didn't know where to find a role that worked, except from someone else.

Kyle Travis was Graeme from this spring on the page, just as Alan Travis had been the Graeme of three years ago.

But Kyle wasn't the only character trying to change his pattern in this book. Morgan was the school yearbook photographer, and he didn't have a life beyond his photos. He was a shadow in the school, bumped by the other kids in the hallways, but mostly ignored—except by Kyle. Kyle was fascinated by him. As things got worse, as Kyle felt an emptiness growing inside him and none of the roles he tried was enough to fill it, he turned on Morgan. He dragged Morgan into his circle of friends on the pretext of wanting him to join their gang (and you could see just how Morgan would be suckered into it, wanting to fit in somewhere) and humiliated him—ripped him so badly that Morgan dropped out of school Maybe he transferred somewhere—he dropped out of the book, anyway.

I knew Morgan was me, whether Graeme meant him to be or not But he got the ending wrong. I wasn't the one who got destroyed—he was.

Or did we destroy each other?

I hug my knees, staring at the blurring parapet across the roof. I may have killed Graeme, but I killed something in myself as well. I'm less than I was when I came here. At least then I had hoped to find some answers. Now I've given up hope. I know (in spite of Adrian saying he doesn't hate me, in spite of Alona telling me not to disappear in my studio forever) I'm beyond redemption. I can't ever pay for what I did to Graeme, or to RacheL I don't dare show my paintings to anyone, ever again.

Why did Graeme leave me his journals and his book? To finish the destruction, or to set me free?

To punish you for killing him...

I stand up abruptly, my stiff legs crying out in protest and limp away from the book and the disc toward the far parapet The familiar guilt is too easy, easier than feeing what we really did to each other. And suddenly, standing beside the parapet, almost the shadow in my painting come to life, I feel a surge of anger wash over me—not anger at myself, for once—anger at Graeme Brandt.

You choose to play Simon Says, and you can choose to stop! Graeme chose to play and, worse, he chose to make me his Simon ( blame me). I wanted him to tell me how to do what I dreamed of doing (God—did I want to give in to the game all along?), but I never wanted to tell him what to do with his life! He had no right to make me responsible for his death—it's monstrous that he should blame you—he had no right to give up! Those two books—that insight that brought me here—the potential they represent—what else could he have written, if he had given himself the chance to grow up? What else could he have written if he had been brave enough to try living, instead of dying?

I grind my palms into the concrete top of the parapet, stopping short of drawing my own blood this time. Blood pays for blood. But it's not blood I owe him—or that he owed me. Graeme owed me more than a dedication and his journals. He owed me (he owed himself) an honest try at starting over—at finding out who he really was inside and learning how to be true to that self. So what if it wasn't easy? So what if it didn't happen in the space of a few months, in the writing of one book? You try every day, pushing yourself and digging deeper. You don't just take the easy way out and give up, even if you have to cripple one part of yourself to keep growing. Unless there's nowhere to grow.

I'm back to the question I asked myself when I found out he was writing: Do we choose who we are, or are we born that way? If Graeme was born a mirror, could he choose to change? Or did he choose to be a mirror, and could he have chosen to grow in a new direction? Adrian said (he said it's monstrous—he said he didn't hate you—but does he still feel that way?) you choose to change as you see things about yourself you like or don't like. Couldn't Graeme have chosen differently—have seen himself differently?

I go back and shove Breaking the Mirror into my pack with the disc. Then I pull out my old sketch pad from last fell. I left it in my pack all this time, until I knew how to finish the sketch I'd begun. Something else I had made myself forget after his death... The breeze flutters the pages as I flip through them to the drawing of Graeme—of his book, rising inspired from my painting. Could you have changed, or were you always a mirror? But the sketch is as lifeless as ever, and I suddenly rip it from the pad, shredding it and letting the kaleidoscope fragments scatter in the wind. The answers I'm looking for can't be found on this rooftop.

I climb down the stone stairs, head out of the building, out into the mid-morning rush of kids hurrying between classes. What am I missing? It doesn't matter. I've completed all my final projects and gotten the passes taken care of. No one will miss the ghost cutting class for once.

I take off across the campus, outside it, two blocks to the church, and then around back to the quiet churchyard where Graeme's grave is grown over with thick grass and decorated with fresh flowers propped against an austere tombstone bearing only his name, the years of his life, and the chiseled words: BELOVED SON AND AUTHOR. A Whitman legend already, just as he wanted. Or was he ever the one who really wanted that?

I reach into my pack, take out the letter Graeme wrote me before he killed himself, and read it again. Then I stare at the gently mounded earth, asking the spirit that lingers there if it really had always been only a mirror. He had written, It must be wanting something, knowing what you want. But everything I wanted was what someone else told me to want. His version of Simon Says... (But Adrian says there aren't any games ... or if it is all a game, then artists are the real Simons—offering good choices, not destroying the other players.) And Graeme did want things. In his journal he wrote about how much he wanted to play baseball, until his mother told him he shouldn't That was wanting something. Or did he only like baseball because his friend, Mike somebody, wanted him to like it?

Except—There was something he wanted, wasn't there? I don't need a computer screen to remember his journals—he wrote that he wanted readers to look at things from a new perspective. He wanted to show them things they hadn't known before. And he did that in his two books. I swallow, finally seeing the true magnitude of his waste. Graeme didn't just want to reflect other people's ideas in his writing. "What mattered to him was showing new ideas—new perspectives. And he accomplished that Only he never realized it.

He told me on the rooftop that he showed his readers what they were doing and who they were in his books, so they'd stop and think about themselves. I think of the way I show what to reach for in my paintings, and remember Steve telling me that they made him uncomfortable because they demanded too much. Maybe my paintings don't speak to everyone—maybe Graeme's books speak to people who would turn away from my paintings. His books don't tell them what to strive for, but if it makes them think about who they are and change themselves because they aren't who they wanted to be, isn't that the same effect? And he would have gone on finding new ways to make readers think, if he hadn't killed himself.

"You shouldn't have accepted that there were only two possibilities open to you," I say out loud, as if his spirit could still hear me, "either my judgment, or the empty reflection you let the world make you into. You should have fought harder to find a way to live up to your writing, the way I try to live up to my paintings. I came here wanting to change, even if I didn't know how."

And suddenly I realize that Graeme may have decided he couldn't change (decided wrongly, because he did have so much more to give—it's a mistake he can't ever take back), but his journals and his books were showing me a different idea—they were telling me that I could change. He didn't want me to stay hidden in my studio. He thought he couldn't be the person (creator) he wanted to be in the end (the person I wanted him to be—yes, but he wanted it, too), and he chose to kill himself because he couldn't go on living with the emptiness (and he wasn't empty—if he'd only held on, he could have found the self inside, the self that reached out to his readers and showed them ideas they hadn't thought about before—the self he always wanted to be, and was). But even if he couldn't see it in himself, he could see that I wasn't empty. I'm afraid, but I'm not empty. He was telling me I could let the Kyles of the world lock me away forever, or I could set myself free.

When have you felt most alive, Charles?

When Graeme Brandt stood in my studio and looked at my paintings.

You're right, Graeme. I can't hide forever.

I sit down beside his grave, confessing the real secret of my heart that I'd kept hidden. The sketch I made of you wasn't a lie, but it was only a moment's truth—sketches are transitory, because who you are at any moment is only one step on the road of who you become. I've made myself stay that masked Harlequin for far too long. You didn't have to stay a mirror forever. When you decided you didn't like that image, it wasn't too late to change. But my true guilt is deeper. Instead of showing you that momentary sketch first, I should have let you see my paintings. Paintings are eternal because they're a promise of what might be, and that potential is always somewhere ahead of you, forever possible and forever worth striving for.

Suppose you'd seen my paintings when your mother and your teachers were trying to mold you into their idea of a writer, and your father was trying to mold you into his idea of the perfect son—when they were all teaching you to play Simon Says? Could you have shown them your real self then, instead of reflecting back the image they wanted? And even though you didn't see my paintings until too late, even though you didn't believe you had a real self, you did have a self buried deep inside the heart of the kaleidoscope—a self that was strain ing to get out, and you put that self—your ideas—into your books. You've left behind a legacy that will make a difference to everyone who reads them, who understands them. You left me a legacy, too—the demand that I admit the truth.

If I died today, who would be better for my having lived? No one. I think of my paintings, of my hope in asking Steve to look at them, of my pride in showing them to Cindy, of my pleasure and shame at my father's hanging that football painting in his office, of my longing for my parents to really look at my paintings and understand them. I always meant for my work to be seen.

I think of my father hopefully extolling the possibilities of computer programming, and my mother looking away from my paintings, and I ache with wishing I'd kept on showing them my real work until they accepted it—and accepted me. Why didn't I? Why weren't they out in the open for Graeme to see?

Mother says ... paint happy pictures, Charlie, pictures that won't make people nervous. Keep the. other pictures to yourself. Comforting words when I was little and the other kids made fun of me, then called me names, then finally looked at me strangely and pushed me away. Comforting words for a mother who doesn't want her friends to think there's something wrong with her because she has an artistic son. But I'm no longer a child to do what Mother says. You're not a little boy anymore, Charlie—painting pictures is fine for a hobby—I'm not a little boy anymore, and I've got to find a way to take responsibility for myself—for my art. It's not just a hobby. It's never been a hobby. It's my life.

And they were never comforting words, were they? Simon says ... keep your art separate, keep it safe from the people who laugh at you or sneer at you, who resent your drawings—It wasn't me keeping my art safe—ever—any more than it was Graeme becoming his own person by taking his own life. He made me into his Simon so that I could take the blame for his wasted future. And I let my mother be my Simon—Or did I make her be my Simon, telling me what to do? Instead of her being entirely responsible for being disappointed in the son she's got, did I somehow make her feel that she had to tell me how to behave? Did Graeme make his mother into the domineering voice who told him to be a writer, and did I make mine into a barricade against the hurt?

The simple tombstone shudders and blurs through a gray wash of tears until there are two tombstones—one for Graeme's body, one for the lost hopes we both share. I shake my head. Does everyone play Simon Says? Was Rachel trying to fix me because I expected her to? Do we all react to each other's expectations, even when we think we're not?

And then it comes to me, like a silver-plucked violin note hanging in the air. Not everyone.

I blink away the tears, put the folded letter carefully away in my pack, and climb stiffly to my feet, my anger at Graeme for casting me as his Simon slowly bleeding away like the colors draining from a paintbrush dipped in turpentine. It was his fault for looking for Simons everywhere, for believing there had to be someone else telling him who he was. It was his fault for believing me, and wasting everything he could have become—that insight, that shining potential. But he was right—I was doing it, too. I listened way too long even when I thought I was screaming defiance in paint I listened to the voice condemning me to isolation, and I did what I was told. There's only one person I know who doesn't listen to any Simon.

Perhaps Graeme wasn't the one I came here to meet after all. Perhaps it isn't too late to ask the question I came to Whitman to get answered.