9

In Ginny Flagg’s bedroom, Darcy said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be sick.’

‘I am sick,’ Ginny said.

‘You don’t look it.’

‘I feel fluey.’

‘Sure you do. You haven’t prepared for Hump’s test, have you?’

Ginny Flagg, a tiny girl with a red-dyed streak in her cropped black hair, took off her glasses and wiped them on the edge of the bedsheet. ‘All that geography stuff is too, I don’t know, blah. Like I need to know the capital of the Ukraine? I don’t know where the Ukraine is even.’

‘It’s a former Soviet state,’ Darcy said before she could stop herself.

She had a memory that was sometimes a curse. Everything got stored automatically inside her head. She could remember the names of minor actors in forgotten B-movies. She could tell you the line-up of rock bands and who split to form another group. She remembered all the things they crammed into her at school, even when they weren’t interesting or useful. Lately she’d begun to let her mind stray in class, as if to spite this gift of recall. Besides, school had started to drag on her – the gossip, the day-after-dayness of it all. She’d found herself daydreaming and drifting, impatient to put the whole place behind her and move on to something else, even if she didn’t know what.

Something exciting. It had to be that, at the very least.

Ginny’s bedroom had black walls and glossy yellow furniture. The blinds were drawn, giving the place the feel of a cave.

‘You on your lunch break?’ Ginny asked. She ripped a pink Kleenex out of a pop-up box on her bedside table and held it to her nose.

‘Yeah. I thought I’d just drop in and catch you slacking.’

‘I am not slacking.’ Ginny smiled and put her glasses back. She had a face like a myopic pixie. ‘I was watching a video actually. Wanna see?’

‘I don’t have time.’

Darcy glanced at her watch. She supposed she could skip PE and get back for Hump’s test. Ginny zapped the remote. A videotape clicked into play. Darcy looked at the TV in the corner.

‘He’s dreamy,’ Ginny said. ‘He’s still the dreamiest babe imaginable.’

James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Darcy remembered that Ginny belonged to a group in school called The James Dean Appreciation Society, a cult of about ten girls who were enraptured by images of a dead man. They met regularly to watch the few movies Dean had made, and on the anniversary of the actor’s death they wore black clothes and mooned around sadly and held a day-long wake. She could see Dean’s appeal up to a point, but not the way Ginny did.

‘Tell me he doesn’t turn you on,’ Ginny said.

Darcy shrugged.

‘Come on. Look at those eyes. Look at that mouth.’

Darcy said, ‘He’s okay.’

‘Okay? He’s got something Brad Pitt doesn’t have. He’s got something Val Kilmer would murder to have,’ Ginny said. ‘You just want to get him in bed and make love for hours and then, when he’s hungry afterwards, you’d scramble him some eggs and bring them on a tray. Like a love slave with an offering.’

Darcy stared at the screen. She thought Dean too moody, as if he was in a place he could never be reached. Maybe that was his attraction on celluloid. He was aloof, mysterious, and his death in real life had added to this allure. Now he was truly inaccessible.

‘I’d be his love slave,’ Ginny said. ‘He’d only have to snap his fingers and boy I’d be there. Who am I kidding? He wouldn’t even need to snap his fingers. He’d only have to give me one of those real cool looks of his and I’d wither, I swear to God.’ Lips slightly parted, Ginny gazed at the picture, then pressed the remote and froze the image. ‘Look at the way he wears his jeans. The way he stands, kinda hunched like that. If that’s not a turn-on, I don’t know what is. Okay, so it’s Fiftyish, it’s ancient, but that doesn’t take anything away from the guy.’ Ginny sighed and laid a hand on her heart. ‘He’s immortal. He’s like some god. He knows something you don’t. He’s got secrets. You just wish he’d share one of them with you. He’s so goddam romantic it’s practically unbearable. It ought to be outlawed, for Christ’s sake.’

Darcy propped her elbows on her knees and leaned forward. The static image of Dean flickered a little, traversed by lines of video interference.

‘You also get the feeling he knew how to treat a girl,’ Ginny said. ‘He had to be a great lover.’

Darcy remembered reading somewhere that Dean was either homosexual or bi, but this wouldn’t have made any difference to Ginny or her fellow members of the Appreciation Society. He was beyond criticism, beyond judgement. Beyond death even. The eternal lover. The endless dream. She could see the romantic strain in this notion. The guy you could never get. The one wasted before his time. The tragic figure.

‘Is Nick a great lover?’ Ginny asked suddenly.

This question bothered Darcy. It wasn’t Ginny’s curiosity, but more the casual assumption behind it. Nick and Darcy, Darcy and Nick. They were a couple, they had to be making out on a regular basis.

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself, Ginny?’

‘Yeah. Right. I’ll just walk up to him and say, ‘“Hey, Nick, how are you in the sack?”’

‘Maybe he’d answer you.’

Ginny plucked a Kleenex from the box. ‘He’s studly,’ she said. ‘I know a few girls that think so.’

‘But I’m the lucky one he picked,’ Darcy said.

‘I hear a funny little note in your voice, Darce.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like you’re not absolutely sure what you feel about this thing between you and Nick.’

‘I guess maybe I don’t,’ Darcy said.

‘Hey, if you ever dump him, let me be the first to know.’

Darcy smiled and looked back at the screen a moment. ‘I have to run,’ she said.

‘Run,’ Ginny said, and touched the remote. James Dean’s image was reactivated. ‘Who needs you for company anyhow? I have my boy, Jimmy.’

Darcy let herself out of the house. The noonday heat was a heavy shroud that hung over everything. She moved along the sidewalk, dragging herself through the humidity in the direction of school.

Get educated, her father had always told her. Like he really believed it was a key to some bright shining future. Ever since her mother’s death, though, he’d lost a lot of his interest in her report cards. He’d lost interest in a whole bunch of things. Over the past two months he’d taken to driving alone at nights, never saying where he’d been when he returned, or whether his voyages into the dark were work-related or some solitary nocturnal way of killing time.

He’d become a mystery.

And last night he’d crashed, and this morning he’d been weird, scowling into dead space over his coffee, then for no apparent reason playing silly knock-knock jokes with her. Oscillating between moods, between sounds and puzzling silences. These were signs of some kind. Was he falling apart a year after his wife’s death as the recognition finally socked him that he’d never see her again for as long as he lived?

But then she hadn’t been present in any real sense for years before her death. She’d lived in a zone of withdrawal. Physicians had run brain scans that revealed no abnormality. Then they’d put her on drugs. But nobody had a connection to her head or what she was thinking. Her father had spent a great deal of time trying to coax her back into the world. He’d sit for hours on the edge of the bed and stroke her hand and whisper to her. Harriet had gazed vacantly into the distance most of the time. Sometimes at night she walked through the house like she was in a dream.

One time Darcy had found her in the kitchen and she’d asked, ‘Is there any way out of this place?’

You found a way in the end, Darcy thought. She drew a hand across her sticky forehead. She thought about Eve Lassiter, whom she’d met a dozen times and liked. Why didn’t her father just get it on with her? Why didn’t he grasp the fact, so obvious to Darcy, that Eve had a thing for him?

She reached the entrance to the school, then stopped. She realized she didn’t give a damn about Hump’s test. She turned round and walked away.