TODD KNEW, WHEN HE WAS alive, that a person is never just one person. There’s the person you are in front of people, and the person you are when you are alone.
As a ghost, Todd spent a lot of time in rooms with people who thought they were alone. He watched Greevy sit in bed watching movies on her laptop and smoking, stabbing endless cigarettes out on a big brown ashtray that looked like a school craft project. Greevy, alone, bought multiple microwave dinners and then ate only the bits she liked out of each of them, like a food puzzle. A very wasteful food puzzle.
She watched romantic comedies starring Sandra Bullock and chatted with men on dating apps on her phone, leaving what Todd thought were vague but leading messages for multiple possible dates.
Todd sometimes wondered if she could see him, hovering in the blue glow of her laptop, which was sometimes the only light in the room other than the amber ember of her cigarette.
Daniels was rarely alone. He had a chubby, blue-haired boyfriend who wore superhero T-shirts Todd found shocking because Daniels only wore really nice things. The boyfriend was always playing upbeat dance music. The kind of music that goes with someone blowing a whistle in time to the beat. The chubby boyfriend liked to dance in the living room in his bare feet. Sometimes Daniels danced with him, muted but happy.
While he was alive, and now, Todd knew that McVeeter was not the same person he was at home that he was at school.
When McVeeter took Todd out for a thank-you dinner for helping out with Model Parliament, they chatted about everything but school. He asked Todd about the kind of movies he liked. He told Todd about a good podcast about old Hollywood. Todd suspected McVeeter was worried about him. McVeeter told Todd he’d known Todd had been through a lot, meaning the dick-pic thing and, Todd suspected, everything else that had to do with what McVeeter thought it meant for Todd to be gay at Albright.
He looked so serious, at the end of dinner. When he gave the waitress his card, he turned to Todd and told him if he ever needed anything he just had to ask.
“I don’t need anything,” Todd told him.
“Well,” McVeeter said, pocketing the receipt. “When you do, you’ll tell me.”
That was also the first time Todd ever saw McVeeter’s apartment, if only from the doorway while he waited for McVeeter to retrieve a book from his living room, on Danish cinema. At the time it just seemed like one of those weird moments, like a break in reality where suddenly teachers have homes and lives.
He didn’t think about McVeeter a lot, if he was honest, even if he was one of only two people Todd actually talked to at school. He was just the guy that seemed to want Todd to be happier. Of course, this was before Todd realized how much McVeeter wanted Todd’s life to be better. And what that would mean for the both of them.
Now, at the police station, in a place that seemed far away from everything else, McVeeter looked uneasy.
“Thank you for coming in,” Daniels said, pointing to the chair at the far side of the table in the interview room.
“Of course.” McVeeter wore his blue sweater and work cords. He sat with his hands clasped on the top of the table.
Greevy smiled and put a paper cup of water in front of McVeeter, before settling into her chair.
“Just a few questions,” she said.
Daniels leaned against the wall by the door, next to the mirror that wasn’t really a mirror.
“Whatever I can do to help,” McVeeter said, brushing his fingers over his top lip, wiping away a thin layer of sweat.
“When we spoke a few days ago,” Greevy said, looking at her notebook, “you told us that you taught Todd. We now have a witness who says he saw you with Todd outside of class. Did you spend time with Todd, outside of school?”
“I have … I did.” McVeeter crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s very … broad. Do you want to be specific?”
“We have a witness who says he saw you and Todd at a restaurant last year,” Greevy said.
“Are you implying that there’s something wrong with that?” McVeeter pressed his fingers into his biceps.
Daniels cleared his throat.
“Did you take Todd out to dinner?” Greevy asked, tilting her head. “Often?”
“I don’t like the wording you’re using here detective. I might have…” McVeeter leaned forward, rested his forearms on the desk, “purchased dinner for Todd after a night of working on a school project. It was … September. I think September fifteenth. We’d just finished Model Parliament. He was a volunteer. That’s … That’s it. There’s nothing wrong with that. I can get a receipt for you if you need it.”
“You don’t buy dinner for every student, do you?” Greevy added, pushing a hair behind her ear. “I’m assuming.”
“Not on a teacher’s salary, no,” McVeeter said, sitting back in his chair. “Next question?”
“A teacher at your school,” Greevy said, moving on swiftly, “said they heard you in a confrontation with Todd a week before his murder. Can you tell us about that?”
Todd looked at McVeeter. His neck was turning purple. “Who said that?”
“What were you upset about?” Greevy asked, blinking away McVeeter’s question. “That day? Do you remember?”
“I wasn’t upset,” McVeeter said evenly. “I never had a confrontation to Todd. This is a fiction.”
Mrs. Cuspin, the music teacher, had taught at Albright for twenty years. She wore pencil skirts that hugged her generous butt, soft silk blouses with floral prints that hugged her generous … chest, and her hair in what was essentially a beehive, something that seemed to endear her only to Todd, who could not sing but loved watching Mrs. Cuspin’s head bob in time to the music. She also wore glasses on a pearl chain that hung around her neck, rarely on her face. McVeeter said she was vain.
Mrs. Cuspin liked to wander the halls at lunchtime, with a pink mug of the staff room’s ancient, and, as McVeeter often noted, tasteless tea. Todd had seen her peering into McVeeter’s office, her nose an inch from the class, to see who was doing what. McVeeter used to wave at her, an exaggerated, cheerful wave, like you’d give standing on a ship leaving port.
“HELLO, MRS. CUSPIN! HOW’S YOUR HOT BROWN WATER?”
She never waved back.
“Nosy old cow,” McVeeter would snort, watching her clip away.
McVeeter said Cuspin had a grudge against old queens. Which was unfair, McVeeter said, since she was also clearly an old queen.
“Did you and Todd ever fight?” Daniels asked, not budging from his spot on the wall. “Have an argument?”
The words Mrs. Cuspin told the detectives she heard McVeeter yell were, “You are a cheat and a liar. A CHEAT and a LIAR.”
She repeated it with the exact cadence and emphasis (“Exact,” she said) to the detectives that morning, pointing to the spot in the hallway, right next to the elbow of hall that turned from the North Wing of the school to the West Wing. She told the detectives she had always thought McVeeter had a loose interpretation of professionalism, but she was shocked to know it went beyond that.
“What does that mean?” Greevy asked Mrs. Cuspin, leaning forward to see what Mrs. Cuspin must have seen that day. “Went beyond that?”
“It means that we are teachers, Detective Greevy. Educators. Icons. When I came to Albright, it was a code of conduct. But teachers nowadays would like to see themselves as friends of students. Which is an immature notion,”—Mrs. Cuspin shook her head—“with grave consequences.”
“What would we have to fight about?” McVeeter’s voice simmered under the fluorescent lights of the interview room. “What would I POSSIBLY have to fight about with Todd Mayer?”
Greevy shifted in her seat, looked at McVeeter with a constant, steel gaze. “Maybe you had a relationship with him that was beyond what a student normally has with their teacher? Maybe this relationship went further than you meant it to? And you fought—”
McVeeter stabbed his finger on the desk, his voice boiling over now. “This is disgusting, what you are doing right now. This is homophobic, at the least, to suggest, that because Todd was a gay student and I am a gay man, to SUGGEST that that somehow means that I would have any feelings, any RELATIONSHIP with a SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY is VILE.”
“Mr. McVeeter,” Daniels said quietly, “we are asking these questions because we are trying to find out—”
“I was his TEACHER,” McVeeter boomed. “I was there for him AS A TEACHER. I was—”
“We have a witness,” Greevy cut in, looking sympathetic, “who is suggesting that you had a conflict with Todd. That a week before his death you confronted him in the hallways of school. If you can clear up for us what that would have been, then we can get to the bottom of what happened to him that night. We have leads that open up, Mr. McVeeter, that we need to pursue. This is nothing more than that.”
“This incident never happened,” McVeeter said, “so whoever told you that is LYING.”
For a good minute, everyone sat in silence. Including Todd, who had everything to say and nothing to say, because he was dead.
“This is discrimination.” McVeeter said, finally, sitting back in his chair. “Unless you have any more ridiculous questions, I’d like to leave.”
Greevy stood, and she and Daniels left the room.
McVeeter put his palms down on the table and looked at his hands in silence for a long time. A small shadow of heat radiated out of his palms. He closed his eyes.
“Todd,” he said, to the empty room, to the ghost of Todd, who felt every word, a unique sensation in his current state. A Q-tip on his soul.
“Todd…”
It’s okay.
When Todd was in grade ten, McVeeter started throwing pens. He’d throw it on the ground, so hard sometimes the caps shattered. It was how he got kids to stop dropping things when he was teaching. The first time he did it, he told Todd, it freaked students out.
“I know what it means to put on a front,” he said. “I bark like a mad dog in class so students think I’m crazy and they don’t give me shit. So I GET it, Todd.”
It seemed important to McVeeter that Todd got that McVeeter got Todd. Which at first didn’t seem to Todd to be a helpful thing. So McVeeter got Todd? So what?
Mark had told Todd that most of the students were scared of McVeeter.
“But you’re not, right?” Mark asked. “I mean … because you guys are like, friends or whatever. Right?”
At the time, Todd flushed red. Friends? Mark thought Todd and McVeeter were friends? What else did Mark think?
Todd could guess.
“We’re not friends,” Todd said. Todd didn’t know what else to say to make it clear that whatever Mark was thinking wasn’t what was happening. So he just rolled his eyes.
The last time he saw McVeeter, the last time he was in McVeeter’s apartment, where no one could see them and certainly Mrs. Cuspin was nowhere around, McVeeter sat in his chair, in his slippers, and his sad blue school sweater, worn cords, and he looked up at Todd, who was standing in the doorway again, because he was afraid to step inside.
Not afraid of McVeeter just … afraid. Or maybe it wasn’t fear, just, a horrible feeling like fear.
McVeeter didn’t yell, he just asked Todd, his voice calm in a way that freaked Todd out even more, “Please just tell me what’s happened. I won’t be mad, but Todd, I need to know.”
Todd remembered staring at his mittens.
“Please, I promise I won’t be upset,” McVeeter said. “I just don’t understand.”
Maybe McVeeter was scared that there were two Todds.
Maybe there were.
Maybe that’s true of everyone you let into your life, which is why people are dangerous, with their barks and their bites.
Greevy and Daniels returned to the interrogation room and told McVeeter that he was free to go.
Outside the hallway, after the heavy metal door clicked behind them, Daniels put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know.”
Greevy pinched the pack of smokes in her pocket. “He looks jumpy to me.”
She touched a finger to her lips. “He called Todd a cheat. Maybe Todd was cheating on him … like in a relationship?”
Daniels frowned. “In a school setting, could be grades.”
Greevy nodded. “Time to call Spot.”