12:30 a.m. Carla is curls and wool sweater and push. With the door open a little, she walks past me and lets out loud words.
“I don’t fucking believe it.”
“Quiet. Terence is asleep.”
She keeps walking until she sees the pull-out couch, then turns her stiff way and walks straight back to me, doesn’t stop. Her arms inside my arms, her face turns into my neck, her body presses flat against mine.
“What’re we going to do?” she asks into my neck, like we do things together.
Her arms around me. My arms wrap around her back. I pull her into me. Sarah gone and now Kyle. I am sinking.
We are standing there, in the middle of my hall, and Carla’s arms tight, her head on my shoulder, her breath, and the walls are wavy, the floor soft. We rock back and forth, and the goose overhead in the night sky is loud. It cracks the sky open.
“What about lights-out?” I say. My head backs away from her, and my hands go to her upper arms. Her eyes move from one of my eyes to the other, and we are still too close. The floor is still soft.
“Whatever,” she says and bends her head down. My arms straighten out, hold her away. “Nobody’ll know I’m not in the dorm. Screw it.” She bends from her waist and leans her forehead on my sternum.
She says, “He’s gone, Taylor, he’s gone.” Since when does she call me Taylor?
“Maybe not.”
“He’s dead.”
“Says who?” The question feels young in my mouth.
“Mr. Song and Mr. Jeffers. They tried to save him.”
The only room where we can talk and not wake up Terence is my bedroom. “In here,” I say.
There’s no place to sit but on the bed. “Have a seat.” I point to it, the covers pulled back from the first time I answered the door. The light on the bedside table makes everything in the room half light. I sit on the floor, my back against the wall.
Carla sits on the edge of the bed, her boots dark on the beige carpet. She tucks her arms around her middle, and her back and shoulders curl around her arms.
“Tell me,” I say.
She rocks forward. Maybe Carla is the wrong person to tell me. And it is the curl of Carla’s body around something sore, some hole in her, that makes me think I don’t want to know. Maybe I don’t want to hear.
After a little while, after the wind clicks branches together on the maple outside, Carla says, “There’s no way. No fucking way. I just saw him. He was just there, in the cornfield. We talked. He can’t. No way.” She says it like she can change what happened.
Maybe this is White’s warning. Maybe the way things spread is the bad thing. Maybe what I hear isn’t true. Kyle. Zippy. Zippo, the students called him.
Carla says, “Around eleven, maybe, Rambo crashes through my door. Her eyes are totally popping out of her head. She says, ‘Kyle’s dead.’
“‘Shut up.’ But I know Rambo’s no drama queen.
“‘Serious,’ Rambo says, totally serious. Standing in front of me, she’s panting, big time, with her eyes all bug-eyed. She says, ‘Donny Zurkus killed him. Somebody said so.’ And I don’t believe her. So, I tell her somebody’s wrong. Kids don’t kill kids here.
“Rambo stops pacing around the room, and her arms go up on her hips.
“I say, ‘What the fuck?’
“And Rambo says, ‘The Second Formers were playing in the little common area by the cubbies, and they’re wrestling, all of them, like Tommy and Terence and the other little guys, and they see Kyle hanging from the rafters, but he always pretends, so they didn’t, they don’t, you know, think.’
“‘So, a couple of them fell through his curtain, and bumped him, and he was all stiff and blue. They thought he was still kidding until they saw flies, like, around his eyes. They thought Donny Zurkus made Kyle jump off a chair, or something.’
“Kids don’t kill kids at St. Tim’s. ‘Donny didn’t,’ I say, ‘kill him.’
“‘How do you know?’ Rambo says.
“‘No way Donny Zurkus did it,’ I say, and Rambo gets tired of me saying the same thing. And inside I feel this molten thing happen. In my throat and going up. My throat fills and the back of my mouth, and pretty soon my eyes rip open. Tears shoot out.
“And Rambo says, ‘I’m sorry, Carla.’ And I almost slug her.”
Carla looks at me like I’m a life ring. But I am way off shore in an ocean with winds rising, and there are peaks of dark waves between us. Carla tells me everyone thinks Donny Zurkus killed Kyle.
“Murder at Prep School” in three-inch letters will top the papers in the morning. Tomorrow the media will drive the black driveway through maples, and there will be TV trucks and lights and reporters with fake concern.
In my bedroom there is only half light and half sound and two people across a room. In a room with no words, I keep seeing Kyle. Kyle at the back of the classroom. Kyle raising a mallet to smash his city at the epicenter of a nuclear blast. Kyle running with Terence to launch his kite.
Carla looks up and shakes her head. “You know what’s weird?”
I don’t know where she’s going.
“All I can think about is Kyle’s hair, the way it sticks out.”
Kyle with his greasy hair, like pickup sticks. The gray sweatpants. Weird sounds. Poor personal hygiene. Inappropriate behavior. Erratic moods.
The signs were there.
He said he would do it.
I should have done something.
The ways Kyle pretended to commit suicide are images swinging in me. Kyle grabbing his tie, Kyle in the corn field, Kyle kidding. He wasn’t kidding any more, and this true thing presses against my neck.
Carla clenches her fist and opens it, hits her forehead with her palm, hits it again and again. She says nothing, shakes her head, hits her head. Different signs from a girl smart enough to know them.
If we were anywhere but St. Timothy’s, I’d reach for Carla, pull her down on this floor, and wrap my arms and legs around her. Her curls would get in my face, her head under my chin, and we’d lie here and watch the light come up in the window. But we’re at a boarding school, and even though I’m only four years older than she is, I’m the teacher. Teachers don’t watch the sunrise with students in their arms.
And besides, there’s Kyle. There’s Terence. There’s a goose cracking the night open.
“Everybody’s wrong, you know,” Carla says. She looks at me with the left side of her face lit up and the right side of her face dark. The left eye is a flare, spitting sparks out.
“You mean, Donny?”
“No, everything.” Her lips come together, and her nose wrinkles like she might spit. “Kyle killed himself.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.” She turns away from the light.
“But how do you know?” The way Carla isn’t looking at me feels like cells dividing, like something bacterial, spreading.
“There was no reason for him not to.” She turns her head to face me, her face a half face.
“There’s always a reason to live,” I say. The words are flat like something in a brochure, words Mr. White wants me to say.
“Like what?” she says.
There is no life ring for me to hold. There is no life ring for me to throw.
“Kyle’s better off. He did the right thing,” Carla says.
We’re sitting a few feet apart, but there’s an ocean between us. Whitecaps keep me from seeing her all the time. We’re both floating, but she rises into view, and then disappears.
“First of all, we don’t know that Kyle committed suicide.” I’m rising. She’s falling. “And even if he did, how could that be the right thing?” I say.
“It’s right for him.”
“What’s right for him doesn’t make it right.” All the muscles in my arms are tight, my hands flat on the floor. “It’s not that simple.”
“He didn’t murder anyone.” Carla tips her mannequin-head to the right, trying to see her way to a type of logic I can’t follow. Maybe she’s trying to look at right and wrong. Maybe she’s trying to figure out Donny. Surely this is wrong.
“Yes, he did.” My chin rises up a little. I tumble down the face of a wave into the bottom of the swell she creates.
“Well, it was self-defense. Really, it was. He defended himself against other boys. Against Donny.”
Carla has a point.
“Self-defense by killing yourself?” My voice goes high. At the crest of a wave, I see whitecaps all around me. We have no lifeboat, no shoreline, nothing but our bodies in all the waves breaking.
“He was just carrying out his means of survival, you know, the survival of the fittest, laissez-faire, Adam Smith, and all that.” Carla’s smile is curl. She’s enjoying the crashing, the submersion in water, the splash.
I swallow, drop my head down, tuck my chin in. Then, I look right at her. “Carla, he didn’t survive. If he’s dead, he wasn’t the fittest.”
A laugh almost leaks out of her. Carla raises one hand to ward off the thought.
“Well, it’s lucky then.” She pushes her hair behind her ear. “Then he won’t be disappointed when his dreams don’t come true. He saved himself from pain,” she says. “Smart.”
My hands rise up to my forehead. My elbows on my knees. The way I turn my head back and forth, I try to wipe my thoughts on my hands, back and forth, my forehead on my palms. “Tell me you’re not serious.”
“I’m dead serious,” she says, and she doesn’t flinch at “dead.”
“You would never kill yourself, right?”
Each time she turns the logic around, the waves hit. Carla rises, and I sink. Each time she disappears, a piece of me bangs against my skin from the inside, trying to get out.
“Sure I would,” she says.
The feeling I had when she came in the door is still the supple floor, the soft walls. Sarah gone, and now Kyle, and I am breathing shallow. Something has to hold. Something has to keep me from sinking.
Both hands push off from the carpet, and I’m up, and one step to the bed, and my two hands go to her shoulders, the shoulders still curled around an ache in her. I go beside her, curl her inside my arms, draw her into my chest. Her weight topples on me, her head under my chin, her curls soft on my neck.
Back and forth, I rock her. Back and forth until my abs ache. The world is this bedroom, no noise from Terence in the living room, no movement outside. But there’s that one goose, loud in the night, two notes rolling into one, above the trees, crossing over campus, the lake, over Delaware. It breaks the sky open.
With her breathing, I breathe. No drowning any more. Not one more drowning. Her head folds into my chest. She rubs her forehead on my shoulder. Her arms around my waist, we’re warm. My chin brushes her curls, her neck white and wet. My mouth opens, to let the hot out of my body, and my lips press against her neck. I kiss her neck.
And her mannequin arms shoot into the air, like someone sinking and trying to find the surface. She gets off the bed, turns around and faces me.
Holy shit.
Holy shit, I kissed a student.
Her eyes are big, and the ocean is there, too. She backs up a step, backs against the closet door, and slides to the floor. All I hear is the rush of her clothes on the wood. Her knees bend in front of her, her legs at funny angles, her lips make a smile that is more secret than happy.