During the three days Carla was hospitalized, TV crews in the parking lot of Winn Dixie, Norma’s Family Restaurant, and Bi-Mart kept us from driving the flat black driveway through maple trees to the world outside. On public property, the reporters talked to residents of Surrey, Delaware, especially ones who worked at St. Timothy’s. Members of the kitchen staff and custodial staff and local contractors talked to reporters. The cameras caught Mr. Leonard, the bartender and handyman and mentor, going into True Value Hardware, but he brushed by them. He held up his hand, said, “No comment,” and kept walking. On TV his gray hair was short and clipped perfectly. His face was lined, though, and his eyes tired. The loss of a student was hard on everyone.
But from those interviewed, the whole country soon learned of bruises and pranks and flies. St. Tim’s was Castle Elsinore, where plots were devised and carried out and young men died. Fiction was fact.
In the three days after Kyle died, students had nightmares about flies in the whites of eyes rolled back. The Second Formers said that’s how they knew Kyle wasn’t kidding. Three nights I went from dorm to dorm and from room to room. One student, feeling guilty, tried to remember Kyle’s face, the grease for hair, the small eyes and teeth, and couldn’t. Another student, trying to forget, was guilty of jumping Kyle’s back and pounding him, holding him down to the lab table, or ignoring him on purpose.
Tommy Underwood dropped out the day of the memorial service. The grapevine reported he wasn’t eating, he couldn’t sleep, and, if asleep, a scream jerked him awake.
Maggie Anderson took it all on. She said she should have been nicer. Most of us figured there was something we should have done, too, but Maggie said it out loud.
“If only I had talked to him, really talked,” she said. At one in the morning, she wrapped her arms around an enormous stuffed dog, one of the many stuffed animals making her bed a zoo of soft, furry forms. I sat on the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees.
“And what would you have said?”
“I’d say he’s smart.” She didn’t wince at the present tense. “And I’d listen.”
“But Maggie, did Kyle talk? Remember his head on the desk?” My smile tried to pry her eyes off her fuzzy slippers.
And we played “what if” for awhile until she slept.
It was Terence who was both still and rushing.
“Ms. Alta,” he said, “what if Kyle survived?”
On the bench under birch trees, we overlooked the lake, the lake where the crew didn’t row any more, the lake where I didn’t look for Sarah.
“You mean, came to?”
Terence sat at the edge of the bench, his legs tucked under, his heels moving back and forth with his toes dragging on the ground.
“Yeah, what if he didn’t die, and he remembered Tommy and me bumping him, and Mr. Jeffers trying to save him, and the ambulance?”
Terence looked across the lake where the fog crept up in the morning. His cheek was smooth, and his forehead smooth. Our down jackets made us round and soft in the December cold.
“You got me there, Terence.”
“I think he’d be the same way.” Terence didn’t look at me or his feet or anything. His chin was up, and he held steady the far shore. “I think he’d talk typewriter, say, ‘Ter-ence, you-should-have-cut-me-down, Zip, Ping!’”
Terence had the metal voice, the movement of the chin from left to right, the staccato words. Kyle’s voice through Terence made my fingers tingle.
“We would have talked like that.” Terence kicked the dirt under the bench. “But maybe people would’ve helped him after that.”
His eyes left the far shore, and he looked quick at me, then looked down at the dirt. “You know what else we did?”
“No idea,” I said. Their spending time together was news to me.
“We fixed Donny.” He took one hand out of the jacket pocket and covered his smile with it. His dark hand didn’t quite cover his whole smile.
“You mean the thing with Donny when we flew kites?”
“Yup, that was us.”
“What do you mean?”
Terence’s feet were swinging under the bench, and his shoulders were forward, and his hands rested on the bench on either side of him.
“Well, you know how Donny was testing Hamlet? Kyle wanted to test something about ghosts and revenge and subliminal suggestions during sleep. Mr. Hofmeister let us check out a tape recorder, and every night we made tapes.” He covered part of his smile again, and this time his pink gums showed bright.
“One night Kyle said Donny’s uncle was going to kill his father, and that he was going crazy. One night I said he was going to pee in bed and he better go to the bathroom. And he got up to go. I swear.” Terence looked at me, then tried to make his mouth not smile.
“Problem is he didn’t make it to the bathroom. He peed in the hall. Somebody saw him, and the guys, you know, called him ‘bed wetter’ and ‘baby’ and stuff.” Terence wasn’t smiling any more.
“Where did you put the tape recorder?” I said.
“Outside his window, under his bed, in his closet. We had to change how loud we talked.”
“How did you get in his room?” Fifth Formers would notice Second Formers.
Terence shook his head. “I got a lot of tardies to dinner.” He smiled down at his feet.
“So, that’s why Donny couldn’t sleep?”
“Yup.” Terence puffed out his chest and sat up on the bench. “I know Donny really knocked Kyle hard. I kind of should have said something.”
“And get shoved, too?”
He shook his head. “Donny came to the cubbies that night before lights out, before the wrestling. He found the library card for the tape recorder with our names on it. He figured it was us.”
And that must have been the tipping point for Donny, the boys kidding him, him not kidding the boys. Second Formers had made a show of him, Second Formers, Kyle, the weirdest little bright boy.
“Him and the others,” Terence said, “they filled up the commons. Donny didn’t do much, mostly pointed at Kyle, like his arm was a rifle. Stupid stuff. He went, ‘No one messes with Donny Zurkus. Not Zippy. Not Song. Not nobody. I’m going to get you for good.’ A regular Godfather. And Kyle giggled. He thought Donny was funny. Or something was funny, anyway. Donny left. That’s all.”
Terence’s feet skimmed the dirt under the bench, one foot at a time. There was so much going on in his legs and so little in his face.
“You know you didn’t make Kyle do anything,” I said. The eye in the profile of Terence’s face was a window into classrooms he and Kyle shared, into dorms, into the dining hall where they sat small in their chairs.
“Didn’t stop him, either.”
“He’d made up his mind.”
“Maybe.”
That’s all he said.
Leaning back on the bench, I crossed my legs, swung my foot a little faster than Terence’s feet swinging under the bench. We faced the lake, the wind picking up, the sting of winter on our faces.
His legs swung. My leg swung. The lake was all there was.
“Aren’t you cold?” Alex Jeffers said. He came around the bench from my side and blocked the breeze picking up. The scent of lime and sweat wrapped around me. Looking up at the tall guy so close was too hard, so I smiled hello and dropped into looking at the lake.
“Not yet,” I said. Terence stopped swinging his legs.
“It’s freezing out here,” Alex said.
“Yeah, going in,” Terence said. With his palms around the end of the bench, he pushed off. He didn’t look at me. “Later, Miss Alta.” Terence folded his arms in front of him, closed his St. Tim’s blazer around him.
Alex walked in front of me, blocked out the lake, then sat beside me, one arm around the back of the bench. “He okay?”
“Not really.”
“Sorry.”
“You?” I said. Alex’s jawline was cut sharp. The muscle flexed and relaxed. He looked down at his enormous hands.
“Not really,” he said.
“I wonder why,” I said.
His thin lips spread into a smile. “No reason.”
“Yeah, kid dying, no sleep, no problem.” My weight shifted toward him, and his arm left the bench and draped around my shoulders. He leaned his weight toward me. And the warm of his lime and sweaty body on one side, his arm heavy on my shoulders pushed out the cold breeze lining my right side.
“I have just the thing.” A brown paper sack, crumpled, came out of his blazer pocket, and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s inside looked small in his hand.
“Shit, Alex,” I said, “on campus?” Suddenly I was underage and sneaking and sure I’d get caught.
The angles of his face softened. “So let’s boogie,” he said. His smile was young, too.
“Now? Leave?” There had to be something wrong with what we were doing.
“Sure,” he said. He put the bottle back in his pocket. “No study hall. We’re free until check-in.” He had a point.
“Deal,” I said. His hand outstretched was warm in the lake breeze. His hand made my hand small. I wanted something big to wrap around me.
Walking past the bench on the way to the parking lot, we dropped hands. In a boarding school, we’re never alone. Except we’re always alone wherever we are, but there may be someone watching. The loneliness we feel is as sure as water. It changes into fog and rain and a frozen lake, but it’s always water. No matter where we are on campus, we see the lake, the water caught by an evening breeze on the way to winter. And someone else sees what we see. We don’t know if they’re there for us. We’re alone. Someone else is alone, too.
It must have been in the eighth grade, about the same time of day when light is strained and cold, when Phil Fenton told me he had something to tell me. It was carpool and time to go home. Phil Fenton had blond, curly hair, played lacrosse, and wore jeans with rips in the knees. Under his straw hat his long blond curls hung down the sides of his face.
“Over here,” he said, and he pulled me into Mrs. Wishert’s room, the eighth-grade English class.
“What?” I said. “Mrs. Harris is here, carpool, got to go.” There was something in my chest that wouldn’t let me breathe. It was cold, like scared, like dark when you go outside to let the cat in and the street is too quiet. Something else in my chest was too warm.
“Back here,” he said. I couldn’t see.
“Phil, where are you?” My hands weren’t completely out in front of me, out to the sides a little.
He didn’t say anything. And the heat of him was close. The sweat of him was close. The sweat was old socks. “Here,” he said.
I didn’t know what his hands were doing or where to stand or what he wanted to tell me. His hands on my hands were squirmy, and his hands led mine around his back. And his hands around my shoulders turned me around, backed me against the wall of Mrs. Wishert’s classroom, and his body pressed me back, and his mouth was all wet on my face. My mouth found his mouth.
This was necking.
Phil Fenton and I necked every afternoon before carpool for two weeks. And then, one time there were hands and sweat and something more in him. My back was smushed against the wall, and he pressed against me harder, and there was a power that wasn’t there before. It made the room darker and farther away from English class and white chalk on the blackboard. I was smaller. My hair stuck to my neck, his mouth was wet on my neck, and his squirmy hands were rough. It wasn’t like necking any more.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. There was a feeling in my chest that wasn’t warm or cold. There was something rising in my chest.
“No,” I said. It came out really loud, like a school bell or something.
Phil jumped back.
“Damn,” he said. “What’s wrong?” His voice was sleepy.
“I don’t know. Got to go,” I said. My hands checked my shirt and pulled my shoulders on right. There was heat coming off Phil, and I went around him, out Mrs. Wishert’s door.
There was something so wrong in me it filled my chest. It was wrong all the way down the linoleum hall, down the sidewalk in the winter dark, into the warm car with Mrs. Harris driving home.
There was something wrong in this ride to this Delaware town, Alex driving a red Toyota Celica down the flat black driveway under maple trees, out the brick entrance of St. Timothy’s. On the highway to town, he pulled out the bottle. With one hand he held the bottle and the steering wheel, and his other hand twisted off the cap. The half-pint bottle made a tap on the steering wheel. Turning toward me, he made his eyebrows do Groucho Marx up and down. Then, he tipped the bottle and took a taste. He handed it to me. The whiskey bit my throat, but warmed me all the way down. The thing in my chest felt warmer.
Town wasn’t far, and it wasn’t big. The one family restaurant was Norma’s, and it served steaks with fries, biscuits and gravy, and real southern fried chicken. Every dish came with corn pone and coleslaw, like it or not. About the same time as the waitress in her orange-striped apron and tiara-type cap came to take our order, a man with polyester pants and blue floral shirt pushed onto the bench seat beside me.
“Mind if I sit for a minute?” the man with the polyester smile said. He almost sat on me. My legs were touching Alex’s legs under the table, and for me to move over, Alex had to turn sideways. “My name is Marshall,” he said, “Marshall Wayne Murphy.” And he stuck a hand across the table at Alex. His hand hung above the table until Alex shook it. “Pleased to meet you,” Marshall Wayne Murphy said. He didn’t offer his hand to me.
“I work for the Delaware Star,” he said. He put a pad of paper on the table. Alex and I looked at each other. Alex with his blond cropped hair, his chiseled jaw, his button down shirt, me in my St. Timothy’s blazer and khaki pants, my button down shirt. We were the bull’s-eye in his scope.
“I understand you work at St. Timothy’s,” he said. The pages of his spiral notepad flipped up as he licked his fingers to pluck them. The lined pages were light green, long and thin. He dug into his inside pocket to find a pencil.
“We have nothing to say,” I said to his notepad still flipping.
“Really.” He stopped plucking the pages and looked at Alex.
“That’s right,” Alex said. He looked at me.
“You have nothing to say about a boy hanging from the rafters and a teacher accused of abusing him? That’s fine.” He picked up the top cover of the notepad and slowly closed it. His hand had manicured nails, glossy, perfectly shaped.
What Alex looked like must have been what I looked like. Mouth closed, eyebrows crunched up, eyes shifting back and forth.
“What teacher?” Alex said.
Marshall Wayne Murphy was quick to open his notebook. “Oh, want to talk?” He looked up and grinned. “Oriental name. Let’s see here.”
There was only one teacher with an Asian name. My stomach with the whiskey in it was a cannon ball.
“Here it is,” he said. “Jack Song, Physics.”
“No,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” Alex said. The muscle of his jaw was sticking out.
“Another student gave great details. Told all about showers and this guy Song tucking the boy in.” He winked at us as if we shared secrets with him.
Alex was turning so red that his hair looked white. “What student?”
“Well, let’s see,” Marshall Wayne Murphy said. He licked his manicured fingers and turned pages again. “I know I’ve got it: Donny Zuckhaus. I think you call juniors ‘Fifth Form.’”
Alex bit down, turned his head to the wall. The jaw muscle flexed, released, flexed, released. My hands went to my forehead, my fingers digging into my hairline. Fiction makes fact look simple.
What could we say?
“The student lied,” Alex said.
“Can I quote you on that?” Marshall Wayne Murphy licked a finger, pushed pages aside, raised his pencil.
“Forget it,” Alex said.
The feeding frenzy of polyester and floral print reporters would hit Surrey tomorrow. More reporters. A lot more. A suicide was good enough for national news. A sex scandal was even better. Poor Jack.
“Excuse me, Mr. Murphy,” I said with a smile, “could you please move? We’re leaving.” I shuffled toward him on the bench, actually pushing him. I threw money on the table for the meal we wouldn’t eat.
His mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything, grabbed his pencil and his pad and moved off the bench. Once he stood, I was out the small space between his polyester pants and the table. Alex was right behind me.
On the way out of Norma’s, I didn’t look at the breakfast bar or the other booths by the window. The glass door with the metal handle across the middle, the decals of credit cards they accepted on the glass, this was the exit. Outside, the parking lot smelled like chicken fat. Five steps on to the blacktop, and I turned to Alex.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Holy shit.”
Both of us raised our hands to our foreheads and bent over, turned in opposite directions. We were in some weird Star Trek episode with sound waves crushing our eardrums. What we heard was too hard.
This must have looked great from the windows of Norma’s. I stopped.
“Oh God,” I said, “let’s go.”
On the flat drive back to St. Timothy’s, Alex and I didn’t say anything. My left hand spread flat across his thigh, his thigh warm, pressed into my hand. We passed the whiskey between us. The only sound was the radio, some Talking Heads song. The lights on the dashboard made the car red inside, and Alex’s hand giving me the bottle, me giving him the bottle, was like the black wand of a radar in some control tower moving back and forth. Intruders were entering our space from all around us. And there was nothing we could do.
At the brick entrance to school, Alex screwed the top back on the bottle, and wrapped it in the wrinkled, brown bag. We had finished it. Maybe Herbert Hofmeister was right at that faculty party on the lawn stretching down to the lake: If you’re going to teach, you’re going to drink.
Alex pulled around my dorm where the light over the parking lot was too bright. After putting the car in neutral, he reached his arm around the back of my seat and leaned toward me. His face big, I could reach it with my lips. Maybe his face was the forever place. Maybe his face could fill the crack in my chest. Some part of me wanted to pretend, wanted to be a part of a school with stone blocks this way and stone blocks that way. I wanted to want Alex. I had led him to believe I wanted him. But the car smelled maple, the two of us large in the little car, close. The whiskey was warm in me. The smell of sweat and maple and chicken fat from the diner was too close. The ceiling of the car was inches above my head and caving in.
“See you, Alex. Thanks.”
“What about Song?” he said.
“Talk to him. Tell him that we know Donny is lying. Tell him he’s not alone in this.” The little handle was somewhere on the door. It was more like a D-ring than a handle, and I almost broke it off trying to get out. The ground felt farther away, and instead of blacktop, it was riverbed, uneven, changing. The pavement sloped toward my back door, and someone sat on my doorstep, the entry light orange above.
The Toyota sprayed pebbles as it pulled away. The person in my doorway sat up.
“Taylor?” she said. It was Crisco rising in my doorway, her big shoulders turning orange in the entryway light.
I said, “You’re here.”
“Of course, I’m here.” I missed a step and fell forward. Crisco caught me, leaned back, and spun me off my feet. Her body was tight, held me like a fitted sheet.
“What’re you doing here?”
“No news like bad news,” she said.