The day after the funeral, my mother and brother drove me back to Walker’s. I’d been gone for three days. A few minutes after we reached the more rural roads outside Hartford, Fritz pulled over and let me drive. It was a beautiful day and the sunlight streamed through the leaves, just starting to turn. Whenever the road narrowed or a car passed me, I tensed up. My brother, now in the passenger seat next to me, peeled my tightly clenched fingers one by one from the steering wheel and then gently put them back. “The trick is to relax,” he said. I remembered sitting on my father’s lap behind the steering wheel on the way out to Montauk. This was harder.
Once I got back to school, I took up the habits of smoking and sarcasm. There was no support system, so I tried to create my own, which was easier when I cloaked my despair in dark humor and asked somebody if I could have a light. The regular smokers in the Fish Bowl formed a loose-knit community. The first time I bummed a Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light 100 from a sophomore I was friendly with, I became part of the group. It helped that as soon as I took that first drag, my entire body relaxed. I’d had no idea how tightly wound I’d been, and I almost fainted when the tension left my body.
Academically, I was able to keep up at first. English and American history kept me especially engaged, not only because they’d always been my best subjects and the teachers were incredibly demanding, but because the reading took me out of myself. At the beginning of the semester, I’d learned that Mrs. Shea, the history teacher, had a reputation for being very serious about her subject; she was so exacting a taskmaster that students in her class rarely got any grade higher than a B. This gave me something to strive for.
The work was so intense, and the workload so potentially overwhelming, that she had advised us to find somebody to study with. I didn’t know anybody well enough to ask, but Parker, a kid who lived in my dorm on the floor above mine, asked if I wanted to partner with her. When I got back from New York, we picked up where we left off. It helped to have somebody to keep me focused. We worked hard. She called me “Sexy,” a familiarity I found both comforting and confusing.