Troubled. A few days later, the word was still rolling around in my head like a marble. I was sighting a bottle of organic Caribbean hot sauce down the barrel of a 20-gauge shotgun, my finger on the trigger. Ted’s brother Tom was home from college—it was the weekend before Thanksgiving, and he had the week off—and though it was an invitation I usually declined, I’d taken them up on a little target practice in the field behind their house. The Parker brothers didn’t shoot empty cans, instead raiding their mother’s pantry for unopened containers of approximate gore: Bonne Maman strawberry preserves, San Marzano tomatoes, red wine vinegar in ornate bottles. Secretly, I had always found this morbid, but that day I saw the appeal. The barrel was cold in my left hand, and the wood butt dug into my shoulder. I braced my boots firmly in the dirt. Tom was watching me, waiting for me to fumble. I squeezed the trigger and grit my teeth, and the hot sauce went down, chipotle gore across the faded leaves of November. I felt pretty tough for a second. You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? (Taxi Driver, four Oscar nominations, 1977.)
“Nice,” said Tom. “Courtney, I must admit, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Good job,” muttered Ted. He hadn’t been watching my shot, but he put his arm around me anyway. He’d been distracted all day, all week, even after Hugh had come back to school. You’d have thought Hugh had been out with an exotic but not contagious disease by the fuss everyone had made. Ted and his boys, Melissa and Hilary, and even Marian, Selena, and Lindsay all flanked him in the halls like bodyguards. Rory Swanson, the junior Ted had thrown up against the wall, didn’t show up at school on Thursday or Friday, and though I knew the kid was probably just afraid of getting his ass kicked and trying to lay low until Monday, the murmured gossip around school was that Hugh had found out about Rory’s bookmaking and put him deservedly in the hospital. At Belknap Country Day, Hugh Marsden was a bigger deal than ever.
I leaned the gun against the large flat boulder that anchored the field, and Tom sat down on it, pulling a Miller Lite from the mini cooler at his feet. “So, little brother. Are you going to tell me what it was Marsden took at Revelry? Because I heard Mom and Dad talking last night. I believe the phrases ‘negative influence’ and ‘dragging Teddy down’ were used.”
Ted dropped his arm from my shoulders, and his jaw tightened. He picked up the gun and began to reload it. “Influence, huh?” He occupied himself with the shells for a moment.
Ted was pissed, but I thought I saw him almost smile to himself. He raised the gun and a bottle of grenadine shattered on the far end of the field. “Nobody’s dragging me down. My boy’s in trouble, and I’m going to have his back.” He dropped the shotgun to his side and finally met Tom’s placid gaze. “If anyone should get that, it’s you, Tom. He didn’t take anything. Hugh has always been a boozehound ever since we first swiped shots of Jameson from Dad’s bar. But he’s never been into drugs.” Ted shrugged.
Suddenly, the anger he’d been wearing like armor fell away, and he looked worried, scared even, for the first time in a week. “They did tests at the hospital, but everything was inconclusive. There were a lot of different things it could have been, and none of them made sense. There was some vaguely plausible allergy med reaction story that Hugh’s parents told Farnsworth, but Hugh doesn’t have allergies.” Ted raised the gun and aimed at the last bottle left, a raspberry vinaigrette from a local farm stand. But then he dropped the gun to his side. “Hugh thinks someone might have slipped him something.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded, more harshly than I meant. I dug my nails into my palms. No way could Hugh know. No way.
“Oh, come on. That’s a little paranoid.” Tom swigged his beer. I was so grateful I could have kissed him, even though I’d always thought he was a jerk. He and Ted looked a lot alike, with the same wavy hair and golden coloring, but where Ted was solid and broad, Tom was long-limbed and lithe. His sport at Country Day had been basketball, but now he ran track at Dartmouth. He resettled his lanky self against the rock.
Ted set the gun aside and got himself a beer. “Well, there’s been some other weird shit going on. He’s missing voicemails from recruiters about tryouts.”
“Technology is a fickle bitch,” Tom said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, but if you’re only losing voicemails about one thing? That’s weird. Look, we all know what Hugh is like,” Ted looked from his brother to me and chuckled a little. “He’s never been a one-woman kind of guy. Not like me,” Ted wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed the top of my head. Tom rolled his eyes and gestured for Ted to go on. “He finally dogged a girl who wouldn’t stand for it, and, well, I guess if she can’t have him, no one can. She’s got a friend who’s into computer shit. Hugh thinks they hacked into his business.”
“What, is she going to poison his pets next?” scoffed Tom.
“Wait a second,” I said, wriggling out of Ted’s embrace. “Who are we talking about here? It can’t be Molly Winslow.”
“Sexy Lexi,” said Ted. He had no idea I’d been hanging out with her lately, but I still began to panic. I felt my stomach get hot, and Ted’s voice sounded far away, but awful words were still tumbling from his mouth.
“Hugh had a little fling with her last summer, but it’s not like he was ever going to hold her hand in Thistleton Hall, right?” Ted swigged his beer. “So now she drives by his house late at night. You know that clunker she parks in the lot at school, Court; it’s unmistakable.”
“Who’s Sexy Lexi?” asked Tom.
“Weird girl in the class below us,” said Ted. “You know the type, like, arty and alternative?”
“You mean freaky?” Tom grinned and clinked his beer against Ted’s. Ted glanced at me quickly, but I was too busy trying to hold it together to act offended.
“So anyway, now that Hugh has his little sophomore sweetheart, Sexy Lexi just cannot let it go. He got a flat in the senior lot back in September, and he swears she slashed his tire.”
Tom laughed. “Damn. Marsden has a bigger ego and a more twisted imagination than I thought.”
“Hugh said he saw her at the dance just before things went sideways. Said she got real close, so she could have given him something, somehow. She hangs out in the photo lab, so she has access to chemicals and stuff.”
I leaned against the rock, my heart pounding. It all seemed so impossible: that Hugh would have caught on, that Ted was standing there recounting such a flipside version of Hugh and Lexi, that he could really not know who Hugh was.
“I don’t think,” said Tom, “that anything they use to develop photos can make you hallucinate.”
“Trust me,” said Ted. “Anything is possible. The girl is a total whack job.”
“So assuming that’s true, which I don’t,” Tom rolled his eyes and swigged his beer. “What’re you and Huey going to do about it?”
“I think,” Ted said, then paused and drained his beer for effect, “that Hugh is going to give her a taste of her own medicine.” He paused. “Hey, Court, are you all right?”
“I’m not feeling very well all of a sudden,” I mumbled.
“Let’s go up to the house,” Ted said. He threw his beer bottle into the woods, and picked up the gun with one hand, putting his other arm around me. “You just don’t have the stomach for shooting pureed vegetables, huh?” he joked. Tom picked up the beer cooler and we walked through a line of trees, up past the old barn left from when the Parkers’ house had been a working farm, before it had been remodeled into an unusually harmonious blend of colonial and contemporary American styles (so said the issue of House Beautiful in which Mrs. Parker’s decorating had been featured when we were in middle school). We crossed the yard and went into the house.
In the upstairs bathroom, Ted gave me some Tylenol and a glass of water.
“What did you mean, Hugh is going to give Lexi a taste of her own medicine?” I asked him. I stared down at the two white tablets in my right hand and the glass in my left. If only the cure for what ailed me was so simple.
“He’s just going to scare her a little. I mean, the girl deserves everything she gets. She drugged him, for God’s sake. What if he’d ended up with brain damage, or worse?”
“How can he be sure it was her?” I asked, trying to maintain my composure and sound idly curious. “It does sound pretty absurd, Ted.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Ted smiled at me and took the glass from my hand, set it on the hall table. “Do you want to lie down?” He opened the door to his room.
I knew he didn’t mean for a nap. I tried to push Lexi and Hugh from my thoughts and focus on Ted, on how he was giving me this excited smile like he was a little boy being naughty and getting away with it. I knew that face well, and found it equally exasperating and adorable.
I walked past him into the bedroom. “What time are your parents coming home?” I sat down on Ted’s bed and pulled off my boots.
“Not for an hour at least,” he said, closing the door and grinning at me.
“Forty-five minutes, then. I am not running down there all disheveled and obvious.”
“You’re so cute when you’re disheveled, though,” Ted said, sitting down next to me. He caught my chin in his hand and kissed the tip of my nose. “I like disheveling you.”
I wasn’t really in the mood to be disheveled. Damn. I’d thought I was past this, but all the lies Ted had just unknowingly repeated kept echoing in my mind. We all know what Hugh is like. I cast around frantically in my head for some way to say no that wouldn’t disappoint him, but that’s a line that no screenwriter has managed to come up with yet. Okay, I thought, let’s get this over with quickly, before he notices that I am not feeling it in the least. Later I could worry about the fact that I had probably lost my libido forever. What would I say to him if I did want to fool around? Line, please.
“You have a talent for disheveling me,” I said. I lifted my chin from his hand and kissed the soft skin between his thumb and forefinger. He slipped his hand around the back of my neck and up into my hair, coming in for a big, open-mouthed kiss, and we tipped backwards onto the bed. His body felt impossibly heavy, suffocating in a way it never had before. Ted slipped one hand under my shirt, his fingers cold. I tried not to flinch.
A loud crack made us both jump.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Goddammit!” Ted leapt up, elbowing me hard in the side.
“What is it?” I asked. Adrenaline was shrieking in my veins.
Crack! This time I saw something move at the window. Ted grabbed the shotgun from where he’d set it on the floor. He wasn’t supposed to have it in the house. Mr. Parker was very big on safety and etiquette when it came to teaching Tom and Ted to hunt, and Mrs. Parker insisted that hunting gear stay in a locked cabinet in the barn.
Crack! It was a cardinal, I saw, flying straight at the window. The sound its small body made against the glass seemed deafening.
“Is that its head, that noise?” I asked, horrified.
“Fucking thing does this every morning!” Ted swore, and threw up the window sash, the gun already braced on his shoulder. Before I had taken the breath I might have used to say something, he’d shot the bird. The smell of gunpowder and the ringing sound of the gun going off lingered in the room.
“Ted. I can’t believe you just—”
“I know, I know, I know.” Ted looked at the gun in his hand as if he wasn’t sure it belonged to him. “Just shut up for a second. My dad is going to kill me if he finds out I did that.”
This time I didn’t try to hide my flinch. Ted wasn’t looking at me, anyway. But he’d never told me to shut up before, not even as a joke, not even when he was drunk.
“That stupid bird did that every morning, like thirty or forty times. It’s been going on for weeks.” Ted looked at me like his explanation of a little lost sleep justified the fact that he’d just gotten out of bed with me to shoot a bird with a gun he wasn’t supposed to have in the house in the first place. “It was brain damaged.”
“Well, it’s not anymore,” I said. I stood up and looked out the window. The bird was a small mess of red feathers on the side lawn. “Now it’s just dead.”
“Come on,” Ted said. “I have to clean that up before my parents get home.” I followed him downstairs, where he grabbed the keys to the hunting cabinet from the top of the refrigerator and ran out to the backyard.
“Here,” he handed me the gun and the key. “Lock that up while I deal with the carcass.” He picked up a shovel and walked off around the house.
I walked down the bottom of the backyard, where the barn sat at the edge of the woods that hemmed in the manicured grass but not the Parker’s property, which went on for a few more undeveloped acres. Inside, I carefully avoided the trap door that opened down to the old root cellar, which was easy to miss even when you knew the barn well—Tom had broken his wrist falling through it two years earlier, when he’d wandered into the barn at 5 a.m. before one of the Parker men’s hunting trips. I suspected he’d been hungover or possibly still drunk from the night before, but Ted had never admitted this. I opened the gun cabinet and placed the 20-gauge in its place in the rack inside. There were four others, of different makes and gauges that I didn’t know enough about to recognize. I ran my eyes over them. I thought about the shotgun slamming against my shoulder.
You talkin’ to me?
Well, I’m the only one here.