I saw Nell today.
She didn’t see me. I’ve spent years cultivating the art of seeing Idlewild without being seen. I keep to the opposite side of the street. I face forward, resisting the flowerlike instinct to turn my face toward the Meetinghouse. To walk briskly is key. So long as I appear to be going somewhere in a hurry, no one looks at me long enough to notice that I’m going in circles, turning the corner and reappearing a minute later like a background extra in a shoestring street scene (see The Truman Show, 1998, dir. Peter Weir). As I tell students, one can mask a lot of weakness—in a thesis statement, in the transitions between paragraphs, in the conclusion or lack thereof—with the illusion of forward momentum. I never stop or slow down to drink in the sight I wish to see. I allow myself to glimpse it only in my peripheral vision.
It was in my peripheral vision, then, that I glimpsed Nell. Despite this, and despite the fifteen years that had elapsed since I’d last seen her, I recognized her with an alacrity that preceded thought or even surprise. For an instant, it felt perfectly ordinary to see her in front of the Meetinghouse. In that instant, I might have turned, waved, cried out Nell! Hey, Nell!
In the next instant, I thought I might be dreaming.
All my dreams take place at Idlewild. I dream, like anyone, of the test for which I haven’t studied, the class I’ve forgotten to attend all year, the play for which I haven’t learned my lines. But even in the dreams thematically unrelated to school, Idlewild serves as the perpetual backdrop, the same set repurposed for every show, as though hamstrung by the cheap production budget of my unconscious. My dreams recreate Idlewild with a mind-numbing degree of architectural accuracy, never adding a classroom or deleting a corridor or taking any Escherian liberties with the stairs (see Inception, 2010, dir. Christopher Nolan). The Idlewild of my dreams is every inch the real Idlewild. Or, rather, the real Idlewild circa 1990–2003, which no longer exists except in my dreams.
A good twenty feet past the Meetinghouse, I ducked behind a lamppost and peered around it. Yes, it was Nell Rif kin herself, accompanied by a tall string bean of a woman; their combined silhouette put me in mind of Ernie and Bert. The two of them stood very close together, facing the Meetinghouse as they conversed, as though their intimacy was such that they didn’t need to make eye contact. It was the same pose Nell used to strike with me.
All this passed through my mind in several seconds. Then Nell and her friend (her girlfriend?) began to walk away, west toward Third Avenue. In a trancelike state, I followed behind. I kept a careful distance, but the street was sparsely populated; there was no crowd into which I could blend. Had Nell looked back at any point, I would have been caught—but I knew, somehow, that she wouldn’t look back.
Nell appeared, at a glance, exactly as I remembered her. The sand-colored hair. The shoulders slightly hunched upward, as if braced for a blow. Even her outfit was oddly familiar. In school she favored a T-shirt worn over a long-sleeved shirt, a look that’s long since fallen out of fashion, so it puzzled me to see her wearing the same thing today. Then I saw that what I’d taken to be a T-shirt was part of a set of matching scrubs, which I’d failed at first to recognize as scrubs because they were a tasteful, un-medical shade of maroon. Of course: I knew, from Googling, that she was a nurse. It was a warm day, too warm for layered shirts, but I imagined the chill of hospital air-conditioning; I pictured her wearing a long-sleeved shirt under her scrubs every day, even in summer.
Then, as if this thought had broken a spell, I saw how Nell had changed. Her hair was shorter than ever, shaved at the sides and back in a men’s taper fade. I wondered if she went to a salon or a barbershop. I imagined someone (I did not imagine myself) coming up behind her and tickling her bare neck. Something in her demeanor made me think that she would not giggle or shriek, as she would have in our Idlewild days, but spin around in unamused indignation. She was not a puppyish teenager. She was, like me, thirty-three years old.
Sunset dimmed to dusk as I stalked Nell and her companion (her girlfriend, I was increasingly certain) up Fifteenth Street, across Third Avenue, and farther west still, into the open space of Union Square. I followed them, dodging skateboarders and a chanting Hare Krishna horde, across the park’s broad concrete steps on which Idlewilders used to sit after school and on which teenagers still sat now. I followed them through the greenmarket’s evening stragglers, briefly losing them in the crowd surrounding the She Wolf Bakery booth, spotting them again at a stall that sold bundles of dried lavender. I was prepared to follow them as far as they walked. Had they walked into the Hudson River and swum to New Jersey, I’d have been twenty feet behind them the whole way, so long as I could remain hidden.
But my pursuit, in the end, lasted no more than ten minutes. Having sniffed the lavender to their satisfaction, Nell and her girlfriend crossed the avenue and disappeared into a Japanese restaurant on Sixteenth Street.
I came back to myself, as it were, disoriented on the western edge of Union Square. I cast my glance in the downtown direction, saw the tripod-mounted spire of the Freedom Tower glittering in the sunset sky, and knew I was awake.
I had a six-thirty meeting with a student at a Starbucks whose East Village location I had selected for its proximity to Idlewild, but now, having walked so far in the opposite direction, I would be quite late. I had forgotten the appointment, forgotten the time, forgotten everything but Nell. So overcome was I at the sight of her, and so consumed with the task of remaining unseen, that only now—alone in my apartment with all the lights off, drinking my midnight whiskey by the blue glow of my laptop screen—do I pause to consider the obvious questions.
1. What was Nell doing at Idlewild today?
I can only assume she wanted to show her old school to the woman she loves.
2. What has Nell told this woman about me?
Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps Nell never thinks of me.
A year and a half, after all, is but a blip in time. Our friendship was a brief and strictly binary thing, never passing through any intermediate stages like casual acquaintance or theater buddy. We were strangers to each other; then, suddenly, we were best friends; a year and a half later, just as suddenly, we were strangers again.
3. How did that come to pass?
It’s a long story, and there are parts of it I struggle to explain even to myself. We grew so close, so quickly, and I still don’t entirely understand why.
As with so many dramatic social changes, though, 9/11 played a role.
4. Why did I approach Nell on the morning of 9/11?
Anyone who was in New York that morning, anyone who stepped outside even for a moment, surely remembers what a pure and sparkling day it was. In the clear sunshine, something in me unfurled. I wanted to share the beauty; I needed someone else to see what I was seeing, feel what I was feeling. I saw Nell outside the Meetinghouse. I thought she might understand.
5. Why Nell?
Three months prior, there had been an incident in the computer lab.
Idlewild’s computer lab was a stiflingly hot little room at the end of the fourth-floor hallway. The school computers had Internet capability, so theoretically the computer lab should have been packed during lunchtime, but the close quarters and wide Power Macintosh G3 screens conferred zero physical privacy—so that if one wanted, say, to read Sherlock Holmes slash fiction, one had to read Sherlock Holmes slash fiction in full view of everyone in the room, including Jimmy Frye the IT guy. In practice, then, the computer lab was a ghost town but for a handful of Idlewild’s inveterate nerds. This included Nell, but not me. I was more of a library dweller. Certain corners of the Idlewild library were so secluded from view that I occasionally masturbated there.
One day at the end of sophomore year, I paid a rare visit to the computer lab to print out my final paper for British Literature (thesis: Iago is a closeted homosexual whose villainous actions are motivated by his secret desire for Othello). I logged into my Idlewild intranet account and navigated to the alphabetical list of folders, one for every Idlewild student. Under normal circumstances my personal folder, labeled FVasquezRab03, was easy to spot, being the only one whose icon was not obscured by a forbidding little padlock icon signifying inaccessibility. On that day, however, some kind of glitch had occurred in the system: there were no padlocks anywhere. All the student folders were temporarily open and available for anyone’s viewing pleasure. This was a major security breach and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to snoop. My heart raced as I scrolled in search of NRif kin03.
An onlooker might have been surprised, given the choice of so many interesting Idlewilders, that Nell was the classmate whose secrets I coveted. Nell never drew attention to herself. She and I had never spoken. We sat next to each other in British Literature, but she was so taciturn both in and out of class that I knew almost nothing about her.
Except, of course, that she was a lesbian.
6. How did I know that?
I’d suspected it from the very beginning. While I was a “lifer”—an Idlewild student from kindergarten onward—Nell transferred from public school in the ninth grade, so it was in freshman orientation that I saw her for the first time. She had the kind of hair that I’ve now come to associate with teenage proto-butches: long, almost down to her waist, a length that suggested not vanity but accidental neglect. I kept my own hair cropped short, but it was out of a similar apathy toward my physical appearance, so I recognized it in her.
As freshman year went on, I began to notice the way she looked at me, and by sophomore year there was no doubt in my mind that she had a crush on me. She wasn’t subtle about it; I could almost feel the pressure of her eyes on me in Morning Meeting. It preoccupied me.
7. Pleasurably so?
Not in the way one might assume. I didn’t find her attractive. I didn’t find any girls attractive. That was one reason I avoided her. Perhaps it was also the real reason I avoided the computer lab.
But here I was now. I cast a covert glance around the lab—and there was Nell, hunched in a corner, her gaze fixed on her own computer screen. I was intoxicated by the prospect of perusing her private documents, right in front of her, without her knowledge. I double-clicked to open her file.
My excitement faded as I scrolled through the alphabetical list: canterburyessay.cwk, canterburyresponse.cwk, chemstudyguide.cwk. Of course it was all homework. No one used one’s school account for anything else. What had I expected?
The bell rang, and in my peripheral vision I saw Nell rise to leave. I scrambled to return to my original purpose, busying myself with the print job. Nell’s straggly long hair tickled my shoulder as she walked behind me. Consumed with the pretense of not noticing her, I opened othelloessay.cwk and selected Print. The printed pages arrived facedown in the printer tray, and in my haste, I didn’t look at them closely.
We all handed in our papers at the beginning of class. As the teacher, Devi, inspected the stack on her desk, she frowned. “Nell,” she said. “I have two copies of yours.”
In the desk next to mine, Nell shrank slightly from the attention. “Sorry,” she said. “Maybe it printed twice.” Her voice, which I’d rarely heard before, was lower pitched than mine.
“And Fay,” Devi continued, “I’m missing yours.”
Surely no one in the classroom deduced on the spot that I had snooped in Nell’s private account, distractedly mistaken it for my own, and printed out her paper instead of mine. Nonetheless, I couldn’t have felt more exposed if Devi had torn off my shirt to reveal my braless chest. Aware of Nell’s eyes on me, I did my best to project imperious boredom. “That’s because I didn’t give it to you,” I said. “I didn’t have time to print it out.”
My impertinence was somewhat out of character, and the gentle Devi was visibly thrown by it. “The last week of school is a busy time,” she said uncertainly. “Just get it to me by the end of the day, okay?”
I shrugged, feeling Nell’s gaze upon me as one feels sunlight through glass.
I never did hand in that paper. Nor did I ever tell Nell about my computer lab blunder. Over the course of the summer, though, I ruminated on the memory, and then on the very fact of Nell. By the time junior year began, the version of Nell that existed in my head felt so real, I’d all but forgotten we’d never spoken in real life.