Читать книгу Dark Rooms - Lili Anolik, Lili Anolik - Страница 15

Chandler Academy of Hartford, Connecticut, was established in 1886 when an Episcopal clergyman, Reverend Peabody Chandler of the Boston Chandlers, converted the ancestral summer home in the Sheldon/Charter Oak section of the city into an academy whose mission was to “take the wayward sons of distinguished New England families and mold the disposition of their minds and morals so that they might become good Christian gentlemen.” In 1971 the minds and morals of the daughters of distinguished families became eligible for molding, as well. The wayward part stayed the same, though. And for a school that’s primarily boarding, Chandler, with its two-strikes policy, is tolerant of rule-breakers. Consequently, each fall it winds up with a high number of students who’ve either been rejected from or given the boot by its stricter rivals.

If Chandler’s reputation is only a cut above so-so, its campus, which looks more like that of a college or a small university than a high school, is anything but. The central building, aptly named Great House, is red brick, impossibly old, and covered in ivy. Great House is set among a trio of shorter and only slightly less grand buildings: Noyes, de Forest, and Perkins. To their left is Burroughs Library, pillared, marbled, silent as dust; and to its right, Amory Chapel, its bell plundered from some bombed-out church in Europe by an enterprising alum at the end of World War I; and, a little farther on, Francis Abbot Science Center and Caroline Knox Abbot Theater. Stokes Dining Hall is south. The hockey rink and tennis courts and various athletic fields are east. So is Houghton Gymnasium and the Health and Counseling Center. And way east, so far east you can’t quite see it from campus, is Chandler’s boathouse, the Gordon T. Pierpoint, a stone’s throw from Trinity College’s boathouse, Bliss, on the banks of the Connecticut River. The dormitories—there are four of them, two for the boys, Endicott and Minot, two for the girls, Archibald and Amory—are west. They’re separated from the main campus by the graveyard, controversial real estate at Chandler even before Nica’s body was found there. The graveyard belongs to the City of Hartford, and technically school rules don’t apply to it, making it a sort of gray zone for boarders, a moral no-man’s-land. It’s the hub of what the administration refers to as “narcotics-related activity.” Is also the hub of alcohol-related activity. Sexual-related activity, too.

I start toward the quad, the air sharp with the smell of cut grass and lawn fertilizer, fresh paint. Campus is empty, all the students in chapel, extra-long this morning because it’s the first day of the new school year. Empty except for a lone figure, a hundred yards or so ahead. And though this person has her back to me, I recognize her instantly. It’s the walk, tight and clipped and harried: Mrs. Amory, Jamie’s mother. She’s looking primly chic in a tailored gray suit, the skirt, meant to be fitted, puckering slightly on her no-ass frame, her sheer-stockinged calves tensed and shadowed by high heels, black and wickedly pointed. She changes paths and I can see her in profile now. Her face, behind its dark glasses, is as hard and brittle as an eggshell. As plain as an eggshell, too.

I slow down, not wanting her to spot me, though there’s little danger of that, so intently is her gaze focused on the doors of Great House. It’s no surprise finding her on campus. She’s been in charge of the Parent Giving Association for as long as I can remember and does a fair amount of volunteer work at the school besides. Plus, she’s constantly ferrying Jamie to and from his squash lessons. Or at least was until the administration agreed to let him keep a car in the student parking lot for that purpose.

It wasn’t always from afar, though, that I saw Mrs. Amory. Once upon a time I saw her up close on a regular basis—in the days when Nica and Jamie were together, and the three of us would spend whole afternoons and evenings hanging out in his house. She made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t wild about having my sister and me around. Whenever she happened to open the door and we were on the other side, she’d draw back her thin lips in an even thinner smile, say, “Welcome,” in a tone intended to convey the opposite.

Sometimes Jamie would use his mom’s ice-cold mannerliness against her, maneuver her into asking us to stay for dinner. These meals were always weird and uncomfortable and never-ending. Mr. Amory, a handsome man, pretty, in fact, prettier by far than his not-so-pretty wife though not quite as pretty as his very pretty son, would pay excessive attention to Nica. From behind a pair of round, black-rimmed glasses, which somehow emphasized his good looks rather than obscured them, he’d watch her, stare openly. Then the questions would begin, too many of them with him hanging too eagerly on her replies. He’d invite her to borrow his cue if she and Jamie and I were going to play billiards, his desk if we were planning to study, his raft if it was warm enough for us to swim. Once he even invited her on a trip he and Jamie were taking to Maine the following weekend to hunt bobwhite quail. Mrs. Amory would observe these exchanges from the other end of the table with eyes that were coolly detached or coolly amused—coolly something. Then she’d start in on Nica with questions of her own, mostly falsely sympathetic ones about our mom, asking how she was doing, saying how difficult her job as a high school teacher must be, how difficult both my parents’ jobs were, putting up with ungrateful adolescents all day, what noble work it was and yet so unappreciated, and how she could never do it herself.

Though she barely noticed me—I don’t even think she knew my name, referred to me only as “dear”—I was the one she upset with these interrogations. They’d leave me shaking with anger and hurt. Nica, on the other hand, was totally unfazed. Would always answer politely, without sarcasm or hostility, never responding to the queries’ spiky subtext, staying right on the placid surface. Actually seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. Amory more than anything else. “It can’t be fun being her, Gracie,” Nica would say to me in the car afterward as she lit a cigarette, “uptight, everybody around her wanting to be someplace else, her husband especially.” Then Nica would do an impression of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest that was very bad but made me laugh anyway. Usually she’d talk me into stopping at the McDonald’s on Albany Ave. on the ride home. We’d split a McFlurry or a hot fudge sundae. The eggnog shake, if it was near Christmas.

I watch Mrs. Amory’s straight-backed form until it’s out of sight, disappearing inside Great House. The dull thud of the closing doors releases me from my stupor, and I continue on my way. As the concrete path turns into marble in front of Burroughs Library, I stop, dig an elastic out of my bag. When I’ve finger-combed my hair into a ponytail, I pull open the glass doors, step through them.

I step through them again two minutes later, only from the opposite direction. A crisis has arisen—burst pipe, bungling maintenance man, leak above the rare books section—and when Ms. Sedgwick, the head librarian, has dealt with it, she’ll deal with me, she said. She said, too, that in the meantime I ought to go see Mary Ellen Lefcourt in Payroll, get started on my paperwork.

So I’m going.

I’m sitting in the Business Development Office on the second floor of Perkins, my I-9 and Direct Deposit Authorization forms neatly filled out and on the coffee table in front of me. Mrs. Lefcourt is still in her office with her nine o’clock, even though it’s nearly ten now. To kill time, I’m browsing through a copy of the Staff Handbook, learning all about the proper protocol for reporting falsification of expense vouchers, when I hear voices rise up in anger—one voice, actually, male, young-sounding—rise up and die down almost immediately.

I crane my neck to see where it came from and notice a door at the end of the short, offshoot-type hallway. The sign outside it reads GLEN FLYNN, DIRECTOR OF FACILITIES. A second later, Mr. Flynn himself appears, a nervous-looking guy with fidgety hands, a red bow tie. He closes the door behind him, but not all the way, hurries over to Mrs. Waugh, the office secretary, whispers something in her ear. She shakes her head disapprovingly, either at what he just told her or at him. With an anxious backward glance, he exits. I reimmerse myself in the Handbook, wait for Mrs. Waugh’s fingers to start tapping on the computer keyboard again. When they do, I close the Handbook, stand, begin walking toward the door like I’m in search of better light. Then, casually, I prop myself against the wall opposite.

The crack in the door is narrow. I can’t see much through it, and what I can see tells me what I already know: that the room is an office, and that the angry-voiced person is indeed male and young. He’s pacing back and forth, his gait lurching, wobbly. It takes me a second to put together that he’s drunk, and I wonder if when Mr. Flynn scurried off, it was to get campus security. A slice of his body is visible, but none of his head. I’m starting to think I’ll never get a good look at him when he pauses to bend over, peel the thick fabric of his jeans from the backs of his knees. And for a brief moment, I have an unobstructed view of his face. Damon Cruz.

Damon Cruz is a day student—at least, was. He graduated in June, same as me. The term “day student” at Chandler is a tricky one to get a handle on because it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, that is, a student who spends his days at Chandler, his nights elsewhere. Not only, anyway. It also means a student who is on scholarship. When Reverend Chandler was writing the school’s constitution, he included a clause stating that ten percent of the student body “must come from the community’s deserving poor.” At Chandler’s inception, “the community’s deserving poor” were, for the most part, the Polish immigrants or the children of the Polish immigrants who settled in droves in Sheldon/Charter Oak in the late nineteenth century to take jobs at the local factories, manufacturers of firearms and horseshoe nails principally. But demographics have shifted radically in the last couple of decades. Hartford is now a predominantly black city with the second-fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the nation. Another thing it comes second in: poverty. The area’s gone from working class—those factories shut their doors a long time ago—to under the underclass. So what was once a gap between the day students and the boarders is a gap no longer, it’s a chasm.

There are day students, however, who manage to cross it. These students usually fit a certain profile—male, excel at a sport, come off as dangerous but not outright scary. Sex appeal doesn’t hurt either. Damon could have been a crossover if he wanted. He was a star baseball player, a little standoffish, known to have a temper. His sophomore year, he punched a rival player in the face during a game, earning himself the nickname Demon and a two-week suspension from the team. (The incident received a fair amount of coverage, not just in the school paper but in the Hartford Courant as well. The suspension was originally for the rest of the season, then got dropped down, and there were people who felt the reduction was sending a bad message, was practically condoning hooliganism, according to one editorial.) He was good at school, too, which I knew because we were in AP calculus together for a week before a scheduling conflict forced me to switch to another section.

Apparently Damon didn’t want to cross over, though. Any time I saw him on campus he was hanging out with other day students or with guys on the baseball team, a team pretty much entirely composed of day students. I remember he was going to college, UConn, the Honors Program, a popular option with smart day students since it offered a first-rate education on the comparative cheap. Was awarded an athletic scholarship, too, I think. So what’s he doing back at his old high school, wasted before noon, picking a fight with some pencil-neck administrator?

I take a step toward the door, bring my eye flush against the crack. Damon’s no longer pacing, is standing in front of the window now. He’s placed his hands on the sill so that his weight’s resting on his spread fingers. When he leans forward to look out, the muscles in his arms jump. It’s tough for me to believe this guy’s my age. He seems so much older—a cold, confident, hard-nosed man: thick, jet-black hair combed straight back, features that are handsome in a crude way, body that’s more broad than tall, bulky through the shoulders and chest, narrow at the waist and hips.

The room’s warm, and his clothes are soaked through, his wife-beater forming a second skin. Looking at it, I have a sudden memory. A girl on the tennis team, Sass Van Doren, saying something I couldn’t hear to Nica when Damon walked by the courts in his fitted baseball pants one afternoon during practice, her low tone and sly grin making me understand that her words were lewd and complimentary. Nica turned her eyes to him, then said, “Rough trade, too rough for me,” and went back to hitting serves. At the time, I was more focused on her remark, this cool deadpan sexual appraisal of a guy she didn’t even know, the style and swagger of it, the offhandedness of its delivery, the weight of experience behind it, than I was the object of it. Watching him now, though, it’s easy for me to see what she meant.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

I turn, blink into the sharp-eyed stare of Mrs. Waugh. I shake my head and start walking away. Behind me I hear her clicking her tongue reproachfully, then the sound of Mr. Flynn’s door being whammed shut.

I return to my seat at the coffee table, bury my face back in the Handbook. A few minutes later, Mrs. Lefcourt calls my name.

The audiovisual department that I’ll be running is less a department, as it turns out, than it is a room, is less a room than it is a cavern, dusty and windowless, in the far corner of Burroughs’s basement. As Ms. Sedgwick shows me around, wrinkling her nose at the dank subterranean air, the clusters of mouse—fingers crossed mouse—droppings on the floor, the shelves stacked with DVDs and VHS tapes, she instructs me on my duties, which are pretty basic: a teacher or student requests a movie or documentary or television series, I deliver it along with the equipment necessary to play it. We spend some time pretending there’s more to the job than that. We can only pretend for so long, though. And finally, she leaves me on my own.

I wait until I hear her footsteps fade, then I start whatever DVD’s already in the machine so it’ll sound like I’m doing something, curl up on a cleanish patch of floor, the phone within easy reach in case any orders come in. Before the FBI warning about piracy has cleared the screen, I’m asleep.

At two thirty I’m awoken by the tolling of the bell in Amory Chapel, signaling the end of the academic day. I stand up and stretch, turn off the TV, the screen glowing blackly, the DVD having played out long ago, and begin gathering together my stuff. I’d meant to stop by Shep Howell’s office on my lunch hour, which I’d obviously slept through. No big deal, I tell myself. I’ll stop by on my lunch hour tomorrow. Speaking of lunch, I notice that I’m hungry for the first time since last night. I’m thinking I’ll just grab something from the kitchen when I go back home, pick up my car. Then I remember the linguine with clam sauce on the bottom shelf of the fridge, and my stomach does a slow roll. I decide to swing by the Student Center instead.

The snack bar’s packed, the line snaking practically out the door. I step to the end of it and look around, surprised at how few of the faces are familiar. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, because, apart from Nica and Maddie, I never paid much attention to anybody younger. There is one person, though, I do recognize right away: Jamie. He’s standing by the far wall, long-boned and slouchy, hip cocked against the foosball table, eating an ice cream sandwich and talking to Mr. Tierney.

Mr. Tierney runs the ceramics and woodworking studio and is resident faculty in Minot. He’s a good-looking guy, young, only a couple years out of Oberlin. Is popular with his students, particularly the girls, and every term he seems to strike up a special friendship with one of them. Nica was a recent enthusiasm. The spring she died she was spending most of her free periods hanging out in the basement of Knox, working on her 3-D Studio Art project—a giant pinwheel with neon plastic curls and a bugged-out eyeball at the center.

When Nica broke up with Jamie and was cagey as to why, Jamie got it in his head that Mr. Tierney was the reason. He talked about it obsessively during our late-night telephone conversations. I saw the logic of his thinking: Nica, who was never close-mouthed, was close-mouthed; close-mouthed then not for herself, for another, another whose job was possibly on the line. Still, though, I doubted Nica and Mr. Tierney actually were involved. There was something about Mr. Tierney that rubbed me the wrong way—an insincerity, acting as if he didn’t know how cute he was, how excited the girls would get when he’d sit behind them at the pottery wheel, cover their hands with his. Nica had better taste than that. Jamie began watching Mr. Tierney, spying on him, basically, which is how Jamie found out that Mr. Tierney was having an illicit affair, just not with Nica. With Mrs. Bowles-Mills, wife of Mr. Mills, Chandler’s CFO and general counsel. One night Jamie followed Mr. Tierney out of the dorm, spotted him sneaking in the back door of the Millses’ house when Mr. Mills was out of town on a fund-raising trip. After that, Jamie’s suspicions subsided, at least as far as Mr. Tierney was concerned.

And it sure looks like Jamie and Mr. Tierney are on okay terms now. Jamie is laughing at something Mr. Tierney’s saying. And when Mr. Tierney’s name is called by Mr. Wallace—the only teacher at Chandler younger than he is, as of last year not even a teacher, a teaching assistant in the English Department—to let him know his toasted bagel’s ready, he squeezes Jamie’s shoulder before strolling up to the counter.

Jamie stays by the foosball table. A television monitor is above his head, scrolling the intramural sports schedule across its screen, and he aims his delicate, red-rimmed eyes at it as he licks melted ice cream off his knuckles. He’s wearing a yellow polo shirt, the one with the rip in the underarm, faded jeans. This is the first time I’ve seen him since I weaned myself off drugs. And as I watch him, I get that old familiar feeling—the quickening of my senses, the shifting of my weight to my toes, the dizzy rush I associate with going from sitting to standing too fast—and realize that the medication functioned for me like a string of garlic. It protected me from his beauty, warded it off. Now I’m once again defenseless before it.

It’s not that Jamie’s all I ever think about. Or that I’m never interested in other guys, never get crushes. I do get crushes. Geoff Holzheimer, sophomore year. Caleb Knapp and Tony Chen, junior year. Corey Worman, senior year. Sometimes my crushes even get crushes back, and I wind up pressed up against one of them in the darkened corner of a party, or stretched out beneath one of them on the cramped seat of a car. These encounters, though, always end up feeling—not wrong, that’s an overstatement, but not totally right, either. As if I’m settling or compromising. And before things can go too far, I slip away, pretend not to notice the baffled looks on their faces, the hurt sound in their voices as they call after me. With Jamie, though, there’s nothing I don’t like, no part of him I have to second-guess or make excuses for. He’s the ideal, the supreme paragon, the one to whom I’m comparing everybody else.

Without making a conscious decision to do so, I step out of line, start walking toward him.

I’m halfway across the room when my stride falters. I missed her before because the foosball table was blocking my view, but there she is—Maddie—sitting at a computer in the row of computers. Buds are in her ears, and she’s watching what appears to be a music video. Her eyes are on it, not me, but from the way she’s smiling—lips curving up in a sort of smirk-snarl—I’d say that I’ve already been spotted. No turning back now.

I reach Jamie, am standing directly in front of him. He doesn’t notice me, though, his gaze still stuck to the screen, now displaying the fall arts calendar. I touch him lightly on the wrist. He turns, looks down at me, lips parted, eyes glazed. Blink. Blink. Blink.

“Hi, Jamie,” I say.

A single hard blink. Then, “Grace, whoa, hey. You’re not at Williams.”

“No, I left,” I say. And when he doesn’t say anything back, “Not ready to do my own laundry yet, I guess,” and smile weakly.

He nods to himself a couple times, absorbing this information. “You left. Wow. Okay. That’s a little, uh, drastic.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re back at Chandler. Not as a student, though, right?”

I explain to him my new position.

“What, like tapes and DVDs and stuff?” he says, when I’m done. “Nice, nice.” He leans over, and with a supple twist, plucks a bud from Maddie’s ear. Through the hole in his shirt, I see a flash of blond underarm hair, a shade darker than the hair on his head. “Hey, did you hear about Grace?”

Maddie turns to me with an expression I recognize, dread: taunting time. I feel her eyes running over my face and body with gleeful dislike, looking for something to find fault with, make fun of. “Did I hear what about Grace?” she says.

He tells her what I told him.

She releases a snort of air, letting him know what she thinks of the job, of the A/V department, of me in general. Then she says, “So you dropped out of the liberal arts college ranked number one by U.S. News & World Report?”

“For now,” I say.

“To come back here?”

“For now,” I say again.

A beat. And then Maddie says, “Are you retarded?”

“You should be nice to her, Maddie,” Jamie warns. “She’s the one you’ll be renting your porn from this year.”

“Nobody rents porn anymore,” she says, then reinserts the bud, turns back to the computer screen.

Jamie looks at me, shrugs. “Some people still do.”

“So,” I say, relaxing now that Maddie’s attention’s off me, “where’s Ruben? Detention already?” Last spring Ruben didn’t get into a single school he applied to, so he decided to do a PG year like Jamie.

“You didn’t hear? He’s at Trinity. Got in off the wait list.”

“His dad promise to buy a wing for the library or something?”

Jamie laughs. “It was for the science center. And not a dinky little wing either, a whole new building.” He lifts his backpack off the floor, balances it on the flat of an upraised thigh as he unzips the front pocket. A zebra-striped Bic—he and Nica bought them together—falls out. Seeing it gives me a pang. It was an object I’d always coveted: cheaply cool, mysteriously cool, cool but in a way not everyone would pick up on, and thus ultracool. I’d looked everywhere for hers. So far, though, no luck.

Jamie scoops up his, continues rifling through the pocket, pushing aside a ballpoint pen, a folded-up class schedule, the Altoids tin he stores his joints in, finally coming to a bottle of Flintstones vitamins. “I’m trying to improve my eating habits,” he says, as he unscrews the cap. “You want?”

I hold out my hand. He pours a couple onto it.

“Who’d you get?” he asks.

“A Fred and two Wilmas.”

He leans over my palm, squints. “Those are Bettys, not Wilmas. Wilma’s got the bun.”

“Oh.”

For a minute or so we just chew, grinding the human- and dinosaur-shaped pellets into a sweet, gritty paste that coats our molars and tongues. This is the most relaxed conversation I’ve had with him since before Nica died, remarkable for being so totally unremarkable, both of us keeping it light, staying on the surface. And I’m reluctant to ruin it by dredging up something dark and heavy and out of the past. But I feel I need to speak while I have the chance, will regret it if I don’t. Checking first to make sure that Maddie’s ears are still blocked, I place my hand on his arm and say, “Listen, I’ve been meaning to apologize to you.”

I can feel him pulling away from me even though he doesn’t move. “For what?”

“For how I acted at your party this summer.”

“Yeah, you seemed a little …” His eyes shift, flick off into the distance.

I drop my hand. “Yeah, I was and more than a little. I’m sorry for what I put you through. I know how creepy what I did was.”

He sighs. “It was creepy, but, no, you don’t have to apologize for it or explain it or anything.”

“But I’d like to try because—”

“No, really, Grace, don’t. It was a rough time. No one knows how rough better than me.”

“For me, it’s still rough,” I say, my voice small.

He kicks the leg of the foosball table with the toe of his sneaker. “Yeah, for me, too,” he says, his voice just as small. Then he looks back at me. Our eyes hook into each other, and for a long moment neither one of us speaks.

And then the spell’s broken by the sharpness of Maddie’s tone: “Jamie, field hockey tryouts are about to start. I’m captain. I’m supposed to oversee. We need to get going.” On the word we, she touches his arm, the bare part of the bicep just below his shirt sleeve, with the short nail of her index finger.

I wonder suddenly if she’s interested in him. Ruben isn’t in the picture anymore, and neither, obviously, is Nica. And she and Jamie are already close, have probably grown even closer since Nica’s death. I feel a swift spike of jealousy.

“Already?” he says to her.

“You said you’d walk me. Are you going to or not?” Without waiting for a response, she about-faces, begins striding across the room.

He nods at the space she just vacated, says, “All right, okay, sure. Let’s roll.” Then he picks up his backpack, turns to me. “Well, Grace, it was, yeah, nice running into you.”

And before I can say, “You, too,” he’s gone, has followed Maddie through the door. I stand there, staring at nothing until a kid taps me on the shoulder, asks me if I’m going to be using the foosball table much longer. I step aside.

The line at the snack bar’s still long. Instead of joining it, I walk into the hall, head for the vending machines at the far end, rooting around in my bag for loose change as I go.

The pack of Wheat Thins has just been released from its coil when I hear my name called. I turn. Standing behind me is a tall man of thirty-five or so. He’s wearing bib overalls, and his blond hair, parted in the middle and so long it touches his shoulders, is held back by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. His smile is sweet and broad, from ear to ear: Shep Howell.

Shep’s official position at Chandler might be guidance counselor, but fairy godmother is a more accurate job title for him where I’m concerned. Not only did he talk Williams out of axing me in the spring, he also convinced Ms. Sedgwick to hire me for the A/V department last week. So he’s rescued me twice in the past six months, has gone out of his way to lend a hand. And yet, the truth is, I’ve never liked being around him.

He makes me uncomfortable. At least, he used to. Shep’s one of those adults who seems never to have grown up, has kept the clear eye and pure heart of a child. Which, of course, is great. Only not to me for some reason. I guess I feel, felt, rather, developmentally stunted enough myself—a virgin at eighteen, for God’s sake, didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs!—to be put off by the quality in another. Not that I thought childlike was all there was to Shep. I knew I was missing something. Had to be. Otherwise Nica, Jamie, Maddie, and Ruben wouldn’t have given him the time of day. They did, though. And this in spite of the fact that he was a hippie, a subset of humanity they normally had no patience with, tie-dyed shirts and soybeans and the word groovy all being things they could do without. Which made me understand that he must be cool in the same way the zebra-striped Bics were cool, as in, he shouldn’t have been, but was, deeply so, only his manner of coolness wasn’t visible to me no matter how hard I looked. So, as far as I was concerned, he was just yet another thing I didn’t get, and I tried to be in his presence as little as possible to keep from having to pretend I did.

As I said, uncomfortable is how I used to feel around him. Well, still do feel, actually, though in a completely different way. When I got Shep to call the Williams dean on my behalf back in May, I was strung out on pills. I knew I was acting in bad faith—exploiting his pity for me, his affection for my sister, the guilt he felt at having been in Lewiston, Maine, at Bates College’s Jumpstart for Juniors program the weekend she died—and that seemed like a perfectly okay thing to do. When I got him to call Mrs. Sedgwick on my behalf last week, I was stone-cold sober. I knew I was again acting in bad faith, and it didn’t seem like an okay thing to do, but I was able to do it anyway because I was doing it over e-mail, no eye contact or even voice contact required. After I slept through lunch today, missed the chance to stop by his office, I’d told myself I’d get to it tomorrow. Seeing him now, though, feeling the floodgates of guilt and shame opening inside my chest, I realize that I was never going to get to it. Not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Not voluntarily.

We stand there, facing each other. I’ve been smiling back at him for so long now that the air has dried my teeth and my lips are sticking to them.

At last he says, “Miss lunch?”, pointing his chin at the Wheat Thins pack in my hand.

My “Yes” back is absurdly eager.

“On purpose or by accident?”

“The second thing. No windows in the A/V Department. Easy to lose track of time.”

“That’s right. The A/V Department’s not on the main floor. You don’t mind that you’re spending most of your day in a basement, do you?”

“I like being underground. It suits my mood,” I say, realizing a second after I say it that this could be interpreted as a complaint rather than a joke—a complaint disguised as a joke, even worse.

He nods at me seriously. “The link between emotional health and social setting has been well documented.”

I hesitate, then risk it. “Or antisocial setting, in my case.”

There’s a long silence in which he stares at me and blinks. I begin to panic: another joke he doesn’t get. He’s going to think I’m an ingrate, not to mention a bitcher and moaner. I’m about to mumble an apology, explain that I haven’t been sleeping much and it’s making me weird, not fit for human company, when a burst of laughter blows out his mouth. Then a second burst. Soon his head is thrown all the way back and he’s laughing and laughing. Finally he wipes his eyes and claps me on the shoulder. “Wow, Grace, I can’t tell you how nice it is to have another Baker on staff at Chandler.”

Pleased, I say, “Oh, well, thanks.”

“It wouldn’t feel right starting a school year without one, you know?”

I hear these words and, all of a sudden, I can’t hear anything else. A sweat breaks out under my arms, behind my knees, on the palm that holds the strap of my bag. Within seconds I’m in the middle of a full-blown flashback.

After Nica’s murder was solved and the stench of scandal grew less pronounced, the Chandler administration discovered it had another smelly problem on its hands: us, me and my parents. We drifted around campus, faces pinched and sallow, clothes billowy since we scarcely remembered to eat; and not eating enough meant we gave off an odor, the bad-breath putrid stink of bodies consuming themselves. People at school pitied us, but the pity was soon mixed with revulsion, so they looked down on us, as well. Anger was in there also, because their sense of duty obligated them to at least try to do right by us, wouldn’t let them just abandon us as they surely wanted to. I think, at bottom, they found us morbid. I can understand why. We were morbid. We were beyond morbid. We were ghouls, going about our daily routines, alive yet lifeless—sordid, unwholesome, obscene, crimes against nature.

And Chandler was stuck with us. Well, not with me. I was headed off to college. With Mom and Dad, though. Between them they’d racked up nearly forty years of service, would have to give the administration one seriously good excuse to get rid of them.

So they went ahead and did.

Mom held it together at first, arriving at the art studio on time, keeping up with her teaching responsibilities, but then she began calling in sick two, three days a week, and when she did appear, she would dismiss her classes halfway through the period. And Dad started to develop a reputation for serious weirdness. Stuff he normally did, like pounding the back of a student struggling for an answer, as if the number or equation were caught in the kid’s throat like a fishbone, would go on for too long or, worse, would turn into a hug that also went on for too long, until the kid said, “At least buy me dinner first, Mr. Baker,” or “Hey, Mr. Baker, I can’t breathe!”—something to snap him out of it. A couple of complaints were lodged and—voilà—the administration had all the ammunition it needed.

Chandler was generous in triumph, though, I’ll give the school that. Mom and Dad were each offered a severance package that included a full year’s pay, excellent references, and assistance in searching for a new position. The catch was, both had to accept or neither could. And if either did decline, both would be forced to take a one-year unpaid leave of absence. “A grief sabbatical,” it was called.

That my parents would acquiesce to Chandler’s wishes seemed a foregone conclusion. No way could they afford not to generate income for that long. Besides, a clean slate was probably just the thing for them, and for the school. It was in everybody’s best interest that they say yes.

Which, apparently, was not a compelling enough reason for my mom to do so. The fight between her and Dad over her answer was an epic battle that lasted from the day the offer was presented in mid-May to the day their response was due on the first of June, the final day of the school year. I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I was well into my drug phase at this point, and I more felt the quivering mouths and hostile glances, the barbed words and tense silences, than saw or heard them. I was on my dad’s side, of course. Not that I was much of an asset in my narcotized state. Not that I would have been much of an asset in any state. Not against my mom. She was too determined to get her own way. And I certainly wasn’t surprised when I found out that she’d won and that the severance packages had been turned down. The only surprise was that Dad had managed to hold out as long as he did.

Two days after Mom declared victory, she was gone, off to some artists’ commune. A fellowship she’d applied for at the beginning of the year had come through. Six months of room and board, plus a living stipend. It was just so typical of her. She’d made her point, her grand gesture, happy to fuck herself if she could fuck Chandler, too—who cared if she was also fucking my dad?—then ducked the consequences, left that part, the no-fun drudgery part, to him.

Shep must sense the movement of my thoughts because he suddenly turns pale. “Oh, Grace,” he says, raising a hand to his mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I say quickly.

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, I know you didn’t.” And I do know he didn’t, but he did, and I feel angry at him for it, then angry at myself for feeling angry at him. “It’s my own fault,” I say. “I have to learn to be less sensitive. It’s just”—and here my voice falters, tears sting my eyes—“the thought of my parents, of my mom, really, gets me riled up and weird.”

He starts to say something, then just nods his understanding.

“I’m not kidding,” I say. “All I have to do is think of her, and I go cross-eyed, basically.”

Softly, “Yeah, I’m sure you do. I mean, I get it, Grace.”

I drag my sleeve across my eyes, try to smile. “Of course you do. You’re a guidance counselor. You know how it is between mothers and daughters. All those petty jealousies and pent-up resentments, arguments about missed curfews and wire hangers.”

“Is that how it is between you and your mom?” he says.

I feel another kick of anger at him for not allowing me to make fun of my situation, lighten the mood, for insisting on speaking the language of the inner self at all times.

He watches me pick at a loose thread on my shirt. Then he says, “Does she know you deferred admission at Williams for a year?”

“If she knows, it’s not from me. The reason I gave the school was family emergency so maybe someone in the admissions office contacted her.”

“You haven’t heard from her then?”

My no is hard, sharp, short.

“Has your dad?”

A sullen shrug. “You’d have to ask him. We don’t really talk about her. I’m sure she’s fine, though.”

“I’m sure she is.”

Shep and I stand silent for a while, long enough for my guilt to reawaken. Why do I keep directing my anger at him? He hasn’t done anything wrong, is just trying to help. I take a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Anyway,” I say, once more attempting a smile, “what you said before isn’t true. I won’t be the only Baker on staff at Chandler this year. My dad’s bartending at the downtown Holiday Inn nights, but he’s SAT tutoring here in the afternoons.”

“Speaking of afternoons, what are you going to be doing with yours? The A/V room closes before three. You want me to put my feelers out, see if any of the coaches are looking for an assistant? I’m sure you could use the extra cash.”

“I appreciate the offer. I really do. I think I’m all right, though.”

“Okay,” he says, but I see the look of worry in his eyes.

“Honestly, I am.”

“You know best, Grace, obviously. I just feel like it might not be good for you to have too much free time on your hands, time to brood, think about things.”

“No, I mean, all right as in I’ve got a lead on a second job. Like you said, I could use the extra cash.”

That ear-to-ear smile again. “Well done, you! Jobs are tough to come by these days. Especially in Hartford.”

“I don’t have the job yet. I’m heading over there this afternoon for an interview. In fact”—I twist my neck to read the face of his watch—“if I don’t get going, I’ll be late.”

“Then I guess you better get going.”

I nod, grateful to have a legitimate, non-trumped-up excuse to end the conversation.

“Good luck,” he says, as I start off down the hall. He says something else, too, but it doesn’t make it across the growing gap between us.

I throw a wave over my shoulder. Then, pushing the bar on the door, I step outside.