Shades of Simon Gray

by Joyce McDonald

  Simon knew Devin and Kyle had been together since their freshman year. Everyone in the school knew that. He knew he didn’t stand a chance with her, knew she was probably asking him to dance because Kyle had told her to, knew he should have felt humiliated, outraged at Kyle. Instead, he found himself overwhelmed with gratitude. Glad for any crumbs Devin and Kyle wanted to toss his way. Until that moment he had believed that no matter how bad things got at school—the body slamming, the food dumped on his head at lunch, the jocks tripping him in the halls between classes—he always had his dignity, his self-respect. He was, and always would be, his own person.

  Until Devin McCafferty laid her milk-white hand on his arm.

  By the end of that night he had agreed to help Kyle and the others with their “project,” the project they had begun in their sophomore year with Walter Tate as their stooge, their computer geek. Had Devin put her hand on Walter’s arm, too? Asked him to dance? And even if she had, would it have made any difference?

  After the night of the party, Simon became Walter’s replacement. It had nothing to do with Kyle’s smooth voice, assuring him that none of them were doing anything anyone else wasn’t doing, although the means might be different. Nor did it have anything to do with Kyle’s insistence that nobody got ahead in life without cheating at least some of the time, or with his rationale for how—things being so competitive these days and knowing that your competition was probably cheating—you had to do it just to keep up.

  Simon had heard it all before. He hadn’t bought it when other kids used these arguments as justification for cheating and he wasn’t about to buy it now. Besides, he was only half listening. How could he concentrate with Devin sitting on the arm of his redwood chair, across from Kyle on the Fishers’ deck, the toes of one delicate bare foot pressed against the wood boards for support, the other foot, still in its open-backed sandal, swinging back and forth, her bare arm brushing against his own?

  The music from down the hall had stopped. There were only the sounds of the wind and the brittle branches beating on the window of his room. Simon wondered what he would do if he could go back in time, change everything that had happened that year. And without a moment’s hesitation he knew he would do it all over again. He would do it for the same reason, the only reason, he’d done it the first time—for Devin.

  The freak snowstorm barreled through at a ferocious speed, knocking the wind right out of everything in its path—people, animals, and budding plants. Winter had returned for one last stand. One day the temperature reaches eighty-nine degrees and you’re baking on the lounge chair in your backyard, oiled all over with Coppertone. The next day you’re slathering Vaseline Intensive Care all over your face to protect it from the stinging sleet and wind while you scrape off the windshield of your car. One minute you’re digging out tank tops from the bottom dresser drawer where you stashed them last September and packing away wool sweaters, and the next thing you know icicles are dangling from the eaves of the roof. While the magnolia’s fragile buds shiver in the bitter wind, daffodils are dashed to the ground beneath heavy wet snow. Already the flowers on the plum trees are turning brown. And mushy flowers from the forsythia ooze like butter between your thumb and forefinger.

  The residents of Bellehaven stood on their front stoops, snow shovels in hand, or in front of their garages, filling their snowblowers with gasoline, and shook their heads. They stared out at the scene, numbed by Nature’s savage betrayal.

  Liz Shapiro could have cared less. She welcomed the weight of wet snow on her shovel as she slowly made her way down the front walk. Each heavy load stretched her muscles to the limit, straining her chest, pulling at her heart, making the other ache, the one deep inside, seem momentarily bearable.

  The sharp glare of sun on snow helped to blur images of Simon hooked up to a tangle of tubes that would keep him alive until he was ready to come back to her. Courtney hadn’t spared a single detail when she described his condition to her two days before. And now Liz couldn’t get these disturbing pictures out of her mind. She hoped Simon, in his coma, couldn’t feel pain.

  She looked over at the magnolia. Only an hour earlier her mother, bundled into her plaid flannel robe, had stood by the window with a mug of coffee in her hand, while tears of disappointment streamed down her cheeks at the sight of the snow-covered tree. She had waited weeks for the blossoms to open. Now that wasn’t going to happen. The next day or the day after that, the buds would turn brown, then crispy, like so many ugly cocoons. Nothing would burst forth from them. No lovely pink-white blossoms. Not now. Liz had seen this happen before, buds tricked by days of warm sunlight into almost blooming, only to be stunned, stunted, destroyed by a heavy biting spring frost. A horrible, cruel joke.

  Liz had finished the front walk and was working on the sidewalk when she spotted Devin McCafferty heading toward her, her jacket unzipped and billowing in the wind, her head hatless, her red hair blowing every which way as she tried to keep her balance on platform boots that weren’t made for snow.

  Devin stopped a few feet away and patiently waited for Liz to shovel the last few feet of the sidewalk.

  Liz couldn’t imagine what Devin was doing here. It wasn’t like they hung out together, although sometimes Liz tagged along with Simon when he went to a game with Kyle and his friends. Once she had even gone with them to a party, but she’d left early because she’d felt disconcertingly invisible.

  She didn’t even like Devin, particularly. She had seen the way Simon looked at her whenever they were all together. It killed her to admit it, but Simon was in love with Devin. And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  “We went to see him,” Devin told her when Liz finally stopped shoveling. “Last night.”

  Liz knew she was talking about Simon. “In this blizzard?”

  “It wasn’t snowing when we left for the hospital.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Kyle and I, of course.”

  “How did you get into the ICU? I thought only immediate family could visit patients in there.”

  Devin breathed an impatient sigh. “We sneaked in.”

  “Why?” Liz leaned her weight on the snow shovel as if she expected it to hold her up. She was so jealous she felt physically sick.

  “Well, to see how he’s doing. Why else?” Devin looked away. She pretended to be watching the windows of Liz’s house. “We only had a few minutes with him before we got caught.”

  Liz wished she had tried to sneak in to see Simon last Monday, instead of letting his father send her home.

  “He looked bad. I mean, really bad.” Devin kicked at a small unshoveled clump of snow with the toe of her boot. “They shaved part of his head, and he’s got these bandages … and there are all these tubes and machines …” Her voice trailed off.

  Liz felt something icy in the pit of her stomach. It was obvious Devin was expecting the worst. Liz could see it in her face. Devin didn’t think Simon was going to make it.

  Being superstitious, Liz wanted to grab Devin and shake her, tell her even thinking such a horrible thing might be bad luck. Instead, she stared down at her boots, uncertain what to do next. She had finished shoveling the walk and wanted to go back in the house, crash on the couch with a bag of potato chips, and watch the soaps all afternoon, although she knew she should spend the day working on her history paper for Mrs. Rosen. The deadline was a week from Friday.

  She couldn’t figure out what Devin was doing there and was beginning to wonder if maybe she had something more to say, since it didn’t look as if she was in any hurry to leave.

  From overhead the crows, balanced on snowy branches, cocked their heads as if straining to hear what the girls would say next. One of them broke ranks and swooped toward a snowbank by the street, picked up a soggy red twist-tie in its beak, then lifted back into the air when it suddenly spotted Devin’s red hair blowing in all directions. Before either girl saw it coming, the bird dropped the twist-tie and dove straight for Devin
’s hair, sending her into fits of hysteria.

  She plunged her black leather boots into the snowy front yard, flailing her arms over her head and shrieking. Liz, a few feet behind her, swatted at the bird with the snow shovel, missing it only by inches, until the crow finally gave up, retrieved the twist-tie, and headed for the nearest tree.

  “God, it’s like being in that old Hitchcock movie. They’re getting worse every day.” Devin headed up the front steps and grabbed the door handle, even though she hadn’t been invited in. “And nobody’s doing anything about them. Like, you’d think they were an endangered species or something, instead of maniacs with feathers and a license to attack on sight.”

  Liz didn’t say a word. She let Devin walk right into her house because she couldn’t think of any reason not to.

  Once inside, Devin blinked and looked around awkwardly, as if she had just realized she’d barged right into someone’s home without being asked. “I wanted to get away from that kamikaze bird, is all.” She gave Liz an embarrassed, apologetic look. “I’ll leave in a minute.”

  Mrs. Shapiro was standing at the end of the hall in the doorway leading to the kitchen. She was still wearing her flannel robe. Strands of her dark shoulder-length hair had escaped the claw clip. She glanced up from the pages of a manuscript she held in her hand and sized up Devin.

  Liz was embarrassed, as much for her mother as for herself, although she was used to her mother working in her bathrobe, sometimes until late afternoon if she was in the middle of a book. “This is Devin,” she said awkwardly. “From school.”

  Mrs. Shapiro smiled at Devin, nodded, then shifted her gaze to Liz. “You’re going to shovel the back walk, too, right? I wouldn’t ask if your dad wasn’t in Zürich.” Mr. Shapiro, a chemist at the pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of town, had left for a conference in Switzerland the weekend before.

  Devin said, “Guess I’d better go.” She clamped her hand around the front doorknob but didn’t make any effort to turn it. Without looking at Liz, she mumbled to the door, “You want to go to the mall or something?”

  Liz wasn’t sure she’d heard her right. Was Devin McCafferty asking if she wanted to hang out at the mall with her? With more than a half foot of snow outside, trees black with crows, and now this latest paradox, Liz was beginning to think she might have awakened in a parallel universe that morning.

  “Well?” Devin turned the knob and opened the door.

  Liz knew if she stayed home her mother would probably find all sorts of chores for her to do. If not, she still had to face that history paper on Jessup Wildemere. “I’ll shovel the other walk when I get back from the mall,” she called over her shoulder and headed out the door before her mother could object.

  As soon as they were outside, Devin said, “So can you get your mom’s car?”

  “You’re kidding. You heard her. I’m supposed to be shoveling the back walk. Can’t you get a car?”

  Devin shook her head. “My mom went in to work today. I’m supposed to be watching the other kids.” When Liz stared back at her, Devin shrugged. “I got tired of wiping jelly fingerprints off the TV screen.”

  “So, what? They’re home alone?”

  “My sister Katy’s watching them. She’s almost fifteen. She can handle it.” Devin stood at the end of the front walk, shivering, her bare hands stuffed in her jacket pockets.

  Liz looked up at Devin’s face. She shaded her eyes with her hand to keep the glare of the sun on the snow from blinding her. She knew Devin had other friends she could go to the mall with. Friends with cars. She wondered if maybe Devin needed to talk to someone about Simon, someone who knew him better than anyone.

  A car zipped by, spraying slush from the road onto the sidewalk; wet chunks of dirty snow clung to the bottoms of their jeans. But neither girl seemed to notice. Devin looked up and down the street before she said, her voice low, “I guess we take the bus, then.”

  Danny chugged the last of his birch beer and pushed his half-eaten hot dog and fries to the side. He and Kyle had spent the morning in Mr. Giannetti’s Jeep plowing driveways for extra cash. Danny had bought the secondhand plow himself the year before, and it had more than paid for itself. When it looked as if they weren’t going to drum up any more business, they stopped at Hot Dog Dottie’s out on Route 40 to get something to eat.

  Danny had spent most of the morning obsessing over what they’d do if the police found something on Simon’s computer. “You’re getting your shorts in a knot over nothing,” Kyle told him. “Simon’s too smart to leave any evidence lying around. And if they do find something, it’s Simon who’s going down.”

  “Unless he talks.”

  “How’s he going to do that?” Kyle, who had polished off all his French fries, took a couple from Danny’s plate. “He’s in a coma. Nobody’s going to try and prosecute some kid at death’s door.” He grinned, biting into the fries. “It’d look bad, especially in an election year. Public sympathy counts in the polls. Look at my uncle Jim; he’s on the town council. He doesn’t make a move unless the mayor gives him a green light. And the mayor doesn’t do anything that’s not going to get him reelected.”

  Danny sighed and looked away. He stared out the front window of Dottie’s place at the steep mounds of snow framing the parking lot. Crows were waddling back and forth along the tops, keeping a precarious balance.

  When he was maybe four or five years old, he used to pretend the mounds left by the plows were snow-covered mountains to be conquered. He’d dig little footholds, making his way carefully to the top.

  “He could come out of the coma any day, any minute, for that matter,” Danny said.

  Earlier that morning, as they plowed the Lehmans’ driveway, Kyle had told Danny about how he and Devin had sneaked into Simon’s room the night before. Now he looked over at Danny and shook his head. “You wouldn’t think so if you’d seen him last night.”

  Danny considered this. Was Kyle saying that Simon wasn’t going to recover? It wasn’t that this thought hadn’t occurred to him before. He just preferred not to think about it. “You know, even if Simon does come out of the coma and the cops grill him, I don’t think he’ll talk,” he told Kyle. Danny desperately needed to convince himself that this was true. Simon considered them his friends. He was the kind of guy who would take the blame for all of them if it came down to it.

  “You about done with that thing?” Kyle said. He pointed to Danny’s hot dog. “I’ve got to get home and study for a math test tomorrow.”

  Danny picked up the half-eaten hot dog, decided he wasn’t hungry, and dropped it back on the plate. “Study?”

  “We’re on our own right now, remember?” Kyle stood and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. “If my grades slip, I can forget Harvard.”

  Danny nodded and followed Kyle out the door, although he didn’t see what Kyle was worried about. Even with “the project,” Kyle studied hard; he had top scores on his SATs. He would probably have gotten into Harvard without Simon’s help. He just wasn’t taking any chances. Danny was beginning to feel a little queasy about this college business himself. If he didn’t keep his grades up through the rest of the year, there was a good chance the admissions directors at Dartmouth would change their minds.

  Recently, he had begun to wonder what he would do when he got to Dartmouth. Because once he was there, once classes started in the fall, there wouldn’t be any Simon Gray to steal passwords to help him get into the system, to help him get copies of exams in advance.

  If he thought about this for too long he would begin to panic. Instead, he told himself there would be other Simons, probably a whole bunch of computer geeks just ripe for the picking. If you pushed all the right buttons—and he’d watched Kyle do that for three years now, first with Walter, then Simon—you could get them to show off what they could do.

  One of the crows lifted off a mound of snow and landed on the hood of Danny’s Jeep. It paraded back and forth in front of the windshield. He l
eaned out the window and shouted, “Stupid-ass bird. You scratch the paint on my dad’s Jeep and you’re history.” When the bird continued to pace, Danny jumped out of the Jeep and swatted it so hard it landed in a snowbank, stunned but still breathing.

  He turned to look at Kyle, who was staring through the windshield at the crow. “We can’t leave everything to chance,” Kyle told him.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning if Simon comes out of that coma, we can’t just assume he won’t talk. We should have a plan, in case things don’t go our way.”

  Danny turned the key in the ignition but made no attempt to back out of the parking space. “What kind of plan?” Judging by the expression on Kyle’s face, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted an answer to this question. But Kyle only shrugged and turned his face away to look out the side window. All he said was “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  DEVIN HELD UP A LIME GREEN SWEATER FOR LIZ’S consideration. After walking the mile to Route 40 and catching the bus to the mall, they were rummaging through one of the sales tables at the Gap. Devin couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she’d asked Liz to go to the mall. It wasn’t like they were friends or anything. Vaguely, she wondered if it had something to do with Simon, then pushed the thought to the back of her mind.

  “The color’s not bad,” Liz told her. “For you, anyway.”

  Devin didn’t miss Liz’s indifference. What was she doing asking Liz Shapiro, of all people, for her opinion on clothes? The girl hardly ever wore anything that wasn’t black, except for blue jeans once in a while. Devin doubted Liz had any color sense at all. And it was obvious shopping was the last thing on Liz’s mind. Devin felt the same way. She was just killing time until … what? Until the police found hard evidence on Simon’s computer or one of the computers at school? Until she and the others were caught and forced into a confession? Until one of them cracked and they all turned themselves in? She tried not to laugh at this last image. It was so B-movie melodramatic.