The Tragedy of Dane Riley

by Kat Spears

  She sets aside the book she’s reading when I walk into the classroom. “Hello, Dane. Thanks for coming.”

  “Am I in some kind of trouble?” I ask.

  “No. Take a seat.”

  I obey, taking a seat right in front of her desk.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your final grade. What grade do you think you should get for the year?”

  “If I’m being honest? Maybe a D.”

  She nods. “I agree with you.”

  “Is that it? That’s why you wanted me to come by?” I ask.

  “No. I agree with you that based on your work and effort, you deserve a D for the year. Do you know what that would mean?”

  I’m unsure if this is a trick question, so I just shake my head.

  “It would mean that you don’t graduate. You need at least a C in Civics and English to graduate. It would mean summer school. That is, if you want to graduate. Do you?”

  “I don’t know. This whole time, I thought I didn’t really care about school. Didn’t care about my future. But lately, I’ve been thinking, I’m pretty sure I didn’t believe I could graduate. And, even if I did, what’s the point? I can’t decide what I want to do, where to go.”

  “You don’t have to figure that out right away. You could start by taking a few classes at the community college. Find out if anything interests you. Or maybe study a skilled trade. Maybe you’d like a job that involves working with your hands. The point is, you don’t have to know right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I figured your performance in your other classes was about the same as it was in my class.” Her smile is almost apologetic as she says, “After talking to your other teachers, I know that assumption was correct.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and blow out a sigh, “I’m pretty much a straight-D student.”

  “I was a lot like you in high school. Actually, I was a Goth—wore a lot of black clothes and makeup, smoked clove cigarettes, listened to the Cure a lot.…” She kind of drifts off then, looking into the middle distance as she’s lost in her memories of a misspent youth.

  “I’m not really into the Cure,” I say. “I used to like the Smiths but I don’t listen to them anymore. Did you know Morrissey is a racist?”

  “I had no idea. That’s disappointing. Anyway, I didn’t bring you here to talk about eighties music. I asked you to come see me today so I could tell you that I’m going to give you a B as your final grade for the semester.”

  “Really? Why would you do that?”

  “Because I think once you leave this place, get out into the world, you’ll find something to make you happy and productive. I think keeping you here, for summer school or to repeat the senior year, would be a mistake. I’ve spoken to some of your other teachers—most important, your Civics teacher—and I’ve asked them to consider giving you the same chance. I can’t make any promises, but … we’ll see.”

  “That’s nice of you, I guess. I don’t understand why, though.”

  “You don’t have to understand. Just say thank you and don’t screw up the chance I’m giving you.”

  “Thank you,” I say obediently.

  “Now, get out of here before you say something to make me change my mind.”

  * * *

  The Parent Teacher Student Association is hosting a graduation event, a fact I hadn’t cared about before today. I never had plans to attend my own graduation. The event is supposed to include parents and teachers for the early part of the evening, then switch to a students-only party that will go until dawn.

  I think the theory is that if parents provided an all-night party, it would minimize the potential for students to engage in risky behavior. This theory is, of course, ridiculous. Anyone looking for opportunities to destroy their future will find a way.

  Ophelia is going to the graduation party and asked me if I would be there. I said maybe, while thinking no.

  In my imagination I am crashing the graduation party. I’ll walk into the room and the needle will scratch off the record and everyone will stop and stare at me, standing in the entrance, all of them thinking I’m a madman. But that isn’t what happens.

  When I get to the party it’s early enough that there is still a big crowd of people, parents and teachers and the entire graduating class. No one really seems to notice my arrival. The principal is up on the stage, talking into a microphone, and there’s occasional applause as the principal hands out some awards to people—parents for their volunteer contributions and a teacher who was voted everybody’s favorite. I see Ms. Guinn, standing off in a corner watching the presentation, and I see Eric, hanging out with his posse of douchebags. Mom and Chuck are here, too, chaperoning the event, and Eric is only allowed to stay as late as they do.

  Now it’s Eric’s turn to be angry and resentful toward Mom and Chuck as they have put restrictions on his freedoms. I know from what I have overheard around school that Eric’s friends all have hotel rooms for tonight, where they will go to drink and party until dawn.

  Eric is angry about having to miss all of the fun, and he blames me for the trouble he is in.

  I walk through the crowd, looking for Ophelia. Finally, I find her. I hadn’t seen her before because she’s standing next to the steps that lead to the stage, waiting for the principal to call her up to accept an award. I don’t hear the principal’s words or what award Ophelia is getting.

  I reach the front of the room right as Ophelia climbs onto the stage and walks over to the podium to accept her award. The principal gives her a hug, which surprises me. I never could have imagined having a relationship like that with an authority figure, especially an authority figure from school.

  Just as Ophelia takes her award and gives a wave to the applauding crowd, she looks down and sees me near the front of the room. Her expression shifts from surprise to a smile and she hurries to leave the spotlight. She arrives at my side slightly out of breath, a question in her gaze. She hugs me, and the people around us are watching with interest.

  “Where have you been?” Ophelia asks me as she takes my hand and pulls me to the edge of the room.

  “I was going to stay away. Let you have your night. This might be the last time you see most of these people.”

  “I don’t care about any of these people. The only person I care about is you.”

  “Okay,” I say. “You want to get out of here? Maybe talk about it someplace else?”

  “Yes. Definitely,” Ophelia says. “It’s our last night.”

  “I know,” I say. “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

  * * *

  We decide to go down to the park. At our age, there is no other place we can be alone, be completely free to say and do what we want.

  Down at the park we pull a picnic table out to the edge of the pavilion, as far as the chain that holds it in place will allow us, as if there was a real risk someone might come down to the park to steal a five-hundred-pound picnic table with a steel base. We stand on the table so we can climb onto the roof of the pavilion and stretch out under the stars. We are lying on asphalt shingle, and it feels like sandpaper catching against our clothes. The roof of the pavilion has a low pitch, so that lying on our backs the surface feels almost flat, like lying on a mattress covered in fine gravel.

  No one would choose a mattress covered in gravel, but it is the bed I share with the girl I want to hold, so it’s okay.

  Ophelia takes up a comfort position, her head resting on my chest, her weight pressing my arm into the rough surface beneath us. I don’t mind. The softness of her body against mine outweighs the discomfort of the asphalt shingle, and I open my mind to the expanse of the universe that blankets us.

  The moon is half lit, and I contemplate the dark half, dimly visible if I focus on it.

  “My dad,” I say, “used to tell me, ‘I love you the way the moon loves the sun.’ He said that all the time.”

  “That’s lovely,” Ophelia
says. Her voice sounds sleepy, but, as if to reassure me she is really listening, she shifts her head against my shoulder. “What does that mean?”

  “My dad always said the moon is just a rock. Cold and dark, no light of its own. The moon loves the sun because the sun makes the moon beautiful. Shines on it to give it warmth. Lights it up so that the people on earth worship its beauty. He always said I was his sun. I mean, sun, like S-U-N. I was his son, his boy, but I was also his sun. Because I was the thing that made him shine, made him something other than a cold, dark rock.” My voice catches on this last part and there is no way Ophelia doesn’t notice. I am close to crying, the way I always am when I think about my dad. The two biggest objects known to man, the moon and the sun, and I can’t think about either one of them without thinking about my dad, without wanting to cry. “I haven’t been anybody’s sun since my dad died,” I say, and my throat aches with restrained sobs.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t really know him,” Ophelia says. “Sounds like he was really romantic.”

  I appreciate that she has something to say like that. That she was sorry not to have known my dad. Rather than just saying she was sorry for me that he is gone.

  “I guess. Yeah, I suppose he was romantic. A lot more romantic than my mom. She doesn’t believe in true love.”

  “Well, you can be my sun. I mean, like the star at the center of our galaxy. Not my kid. That would be creepy and weird. You know, I remember when I just accepted the fact that my mom was never going to really be there for me. She was never going to live up to my expectations for what a mom should be. It was like a gut punch—took everything right out of me.”

  “And now?”

  “And now I’m used to it. I won’t say I’ve accepted it. Maybe I never will. But I’ve stopped hoping for a different outcome. No expectations means no disappointments, right?”

  “Right. But someone like you—you should be allowed to have expectations. You’re smart and you’re going to do awesome things with your life. It must be exciting for you, leaving to go away to school,” I say, testing how much it hurts to think about her being gone.

  “Exciting. Scary. The great big ‘what if.’ I don’t think I’m so smart. I just work hard.”

  “You are smart,” I say as I turn my head to deposit a kiss somewhere on her head and getting a big mouthful of hair. “Smartest person I know.”

  “You’re pretty smart, too,” Ophelia says, “when you aren’t saying something dumb.”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about tonight,” I say.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been thinking I’m going to miss having you as my girlfriend.”

  “I suppose we didn’t really think it through, deciding to just end it at graduation. It seemed so far away when we started talking about it.”

  “And now it’s here. But, I’ve been thinking, you know, can I really love you? Love you the way someone should love you, when I have this giant hole in my heart? Being in love, it’s like … standing at the edge of a cliff, deciding to jump off holding hands. Like that movie with those two women who drive off the cliff together.”

  “Thelma and Louise.”

  “That’s their names?”

  “That’s the name of the movie. And their names.”

  “Yeah. Like Thelma and Louise. You stare off into the abyss and decide, ‘I’m going to do it, I’m going to jump.’”

  “And it’s going to hurt a lot when you land,” Ophelia says, finishing my thought.

  “Yeah.”

  We’re both quiet for a minute, maybe thinking about what Thelma and Louise ended up with at the bottom of the cliff.

  “Is that what you think?” Ophelia asks me. She props herself up on one elbow to look right into my face. “You think you’re in love with me?”

  I study the side of her face that is illuminated by the streetlight from the parking lot. I look at the lines of her cheekbone and the side of her nose.

  “I think you’re like a goddess,” I say. “I don’t believe in a god, but I worship you. I could be the founder of a religion with you as the goddess. That’s how amazing I think you are.”

  “I suppose it’s easier to say ‘I love you’ than to say that,” Ophelia says as she puts her head back on my shoulder, flipping her hair out of the way as she lands. “I wish we had a blanket. I could go to sleep out here.”

  “Yeah,” I say as I take a deep breath and push out a lungful of air. “Let’s pretend like we can just stay here forever. We never need a job, or money, or a roof over our heads. We can just stay here and be comfortable forever.”

  “Until we have to go to the bathroom,” Ophelia says.

  Maybe she’s not as romantic as she likes to think she is.

  “Until then, I guess,” I agree.

  “I don’t want to go to sleep. Once we go to sleep, that’s it. Tomorrow is graduation.”

  “Let’s go back to my house,” I say. “We can hang out in my room where it’s more comfortable.”

  “I think we should go out to a twenty-four-hour place to eat first. Our last night ends when we go to sleep. I want to stay up for as long as possible.”

  “I want to stay up all night,” I say. “I want to hold you for as long as I can.”

  ACT V

  WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE, BUT KNOW NOT WHAT WE MAY BE

  If you knew you were going to die at the age of seventeen, it would impact every decision you made—who you dated; if you tried to be a better person; whether you told the people you loved that they are important. Probably you wouldn’t worry about whether you were popular or not, and you wouldn’t care about tools like Eric. People like that would be insignificant.

  You definitely wouldn’t worry about grades, or whether you were going to college.

  But if you didn’t have the luxury of knowing ahead of time when you were going to die, maybe you’d keep a part-time job in a grocery store and go to classes at the local community college until you figured out what you wanted to do. And if you never figured it out, well, that’s fine, too. There’s lot of people who live to be forty-seven or sixty-seven and they haven’t figured it out, either.

  The sun is shining and I am uncomfortably warm in my graduation gown. The gown and hat are black. The girls are dressed in red, making the graduating class of McLean High School look like a checkerboard of chaos.

  The commencement speech, by some politician whose kid goes to McLean High School, is probably only about fifteen minutes long, but it feels like forever. I’m not the only one who feels that way. People are shifting in their seats, murmuring to each other.

  Now, as class valedictorian, it’s Ophelia’s turn to get up and speak. I have given up many golden hours of time with Ophelia over the past few weeks as she has prepared her speech for graduation. I resented it at the time, but now I am glad she is the kind of person who takes time to prepare. I feel my face flush in sympathetic embarrassment for her, every molecule of my body hoping that she doesn’t make a fool of herself onstage.

  Ophelia is tall, her back erect, and her black hair is stunning against the dark red of her graduation robe. Her hair is loose, hanging in a perfect halo of ringlets under her graduation cap. Even from my seat in the sixth row, the softness of her brown eyes gets to me the way it always does. She’s not awkward or scared, and just pauses for a moment, using the same tactic teachers do to get a restless class to settle.

  As I look at her up at the podium, I feel the same sense of reverent awe that I always feel when I look at her. But now I feel a sense of pride, too. I’m proud that this girl was my girlfriend, if only for a little while. It means that there is something worth liking about me. Even, maybe, something worth loving.

  “I had a speech prepared for today.” Ophelia’s voice is strong, the first words of her speech perfectly clear. Her mouth twists into a conspiratorial smile as she gives the impression, like she always does, that maybe she’s in on some kind of joke the rest of us just don’t get. “I spent a lot of time
writing it, and rewriting it, and I had it just the way I wanted it. I always like to be prepared, to know exactly what the outcome of anything will be, so I had planned my speech carefully for today. And then, a few days ago, I threw out that speech and wrote something else.

  “It was hard for me, because I don’t like surprise endings. I want movies to end with a kiss, the heroine riding off into the sunset, the good guys winning the fight, and the bad guys getting what they have coming to them. I want only happy endings.” From the corner of my eye I catch Eric, seated a few rows ahead with others who have names earlier in the alphabet, chuckling, turning in his seat to give a couple of his friends a knowing look at Ophelia’s use of the phrase “happy endings,” but Ophelia is oblivious to it. It is a reminder that education, even the most privileged kind, does not necessarily lead to enlightenment.

  “A friend of mine once said to me,” Ophelia continues, her eyes searching for me in the crowd, “that everything ends—and usually things end badly. At the time I agreed with that. When we think about endings, often it is something bad—the end of a fun experience; the end of a relationship; the end of a life.”

  Ophelia’s gaze leaves mine as she moves on to captivate other people with her direct stare. “But I feel differently now. I think I’ve figured out the secret to a happy life,” she says, and she says it in a way that makes everyone want to be in on the secret with her. “Maybe tomorrow the idea will seem trite, but today, I know the meaning of life.” She leans back from the podium a little and looks around the audience. Then she comes back into the microphone to say, “Do you want me to tell you the meaning of life?” She waits again, waits to see that her audience is engaged, that they really are waiting to hear the meaning of life. I know I am.

  “The secret is, you can’t think of life as a series of beginnings and endings. We think about it that way because we begin with birth, and end with death. But life isn’t about beginnings and endings. Today, our graduation day, can be looked at as an ending. The end of high school, the end of important friendships, the end of relationships with some teachers we love, and some we don’t. For some it is the end of incarceration in the halls and classrooms of our school. It’s the end of a lot of things.