The laugh stuck in my throat, though, when I flipped to the next page, the poetry section. A word about The Rag and poetry. The poems that were submitted to the magazine generally fell into one of three categories: self-loathing (eating disorders, substance abuse problems, cutting, etc.), alienation (writer feels insufficiently loved/understood/appreciated), and sexual ambivalence (self-explanatory). The poem I was looking at now fit squarely into category number three.
A Flower’s Lament
By Anonymous
I am a flower,
The kind of flower that cannot survive in the Garden of Eden.
Its soil will not nurture my roots,
Its sun will not shine on my buds.
I lie to myself about lying with him,
Tell myself that I am not feeling what I am feeling
But it is too strong,
Too strong to be denied.
He is Chaos and Desire.
I am Contradiction and Confusion.
His skin, cool and milky white,
Slides against mine, warm and Coca-Cola brown.
His body stretches up and out,
Extends with feline elegance,
His fingers in my hair,
Drawing me to him.
I bow before his Beauty,
Kneeling to receive his liquid grace.
On my tongue I swallow,
Like the wafer from my First Communion.
Jesus, He died for my Sins,
But this one’s on me.
The Cross around my neck,
A chain or a noose?
And now a word about The Rag and anonymous submissions. There’s no such thing. Not anymore. My freshman year, someone turned in an unsigned short story that had been copied off Seventeen’s website. It was accepted by the editorial board and the plagiarism wasn’t identified until the issue had already been printed and sent out to parents and alumni. Embarrassing for the school. Even more embarrassing for The Rag. To be caught stealing was bad enough, but from a teenybopper magazine? Never mind that it was the liveliest, most entertaining piece of fiction ever to grace our pages. Because the perpetrator was nameless, he/she remained at large. Since that day The Rag has instituted a strict policy: student-writers are allowed to publish anonymously, but not submit.
I remember the day “A Flower’s Lament” came up for discussion. The Rag’s board was sitting around the office, a cramped room on the top floor of Noyes, the winter issue deadline looming. The radiators were on at full blast, making the air hot and dry. At the beginning of the meeting, I’d ripped open a giant bag of off-season candy corn, thrown it on the table. Now everyone was dull-eyed and cranky, having crashed from the sugar high.
“I think it’s powerful,” Benny Quintana said. Benny, who one day last year had up and quit the Catholic Student Fellowship Club, pierced his right ear—his queer ear, as he called it—adopted a bored, lockjawy way of talking, and started wearing T-shirts with slogans like SIZE QUEEN and POWER BOTTOMS FOR JESUS, was our literary editor. He’d campaigned hard for the editor in chief position. Unsuccessfully, obviously. (I’d won less because people liked me, I think, than because people really didn’t like him.) At present he was sprawled across the ratty velour couch a former staff member had rescued from a Dumpster, languidly fanning himself with a copy of the meeting agenda I’d printed out. “I want to publish it.”
“Veto,” Ethan MacLellan, our managing editor, said.
Benny let out a theatrical sigh. “Reason? Other than that you’re pussy-whipped?”
Ethan claimed to object to the poem on the grounds that its religious imagery was heavy-handed, but, as we all knew and as Benny already alluded to, he was really objecting to it on the grounds that earlier Benny had shot down Ethan’s girlfriend’s piece about her struggles with bulimia, Benny saying that he did not need to read another first-person account of a girl finger-fucking her own throat because she didn’t get enough hugs from daddy and neither did anyone else at this school, thank you very much.
“You’ve missed the point, as usual,” Benny said, when Ethan was finished talking. “The strength of this poem isn’t in its imagery. It’s in the way it shows what it’s like for a young male to realize he has feelings that don’t fit into the heteronormative paradigm.”
“A young homosexual male, you mean,” Ethan said. He was wearing Buddy Holly glasses and a gas station attendant jumpsuit, the name BUCK stitched in script across the breast pocket.
“No, a young male. The experiences and emotions the poet’s writing about are universal and don’t deserve to be ghettoized.”
Ethan shook his head. “You gay guys, always thinking that there’s no such thing as an actual heterosexual. Just repressed homosexuals.”
“You straight guys,” Benny snapped back, “always pissing the shit out of me.”
The two traded insults for a while. Finally, I stepped in, came down on the side of Benny since I had to come down on the side of somebody, and since, I guess, I didn’t think anyone at school needed to read another first-person account of a girl finger-fucking her own throat because she didn’t get enough hugs from daddy, either.
“Benny,” I said, “will you just verify that Anonymous is actually a Chandler student? Then we can accept the poem, move on.”
“Moi?” Benny said.
“You have the submission sheet.”
“I do?” He started rifling through the papers scattered across the armrest of the couch. Picked one up, scanned it. “Ah, I do.” His laugh came out high-pitched and explosive. “Oh my God. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” I said.
“I did not see this one coming.”
“See what one coming?”
“The kind of flower that doesn’t survive in gardens but apparently just thrives in crappers.”
“Benny, what are you talking about?”
Addressing the submission sheet rather than me, “So that’s what you’ve been doing in Burroughs. I should’ve guessed. You little imp.” He smiled, shook his head. “Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow.”
“Wait,” I said, confused, “is it bathrooms this guy hangs out in or libraries?”
“A Flower’s Lament. Sammy Jay would not approve.”
Sammy who? Benny was being deliberately cryptic here, clearly wanted me to keep asking questions he wasn’t going to provide answers to. Unwilling to give him the satisfaction, I said, impatient, “You do know the poet then? He does attend this school? That’s, like, confirmed?”
“I’ve known him since we were in diapers. Didn’t know him as well as I thought I did, though, obviously.”
“Great.” I turned to the other end of the table. “Ethan, where are we on layout?”
Slowly I closed The Rag, the words, “A Flower’s Lament,” reverberating in my head. What if the poem’s title was actually a pun, the lowest form of humor, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century English essayist and critic (Imagination in the Romantic Age, Mr. Dudley, seminar, junior fall)? What if “A Flower’s” was, in fact, A. Flowers, A. as in Armando, which Manny was short for, and Flowers as in Flores?
I stood, a tunnel forming before my eyes, my ears filling with a dull roar. The magazine tumbled from my lap to the floor. Leaving it there, my bag, too, with my wallet in it, my keys, my phone, I walked straight out of the Health and Counseling Center, across campus, and into Burroughs Library. The boys’ bathroom was in the exact same spot as the girls’, one floor above. Without knocking, I opened the door, not knowing what it was I was hoping to find, only that this was where I would find it, my heart going so hard and fast and heavy I could feel it beating in my fingertips, all over my skin.
The bathroom was empty. Immaculate, too, every inch of it bright and fresh and gleaming. The walls had been repainted. The stalls, also, that or replaced. No so-and-so was heres, no for a good time calls, no dick markers or swear words. Just blankness. Naturally, I thought, it was the start of a new school year. All traces of last year
would be gone—scrubbed away, scraped off, painted over, or junked altogether—like it had never even happened. I swallowed my disappointment, moved to the sink to splash water on my face. A. Flowers was a reach, anyway, I told myself, twisting the spigot. A stupid, made-up clue, like how a crime got solved in an Agatha Christie novel, not a crime in actual life. I must’ve been out of my mind to think it meant anything, had any sort of significance to be uncovered or decoded, or that if it did I’d be the one to do it.
Raising my head, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror, thin-cheeked and big-eyed, scarred from the other dumb shit that I’d done, younger and more useless-looking than I’d even imagined. Dripping wet, too. And it was as I was turning toward the paper towel dispenser that I saw it, saw them rather, the two words: MANNY and FLORES, the FLORES only partial, up to the O, the RES blocked out by the newly installed dispenser. They were scratched into the tile wall that separated the urinal section from the washing up. Just the name, nothing else. No phone number followed or inflammatory remark. One or both of those things had likely been attached originally, but it or they were now covered by the dispenser along with the second half of FLORES.
For several seconds I stared at the writing without quite knowing what it was. Then, blinking, I reached up, pressed the dug-out letters, spindly and crooked, with the tips of my fingers, needing to feel them, make sure they were real.
My thoughts were simple and definite in my head: it was Manny’s name that I was touching; which meant that Manny was A. Flowers; which meant that Manny wrote poetry about swallowing another guy’s liquid grace; which meant that Manny was gay; which meant that Manny was not in love with my sister; which meant that Manny did not kill my sister; which meant that someone else did.
It was just as I’d connected the final shocking dot that the door flew open, and a maintenance man, walkie-talkie squawking in his belt, entered, fumbling with the fly on his heavy khaki work pants. Seeing me, he froze. And we stood there, staring at each other, both of us caught in a place we weren’t supposed to be: me in a bathroom for guys, he in a bathroom for students. I moved first, snatching three or four sheets of paper towel, hurriedly wiping off my face, then rushing past him.
I wanted to ditch the physical, go directly home, hole up in my room with what I’d just found out. I’d left my bag in the waiting area, though, right outside the doctor’s office. And when I attempted to sneak in and grab it, I nearly collided with the nurse. She was looking at me, mad-faced.
“I’ve been calling your name for the past fifteen minutes,” she said. “You better hurry up. Dr. Simons doesn’t have all day.”
I tried to respond, come up with a reason as to why I couldn’t do what she was asking, but my mind had gone fiercely, hopelessly blank, and her mad face was getting madder and madder. So finally I just gave a resigned nod. Followed her into the office.
Thirty minutes later I was listening to the door of the Chandler Health and Counseling Center click shut behind me. I stood there, blinking into the strange, half-dazed emptiness of a school during summer break, the dirty-penny taste that follows a sudden blow to the skull coating my lips and teeth and tongue. I was in shock. I knew I was in shock even if I didn’t feel like I was in shock, didn’t feel like anything at all. In the space of a single afternoon I’d discovered that Nica’s killer was out in the world somewhere, walking around, eating, talking, laughing at jokes, and that not only was I no longer a virgin, I was an expectant mother, as well.
I took a step toward the parking lot and started to sink to the ground. Not a faint or a full-on collapse, more a forgetting how to walk. And it was as I was sitting on that stoop, my teeth chattering even though the sun, metal-bright and fiercely hot, was beating down on my head, the prenatal instruction booklet Dr. Simons had thrust at me as I left his office in my hand, The Rag spilled from my bag and spread open at my feet, that I suddenly understood, made the connection between my sister and my pregnancy, between the mystery of her death and the mystery of the new life inside me.
I’d known from the beginning that something about the murder wasn’t right, that it had been solved too easily, that the explanation was too pat, senseless in a makes-perfect-sense kind of way: fringey weirdo with no friends or family kills the beautiful popular girl, kills himself. None of us close to her was even slightly implicated, bore so much as the faintest hint of responsibility. We were all off the hook. And I spent the entire miserable, lonely spring trying to pretend I didn’t know what I knew. That’s what the anti-anxiety drugs were about. Easier to lie to yourself when the link between your brain and your feelings has been chemically severed.
But the truth couldn’t be denied. Not anymore. Not with this baby growing in my stomach. It was a reminder that the past wasn’t done with me yet, that Nica wasn’t done with me yet. I thought I’d escaped both, left them behind when I moved on to college. Here they were, though, pulling me back. And the only way I could ever truly be free of them was by setting things right. What I needed to do now was find Nica’s killer, and fast. Get him behind bars or under dirt before the end of the first trimester, after which, according to Dr. Simons, termination became a lot less safe and a lot more expensive. That gave me twelve weeks since July fourth, so thirty days. If I failed to complete the task at the close of that period then I would have to forfeit my life as I knew it, keep the baby. That was my vow: make someone pay for Nica’s death or pay for it myself. No justice for her, no abortion for me.
Tick tock, tick tock.
My first break didn’t come till four days later. It was hot and sticky when I awoke that morning, and it had been tough to get out of bed. I was fighting the growing desire to give up, to accept that I was in over my head, didn’t know where to begin or what to do. Losing the fight, I reached for my cell to tell Ms. Sedgwick I couldn’t take the job after all, the one I’d applied for so I could be close to Chandler, to the scene of the crime and many of its key players. Only I was unable to get through to Burroughs even after trying for more than an hour. A voice mail that hadn’t been set up yet answered every time. Realizing the conversation would have to be in person, I groaned.
Not bothering to run a brush through my hair or across my teeth, I walked over to campus. Burroughs was open, but Ms. Sedgwick wasn’t at her desk. While I waited, I decided to stop by the boys’ bathroom, press my fingers against the name etched in the tile wall. Bask in the presence, basically, of my one piece of tangible proof. Assure myself that this whole thing was real, not a figment of my imagination. Touching MANNY FLO might, I thought, make me change my mind about quitting.
It didn’t.
I returned to the library’s main floor. Still no Ms. Sedgwick. I left a note asking her to call me, then began the trek home. At the fountain outside Houghton Gymnasium I paused to take a drink, only I couldn’t stop, drinking and drinking the ice-cold water until brain freeze set in.
As I straightened, dragging the cuff of my sleeve across my mouth, I looked. There, right smack in front of me, was Damon Cruz. He was on his back, doing bench presses, so close that if there hadn’t been a plate of glass between us, I could have reached out and wiped the sweat off his face. My eye went directly to it, the tattoo tucked away in the hollow of his arm, peeking through a blear of fine, dark hairs: a bright red heart spilling drops of even brighter red blood.
Suddenly, there’s movement inside the house I’m watching. Someone’s standing by the window in the front room. Damon. He’s raising his arm to pull down the shade. And even though there’s no need to check a thing I’ve already double-checked, triple-checked, quadruple-checked, I pick up the camera with the telephoto lens. Bringing it to my eye, I zoom in on that bleeding heart, the perfect complement to Nica’s dripping arrow.
PART THREE
Chapter Ten
It’s late. I’m on my way over to Damon’s grandmother’s house. Not to spy on him, though, as usual. He’d texted me the address while I was still at Chandler, told me to pick him up there at m
idnight. No explanation, just the order.
Fourteen days have passed since I discovered Damon was Nica’s mystery man, but I’m still no closer to knowing if he’s my mystery man, i.e. her killer. I do know a little more about him, though. His situation, anyway. The reason he isn’t at UConn now, playing beer pong in some frat house basement, feeling up a girl from his sociology class under a poster of Starry Night or Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Albert Einstein making a funny face, is because the baseball scholarship he was awarded is only partial, and with partial scholarships the amount of money given varies from year to year. So if he were to, say, ride the bench as a freshman—pretty much a definite since the average recovery period for ACL surgery is six to nine months—he’d be lucky to see a dime as a sophomore. Which is why he’s decided to sit this year out, wait until he’s fully healed before enrolling.
Not that he’s told me any of this himself. All my gleaning’s been from Renee, the chatty type, fortunately. Damon still barely talks to me. Looks at me even less. I sure look at him, though. Every night through the windows of his grandmother’s house. I don’t know what it is I’m hoping to see—him torturing small animals, building a shrine to Nica in his closet, pouring his heart out into a diary I can later steal, find a full confession in. Whatever it is, I don’t see it. His routine is the same, never changes. He and his grandmother eat dinner, move into the den after cleaning the kitchen. He does strength-training exercises as the two of them watch TV. At ten thirty, he kisses her on the cheek, goes upstairs, brushes his teeth, and it’s lights out. His grandmother seems to be the only person he spends time with besides Max and Renee. At first I think this is odd, but then I realize it couldn’t make more sense. All his friends are in college now, even U Bridgeport-bound Frankie. Apart from discovering that he prefers steak to chicken, courtroom dramas to police procedurals, Colgate to Crest, though, I’ve learned nothing.
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