Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  “So,” Silas says.

  Silas is not tall for a basketball player, but he has broad shoulders and he is strong. I have seen this when he plays. He dribbles the ball as if pummeling it. For two weeks now, Silas and I have been finding each other in places where we never noticed the other before. In a hallway after a class. Hovering by the door to the dining hall. In assembly or in the distance when he is walking with friends and I know that somehow he has spotted me, too, though he gives no sign of it. It is in his body and his posture. A sudden sense of being alert.

  Silas has smudged brown eyes and hair that won’t lie down. He wears a baseball cap except when he is actually in a school building during school hours, which is the rule. When he takes his cap off, his hair is not flat like it is with most boys: it stands up with a life of its own, and that is how I think of Silas, as someone with a life of his own.

  He looks over at me and then away. There is the question of what we will do now, with the free half hour that we have, here in his bedroom.

  I want it, and I don’t.

  He wants it, and he doesn’t.

  He asks — surprising me — if I play Boggle.

  I laugh. We have not even kissed.

  I am in a practice room at the school. The acoustics are terrible, and I don’t understand how this came to be a practice room. The ceilings are high, the windows are tall, and the walls are wood paneled, as if this might once have been a library. When I practice, you can hear what I am playing outside in the hallway, but I don’t care. When I practice, I go someplace else, and time moves at a different pace than it does when I am in math class. When I practice, I think about nothing except the music.

  I pack up my violin and open the door. Silas is standing across the hallway, leaning against the wall. He isn’t pretending to look at the canvases of student art that have been displayed, and he doesn’t look away.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says.

  He reaches forward and takes my case. I hoist my book bag over my shoulder. It’s a short walk to the dining hall, and I didn’t bring a jacket. I pick my hair up with both hands and let it fall onto my back. We both know this is a nervous gesture. Silas looks too strong to be carrying such a small case. He walks with an odd gait, his legs slightly apart. He has blemishes beneath the stubble on his chin. He still smells of Neutrogena shampoo.

  When we reach the dining hall, he stays with me in line. We sit by ourselves at a small table, and I know without even looking that his friends are watching us and making comments. I don’t really care about that, but still, I can’t eat. When we stood in line, I let them put Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes on my plate, even though I never order from the entrée counter. I don’t even like meat. When I get up for a glass of milk, my hands are shaking. I take a deep breath and close my eyes.

  This is going to be different, and I’m excited.

  We are standing against a brick wall outside the gym. I waited for Silas outside the double doors. He didn’t know I would be there, and when he saw me, he smiled. He is wet from his shower. We are kissing for the first time.

  We move along the wall until we turn a corner and are out of sight. I have been waiting for this for what seems like forever. He puts his hands at the sides of my face, and I can smell the shampoo and his soap. His breath tastes like popcorn. Our feet get in the way, and I’m not sure at first which way to bend. Silas is taller than me, but not by much. He throws his arms around me, and I am surprised by his strength. He pulls back and laughs. We are both nervous now.

  Silas laughs and kisses me again, hard this time, because we have to go and he wants me to remember the kissing.

  We break apart and make our way to the parking lot. I stand at the side of his car while he fiddles with the key. His car is old and rusted and has many dents. The upholstery smells like dogs. We don’t make any plans because we know that we have tomorrow and the day after that.

  “See you,” he says as he slips into his car.

  “See you,” I say.

  Instead of driving away, Silas gets out of the car. He comes right at me and kisses me again, in the parking lot outside the gym. There are students getting into cars, parents waiting for their kids. A coach whose name I don’t know walks by and stares at us. He has his hands in his pockets and is hunched over, but I see him smile to himself as he hurries on. I pull away for breath.

  Silas leans against his car. He wants to say something but doesn’t know how. I think that he is wondering if this is too soon. I want to tell him it is not too soon.

  “Noelle,” he says.

  I wait.

  He laughs at himself and turns around. He lightly punches the side of his car.

  I smile. It’s all so easy, so uncomplicated.

  He turns and puts his arms over my shoulders and draws me to him. He is like a furnace, burning. He doesn’t kiss me this time, just holds me.

  “See you,” he says. He gets into his car and stays there. I watch as he backs his car out, makes the turn, and leaves the parking lot. I wait for the wave. He bends down so that he can see me through the passenger-side window. I smile and wave back at him.

  I run to the dining hall, trying to decide if I will tell my friends or if I will keep this new thing to myself for a little while so that I can savor it.

  Before I reach the top of the hill, Silas calls. I fumble for my cell phone.

  “Hey,” he says to me.

  Daryl

  So, who told you it was me? They kept that out of the papers. I was glad for that. But, fuck, you tell me you’re not the press, I have to believe you. I don’t think anyone would be too interested now anyway, do you?

  Yeah, I sell the booze to the kids. So what? I got eight guys who want my job. Some kids have their own IDs and don’t need me. They buy the fakes from this guy in town, you don’t need to know his name. He gets two hundred bucks apiece. These kids, they got money comin’ out their assholes. They tell their parents they need two hundred bucks for cleats, and they got the money that afternoon. Me? That’d be my paycheck for a week.

  The kids come swaggering over to my truck like they’re not the little fags they are. Everybody knows who I am and what I do, and the kids are trying to be so street, like it’s nothing, buyin’ a case, and when I give it to them, you can see this, I don’t know, this look on their faces. Like they just scored their first pussy or something. So, yeah, I like that.

  I didn’t know any of the kids. I don’t ask names. Why would I do that? Ruin business. I don’t care who they are. It could be the fucking president’s daughter, for all I care. I sell a product. I mark it up. These kids, they’re so fucking eager to score, they pay double what you would in a package store.

  Rite of passage, buying their first case.

  I don’t see girls buying too much. It’s mostly the guys. I know the girls are drinking it, though, because I see some of them at the parties in the woods. Shit-faced. Truthfully, nothing worse than a shit-faced girl. A shit-faced guy? That can be funny. Nothing funny about a girl falling down and puking her guts out, getting it in her hair. That’s the worst, a real turnoff, when the girl gets it in her hair.

  I do a sideline in cigarettes. Don’t touch the drugs. There’s other guys you go to for that. You get caught selling booze in this town, it’s a slap on the wrist. You get caught selling drugs, town doesn’t have anything to do with it. You got to go to the county courthouse. You’re fucked.

  I been doing this five, six years now. I’m living with my dad, saving on expenses. Putting some serious money in the bank. I got some guys down in Florida want to go in together on a condo. I need eight thou for the down payment, another eight to meet expenses for the first six months or so. Get myself set up down there.

  I don’t think what I do is immoral. What’s morality got to do with it? If they didn’t get it from me, they’d just get it from someone else.

  Silas

  Your smile is sweet. I remember it the first time we met. You
don’t remember, but I do. I saw you coming across the quad. It was in the spring, there were red buds still on the trees and no one was wearing a coat. I saw you coming on the diagonal across the quad. You had no idea anyone was watching you. I saw you lift your arms, ever so slowly, like a dancer warming up. I think I was already in love with you, with the way your arms moved just ever so slightly. And then, later, I fell in love with your mouth and your smile and that little laugh you always had, a little laugh, but so real. There was never anything fake about you, you never pretended.

  If I could go back, I would erase that day, that night. I would stay home in my room and lock the door until the anger was through with me and then I could come out, and you would have been worried, I know you were already worried because I didn’t call you or answer your messages, and I’m sorry about that, too, and my mother would have been knocking on the door and the coach would have wondered where I was, but it would have been so much better than what I did, which was to start drinking even before I went to the game. It was in the fridge, the beer, and I drank it for breakfast before the game. I threw the ball into the stands. It hit that woman, and then I was gone, and then all I could think was to get as drunk as possible. And none of this is an excuse, there is no excuse, and I am so sorry that I didn’t lock myself in my room. Because you will never understand, because I cannot understand, even though I was there. I was there. I did it. But I don’t want to remember that. No, I want to cut it away from my brain. I want to go back in time, want to stop time and cut the day away. Cut the night away. Just cut it from my brain, and if only there wasn’t a tape. If only I had left. If only I hadn’t been so drunk. If only I hadn’t been so angry.

  It will hurt you, and that I can’t stand. It is that, of everything, that I can’t stand. And I can never look at you again. I can never face you. I can never see your face again.

  You moved your arms just ever so slightly, as if you might dance or twirl with the spring inside you, and I felt it, too, and I fell in love with you that day, and you never even knew.

  Mike

  Mike had first encountered Avery Academy on an afternoon when a snowstorm had lightly dusted the frozen grasses and bare trees that bordered the long drive into the campus. The clouds overhead were dispersing, and the school and its grounds were lit with that miraculous clarity that accompanies a sudden occurrence of sunshine on a gray day. It would have taken an insensitive man, Mike thought, not to be awed by the sparkle on those granite buildings, and it was difficult to regard the spectacle as anything but a good omen. As if on cue, the doors to several of the four-story edifices opened, and pods of students, wrapping their scarves around their necks but not zipping their jackets, spilled onto the lawn, amazed by their own footprints in the shallow dusting. A few attempted snowballs, and there were many chases and squeals. It was the first of a number of such scenes Mike would witness that would remind him that secondary-school students were as much children as they were adults, and that therein lay the dilemma of how to educate and parent them simultaneously. Mike was cheered by the general ebullience and by the homogeneous campus, architecturally speaking. A dozen imposing buildings were evenly spaced around a large quadrangle that was neatly crisscrossed with paved pathways. Some of the more formidable buildings had white columns set atop granite steps, while others, which he took to be dormitories, had shutters, suggesting large New England houses. Beyond the quadrangle, treed lawns sloped away from the center of campus, and through the thinning foliage, one glimpsed other similar buildings and several good houses, one of which Mike was hoping would be given to him.

  He parked his car in front of the central administration building, wondering if he should have taken the trouble to find a parking lot, since his was the only vehicle on the pristine quadrangle. He stepped briskly to the front door, wishing already to make a good impression on the trustees, who had hastily been assembled for his interview. The previous headmaster, much beloved, had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had very little time left to live, none of it available to the school. He had, in fact, already left the campus to live with his sister in Boston. It was only after the headmaster had gone that the fact that he, a tolerant man of fifty-five, was gay was openly discussed. This information was seen to be largely irrelevant by an equally tolerant faculty, though it may have induced the trustees to view Mike favorably since he had a wife and had been married for half a decade. (The phrase married for half a decade, with its suggestion of stability and harmony, hardly described the tempestuous and fragile union Meg and he had forged, but the trustees did not know that.) Mike was, if the board approved, to be hired as interim headmaster while a formal search was conducted. It was no secret that a number of the deans, Geoff Coggeshall among them, were angling for the spot — Mike had been told this over the phone — but he hoped to remain above the fray and simply do what was needed, which was to hold a slightly grieving campus together until June and to graduate as many students from the senior class as possible, given, for some, an impressive number of units, or demerits, that threatened to send them home. In addition, he was also to raise money for a campaign that had been started the year before with the goal of building a new field house and an arts complex.

  Mike had been called to the interview because he was then the dean of students at a lesser institution in Hartford, Connecticut, and it was known among some of his peers that he was unhappy with the job of policing an extremely diverse student body, most of whom were day students, in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the nation. At the school in Hartford, the gates were locked, students had to pass through metal detectors to enter buildings, and there had already been one stabbing during a rancorous soccer game with a school across town. Mike’s was a high-stress job in a high-stress school that had more in common with the public schools of New York City than it did with the collegiate atmosphere of the private schools to which he had aspired. The salaries of the faculty and deans were pitiful by most standards, forcing Meg and him to live in a neighborhood that only added to the strain. (Meg, however, thrived at the school and was one of its more popular teachers, owing to an ability to clarify even the most abstruse math for well-intentioned pupils as well as to a remarkably deft touch with students who were not.) So it was with a somewhat selfishly light step that Mike opened the door on that briefly sparkling afternoon, buoyed by the chatter of seemingly happy students and excited by the prospect of a headmastership at a bona fide private school more in keeping with his academic dreams than the one he had just left.

  First impressions are enduring ones, but Mike found that the longer they lingered, the more at odds they later seemed with the reality of the setting or the people in it. He was, for example, very taken with the reception room that was the hub for the various administrative offices that surrounded it — those of the deans, the development officers, the admissions people, and the headmaster and his assistant. The lobby resembled a living room, with a herringbone-patterned floor (once again, those peaks and Vs), fresh white paint, and a number of portraits on the walls. There were several Persian carpets and, to one side, an attractive area where a visitor might make himself a cup of coffee and select an apple or a cookie for refreshment. The effect was calculated to impress parents and potential donors, but Mike found that it impressed him as well, since the administrative offices at the school that he, feigning illness, had left earlier that day had iron webbing across their windows to protect them from vandals.

  However, even at Avery, where Mike initially felt cosseted, he would discover over time that the carpets were not true Persians but rather cheap reproductions; that they were, in addition, stained with blots of spilled coffee and something that could only have been axle grease; that the cookies — the same as were mass-produced by the dining hall chefs — often lingered untouched on their plates for days, causing Mike to wonder if they oughtn’t be dusted; and that the portraits on the walls, which had at first seemed so venerable, were in fact of benefactors and no
t of headmasters. (In years to come, Mike would develop a sharp, unyielding antipathy to a chinless man depicted in one of those oils, a financier and trustee of the school for most of his term who spoke to Mike, even in front of his colleagues, as he might to one of his many underlings at his Wall Street firm. Mike particularly disliked the phrase Do it now, which the man seemed to think he had coined and trademarked.)

  Mike’s first impression of Mrs. Gorzynski (shortly to become Kasia to him) proved his point. She glanced up at Mike as he crossed the wide expanse of polished floor, and even as he was trying to impress her, he was thinking, Glasses, thick in the waist, permed hair. He then formed the image matronly, when in fact nothing could have been farther from the truth. Mrs. Gorzynski, Mike was to discover, had been married three times and was possessed of an earthy wit and throaty laugh that suggested a varied and rich sexual history. Sarah Grace, Mike’s colleague in admissions, could speak volumes on the issue of deceptive first impressions and often did, recounting how the most promising and clear-eyed of young men might turn out to be the one procuring alcohol for younger students or how the sweetest-seeming girl might become the one who was downloading term papers at a considerable profit to herself.

  Mrs. Gorzynski asked Mike to sit a minute. She offered him coffee and cookies, all of which he declined, since nibbling on a cookie while he shook hands with trustees could hardly be viewed favorably. He was nervous, but he was something of a fatalist as well, and he knew that even if he didn’t get the position, he would have enjoyed the excursion to an especially beautiful sector of Vermont and that he’d at least have had a day off from a job he both feared and loathed. In addition, the few minutes of first impressions would have fed his imagination and produced a new gloss on an old fantasy. Perhaps it would spur him to actively seek another post.