The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  “Anyway,” Mary Ann continued, “one day last year toward the end of first semester, somebody destroyed the Prisom Artifacts.”

  The Prisom Artifacts was a collection of memorabilia preserved from the early days of the school: time-glazed portraits of Mariana, Charles, and Henry Prisom; sepia photographs of the school’s first class, twenty-five stern-eyed boys, their hair slicked, their mouths unsmiling; the Prisom cup, a crystal goblet engraved with the school’s motto—Brotherhood, Truth, and Equality for All—that was symbolically bestowed upon the head of the Community Council each year; and an original copy of the Community Code booklet, bearing Charles Prisom’s signature. These were kept in a glass display case in the lobby. Or had been. Only now did I realize that the display was gone.

  “The case was toppled, the goblet smashed, the pictures shredded to pieces, and the Community Code booklet burned.” Mary Ann shook her head. “Then a few days later a Devil’s Advocate appeared with photographs of Matt Sheridan trashing the stuff.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What happened?”

  “We think Sheridan just snapped. Too much pressure, I guess. He left school and took the rest of the year off. We heard he had a breakdown. I think he’s now at the Melville School.”

  “Talk about a downgrade,” Bill McCaffrey said. I looked at Bill and his mustache, and my chest welled with antipathy. With a father like that, no wonder Peter walked around like he was constantly ducking for cover.

  “Mary, tell them about the girls in the library,” Rayburn said.

  Mary Ann sighed. “Well, I overheard some girls gossiping a few weeks ago.” She lowered her voice so Peter wouldn’t hear her in the kitchen. “They seemed to think that Matt Sheridan was forced to destroy the Prisom Artifacts. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.” She paused. “Did you find the club soda?” she called to her nephew.

  “Yes.” Peter’s voice sounded like it was coming from just behind the door.

  “So, Jonah,” Rayburn said, folding his hands on the table, “what’s your take?”

  The adult in me wanted to believe that these rumors were outrageous, but the child in me knew otherwise. “Actually, I’d like to know why some of our students are stressed to the point of meltdown and why others feel so marginalized that they’ve taken up vigilante justice as an extracurricular activity.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the table. I hadn’t meant to sound so defensive. I glanced at the pillaged side dishes and the bones sticking out from the turkey carcass, and began to feel ill. Peter returned with the club soda.

  “Don’t worry,” Jamie said, and tousled her brother’s hair. “Dad’s disappointed that there’s no grand conspiracy happening at school. Other than that, you didn’t miss much.”

  Peter smiled at his sister like she was his only friend in the world. Had I ever smiled at Justin like that? I combed my brain for a memory, just one carefree, uncomplicated moment. I couldn’t remember much before junior high, when Justin started outgrowing me. Even playing in the woods was competitive practice for us. My chest grew tight, and I felt a dense ball of pressure in my throat. I watched Jamie noogie Peter and Peter swat her away, the grateful smile still plastered across his mouth. The ball in my throat pushed its way up; I could feel it behind my nose, spreading outward, heading for my eyes. I excused myself.

  In the bathroom, I stood over the sink, closed my eyes, and took a couple of deep breaths. Gradually I forced the ball of pressure back down.

  When I returned to the dining room, plates were being cleared. “You all right?” Rayburn said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Too much turkey,” I said.

  “Well, go in the other room and take a load off. We’ll have dessert out in a few.”

  I walked into the family room to find Peter sitting on the couch with a book. “So, how are things going?” I said, trying to engage him. “You haven’t come by office hours in a while.” Mariana teachers had mandatory office hours. Along with academic majors, office hours were supposed to help acclimate the students to the “college mentality.” Of course, this raised the question of when the kids were supposed to get into the high school mentality. Had specific measures been taken in elementary school? Kindergarten?

  “I’m on top of everything, Mr. Kaplan.”

  I nodded. This kid was not easy to talk to. “Hey, I know we’ve discussed the Academic League,” I said, watching for his reaction. This subject required a gentle tread. “And I know you’re concerned about public speaking. But you could start out as researcher. You don’t have to compete right away.” Peter was listening. He wasn’t protesting yet. “And I thought you might be interested to know that we’ve recently made sort of a new addition to the team.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Iris Dupont is doing a story on us for the Oracle. She’s going to be sitting in on our practices and interviewing team members.”

  “So?” he asked, the color rising in his face.

  “Well, if you joined the team, she might want to interview you. And maybe an interview would be a good way to break the ice.”

  Peter nodded slowly. “And I wouldn’t have to get up in front of an audience?”

  “Start off behind the scenes and see how you like it. But I’m telling you, Pete, competing might win you some points with the ladies.”

  Rayburn stuck his head into the room. “Petey, how are you getting on with your big brother? He’s giving you good advice, I hope.”

  Peter blushed.

  “Okay, lads, dessert time.”

  Peter followed Rayburn into the dining room. I pulled out my phone. I had missed a text from Hazel. Having a bad night. Can you come over? Finally. I wrote her back and asked for the address. I hoped dessert wasn’t going to take very long.

  Lily

  February 2000

  IT WAS FEBRUARY, the bleakest month of all. As Dipthi told Lily one day during lunch, February had the highest rate of relationship failure and heart failure. More homeless people froze to death in February, Dipthi said, than in any other month.

  Lily and Justin had been dating for four months, but Justin’s friends continued to shut her out. They plastered duct tape over the little window of their Trench lair and made her knock before entering. Lily couldn’t figure out what they were hiding, and Justin parried whenever she confronted him. “They’re just territorial,” was his constant excuse.

  Lily returned to the art rooms at lunchtime, now recording her observations of the Studio Girls in the back pages of Marvelous Species. She didn’t tell Justin about it. She wasn’t sure if this was wrong, but it certainly felt illicit—like something Veronica Mercy would do.

  Still, Hazel remained a problem. Whenever Justin left the girls alone, the silence was toxic. One night they sat on opposite sides of the Greenburgs’ couch while Justin gathered snacks for a Monty Python marathon. Unwilling to meet Hazel’s challenging gaze, Lily instead studied the ring on Hazel’s hand: a thick silver band with a horsefly mounted on top. Justin had presented this ring to Hazel on her birthday the previous year. He’d recently given Lily her own ring, a silver monarch, in honor of the first insect he’d ever preserved. The monarch was regal enough, but it lacked the horsefly’s ferocity. She wished that Justin’s gift to her had been similarly aggressive and strong.

  “Veronica Mercy told me she’s applying to artist apprenticeships this summer,” Lily said now, unable to stand the silence any longer.

  Hazel pressed a pillow to her chest. “So?”

  “I thought you might have an opinion because your mom’s an artist.”

  “My opinion?” Hazel laughed as though she found this a ridiculous question. “Veronica doesn’t have a chance in hell of making it in the art world. Her work is crap.”

  Lily sat up. “What’s wrong with it?” Veronica had recently presented her friends, including Lily, with a photographic compilation of her work, and Lily had pasted the pictures into Marvelous Species. “Because I’m trying to get my art out ther
e,” she’d explained as she handed Lily the album. Lily, of course, was thrilled that Veronica had included her. “I think her stuff is pretty good,” she said now.

  At that moment Justin arrived, struggling to balance three full glasses of soda and a plate of cookies. Hazel looked at him, her face inexplicably sad.

  “What’s wrong?” Justin said, carefully laying the goods on the coffee table.

  “Odi et amo,” Hazel mumbled and then proceeded with a string of Latin words Lily didn’t recognize. That first part, I hate and I love, was all Lily was able to catch. She was certain that Justin had understood, but he did not react.

  The next evening Lily curled up beside Justin with This Side of Paradise. A single lamp lit the room, and shadows collected on the walls. The Kaplan parents were out to dinner and Jonah was at Toby’s house. In the cocoon of Justin’s bedroom, she finally felt safe and calm. Justin, on the other hand, was frazzled. He was studying for the Academic League division championship. The tournament was two months away, and already the stress pulsed in his face like a vein.

  “Lily?” he asked.

  “Hmm?” She was absorbed in the book and barely noticed when Justin didn’t respond. A few moments later he repeated her name. She looked up this time and their eyes met. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Fine.” But then a few minutes later he said her name again.

  He probably just wanted to kiss her and was feeling shy. Only the next instant he was on top of her, pressing her back, holding her arms against the bed. The book fell out of her hands. She tried to speak, but her voice was muffled beneath him. He was kissing the sides of her neck, her throat. “Justin,” she gasped.

  He pulled off of her. “What’s wrong?” He looked terrified. “Did I hurt you?”

  Lily shook her head. They sat for a moment without looking at each other. “You never did anything like that before,” she said, finally.

  “You didn’t like it.”

  “No—I just—I didn’t know what was happening.”

  “I’m so fucking stupid. So stupid. Stupid.” He clenched his fists. “It’s just that she—”

  “She who?”

  “She said you’d want me to be more aggressive, that you’d be afraid to ask for it.”

  “You were talking to Hazel about us?”

  “Only because she asked me how things were going and I said good, but . . . well, maybe I wasn’t doing things right. Because we still don’t take off a lot of clothes.”

  “I can’t believe you told Hazel about our—”

  “Don’t you talk to Dipthi about us?”

  “It’s different.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Justin hung his head. “I’m sorry. I’m stupid. So stupid.”

  “Stop saying that!” Could Hazel have put Justin up to this, knowing it might scare her? But Hazel wasn’t malicious, she was just messed up. Being Queen of the Geeks didn’t make her a master manipulator.

  “I promise not to talk to Hazel about this stuff anymore. I swear.”

  Lily squeezed her legs against her chest. Justin inched forward on his knees, like he was about to bow down before her. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”

  She shook her head. He placed his hands on her knees. Then he laid his head in her lap. “Am I hot or cold?”

  A long time seemed to pass. Lily’s heart galloped in her chest. What if she spoke and he recoiled in disgust? But then she pictured Veronica Mercy lying on this very bed, her thick dark hair flared around her shoulders. She imagined she was Veronica Mercy, a girl who did not hesitate.

  “Hot,” Lily said.

  Later that night, Lily walked into her house to find her parents at the dining room table, a mess of papers between them. Her father whispered into the phone, rattling an agitated pencil against the tabletop. His eyes were red. Her mother stood up, and for a brief moment, mother and daughter only stared at each other through the heavy silence.

  “What happened?” Lily could barely get the words out. It was as if she already knew. Her mother rushed to her, but Lily backed away.

  “She’d just come back from her afternoon walk . . . The doctors said aneurysm . . .”

  Lily fled to her room and climbed into bed fully clothed. She lay there in the dark but soon was reaching for the phone and dialing Justin’s number. It was as if her grandmother had prepared her for this moment, had prodded her not so gently toward Justin Kaplan’s arms for this very purpose.

  Jonah

  November 2012

  I ARRIVED AT the Historical Society and found Hazel crying at the front door. I took one look at her—the wild mane of hair and raw nostrils—and remembered what my mother had said about Hazel seeming depressed.

  “Jonah.” Fresh tears spilled from her eyes, and her head tipped forward into my chest.

  Leaning into my armpit, she led me to her living quarters at the back of the building. A single lamp lit the room. Crumpled tissues dusted her sheets. I noticed three prescription bottles on the nightstand. I sat Hazel down on the bed and propped some pillows behind her.

  “Jonah—” Her voice was hoarse. Her tears were hot and wet through my shirt. “I disappeared on you.” She was crying harder now.

  She wasn’t talking about the last two weeks, I knew, but her previous disappearance, after Justin’s death. Back then, she’d begged to know what killed him—accident or, as many people believed, suicide? But I refused to talk about it. Not even if she’d sworn her undying love for me. So she cut me off, stopped speaking to me entirely.

  The following year, her last one at Mariana, she quit the Academic League and stopped hanging out in the Trench. I’d see her in the halls sometimes, but she ignored me. If I couldn’t answer her questions, she wanted nothing to do with me. All of this left me feeling not only heartbroken—I would never have a chance with Hazel now—but utterly alone. In an instant my brother had disappeared. Within weeks of his death I’d lost my best friend too.

  Now, a decade later, she was suddenly owning up, which for Hazel was equivalent to an apology. “Did something happen today?” I asked. “What set this off?”

  She pulled away and sat up. “I won’t do it again, Jonah.” She shook her head. “I promise. I’m going to stay right here. I’m not going to let you down. We’re the only ones who know what it’s like.”

  I nodded. She didn’t need to finish. We were bonded over my brother’s death, tied together as no one else would ever be tied to either of us. It was scary, acknowledging this need for another person, a person for whom there was no replacement. I was sure this was why Hazel had vanished for the last two weeks. She was independent to her core; she didn’t want to believe that she needed me.

  “I won’t leave you again,” she said, as though she hadn’t already made this promise twice over. “But you can’t leave me either. You have to swear that you’ll stay. Promise me, Jonah. Please!”

  I ran my hand down the length of her thick hair, and turned my head away. I was grinning. I wasn’t happy to see her like this, but she had suddenly vindicated my most deeply held conviction: that our compatibility was not merely a hypothesis but a result. Quantifiable and repeatable. “You and me,” I whispered in her ear. “From now on.”

  I woke some time later to the touch of Hazel’s lips, so soft and buoyant they made my whole body feel afloat. Soon we’d shucked off the covers. A ball of emotion—the same one that I’d fought against in the Rayburns’ bathroom—pumped in my chest. I pressed myself against it, and Hazel kissed me harder. She dug her fingers into my back as though trying to tear through me. I kneaded my fingers into her spine. We were fighting each other, physically confronting a decade of loneliness and disconnect. But we were also struggling together, desperately trying to grasp what we’d lost. Did we think we could retrieve it now that we were together? Because we were fighting Zeno’s Paradox: No matter how many times you halved the distance, you’d never reach the destination.

  The
following day, Hazel was still out of sorts. She didn’t fall asleep until dawn, hours after we’d exhausted ourselves on her bed. After she woke up in the late afternoon, we sat on the rumpled bed, talking and drinking tea. She showed me photographs from Greece. For the first time since I’d arrived at her house, she seemed to relax.

  “I loved it there,” she said, pulling the blankets around her legs. “That hot, white sun bleached out my whole previous life.”

  When she said this, I remembered something. “That thing that happened when you were twelve—with the bleach . . .” We’d never discussed this, but I recalled the afternoon my mother told me Hazel was in the hospital. She’d had an accident with a bottle of Clorox, but was going to be all right. Later on Justin informed me that Hazel had purposely tried to wipe out her freckles.

  “I never told you what happened with me and Lily at Water World, huh?”

  “You and Lily went to a water park together? You mean, like in a parallel universe?”

  Hazel wasn’t amused. “Remember that fancy camp your parents refused to send you to? Lily and I were kind of friendly back then.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s true. I was going through a seriously awkward phase. I looked like a babushka doll in neon spandex.”

  “Yes. That may have been the one time in our lives when I was better-looking than you.”

  “A moment that lasted approximately five minutes.” She patted my leg. “Anyway, Lily was the only person there more clueless than me.”

  Here Hazel paused and looked down at the white sheets covering her legs. She ran her fingers up and down the slopes of her thighs, as though brushing them clean of some invisible residue.

  “Anyway, I promised to look out for her and make sure she didn’t burn, because she wasn’t supposed to be outside at all. And when she did burn, I got scared. So I just pretended nothing was wrong. She thought I’d intentionally betrayed her—that I was jealous of her, because she had this perfect white skin and I looked like a walking disease.”