The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  “You used to think that about your freckles?” I said. Hazel shrugged. “But they’re beautiful.”

  Hazel shook her head. “I tried to apologize. But Lily wouldn’t even look at me. So I did that thing with the bleach.”

  “But why?”

  Hazel pulled the sheet away and stretched her legs out on the bed. I ran my eyes down the length of her strong thighs and muscular calves. “It was really stupid, I know. I guess I was trying to punish Lily for not accepting my apology. I remember thinking, See how you feel when you hear what you’ve made me do.”

  “My mom told me it was an accident.”

  “Lorna spread that around. I mean, Jesus, think about the alternative. Crazy Lorna Greenburg let her daughter rub out her freckles with a bottle of bleach. Somebody would have called in child services.”

  “But you told Justin the truth.” I still felt a twinge of jealousy knowing that Hazel had taken her secrets to Justin before me.

  “The conclusion of this pitiful tale is that because everyone thought it was an accident, the whole reason I’d done it in the first place was completely moot. Which made me really, really mad—” She cut herself off. “I don’t want to talk about this. Don’t ask me any more questions about Lily.”

  I felt reprimanded, so I looked around the studio and directed my frustration there. Everything appeared to be crumbling, like we were surrounded by mounds of decomposing matter. Why was Hazel living in this glorified junkyard?

  “It doesn’t help to dredge up everything, Jonah. It doesn’t make dealing with my mother’s genetic baggage any easier. You grew up with me. You know what to expect.”

  Be patient, I ordered myself. Think geological eras and thank evolution for those beautiful legs in front of you.

  “I don’t expect anything, Hazel,” I said. “I’m just happy to be here.”

  The next morning, while Hazel slept, I went grocery shopping and stopped by my apartment for clean clothes. Then I took a detour. My childhood home was a white colonial built in 1862. From afar it was a work of country perfection: white clapboards, glossy green shutters, fancy molding over the front door. All illusion. Up close, the clapboards were scratched and the paint had been flaking off the molding for years. The front lawn was usually a soggy mess of carpetweed and crabgrass. The bathroom fixtures were rusty, the door frames warped, and the floors slanted at preposterous degrees.

  When I pulled up that afternoon, I felt a stab of guilt. My parents knew I’d chosen to rent an apartment instead of living at home. They understood I needed to “separate” (my mother’s word) and “build my own life” (my father’s). But I’d done little in the way of home management—none of the raking, mowing, dusting, or periodic anti-burglar checkups my parents had requested. The truth was, I’d been avoiding the place.

  I pulled my hat down over my ears, noosed my scarf around my neck, and hurried up the front walk, careful to avoid loose bricks. Entering was like stepping inside a mausoleum. A cold, unused feeling pervaded. I walked through the living room into the kitchen. Out of habit, I opened the fridge. Just as you can date a tree by its rings, you could tell the age and events of our home by our condiments: rows of crusted ketchups, jams, and mustards that no one had bothered to throw away, each jar a putrid microbial breeding ground.

  I climbed the stairs and walked past the insect display, the dark, still bodies frozen in their frames like prehistoric mosquitoes preserved within amber. My room was similarly preserved. Sci-fi novels filled the shelves along with the requisite model vehicles and Academic League trophies. My father wished we’d added a few athletic trophies to this collection. He convinced us to play a season of baseball under the pretext that it would improve our understanding of physics. (Somewhere in my room was an article titled “How to Hit Home Runs: Optimum Baseball Bat Swing Parameters for Maximum Range Trajectories.”) Of course, we were awful. Justin was distracted by grasshoppers in the outfield, and I usually got thrown out for attitude. Our combined batting average was an imaginary number.

  I’d come here to find a certain Airwalk shoebox filled with materials my friends and I had collected on secret societies. The collusions, pledges, and religious rites fascinated us, and we filled notebooks on the Skull and Bones, Freemasons, the Sufis and Druze. We were drawn to these groups for the same reason we were drawn to science fiction: the legends and myths made us feel powerful. But this time around, I wasn’t looking for power. I wanted clues to ferret out Prisom’s Party.

  My room yielded nothing, and I moved on. The door to my brother’s room was framed by two long-horned beetles, Macrodontia cervicornis, each of them half a foot in length. The mandibles resembled miniature lobster claws, and wings sheathed their abdomens like wooden skirts. They were brilliant, these wings, decorated like cave drawings and varnished in shades of brown, chestnut, and gold. My parents used to call the beetles “mezuzahs” and joked about our having to kiss them before we entered Justin’s room.

  My brother’s room no longer felt like his, and hadn’t for a long time. It had once been the very definition of entropy: mounds of paper, clothes, school supplies, and Academic League materials dumped on every available surface. Now a couch had replaced the bed, and there wasn’t a stray paper to be seen. I had to give my mother credit. For months after the accident, the littlest thing ignited her tear ducts: pouring a cup of coffee, tying her shoes, shoveling the front walk. Her every action was filtered through Justin’s absence. “It’s a different world altogether,” she’d told me. “Everything is stunted, elongated, or just blurry. It’s like looking at the world through an unfocused microscope.” In her place, I would have barricaded Justin’s room, or set fire to it, or thrown his possessions away.

  Now, only the books identified the room as Justin’s. They rose to the ceiling in impeccable rows, organized by an algorithm Justin had written that accounted for the text’s subject, author, and physical height. Each book was pushed to the exact edge of the shelf, the spines flush. Justin was incredibly OCD on this point. I used to torment him by sneaking in and pushing random books back, some of them by just a few centimeters.

  There were undoubtedly still parts of my brother here: skin cells and nail clippings that the vacuum cleaner didn’t catch. Plenty of DNA. But his odor faded a week or two after his death, and now I could no longer remember what my twin brother had smelled like.

  I sat down in the desk chair and looked up at the inscrutable expression of Albert Einstein. Given Justin’s literary sensibilities, I’d have expected him to choose Walt Whitman or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the image of the physicist was the single poster on Justin’s wall. Taped up beside Einstein’s furrowed brow, thick mustache, and cotton-tuft hair was a piece of college-ruled paper.

  “The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”

  This was Einstein’s Cosmic Religious Feeling, his belief that the pursuit of science and art was enough to make us feel connected to each other and, ultimately, would save us from isolation and despair. I thought about my brother sitting at his desk, copying out these words and taping them to his wall. I thought about his isolation and despair. He believed a connection with Lily could lift him from the abyss, shoot him like a rocket toward the sublime. But according to Einstein, a person could achieve this connection only if he gave up his individual desires. And who lived without desire? The desire for scientific distinction had left me disconnected and exhausted. My brother’s desire for Lily had killed him. We all desired what we could not have. Justin, Lily, and myself. Even Hazel.

  I searched through Justin’s dresser and cabinets but found nothing. Meanwhile, I started to feel panicked. The house ached and groaned, as though complaining about my presence. Wind gusts rattled the windows, calling to mind the clicking and snapping of insect exosk
eletons. Finally, in Justin’s closet, I located the Airwalk box. I’d bought the shoes early in high school, one of my few (and fruitless) attempts to feel cool (I didn’t ride a skateboard, had never even tried), and the shoes themselves had long since disappeared. Now that I’d found what I wanted, I grabbed the box, tucked it under my arm, and fled. I ran down the stairs and out the front door like something was chasing me.

  I sat panting in the car, waiting for the heater to warm up. I lifted the shoebox lid and quickly realized my mistake. My mother, utilitarian to the core, had chucked the material on secret societies and filled the box with papers related to Justin’s accident instead. There were news clippings, condolence notes, and mathematical equations that my father had collected at the crash site—his desperate attempt to determine exactly what had killed my brother.

  So now what?

  I did not want these reminders nearby, but I wanted to go back inside the house even less. I pushed the box beneath the passenger seat and drove away without looking back.

  Iris

  November 2012

  THE MONDAY AFTER Thanksgiving break, I reported first thing to the Oracle office for a new assignment: covering the Jimmy Get Well campaign. Jimmy Cardozi was a freshman who’d been diagnosed with cancer over the summer, and I was supposed to interview the juniors and seniors in the premed major who’d been handing out pamphlets on childhood leukemia and selling chocolate chip cookies. Contributions went into the lockbox that sat in the school lobby beside a life-size cardboard cutout of Jimmy. This was Jimmy pre-cancer: six feet tall, rotund and grinning. He hadn’t looked like this for a long time.

  I wondered how Jimmy felt walking past the Jimmy Get Well table every day. I know if I’d lost fifty pounds and all my hair, I wouldn’t want to be reminded of my former healthy state. I doubted anyone had bothered to ask Jimmy for permission to use his likeness, just as I doubted the teachers knew that as soon as the picture went up, kids started saying things like “Hey, Jimmy Get Thin,” or “Jimmy Get a Clue,” or “Jimmy Get a Life!”

  I wanted to present the truth of Jimmy’s experience. I planned to accompany my written story with a podcast modeled on Murrow’s program This I Believe. But Katie Milford said the story should cover how successful the JGW campaign had been and how it exemplified the tenets of the Community Code. “Don’t give me your self-righteous free-press crap, Iris,” she told me. “There’s a lot of money in that donation box.”

  Maybe so. But money didn’t tell the whole story.

  I was about to raise these concerns when our features editor ran in, flushed and panting. “Devil’s Advocate!” he exclaimed. Katie snatched the paper from his fingers, and she was suddenly magnetized—the entire office practically stuck to her. Clearly enjoying her newfound popularity, Katie cleared her throat and read the headline, “Technology Lends Immorality a Hand,” and then continued:

  “MARIANA ACADEMY—First there was Wikipedia; now there’s Wikicheatia, an online encyclopedia for students seeking the ‘non-study’ option. This password-protected site (access comes with a $500 price tag) offers pages for a variety of classes at Mariana Academy, each with the questions and answers for major tests. Like the actual Wikipedia, users can edit information or create new pages. As the tests change, students who have taken those tests can update information for future users.

  “But what’s the point, you might wonder, if the exam questions change each year? How could Wikicheatia help? The answer is simple. The exams don’t change that much. Wikicheatia relies on faculty laziness. And so far it’s been pretty successful. Because our exams are not proctored, students can easily whip out their smartphones and search sites like Wikicheatia.

  “But Wikicheatia, like its mainstream counterpart, runs into trouble with accuracy. Wikicheatia’s head editors are supposed to supervise page content, but they can’t keep tabs on everything. And so, sophomores Reagan Rodriguez and Madison Morrison are about to find themselves in cyber-trouble. The girls paid the five hundred bucks each and copied the answers from Wikicheatia onto Mr. Harley’s most recent trigonometry exam. They did not know that all of the Wikicheatia answers for Mr. Harley’s trig test were off by two numbers. Oops.”

  “Cocky bastards,” Katie said, crumpling up the Devil’s Advocate and tossing it in the trash. “Now get back to work!”

  I headed out to find a crowd of students gathering around the math department. I pushed my way through until I had a glimpse of the door window. Inside, Reagan Rodriguez huddled in a chair, her head bowed while Mr. Harley screamed at her. He flailed his arms like a boat motor, his face red and shining. The atmosphere at school was turning downright hostile, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I had work to do.

  The plan Hazel and I had come up with would prove Mr. Kaplan’s innocence via the scientific method. Just as he’d taught us in class, I started by defining the question: Was Mr. Kaplan the locker vandal? Next I gathered information and resources, such as Oracle articles and discussions with Mr. Kaplan’s classmates (i.e., Hazel) and the observations of his students (i.e., myself). Third, I formed a hypothesis: Mr. Kaplan is not the locker vandal. And finally, I planned to test the hypothesis with an experiment—a drawing test. It was an innovative approach, and I thought Murrow would have been proud.

  The science department was blissfully unaware of the chaos just one floor below them. The journalist in me wanted to break the news, but I couldn’t risk them all losing focus. I called for attention and explained that I was reporting a science story on the relationship between left-brain individuals and artistic ability. Then I gave everyone a list of objects to draw. The goal was to see whether Mr. Kaplan’s pictures resembled those from the locker vandalism and to observe his response to the images. I had everyone participate so he wouldn’t get suspicious.

  I couldn’t instruct a bunch of teachers to draw students sodomizing each other, so I adapted the images to a PG-13 rating. Mr. Kaplan’s rabid dog resembled a cloud-eating sausage with feet; his tarantula looked like an amoeba, and his frightened schoolgirl bore a striking resemblance to a banjo. He seemed perplexed by the assignment—not the reaction of a guy with something to hide. The teachers joked about their pictures. A few looked annoyed. Finally Mr. Kaplan asked me what was going on.

  “You’re not the locker vandal!” I exclaimed, and then clamped my hand over my mouth, stunned at my imprudent reaction.

  The teachers looked at each other, then at Mr. Kaplan. “What’s she talking about?” Mr. Rayburn said.

  Mr. Kaplan’s initial bafflement quickly morphed into consternation. I approached him and motioned that we needed to speak confidentially. “Just say what you need to say.” His voice was clipped.

  I explained about the Oracle articles I’d found in the Trench, and how I was hoping to exonerate him. “I thought you’d be proud,” I said, my voice starting to quaver. “Because I used the scientific method.”

  Mr. Kaplan’s face was hard with disappointment. “Iris, nobody would be asking questions about me if you weren’t.”

  He never used my first name, and it made me feel like a child. “I’m sorry,” I said, working hard to keep my voice steady.

  Do you see the problem of trying to report as a friend? Murrow whispered. Your lack of professionalism has been disappointing.

  I bit my lip.

  “Iris, are you listening?” Mr. Kaplan was eyeing me. “I need your cooperation on this. I need you to promise you won’t bring the vandalism up with anyone else. Can you do that for me?”

  I swallowed. “What vandalism?”

  Mr. Kaplan sighed. “Now, are you still planning to come by the Academic League practice tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I’ll be there,” I said. I’m a hard-nosed reporter, I thought to Murrow. I’m not a friend. “Oh, and by the way”—I turned back to the room—“you guys just missed the latest Devil’s Advocate.” I let the door shut on their startled expressions.

  I went to the third-floor bathroom and wrote to Prisom’s Pa
rty.

  A good start, they wrote back. But we’re going to need more evidence. Even if Jonah Kaplan didn’t paint the lockers he still may have masterminded the project. Have you searched his desk? His faculty box? His car? Start using that investigative brain of yours!

  It’s not like I’ve done this before, I wrote. And anyway, you were the ones who tapped me. Maybe you should have hired a professional!

  Fair enough, they responded. But you want to come back and see us, don’t you?

  You guys said access in exchange for information. So how did you get to be involved in the Party? I prayed my correspondent was Winston. I was sure he would answer honestly.

  A few seconds later the response came: I was tapped.

  I wrote back immediately: By whom?

  I can’t tell you that.

  Do you test out all your potential inductees? Are there others like me?

  There was a lengthy pause. My heart flipped inside out as I waited for a response. I was starting to realize that I had a serious crush on Winston, which was really weird, considering that I’d never seen his face.

  There’s no one like you, my flower.

  It wasn’t Winston but creepy Syme. I logged out as fast as I could.

  IV

  Microbial Invasions

  Just as melanin protects human skin from the sun, melanin polymers defend microorganisms against radiation, extreme temperatures, and heavy metals. A microbe with low melanin levels can easily fall prey to pathological bacteria.