The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  “And then?” Julia and Syme said in unison.

  “Then Mr. Kaplan pried one of my fingers free and started forcing it toward the button. And I was crying and begging him to stop, but he just kept saying, ‘You must continue, Iris. You must finish the experiment.’”

  “And then?” Julia said, breathless.

  Tears rose behind my eyes, and all I could manage to do was shake my head. To someone watching this video, I realized, my reaction would only confirm the story I was telling. “Mr. Kaplan . . .” My voice wavered. “Mr. Kaplan pushed my finger down on the button and held it there. And on the screen Jimmy’s body convulsed and contorted. And I could hear screams coming from down the hall. But Mr. Kaplan just kept pressing my hand down on the button.”

  “And he was speaking, wasn’t he, Iris?”

  “He was saying, ‘Look what you’re doing to the boy, Iris. Look at the pain he’s in!’ And I struggled against Mr. Kaplan’s hand, but his grip was too strong. I turned away, but he took his other hand and grabbed my chin and forced me to watch.”

  “And?”

  “And then Mr. Kaplan let go. And Jimmy slumped over in the chair, and he didn’t move again.”

  “And did Mr. Kaplan say anything?”

  “He said I’d confirmed his hypothesis.”

  Syme turned off the camera. “What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

  “Keep it safe, my flower. Unless you turn on us.”

  They left me alone and I sat on the bed, seeing images flicker in the air like a stop-motion film. I saw strange insects with poisoned stingers and alien eyes crawl across a powder-pink carpet; I looked at Veronica Mercy’s black, liquid eyes, which melted into the single pupil of a video camera; I stared at the implacable oak tree outside my window and its maze of dark branches.

  I was desperate for Peter. I needed to see that his face wasn’t simply another mask. The others were slippery, but Peter had wrapped his arms around me and kissed me. The air had been cold, but Peter was warm. At that moment, as though by magic, the door opened and there he was. I nearly jumped on him.

  “Do you want cupcakes or chips?” He produced two packages. Then I did jump on him.

  “I love you!” I cried. “I mean, I don’t love you. I’m just hungry. And happy to see you.”

  Peter chuckled. “Yeah, I get it.”

  I tore open one of the cupcakes and ate it in three big bites. Peter wrapped his arms around me, and in that moment I almost forgot where I was and what I’d just done. He didn’t ask me about the video, and implicitly I knew we were to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  Julia walked in with a couple of sleeping bags. “Why don’t you guys get some sleep. Bathroom’s down the hall. And don’t go sneaking off. We’ll give you the grand tour tomorrow.” She nodded at Peter. “The papers are almost done.” I was hoping she’d say more about the Devil’s Advocate, but she didn’t.

  When I slipped into the hallway, I thought about making a break for it, but I knew Peter would come looking for me. I peed in the girls’ bathroom, crouching over the cold toilet seat.

  “Climb in,” Peter said when I returned. I lingered in the center of the room, my arms wrapped around me for warmth. “Seriously, Iris. We’re sleeping. That’s it.”

  “I’m not worried about you taking advantage of me,” I said. “I’m worried about contracting a disease from that mattress.”

  “Fair enough.” He unzipped one of the sleeping bags and spread it over the bed. “I promise that not a millimeter of your skin will touch a millimeter of the festering mattress.”

  I jumped on the bed, and the rusted metal frame made a sound like a trash compactor.

  “I think you ate too many cupcakes,” Peter said, and I slapped him. He pulled me down and we curled up together. I should have been on guard, planning my next move, but I’d never slept next to a boy before and I wasn’t about to squander the chance.

  Peter turned off the desk lamp. He stretched out on his back—he was almost as long as the bed—and I laid my head on his chest. His arm curled under and around me, so that the tips of his fingers rested on my back. “You are so little,” he said.

  “You’re so long.”

  He laughed.

  “What is the newspaper going to say about Mr. Kaplan?” I said. “We don’t know why he took Jimmy’s money.”

  “It’s going to report exactly what happened. An accurate portrayal of events. I made it clear to the others that our intention is not to hurt Mr. Kaplan. With him, we’re sticking to the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “You mean you don’t always?” I sat up and the bed creaked.

  “Sometimes, when we know something but we can’t prove it, we have to engineer the right situation. To help people show who they really are.”

  “You trick them?”

  “People only do what’s in their nature.”

  I was too exhausted to ask Peter what he meant by this. We were quiet for a few minutes and then he said, “Remember I told you how the Party made me different?”

  I nodded, but I was looking at the cloudy overhead light. A dark shadow spread along the bottom of the glass.

  “It’s like I belong now. We all feel that way—Julia, O’Brien, and Syme. And the others before us. That’s why you’re here, Iris. You deserve to be a part of this. To be inside for once.”

  My eyes welled. What was I doing here? If being on the inside meant I was trapped, I didn’t want any part of it.

  “Think how awesome it will be . . .” Peter’s fingers trailed up and down my back. “You and me, together at school. We’ll be a real power couple.”

  I focused on the shadowy light fixture to keep from crying. Tonight was the only night Peter and I would sleep beside each other. I didn’t know how this was all going to end, but it would end. After tonight, he would never speak to me again.

  “Iris, you don’t have to be lonely anymore.”

  “I wasn’t lonely, Peter,” I whispered, and turned over to sleep.

  Lily

  May 2000

  LILY PERUSED Marvelous Species, trying to figure out what Veronica was plotting. Her appendix on the Studio Girls stopped just before the sleepover, but now Lily imagined devoting an entry to Sacrificial Lamb, discussing what the girls had done to her in clinical, scientific terms. It never occurred to her during the months she’d spent in the art studio that if she joined this world, she’d inevitably become part of the appendix herself. A marvelous life form, an organism to be studied. And that was what had happened. During the lost hours of her drugged oblivion, she’d become the specimen under the microscope.

  A knock on the bedroom door startled her, and she prayed it wasn’t Justin. She needed to study; her math final that morning had been a disaster. At first she saw only her father, but when her mother materialized, her body grew cold. They walked in and stood in front of the bed, her father in his trim khaki pants, pressed dress shirt, and tortoise-shell glasses. He looked like he’d been born with patches on his elbows. Her mother wore a long flowered skirt as though in defiance of the weather: rancorous and frigid for May, even for Nye. They looked young. Standing there on her pink carpet they could have been new parents, excited and afraid.

  Maureen sat on the bed. Elliott remained standing. “Justin came to see me,” he said. “He told me about Veronica’s party, the sleeping pill and the dye. Are those things true?”

  Lily glanced at the disc among all the others on her dresser.

  Her father knelt before the bed, as Justin had done the previous night. Her mother hovered specter-like behind him. “I want you to listen to me, Lily. We’re not angry with you for drinking.”

  Like her situation amounted to a common teenage infraction! But Justin was smart enough to keep the art project from them. They wouldn’t have understood, and he wanted them focused on the important point.

  And on cue her father said, “You were violated.”

  “No, Dad. That’s not true.”

&
nbsp; Elliott blinked. “This is serious, Lillian. Were you or weren’t you drugged?”

  Maureen took Lily’s hand, but she yanked it free.

  “I knew exactly what I was drinking. I took the sleeping pill on purpose.”

  Her father shook his head. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Sweetheart, this isn’t your fault.”

  “It is!” She shrank away from her mother’s weepy face.

  “Stop saying that,” Maureen begged. “It’s like—like you were raped.”

  “No!” Lily screamed. “You’re not listening to me!”

  “We are listening, and we don’t understand why you’re not taking this more seriously. Who knows what else happened to you while you were passed out!”

  Of course they’d believe only what Justin told them. She had to be the victim.

  Abruptly Elliott left. Lily felt his absence like a cold wind.

  “Listen, sweetheart.” Maureen edged closer to Lily on the bed. “We have to get you checked.”

  Lily shook her head.

  “Tomorrow morning you have an appointment with my doctor.”

  “Nothing happened!”

  “We don’t know that.”

  And her mother was right. The Studio Girls or Alexi could have done anything to her.

  “I’m not going to any gynecologist!” Lily jumped off the bed and ran into the bathroom. Sixteen years old and she had no control over her own body. She made her own decisions. But everyone insisted she’d been manipulated and tricked. Outside the window, a violent wind whipped the tree branches, scattering spring petals across the pane. She watched them blow in the air like pink snow. Justin kept calling, so she turned off her phone.

  “A little farther,” the gynecologist said, and Lily scooted down the rough paper. The metal stirrups of the examination table gripped her feet. She felt like an animal in a zoo. “A little more. I’m going to need you to come all the way down . . . That’s right.”

  At least it was a woman. At least she said nothing about the dye.

  “Now I need you to spread your knees. All the way . . . That’s right.”

  Air hit Lily between the legs. She felt split open, bisected.

  The exam began. The doctor promised pressure, and there was pressure. She promised a short uncomfortable sensation, and there was that too, as though she’d scooped out Lily’s insides with a spoon. Then it was over. “You look fine,” the gynecologist said. “Is there anything you’d like to discuss? This is confidential.”

  Lily sat up. She felt sticky.

  The doctor waited a beat. When Lily didn’t respond, she left the room.

  Getting out of the car at school, Lily saw Veronica and her parents dressed in dark, funereal coats, walking into Prisom Hall. As they disappeared, Justin materialized. In his navy blue parka his hair seemed to glow a brighter red and his eyes a deeper blue. Students streamed around them and up the steps, eager to escape the ferocious May wind.

  A strong gust hit Lily’s back. “How could you?” She gritted her teeth. “I know I hurt you, but you promised.”

  “You needed my help!”

  The students slowed around them like she and Justin were a traffic accident in the middle of the road.

  “Lily, we can’t just let the Studio Girls do whatever they—”

  “I did it!” She dropped her voice to a hot whisper. “I’m responsible for myself.”

  She wasn’t vulnerable. She was dark and disturbed. She’d shown him the physical evidence. But like everyone else, Justin could see only her lily-white skin. Now his head bobbed up and down in small, shallow movements. “I know I did the right thing,” he muttered, but he looked lost, like he was trying to prove a simple equation and kept getting the wrong answer.

  “Justin, please.” Maybe if she hugged him. If she could just squeeze him tight enough . . . She moved forward to embrace him, but at that moment, his head slammed forward, nearly butting her.

  The first-period bell rang. The wind lashed Lily’s hair across her cheeks.

  “Are we okay?” Justin gripped her arms. “If we’re okay, everything’s okay.”

  A hollow feeling yawned inside of her. She turned from him and went into the school.

  All that day, rumors flew on the wild May wind, landing everywhere and blossoming into hideous shapes. Lily had entered a satanic cult and dyed her pubic hair black. She and the Studio Girls had posted a bondage movie of themselves on the Internet. Alexi had confessed to raping her. Veronica Mercy’s parents were sending her to live with a strict Muslim family in Saudi Arabia so she could learn obedience and modesty. If Lily had been less depressed, she would have laughed at these ridiculous stories. But she was too exhausted to care one way or the other.

  Now, at the end of the day, she and Dipthi stood inside the auditorium, watching the long-awaited Academic League tournament.

  “Your grandmother wanted you to give Justin a chance, not pledge eternal love,” Dipthi whispered.

  Lily nodded, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was watching the stage. There were three teams. Hazel stood in the middle of Mariana’s table with the twins on either side of her. The atmosphere felt pressurized.

  “Next question,” the game master said, and the nine students on stage hunched over their tables. “These rotating neutron stars emit beams of electromagnetic radiation.”

  Hazel punched the buzzer. “Pulsars!”

  “Mariana Academy, twenty points.”

  Hazel slapped hands with Justin and then Jonah as the audience clapped and cheered.

  “Next question. ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts—’”

  Justin punched the buzzer. “Lord Acton!”

  “Incorrect. Mariana down twenty points.”

  Justin winced. The team had worried this would happen—that Justin would prematurely ejaculate, League slang for buzzing in too soon. But had he screwed up because of her or because he couldn’t handle the pressure? How could Lily know? The teams huddled. Kent Hill and Episcopal eyed Justin like predators smelling fear.

  “The full question,” the game master said, his booming monotone echoing throughout the theater, “is the following: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ This is the first part of a statement spoken by the nineteenth-century moralist and historian Lord Acton. What is the rest of the statement?”

  Kent Hill’s buzzer flashed. “‘Great men are almost always bad men.’”

  “Correct,” the game master announced. “Kent Hill, twenty points.”

  Justin looked crestfallen. Hazel put a protective arm around his shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” Lily said, and the girls slipped into the empty hallway. Lily dialed Justin’s number and waited for his voicemail. Dipthi stood by like a bodyguard, her arms folded across her chest.

  That night, Lily lay awake in bed waiting to feel something—sadness, guilt, relief—but she was numb. In the coming weeks she would have to talk to Justin in person and try to make him feel okay about this. But she would not change her mind.

  She switched off the light and went to sleep. Some time later, she was yanked into wakefulness by a noise like a bomb detonating. She held her breath and listened, but her bedroom was silent.

  Jonah

  December 2012

  AFTER THE SCHOOL lights shut off, I returned Jimmy’s money to the lockbox. Then I headed to the Trench. I was hoping the Prisom’s Party cameras didn’t have night vision.

  I was prepared to wait as long as necessary for the paper to come out. I’d sleep at school for the rest of the week if I had to, as long as I could be there when the kids showed themselves. In the meantime, I holed myself up in the old Academic League room. The file cabinets had sat untouched for over a decade. We used to spend hours after each tournament analyzing our performances and writing long critiques of the events. Everyone had a folder with his or her own notes. I pulled out 2002, the year I’d graduated, and read in reverse order until I came to May 2000,
the last tournament Hazel, Justin, and I competed in together. Justin’s notes weren’t there, of course. He’d never had the chance to write them.

  On the morning of our final tournament, Justin woke me at dawn so we could get in an early practice. He arrived at my door dressed in khakis and a navy blazer with the school crest. He’d shaved, and his hair was slicked down from the shower. I knew he’d been awake for a couple of hours already, hunched over his books in the half dark. I saw no reason to get up. Justin had been a wreck over Lily all week, Hazel was upset because Justin was ignoring her, and I couldn’t stand to see Hazel fawn over my brother. It was a trifecta of failure.

  “We have a practice to get to,” Justin said, lingering in the doorway.

  I jumped up and began pulling up the window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s forty degrees in here and I don’t want to freeze my ass off going to the bathroom. Also,” I added, ever eager to prove my grand intelligence, “why flush all that potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen down the drain when it could help fertilize the front lawn? Nitrogen-fixing bacteria love urine.”

  “The ground is frozen.”

  He was right, of course. Spring in Nye’s a real hard-ass. Until the buds break ground in June, the only yellow you see is dog piss on snow. Still, that spring was the coldest on record in over fifty years, and the many conservative crackpots in our town were going wild, certain that the “myth” of global warming had finally been debunked.

  “We have to win today, Jonah. We don’t have a choice.”

  “We do,” I said. “We could choose to lose.” But I was talking to myself, the doorway now empty as though my brother had never come in.

  I resumed my journey toward a badly needed nirvana. I pushed up the window, and freezing air burst into the room. I gritted my teeth and dropped my flannels. “Here’s to you, Justin,” I said to the empty room. “L’chaim!” But my urine never arrived at its intended destination. Halfway down it froze and shattered on the walk.