The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  After we lost the tournament, Justin drove himself home and disappeared into his room. An hour later, when he didn’t come down for dinner, my father and I went to check on him. We knocked, but there was no answer. “Maybe he’s sleeping,” I suggested. “Or dead.”

  My father shot me an angry look and opened the door to find Justin on his bed, surrounded by a snowfall of tissues. My dad walked a few paces into the bedroom. “We’re having breakfast for dinner!” he announced.

  Justin sat up abruptly. His eyes were so swollen and red they looked bee-stung.

  “You’ll win the next tournament,” my father said. “This is only a small setback.”

  I shook my head. Here was a physics professor capable of reading equations impenetrable as hieroglyphs, but he couldn’t read the face of his own son. A hissing sound escaped Justin’s lips.

  “He’s gonna blow,” I said.

  “Leave me alone,” Justin groaned. “Please!”

  My father smiled and nodded with encouragement. He’d always treated “father” like a noun and a verb, acting like any problem could be talked through, reasoned out, parented away. This made me sad, for our dad and for us.

  When he’d left, I turned back to my brother. “That bitch dumped you, huh?”

  “Don’t talk about her like that.”

  “I told you this would happen.”

  “It’s a mistake. She’s upset. You have no idea what—”

  “It’s not a mistake, Justin. She doesn’t want you. She never did.” It was awful of me to say this. But I was convinced my twin needed my tough love, now more than ever.

  Justin climbed off the bed and walked toward me. He loomed over me, six solid feet of him. We looked at each other good and hard, and then, without a word, he shut the door in my face.

  I returned to the kitchen. My mother asked how Justin was doing. I said nothing about the breakup. I didn’t want my parents heaping loads of sympathy on him.

  After dinner I jumped on my bike. My mother didn’t like us riding around after dark because there weren’t any streetlights and the cars treated the roads like a luge course. The temperature had plummeted in the preceding hours, and I couldn’t decide whether to pedal my bike quickly to cut down on time or go slowly and keep the wind out of my face. I wished I were a life form that adapted automatically to its environment, any other species than human.

  I was pedaling hard, and my throat burned like I was gargling with broken glass. Just as my energy gave out, I skidded to a stop outside the Greenburgs’ house. Hazel let me in. I pulled off my gloves, and the tips of my fingers began to burn. As usual, no sign of Lorna. “You look apoplectic,” she said.

  We’d wanted Justin to break up with Lily, not the other way around. I thought about my brother and his pitiful hope—It was a mistake. She didn’t mean it—and felt so angry I couldn’t speak. “Lily,” was all I managed to say, but Hazel understood.

  “Is he okay? I need to see him.”

  “He doesn’t want to see anybody. Not even you, Hazel.” I could tell she was stunned, but my fury urged me on. “You said you’d fix this!” I cried. “That night in the car, outside Veronica’s. And now look what’s happened!”

  Without warning, Hazel grabbed my arm and pulled me into her bedroom. She didn’t bother turning the lights on, but knelt before a silver laptop on the carpet, her freckled face awash in the computer’s blue glow. I sat down beside her, accidentally bumped her knee, and quickly retracted my leg. The blue screen faded to black, then opened to a scene of a room with a mint-green carpet, flowery couches, and an enormous television mounted on the wall.

  “What’s this?”

  “Something I got ahold of. Just watch.”

  Hazel sped through a bunch of scenes and then I saw a close-up of Lily’s face. She looked strung out—whorish eye shadow, eyes glowing acid purple in the sharp light. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but they produced no sympathy in me.

  “Don’t lie to us,” said a voice off screen. “Are you using Justin Kaplan for sex?”

  “Are you?” another voice repeated.

  “Are you?” a third said.

  “Are you?” the voices shouted at once.

  Lily blinked and more tears spilled out of her eyes. She stared into the camera, her expression determined. “Yes,” she said.

  Hazel paused the video. We said nothing, just stared at Lily’s too-large face. But I didn’t see her exactly. I saw her father fuming, accusing me of the locker vandalism, shaking his head as if I was responsible for every problem the school had suffered; I saw my classmates laughing at me in the halls, calling me Prepubes; I saw Hazel naked in the bathroom, laughing at my hard-on; I saw Lily staring me down: Have you kissed a girl, Jonah? Have you touched a girl’s breasts? Have you stroked a girl’s hair? You’re jealous of him, Jonah. Jealous.

  “Jonah.”

  I looked up. Hazel’s freckles pulsed in the eerie backlit light. My heart pumped with hatred for one girl and love for another. I was small and weak outside but strong inside. I was going to prove it, do what my brother lacked the courage to do. That was what I told myself, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Underneath, I harbored this last hope: that with one heroic act, I could make Hazel choose me instead of him.

  I was flying then, back on my bike, pedaling into the night. I vaguely heard Hazel yelling at me—she knew something dangerous was brewing in my brain—but I was already far away, cutting through the woods. My pedals jolted over the uneven ground, skirted the dark stumps and branches swooping inches above my head. Twenty minutes later, I burst from the brush into my parents’ backyard, threw my bike on the ground, and snuck into the basement through the back door. Synapses fired in my brain, bright questions bursting like sparks—Why was Lily on a video? Who was asking her the questions? How had the DVD come into Hazel’s possession?—but every time a question blazed forth, it fizzled. My heroic act was my only point of focus.

  Our basement was musty and dank, a repository for fertilizer and tetanus-encrusted gardening tools. I clanked and clamored around in baskets and bins. My fingers were raw, but I refused to lose momentum. And then, in a box on a high shelf, my hand touched something cylindrical and smooth. My palm closed around it, as though my body knew instinctively that this object was the one I’d been seeking. Then I was back on my bike, pedaling through the same slice of woods by which I’d come.

  ***

  I put down the notes. Cold air trickled from the vents, but my underarms were marshy with sweat. Why had I come here? Oh yes, I was waiting for Prisom’s Party to put out the Devil’s Advocate. But I couldn’t spend the night like this, carelessly slipping into the past.

  I returned the Academic League notes to the file cabinets and left. The Trench was dark and silent. I had never spent the night down here, and I felt like a cave-dwelling creature, a crabby troll, festering in his domain, or Gollum plotting murder in the dark. This environment was no longer hospitable; its crushing psychological pressure made me desperate for air.

  Iris

  December 2012

  IRIS, WAKE UP.” Peter was squeezing my shoulder. My brain felt packed with rocks. “It’s six,” he said. “We overslept.” I stretched. My legs were pleasurably warm beneath the sleeping bag, but needles of cold pricked my face. “I’m going to get the Devil’s Advocates,” he whispered, and disappeared.

  I threw back the covers, hurried into my shoes, and grabbed my coat from the other bed. Then I pulled one of the sleeping bags around me and sat on the bed shivering, waiting for Peter.

  I had to think. I would keep one of the Devil’s Advocates for evidence and destroy the others. But how? There’d be stacks of papers, too many to flush down the toilet or immolate with a Bunsen burner. I yearned suddenly for Marvelous Species, to be holding the thick text in my hands at this moment, searching through the index for a solution. I imagined that the book’s information was limitless, that it could solve any problem. But this wasn’t the case, and even if it had been, I was
out of luck. The book was at home, in Lily’s bedroom.

  Peter arrived with a backpack slung over his shoulder. I was eager to see what the Devil’s Advocate said about Mr. Kaplan and Jimmy Cardozi’s money, but I didn’t want to appear too curious. Peter took my hand and led me from the room. We walked down the hallway and into a stairwell. I wasn’t blindfolded this time, but the darkness was fuzzy beyond the glow of Peter’s flashlight. At the bottom of the stairs, we crossed a foyer and entered another stairwell. The air grew damp and cavern-like as we descended. Then we were back in the basement. Peter’s light illuminated a door at the far end of the room. He opened it, and we stepped into a long, concrete esophagus.

  “Doing okay?” He squeezed my hand. At the tunnel’s end, Peter took a few steps forward, and then the wall before us seemed to slide away. He reached up and a light clicked on. We were standing in a janitor’s closet. The closet’s back wall was a sliding panel of wood—and behind that, the tunnel.

  Peter smiled at me. He looked tired, and brown tufts of hair stuck out from his head at erratic angles. “I’m going to take you upstairs into the school,” he said. “Put stacks of the papers in the locker rooms, bathrooms, and outside all the department offices. When you’re finished, go back through the tunnel. You still have Katie Milford’s key?” I nodded and Peter opened the door of the janitor’s closet. We stepped into the Trench.

  Of course! I’d heard of northern colleges building tunnels so students could move around during inclement weather. I remembered the girls in Veronica’s video walking through a blackness before stepping into the Trench. In the exact spot I was now standing.

  “The lights come on in half an hour, and we need this wrapped up before people start arriving.” Peter handed me the backpack and the flashlight. “Good luck.” He kissed my lips and was gone.

  I hurried from the Trench and unzipped the backpack. It was stuffed full, too many papers to destroy in half an hour. Much better, I thought, to hide them in my locker and get rid of them later. But when Prisom’s Party realized I’d lied to them, they’d release the confessional video. And I’d have all the Devil’s Advocates in my locker—damning contraband. And then what?

  Even if I could convince everyone that my confession was false, I wasn’t sure Mr. Kaplan’s reputation could recover from the scandal. Everyone from biology class who accused him of sadistic behavior earlier in the year would surely come forward now. He’d be fired, and I’d be responsible.

  I needed to get moving, but I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer. I pulled a single Devil’s Advocate from the backpack and shone my flashlight on the text. The headline, printed in bold black letters, had nothing to do with Jimmy Cardozi.

  Jonah

  December 2012

  AFTER I LEFT the file cabinets in the old Academic League office, I hunkered down in a classroom near the Trench stairs to wait for Prisom’s Party. I sat in the dark, my back propped against the cinderblock wall, and passed the time by planning a class lesson about gallflies, a species of insect extremophile. The more I tried to focus on my students, however, the more I thought about my brother. As the child of scientists, I had unique ways of tormenting Justin. After putting a few drops of some yellow alkaline substance from our “nontoxic” chemistry set into his orange juice, he lost his sense of taste and smell for two days. I once changed all references of “organism” to “orgasm” in a seventh-grade science paper he’d written. I also called him a gallfly, nature’s puniest, most pathetic insect. Or so I thought.

  One winter afternoon—we must have been eight or nine—after I’d reduced Justin to tears, my mother decided to teach me a lesson. I was wearing nothing but a sweater, but she pulled me into the backyard. “Come on!” she said fiercely, marching me across the grass, the air nicking at my ears and neck. At a stringy patch of goldenrod she halted. Shivering, I watched her snap off one of the thin brown stalks. In the center of this was a gall, a bulbous gray pod, just smaller than a cherry. “See this?” she said.

  I nodded, shaking in my tennis shoes, astounded by my mother’s cruel and unusual punishment. She pulled a small knife from her pocket and sliced the gall in half. Inside was a white lump. “Touch it,” she instructed.

  I did and found the lump hard. Only then it began to move and squirm. And just like that, in front of my eyes, the white lump was alive.

  “Touch it again,” my mother said.

  This time, the lump was disconcertingly soft. It wasn’t a lump at all but a larva.

  “This is the spectacular child of your puny and pathetic gallfly,” my mother said, her breath curling into the air. “It can survive for up to nine months by producing an intercellular antifreeze that keeps the larva’s cells from exploding. Does that sound puny and pathetic to you?”

  I shook my head. I imagined my lips turning blue and frostbite edging up my toes. I imagined blackened skin and amputations.

  “What’s the matter?” my mom said. “You’re not cold, are you?”

  This was my introduction to extremophiles. I never called Justin a gallfly again. If I had, it would have been a compliment.

  I must have been dozing, because I was startled awake by voices and a door clanking shut. I grabbed my flashlight and bounded into the hall. The Trench was empty, so I hurried up the stairs and into the school. I threw open the Trench door and my flashlight caught Iris’s face, her eyes frozen wide like an animal in the headlights of a hurtling car. She was holding a Devil’s Advocate. “It’s not true!” she burst out. “They’re lying!”

  At first I didn’t understand, but then I saw the headline.

  THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

  “Carrying the Torch of Prisom’s Party since 1923”

  Mariana Teacher Kills Twin

  MARIANA ACADEMY—Science teacher Jonah Kaplan, a Mariana alumnus, has been harboring a terrible secret for over a decade: He is responsible for his twin brother’s death.

  The deadly car accident that killed sophomore Justin Kaplan on May 2, 2000, shook the Mariana community—but until now, the secret behind this tragedy has never been reported. However, new evidence from that night has come to light. And now that Jonah Kaplan is a teacher here, responsible for the moral and physical well-being of his students, this school deserves to know about his reckless and negligent past.

  During Mr. Kaplan’s student tenure, he and a group of friends created an image—a four-eyed demon meant to represent the mythological Greek Argus. The Argus symbolized Kaplan’s anger toward an administration that turned a blind eye on the school’s intense social stratification. Mr. Kaplan harbored particular animosity toward the school’s then-headmaster, Elliott Morgan. So on the evening of May 2, he spray-painted the Argus on the street outside Morgan’s home.

  Hours after this act of vandalism, Kaplan’s twin brother, Justin, drove to visit Morgan’s daughter. Halfway down the street, his car spun out on black ice, causing him to crash into a large oak tree on the Morgans’ property. He was killed instantly.

  A thorough examination of the area conducted by the Kaplans’ father, a physics professor, determined that the ghastly Argus startled Justin Kaplan, sending him toward the black ice that precipitated the fatal collision.

  Jonah Kaplan owes his school, his community, and his friends an honest accounting of the role he played in this tragic event. Instead, he has repeatedly lied about his past—claiming to be an only child and hiding his actions on the evening in question. Even worse, his silence allowed people to believe that Justin’s death was a suicide. That Jonah has known the truth for all these years and has not come forward is unconscionable.

  I read the story. I read it again. I stared at the words until they dissolved into amorphous shapes. I wanted to obliterate the paper, destroy the very molecules of its making. But the story itself was indestructible. Thirteen years ago, I’d fled my parents, my home, everything I knew, desperate to escape what I’d done. I convinced myself that three thousand miles was far enough, but I could have traveled to anoth
er galaxy and outflown asteroids, and still I would have failed to evade the memory of that night. That memory was a parasite. For years it fed on my guilt, secretly thriving inside its host. I’d been sick all along; but I hadn’t known it. Until now.

  After Hazel showed me the video of Lily saying she’d used my brother for sex, I immediately thought of the Argus, the god my friends had ordained as our protector: the watcher, a powerful deity who saw every transgression and hypocritical act perpetrated by our immoral community. We’d painted our version of the Argus on the Trench wall my freshman year and hidden it behind a stack of chairs. As I searched for the perfect heroic act, my mind returned inevitably to the locker vandalism: those gruesome pictures everyone wanted to blame on me. Why not appropriate the tactic and bring our god to life?

  I’d rushed from Hazel’s house back to my own, snuck into the basement, and grabbed a can of spray paint. Then I set out again. Lily’s house was five miles and three large hills away from ours. I pumped my bike until my thighs burned. The streets were just starting to freeze, but there weren’t any cars, so I kept to the center of the road and navigated around the slick patches. I paused like a ski jumper at the crest of Church Street. Then I was off, the wind slicing my eyes. Faster and faster, gravity pulled me toward my heroic act.

  At the bottom of the hill, I stared at the Morgans’ windows. I was so angry I didn’t care whether they saw me. I wasn’t in control. I just kept hearing Lily’s voice—kissed a girl, touched her breasts, stroked her hair? You’re jealous. Jealous—and her face as she declared, Yes, I used him, and Hazel gripping the steering wheel: You’re so naïve, Jonah. You’re like this little kid, just trying to keep up.

  I pulled out the spray can I’d taken from my parents’ basement—a garish police-tape orange left over from some science fair display board—and shook it vigorously. The Argus was crude enough that even I could draw it, and I made it huge, half the width of the street. I sprayed the four eyes and gaping mouth over and over until the color leapt up like flames. Then I hurried a few yards up the hill, took a deep breath, and turned toward my creation.