The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  My horror was instantaneous: the Argus was upside down. I’d intended to draw it facing the Morgans’ house so Lily would see it first thing in the morning and know that we were watching her—that someone knew all about her fickleness, selfishness, and deception. Instead, I’d painted the creature looking away from the house, up the hill. Of all the careless mistakes I’d ever made, all the numbers I’d forgotten to carry and the negative signs that had vanished from my answers, this was the worst. I had ruined my heroic act. I’d failed Hazel, whom I loved, and my brother, whom I was trying to protect.

  I barely registered the ride home. Back in my bedroom, I tossed the backpack with the spray can in the closet and climbed into bed with my clothes on. I lay under the covers, shivering and crying. I must have fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion, because the next thing I knew, my father was shaking me awake.

  Elliott Morgan called our house just after four in the morning. There’s been an accident. My father thought it was me, because I’d been the one to storm out of the house hours before, but I was safe if not entirely sound. My parents and I dressed quickly and headed out.

  The night felt hungry, the blackness eager to swallow warm-blooded life. The moon was a white hole in the sky. A freezing rain had fallen, and ice plated our front walk. I slid across the cold, stiff leather of my parents’ Toyota and buckled in. Only when we reached Church Street did I understand where we were going. We began a careful descent down the hill, because by this time patches of black ice clearly pocked the street. I had the odd feeling that we were submerging ourselves, only the air seemed to be growing thinner like we were climbing. Midway down, flashing lights spilled onto our car, and then the Argus rose before us like some awful sea creature from the deep.

  “What in God’s name—” my father said, only we were all distracted at that moment by another sight: our car, its hood smashed like a broken nose against the Morgans’ colossal oak. Fire trucks and an ambulance and medics attended to something at the car’s driver-side door. The police were waiting for us. My mother struggled against the meaty arms of one policeman, gnashing her teeth and screaming until my father pulled her away. I hovered in a daze. Medics pushed a stretcher toward us. It was covered with a white sheet and beneath the sheet was a six-foot-long lump. At that moment, I remembered the frozen gallfly my mother had shown me and how it had struggled to life before my eyes. I half expected the same thing to happen now. But the stretcher rolled by. The lump did not stir.

  Soon words floated by, as though borne on the current of flashing lights. Ice . . . impact . . . instantaneous. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about how my parents, with their arms wrapped awkwardly around each other and their bodies shaking, looked a lot like sea life.

  Then my parents were pulling me toward them, locking me into their embrace. “Jonah.” They sobbed. “Justin.”

  There was a cough and we looked up to see Elliott Morgan standing on the sidewalk in slippers, flannels, and his winter coat.

  “What happened?” my mother yelled.

  But Morgan just shook his head. He seemed unable to do anything except move his neck from left to right. Then we were back in the car, driving up the hill.

  The rest of the night was a succession of fluorescent lights, signatures, and hard plastic chairs. The police had no reason to suspect that the crash was anything other than accidental, and though we were all considering the alternative, we didn’t mention it. We nodded our heads when they explained about the frozen roads, the black ice, the lack of air bags. We said we understood.

  We pulled back into our driveway just as the sun rose above the treetops. The wasted night had given way to a cold, drizzly dawn.

  Thirty-six hours later, the evening before my brother’s funeral, my father returned from the crash site carrying his calculations. “It wasn’t suicide,” he said, spreading his plans and measurements across the kitchen table. “But it wasn’t just the ice. That horrible thing spray-painted on the road. You remember . . .” He handed my mother a photograph he’d taken of the Argus. “I drove down Church at the same speed I believe Justin was going. And that thing just flew up at me. Right in my face.” My father raised his palm toward his face, like he was about to slap himself. “Justin swerved out of shock, maybe fear. That’s why he hit the black ice.”

  My mother’s mouth was moving. At first no words came out, but soon she was mumbling, “That bastard.” Her voice grew louder: “That bastard!” Suddenly I realized she was talking about the person who’d drawn the Argus. She banged her fist on the table and screamed, “That bastard!” The pain stunned her right hand, so she started in with her left. “That fucking bastard!” My father struggled to hold her, but she kept fighting him and screaming.

  I just sat there doing nothing, watching my mother writhe and listening to my parents’ tears and my mother’s chair scraping against the kitchen floor and the silence of our house and the ringing in my ears and Lily’s accusation—you’re jealous, jealous—and it was like a torrential rushing, like gallons of water filling the room. But then the rushing began to fade and the ringing subsided and Lily’s voice went silent. All that was left was a single thought: that it would have been so easy to blame my brother’s death on natural phenomena—the freezing of water as a catalyst for tragedy. But we were a family of scientists, so we knew that humans were part of nature too. As catalysts, humans made all kinds of awful things happen.

  The Devil’s Advocate had fallen from my hands. Someone was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand a thing. I felt sickened, and there was no cure. If I wanted to end the parasite’s life, I would have to end my own. Otherwise, I had no choice but to let the spiteful memory feed.

  Iris

  December 2012

  I KEPT SAYING his name, but Mr. Kaplan was paralyzed.

  “Where did you come from?” He suddenly grabbed my shoulders. “Where?” He threw open the Trench door and plunged inside, banging his fists against the lockers. “Iris!” Mr. Kaplan looked deranged. “Show me where you’ve been hiding!”

  “It’s not me. I’m undercover—”

  “Right now.”

  I’d left the backpack with the newspapers in the hallway. “Can I just go and—”

  “Now!”

  I rushed to the janitor’s closet and pulled the panel aside.

  “This is brilliant, fucking brilliant!” Mr. Kaplan pushed past me and disappeared into the tunnel. I followed, stumbling through the dark, afraid of what he’d do when he caught Peter and Julia.

  The tunnel spit me out into the concrete room where the pigs had interrogated me. I could hear the echo of Mr. Kaplan’s voice, and I followed it into a stairwell and up into the foyer of the Outpost. I found him in a defunct student lounge lit by dawn. I looked from the dirty blue carpet to the furniture covered with white sheets. Motes of dust twinkled in the streaming shafts of sunlight.

  Mr. Kaplan ran to the far corner of the lounge, then back to the foyer. “Hazel!” he bellowed. “I know you’re here.”

  Hazel? But then I turned, and she stood in the doorway.

  Jonah

  December 2012

  SHE LOOKED LIKE a hologram, her hair gleaming, her freckles crackling like sparks, her green eyes shooting lasers of fury at me. “You,” she spat, and her mouth crumpled.

  I couldn’t speak. I was trying to work out how Hazel had obtained the materials I’d taken from my parents’ house. On their own, those documents told a fragmented tale. But the article in the Devil’s Advocate had supplied the connective tissue. Anatomical material that only Hazel understood.

  “You killed him!” she snarled.

  For weeks after the accident, Hazel begged to know what had happened to Justin. Had Lily driven him to suicide? Why hadn’t I done everything in my power to ensure that he survived the first night of his despair? I knew what had happened, she was convinced, so why wasn’t I telling her?

  But I couldn’t talk about it. It was too painful even to think about, and I dar
ed not risk her discovering my culpability. If she’d only gone to Lily’s home before the county power-washed the Argus from the street, she’d have known at once, but she couldn’t bear to stand in the place where Justin died. Still, her need to piece together the events of that night had split us apart, the way lightning splits a tree. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to tell her what I knew—and my refusal was indication enough that I did know something—she stopped talking to me. I hoped that the Trench would lure her back, but shortly thereafter Headmaster Morgan abolished the Rule of Lockers. Come September, we lost our home.

  Now the Devil’s Advocate had stripped me naked before the school and plunged me into the singularity of my past. This hurt like hell, but even worse was the way in which Hazel had placed me in the center of her universe, as though inside a cocoon. I’d believed that I was maturing and growing strong. But now that the chrysalis had finally cracked open, I was only a weak, despicable thing. Not an adult. Not even a hearty child. And that was exactly what Hazel wanted. I’d killed the boy she loved, so I needed to suffer.

  Iris broke the silence. “Hazel, what are you doing here?”

  Hazel composed herself. “Why don’t you sit down and let me have a talk with Jonah. Then you and I can chat.”

  “Chat?” Iris shook her head. “Don’t patronize me! I knew you were a liar. Pretending you hardly knew Mr. Kaplan. But I saw you kissing him.” I started to protest, but Iris cut me off. “Who are you?”

  “I’m your mentor.” Hazel took a couple of steps into the lounge and smiled. “I brought you into Prisom’s Party to give you a voice. You’ve lost so much, but that’s what makes you special. Trust me, Iris, I know what it’s like. We’re kindred spirits.”

  “You used me to get information about Mr. Kaplan!”

  “You made that choice, my dear. You acted of your own volition.”

  Iris shook her head, her eyes tearing.

  This was getting stranger by the second. “The newspapers, the cameras hidden around school, Matt Sheridan—Hazel, you were behind all that?”

  Hazel looked at me like I was a lost lamb. “I’m not some cult leader, Jonah. I returned to Mariana for the same reasons you did: to overcome my failures, help these kids.”

  I shook my head, but Hazel continued, her voice passionate. “Prisom’s Party has lived in these walls for over a century, long before my return.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. I felt like grabbing it in clumps and tearing it out. “It’s a myth, Hazel! Prisom’s Party exists only in people’s minds.”

  “You and I vowed to bring Prisom’s Party into existence, but we were cowards. I’m carrying on the legacy that should have been ours. Yours and mine. Justin’s.”

  I couldn’t believe this. “Did you pretend to be Sonya Stevens, Hazel?”

  “They were just photos from some pornography site. They weren’t of me.”

  “But you made Matt Sheridan send pictures of himself!”

  “I made him do nothing! You’re not listening. Everything these kids have done has been of their own volition. Matt Sheridan symbolized—”

  “Matt Sheridan isn’t a symbol, Hazel! He’s a person. A teenager! This isn’t a game.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s quite serious.” She was moving forward, closing the distance between us. I did not like how calm she appeared. “Do you remember us as kids, Jonah? Everybody taunting us in the hallways? Jeering. Do you remember Morgan questioning us, practically accusing us of plotting the nation’s next school shooting? Do you remember the signs kids hung over the Trench door?”

  I hadn’t thought about these signs in years. The worst—Columbine Breeding Colony—we’d torn down before the faculty found out. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves, our inert schemes.

  “And fucking Veronica Mercy,” Hazel went on. “And her second-rate identity thieves, strutting around in their Outcast Chic. Taking what belonged to us! Usurping our pain!”

  The realization came like a flash. “You wanted to be friends with them,” I said, and almost laughed. But Hazel’s eyes narrowed to small, mean points, and I saw that I was right. The girl who walked goddess-like above us wanted the same acceptance that we did. But she was a Trench kid, so she’d been rejected.

  “What happened to you, Jonah?” Hazel began pacing, moving ever closer to me and Iris. “What did you think you’d accomplish as Pasternak’s lackey? Did you forget how harsh an environment this is?” She thrust her finger at Iris. “If a kid doesn’t fight, she ends up like your brother.”

  “Hazel, Justin died because—”

  “I’m not talking about his death. I’m talking about his life.”

  I shook my head, grabbed at my hair. “Don’t you think I know that? He was my twin.” My throat constricted, like I’d been bitten by something venomous. “Why do you think I drew the Argus? I was trying to show you and Justin how strong we could be. How much I . . .”

  How much I loved you, I thought. But I couldn’t say it. “You’re not in high school anymore, Hazel,” was all I could manage.

  Hazel looked at me, stunned, and in that moment I knew fleeing to California had saved me in some unanticipated but vital way. For all her itinerancy, Hazel had never really left Mariana, never learned to adapt to any other environment. She was trapped in the torturous emotional landscape of her adolescence, despising her alienation but thriving on it all the same. I’d convinced myself that Hazel needed me, but what she really couldn’t do without was her pain.

  “Where are the others?” came a small, timid voice from the corner. I’d forgotten that Iris was there.

  “Gone,” Hazel said, and smiled. “Peter ran out on you without a moment’s hesitation.”

  “Peter McCaffrey?” I said, but they ignored me.

  “Peter and I are through.”

  “Don’t talk about Peter like there was ever anything special between the two of you. I’ve been close with Peter for three years, my dear. All the information he learned from you, he passed right over to me.”

  “Fuck you,” Iris said.

  Hazel’s mouth stiffened. She took an aggressive step forward. We stood just feet from each other now, the three points of a triangle.

  “You’re a lonely, manipulative freak,” Iris said, and the next thing I knew, Hazel lunged. She would have slapped Iris across the face, but I shoved myself between them. Hazel stumbled, but then she was on me, her fists pummeling my body, her fingers scratching. Her nails bit into my forearm and suddenly I was bleeding.

  “Get off him!” Iris yelled, and Hazel turned on her like a wild animal distracted by fresh prey. She swung out, and her right fist, adorned with its horsefly ring, made contact with Iris’s face. The fly’s sharp wings punctured Iris’s cheek and ripped upward toward the bridge of her nose. Iris screamed with pain as blood welled lava-like from the gash.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I grabbed Hazel by the shoulders and shook her, crazed, unable to stop myself.

  “Mr. Kaplan! Stop it! Please!”

  I was vaguely aware of Iris’s pleading voice and her bloody face. She needed medical attention, but the urge to hurt Hazel, physically and brutally, was too strong. Hazel broke free and charged Iris.

  “Don’t forget your confession, Iris,” she snarled. “Don’t you forget—”

  Iris hesitated, her eyes bright and afraid. Then she bolted. I ran after her.

  Iris

  December 2012

  I FLED THE Outpost, grabbed the backpack with the Devil’s Advocates I’d left outside the Trench, and ran for help. Headmaster Pasternak was in the lobby, still wearing his coat and a newsboy cap dusted with snow.

  “They’re going to kill each other!” I was breathless, half delirious. Black spots clouded my eyes, and I felt like I was going to puke out my entire stomach. My face throbbed. My neck and hands were sticky with blood.

  Headmaster Pasternak was unflinching. “Let’s get you to the hospital,” he said, and pulled a clot
h handkerchief from his pocket. He pressed it to my cheek with surprising care. “I’ll call your parents and tell them to meet us at the ER.”

  I shook my head wildly. My neck barely felt attached to my body. “Come on!” I cried. I saw Mr. Kaplan hurrying toward us, and then the hallway and Mr. Kaplan and the rows of lockers melted into a hazy puddle.

  I woke up to the smell of leather and car heat. I was leaning against Mr. Kaplan’s shoulder; his hand was pressing the handkerchief to my face.

  “She’s awake,” he said, and I saw in the rearview mirror the headmaster’s visible sigh of relief.

  “You fainted,” Pasternak said. “We’re going to the hospital.”

  “The confessional! Where’s the confessional?”

  Pasternak looked worried. “Just relax, Iris,” he said.

  “Mr. Kaplan,” I mumbled, my lips thick and gummy. “Where is she?”

  He shook his head. “We don’t know.”

  I tried to remember what had just happened, but the pain was like a wall. As Mr. Kaplan walked me to the ER, I thrust my backpack into his hands. “You need this,” I said, though I couldn’t for my life recall why.

  VI

  Mutation

  Weak microorganisms that have been exposed to foreign chemicals or ultraviolet radiation will often die. But if they survive, they can mutate into a more robust version of their former selves, able to thrive under new conditions.

  —Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth’s Mysterious Biology