The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  Sincerely,

  Thomas Morrissey Esq.

  Lily read the letter twice. Halfway through the second reading, she heard the front door open and shut. She stiffened. But her parents were not in the room with her. They could not see her. Nor could they stop her. She turned on her computer and started searching the websites of boarding schools in California, and Florida, and even Australia—all of them places far away, where the sun burned hot and bright. The application deadlines had already passed, but she was sure that, with enough persistence, she could convince one of them to accept her for the fall.

  Jonah

  June 2013

  I KNEW VISITING Hazel was ill considered, but the talk shows always emphasize closure and I believed I needed some. The town had fired her from the Nye Historical Society, so she’d moved into a cramped studio over the Decatur Pub. I went to see her in early June, my penultimate stop before leaving Nye.

  In December, I told the police that Hazel was behind the Sonya Stevens hoax, and explained how she had fooled Iris Dupont, Peter McCaffrey, and the other kids. (I omitted how she’d conned me.) Hazel, however, had an arsenal of excuses at the ready. She told the police she’d found the book with the fabricated letters from Edmond Dantes and Thelonius Rex in a drawer at the Historical Society when she first moved in, and claimed it had given her the idea to revive Prisom’s Party. But Hazel was very much Lorna Greenburg’s daughter. She had the artistic talent to take the myths about Rex and turn them into physical history, creating an authentic-looking artifact. She was certainly disturbed enough to do it. I think we both felt the intermediary years between high school and adulthood were less significant than what had come before. But whereas I was ready to move on when my future beckoned, Hazel was stuck in the world of our childhood, stunted.

  I had a preparatory drink and then I walked up the rickety steps to Hazel’s apartment. I pressed the buzzer and heard her padding toward the door. I’d expected her to look depressed, possibly unwell, but not as ill as I found her. She’d lost weight. Her once-full cheeks were gaunt, her bare arms too slim. Her freckles looked like the spots of some rare disease.

  “Hi,” I said. Hazel leaned into the door frame and glowered. I looked beyond her into the apartment gloom. The place smelled like VapoRub and cigarettes. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sit in that fetid air. “I’m leaving town this afternoon. I wanted to see you. Can we take a walk?”

  Hazel picked up a blue shawl from the couch and stepped outside, shoeless. We walked down the sloping hill behind the Decatur to a trickling creek. In the glaring summer sun she seemed to exist in only two dimensions, like a paper doll. She laid her shawl on the spindly grass and sat down on it. I sat beside her. We looked at the cold, murky water. Hazel curled and uncurled her freckled toes. I tried not to let those toes distract me.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked. I knew her situation could have been much worse—she’d avoided jail time—but I suspected that the restraining order was punishment enough. She couldn’t hide inside Mariana’s walls anymore, which meant that the only other place she had to go was her mind. And her mind wasn’t well. “Will you stay here for a while?”

  “Probably not.” She shut her eyes and turned her face to the sun. “I’m thinking about Italy or Greece.”

  Her interest in the ancient world was fitting, I realized. Hazel lived for the past and glorified the dead: defunct languages, civilizations, people. To her, the dead possessed greater worth than the living. It made total sense that kids like the one Hazel had been, ostracized and shunned, so often gravitated toward Latin. It was as though by resurrecting the language of Julius Caesar, they could claim some of Rome’s glory for themselves. Or maybe Caesar was turning in his grave and thinking: My legacy is being carried forth by these losers?

  “The night we went to Veronica Mercy’s . . .” I’d been thinking about this a lot since I realized how manipulative Hazel was. “You persuaded her to make that movie of Lily.”

  Hazel shrugged. “I invented an apprenticeship position, told her what her application video should include, gave her our home address.”

  “And then you sent a copy of the video to Justin.”

  “He needed to see Lily for the cipher she was.” Hazel smiled faintly into the light.

  I remembered the day Iris brought Marvelous Species to school. She said Lily had set the book up like a shrine. In her own small way, she’d honored my brother. “I don’t think we were fair to Lily,” I said.

  “I’ve been telling you this for months now, Jonah, but you won’t listen. People act within their nature. Lily didn’t have to participate in Veronica’s video or say those things about your brother. But she did.”

  I swallowed hard. “Your plan didn’t work, Hazel.”

  Hazel shrugged again.

  “Why did you show it to me that night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jesus, Hazel. You knew how I felt about you. You knew I was already out of control.”

  “You want to blame the accident on me? Oh, Jonahlah . . .” She shook her head like she felt very sorry for me indeed. I was starting to feel disgusted with her. Only then I imagined her standing at the top of Church Street, looking down at Justin’s dead body. Many of us stood at various points in between—me and Lily and Veronica and who knows how many others. So maybe Hazel was right about people acting within their natures. The avalanche had started with her, but we’d helped more than a little to push it along.

  Hazel left me by the riverbank. Like me, she was host to her own emotional parasites, but she’d allowed the hostile microbes to gnaw her thin. I refused to waste away like that. I was managing my illness, or attempting to.

  I departed my paltry square of grass and drove to my parents’ house, where I returned the box I’d taken from Justin’s room so many months before. Then I turned my Sube toward the highway. I had pulled out of the UMass entomology project and instead was going to see my parents in the Cook Islands. They wanted to know how long I’d be visiting, and I told them the trip was not a visit, but a next step.

  “A next step toward what?” my mother wanted to know. I had no answer.

  I wasn’t sure I’d miss teaching. I’d resigned in May as one of Mariana’s most well-respected teachers. But I’d also failed in numerous ways. I’d returned to prove my own hypothesis—that given the right support, students would learn to think for themselves. But one cannot teach according to the scientific method. A lab experiment is centered on a control; in teaching there are only variables.

  Exposing Prisom’s Party didn’t change or even improve the school’s culture. As far as I could tell, most of the kids remained as stressed out, misguided, and socially stratified as ever. Iris had become dangerously attached to me—way beyond what the odd experience we’d shared in December would account for. All through second semester, Hazel’s warning plagued me: Young girls get carried away. You need to watch yourself. I feared that Iris had turned me into a symbol of something—I couldn’t imagine what—when I was only a teacher, and a flawed one at that. The only way I knew how to address the problem with Iris was my special approach of tough no-love.

  But like so many of the tactics I’d tried with my students, this one didn’t work. The look of sadness on her face as she took the exam from me was too painful. It was wrenching. She deserved something from me, a small gift as she continued her journey and fought her battles. What I finally offered was inadequate. It was, simply, an admission of my gratitude. But it was real, and I hope she saw that.

  Only after the school year ended did I start to understand how extraordinary Iris was. The difference between her and almost everyone else at Mariana was that she understood the paradox of preparatory school: that preparing and doing are mutually exclusive states. She knew that a student who spent his time getting ready to live and to learn wasn’t doing either. In a way, the idea of prep school flouts evolution itself. From single-cell organisms to human beings, each stage of life is an active an
d living moment. Nature in a state of preparation makes no sense.

  Of course, in some distant future, the high-powered prep school will become obsolete. Centuries from now, students will spend their days in isolated pods having lessons transmitted into their brains via satellite. Until that time, kids will have to learn how to survive in the teeming culture that is a high school. We all desire immunity, the ability to deflect pain the way some microorganisms do. We want to shrug off radiation like a halophile or survive crushing pressure like a piezophile. But we are only human beings. My brother was not the weakling I once thought him to be. In his few years on this earth, he represented the very best of his species: someone who failed often and continued to strive. Moving forward, I aspire to be more like him.

  Iris

  June 2013

  AROUND THE TIME that Peter was expelled from school, a girl from my bio class said, “You’ve got to hand it to him: he has integrity.” In the strictest sense of the word, she was right. When it came to Prisom’s Party, Peter showed total unity. He refused to give up the names of his Party co-conspirators; not even the police could break him. Unlike me, Peter put his morals (as screwed up as they may have been) before his fear of punishment. A small part of me admired him for that.

  The remaining members of Prisom’s Party remained anonymous. Second semester, I couldn’t walk through the halls of school without scrutinizing the faces streaming by and wondering if I was looking at Julia, or O’Brien, or Syme. Getting through the day was like slogging through four-foot snowdrifts. I waited anxiously for my confession video to appear online or in the news. I had nightmares in which Hazel’s freckles were billions of mites swarming over her body and mine. In other dreams, Dalia sat naked in a tub of bright red water, the stitches on her wrists matching those across my face. Come join me in the bath, Dalia said. The water’s fine.

  My parents grew worried. They took me to a new shrink. They whisked me off to Florida for spring break, hoping a vacation might relieve my symptoms. It didn’t. I’d misjudged all of the people who were supposed to care about me, but Mr. Kaplan hurt the most. Maybe I really was a naïve kid, dumb to believe that adults would ever treat me as one of their own. But I’d learned my lesson. Grief is personal; you can’t share it with anyone.

  The end of school was a tremendous relief. When the weather warmed up, I spent my afternoons reading on the Morgans’ front porch and, after dinner, watching the fireflies glow and fade in the dusk. When you live in a big city, where the summers are all scorching pavement and rippling heat, you forget what it’s like to have a million green leaves breathing overhead. But I wasn’t sad to be leaving Nye. I couldn’t wait to be alone in the middle of Boston, making my way around town. The Globe news desk was giving me a press pass, and when I called a source, I’d be able to say, “Iris Dupont calling from the Boston Globe.” Just thinking about this conjured up thrilling images of cover stories and full-page spreads adorned with the hottest accessory of all—my byline.

  A few days before my internship began, I was sitting on the Morgans’ porch swing when a familiar car pulled up. Peter. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him since first semester. I’d tried not to think about him. My feelings about what had happened between us were a maze of arguments that circled back on themselves and generally made my brain hurt.

  It was dark, and Peter didn’t see me until he’d made it halfway up the walk. He stopped and we looked at each other. Then he came to stand at the steps below the porch. He hadn’t changed at all in five months. I imagined us lying together on that ratty Outpost mattress. I felt his fingertips sweeping along my arm. I wished I didn’t want him to be here. I started rocking in the swing, just enough to hear the chains creak overhead.

  “Did you really believe all that stuff about Edmond Dantes and Thelonius Rex?” I said.

  “Didn’t you? Isn’t that why you went along with us?”

  I didn’t want to answer this question.

  “We wanted Mr. Kaplan to leave us alone, Iris. We didn’t know Hazel had personal motives. When she brought us into Prisom’s Party two years ago, all of our activities concerned current events. We never dealt with the past at all. And then . . .”

  “And then cue Iris Dupont, the unwitting ingénue.”

  “Come on, Iris. Give yourself some credit.”

  “Why?” I snorted. “I trusted Hazel and she funneled everything I told her in confidence straight to all of you.”

  Peter nodded, and I clenched my teeth to keep the tears from spilling out.

  “But you were so much worse than me,” I said, my mouth quivering. “You gave Hazel the documents I found in Mr. Kaplan’s car. You published the Devil’s Advocate about Justin Kaplan’s death. That story was so punishing, Peter. Imagine if you’d lost someone so close to you. Imagine how reading a story like that would feel!” I was crying now, but I didn’t care. Peter hadn’t lost anybody, so he couldn’t understand.

  “That paper was supposed to be about Jimmy Cardozi’s money. I swear to you, Iris. O’Brien was in the middle of writing copy about the theft when Hazel came in with her own article. She said we had to switch up the stories.”

  “And you let her do it.”

  His face glowed with an emotion that resembled shame. But I didn’t believe Peter felt any of that.

  “What were we supposed to do? We trusted her. She changed our lives, pulled us out of our pitiful, weak existences, and—”

  “Stop it. Just stop it!” I shook my head, hoping I could deflect the words from my ears. It hurt too much, hearing him talk about how Hazel used him. Knowing how she’d used me.

  “You know your conscience isn’t clear either,” Peter said. “I hardly think Murrow would have found you innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  These days when I thought about Murrow, I imagined us as adults living at the same historical moment, sitting side by side in some journalists’ watering hole, our sleeves rolled up, laughing about the characters we’d interviewed that day. Our conversations were never serious or heavy; we knew we were doing the valuable work of democracy, and that was enough.

  I was smiling through my tears, and Peter was clearly confused by the emotional mash-up. He frowned and said, “Look, I just came over to give you this.” He thrust a small plastic case through the porch railings. “This is the only copy, so you don’t need to worry about any surprise attacks.”

  I turned the case over in my hands. It was unlikely that Lily had sat on this same swing with her copy of Sacrificial Lamb when she decided not to destroy the video, but I liked to entertain the possibility. I’d despised her after watching that movie. I’d believed many horrible things about her. But after my confessional against Mr. Kaplan, I knew I’d pegged Lily wrong. I, too, had become lost in a moral maze where the opposite of up was wrong and the reverse of down was right. Because the girl reading the Party’s script resembled me, and sounded like me, and might actually have been me in spurts and flashes. But she wasn’t the flesh-and-blood me. The consistent Iris Dupont. I guessed it was much the same with Lily.

  I looked up to ask Peter why he’d decided not to release my confessional, but he was already heading back to his car. I watched him get in, and after he drove away I watched the place where his car had been. Then I went into Lily’s room and slipped my confessional in beside Sacrificial Lamb.

  Later that night, I was in the middle of packing for Boston when my mother called me downstairs. I slumped over the suitcase and pretended I hadn’t heard. In the lead-up to my departure she’d instituted a regimen of daily heart-to-hearts, and now, after Peter’s visit, I didn’t feel like talking to anybody.

  “Sit down,” my mom said when I finally dragged myself into the living room. She and my dad were on opposite ends of the couch, looking serious.

  “We’ve been talking,” my father said, “and we’d like to know how you’d feel about attending Blessed Sacrament in the fall.” I watched my parents shrink back just a little, as though afraid I’d throw a lam
p at them.

  “BS? You mean of the hideous tartans and diabolical nuns?”

  “It’s just a suggestion,” my mother said.

  A suggestion, as opposed to a dictum? This was an unexpected play from the Dupont duo. “Can I think about it?”

  “Absolutely,” they said in unison, their faces slack with the relief of people who have just watched the tornado slam into somebody else’s house.

  I returned to my suitcases. Blessed Sacrament, I thought, sitting on Lily’s antacid carpet. Now there’s a challenge. BS wouldn’t be thrilled to enroll a girl like me, mired as I was in scandal. From what I could tell, they didn’t like their young ladies ballsy or ambitious. They certainly wouldn’t like a fifteen-year-old who looked as though her face had picked a fight with a scimitar. Just wait until their paper, the Blessed Sacrament Confessional, learned about me. Headline: Mariana’s Magdalene! Subhead: Iris to Deflower Our Holy Halls.

  Iris

  July 2013

  The T rumbled up and out of its minelike tunnel and into the afternoon sun. I’d been riding underground for thirty minutes, since I boarded at Harvard Square, and the world wavered obliquely through the train windows. I squinted against the glare and, feeling suddenly vulnerable, pressed Marvelous Species against my chest. I’d wrapped the book in tissue paper, but now the crinkling stuff seemed horribly insufficient as protection. I ordered myself to relax. I’d schlepped this book all around Mariana Academy, practically waving it in people’s faces—I was almost as bad as Chris Coon, who’d gone an entire year with the Fountainhead fused to his back pocket. But Mariana was tiny, like one of those miniature self-sustaining ecosystems that Mr. Kaplan once disparaged as “expensive windowsill knickknacks, for science dilettantes.” I was in a real city now, and this trip marked the book’s last hour in my care.