What We Hide

by Marthe Jocelyn

  “This is finally your night?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m dead tickled!”

  “Good timing, with Caroline gone home for the weekend.”

  Brenda wore such a grin. “It looks different, me knowing I’m sleeping over, not just popping in.”

  “What’s with your new decor?” Kirsten meant my piles of clothing. “You’re not packing!”

  “My semester’s nearly done.”

  “But you’re not leaving,” she said. “Right? You’re coming back after the break?”

  “I …”

  “Shouldn’t we all be getting to Games?” said Brenda. “We still have to change.”

  Who invented field hockey anyway? Some girl-hating sadist with a perverted addiction to reddened, wind-chafed thighs and bruised shins. At Ill Hall we had Games instead of PE, usually quite benign: running laps around the playing field or smudging the dirt to obliterate poor effort in the broad jump. But when Fran and Kirby rounded up girls and handed out hooked wooden mallets and shin guards, normally tame females were transformed into gladiators. Hockey sticks became brutal weapons in a battle to the death. It was the end of November, drizzling and miserable. Looking at the other girls, you’d think we’d been promised a chocolate cake for the muddiest participant. They went crashing up and down the field, banging sticks at the stupid ball, ruddy-cheeked, shouting, Hooray! Good show! and twirling their soggy pleated skirts with every darting smash.

  It had taken Fran two minutes to plunk me in one of the nets as goaltender; she’d seen that otherwise I’d be trampled among the sheep droppings. Meaning I was the farthest from the road when Oona started hollering, “Oy, Penelope! Where the hell are you going? Our goal is at the other end!”

  Penelope trotted along the boundary line and then off the field through long grass, toward the road where someone … a boy … it was Tom! I set off running too, only I had on bulky goalie pads, so my pace was a waddle. Fran blasted her whistle. The game stopped, sticks frozen. Kirby blew his whistle and charged after Penelope, catching her on the verge of the drive. I clumsily unstrapped a shin guard while I ran, and then the other, leaving them in the scrub.

  “Jenny!” Kirby held Penelope’s arm and now reached out to grab mine. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s my brother. I just … it’s a surprise, him being here.”

  “I dig that.” He untucked his ponytail from the collar of his jersey and wiped his damp forehead with a sleeve. “But you can’t just split. We’re in the middle of a game, right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “No relation to you?” Kirby asked Penelope. She pouted and kicked the grass.

  “Jenny, say hello to your brother and make arrangements for his visit to begin after lessons.” He put a hand on Penelope’s shoulder. “You. Stick with me.” He steered her back to where the girls were tearing around again, clacking their swords.

  By the time I’d plowed through the spiky stalks that rimmed the field, Tom was holding out his arms. The hug was flannel and warm and weedy, until I remembered I was mad at him.

  “You suck,” I said. “You got off with Penelope on Visiting Day and then left with Mom and Dad and I never heard from you again.”

  “That was weeks ago!”

  “Yeah. Weeks ago!”

  “You can’t be bummed about her. She … made me. I told you that.”

  “She made you? That’s the weakest crap I’ve ever heard.”

  “Jesus, Jenn, I’m here now.” He sounded exhausted, as if he’d walked the forty miles from Sheffield. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I hitched.”

  “You look terrible.” Kind of shrunken.

  A whistle blew on the field. Two whistles. The players jogged off, hair whipping, skirts flapping in the wind.

  “I’ve got lessons until three-thirty. It’s not okay to just show up.” I sounded prickly, but he deserved some flack. I should be hoofing it to catch the others.

  “But I came to tell you … I just wanted to see you. There’s some stuff going on.… ”

  “What?”

  “Trouble. And stuff. At school.”

  “What do you mean, trouble? What did you do?”

  “More about what I didn’t do. I’ve … missed a few classes … not shown up for seminars, that kind of thing.” Tom blinked his pink-rimmed eyes. “I’ve been warned.”

  “You’re high,” I said. “You get high and don’t go to class. You’re always effing high, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged, rolling his eyeballs back like I was Mom or something. He’d come looking for me but he wasn’t ready to see me yet. People, I thought, are in and out of each other’s orbits every minute. Often we don’t even notice. Once in a while, we collide, knock ourselves into new territory. Here on the grounds of Illington Hall, Tom was so vividly an alien from another place, it was like one of Percy’s movies.

  “Why are you messing up?” I couldn’t control the pissy shake in my voice. “You’re at school to stay out of the army, for god’s sake! What are you thinking?”

  “Jenny!” called Fran. “Time’s up!”

  “Come on, it’s raining.” I grabbed his hand, pulling him along.

  I stuck him in the library, said I’d be back after Art. When I got to the Girls’ Changing Room to peel off my drenched and yucky hockey togs, most of the others had already disappeared to class. But in where the loo stalls were, a furious dispute was going on.

  I didn’t recognize Kirsten’s voice at first, because I’d never heard it mad before.

  “… so bloody thoughtless!”

  “How was I supposed to know? I only said it as a joke.” Penelope, defending herself.

  “How is it amusing to spread malignant rumors about someone?”

  Penelope took in a deep breath. “It’s not a rumor, though, is it? What I said was the truth.”

  Was this about me?

  “There are certain true things”—Kirsten, terse as hell—“that should not be said. You don’t tell the Nazis that someone is hiding under the floorboards just because it’s a fact! That’s what you did! There’s no prize for telling the truth if it leads to someone getting seriously hurt.”

  “Remind me,” said Penelope. “Since you and your family live in emotional hibernation, avoiding reality. Next time I go around telling the truth, remind me to shut my gob.”

  “You should shut your gob before you say pretty much anything!” Kirsten shouted.

  “Stop it!” I stepped into the doorway. “I utterly guarantee that I did not get off with Luke! There is nothing to fight about!”

  They stared as if I were speaking Chinese, looked at each other and back at me. They shook their heads, slowly, as if they’d practiced doing it together.

  “I … saw him …,” I said. “Down the woods. But we didn’t … We never …”

  “Obviously,” said Penelope.

  “This is something else,” said Kirsten. “Not about you.”

  “Not everything is about you,” Penelope added. “As shocking as that may seem.”

  “Jenny,” said Kirsten. “All she meant was …”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to butt in. Just wanted you to definitely know that I didn’t—”

  “We get it,” said Penelope. “Saint Jennifer. Saving yourself for your boyfriend. Oh! Excuse me! Your ex-boyfriend!”

  “Shut it, Pen.” Kirsten’s voice went shrill. “Why do you have to be so nasty all the time?”

  “And why do you have to be so nice?” Penelope snatched up her shoulder bag from where it sat in one of the sinks. She pushed past me, but then turned back to Kirsten.

  “If it was me,” she said. “My fault, what happened … well, I wouldn’t do that on purpose, I never would. I hope you know that, Kirsten.”

  She made her exit, hair bouncing.

  “Not exactly an apology,” said Kirsten. “But the closest she’ll ever come.”

  “Wait,” I said.
“What just happened? I thought you were talking about Luke. And me. The rumor. Who got hurt?”

  “A boy in town.”

  “Brenda’s friend?”

  “His name is Robbie, as it turns out.”

  “Is he also … a friend of Luke’s?” Finally the pieces were clicking together.

  Kirsten breathed on the mirror and drew a little circle with the tip of her finger.

  “It’s … none of my business,” I said. “But … I saw …”

  There was no mistake about what I’d seen. It wasn’t misinterpretation, like kids “seeing” Luke and me. If I hadn’t seen the boys together … all this would have been behind my back, out of earshot. Someone else’s secret, one of the million or two that lingered like ghosts within these old walls.

  “Just chance,” I said. “I saw him … them … down the woods. Luke knows I know. He knows I’d never tell.”

  So then it came out. Luke was shy, he’d never had a girlfriend even though they all thought he was a heartthrob. He’d never said a word, even when Kirsten guessed a while back and dropped hints. “You sort of know, right? Your own brother.” But Luke never said, just went quietly along. Turned out he’d met this boy in town, oh, did I remember meeting him, that first day in the chip shop? That was before Kirsten knew anything. But then the boy got beaten up and horribly hurt. Being queer might be legal but it wasn’t liked. Luke had skived off lessons and gone to see Robbie in hospital. Back at school, he’d found Kirsten and told her everything. He’d cried. She hadn’t seen her brother cry since he stepped on glass at the beach when he was nine. So she’d cried too and they’d had this big moment.

  “Robbie seemed fine when I saw him.” I hoped she didn’t ask for details.

  “He’s much better,” she said. “Scars, but otherwise fine.”

  “How is it Penelope’s fault? Is she … she’s not against them, is she?”

  “She opened her big fat mouth and said something. To the wrong somebody. Luke found out at the weekend, at a wedding. But he only told me today.”

  “You mean the somebody who … hurt Robbie?”

  Kirsten turned to look at me. “Where’s your brother, speaking of Penelope’s big fat mouth?”

  “I left him in the library after Games.”

  “What do you bet Pen’s with him by now? I’ll cover for you,” said Kirsten. “We’ve missed half of Art already.”

  Penelope jumped up to wave me off when I came into the library.

  “He’s sort of pathetically messed over,” she whispered, blocking my way.

  Tom lay on the library sofa, shoes kicked off, feet dangling over the end, familiar holes in the toes of his gray sweat socks.

  “Move, Penelope. He’s my brother.”

  “You just hate me,” she said.

  “You start galloping across the playing field like a deodorant commercial, with my brother as the hero. Did you …” I hated asking her this. “Did you know he was coming?”

  Her curls tumbled forward as she dropped her face.

  “No.” Finally. “But …”

  But?

  “But there was this tiny hopeful crappy stupid bit of me …” She glanced over her shoulder to check Tom. His eyes were closed. “I had a minute’s worth of fantasy, while I was running, that he had come … to visit me. All right?”

  I stared at her. There was a tiny crappy stupid bit of me still worried that Pen was right. He’d hardly ever called, let alone traveled forty miles for my sake, other than Visiting Day when our parents brought him. Maybe he was here to find her?

  “Happy now? That you’ve seen into my pathetic heart?” She stepped aside, letting me in. “He’s passed out.”

  “He’s faking.” I jounced his foot, watched his eyelids flutter.

  “I’m off,” said Penelope. “Precious family moments are not my favorite entertainment.” One of Pen’s guilt-inducing remarks that we all ignored. Except that … family moments—or Tom and Matt moments, anyway—had always been my favorite entertainment. Maybe Kirsten felt that way about Luke. I watched Pen go, surprised at how not mad I was.

  Tom spent half his life with his eyes closed. When someone asked an irritating question, Tom’s eyes went click shut, like the snap of a lens cap on a camera. Was he hiding? Or giving the other person a chance to slink away into the undergrowth? And what is undergrowth anyway? We all grow underneath what people see, right? Most of life happened out of sight, as it turned out.

  “Jenn.” He patted a spot next to him for me to sit close. “I know I’m stoned. I know I’ve made a total cock-up of the whole semester.… Don’t you love that word? Cock-up? Best thing I’ve learned in England.”

  “Have you been kicked out?”

  “Not quite,” he said.

  “But almost?”

  “Really, really almost.” He shuffled himself to a sitting position. “All Matt’s fault,” he said. “Every day I wake up, I think about where Matt must be waking up. It’s making me crazy, Jenn.”

  I thought about Matt waking up, going outside to find a dead barber’s body. It made me want to kick Tom.

  “I never noticed,” I said, “how selfish you are.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “I know he’s your best friend. But he … I … Matt’s my …”

  “Brother.” Tom, still shut-eye. “He’s our n’other brother.”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Now you’re up to where I have to smoke a pipeful to forget.”

  I whacked his arm. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard ever. Total bullshit!” I punched the sofa cushion to stop from hitting him. “How can you waste time being guilty? How dare you? Don’t make me scream. How will it help Matt if you’re drafted and get your pot-wasted head blown off?”

  Tom sat up and looked at me. I’d never yelled at him before. I’d hardly even disagreed with him before.

  “Change of plan.” He cleared his throat. “That’s what I came to tell you … I came here for a reason, you know. Not to whine or collapse or … bonk your friend.”

  I tucked my legs under me. Listening.

  “There was an academic hearing. Three ancient professors grilled and reprimanded and scolded and chastised. I had to wear a tie!”

  “A tie is not a helmet!”

  “I know that, Jenn.”

  “Did you have to tell Mom and Dad?”

  “Not yet. Never, if I can avoid it. Pray that the college holds off. And that includes you, unless you want your tongue sliced and fed to pigeons. Listen to me. There’s an outcome. If I never get high again—”

  “Ha! What are the chances of that?” I’d say zero. “You’re high right now!”

  Click. Eyes again. “I’m ignoring your negative vibes. If I chill on smoking. If I can possibly manage to chill on smoking. Which I really, really mean to. Today is my farewell stone. If I go to every lecture. If I miraculously pass my exams next week with gold stars. If all that happens, I get another hearing instead of expulsion.”

  “Instead of the army, you mean.”

  “Right.”

  I lay down with my head on his knee. “You better,” I whispered. “You really better, Tom-Tom.”

  He laid a hand on my head and patted ever so gently.

  The bell rang for the end of lessons.

  “And!” I popped back up. “You write to Matt. Right away.”

  He sighed, sort of a moan. “Matt wrote to me,” he said. “That’s what killed me. Him being plucky as hell, telling me plans for after.”

  “Or, better yet, ten letters.”

  “I get it. I hear you. It’s a deal.” He lay back against the lumpy cushions. “Do you think I could stay on this sofa tonight? It’s not in me to hitch back.”

  “It’s called thumbing.” Maybe he could pull off his plan, gold stars and all. He was lazy but also crazy smart. “We’re having baked beans for tea. It’s the worst food you’ll ever eat. Wouldn’t you rather sleep in one of the boys’ dorms, if there’s a bed?
”

  “Seriously, no. I’d have to participate in a schoolboy ritual or something drastic. Can’t I just stay here?”

  “I’ll have to ask Richard. The headmaster.”

  “Jolly good.”

  A church bell in town chimed on the hour. We heard midnight and then waited at the top of the stairs for another many minutes to make sure. Four of us from the girls’ dorms, plus Percy, converged in the corridor outside the kitchen with only one flashlight among us.

  “You’re bleeding useless,” whispered Penelope, aiming the beam at the door. “Brenda will come with me, since this is her big adventure. You others wait here to receive the goods.” They were back in under a minute, giggling like maniacs, balancing two baking trays covered in foil.

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Percy hopped up and down in socks.

  “Did you get cutlery? Napkins?”

  “Jesus, do you think we’re at the Buckingham Hotel?”

  Tom was not thrilled at first to have a party land on his sofa, but we soon won him over. The flashlight battery died after a few minutes, making the library grow in size, especially with a half-moon glimmering through the window.

  “I count twenty-six baked apples,” said Kirsten. “Enough for six of us, do you think?”

  Not having spoons or plates, we hovered around the pans, slurping sugary apple flesh and trying not to touch anything else with sticky fingers. We finished off about half before they lost their appeal.

  “We’d better return the leftovers,” said Brenda. “Think how ticked Vera will be at dinner tomorrow to find some missing!” She volunteered to tiptoe back with the trays, and I helped her put things away.

  “It’s just how I fancied it would be.” Brenda’s voice was eerie in the unlit kitchen hallway. “Staying in the dormitory, mucking about all night, being silly. Dream come true.”

  “It’s not always like this. Usually we sleep.”

  “For me, it’s my one go. It’ll be this way forever, noshing stolen apples in the dark. Like one of Richard’s poems, you know? ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ …?”