Fell Back

by M. E. Kerr

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but Paul talked against Cyr so hatefully, I was expecting this slick con artist, not this shy — ” “Shy?”

  “He is, Fell! He’s shy and he’s sweet. I know he looks goofy, but he’s not. He reads Camus and Vonnegut.”

  “We all read Camus and Vonnegut. They’re assigned.”

  She let that go by.

  She said, “Paul and I were very close. Too close. Twins are. We told each other everything. All I used to hear about was Cyr, Paul’s great hate. Hearing about someone’s great hate is like hearing about someone’s great love. You get involved yourself. And curious. When I heard he was coming to our Halloween Dance, I couldn’t wait to see him.”

  Across the room Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were visiting San Francisco. Behind them the snow was falling so thickly, it was all you could see from the windows.

  She seemed to sense my concern about the weather. I was beginning to wonder if I could get the BMW back that afternoon.

  “To make a long story short,” she said, “at the end of Christmas vacation, Paul told me he knew about us. He said he’d been waiting to see if I’d tell him about it. He said there wasn’t a meal he ate all the while we were home that he didn’t throw up after. He waited right up until we both had to go back to school, and you know what he said?”

  It was one of those questions you weren’t expected to answer.

  Her face was breaking like a baby’s before it starts to cry. “He said … Paul said … Why didn’t you just put a knife in me?”

  I waited for her to get a hold of herself.

  “So in a way you feel responsible,” I murmured.

  “Not in a way. I do. Of course I do…. We haven’t even dared show up on The Hill together. Everyone will think, or know, we were the reason for his suicide … or they’ll wonder how I can date Paul’s worst enemy so soon…. Cyr’s stepbrother says to just face it head-on. Go to The Charles Dance. Deal with it … He’s the only one we’ve confided in until now … Fell? Why were you up on Playwicky today? Is Sevens up to something?”

  “No, not Sevens.”

  I told her about Lasher’s letter to Lionel, which had been stored in the word processor. I left out the part about The Sevens Revenge. I explained how Dib had come upon it … and how I’d simply gone to Playwicky out of curiosity, after I’d overheard Creery’s phone conversation last night.

  “I know about Cyr’s letter to Lowell,” she said. “He wants to get off drugs, Fell. That’s all. He wrote Lowell to tell him that, and to tell him about me. I’m helping him straighten out his life. Lowell is too…. Why wouldn’t The Sevens be glad of that?”

  “Maybe Schwartz expected him to do Twilight Truth.”

  “He might have. But Paul was trying to force it on him!”

  “I think there was more in Creery’s letter,” I said.

  “No. Cyr would have told me if there was…. And what does it all have to do with you, Fell?”

  “I’m just nosy, I guess.”

  “Cyr doesn’t believe that. Fell? Why? He’s almost flunking out, he’s so terrified. Last night he even forgot I was coming on the eight-twenty bus. He can’t think straight anymore! And now he’s really convinced there’s this Sevens Revenge brewing … and you could be part of it.”

  “Tell him I’m not part of anything.”

  “We don’t even know how Paul found out about us. Now you say Paul really did have a copy of Cyr’s letter. How did he get it?”

  I didn’t have any answers for her.

  Lauren took out a handkerchief and blew her nose.

  She said, “Both Cyr and I are going down the tubes over this thing, Fell. I have to go back to school now and try to study for midsemesters. Cyr’s thinking of quitting altogether, and he would, too, if Lowell wasn’t there to stop him. You don’t know how depressed he is! … Paul did this!”

  “Creery did his share of baiting your brother, too.”

  “No one is a match for Paul. You don’t know him!”

  She realized she’d slipped into present tense.

  She said, “I mean you didn’t know him … did you?”

  “Not really.”

  “What he was capable of?”

  “I guess not.”

  Lauren pressed her fingers on my wrist. “I’m going to tell you something that I’ve only told Cyr and Lowell,” she said. “I think Paul picked that fight with Cyr deliberately right before he jumped. He wanted everyone to think Cyr’d pushed him.”

  There was nothing to say to that.

  Lauren looked at her watch. “I have to go, Fell.”

  I hadn’t taken my coat off, only unbuttoned it. I gave another glance out the window and started buttoning it. Someone wrote something that said when it snows hard, the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only. That’s what it looked like outside.

  “There’s something I don’t understand, though, Lauren,” I said. “Why does Creery think Sevens would want revenge?”

  “Do you really want to know what I think? You’re not to repeat this to anyone, Fell.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think trying to come off all the drugs has made Cyr paranoid. Lowell thinks so, too…. Things are bad enough, but they’re not as bad as he’s making them.” She tapped her forehead. “Up here … he needs supervision while he’s getting clean.”

  “Can’t this Lowell get him in someplace?”

  “Lowell’s afraid that if he leaves school now, he’ll never go back. His father’s dying, too. If he can just hold out four more months!”

  I helped her into her coat, and took her Le Sac.

  “The lease on the Playwicky apartment is up the first of the month,” Lauren said as we walked down the lobby. “Lowell’s not going to move into a motel and live here until June.”

  “Was it just Paul’s apartment?”

  “Yes. I’d stay there sometimes.”

  “Because Rinaldo said some of the Sevens used it.”

  “Only to play cards in…. Rinaldo’s such a know-it-all, isn’t he? I hear he’s selling everything we gave him.”

  “Well …” I shrugged.

  “I don’t care, really. I don’t want anything of Paul’s! I know right now his ghost is somewhere howling at what he’s done to Cyr!”

  “I have the material for the memorial book, by the way.”

  “I finally found a smiling picture of him, too. I’ll get it to you, and then I wish you’d send it all to Daddy … I don’t want to see his sick stories right now.”

  “Are you going to tell your father about Cyr?”

  “I have to … and my mother.”

  Her fingers were back touching the gold 7.

  “I’ll get the blame for Paul’s suicide. From him, not from her.” Lauren stopped by the small bus line at the end of the lobby. “My mother would only blame me if it was one of her patients. She only cares about them. She’s never even known our shoe sizes.”

  I handed her the Le Sac.

  “I feel a little disloyal to Cyr right now, Fell,” she said, “telling you he exaggerates his problems, and I don’t believe they’re that bad. It doesn’t mean that I don’t trust him…. I want to trust him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know how that works.”

  I looked through the glass doors at the thickening snow. It wasn’t just the car I wanted to return — I wanted to return to Nina, too.

  “Cyr’s changing now. I think it’s because of me. But you can’t become someone new overnight.”

  “No, you can’t,” I agreed.

  “He doesn’t want to be punk anymore … or any of it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “There’s a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.”

  “What an interesting thing to say, Fell.”

  “It’s from Camino Real,” I said. “Tennessee Williams wrote it. We had it in English last term.”

  “But you remembered it,” she said. “That’s nice.” />
  Chapter 19

  Amazing!” Nina said when she opened the door. “Dad’s stuck at his office, says he’s going across the street to the matinee until the snow stops … and Mrs. Whipple’s son called to say the roads aren’t negotiable.”

  “They aren’t,” I said. “What kept me going was the thought of your jar of Fox’s U-Bet.”

  “I thought you were going to say me.”

  “Don’t make me choose between you and an egg cream,” I said.

  • • •

  While I took my boots off, Nina took my wet coat and put it on a hanger. Then she hung it on the back of the closet door and put a newspaper under it on the floor.

  “If it was anything besides an egg cream, would I have a chance?” she asked me.

  I looked up at her while I struggled with my left boot. She had on a black mock-turtle top, black pants, yellow socks, and black lace-up running shoes. Her yellow hair seemed just washed and still damp, no makeup. She was looking better and better to me.

  “I’m still mad at you, Nina,” I lied.

  “Don’t be, Fell. I’m a new person.”

  I made us some egg creams, and we sat in the living room talking. The snow clung to the tree branches winter-wonderland style, while she told me about the new person.

  First, the new person was never going to say or think the name Eddie Dragon ever again.

  Second, the new person was going to end her analysis.

  Third, the new person was going to start shopping for a whole new wardrobe.

  “Go back to two,” I said. “What does your dad think about that?”

  “He’s been telling me I ought to take a rest from her. It costs him one hundred and twenty dollars a week. Just imagine all the Easter clothes I can buy! I want to start thinking about outside me for a change. I’m tired of inside me.”

  “Doesn’t Dr. Lasher have a say in that?”

  “She’ll probably be glad, too. She used to complain that I used up her answering machine tapes with all my messages. I’d call and talk as long as I could to her machine, and then I’d just call again and talk, call again and talk … She’d say, Nina, vy can’t you vait until de session for all dat?”

  The new person was playing Tiffany softly in the background wearing the old person’s White Shoulders. I was letting my head rest from thoughts of Lauren and Creery, the letters — all of it — while I watched the snow and her green eyes … and thought of Mom as Nina told me how long it had been since she’d gone to the mall.

  “Why are you smiling?” she said. “That’s part of being a female, caring what you wear, how you look.”

  “I know it is. But when I’m home, I live with a shopping junkie.”

  “Who? Your mother or your sister?”

  “My sister’s only five. It’s my mother. My father’d say instead of a gun moll, she was a mall moll.”

  “What was he like, Fell?”

  A personal question from Nina Deem.

  I started talking the way someone from Maine basks in the warm sun of July, fearful that it won’t last long, that a cold snap is right around the corner.

  I think it was close to five o’clock when I was explaining how they “decop” a police officer before he becomes a narc. “Even the posture has to change,” I was saying, “because a cop walks with one arm swinging. And another giveaway is not haggling over the price. If the doper says a quarter ounce of pot is fifty, the narc has to talk him down to forty, forty-five. Cops make the mistake of buying anything at any price.”

  The phone put a stop to my sudden diarrhea of the mouth.

  Nina came back from the hall all smiles.

  “Dad’s met a friend and they’re going down the street for dinner. I guess you’ll have to cook me mine, Fell. The new person can’t think of anything interesting to do with a pair of chicken breasts.”

  “Where’s Meatloaf today?”

  “In Dad’s office. He has a bed there, and his toys. He has office toys, home toys, and car toys … What happened to Tiffany?”

  “My lecture on narcs happened to her,” I said. “Do you have any Progresso bread crumbs?”

  “You’re a brand-name freak, Fell. Do you need them for the chicken?”

  “And some Dijon mustard,” I said. “They’re my toys.”

  • • •

  She sat on the stool in the kitchen while I slathered the chicken breasts with Dijon, dipped them in Italian Style Wonder bread crumbs, (not ideal, but okay in a pinch), and dotted them with butter.

  “We put them in at four hundred for forty-five minutes,” I said.

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “Wait till you taste them!”

  • • •

  While we waited, she said she had something to show me.

  “It took me a long time to hunt this down,” she said, “but the new me is determined to hear you, even if I’m a day late.”

  She handed me a thin white leather book with THE COTTERSVILLE CLARION written in gold across the front.

  “Rinaldo’s at the end, in the V’s.”

  I found him immediately. You couldn’t miss him. He had the same big, toothy smile, and a certain cock-of-the-walk expression maybe inspired by having good buns and hips that could do things blancos’ couldn’t.

  Our Rinaldo on his own turf. He didn’t look like somebody you’d send back to the kitchen for a clean fork.

  VELEZ, RINALDO A.

  “Velly”

  Activities: vice-pres class 2; cheerleader 2, 4;

  class treasurer 3; drama 3, 4.

  Sports: tennis, golf, 1, 2, 3, 4

  At the bottom of the page there was one of those quotes you found in yearbooks, supposed to sum up someone’s personality.

  I am

  indeed

  a king, because I know how to rule myself.

  Pietro Aretino

  In addition to the formal portrait there was a snapshot of each graduate. Rinaldo’s featured him in a magician’s cape, pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  The camera angle was bad. Rinaldo was all hands.

  I remembered those hands reaching in somewhere else … to pull out mail. The blue CORRESPONDENCE box in Deem Library.

  I thought of my conversation hours ago with Lauren: We wrote each other more than we saw each other. And, of course, I thought of the letter Creery had written to his stepbrother.

  What would it have been worth to Lasher to have his own hands on Creery’s mail? A pen? A watch? A VCR? Lasher had always believed Creery was involved with drugs and dealing on The Hill.

  I handed the book back to Nina.

  “There’s one other thing about him under Class Prophecy,” she said. “They did it in rhyme that year. Here it is.”

  She read it to me.

  “Someday he’ll show them on The Hill,

  He will!

  That he’s a match for all of them,

  A gem!

  Velez, Rinaldo A.

  Hooray!”

  I wasn’t great company at dinner. As soon as the snow stopped, I got ready to hike back.

  “Fell,” Nina said as she walked me to the door, “when I go to The Charles Dance with you, can I stay in Sevens House overnight like the girls from Miss Tyler’s?”

  “Your dad won’t agree to that.”

  “Yes, he will. He told me about it, that they clear a whole floor, and it’s the only night girls stay there.”

  “You’d be stuck in with a lot of other girls, three and four to a room.”

  “That’s what I want, Fell. I want to be like everyone else. I want to have someone say about me what they said about Rinaldo. I want to rule myself.”

  “If your dad agrees, it’s fine with me.”

  We kissed good-night right before I left.

  I wished we hadn’t. Either my mind was too much on Rinaldo or my memories were always going to spoil the present. I didn’t feel the way I had a summer ago on a beach on Long Island after kissing Delia. I felt more like a pr
eppy on a first date.

  • • •

  I was definitely down by the time I’d climbed my way through unplowed streets up to The Hill.

  I wasn’t in the mood for Mrs. Violet and her groupies clustered in the reception room, along with Sevens members and their dates.

  It was only around nine o’clock, too early for everyone to be milling around, but I supposed the snow had kept them all from movies and coffeehouses and places they went on Saturday nights.

  I knew I should have stopped by the dorm, that by now Dib would be steamed because I hadn’t reported back to him anything that had happened on Playwicky Road.

  I also knew I’d earned a Sevens fine of seven dollars for not calling The Tower to say I was skipping dinner.

  I tried to make it to the stairs without answering to anyone, when I suddenly saw the familiar blue uniforms.

  There were two of them. There are always two.

  Then I saw Dr. Skinner, the snow still melting down his bald head, standing in front of the front-hall bulletin board where there seemed to be a space cleared just for him. He had on his mackinaw with a wet scarf, overshoes, standing arms akimbo, reading a sheet of paper thumbtacked there.

  There was a semicircle of kids watching him, whispering together.

  After he stepped away and walked over toward the policemen, I took his place.

  The mystery of the missing letter was solved. There was the copy, for anyone to read.

  Dear Lowell,

  You will laugh, but can you send me somewhere I can kick this thing?

  I mean it, Lowell! I gave myself an early Christmas gift, a new girlfriend. I think the pills are taking over, too. I take more and more and get back less and less.

  I know it is my fault you have to work so hard, and I intend to make that up to you. I don’t need college. I can learn the business.

  This girl, by the way, is the sister of my old enemy, Lasher. Maybe you remember that name. Dad would! She’s no dog, either, and I found out I like getting laid better than getting laid back. Did you ever think you’d live to hear me say that?

  I don’t know how much Dad understands anymore, but tell him not to worry about a Christmas gift for me. He gave me the best when he gave me Sevens. Nothing can top that!