How the Light Gets In

by Hyland, M. J.

  The vainglorious pig-boy looks across at me and runs his fingers through his perfectly coiffed hair; hair like a golden field of something breakfast cereal is made of. The three girls stare at him from across the room like low-IQ witches.

  The teacher – three-quarters bald and skinny – walks in, stands for a moment and starts the lesson by taking off his glasses and unbuttoning his jacket and putting them both, slowly, carefully, on the table.

  ‘That’s my cue for starting class,’ he says. ‘I hope you can remember it.’ Everybody falls silent.

  My neck tightens. I have nothing to write in, or with, and my desk is empty.

  ‘For those of you who don’t already know … and God forbid, I’ve been around long enough …’ says the teacher, pacing behind his desk, wearied and wrathful like a zoo animal, ‘my name’s Mr Caldwell and I’ve been taking this class for seven years.’

  Then, as though having a private joke, he snickers, and scratches an itch at the top of his left thigh.

  After writing some notes on the board, Mr Caldwell acknowledges me with a perfunctory smile, then, as though I’ve given him a brilliant idea for a novel form of cruelty, says to the class, ‘I know what I’m in the mood for. I’m in the mood for a quiz. We have some new people and I want to know who, and what, I’m dealing with.’

  I don’t like him. He has a jagged black hairline near the front of his skull that makes him look like a shiny egg cracked open by a small and furious hatchling.

  The topic of the quiz is the American Civil War. The questions are about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and thinning Confederate lines at Petersberg and the ruins of Richmond, and John Wilkes Booth. I know all the answers. There isn’t a single one I don’t know.

  I rehearse the answers in my head and prepare my voice by clearing my throat, but when the time comes to put my hand up, my face reddens and my stomach collapses. My heart pounds so hard it fills my chest and there’s no room to breathe.

  And so, like the intellectually effete girls with long sticky hair and pink lipstick, I remain mute. The clever ones, including the vainglorious pig-boy, not only answer the questions, but offer elaborate embellishments; the exact numbers of remaining soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies at the time of Lee’s surrender.

  By the end of the day I feel exhausted by my shame and I want to get home, lie on my bed, write a few pages of new pacts and promises, take a bath then sleep for ten hours.

  Margaret has left work early and prepared a special ‘back-to-school’ dinner. We eat it at the dining-room table, where linen napkins, crystal glasses and the best silver are all laid out as in a museum exhibition. James is late and the boy who has driven him home comes inside to say hello.

  ‘You’re late,’ says Margaret.

  ‘Sorry,’ says James. ‘It’s just that we all went for a Coke …’

  I’m sick of hearing about Coke. Henry stands. ‘Is your friend staying for dinner?’

  James’ friend walks up to the table and stares at me.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out,’ he says. He has the greenest eyes I have ever seen. They can’t be real. He is tall and dressed in a loose woollen jumper even though it’s a warm afternoon.

  ‘Sit down,’ says Margaret, no longer angry with James, but curious, wondering, as we all are, how it is that James has made a new friend, and an older friend, so quickly, on his first day back at school.

  ‘Hadn’t you better introduce your friend?’ asks Henry, still standing, wondering whether or not he should go to the kitchen to fetch more food. He is as bewildered as I have ever seen him.

  I am obviously not the only one unsettled by this boy’s preposterous good looks. It is impossible to look at him and not feel your limbs fill with shivering.

  ‘Oh,’ says James, ‘this is Tom. He’s just moved here. But he’s Scottish, originally.’

  ‘Well,’ says Tom, looking at me again, ‘I’m still Scottish.’

  Tom stands with his arms by his sides. Like Margaret, he doesn’t need to lean on something to occupy a room, doesn’t need to fold his arms, or fidget, or gesture gratuitously to fill the space around him.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ says Margaret, who stands to shake his hand, so charmed that her entire manner is altered. Instead of her usual ease, she rubs her fingers across her neck and as soon as she sits down again, drinks half a glass of cold water and leaves her lips wetted.

  Tom is a senior, and so, like me, this will be his last year of high school.

  Henry returns with an extra plate and serves Tom’s food while Tom explains that he spent most of last year in Europe with his mother after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  ‘It started in her breast,’ he says, like a young doctor, almost comfortable with the word breast and yet aware of its impact and meaning. He stares at me and continues, ‘And then it spread greedily to several of her internal organs.’

  I cannot eat.

  ‘Oh, how awful,’ says Margaret, behaving as though there is a camera in the room, self-conscious, her chin held high. Perhaps this is always the effect of the presence of somebody extravagantly beautiful.

  Tom hasn’t begun to eat. Bridget is beside me, playing with her food on the end of a heavy silver fork. James is silent, busy wolfing his food as though nothing has happened or is about to happen.

  ‘Well,’ says Tom, looking at Henry so as not to leave him out, ‘it was horrible, but then she went into complete remission. She’s still alive and doing extremely well.’

  Anybody else would have described this as a miracle. My mum would have said it was ‘the work of God’. My dad would have said ‘it was meant to be’. But Tom lets the facts speak for themselves.

  I swallow some potato and look at him.

  ‘You must have been relieved,’ I say, and he smiles as though I have been his friend through it all.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, taking me in, ‘but then, like everything, you get used to it and everything’s taken for granted again. My father and I tried not to forget what might have happened to us, but we have. We go on as though nothing ever happened.’

  I stare at Tom and he stares back at me, as though we are alone in the room. His hands rest loosely in his lap, one jumper sleeve rolled up, his long white fingers like little people wearing glass helmets.

  I feel good just from looking at him.

  Margaret clears her throat and puts her knife and fork across her plate to show that she is finished.

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat anything, Tom?’

  Tom looks away from me and pushes his plate towards the middle of the table. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I don’t really feel like eating after all.’

  Margaret is cross. I can tell by the way she fidgets with her wedding ring.

  ‘It’s really easy to lose your appetite,’ I say, ‘when you have been talking about your mother nearly dying of cancer.’

  James reaches across the table, ‘I’ll eat it,’ he says and takes this extra plate of food into the living-room; something normally forbidden in the Harding home, but under the circumstances, completely ignored.

  ‘See you later,’ says James to Tom as he leaves the room. ‘Thanks for the ride home.’

  Tom stays for an hour, talking about his trip around Europe. Margaret clears the table and Tom doesn’t offer to help. This reminds me of my first weeks here and how often I forgot to offer to help, too nervous to speak, too nervous to say please or thank you.

  Margaret is still angry with him for leaving his food uneaten. Henry wants to know about Spain and asks if Tom will come back one day and show us the photographs.

  Margaret stands. ‘Well, it’s getting late,’ she says untruthfully. ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to get home to your family.’

  As Margaret shows Tom out, she says, ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’

  Bridget goes to the living-room without saying goodbye.

  I do not go to the door, but stand near the hallway bookshelf.

  ‘B
ye,’ I say, and think what a dull house it suddenly seems now that Tom is leaving it.

  Tom looks at me. ‘I hope I’ll see you at school,’ he says, and then he winks.

  As we watch him get into his flash red car, Margaret stands by the window and grips the curtain.

  ‘What an interesting person,’ I say.

  ‘What a rude young man, more like it,’ she says, anger bulging around her chin and making her face ugly. ‘Can you believe he took a meal and just left it there?’

  Henry agrees even though he probably thought Tom was interesting too.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’ve seen better manners.’

  I follow them into the kitchen. I want to hear what she will say. Henry starts washing the dishes and says nothing while Margaret continues to complain.

  ‘Don’t you think he was very arrogant?’ she asks him.

  ‘I guess he seemed a wee bit over confident,’ says Henry, doing a pretty good job of a Scottish accent, ‘but that might be a cultural thing.’

  Margaret turns sharply and takes a plate out of Henry’s hand.

  ‘Why is that your excuse for everybody’s bad behaviour?’

  Henry frowns and tries to will me out of the room, but I stay where I am.

  I lift a plate from the table and drop it. It hits the floor and breaks neatly in half. From where Margaret stands, it is impossible for her to tell whether it has been thrown or whether it has merely slipped. But Henry knows, and he frowns at me.

  Margaret turns on me. ‘Tell James I would rather not see that boy in my house again.’

  Henry stops what he’s doing and follows his wife upstairs. I know – without knowing how I know – that he will go along with her and Tom will never be allowed back in the house.

  11

  It’s the end of my second week at school. Last night I had trouble getting to sleep and when I did finally sleep, I dreamed about Leona and her fiancé, Greg.

  Greg was sitting up in bed, naked, scratching his leg with oil-stained, eczema-scarred fingers. The bed was covered in a cheap red satin sheet, and his knees were up against his chest, his testicles squeezed between the tops of his thighs, purple and blackened with thick dark hairs. Leona sat in a chair in the corner of the room, sobbing without noise, staring at him. I was in the bed next to him, curled up against his awful arm. He whispered, ‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen. That’s my motto.’

  I go red whenever I think of him. He’s in my mind like a word I use in company when I don’t know its exact meaning and yet it just pops out of my mouth. I know I’m about to be caught out but I can’t help saying it.

  I go to the cafeteria at lunchtime hoping that I might sit at a table and have somebody come and sit with me. But as I walk into the brightly lit room – its awful smells, its terrible scraping of dishes and clicking of bottles in crates, its exaggerated laughter and squealing of hordes of students funnelling food into their throats as though they have no teeth to chew with – I see a boy with only one arm, sitting alone near the entrance, spreading tomato sauce with a spoon onto white bread. I walk away.

  I spend the lunch hour without food, walking around the enormous campus pretending I’m running late for an appointment.

  I have now explored every corner: the indoor swimming pool, two gymnasiums, four tennis courts, a theatre and three basketball courts with retractable bleachers.

  There are students everywhere carrying sports bags and racquets, their hair wet, the armpits of their t-shirts lightly damp. There are so many healthy, good-looking teenagers, that a few crooked teeth, or short, fat fingers, suddenly take on the proportions of deformities. Everywhere there are bare limbs: well shaped, hairless, perfect. An end of summer gaiety, a sporting spirit. I cannot wait for winter.

  The Organisation has held several parties for exchange students. I went to the first one, but was bored witless. Flo Bapes was there – my alleged mentor – and she wanted to know why I hadn’t been at the assembly on the first day of school. ‘Didn’t the Hardings tell you?’ They didn’t. Henry told Bridget to tell me, but Bridget forgot. At least, that’s her story. In any case, I don’t like the way the other exchange students constantly complained about their difficulties with study and I’d rather avoid Flo Bapes – and her pestering and voyeuristic interest in my impoverished background – if that’s at all possible.

  Sometimes I sit in the mezzanine of the library and look down at the tennis courts and wonder what it would be like to wear a pair of shorts and sit with my knees apart opposite somebody who is also wearing shorts sitting with their knees apart.

  I have seen many teenagers wearing shorts sitting with their knees apart and I have wanted to stare at the extra-white soft loose flesh of the inner thigh because it looks so surprised by the world, so apart from the rest of the body.

  It is time to go home and I am at my locker. The corridor is nearly empty and the only sound is the hellish scraping coming from the cafeteria where white-coated staff pile orange plastic chairs too noisily onto blue plastic tables. It sounds like war in Lego-land. I gag at the smell of frying fat being poured through funnels into enormous vats.

  Tom emerges from the bathroom, his hair damp.

  ‘Lou?’ he says.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘It’s great to see you again,’ he says. ‘Is this your locker?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stupid me,’ he says. ‘If it wasn’t your locker you wouldn’t be rummaging around in it, would you?’

  ‘I might,’ I say, ‘if there was something I really wanted to rummage for.’

  ‘Fair play,’ he says and offers to hold my things so I can keep looking with free hands.

  He takes a camera out of his bag.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘you’ll think I’m really vain, but I need a good picture for an audition. Would you mind coming outside with me and taking a few?’

  He leans against his locker and smiles, aware of his beauty. I don’t like actors. But I am feeling too happy to really mind. I wonder at the way it is that I can be a different version of myself around different people. For no apparent reason, I am not a blusher around Tom. My skin started out liking him and, so far, it still does.

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘Do you know that the person who had your locker before you died in a car crash and now there’s a plaque for her on the bridge at the river? It says Blithe Spirit. It always makes me sad when I see it.’

  I don’t know exactly what blithe means. It’s one of those words whose actual meaning never convinces me; whose actual meaning doesn’t seem to suit the word, and I think, therefore, that it must mean something else; usually something quite opposite. In this case, I decide that blithe means ill, or vile, or diseased.

  ‘Was she your friend?’ I ask.

  ‘No. I didn’t even know her really. A cheerleader. Too bouncy,’ he says, peering into my locker.

  I search for something clever to say.

  ‘I don’t think cheerleaders are my type either,’ I say. ‘They’re always climbing up on each other’s backs and making human pyramids.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he says, thrilled to pieces, obviously glad to have me to talk to, one half of his face smiling.

  We start walking up the stairs together.

  I suddenly remember that I have to meet Bridget after her basketball practice if I want a lift home. Otherwise it’s a long walk in the sun. Tom follows me, his steel caps clicking on the floorboards.

  ‘I’m an exchange student,’ I say, as though this explains everything.

  ‘I know that, of course,’ he says, checking for the cigarette packet in his top shirt pocket. ‘James told me. Plus all the exchange students were introduced at assembly and you weren’t there, but they showed your picture on a slide with all the others and gave, like, a synopsis of where you’re from and everything.’

  He is staring at my profile so I stare back at him. The thing about Tom’s beauty is that it is not the perfect, symm
etrical, blue-eyed blondness that’s supposed to signify superiority. It’s more that his bright green eyes deliver sharp and beautiful electric shocks every time you look at him. It happened to Margaret too, and Bridget and probably even Henry.

  ‘You look better in real life,’ he says, delivering a few quick shocks to my stomach. ‘Anyway, there are seven exchange students in total, if you don’t already know. They all got to say something about themselves. This school seems to absolutely adore exchange students. Practically treats them like royalty.’

  ‘What did they say about me?’ I ask and feel my insides curdle. I imagine what it would have been like if I’d gone up on that stage in front of hundreds of students, stuttering and stammering and sweating like a moron.

  My face heats up as though I am reliving something horrible. I see myself as naked and wet as a peeled tomato, being led from the stage by the pig-boy, and I feel as though there is salt under my skin. I hide my face from Tom by looking at the ground.

  He puts a cigarette behind his ear.

  ‘I can’t remember exactly what they said. Something really good though.’

  I know that he remembers nothing and I don’t care.

  Tom and I walk through the school and onto the field. I take a few photographs of him sitting on the grass.

  He sits cross-legged with a cigarette in his hand and looks up at the sky, not at the camera. I wonder if I should be directing him to tilt his head, lie on his stomach, put his chin in his hands. We are silent as I move from left to right, crouch down, then stand up again and all the while he is just looking at me as though he is falling in love or something.

  ‘I better go,’ I say. ‘I have to get a lift home.’

  We walk across the field and when it is time to say goodbye and we are standing at the gate, the breeze is blowing our hair across our faces. We stare at each other; we don’t speak or move. Then he smiles, a quick, easy smile, especially on his left side, which rises up when he’s amused.

  ‘Which way do you have to go?’ he asks.