So Shelly (29 page)

Given my nearly complete lack of firsthand experience in the field, I’m even less of a relationship expert, but, as I tried to warn Shelly at orientation, I think Gordon was incapable of genuinely loving anyone outside of himself—at least in the way most of us define love and love’s responsibilities. What I didn’t yet totally understand then was that his egotism was so substantial that it prevented Gordon from allowing Shelly to love anyone else.

But it’s impossible to quantify the sustaining power of even the smallest morsel of hope, like the one Gordon had fed Shelly when he’d said “I love you” on the morning after the day of his return from Europe. With little additional encouragement since that initial declaration, Shelly clung to the possibility of recreating the experience of that first-time high. Because she wanted so badly for his love to be true, in her mind it was, and she would require a series of repudiations on a Yahweh-placing-the-smack-down-on-pharaoh level to convince her to the contrary.

Both Shelly’s and Gordon’s
Beacon
pieces that semester were inspired by their previous summers. Shelly’s essays were hell-bent on sparking an awareness of political and social injustice in Trinity’s comfortably apathetic masses. I believe she
was trying to counterbalance her abandonment of Neolin and his cause. Gordon contributed a satirical travelogue of his trip to a happily secularized Europe, where he had “witnessed” kids his age legally drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, clothing-optional beaches, and young people clubbing until daybreak. The piece, which Shelly snuck in after Mr. Robbins’s final proofreading and long after she still gave a shit, nearly cost Mr. Robbins his job at Trinity.

At that time, I thought that I wanted nothing to do with changing minds or the world—the idea of which still seems a bit pretentious. Because I’d been stamped with a fast-approaching expiration date, little of what mattered to others mattered to me: sports teams, television shows, movies, the latest cell phones and MP3 players—none of it. I had things to do. I didn’t have time to waste on bullshit, and most of it was bullshit. True things, beautiful things, stuff I could wrap my soul around, were few and far between. Instead of changing the world, I had decided to try to appreciate the true and beautiful things and write about them for as long as I could.

This sense of urgency, coupled with the necessity of maintaining fresh material on my Web page, resulted in a disciplined—borderline obsessive—writing routine. I counted hits on my site like A-Rod in a contract year. As a result, other than the writing and my taking care of Tom, I had no other life, and whereas I had once looked forward to school beginning, to escaping my charnel house and returning to the classroom, where I’d always excelled, I now loathed the idea of wasting my limited time studying subjects to prepare me for a college from which I’d probably never graduate, or
for careers I’d never pursue. Therefore, to the shock of my teachers and counselor, my first quarter midterm grades were uncharacteristically low (meaning Bs), and they stayed there, but what I was writing for myself and the
Beacon
seemed purposeful and invigorating, and I had an abundance of material to contribute.

It didn’t take long for Gordon to return to being Gordon, for Shelly’s euphoria to vanish, or for her to begin to regret her abandonment of Neolin. A month into her so-called relationship with Gordon, other than collaborating on the
Beacon
and sitting together at a few football games, there had been no real dates, few displays of affection—public or otherwise—and no discussion of love or the direction of their relationship.

Adding to Shelly’s vexation, Claire’s belly had ballooned and had become a reminder of Shelly’s own tragic pregnancy and Gordon’s most likely unalterable “player” lifestyle.

No longer feeling “cute” in her new clothes, and growing increasingly uncomfortable, Claire grew pouty. Despite having agreed, under the duress of Mr. Shelley’s insistence, on the plan to lock Gordon out of their lives, Claire was having second thoughts. Contrary to any rational consideration of his behavior, she once again began to view Gordon in romantic terms, as if he were, like Leander (my allusion, not Claire’s), being kept from her against his will.

Oblivious to Shelly’s own Gordon-centered hell, Claire cried to her and begged Shelly to talk to Gordon for her, which Shelly would promise to do but never did. She’d give
Shelly notes to pass along to him, which Shelly insisted she’d delivered but had actually thrown away. So, on top of her breaking heart, Shelly added a conscience racked by her deceptions.

Before long, talk of Gordon’s hookups reached Shelly. At first, she didn’t take the talk too seriously. In time, however, she grew fidgety, nervous, and self-doubting. She squirmed in her skin as if it were lined in burlap. Shelly had never been an honor roll student, but four “In Danger of Failing” slips were mailed home at the first quarter’s midterm.

Something strange was happening to Gordon also.

“Is Gordon putting on weight?” I asked Shelly one afternoon at the
Beacon
, as I watched him waddle toward the printer.

“Maybe it’s sympathy weight,” Shelly said. “You know, as Claire puts on the pounds, so does Gordon.” (Talk of Gordon’s knocking up Claire was all over school.) Her tone was bitter, more sarcastic than ironic, and betrayed a resentment uncharacteristic of the Shelly I knew. “He gets it from his mother,” she added.

I looked at Gordon once more, and for the first time saw the resemblance between him and the woman I had encountered at the swim meet the previous year.

“I’ve only seen it once before,” Shelly said, “it” being the weight gain. “After he was dumped by his first love, his cousin Annesley. When he’s depressed, he eats and pouts. It’s his way of coping. But as he eats, he puts on the pounds, and he hates the way he looks, which only further depresses him. A vicious narcissistic cycle.”

It probably didn’t help that, having already won two state
championships, Gordon seemed complacent and unmotivated to swim. I know he wasn’t attending preseason morning workouts, because his Hummer was never in the parking lot when I got to school in the morning. He wasn’t expending the calories that he’d typically burn in the pool, and they had begun to pad his cheeks, his chin, and his midsection. On many guys, the extra weight wouldn’t have been noticed. Gordon was now far from fat, but he was equally distant from his typical “cut” figure.

“He’s clearly depressed,” Shelly reiterated.

“Depressed?” I asked, trying to imagine how a kid who had everything could possibly be depressed.

“It’s me. It’s this whole pseudo-relationship thing. It’s killing him. He isn’t any good at it. And Gordon can’t handle not being good at anything.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

The very next day after school, as I was heading to the
Beacon
from the junior class hall of lockers, I surreptitiously overheard one of the junior varsity cheerleaders playfully comment to Gordon about his “man boobs.”

I ducked into a crevice formed by a break in the row of lockers near the entrance to a classroom.

“You calling me a woman, Stacy? Is that it? I’m a woman now?” His tone and posture terrified poor Stacy Bloom.

“I’m sorry, Gordon. God, I was just kidding.” She pled her case to no avail and, I imagine, tried to sidestep around
him, but when I peered around the corner, I could see that he had her backed into a bank of lockers.

“If I’m a woman, Stacy, how do you explain this?” Gordon pulled his junk through his open zipper and waved it at her.

She screamed, twisted away from where he had her nearly pinned, and ran for help right past where I cowered.

I heard Gordon punch the locker. He must have split the skin of a knuckle wide open, for he left a trail of blood that I followed to the boys’ locker room before making my way to the
Beacon
.

In Mr. Smith’s office the next morning, I’m sure Gordon denied the indecent exposure. Since there were no known third-party witnesses, it was his word against Stacy’s. Mr. Smith assigned him an essay on sexual harassment, and assigned yet more counseling with Father Fulop. For Gordon, it meant more study halls spent in Fulop’s office, listening to Fulop brag about “sowing my own wild oats as a young man,” and, finally, it meant kneeling in front of the priest as he prayed over him. I didn’t need Gordon to describe the procedure. It was the same for every student, boy or girl, sentenced to Fulop for counseling. Every kid at Trinity knew the drill.

If nothing else, his traumatic encounter with Stacy inspired Gordon to end his pig-outs, and he returned to morning swims wearing one of those Olympic-style full bodysuits. At lunch he ate nothing but fruits and vegetables, and a gallon jug of water was his constant companion.

Before long, he had shifted his shape back into its model physique.

*    *    *

Mid-October. Shelly and I were in the office debating final selections for the first semester’s issue. Gordon sat across the room at a computer station, surfing the Net and oblivious to our conversation.

Out of nowhere and in a suddenly somber tone, Shelly said, “We did it.”

“Did what?” I asked, sincerely afraid that the “it” was the “it” usually meant when a teenager tells another teenager that she did “it.”

“We broke up.”

“Oh. Good.”

Naturally, she looked hurt.

“I thought you meant … I mean … It’s probably a good decision,” I said in an attempt to recover.

Shelly said, “I just couldn’t stand it any longer.”

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Not sure. I’m thinking about trying to find Neolin. If it’s not too late.”

I was about to suggest that she stay single for a while. Maybe focus on the
Beacon,
get back involved in a club or two—you know, just try to enjoy her senior year—when we heard “Well, fuck me!” I turned to see Gordon leaning in close to the screen. “Hey, Shelly. Come here.” He was already his old self, acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever occurred between them.

Shelly made an unconvincing show of being put out, then rose and walked over to Gordon so that she stood
staring at the screen over his shoulder, blocking any chance I had of cheesing in on what they were reading.

I watched Shelly’s profile as she read. At first she seemed mystified, but, slowly, a look of recognition dawned over her face. She exchanged a knowing look with Gordon but didn’t say a word. After Shelly backed away and returned to the table we shared, he closed the browser, rose from his chair, gathered his things, and exited the room. Shelly, no longer able to focus, soon called it a day herself.

Left alone, I reopened the browser and searched its history. The last page visited was an online English version of the
Athens News.
The lead article reported an explosion inside a small warehouse in Pireas that killed several people. The explosion had rendered the victims unrecognizable. The police were waiting on forensics reports to aid in their identification of the bodies. Based on the high concentration of ammonium nitrate and evidence of other “bomb-making materials,” police suspected that the detonation was accidental and that the dead were members of the Struggle, the terrorist organization responsible for the murder of two members of Athens’s riot police during an ambush the previous August.

At that time, the story was meaningless to me, but that was about to change.

None of us attended the Halloween dance. By then, an anti-Gordon vibe had begun to pulsate through the halls. He explained away his sudden social marginalization as jealousy, and to a certain extent, it was. But, to be fair to Trinity’s
blockheads, it wasn’t sudden. From the string of his disconnected hookups, to his ruination of Hogg, to being Claire’s rumored “baby daddy,” to exposing himself to Stacy Bloom, it was an accumulation of offenses. And, prudish or not, the cold shoulders were more than justified.

But most damaging to his status was a tidbit of gossip of the most pernicious sort that reached the high school and the Ogontz community. Remember, the god Rumor was the most conniving and unmanageable of all the Greek deities. Around the same time that Gordon was growing chunky, Augusta was also mysteriously packing on pounds and undergoing the throes of what would eventually be diagnosed as morning sickness. Word was that she had withdrawn from college and was in hiding with her East Coast relatives.

It was Shelly’s turn to be nauseous.

On the afternoon of the dance, clearly stung by the talk of Gordon and Augusta, Shelly asked if she could spend the night at my house. An odd request, but I didn’t need anyone’s permission, and, for reasons I didn’t yet know, it was obvious that Shelly desperately didn’t want to be at home that night of all nights in the year.

“I tried to call Neolin,” she said, “but either he no longer has his cell or he doesn’t want to talk to me. Maybe he’s gone home.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“How do you know?” she asked in a tone tinged with hope.

“Do you remember that article in the
Reporter
that I tried to show you, but you wouldn’t look at?”

“That was nearly two months ago.”

“I know. But it said that Neolin had refused to leave the
island. The reporter called him a renegade. He
may
be gone. He probably
is
gone. But for all we know, he’s still there. Maybe it’s worth a shot.”

Shelly didn’t respond to my advice, but a plan was being hatched inside her head. “I’ll see you tonight, John.”

That evening, with a six-pack of hard lemonade, Shelly arrived at my door around eight o’clock, already tipsy. She started talking the second I let her in, sharing the stories of hers and Gordon’s summers. She didn’t stop until she had passed out dead drunk around six in the morning.

At noon, still buzzed, Shelly spoke—more like slurred—of the future—how she would graduate from high school and “leave this horseshit town,” how she planned to reunite with Neolin and “make beautiful babies,” how she would live on North Bass with him away from the “bullshit” of people and parents and Gordon Byron, and how she’d be happy.