“I called you all here because I think that a person or persons here know where Adam is. If any of your heads have cleared since the party, you’ll remember that I briefly attended your, um,
social gathering
Sunday night. Emotions seemed to be running pretty high and I know there was a lot of drinking. That’s why I didn’t want to contact the police until I talked to you, because I know that you guys don’t want your parents knowing all about that party. But Adam’s parents are worried. They’re frantic. If you can’t or won’t give me any information, I’ll have to drag you guys into it. Is that clear?”
It was dead quiet. Ron scanned us slowly like he was watching a horse race. I looked up and saw all those ropes they need to raise and lower flat wooden backgrounds, thin frayed lines climbing up and up into the darkness, wondering how high they went and if I dared climb them. Then the back door of the audit- orium slammed shut and we all jumped and stared into the blackness where the audience sat. I held my breath, half expecting Adam to walk down the center aisle and claim his ticket. “
Cym- beline
!” Do you realize that was only September 14th?
“I know you’re worried,” he said. “
Everyone
is worried. But I’m trying to arrange things so that nobody
gets in trouble, OK? OK. Now, can anyone tell me what happened at the party, with Adam? The last time I saw him was on my way home Sunday night, when he was standing at the bus stop on the corner of California and Styx. He looked upset. Can anyone tell me what happened?”
Nothing emerged from the shadows. The
slam
! must have been the work of a poltergeist or janitor.
Ron sighed. “I hope that somebody in this room will realize the true seriousness of this situation. If someone is hiding Adam or knows where he is, you’re in way over your head. I’m going to wait another twenty-four hours and then contact his parents with what I know. I don’t want the police to start questioning all of you, I just don’t think that’s right, but if that’s what has to happen that’s what will happen. I’ll wait twenty-four hours. If anyone wants to talk to me in private you can see me tomorrow in the Theater Office and you can even call me at home tonight. My number is–”
Why do phone numbers in movies and such always have to start with 555? Ron’s gone now, his house burned down and I heard very vague rumors about his staying with a friend in Am- sterdam during the trial. You can’t call him. The phone number I give now will never reach Ron. In defiance of this tripentagonal tradition I will complete the sentence the way it really ended. I know because I was there.
“–666-7314.” Ron put his hand to his head in a theatrical gesture of thinking. “And I want to say this. Figuring out that you’re gay is one of the scariest things that can happen to you. You feel like you’re alone and that no one will help you. As most of you have guessed,” he smiled gently, “I am gay. You’re not alone. That’s what you should tell somebody who is maybe figuring out
they’re gay. You can tell them to talk to me.” Ron’s face was lit with sheer kindness, naive and effortless. He was breaking my heart. Everything was. “You can tell them they’re not alone.”
Lily, replenished somehow, threw up.
Ron stepped toward her, then looked at us and stepped back a little bit. He had the same look at the party: a sudden realization of bad news. I never saw him again.
“We don’t have to clean that up, do we?” called out some fat stage crew boy with long hair.
“You certainly do,” Natasha said, but as it turns out the stage area is everyone’s responsibility and not just the stage crew’s and we should all work together anyway, like the finest theater troupes in the world do.
Gabriel took me home. All the way he kept sighing like he couldn’t think of how to start the sentence, and I guess he never figured out how because when we got to my house he killed the engine and just looked at me. Sat there staring until I put my bag on my shoulder and made like I was going to leave. Where was everybody? What were they thinking?
“I’m sorry,” I said, because it felt right, chilly there in the car, to apologize for something. For everything, or for whatever people were mad about. Around the corners of my eyes, and high in my head, I felt the weight of all my friends, exasperated and at their wit’s end because of something I’d done, and I couldn’t even think what it could be. “I’m sorry.”
Gabriel smiled faintly and leaned across the gearshift to kiss me. I felt his warmth drip down my body like something in an IV bag. I tasted him like a fix, leaned in to kiss him back, kiss him more, kiss him hard, and then I was just going at it, slurping at him like a thirsty Popsicle. He responded, his breath sharp and sour with the day’s
worry, and reached down between my legs, not even stopping above the waist like you usually do with boyfriends, you just
do
because that’s how it works. He unbuttoned my jeans like he was tearing bread and I was coming as soon as his fingers were inside me, three fingers not even pulling down my underwear, just pulling it sharply aside. I’d never come that fast, not even by myself. I unzipped him and grabbed him sharply, still heaving myself. I ran my hand up and down around him like I was shaking a bottle of salad dressing. I’d never handled anyone so harshly, but it worked, instantly, staining his pants and dribbling on the seat, even a little drop on the steering wheel like a dewdrop or a baby slug. He gave a sharp cry like he’d sat on a shard of something, and then a series of rough grunts before ripping his fingers out of me so quickly I shrieked. Trembling, I buttoned my pants while he looked at me and zipped himself up. I turned to give him a sheepish smile–hot fast fun sex, I thought–but he was just staring at me like he was afraid, a pure dread stare like he couldn’t remember who I was, or did remember, but couldn’t believe it.
LATER
I found myself sitting on a corner of my bed, curled up against the wall like a creature new and nervous to captivity, when the phone rang.
“Hello?” the creature said.
“Um, we got cut off,” Douglas said. “It’s me.” “What?”
“Douglas,” he said. “We got cut off. The car?” “What?”
“Hello?” “Douglas?” “Natasha?”
“No,” I said. “Flannery. We didn’t get cut off, Douglas. What do you mean? What car?”
He sighed. “About moving the car to Roewer. Come
on
, Flan.
Hello?”
“Douglas,” I said. “Who are you trying to call? This is Flan.” “I
know
,” he said. Then he didn’t say anything.
“Douglas?”
“
About the car
!” he roared. “
About the fucking car
!”
I looked at the phone and tried to figure out what it was screaming at me. “Are we talking about V ’s car again?” I asked it, hesitantly.
“Oh for God’s–” Douglas hung up, on himself. What? I looked at my clock; it was 4:00 a.m. What? I stared at the phone for a few minutes, thinking that in a minute something would happen that would make everything click into place. I stared and stared but then I had to bound downstairs because someone was rapping on my door. Rapping on my door, late at night. It was like something in a poem, or one of those hushed moments in early American history:
Those blasted redcoats! Wait a minute while I get my shoes, and then we’ll throw tea into the harbor
. “I have to talk to you,” Natasha said, panting steam into the 4:00 a.m. sky.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“No,” Natasha said blankly, shaking her head. “Get in the car.” “Wait a minute while I get my shoes,” I said, but when I looked
down I saw I already had them on. “What’s going on?” “Consider it another meeting,” she said as I buckled up. “I can’t deal with any more meetings,” I moaned.
“You
have
to deal with it,” she said. She U-turned; the sky spun. “That’s what I’m saying. You’re getting out of control, Flan, and–want a cigarette?”
“
No
. Have I
ever
wanted a cigarette? Why is everybody smoking, all of a sudden?”
“I guess they’re a little tense,” Natasha said, grinning wickedly. The zoo sped by, closed. I figured we were going to the beach. The raw white-gray of the approaching ocean sky was making my eyes throb. Natasha’s door was open before we slowed down, slammed shut before we stopped and she was at the shore while I was still fiddling with my seat belt.
I puffed through sand. “It’s great to spend time with you like this,” I said, when I reached her. We were right at the edge of the ocean. She was staring out, her eyes so far away she was probably scanning Japan. “Natasha?” She didn’t say anything, just tapped ash into the foam. Was she angry, was I? “I tried calling you last night,” I said. “Nobody answered.”
“When I got home I tore the phone out of the wall and threw it out the window,” she said, smiling fondly like she was talking about some childhood tantrum.
“You didn’t,” I said.
She looked me straight in the eye. “When I got home,” she said, “I tore the phone out of the wall and threw it out the window. I stepped on pieces of it on my front steps when I left the house this morning.”
“That exact thing happened to me one morning,” I said, “when I got really sick of a tape and threw it out the window when I was taking a shower.” My voice trailed off, because Natasha had stalked off, down the shore. Toward Canada. At a party once, last year I think, at V ’s house, I remember following someone out to the dark garden, the person’s face flickering as the light
from the party hit it. I can’t remember who it was. Now I followed Natasha.
“So,” I said, reaching her again, “why’d you throw the phone out the window? Besides the obvious reasons.”
“I didn’t want to talk to you,” she said quietly. The waves crawled toward us. Pale, pale morning tentacles were tinting everything gray and unearthly. Underneath my feet, sneaking through my shoes, was what remains of even the mightiest rocks when they try to go up against the ocean. Somewhere in my head was something I couldn’t remember that was making Natasha scowl out to sea like her shipment wasn’t anywhere in sight. Like a pearl in an oyster it sat in my head, valuable and wanted. You have to kill the oyster to get it, though.
“Natasha,” I said, “
please
.”
She blinked and sighed like she couldn’t believe it, but she faced me. “Please
what
?” she asked.
“Please tell me what’s going on,” I said, “please. I–everyone’s been so
strange
. Something happened at the party, right? Is that it? Somebody stole V ’s car, or–I can’t remember, Natasha.”
“If you’re lying–” she said.
“I can’t remember,” I said. I felt the sunken globe within me, hiding in the reeds like a big wary fish, thinking every shadow is a net that will capture it and bring it into the light. So many good poems I’m writing here.
“Well,” she said. “Do you remember this boy you had a crush on? He conducted the choir?”
I blinked, clicking the dark world between open and closed like a snapshot. “Adam,” I said. “Of course I remember Adam. I haven’t fallen on my head, Natasha, I just can’t remember the party. Is it about Adam?” I remembered he hadn’t been in school, his gaping
absence in choir like a lost tooth. “Do we know where he is? Something about why he isn’t around?”
She snorted. “You could say that.” “Natasha,
where
is–”
“He’s dead,” she said simply. She kicked at seaweed like it was as easy as that.
“What?”
She looked at me. “What, did you not hear me?” “Well–”
“Or was that sentence too complicated for you?” she said. “Who–how–”
“He’s
dead
. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Didn’t you learn about it in Econ? The Death of the State?”
“
Stop
,” I said, covering my eyes.
“Don’t you cry,” she said. “I knew you remembered. Adam’s dead and he’ll always be dead, from now until
we’re
all dead and after that, even. Forever dead. So don’t start weeping like V
keeps doing or I swear to God I’m going to throw you to the jellyfish.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said.
“
What
can’t you believe? That we all know about it?” “When did it–how–”
“Remember the thing at the party you
can’t remember
?” she said, with all the cruel sarcasm of soap opera matrons. “Well,
then
, that’s when it happened. That’s when you–”
I screamed, wide open and short like an animal, briefly struck and dead instantly. I didn’t hear it, so I don’t know how loud it was, but my throat was burning like a first sip of liquor, warm from your dad’s bottle when you’re no more than nine years old. Shut up, Tert. I tasted blood and realized I had bit my own finger, broken the skin as I tried to keep back the rest of that gaping scream.
Natasha looked at me like I was, I don’t know, some creature by the side of the road, hissing and bleeding. Something you’re not sure whether you should help it, kill it or leave it alone. “That’s when you saw me do it,” she said, finishing her sentence uncertainly. “
I
did it. That thing you can’t remember is that you saw me do it. Do you remember now?
I
did it, Flan. That’s why I had to hide my dress. It was covered in–well, do you remember now? Flan?”
I looked at her. The truth of her story was slipping around me like a borrowed shoe. A little big. Not shaped to my foot. But wearable. Fitting. “No,” I said, “I don’t remember.”
“Well it’s true,” she said primly, exhaling. My finger aimed my blood at the ground, stinging and vibrating at my side. “I killed Adam, Flan. And now we have to work fast, because, well–” “You don’t want to get caught,” I said. Three blood drops were in a sloppy row on the damp sand in front of me like little scarlet
saucers.
“Right,” she said, relief bright and sharp in her eyes. She was talking faster like she’d made up her mind. “That’s why V ’s car–well, it’s not
stolen
, not really. We’re
saying
it’s stolen. We just–”
“
Adam’s
in the trunk?” I said. “That’s what Douglas meant yesterday? He meant you guys stuffed
Adam
–”
“It’s not like it sounds,” she said.
I blinked. “How is it not like it sounds?” I asked.