The Tragedy Paper (15 page)

And then one day in February, she found me in the library. When I looked back, I realized that she had passed me that morning and muttered something about a new novel based on the
Odyssey
that was now available and could be signed out at the main desk. As usual, I enjoyed every second of her attention but didn’t think anything more about it. It just so happened that that afternoon all the desks in the Hall were taken, so I ducked into the library, happy to have some quiet time where I could hide behind a book display.

Then suddenly she was standing next to me.

“Did you see the book?” she asked.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“What book?”

“The one based on the
Odyssey
?” she asked. “The one I mentioned this morning.”

“Oh no,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of math homework, though.”

My eyes had been giving me trouble lately. Sometimes they focused and sometimes they didn’t, and I wasted a lot of time waiting for them to let me read or see the numbers
on the page. On that particular day, my eyesight was so clear, and I honestly didn’t want to waste any time. I wanted to enjoy it.

So when she asked me to take a walk with her, the thing I had most wanted for weeks now, I actually hesitated. I wasn’t sure how my eyes would be in fifteen minutes, let alone after I got up, went outside, and then came back in. Why was she daring to do this now?

To be truthful—and I feel I need to be here—something had shifted for me. I had built up every gesture in my mind to mean so much, and I was now sure she had feelings for me. The reason she wasn’t more open about it, I told myself, was because she didn’t know how to get away from Patrick. I also imagined that, despite her feelings for me, she wasn’t quite ready to face the humiliation of being seen with me in public. I was pretty sure people had gotten used to me—I rarely encountered one of those shocked expressions as I walked toward someone—but that didn’t change anything. Patrick was tall and handsome with perfect skin. Everyone liked him, and people expected to see Vanessa with someone like that. That was the right world order (or should I say chaos?) at the Irving School.

Still, there was something.

That day in the library, I got up and followed her outside. It was windy and freezing. The sky was gray, and I was glad because the light was less harsh. She didn’t stop but kept walking down toward the athletic field. I followed her
even though I didn’t have my coat. Of course I didn’t have my glasses; I hadn’t touched them in weeks.

She stopped behind the gym. She was wearing a lavender ski jacket and jeans. Her blond hair was down and was blowing everywhere—in her face, in my face. She kept trying to push it over her shoulders.

“Hi,” she finally said.

“Hi,” I said back.

“You never meet me when I ask you to,” she said, her lower lip sticking out in a bit of a pout. There was some hair stuck to her upper lip, and I reached over and gently brushed it away.

“What are you talking about?” I said. My voice was gravelly. I cleared my throat, knowing I didn’t talk enough during the day. I didn’t have that many people to talk to—which, I will say now, was probably my own fault.

“Well, I say there’s a book available in the library, then I go to the library and wait but you never come,” she said. The wind was picking up, I could hear it moving through the treetops. “Or that time I told you about the meatballs and the Parmesan cheese at the condiments table, I wanted you to meet me at the condiments table!”

“How was I supposed to know?”

“Because I was giving you clues,” she said, clearly exasperated. “I was trying to be clever.”

A branch snapped above us and fell to the ground a few feet away. Vanessa jumped, then reached out and grabbed
my wrist. It was like a tiny bolt of lightning ran up my arm. Then she pulled her hand back and shook her head.

“Sometimes I wish something would happen to me, like I would get hit on the head with a branch and then I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I was aware of my voice. It was confident and strong. I was still the same as far as the other kids went, but I knew I could be myself with Vanessa. It was such a strange feeling. I actually liked the way I sounded when I talked to her.

“You know, I told you, the whole college thing,” she said. “Hey, have you heard about colleges? I never even asked you.”

“I’m going to Northwestern,” I said. “I got in early.”

“Oh, cool,” she said. “Right, ’cause you’re from Chicago.”

After she said that, she smiled a brilliant smile, and so did I. Like we were sharing an inside joke about Chicago and the airport.

“Well, yeah, but it’s also a good school,” I said. “And, actually, well, you know, my parents don’t even live there anymore, so it has nothing to do with being from there. Except that my stepdad went there, and that helped me get in.”

“Are you excited?” she asked. She was standing on the hill, twisting a long strand of blond hair around her finger by the left side of her head, with the most serious look on her face.

“Do you want to be a reporter or something?” I asked.

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Suddenly you’re asking a lot of questions.”

Two teachers walked by us at that moment and nodded in our direction. I think it made Vanessa nervous because she started to look around. Then she pointed to another spot up the hill but behind the chapel. It was that really pretty spot—you’ve probably walked by it a zillion times—that gave the illusion of being out of the way even though it wasn’t really. You know, where that iron bench is? It was a gift from one graduating class or another. She sat down on it, so I sat down next to her.

“I feel trapped,” she said. Then she looked at me. “I can’t think of how to get out of this. I mean, if Patrick was simply being his usually pushy self, it would be one thing. But his mother just
died
. There’s no way I can hurt him right now. I’ve tried a few times, and I honestly can’t make the words come out of my mouth.”

I didn’t say anything. As I often felt with her, I was afraid she would disappear, vanish.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “There are times I like being with Patrick. He can be very sweet when he wants to be.”

I snickered and she swatted me on the arm.

“If it was just a matter of getting through to the end of the year, to graduation, I could do that, no problem. But four more years? I was hoping that the college thing would
work itself out. That we would try to do what I told you. Do you remember?”

“Yes, yes, I remember,” I said.

“So I figured we would try that, but in the back of my mind, I hoped it wouldn’t work out—that we wouldn’t get into the same school or even schools in the same city.”

“What did happen?” I asked.

“Well, it turns out we both got into schools in New York.”

“The same school?”

“No, but the same city.”

“New York is big,” I said, though I had very little actual experience with New York City. Still, you would have to live under a rock not to know that someone could get lost in a place like that.

“Now I worry it isn’t big enough. I mean, I’ll be uptown and he’ll be downtown, but he’s already talking about sharing an apartment somewhere in the middle,” she said. “How did I get myself into this?”

“Just get yourself out,” I said. “Is that the only school you got into?”

Her eyes lit up for a minute, and she smiled. And then she reached her hand across the bench and rested it on my thigh. It felt like a burning rock there. Everything around me stopped, and her hand on my leg was all that I could think about, all that I was aware of. She leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, and then she was gone.

I sat there for a long time. Feeling that kiss, wanting more, wanting Vanessa, wanting to be like Patrick, not wanting to be this lost-in-love albino whose eyes were getting worse by the day. I went back to the library and put my head down on the paper and went through every minute of what had just happened, wishing I could do it all over again, wondering when I would talk to her next.

At dinner that night I saw her sitting with Patrick looking as happy as anyone could look. There were no traces of wishing she could be somewhere else or feeling trapped—at least none that she gave away. I had taken to eating by myself at a round table in the back. On occasion one misfit or another would join me, and I was always open to that. But on this night nobody did; so as I spooned nutmeg-laced butternut squash soup into my mouth, I watched Vanessa and Patrick thumb-wrestle and laugh, and at one point, I think they were singing a song together. I lost my appetite quickly and headed back to my room.

The next morning Patrick cornered me in the bathroom again. I know I promised I wouldn’t talk about the bathroom too much, but this one is important too, so bear with me.

As you can imagine, I immediately thought I was in for it, that he or someone else had spotted me with Vanessa the day before. I was at the sink trying to get the last of the toothpaste out of the tube, cursing myself for forgetting over and over to go to the school store when it was open,
when I felt his hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t just his hand, really; it was a tight grip like a claw. I jumped and my tube of toothpaste fell off the side of the sink into the garbage. He reached around me and pulled it out.

“Here you go,” he said. I couldn’t read his tone at all, but I anticipated the worst. “Sorry about that.”

I took the tube from him, waiting for him to do something awful to me, but he just unloaded his stuff at the sink next to me and went about his business. I could barely stand to touch the tube anymore since I imagined all those dirty tissues and whatever else had touched it. I threw it back in the trash. Patrick looked up at me. Then he handed me his tube.

“Here, use some of mine,” he said. I would have thought it was poisoned or something, but he had just used a squeeze and at that moment was messily brushing his teeth, so I took the leap of faith and pushed some onto my brush. We stood there like that for a few minutes, brushing side by side, and I kept waiting for him to explode, or shove me into a stall and dunk my head in the toilet, or say how ugly he thought I was, but he didn’t do any of those things. He just hummed to himself and brushed his teeth.

“So, I’ve been thinking,” he said very seriously.

“Yeah?” I said back, thinking
Okay, finally, here it comes
.

“This is going to sound crazy. We’ve never done anything like this before, but how about instead of a game we have an outing?”

I looked at him like he had just suggested we paint the bathroom red.

“I mean, a really great outing. A secret outing. Something that we’re all in on, that we plan together.” He kept talking, but it started to sound like he was really talking to himself, working out the idea in his mind. “Something that Vanessa will love. What do you think?”

I had been staring at him the whole time, thinking how perfect his hair looked even though he probably hadn’t brushed it yet, how perfect his face looked even though he had nothing to do with it—he didn’t work hard to make his face look that way, to make the pigment be there in his skin—so why should his life be so much better than mine?

“Whatever you think,” I said, turning to leave.

“No, I’m asking what
you
think,” he said, and for the first time he sounded sincere, not like a cartoon character of a high school jock from one of my comic books. “And there’s something else. I’m … Well, have you talked to Vanessa lately?”

Now he was going to give it to me, I thought. I waited.

“I mean, I can’t talk to her friends, and I doubt she would ever want them to think things were anything but perfect between us. But I’m sensing something—not exactly that she’s less into me, just something,” he said. “I figured maybe … Since she probably doesn’t care what you think of her and you’re sort of like a friend to her, I wondered if she said anything about me.”

“No, I barely talk to her,” I said. “Besides, why would she tell me what she thinks about you?”

He nodded. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Must be my imagination.”

“Must be,” I said. “You guys looked pretty cozy at dinner last night.”

He nodded again. This time he was smiling. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t know what my problem is. Girls love me.”

What did he mean “girls”? Did he think Vanessa was just any girl?

“So, what do you think about my idea?”

“What idea?” I said. I couldn’t get past the fact that Patrick didn’t see Vanessa as the most incredible, beautiful girl on campus.

“About an outing instead of a game,” he said, clearly annoyed that I had forgotten about that important question. “People are depending on me.”

“I think an outing is a great idea,” I said. I had no clue at that moment, of course, what I had set in motion.

Duncan knew what Tim had set in motion. Why couldn’t there be a big flashing red light that goes off when someone makes a bad choice, or in this case, a disastrous choice? A warning or something telling you to go back and try again. It was so frustrating that he considered throwing the CDs out his little round window and never thinking of them again. He’d lived through it once, why was he doing this to himself? The last thing he needed was to go through it all again. But it was late and Daisy was asleep, so there was nothing to distract him. And he could hear Tim’s gravelly voice thanking him for listening. He didn’t want to let him down again. He had already done that.