The Tragedy Paper (17 page)

Once I forgave Patrick for ruining my favorite part of the song, I asked why we needed fifty-three. There were exactly forty-three members of our graduating class. I knew that number by heart; it was something that was said over and over in one way or another. There were forty-two before I arrived. I made lucky number forty-three.

“Because,” he said, not looking up, “as I mentioned earlier, we invite a few people from the junior class to join us. You have to start paying better attention if you want to learn anything around here.”

“Okay,” I said, knowing without having to be told that Patrick was one of those people, one of the members of the junior class who was chosen to play with the seniors last year.

“Who decides which juniors will be included?” I asked.

“I do, sort of,” Patrick said.

“How do you decide?” I asked.

Patrick thought for a minute. He seemed to take my question very seriously.

“You’ll see,” he said.

So that was the big question, Duncan realized. And he also realized that maybe he really didn’t want to know. Before Tim had a chance to continue, Duncan took that CD out of the computer, added it to the stack, and put them all on the hidden shelf in his closet.

“Now, stay there,” he said, and then felt silly. Who was he talking to? Tim? If he could, he would apologize for not following through and listening to the rest of the story. But, he decided, he was doing exactly what he’d said he wouldn’t do: he was letting the events of last year ruin this one. He was done. He was sorry, but he was done.

The rest of the fall could only be described as blissful for Duncan. October especially. The air turned cool and then colder—but the students refused to pull out their winter coats. Instead, they wore sweaters—each week thicker and
bulkier. It became a thing, really, something that Duncan didn’t remember from years past but sort of liked. He and Daisy were together constantly—spending as little time in their rooms as possible. When they did go to their rooms, they spent the night texting each other, planning when and how early they could meet the next morning.

“7 more hours,” Duncan would text as soon as he got to his room.

“2 long,” Daisy would text back.

“Should we make it 6?”

“How about 5?”

“No, u rest,” Duncan wrote. “I don’t want u 2 be tired 2morrow.”

“I love u.”

“I love u 2.”

Duncan always tried to be the one waiting at the bottom of the stairs in the morning. He loved how Daisy’s eyes would light up when she saw him. It became a game to see who could get there first. When she beat him, he would always feel a twinge that he was letting her down in some way.

On the day before they left for Thanksgiving break, he set his alarm for five in the morning. When it first went off, he thought about just ignoring it and going back to sleep, but the images of Tim’s missed opportunities ran through his mind. He didn’t want to come close to making the same mistakes Tim had. Already he was certainly doing a million
times better than Tim had done, but he felt a constant nagging that he could do more. He owed it to himself, and to Daisy—and when it came down to it, he felt he owed it to Tim and Vanessa.

He forced himself out of bed. He had been planning this morning for a while, so once he was up and out of his warm bed, he was full of energy. He had borrowed a small plug-in hot plate from a kid down the hall, even though they were illegal in the dorms. The day before, he had gone into town to shop. The best he could come up with was oatmeal with brown sugar and cream, which he carefully kept on ice all night. He knew Daisy liked that because she always ate it when it was available in the dining hall, but she complained that they had no cream to put in it—only milk. Duncan made it, put it in a pretty flowered plastic bowl he had also bought the day before in town, and then he texted her, asking her to open her door. It took a minute—he expected that she would be fast asleep—but then the “OK” came and he went.

As he rounded the corner, he could see her waiting, sleepy in bright yellow pajamas. She didn’t say a word but let him come inside and shut the door. They turned and looked at each other. He was certain in that moment that he would never have feelings like that for anyone else. Ever. They started to kiss. She was warm and smelled so good. He realized it was the first time that he was with her before
she had a chance to shower or brush her teeth, and he held on to that idea, thinking that’s how married people are.

Then she got into bed and pulled a blue-flowered comforter up to let him know she wanted him to join her. The oatmeal was long forgotten on the desk. He couldn’t believe how sleepy he felt suddenly, like he wanted to shut down and stay there forever. And then instead of spending the next hour fooling around, they fell asleep. It was the most peaceful sleep Duncan had ever experienced.

When they had to say good-bye the next afternoon, it was so much harder than Duncan imagined it would be. Five days—four full ones, really—shouldn’t be so hard to get through. But Duncan felt like every second away from Daisy was almost painful.

Once he was home, he tried hard to enjoy himself, but it was impossible. Duncan called Daisy every day in Connecticut, had even sent letters to her home that were perfectly planned to arrive each day she was there. They emailed and texted constantly, but he loved the idea of the letters showing up at her house, letters that he had touched a few days before.

When they got back to Irving, they started dreading the big holiday break that loomed in front of them. First they had nineteen days together, then eighteen, then seventeen. Neither of their parents thought they should take time away from their families to visit during the almost
three weeks of break—they spent enough time together at school, the adults seemed to agree. But they vowed to call every day—twice a day—maybe even three times a day. And they realized that as much as they dreaded the countdown they were on to the vacation, when they got home, they could start at the same place and count down to being together again—nineteen lonely days, then eighteen, then seventeen.

During that time, Duncan never went back to Tim’s story. He was too busy, for one thing. Between squeezing in every last second with Daisy, hanging out with the guys, showing off his math skills, and reading Aristotle and Shakespeare, he simply couldn’t find time to sit and listen. But it was more than that, and Duncan knew it. The last time he’d listened to Tim’s tale, it made him feel awful. It made him remember things he didn’t want to remember. He left the CDs in the secret compartment of his closet and tried not to think about them or what listening to the rest of Tim’s year might mean. He had a moment every now and then when he thought he would tell Daisy about them, about everything, but then something would happen, or he would flash forward and be unable to imagine her reaction, and he would decide not to. So he never did.

January turned to February, and then one day while the guys were up late in Tad’s room listening to some music that
Hugh’s brother had recorded himself, hoping to make it big, Ben turned to Duncan and changed everything—again.

“So, what about the senior Game?” he asked. “I trust you’ll have a better handle on it than Patrick did last year.”

The words pierced Duncan. Nobody had mentioned the senior Game to him. Partly that was because it wasn’t supposed to be talked about openly, but privately, among friends, it was allowed. Still, until that point, Duncan thought it had been on purpose that the subject was never brought up. Nobody talked to him about what had happened. It wasn’t unusual for him to come upon a conversation, especially at the beginning of the year, and feel like he was interrupting something, and he would know they were talking about it. But he felt like his friends had really protected him from it, and he had gotten used to that. He knew he couldn’t avoid it, though there was a tiny bit of him that hoped the Game would be canceled for good, considering everything. Of course, outings were now forbidden, that was a definite, but an easy game of tag or capture the flag should be okay, the administration seemed to agree.

“Yeah, Dunc, what about the Game?” Tad chimed in.

Duncan swallowed. He was glad at that moment that the lights were out. He was sure that his face was turning an ugly shade of red. He was certain last year that it had all been a misunderstanding. Maybe not a misunderstanding so much, but something that could be switched back, that
was never validated. Especially after what happened, there had really been no question in his mind. But if the guys were waiting for him to plan the Game, then the rest of the senior class was also waiting.

“I’m on it,” he said, with as much confidence as he could find. “You can count on me.”

That was when Duncan started listening again. He pictured pulling the CDs out of the closet and wiping dust and cobwebs off them, that was how far away he felt from them, but they were as clean as they had been when he hid them. There was no way he could plan his own Game without knowing the exact details of last year, of Patrick’s Game. How else was he going to be absolutely sure he didn’t make the same bad choices? So once again he traveled back to last year, leaving the current one behind.

Patrick and I spent hours making the invitations. It was well after lights-out when we were finished. They looked great, I had to admit.

“Now let’s get them out there,” Patrick said.

“Now?” I asked, glancing at the clock by his bedside.

“Yeah, it’s as good a time as any. Plus, we want to surprise everyone, right?”

“I guess so,” I said halfheartedly. It was so late. I had to be up in three hours, four if I really pushed it. I still had work to do for Mr. Simon’s class in the morning. More work than I would ever be able to do even if I worked from then until the class. The first ten pages of the Tragedy Paper were due in the morning. The first ten pages! I had written three bad ones and was going to ask for an extension that I was sure I would get. After all, everyone else had a full semester’s head start on me. Mr. Simon had been pretty nice about it so far.

“Come on,” Patrick said, turning to take a quick look at himself in the mirror. He smiled and then turned back to me. I avoided the mirror with all my might.

“How do we do it?”

“Okay,” he said, handing me a stack of Bigfoot invitations. “Let’s do our hall first. You do that half and I’ll do this half,” he said. “Just slip one under each door.”

We took about ten minutes, and I realized Patrick was right—this was the perfect time to do it. Quiet, no teachers. We met back in the middle of the hall.

“Now we have to go to the girls’ side,” Patrick said without any hesitation. He said it the way you would say
Now it’s time to buy milk
or
brush your teeth
.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Very,” he said, again without hesitation. “But let’s go
down to the dining hall first and see if we can get some crackers and ginger ale for Ness.”

The use of her nickname gave me that awful, lonely feeling again, like Patrick had something that I wanted more than anything but would never be mine. I had heard it in passing, but it had never been used in direct conversation with me. To me, she was Vanessa.

“Are you kidding?” I asked, and it occurred to me again that this could be some sort of trick. Maybe he had the dining hall booby-trapped and I was going to get caught up in it.

“No, I mean, the dining hall is no big deal. They have that sick station, you know,” he said. I shook my head. “In the far back corner, there’s that refrigerator with Gatorade and ginger ale and crackers, ice chips, I think. It’s meant to be taken—in case someone gets sick in the middle of the night or something. It is totally within our rights.”

“Huh, I didn’t know about that,” I said.

“Follow me,” he said. “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

Have you ever been in there at night? It’s creepy. The floor was icy cold, and I wished I had put my slippers on. There were shadows everywhere. I followed Patrick into the back corner of the dining hall, where he grabbed a cold soda from the fridge and a few packets of saltines. I took a Styrofoam cup and scooped chipped ice into it, looking to see if there was anything else there that might help her.

“Come on,” he said, and I did. This time back up the stairs, and at the fork we went to the right. I held my breath, but the hall was as quiet as could be. He handed me another stack of big feet and nodded toward one half of the hall. Wordlessly, we started at the ends and slipped an invitation under each door. We met back in the middle, and I wondered if he was going to skip giving the stuff to Vanessa, but then he handed me the leftover invitations, walked toward her door, and knocked softly.

“What if she’s asleep?” I whispered urgently.

Patrick looked at his wrist. There was no watch there, but he acted like there was.

He waved me off and knocked lightly, so lightly I couldn’t hear a thing. We waited.

“Maybe she went to the infirmary,” I offered. That was a possibility. I knew from a time I went to get Advil for one of my headaches that it was pretty nice there, with a cot and a TV.

“No way,” Patrick said. He knocked again, this time a bit louder. I started to get nervous. Someone was likely to see us or hear us. Someone was bound to go to the bathroom.

He knocked again.

“I’m going to head back,” I said. “If she’s that sound asleep, she’ll be okay without this stuff until the morning. Or maybe you could leave it outside her door. Just put it there; she’ll find it when she wakes up.”

Before Patrick had a chance to answer me, the door creaked open, first about an inch and then two inches. It was so dark inside, I couldn’t see anything. I took a step back. But then the door opened all the way, and I could see it was Vanessa, her hair as crazy as I had ever seen it, literally standing up in the front and the back. Her face was pale, her eyes red. She was wearing gray sweatpants and a red bulldog shirt that I had never seen. She groaned quietly and then opened the door even wider, indicating that we should come in. Patrick walked in but I hesitated.