The Tragedy Paper (8 page)

We talked briefly about the weather and the delays at the airport and at school. He said classes would not start on time. I’m sure you remember that. I told him I would take a cab from the airport, but he insisted on coming to get me.

When I hung up, I realized how relieved I was to have someone waiting for me on the other end. But I also started losing my resolve about Vanessa. Where was she anyway? The gate agent had said we should be boarding in about forty minutes, and she was still nowhere in sight. As the time ticked by, I considered asking someone to help me find her, or searching those lounges myself. I wasn’t sure if you could get in without proof that you were a first-class passenger, but I was willing to try. Then I decided I was just being stupid. She probably hadn’t given me a second thought since she headed up that escalator away from me. I was sure that she had spent those last few hours texting
her boyfriend, counting down the hours until they could be together again.

When the gate agent announced that she was going to begin preboarding the plane, I realized for sure that Vanessa had made another flight. It felt for a minute like I had been hit in the gut. Why had I not accepted her invitation to try to go with her to first class? I missed her and wondered what it would be like the next time I saw her. Suddenly I would have given anything to be sitting next to her on that plane.

I looked through the contact list on my phone: Mom; Sid; Steve, who was my one good friend from my old neighborhood; a few other random kids; and then VANESSA. Without giving it too much thought, I pushed the buttons to get to a blank text screen and proceeded to write one of the longest texts ever. This is what I wrote:

And then I pressed Send.

At the entrance to the plane, there was a minor incident going on. A small child was literally holding on to the open door, refusing to move into the plane, begging to not go on. The mother was pulling as hard as she could. As soon as I
rounded the corner and saw what was happening, I lowered my eyes and kept moving forward. I did not stare—certainly she didn’t need that on top of everything else. People were huddled just outside the plane, watching. It seemed to me like they were waiting to see if the child would agree to board before they did—like maybe the child knew something no one else did. There was plenty of room to move around them, so I kept going. And then I broke my no-staring rule. As I walked through first class, I did stare—at every single passenger sitting in each of the big, fancy seats. That was when I knew without a doubt that Vanessa was not there with me. Every seat was taken, and Vanessa wasn’t sitting in any of them. She was long gone.

Just as I sat down, my phone beeped. I didn’t get many text messages, so I fumbled a bit and then saw her word on my screen clear as day.

“Good” was all she wrote.

I put my head back against the seat, feeling suddenly like I had been drugged. The next thing I knew, the captain was announcing our descent into New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The weather was finally clear, though a bit windy, and we were going to land right on time.

“Right on time, sure,” the man next to me said. “The right time maybe, just not the right day.”

There was a light knock at the door, and Duncan was startled awake, the earphones digging into the side of his face. He pulled them off and dragged himself out of bed, rumpled but still dressed from the night before, and answered the door. Before he could even see who it was, he smelled cinnamon.

“Hey there, Duncan,” Mr. Simon said. “I’m making the rounds, first morning of classes and everything, but I wanted to start with you and bring you this sticky bun. I was trying a new recipe and wanted to share. Hey, I’m glad to see you’re dressed. It’s never easy to get back into the routine. I’ll see you in my classroom in about thirty minutes. Oh, and do you like coffee? I just bought a few pounds from Guatemala that I grind and brew myself. Here.”

He thrust a full mug of steaming coffee at Duncan,
smiled, and then turned and walked down the hall. He stopped and came back.

“You know,” he said, “the last guy who lived in this room was named Macbeth.”

Duncan sucked in his breath. Did Mr. Simon somehow know what he was going through? That Tim had left the recordings for him? Had Mr. Simon snuck in and listened to them? No, Duncan couldn’t imagine that he had. He just stood there, not knowing what to say.

“You guys don’t get along so well historically,” he said. “Rumor has it that he wants to kill you.”

When Duncan still didn’t say anything, Mr. Simon sighed softly.

“Sorry. I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “That was just a little Shakespearean humor. But given the circumstances, perhaps that was in bad taste. Please forgive me.”

Mr. Simon bowed and offered a weak smile. Duncan watched him walk to the end of the hall and then down the stairs. Why did
he
get the bun and the coffee? And then he remembered. It was just like Tim said it would be: Mr. Simon would bring him food because he felt sorry for him that he had this lame room.

He closed his door and sat down at his desk. He sipped the coffee and ate the bun. Both were delicious. He didn’t usually drink coffee in the morning—it seemed so adult—but he really liked it. Soon enough he’d be like his father, having to have coffee at various intervals during the day or
he’d get a headache. Starting a vacation by saying he would not, under any circumstances, drink Starbucks coffee that week. He would drink only locally brewed coffee. And then, after a few cups of watery coffee, they would be driving miles out of their way following the signs to Starbucks, Duncan and his sister groaning in the backseat. He liked the idea of that too. It reminded him of their recent trip to northern Michigan. It made him miss his family, especially after listening to Tim’s seemingly endless journey to the Irving School.

After he downed about half the cup and started to feel a bit of a caffeine buzz, he placed the mug on his desk, pulled a clean shirt out of his suitcase, and changed into it, leaving on the same jeans he had slept in. He knew he would have to unpack and get his room organized—the fact that it was so tiny made it even more important that he find a place for everything—but every time he was about to do it, he was drawn back to the CDs, Tim’s voice, and his story.

He grabbed the bucket that held his soap and toothbrush and went to get cleaned up. When he walked into the crowded bathroom—bright but a little dingy with white tiles, three sinks, and four stalls, each with a swinging wooden door painted white—he had that same feeling he had when he walked into the cafeteria for the first time, that it was going to be hard to get used to this after being home all summer.

He waited patiently for his turn at the sink, and as soon
as he got it, he realized he had left his towel in his room. He thought about running back, but he would lose his place in line. Instead, he grabbed some toilet paper and tried to dry off a bit, but it was so thin, it just stuck to his face.

There were two places that connected the boys’ hall to the girls’ hall. One was tucked behind the rooms, just beyond the last doors, and led to a fire exit and outside steps toward the back of the senior dorms. The other allowed everyone to reach the main stairs that led down to the first floor. Duncan’s room was the last one on the hall, so the rear connecting hallway was just past his door. He was about to enter his room when he just happened to look to his right, and there, in the hallway, was Daisy. She shouldn’t have been there. Unlike the hall in the front, where you could run into someone at any time, this one was almost never used, mostly just for fire drills and emergencies. Otherwise, it was strictly off-limits. A sign on the door leading to the outside stairs said not to open it, that an alarm would sound. But Daisy had her hand out the door, as if she was trying to feel the temperature, and there was no alarm going off.

Duncan couldn’t be sure if Daisy saw him. It was so quiet right there, she must have heard his footsteps or his bucket rattling, but he moved by fast and went into his room, which luckily he had left wide open. He pulled the door shut and was about to grab his notebooks for class when there was another light knock on the door. He thought to look in his mirror quickly and saw he had smudges of toilet paper on
his chin and below his left eye. He furiously used his fingernail to work them off. By now they had dried there, and he made bright red marks where he scraped the paper off with his fingernail. Another knock.

He pulled open the door. Unbelievably, Daisy was standing there. So many things ran through his mind: that she could get detention or worse; that he wished he had saved some of his sticky bun; that he wished he hadn’t scratched his face, but better that than bits of toilet paper; that she looked beautiful.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He was generally not a rule breaker.

“You know what, you’re right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have knocked.”

She turned and started to walk quickly back through the hall to the girls’ side.

“Daisy!” he called in a loud whisper. What was he thinking? He wanted to talk to her. And now he was making more of a spectacle than if he had simply let her in and closed the door. She didn’t even hesitate: she kept walking and then she was gone. He wanted to curse himself. Why had he done that? What had she wanted? He saw Mr. Simon leave the hall to go to his classroom. Why hadn’t he thought of that a second ago? And why was he so scared of getting in trouble anyway?

He didn’t have the nerve to walk over to her side of the dorm. Somehow a girl on the boys’ side didn’t seem quite as bad as a boy on the girls’ side. And, besides, how did she know which one was his room?

He glanced at his watch. He couldn’t believe it but he ran the risk of being late, and he didn’t even have to go to the dining hall, thanks to Mr. Simon, who thought he was ready for class a long time ago. He would have no excuse.

Part of him wanted to give up, just stay in his room and listen to the next installment of what he was now calling “The Sorrows of Young Tim.” He was dying to know how Mr. Bowersox treated Tim. He was usually so distant and uninvolved with the students. He was pleasant enough—he smiled and waved whenever he passed a student—but he never seemed to actually engage anyone. It seemed so out of character to offer to pick up a student at the airport. And of course Duncan knew that at some point Tim and Vanessa would run into each other. He wanted to know when and how. But he didn’t have the time. He knew Mr. Simon was going to start talking about the Tragedy Paper today—he always did on the first day, even though they didn’t have much actually due before second semester. And sometimes he would drop an important detail—the paper has to be exactly fifteen pages long; or I want you to number the pages on the bottom right; or if you highlight the title of your paper in neon green, I’ll give you ten extra points—the minute the bell rang, telling everyone who was there that if they
revealed the secret to any latecomers, they would not benefit from it themselves. Sometimes he would even lock the door for a few minutes when the bell rang, briefly excluding everyone who wasn’t already there while he finished telling the students who were on time some important tidbit.

Duncan grabbed his notebook and ran, all the time on the lookout for Daisy. He had no idea who would be in his class—this class that loomed so large throughout all of high school: senior English. His graduating class was made up of about forty-five people, so he guessed there would be three sections of the class, since there were never more than fifteen students in a class—one of the school’s claims to fame. But maybe he was wrong—he really didn’t know exactly how many people actually came back after the summer, so there could be more or less. What he did know was that there would be two sections at the very least, so Daisy might or might not be in his class. His odds were fifty-fifty or more likely a thirty-three percent chance. Wow, he liked numbers so much more than words. He wondered why there wasn’t as much fanfare around his math class—calculus for him, not senior math. Of course he knew the answer whether he liked it or not. Everyone was at a different level of math—but all seniors, no matter what, went through the same English class. This year that meant reading
Moby-Dick
and participating in “the”
Moby-Dick
project. They loved that because it was so much less rigid than the Tragedy Paper. You could do anything, really, as long as it had to
do with a whale. In years past, people had made cakes, painted pictures, put on plays, written and performed rap songs. He had no idea what he was going to do. He dreaded it. After that came Shakespeare and the reading of various plays, ending with
Hamlet
and the all-embarrassing performance of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in front of the entire senior class. And then, of course, the Tragedy Paper.

Duncan ran down the stairs, and then turned in the opposite direction from the dining hall, walking quickly through the long, narrow hall that housed teachers’ offices and the office of the guidance counselor, who would attempt, however lamely, to help Duncan decide where he would spend his next four years. He turned then to his left, past the Hall, where everyone came to write a weekly composition and spent many evenings doing homework. And then into the long main corridor, which was a little too empty. Before classes, usually, people were sitting on the floor everywhere. But now the hall was mostly clear, and there were only a few stragglers. He couldn’t believe it—he was going to be late.

He ran past the main office and then slowed, catching his breath as he neared the classroom. He could see the door closing. Mr. Simon must have been pushing it shut, but Duncan eased his arm in between the door and the frame and it opened wide for him. Mr. Simon smiled at him, bowed slightly, and let him pass, then shut the door hard and turned the lock.