The Year of the Gadfly (20 page)

Hazel kicked over. “I didn't see them coming.”

Lily swam madly to the shallow end, and climbed out. Her limbs felt like wet rags. Her head spun. The campers were now silent, gaping at her like she was a hideous creature slithering from a swamp.
They saw,
she thought.
They know.
She stood on the hot pavement, her bathing suit, dripping hair, and tears forming a puddle on the concrete.

Jenny led Lily from the pool, cursing, saying she'd be fired. Lily's head throbbed. Her mouth felt full of water. Why would Jenny be fired? Was it illegal to do that thing with the water jet or just perverted? Would all of Camp Sunshine get kicked out of Water World?

“I should have been watching you,” Jenny moaned. “Does it hurt? Here's First Aid.”

“Jesus!” the lifeguard said when he saw Lily, and led her to a chair.

“Put your head between your knees, honey,” Jenny coaxed. “Let's take off those glasses.”

Light filled Lily's eyes, and then she saw something that looked like her legs but couldn't possibly be. Swirling waves of sickness rose in her gut. She began to shiver. Her head lolled on her neck like it was only partially attached. Then it seemed that the entire room—from the chair, to the first-aid cabinet, to Jenny herself—was tipping over.

 

Lily opened her eyes to a white cubicle, a white bed, and white curtains. She was stretched out on the bed with damp white cloths covering her arms and legs. Nausea lapped at her, and she was grateful for the blandness of her surroundings. In the space between the bottom of the curtains and the floor, she saw three pairs of shoes in a triangle: her mother's sandals with the toe that poked through the front like a little tongue, the doctor's black clogs, heavy and hooflike, and her father's loafers with their mustache of leather fringe.

“There's a good chance that whatever chemicals that place uses to sterilize its water ate right through your daughter's sunscreen,” a male voice said. “And I'd guess she probably spent some time in direct sunlight. You'll have to keep an eye out for signs of heat exhaustion.”

“Heat stroke?” her mother burst out.

“Heat exhaustion,” the doctor corrected. “Which is significantly less severe.”

“Heat stroke,” Maureen whimpered.

Then the feet broke formation and the curtains parted. Lily's father approached the bed. He reached out his hand as if he was going to touch her forehead, and then quickly retracted it.

“I want to know what she was doing in that pool!” Maureen demanded from where she cowered behind her husband. Suddenly Lily remembered Jenny and the group of kids pointing at her. She remembered the water jet. Hot, embarrassed tears filled her eyes. And then she remembered Hazel. Hazel was supposed to warn her. But Hazel had betrayed her and said nothing.

“I want a mirror,” Lily croaked, and the doctor handed the object to Elliott.

“I don't want you to be frightened,” he said, and turned the mirror toward her. Maureen shut her eyes. In the instant that Lily saw herself, a billion needles seemed to puncture her arms, legs, and face. She wanted to claw her skin off, but the smallest movement sent searing pains over her body. She recognized the color immediately: Scarlet Letter red.

 

After two agonizing weeks spent soaking in oatmeal baths, Lily finally returned to camp. Hazel followed her at a distance all day, floating behind her like a balloon. At the end of the afternoon, after most of the kids had gone home, she approached Lily in the parking lot.

“I'm sorry,” she said, coming up beside Lily, who was scanning the road for her mother's car. “I didn't mean for you to get hurt.”

Lily said nothing.

“I got scared when I saw your skin burning.” An urgency had crept into Hazel's husky voice. “I didn't know what to do. I'm so sorry, Lily.”

Lily bit her lip. There was something prickly beneath Hazel's words, a tightness she hadn't noticed before.

“Please, Lily, you have to forgive me!” And all of a sudden Hazel was crying, a messy eruption of tears and phlegm.

Hazel, who had promised to protect Lily, had lured her out into the sun and then betrayed her. Was she really to believe that Hazel—the same girl who'd shown her the water jet—had been scared?

Lily's mother pulled up, and Lily climbed into the car. Hazel continued to weep. Lily watched the girl's body disappear in the mirror, dissolving into the waves of asphalt heat.

She'd never told anyone what had really happened at Water World. But the fact that Hazel knew made her feel sick inside.

I WAS LEADING
an Academic League practice after school one afternoon when the door opened and in walked Iris. We all stopped what we were doing and stared. Iris was wearing a gray suit and black heels. Her hair was done up in a bun. She looked like an adult, only smaller.

“Can I speak to someone from PR?” she said.

“Excuse me?” I looked at the team. They were thoroughly enjoying this.

“You know, public relations for the Academic League.”

“Hey!” I shook my head at the team. “Do you guys want to get back to work?” They resumed their scrimmage prep, but they were keeping one eye on the action. “We don't have a PR rep, Ms. Dupont. This is just a school club.”

Iris glanced uncertainly around the room. “Well, I'm considering an immersion story on you guys. I want to spend time with the team and interview them—and you, of course—to get the inside scoop. Hunter S. Thompson style.”

“You want to write a piece of Gonzo journalism about the Academic League?”

Iris nodded.

“If the kids don't have a problem with you doing some interviews, it's fine with me.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Kaplan. You won't regret—” But Iris snapped her lips together and stared at me with wide, startled eyes. She then clasped her hands primly and walked out of the room. Something odd was going on with her, but trying to pin down a fourteen-year-old girl's problems was like trying to identify the exact location of an electron. According to the Observer Effect, the minute you actually looked at the electron, it wasn't there anymore.

“Wrap it up, guys. And please,” I implored, “be respectful to Iris when she comes back.”

The team nodded, reluctantly. You'd have thought the Academic League would be more understanding of Iris's quirkiness. They weren't exactly the social crème de la crème. But contrary to popular belief, high school did not run according to a horizontal social hierarchy with the nerds as serfs to the popular despots. The alliances and antagonisms were more complicated than the political dealings of a Third World country. In high school, you never knew who was your enemy and who was your friend.

 

Later that evening, Hazel called to make dinner plans. When she suggested the Sidecar Café, however, I panicked. The Sidecar is first-date central. This probably wasn't a date—I hadn't seen Hazel in years—but the mere prospect that it might be set my serotonin levels into free fall.
I don't understand your bad luck with women, Jonah,
my mother once said.
Your father snagged the hottest entomologist in the lab.
But my father is an astrophysicist, a field that has ranked at the top of
SciGuy Magazine
's
Sexiest Scientific Field Index for fifteen years. (Stephen Hawking barely has the use of his hands, but to see the female PhD candidates chasing his electric wheelchair, you'd think he had more sex appeal than James Franco.) Microbiologists rank second to the bottom, only one tier above the comp sci guys who can't get laid because they only know how to communicate in zeros and ones.

Still, on the appointed day, I showered and shaved and drove into town to meet Hazel. I rapped my fingers against the wheel, feeling both anxious and sour. It was a dismal night, with an icy rain falling. It seemed that even the atmosphere was pissed off. But succumbing to the pathetic fallacy was my brother's realm, not mine. I turned up the radio to snap myself out of the funk.

I turned onto State Street, drove past the library, the Nye Grocery-Drug, Main Street Hardware, and the Decatur Pub, where the science department went to play trivia each week. Nye wasn't exactly bustling, though we did get a student crowd from the nearby college where my parents had once taught. Tonight, the rain had kept most people indoors.

The buildings along State Street were reminiscent of Mariana's gray stone, though they'd been constructed more with medieval implacability than with Gothic flair. The squat, chunky blocks gave the place a thirteenth-century feel, like we were all tribal Scotsmen protecting ourselves from foreign invaders (in this case, antique-hunting Bostonians). Nye required only a fifteen-foot stone wall with flaming torches and a trebuchet plunked down outside the post office.

There's plenty of wealth in our general vicinity—we're not far from the glimmer of the Berkshires—and that wealth does seep through the cracks. But most affluent families who send their children to Mariana Academy reside in the less isolated towns to the southeast. People in Nye proper have either been here for a very long time or are transplants (like my family) who couldn't afford to live in Stockbridge and Lenox. The small college where my parents taught is even more remote than Nye, so many of the faculty settle here, moving into one of the ramshackle Victorians on Church Street as the current inhabitants die off one by one.

When I returned last summer, I spotted several efforts to lure in visitors by increasing the town's quaintness quotient. For example, a new sign had appeared outside the bookstore: a black iron arm, exploding with curlicues, from which hung the silhouette cutout of a large book. Matching curlicues spelled the name, NyeTime Bookshop. The Sidecar Café displayed a similar emblem from its doorway, this one a jaunty sidecar and a man sporting a newsboy cap. The Sidecar had claustrophobic low-slung ceilings and lighting so dim you felt like a blind geezer trying to read the menu. The café served wine but no other alcohol. Not even sidecars.

I immediately spotted Hazel at the bar, leaning flirtatiously toward the bartender. The sight of her coiled updo and beautiful freckled neck ratcheted up my nerves. Maybe this was a date after all. Her laughter rose, resonant and deep. She hadn't seen me yet and I hung back a moment, taking in the scene. The bartender was tall with scraggly facial hair and a fitted shirt that advertised his pectoral muscles. Approaching the bar, I spotted a dark tattoo on each of his forearms. They might have been of skulls, or the logo of some indie band, or a fashionably obscure Nietzsche quote like “Idealism is mendaciousness in the face of necessity.” A rhinestone belt glinted around the Nietzsche wannabe's skinny hipster waist. For all these reasons, and because I was wearing only corduroys and a button-down from the Gap, I hated this man. If Hazel was into this guy, I didn't have half a chance.

He noticed me with a cool nod. “What can I get you?”

Hazel turned her head but did not get up. She looked like she was stuck there, like she had no intention of moving away, ever. “Hi, Jonah,” she said, and gave a tug at a loose strand of hair. Like magic it all came tumbling down over her shoulders, unfurling like coiled lengths of silk. (I was pretty certain that women played with their hair when they were seeking male attention—but which man was this display for?)

Nietzsche Man refilled Hazel's glass. “On the house,” he said, smiling a row of crooked bottom teeth.

“Thanks, Marcus.” She returned the smile.

“Hey,” I said, responding to a greeting that already seemed long gone.

“So can I get ya something?”

I looked at Hazel. Maybe this wasn't a date at all. Maybe she, Friedrich N, and I were going to stand around all night shooting the shit.

“Mar, we're going to sit down. Thanks for the wine.”

He nodded and proffered a pair of menus. “Lentil's really good tonight,” he said. “Just the way you like it.” He refilled the two sips she'd taken.

I would have preferred something much stronger, but
Mar
produced a wineglass from under the counter. I reached for my wallet.

“That's on me.” Hazel grabbed my wrist. I tried to protest, but I was too preoccupied with the sensation of her hand squeezing my pulse point. “Shall we?” she said after she'd paid. I could still feel the pressure of her fingers as she led me to the back of the café. The ceiling was so low that I could reach up and touch it with my hand. I looked out the window but saw only streaks of rain. I took a big gulp of wine.

We chatted about the Academic League until our soup came. “So tell me, Jonah,” Hazel began, as though this was a business meeting, “why on earth are you teaching at Mariana? I had high hopes for you, sonny.”

I ran through the litany: the UMass entomology team, Pasternak's generous offer, my plan to be a better teacher than the ones we'd had. “I'm saving student lives,” I joked, and then remembered the speech I'd given my class about being ill equipped to do just that.

Hazel nodded, but she knew as well as I did that a microbiologist didn't just wake up one morning and decide to switch fields. I didn't feel like elaborating, however, so I changed the conversation to my parents. Hazel's home life was more than a little erratic, and my parents had treated her like a surrogate daughter. I told her about my mom's NSF grant to study a rare beetle in the Cook Islands and how my dad had gone along to kick off his retirement. Hazel asked if I was living at home, and I told her about my apartment in Forest Acres. The whole time, I was fixated on her tongue, soft and pink, testing the lentils.

“Let me guess. Your apartment features track lighting and beige carpets?”

I nodded and took a bite of soup. It scalded my tongue. I pushed the lentils around to cool them, but it was no use. When I swallowed, they burned my throat. I took a gulp of water. Hazel watched, amused, clearly unconcerned with my scalded papillae.