The Year of the Gadfly (27 page)

 

I woke some time later to the touch of Hazel's lips, so soft and buoyant they made my whole body feel afloat. Soon we'd shucked off the covers. A ball of emotion—the same one that I'd fought against in the Rayburns' bathroom—pumped in my chest. I pressed myself against it, and Hazel kissed me harder. She dug her fingers into my back as though trying to tear through me. I kneaded my fingers into her spine. We were fighting each other, physically confronting a decade of loneliness and disconnect. But we were also struggling together, desperately trying to grasp what we'd lost. Did we think we could retrieve it now that we were together? Because we were fighting Zeno's Paradox: No matter how many times you halved the distance, you'd never reach the destination.

 

The following day, Hazel was still out of sorts. She didn't fall asleep until dawn, hours after we'd exhausted ourselves on her bed. After she woke up in the late afternoon, we sat on the rumpled bed, talking and drinking tea. She showed me photographs from Greece. For the first time since I'd arrived at her house, she seemed to relax.

“I loved it there,” she said, pulling the blankets around her legs. “That hot, white sun bleached out my whole previous life.”

When she said this, I remembered something. “That thing that happened when you were twelve—with the bleach . . .” We'd never discussed this, but I recalled the afternoon my mother told me Hazel was in the hospital. She'd had an accident with a bottle of Clorox, but was going to be all right. Later on Justin informed me that Hazel had purposely tried to wipe out her freckles.

“I never told you what happened with me and Lily at Water World, huh?”

“You and Lily went to a water park together? You mean, like in a parallel universe?”

Hazel wasn't amused. “Remember that fancy camp your parents refused to send you to? Lily and I were kind of friendly back then.”

“Come on.”

“It's true. I was going through a seriously awkward phase. I looked like a babushka doll in neon spandex.”

“Yes. That may have been the one time in our lives when I was better-looking than you.”

“A moment that lasted approximately five minutes.” She patted my leg. “Anyway, Lily was the only person there more clueless than me.”

Here Hazel paused and looked down at the white sheets covering her legs. She ran her fingers up and down the slopes of her thighs, as though brushing them clean of some invisible residue.

“Anyway, I promised to look out for her and make sure she didn't burn, because she wasn't supposed to be outside at all. And when she did burn, I got scared. So I just pretended nothing was wrong. She thought I'd intentionally betrayed her—that I was jealous of her, because she had this perfect white skin and I looked like a walking disease.”

“You used to think that about your freckles?” I said. Hazel shrugged. “But they're beautiful.”

Hazel shook her head. “I tried to apologize. But Lily wouldn't even
look
at me. So I did that thing with the bleach.”

“But why?”

Hazel pulled the sheet away and stretched her legs out on the bed. I ran my eyes down the length of her strong thighs and muscular calves. “It was really stupid, I know. I guess I was trying to punish Lily for not accepting my apology. I remember thinking,
See how you feel when you hear what you've made me do.
”

“My mom told me it was an accident.”

“Lorna spread that around. I mean, Jesus, think about the alternative.
Crazy Lorna Greenburg let her daughter rub out her freckles with a bottle of bleach.
Somebody would have called in child services.”

“But you told Justin the truth.” I still felt a twinge of jealousy knowing that Hazel had taken her secrets to Justin before me.

“The conclusion of this pitiful tale is that because everyone thought it was an accident, the whole reason I'd done it in the first place was completely moot. Which made me really, really mad—” She cut herself off. “I don't want to talk about this. Don't ask me any more questions about Lily.”

I felt reprimanded, so I looked around the studio and directed my frustration there. Everything appeared to be crumbling, like we were surrounded by mounds of decomposing matter. Why was Hazel living in this glorified junkyard?

“It doesn't help to dredge up everything, Jonah. It doesn't make dealing with my mother's genetic baggage any easier. You grew up with me. You know what to expect.”

Be patient,
I ordered myself.
Think geological eras and thank evolution for those beautiful legs in front of you.

“I don't expect anything, Hazel,” I said. “I'm just happy to be here.”

 

The next morning, while Hazel slept, I went grocery shopping and stopped by my apartment for clean clothes. Then I took a detour. My childhood home was a white colonial built in 1862. From afar it was a work of country perfection: white clapboards, glossy green shutters, fancy molding over the front door. All illusion. Up close, the clapboards were scratched and the paint had been flaking off the molding for years. The front lawn was usually a soggy mess of carpetweed and crabgrass. The bathroom fixtures were rusty, the door frames warped, and the floors slanted at preposterous degrees.

When I pulled up that afternoon, I felt a stab of guilt. My parents knew I'd chosen to rent an apartment instead of living at home. They understood I needed to “separate” (my mother's word) and “build my own life” (my father's). But I'd done little in the way of home management—none of the raking, mowing, dusting, or periodic anti-burglar checkups my parents had requested. The truth was, I'd been avoiding the place.

I pulled my hat down over my ears, noosed my scarf around my neck, and hurried up the front walk, careful to avoid loose bricks. Entering was like stepping inside a mausoleum. A cold, unused feeling pervaded. I walked through the living room into the kitchen. Out of habit, I opened the fridge. Just as you can date a tree by its rings, you could tell the age and events of our home by our condiments: rows of crusted ketchups, jams, and mustards that no one had bothered to throw away, each jar a putrid microbial breeding ground.

I climbed the stairs and walked past the insect display, the dark, still bodies frozen in their frames like prehistoric mosquitoes preserved within amber. My room was similarly preserved. Sci-fi novels filled the shelves along with the requisite model vehicles and Academic League trophies. My father wished we'd added a few athletic trophies to this collection. He convinced us to play a season of baseball under the pretext that it would improve our understanding of physics. (Somewhere in my room was an article titled “How to Hit Home Runs: Optimum Baseball Bat Swing Parameters for Maximum Range Trajectories.”) Of course, we were awful. Justin was distracted by grasshoppers in the outfield, and I usually got thrown out for attitude. Our combined batting average was an imaginary number.

I'd come here to find a certain Airwalk shoebox filled with materials my friends and I had collected on secret societies. The collusions, pledges, and religious rites fascinated us, and we filled notebooks on the Skull and Bones, Freemasons, the Sufis and Druze. We were drawn to these groups for the same reason we were drawn to science fiction: the legends and myths made us feel powerful. But this time around, I wasn't looking for power. I wanted clues to ferret out Prisom's Party.

My room yielded nothing, and I moved on. The door to my brother's room was framed by two long-horned beetles,
Macrodontia cervicornis,
each of them half a foot in length. The mandibles resembled miniature lobster claws, and wings sheathed their abdomens like wooden skirts. They were brilliant, these wings, decorated like cave drawings and varnished in shades of brown, chestnut, and gold. My parents used to call the beetles “mezuzahs” and joked about our having to kiss them before we entered Justin's room.

My brother's room no longer felt like his, and hadn't for a long time. It had once been the very definition of entropy: mounds of paper, clothes, school supplies, and Academic League materials dumped on every available surface. Now a couch had replaced the bed, and there wasn't a stray paper to be seen. I had to give my mother credit. For months after the accident, the littlest thing ignited her tear ducts: pouring a cup of coffee, tying her shoes, shoveling the front walk. Her every action was filtered through Justin's absence. “It's a different world altogether,” she'd told me. “Everything is stunted, elongated, or just blurry. It's like looking at the world through an unfocused microscope.” In her place, I would have barricaded Justin's room, or set fire to it, or thrown his possessions away.

Now, only the books identified the room as Justin's. They rose to the ceiling in impeccable rows, organized by an algorithm Justin had written that accounted for the text's subject, author, and physical height. Each book was pushed to the exact edge of the shelf, the spines flush. Justin was incredibly OCD on this point. I used to torment him by sneaking in and pushing random books back, some of them by just a few centimeters.

There were undoubtedly still parts of my brother here: skin cells and nail clippings that the vacuum cleaner didn't catch. Plenty of DNA. But his odor faded a week or two after his death, and now I could no longer remember what my twin brother had smelled like.

I sat down in the desk chair and looked up at the inscrutable expression of Albert Einstein. Given Justin's literary sensibilities, I'd have expected him to choose Walt Whitman or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the image of the physicist was the single poster on Justin's wall. Taped up beside Einstein's furrowed brow, thick mustache, and cotton-tuft hair was a piece of college-ruled paper.

 

“The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”

 

This was Einstein's Cosmic Religious Feeling, his belief that the pursuit of science and art was enough to make us feel connected to each other and, ultimately, would save us from isolation and despair. I thought about my brother sitting at his desk, copying out these words and taping them to his wall. I thought about
his
isolation and despair. He believed a connection with Lily could lift him from the abyss, shoot him like a rocket toward the sublime. But according to Einstein, a person could achieve this connection only if he gave up his individual desires. And who lived without desire? The desire for scientific distinction had left me disconnected and exhausted. My brother's desire for Lily had killed him. We all desired what we could not have. Justin, Lily, and myself. Even Hazel.

I searched through Justin's dresser and cabinets but found nothing. Meanwhile, I started to feel panicked. The house ached and groaned, as though complaining about my presence. Wind gusts rattled the windows, calling to mind the clicking and snapping of insect exoskeletons. Finally, in Justin's closet, I located the Airwalk box. I'd bought the shoes early in high school, one of my few (and fruitless) attempts to feel cool (I didn't ride a skateboard, had never even tried), and the shoes themselves had long since disappeared. Now that I'd found what I wanted, I grabbed the box, tucked it under my arm, and fled. I ran down the stairs and out the front door like something was chasing me.

I sat panting in the car, waiting for the heater to warm up. I lifted the shoebox lid and quickly realized my mistake. My mother, utilitarian to the core, had chucked the material on secret societies and filled the box with papers related to Justin's accident instead. There were news clippings, condolence notes, and mathematical equations that my father had collected at the crash site—his desperate attempt to determine exactly what had killed my brother.

So now what?

I did not want these reminders nearby, but I wanted to go back inside the house even less. I pushed the box beneath the passenger seat and drove away without looking back.

THE MONDAY AFTER
Thanksgiving break, I reported first thing to the
Oracle
office for a new assignment: covering the Jimmy Get Well campaign. Jimmy Cardozi was a freshman who'd been diagnosed with cancer over the summer, and I was supposed to interview the juniors and seniors in the premed major who'd been handing out pamphlets on childhood leukemia and selling chocolate chip cookies. Contributions went into the lockbox that sat in the school lobby beside a life-size cardboard cutout of Jimmy. This was Jimmy pre-cancer: six feet tall, rotund and grinning. He hadn't looked like this for a long time.

I wondered how Jimmy felt walking past the Jimmy Get Well table every day. I know if I'd lost fifty pounds and all my hair, I wouldn't want to be reminded of my former healthy state. I doubted anyone had bothered to ask Jimmy for permission to use his likeness, just as I doubted the teachers knew that as soon as the picture went up, kids started saying things like “Hey, Jimmy Get Thin,” or “Jimmy Get a Clue,” or “Jimmy Get a Life!”

I wanted to present the truth of Jimmy's experience. I planned to accompany my written story with a podcast modeled on Murrow's program
This I Believe.
But Katie Milford said the story should cover how successful the JGW campaign had been and how it exemplified the tenets of the Community Code. “Don't give me your self-righteous free-press crap, Iris,” she told me. “There's a lot of money in that donation box.”

Maybe so. But money didn't tell the whole story.

I was about to raise these concerns when our features editor ran in, flushed and panting.
“Devil's Advocate!”
he exclaimed. Katie snatched the paper from his fingers, and she was suddenly magnetized—the entire office practically stuck to her. Clearly enjoying her newfound popularity, Katie cleared her throat and read the headline,
“Technology Lends Immorality a Hand,”
and then continued: