The Year of the Gadfly (30 page)

I turned to see Murrow smoking in a swivel chair, perusing a biology textbook. I gasped. Had I subconsciously summoned him?

“You're really about to search through a man's desk?” he said. “You're a journalist, Iris, not a detective.”

“This is hard enough for me without your input,” I said, trying to shake my unease.

“You can't make good reporting out of bad practice.”

“I have to do this. I need access. Didn't you recently advise me not to think of Mr. Kaplan as a friend?”

“Yes, but that doesn't mean you should invade his privacy.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

Murrow looked around for an ashtray and, finding none, tapped his cigarette into the textbook. “The world blackens even the most innocent hearts,” he murmured.

“Who are you talking to?”

I whipped around.
Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit. SHIT!
Peter walked into the office and sat down in Mr. Kaplan's chair.

“Mr. Kaplan asked me to look for something,” I said, glancing at the chair where Murrow had been. It was empty.

I pulled a stack of
Oracle
s and old yearbooks from Mr. Kaplan's desk, affecting an air of purpose. Peter said nothing. He just swiveled.

“You want to cut that out?”

Peter swiveled to a stop. “I'm not going to tell on you, Iris.”

“There's nothing to tell.”

“Did I offend you?”

“I don't like people spying on me.”

“I came to get note cards.” Peter looked genuinely hurt. I thought Mr. Kaplan had sent him to follow me, but maybe that wasn't true. “And anyway,” he added, “you're a hypocrite, going through Mr. Kaplan's desk.”

I stared at him, fuming. I had no rebuttal. “Sorry I snapped at you,” I said.

Peter looked surprised. “It's okay. I'm working on a project for my engineering major on digital modeling and video surveillance.”

“Spying,” I said, and smiled.

Peter leaned over me. “Hey, can you hand me one of those newspapers?” But he'd already grabbed one. “These bylines say Justin Kaplan,” he said, rustling the pages. “Who's that?”

“Mr. Kaplan's brother?”

“Mr. Kaplan doesn't have a brother. He told me at Thanksgiving he's an only child.”

I looked up. Peter had spent Thanksgiving with Mr. Kaplan? He'd had an opportunity to sit at the same table with Mr. Kaplan for hours, talking like two regular people? Only Peter had probably wasted the opportunity. He could have delved the depths of Mr. Kaplan's brain, but he probably just sat there, pushing his turkey around. I was phenomenally jealous. “Maybe there were two Kaplan families at Mariana?” But I knew how unlikely this was.

Peter knelt beside me and my pulse jumped. He reached across me—static from his sweater giving me a shock—and picked up one of the yearbooks. He flipped through the opening pages. “Look at this, Iris. Right here!” He tapped the book. The heading read,
In Memoriam. Justin Kaplan:
1983–2000.
Below a portrait showed a plaintive face with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes.

Mr. Kaplan's brother was dead? Something fluttered in my chest, something that pushed against the muscle.

“They were twins.” Peter pointed to a photo of two boys beneath a banner that read,
Happy Fourteenth, Justin and Jonah.
“Fraternal.”

“You don't say.”

“You know, Iris, I'm not even upset that you're being rude. And the reason I don't care”—Peter paused and took a deep breath—“is that I like you, Iris.”

I looked at him, stunned.
Dalia,
I thought,
a boy likes me.
And I almost burst into tears. Because I wanted to run and tell her. Because she should have been here and she wasn't.
Keep it together, Dupont!
I ordered myself. I grabbed the yearbook from Peter's hands and returned it to Mr. Kaplan's desk drawer. Then I jumped up and headed for the door. The song on loop in my head was:
I like you, Iris. I like you, Iris. I like you.

I should have been happy that a boy liked me, especially a cute one. But I just wanted Peter to back off. He was a distraction. He made me uneasy. He was confusing. But he followed me, trailing through the halls and into the Trench stairwell. “You're going down there?” he asked.

At this point I should have opened the black door and locked Peter out. But my body was jittery with a feeling somewhere between anger and elation. It was as if some other girl—a much more experienced girl—had usurped my identity. And that girl liked the thrill of taking this boy somewhere she shouldn't. That girl liked the idea of giving Peter a hard time.

“Buck up and be a man,” I said, and felt quite satisfied with myself until I realized that “buck up” is a cliché and, worse, refers to the rutting season for deer, when stags fight each other for the attention of fertile females. The last thing I wanted was for Peter to put me and fertility anywhere in the same Zip Code.

“But how are you going to get in?” he asked.

The girl, the one who was me but not me, held up Katie Milford's key and dangled it in front of Peter's face.

“But the rumors . . .”

“Poor Peter's scared,” the new girl said, and laughed, because Peter had no idea what was really in the Trench. But I
did
know, so I was happy to have him with me. As much as I wanted Prisom's Party to take me back into its lair, I wasn't in the mood for a kidnapping.

 

Sure enough, the
Oracle
s in Mr. Kaplan's desk were missing from the archives. Was grief the reason he'd removed the newspapers with his brother's byline? Why he'd lied to Peter about being an only child? But Justin had been dead for twelve years.

Twelve years from now I'd be twenty-six, which seemed inconceivable. I already felt that the older I grew, the farther I traveled from Dalia. I saw her growing distant in my memory, like an object in the rearview mirror. I couldn't imagine looking back and no longer being able to see her.

“Are you okay, Iris?”

I'd almost forgotten Peter was there. We were standing outside the archives, so close together that I could smell the detergent on his clothes. A freckle in his left eye sparkled like a speck of gold, and the confident girl of a few minutes before had vanished. “Look at this!” I said. I hadn't planned on showing him the demon, but I needed to squash the awkwardness between us.

“Holy shit,” Peter said when I'd finished unstacking the chairs. “That's the same picture as in the bathrooms.”

“I know. But it looks like it's been here for a long time. See how the paint's faded?”

“I can't believe you've been hanging around down here by yourself.”

Peter spoke with such sincerity that my stomach dropped like a water-filled balloon and went
splat.
I like you, I like you, I—
I shook my head a little, hoping to empty Peter's words from my brain. Meanwhile, the demon went on grinning, its mouth wide and dark. I felt an amorphous fear as though some ill-intentioned force was leading me along. And where did that path lead?
Well,
I thought,
you're staring at it!
These four eyes, this gaping mouth.
It seemed only a matter of time before the monstrous mouth sucked me in and swallowed me whole.

Peter stepped closer. He was tall, I realized. Very tall. “Iris?” He touched my shoulder, and thousands of shocks zipped through my body.

“I have to go,” I stammered, and fled.

Coming out of the Trench was like surfacing from a mineshaft, and as I climbed the stairs, I realized I'd made an important discovery. I now knew the origin of my ineffable connection with Mr. Kaplan—what he'd seen in me that first day at the ice cream social and what continued to bind us together over the weeks and months. He'd lost his brother, his twin. I'd lost my best and only friend. Our pain was the same. I stopped in the middle of the hallway. Students walked by on their way to sports practices and play rehearsal. The ordinary afterschool world in motion.

Reporter, not friend. Don't forget what you are.

Whose thought was this? Murrow's or mine? There was an acrid smell in the hallway. Camel cigarettes? I looked around, but there was no one there.

 

I'd come to think of the third-floor handicapped stall as my private hideaway. The stall was spacious with a wide ledge above the heater on which I could curl up like a cat. I settled in and called Hazel. I was nervous about talking to her after our awkward parting on Thanksgiving. But we were friends, I reasoned, and friends checked in with each other.

“Are you all right?” she asked when she picked up the phone. Hearing her concern, I felt silly for worrying.

“Actually, I wanted to ask you something.” I explained about locating Justin Kaplan in an old yearbook. “And I have this feeling that Mr. Kaplan's trying to hide his brother, or is pretending he never had one.”

There was a long silence on Hazel's end. “What makes you think he's pretending that?” she said finally.

“Well, a friend of mine overheard him say he's an only child. Plus he removed all references to Justin from the
Oracle
archives. What happened to Mr. Kaplan's brother, Hazel?”

“Car accident.” She paused again, and I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. “Grief has a way of worming inside of some people, Iris, burrowing into their heart's core. Sometimes when a person's in pain, he'll behave in uncharacteristic ways. Dangerous ways, even.” She paused. “But you know all of this already, don't you?”

“Yes.” I swallowed. “I guess I do.”

“If you need me,” she said, “you should call. Any time.”

I thanked her and we hung up. Outside, I saw two girls walking arm in arm across the playing field toward the Outpost, the old dorm at the edge of campus where upperclassmen went to smoke. I followed the girls as they made their jaunty trip across the field, and I remembered my parents coming into my bedroom in Beacon Hill last December saying, “We have something to tell you.” I knew right away what had happened. And before they said another word, I started asking,
How?
But they wouldn't tell me. They were always trying to protect me. So I screamed,
HOW?
And finally my dad turned his left palm over and tapped his wrist, like he was giving me some stupid baseball sign.
Where is she?
I screamed.
I need to see her!
I jumped up and ran out the front door, even though I wasn't wearing shoes. And I started running down the street toward Dalia's house, though she lived many blocks away. My feet burned with cold, but I kept going until my dad caught me in the middle of our street. He swung me into his arms like I was a baby, and carried me back to our house. I kicked and screamed the way Dalia had the night she'd run into the cold, wearing almost nothing. And I kept screaming for her and crying, and my parents sat in my room all night long because they didn't trust me to be in there alone. Not long after that, they sent me to Dr. Patrick.

Hazel talked about grief like it was a carnivorous parasite, destroying the person you'd been before it infected you. And it was true. Who was I, sneaking around and lying to people? Was I even a good person anymore? And did I even care? The girls down below disappeared into the trees. At that moment, I wanted nothing more in life than to be out there with Dalia, arm in arm, escaping into the woods.

WHEN IT COMES
to problem solving, I've always preferred written materials. Unless I'm out in nature or working in a lab, inanimate sources are more efficient and they eliminate the inherent awkwardness of face-to-face interaction. But sometimes you just need a live source, a conclusion I came to after rooting around in my parents' house and coming up with nothing relevant to my Prisom's Party mission.

The week after Thanksgiving, I headed out to Melville, Vermont, a small, lifeless town over the state line. I was going to talk with Matt Sheridan, the student who had supposedly destroyed the Prisom Artifacts. “Melville's worse than the state pen,” Matt told me over the phone. “This boarding school is like the sixth circle of hell. Get me out of here for a night, and I'll tell you whatever you want.”

I drove along winding roads, past forests of brittle trees and shadows sprawled across snow. I should have been preparing for my interview, but I couldn't stop worrying about Iris's drawing test. Her reliance on the scientific method reminded me of a book I'd read,
Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story.
The author, a Scottish chemist, had conflated scientific exploration with detective work. He'd even opened his book with a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle. Now, I couldn't help but wonder if my curriculum—investigating the distant past—had somehow encouraged Iris to look into
my
past. I'd told my students to think for themselves, to strike out for the unknown. And Iris, unfortunately, was doing just that.

The locker vandalism that she'd discovered almost caused a student's death. If I was again associated with the incident, my PhD could not protect me from the ensuing parental wrath. At the same time, I was heartened to see Iris getting along with Peter. Individually they were unstable elements—say, sodium metal and chlorine gas. Bonded together, they'd be predictable as salt.

 

Matt Sheridan was skinnier than I expected him to be. He had an archetypal prep school face—chiseled cheekbones—but with ears just a little too large for his head. The Melville School had not been good to him. He walked from the dormitory to the parking lot with the defeated hunch of a person who'd once stood up straight.

“Sometimes I wish I'd stayed at Mariana,” he said, absently drumming his fingers on the window as we drove through town.