The Year of the Gadfly (41 page)

Air hit Lily between the legs. She felt split open, bisected.

The exam began. The doctor promised pressure, and there was pressure. She promised a short uncomfortable sensation, and there was that too, as though she'd scooped out Lily's insides with a spoon. Then it was over. “You look fine,” the gynecologist said. “Is there anything you'd like to discuss? This is confidential.”

Lily sat up. She felt sticky.

The doctor waited a beat. When Lily didn't respond, she left the room.

 

Getting out of the car at school, Lily saw Veronica and her parents dressed in dark, funereal coats, walking into Prisom Hall. As they disappeared, Justin materialized. In his navy blue parka his hair seemed to glow a brighter red and his eyes a deeper blue. Students streamed around them and up the steps, eager to escape the ferocious May wind.

A strong gust hit Lily's back. “How could you?” She gritted her teeth. “I know I hurt you, but you promised.”

“You needed my help!”

The students slowed around them like she and Justin were a traffic accident in the middle of the road.

“Lily, we can't just let the Studio Girls do whatever they—”

“
I
did it!” She dropped her voice to a hot whisper. “I'm responsible for myself.”

She wasn't vulnerable. She was dark and disturbed. She'd shown him the physical evidence. But like everyone else, Justin could see only her lily-white skin. Now his head bobbed up and down in small, shallow movements. “I know I did the right thing,” he muttered, but he looked lost, like he was trying to prove a simple equation and kept getting the wrong answer.

“Justin, please.” Maybe if she hugged him. If she could just squeeze him tight enough . . . She moved forward to embrace him, but at that moment, his head slammed forward, nearly butting her.

The first-period bell rang. The wind lashed Lily's hair across her cheeks.

“Are we okay?” Justin gripped her arms. “If we're okay, everything's okay.”

A hollow feeling yawned inside of her. She turned from him and went into the school.

 

All that day, rumors flew on the wild May wind, landing everywhere and blossoming into hideous shapes. Lily had entered a satanic cult and dyed her pubic hair black. She and the Studio Girls had posted a bondage movie of themselves on the Internet. Alexi had confessed to raping her. Veronica Mercy's parents were sending her to live with a strict Muslim family in Saudi Arabia so she could learn obedience and modesty. If Lily had been less depressed, she would have laughed at these ridiculous stories. But she was too exhausted to care one way or the other.

Now, at the end of the day, she and Dipthi stood inside the auditorium, watching the long-awaited Academic League tournament.

“Your grandmother wanted you to give Justin a chance, not pledge eternal love,” Dipthi whispered.

Lily nodded, but she wasn't paying attention. She was watching the stage. There were three teams. Hazel stood in the middle of Mariana's table with the twins on either side of her. The atmosphere felt pressurized.

“Next question,” the game master said, and the nine students on stage hunched over their tables. “These rotating neutron stars emit beams of electromagnetic radiation.”

Hazel punched the buzzer. “Pulsars!”

“Mariana Academy, twenty points.”

Hazel slapped hands with Justin and then Jonah as the audience clapped and cheered.

“Next question. ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts—'”

Justin punched the buzzer. “Lord Acton!”

“Incorrect. Mariana down twenty points.”

Justin winced. The team had worried this would happen—that Justin would prematurely ejaculate, League slang for buzzing in too soon. But had he screwed up because of her or because he couldn't handle the pressure? How could Lily know? The teams huddled. Kent Hill and Episcopal eyed Justin like predators smelling fear.

“The full question,” the game master said, his booming monotone echoing throughout the theater, “is the following: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' This is the first part of a statement spoken by the nineteenth-century moralist and historian Lord Acton. What is the rest of the statement?”

Kent Hill's buzzer flashed. “‘Great men are almost always bad men.'”

“Correct,” the game master announced. “Kent Hill, twenty points.”

Justin looked crestfallen. Hazel put a protective arm around his shoulder.

“Let's go,” Lily said, and the girls slipped into the empty hallway. Lily dialed Justin's number and waited for his voicemail. Dipthi stood by like a bodyguard, her arms folded across her chest.

 

That night, Lily lay awake in bed waiting to feel something—sadness, guilt, relief—but she was numb. In the coming weeks she would have to talk to Justin in person and try to make him feel okay about this. But she would not change her mind.

She switched off the light and went to sleep. Some time later, she was yanked into wakefulness by a noise like a bomb detonating. She held her breath and listened, but her bedroom was silent.

AFTER THE SCHOOL
lights shut off, I returned Jimmy's money to the lockbox. Then I headed to the Trench. I was hoping the Prisom's Party cameras didn't have night vision.

I was prepared to wait as long as necessary for the paper to come out. I'd sleep at school for the rest of the week if I had to, as long as I could be there when the kids showed themselves. In the meantime, I holed myself up in the old Academic League room. The file cabinets had sat untouched for over a decade. We used to spend hours after each tournament analyzing our performances and writing long critiques of the events. Everyone had a folder with his or her own notes. I pulled out 2002, the year I'd graduated, and read in reverse order until I came to May 2000, the last tournament Hazel, Justin, and I competed in together. Justin's notes weren't there, of course. He'd never had the chance to write them.

 

On the morning of our final tournament, Justin woke me at dawn so we could get in an early practice. He arrived at my door dressed in khakis and a navy blazer with the school crest. He'd shaved, and his hair was slicked down from the shower. I knew he'd been awake for a couple of hours already, hunched over his books in the half dark. I saw no reason to get up. Justin had been a wreck over Lily all week, Hazel was upset because Justin was ignoring her, and I couldn't stand to see Hazel fawn over my brother. It was a trifecta of failure.

“We have a practice to get to,” Justin said, lingering in the doorway.

I jumped up and began pulling up the window.

“What are you doing?”

“It's forty degrees in here and I don't want to freeze my ass off going to the bathroom. Also,” I added, ever eager to prove my grand intelligence, “why flush all that potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen down the drain when it could help fertilize the front lawn? Nitrogen-fixing bacteria
love
urine.”

“The ground is frozen.”

He was right, of course. Spring in Nye's a real hard-ass. Until the buds break ground in June, the only yellow you see is dog piss on snow. Still, that spring was the coldest on record in over fifty years, and the many conservative crackpots in our town were going wild, certain that the “myth” of global warming had finally been debunked.

“We have to win today, Jonah. We don't have a choice.”

“We do,” I said. “We could choose to lose.” But I was talking to myself, the doorway now empty as though my brother had never come in.

I resumed my journey toward a badly needed nirvana. I pushed up the window, and freezing air burst into the room. I gritted my teeth and dropped my flannels. “Here's to you, Justin,” I said to the empty room.
“L'chaim!”
But my urine never arrived at its intended destination. Halfway down it froze and shattered on the walk.

 

After we lost the tournament, Justin drove himself home and disappeared into his room. An hour later, when he didn't come down for dinner, my father and I went to check on him. We knocked, but there was no answer. “Maybe he's sleeping,” I suggested. “Or dead.”

My father shot me an angry look and opened the door to find Justin on his bed, surrounded by a snowfall of tissues. My dad walked a few paces into the bedroom. “We're having breakfast for dinner!” he announced.

Justin sat up abruptly. His eyes were so swollen and red they looked bee-stung.

“You'll win the next tournament,” my father said. “This is only a small setback.”

I shook my head. Here was a physics professor capable of reading equations impenetrable as hieroglyphs, but he couldn't read the face of his own son. A hissing sound escaped Justin's lips.

“He's gonna blow,” I said.

“Leave me alone,” Justin groaned. “Please!”

My father smiled and nodded with encouragement. He'd always treated “father” like a noun
and
a verb, acting like any problem could be talked through, reasoned out, parented away. This made me sad, for our dad and for us.

When he'd left, I turned back to my brother. “That bitch dumped you, huh?”

“Don't talk about her like that.”

“I told you this would happen.”

“It's a mistake. She's upset. You have no idea what—”

“It's not a mistake, Justin. She doesn't want you. She never did.” It was awful of me to say this. But I was convinced my twin needed my tough love, now more than ever.

Justin climbed off the bed and walked toward me. He loomed over me, six solid feet of him. We looked at each other good and hard, and then, without a word, he shut the door in my face.

I returned to the kitchen. My mother asked how Justin was doing. I said nothing about the breakup. I didn't want my parents heaping loads of sympathy on him.

After dinner I jumped on my bike. My mother didn't like us riding around after dark because there weren't any streetlights and the cars treated the roads like a luge course. The temperature had plummeted in the preceding hours, and I couldn't decide whether to pedal my bike quickly to cut down on time or go slowly and keep the wind out of my face. I wished I were a life form that adapted automatically to its environment, any other species than human.

I was pedaling hard, and my throat burned like I was gargling with broken glass. Just as my energy gave out, I skidded to a stop outside the Greenburgs' house. Hazel let me in. I pulled off my gloves, and the tips of my fingers began to burn. As usual, no sign of Lorna. “You look apoplectic,” she said.

We'd wanted Justin to break up with Lily, not the other way around. I thought about my brother and his pitiful hope—
It was a mistake. She didn't mean it—
and felt so angry I couldn't speak. “Lily,” was all I managed to say, but Hazel understood.

“Is he okay? I need to see him.”

“He doesn't want to see anybody. Not even you, Hazel.” I could tell she was stunned, but my fury urged me on. “You said you'd fix this!” I cried. “That night in the car, outside Veronica's. And now look what's happened!”

Without warning, Hazel grabbed my arm and pulled me into her bedroom. She didn't bother turning the lights on, but knelt before a silver laptop on the carpet, her freckled face awash in the computer's blue glow. I sat down beside her, accidentally bumped her knee, and quickly retracted my leg. The blue screen faded to black, then opened to a scene of a room with a mint-green carpet, flowery couches, and an enormous television mounted on the wall.

“What's this?”

“Something I got ahold of. Just watch.”

Hazel sped through a bunch of scenes and then I saw a close-up of Lily's face. She looked strung out—whorish eye shadow, eyes glowing acid purple in the sharp light. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but they produced no sympathy in me.

“Don't lie to us,” said a voice off screen. “Are you using Justin Kaplan for sex?”

“Are you?” another voice repeated.

“Are you?” a third said.

“Are you?”
the voices shouted at once.

Lily blinked and more tears spilled out of her eyes. She stared into the camera, her expression determined. “Yes,” she said.

Hazel paused the video. We said nothing, just stared at Lily's too-large face. But I didn't see her exactly. I saw her father fuming, accusing me of the locker vandalism, shaking his head as if I was responsible for every problem the school had suffered; I saw my classmates laughing at me in the halls, calling me Prepubes; I saw Hazel naked in the bathroom, laughing at my hard-on; I saw Lily staring me down:
Have you kissed a girl, Jonah? Have you touched a girl's breasts? Have you stroked a girl's hair? You're jealous of him, Jonah. Jealous.

“Jonah.”

I looked up. Hazel's freckles pulsed in the eerie backlit light. My heart pumped with hatred for one girl and love for another. I was small and weak outside but strong inside. I was going to prove it, do what my brother lacked the courage to do. That was what I told myself, but it wasn't the whole truth. Underneath, I harbored this last hope: that with one heroic act, I could make Hazel choose me instead of him.

I was flying then, back on my bike, pedaling into the night. I vaguely heard Hazel yelling at me—she knew something dangerous was brewing in my brain—but I was already far away, cutting through the woods. My pedals jolted over the uneven ground, skirted the dark stumps and branches swooping inches above my head. Twenty minutes later, I burst from the brush into my parents' backyard, threw my bike on the ground, and snuck into the basement through the back door. Synapses fired in my brain, bright questions bursting like sparks—Why was Lily on a video? Who was asking her the questions? How had the DVD come into Hazel's possession?—but every time a question blazed forth, it fizzled. My heroic act was my only point of focus.