The Year of the Gadfly (45 page)

“You're welcome,” I replied, even though I didn't know what we were talking about. I rushed from the room before he could see me cry.

ON THE DAY
of Justin's funeral, the Morgans took a silent car ride to the synagogue and, after the service, another silent ride to the cemetery. Now, still in silence, they joined the stream of mourners toward Justin's grave. Lily followed her parents, staring at the monarch ring Justin had given her. A butterfly was the first insect he'd ever preserved and, according to his mother, a coming-of-age milestone on par with his bar mitzvah. Lily hated the term “coming of age” and its suggestion of menstrual cycles. But in this case, Mrs. Kaplan was right. The moment you killed something—a living creature or a false hope—was the moment you came of age. Loss of innocence wasn't a passive experience that happened
to
you. It was something you gave up.

“Lily?” Elliott's voice was tentative. She looked up at him and followed his gaze to the grave. Was he asking her to climb inside of it? Then she understood. One by one, people were shoveling dirt into the hole. Her body protested, her limbs jelly-like. How could she throw dirt onto Justin? Wasn't he a human being with skin, and eyes, and organs, still warm? Hadn't he pressed his chest to her chest and put his tongue inside her mouth?

Her heart pounded as the distance between her body and the grave narrowed. The person ahead of her moved away, and somehow a shovel appeared in her hands. She looked at the pile of dirt to her left but didn't know what to do with it. Finally, as though of its own volition, the shovel sank into the soil. Now she was at the grave's edge. Dirt covered the casket. Was that Justin's head or his feet?
Please God, let it be his feet.
And maybe this wasn't even a coffin. Maybe she was at the beach, burying Justin in the sand. Or maybe the earth was really a warm blanket and she was tucking him in to sleep.

 

After the cemetery, Lily's parents picked their way down the Kaplans' ice-scabbed street and Lily wobbled behind them, imagining reporters from the
Nye County News
crowding the sidewalk.
Ms. Morgan, how are you coping with this tragedy?
Ms. Morgan, was Justin Kaplan's death really an accident?
Antique bulbs popped in Lily's face, each flash capturing a portrait of her guilt.

For two days after the crash, she'd stood at her bedroom window watching Justin's father perform complicated measurements on her street. Her parents refused to say what he was doing, but she could guess well enough. Everyone wanted to know how Justin had died. Everyone had a theory. But Lily had the answer. Justin had slammed his car into the tree out of desperation and maybe, though he wouldn't have admitted it to himself, as retribution for all she'd done to him. Because even though she loved him, they both knew her love wasn't equal to his.

The Kaplan house was full of people, but freezing. Lily followed her parents from the foyer to the living room and watched the sea of black-clad bodies swallow her father, then her mother. She headed in the opposite direction and up the stairs. But as she neared Justin's bedroom, she heard arguing.

“You have to tell me where you went after my house.”

Lily recognized Hazel's husky voice.

“Home! I said that already.”

And Jonah's nasally pitch.

Lily walked into Justin's room to find Hazel on the bed, her freckled palms pressed into the mattress, her body angled forward like a runner at the starting gun. Jonah glared, his furious blue eyes full of tears.

“You're evil,” he hissed at Lily. “Evil!” He was about to charge, but Hazel grabbed him and led him from the room. Lily heard bickering, followed by a slamming door. Hazel returned alone and collapsed on the bed. “How long were you in the hall, Lily?”

“Not long.”

“Right. Sure.”

“No, really, I—”

Hazel shook her head. “It doesn't matter.”

For a moment they were silent. Lily stood awkwardly in the middle of the room.

“It's so claustrophobic downstairs.” Hazel frowned. “And all those covered mirrors freak me out.”

Lily had noticed the large front hall mirror draped with a dark sheet, though she didn't understand the reason for it. “Yeah, it's pretty creepy,” she said.

“You Catholics do plenty of weird shit, too.”

“I wasn't . . . I just meant . . .” But Lily knew better than to argue; Hazel had a way of twisting things.

“You're not afraid of Justin's bed, are you?” Hazel flipped onto her stomach.

Lily hesitated, but the older girl smiled with such warmth that she lay down beside her. She saw how many hundreds of freckles Hazel had, how her nostrils flared when she breathed. She realized Hazel must have spent countless nights on this bed, reading Justin's books, and breathing in the sweaty-sweet scent of his room. Lily couldn't even claim a year. “I feel like we're not supposed to be in here,” she said.

“That's strange. Of all people, I thought you'd feel the most comfortable.”

Lily flushed.

“I mean, you're kind of a big deal to Justin's parents, being his first and only girlfriend. And it's obviously not your fault that Justin was on his way to your house. But what I really want to know,” Hazel said, propping herself on a freckled elbow, “is how he was feeling that night when he got into the car. I mean, if he was in any kind of severe distress, you would have known about it. Right?”

Lily's heart was pounding so hard she was sure Hazel could see it. The girls eyed each other for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then Hazel jumped off the bed. “I'm starving. I think we need some rugelach.”

Lily nodded. She felt like she'd completed an important test but had no idea whether she had passed.

 

The Morgans drove home, and as they descended the steep hill toward their house, the awful demon blazed up before them. The Studio Girls must have drawn the image, Lily thought, because her father had expelled them. They'd been responsible for the locker vandalism, too. It made so much sense now. They didn't give a shit about exposing the hypocrisy of the Community Code, or the superficial nature of teenage social interaction, or anything else. They didn't care who they hurt or even what message they were sending. They simply liked the idea of making a statement.

Elliott parked in the driveway, but Lily was halfway to the house before she realized that her parents were still sitting inside the Lexus.

She let herself in, picked up the mail, and shuffled through it. Among the bills and magazines was a letter with her name on it. In her room, she undressed, hanging up the jacket, sweater, and skirt and slipping off her dark stockings. She removed her bra and underwear and looked at her reflection in the closet mirror. Her nipples were pink as the wallpaper, and down below, what was once the fairest hair of all was the color of dirty water.

She pulled on pajamas and then turned her attention to the envelope, mailed from Boston. The return address read,
Morrissey and Associates
.

 

Dear Ms. Morgan,

I am terribly sorry I have neglected to contact you for so many months. A number of Mrs. Morgan's files were misplaced, and only now have I fully put her affairs in order. Your grandmother has left monies in the amount of $75,000 for you. She asked our offices to help you with any financial management you may need, but has specified that you—and you alone—are the sole executor of this sum. Again, forgive me for the long delay. Please be in touch with any questions.

Sincerely,
Thomas Morrissey Esq.

 

Lily read the letter twice. Halfway through the second reading, she heard the front door open and shut. She stiffened. But her parents were not in the room with her. They could not see her. Nor could they stop her. She turned on her computer and started searching the websites of boarding schools in California, and Florida, and even Australia—all of them places far away, where the sun burned hot and bright. The application deadlines had already passed, but she was sure that, with enough persistence, she could convince one of them to accept her for the fall.

I KNEW VISITING
Hazel was ill considered, but the talk shows always emphasize closure and I believed I needed some. The town had fired her from the Nye Historical Society, so she'd moved into a cramped studio over the Decatur Pub. I went to see her in early June, my penultimate stop before leaving Nye.

In December, I told the police that Hazel was behind the Sonya Stevens hoax, and explained how she had fooled Iris Dupont, Peter McCaffrey, and the other kids. (I omitted how she'd conned me.) Hazel, however, had an arsenal of excuses at the ready. She told the police she'd found the book with the fabricated letters from Edmond Dantes and Thelonius Rex in a drawer at the Historical Society when she first moved in, and claimed it had given her the idea to revive Prisom's Party. But Hazel was very much Lorna Greenburg's daughter. She had the artistic talent to take the myths about Rex and turn them into physical history, creating an authentic-looking artifact. She was certainly disturbed enough to do it. I think we both felt the intermediary years between high school and adulthood were less significant than what had come before. But whereas I was ready to move on when my future beckoned, Hazel was stuck in the world of our childhood, stunted.

I had a preparatory drink and then I walked up the rickety steps to Hazel's apartment. I pressed the buzzer and heard her padding toward the door. I'd expected her to look depressed, possibly unwell, but not as ill as I found her. She'd lost weight. Her once-full cheeks were gaunt, her bare arms too slim. Her freckles looked like the spots of some rare disease.

“Hi,” I said. Hazel leaned into the door frame and glowered. I looked beyond her into the apartment gloom. The place smelled like VapoRub and cigarettes. I wasn't sure I'd be able to sit in that fetid air. “I'm leaving town this afternoon. I wanted to see you. Can we take a walk?”

Hazel picked up a blue shawl from the couch and stepped outside, shoeless. We walked down the sloping hill behind the Decatur to a trickling creek. In the glaring summer sun she seemed to exist in only two dimensions, like a paper doll. She laid her shawl on the spindly grass and sat down on it. I sat beside her. We looked at the cold, murky water. Hazel curled and uncurled her freckled toes. I tried not to let those toes distract me.

“How've you been?” I asked. I knew her situation could have been much worse—she'd avoided jail time—but I suspected that the restraining order was punishment enough. She couldn't hide inside Mariana's walls anymore, which meant that the only other place she had to go was her mind. And her mind wasn't well. “Will you stay here for a while?”

“Probably not.” She shut her eyes and turned her face to the sun. “I'm thinking about Italy or Greece.”

Her interest in the ancient world was fitting, I realized. Hazel lived for the past and glorified the dead: defunct languages, civilizations, people. To her, the dead possessed greater worth than the living. It made total sense that kids like the one Hazel had been, ostracized and shunned, so often gravitated toward Latin. It was as though by resurrecting the language of Julius Caesar, they could claim some of Rome's glory for themselves. Or maybe Caesar was turning in his grave and thinking:
My legacy is being carried forth by
these
losers?

“The night we went to Veronica Mercy's . . .” I'd been thinking about this a lot since I realized how manipulative Hazel was. “You persuaded her to make that movie of Lily.”

Hazel shrugged. “I invented an apprenticeship position, told her what her application video should include, gave her our home address.”

“And then you sent a copy of the video to Justin.”

“He needed to see Lily for the cipher she was.” Hazel smiled faintly into the light.

I remembered the day Iris brought
Marvelous Species
to school. She said Lily had set the book up like a shrine. In her own small way, she'd honored my brother. “I don't think we were fair to Lily,” I said.

“I've been telling you this for months now, Jonah, but you won't listen. People act within their nature. Lily didn't have to participate in Veronica's video or say those things about your brother. But she did.”

I swallowed hard. “Your plan didn't work, Hazel.”

Hazel shrugged again.

“Why did you show it to me that night?”

“I don't know.”

“Jesus, Hazel. You knew how I felt about you. You knew I was already out of control.”

“You want to blame the accident on me? Oh, Jonahlah . . .” She shook her head like she felt very sorry for me indeed. I was starting to feel disgusted with her. Only then I imagined her standing at the top of Church Street, looking down at Justin's dead body. Many of us stood at various points in between—me and Lily and Veronica and who knows how many others. So maybe Hazel was right about people acting within their natures. The avalanche had started with her, but we'd helped more than a little to push it along.

 

Hazel left me by the riverbank. Like me, she was host to her own emotional parasites, but she'd allowed the hostile microbes to gnaw her thin. I refused to waste away like that. I was managing my illness, or attempting to.

I departed my paltry square of grass and drove to my parents' house, where I returned the box I'd taken from Justin's room so many months before. Then I turned my Sube toward the highway. I had pulled out of the UMass entomology project and instead was going to see my parents in the Cook Islands. They wanted to know how long I'd be visiting, and I told them the trip was not a visit, but a next step.

“A next step toward what?” my mother wanted to know. I had no answer.