Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  “What song?”

  “‘More Than a Feeling,’” said Bert, looking him straight in the eye when he said it.

  “Well, of course,” said Dex. “Boston girl.”

  “Indeed.” Bert hunched closer to Dex’s shoulder. They had reached the end of the loop and were about to reenter the old library. “She’s taking Vince’s death a lot better than I would if I were in her shoes. Hell, she’s taking it better than I am in my shoes.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dex. “All the” – insanity? hoopla? – “the activity of his game makes it easy to forget it’s happening because he died. Do you think that’s why he did it, to keep people preoccupied in the early stages of grief?”

  “Possibly,” said Bert.

  “I’d say something wise and comforting about death,” said Dex, “if I had anything wise or comforting to say about it. Tuesday’s the one—” with the philosophical approach to morbidity, he almost said, but stopped, because he was the interrogator, not the interrogatee, and it was almost full dark in the courtyard, and despite the fact that Bert Hatmaker was pointedly – pointedly – brushing against him as Dex held the door open, he was creeping himself out. He wanted to be inside. Where electricity reigned and the mosaic ceiling was tiled with writhing vines and the names of dead men (EMERSON, ADAMS) who had nonetheless achieved a kind of immortality. He let the door slam shut behind them.

  They walked up the main stairs of the building – McKim, Bert called it, like the building was an old friend (And he says he doesn’t come here often, thought Dex, doing his best to think like Tuesday) – past the white stone lions on their plinths, the murals of dancing nymphs, ladies in togas and capes swanning about gardens and lakes, the water so blue it reminded him of the mural in the underground theater, hidden and rotting away. For a moment Dex was full of an artist’s indignation, that these murals – which were great, he meant no slight – should be seen and the others should fade forever.

  Maybe it was the company. Maybe it was the whole game, making him suggestible and sensitive to ridiculous notions he’d grown a hearty hide against years ago. He’d dipped a toe in the visual arts, painting, film and video, en route to his performance degree, and he’d found the fine-art nerds both delusional and charming; they legitimately believed they were creating objects meant to last. Performance, by comparison, had always felt more authentic. Performance was alive, so performance had to die. A piece or a song or a play was designed to last for only as long as it took to perform, to begin and end and echo in the mind. But he had to admit there was something noble, too, in the pursuit of permanence, and something beautiful and sad about how much art had been lost and forgotten by time.

  Dex followed Bert into a gallery on the right. There were more murals, red here rather than lake blue, vaguely Arthurian. Lots of knights and ladies-in-waiting and crowns and long gowns.

  Bert planted himself in the middle of the room, then about-faced toward the doorway they’d just entered. The wall above depicted a mural of three distinct scenes: the left was a king’s hall of courtiers in earthy browns, and the right, bright, with touches of blue and yellow, was some sort of holy conga line. Dex could make out angels, maybe, brandishing candelabras, a spear. A figure in red held a platter with a halo above it over her head, and at the front of the line was a crowned queen brandishing something so magical its glowing rays burst from beneath the hankie covering it. In the middle, directly over the doorway, was an old man lying on a bed, wrapped in a blanket of rich black fur that would have looked magisterial on Joan Collins. To the left of the bed was a young man in a blood-red cloak with blond hair and a troubled face.

  “What’s this?” asked Dex. He pointed to the man in the bed, the man in the cloak, the woman with the platter. “Father, son, holy roast?”

  Bert turned. “I’m going to pretend you never said that.”

  Dex grinned. “Pretend all you want, dear.”

  “That’s Galahad.” Bert pointed to the man in the cloak. He was speaking quietly, which had to be for show because they were the only two in the room. “Do you know his grail story?”

  “If it doesn’t involve Harrison Ford and Nazis,” said Dex, “or a castle full of lady virgins into spanking and oral sex, then no.”

  Bert just looked at him.

  “What?” asked Dex, though he knew perfectly well what. He could feel it in the air between them, a charge between their lips and their skin: Bert thought he was funny. He made Bert want to laugh. Everything Dex said had the improbable effect of making this man actually like him more.

  “This panel—” Bert cleared his throat. “This panel is Galahad’s first visit to the castle of the grail under the Fisher King. The grail is there, but no one can see it – I forget why; the king committed a great crime long ago, so they’re cursed with not being alive, but not dying. Despite being pure—”

  “Overrated,” said Dex. “Sorry, go on.”

  “Galahad couldn’t see the grail either. He had to figure out from these apparitions” – he pointed to the conga line – “what it all meant. But it was too soon. He was too young to solve it. He had to spend the rest of his life questing in order to understand the first, the only, the organizing mystery of his life.” Bert turned to the next panel. “He figured it out eventually, and came back to the castle, freed the king. Galahad got the grail in the end.”

  “Those,” said Dex, pointing to a panel on the other side of the room, of the man in the red cloak bowing before a crowd of queens. “Those are the randy virgins, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Bert. “But that’s not the point.”

  “What’s the point, then?” Dex looked back over his shoulder.

  “We spend our whole lives becoming worthy. Of ourselves. Our mysteries, our solutions, the fruits of our quests.”

  Dex turned slowly to face him. His heart ached something marvelous. “What are you trying to tell me?” he said.

  “Did you find it?” Bert looked like he was happy but it hurt. Like he wanted to tell Dex everything in the world but simply couldn’t.

  Dex blushed. “It? You mean” – he dropped his voice to a whisper – “you mean the theater? The room and the symbols and the code?”

  Bert didn’t respond. He inhaled and looked warmly at Dex with that beautiful face of his, and Dex realized this wasn’t a real date. This was only a prelude.

  Dex wanted to take this man out for real.

  “Yes,” he said, answering all of the questions, his own and Bert’s. But there was so much more to ask. “What do you know abou—” was all Dex got out before Bert crossed the tiles between them and kissed him, softly and perfectly.

  “My friends call me Rabbit,” he said, and left, taking every word Dex could think to say with him.

  Someone screamed.

  Dorry jumped from the book where she’d buried herself. She’d been down so deep – and she was in the library, where you got shushed for talking, let alone screaming – that her first thought was that she’d imagined it, heard it at the back of her head. She was reading about ghosts. She might have fallen asleep and not realized. She was tired enough; she hadn’t slept much lately. She felt awful that Tuesday was avoiding her – something was up, and Tuesday hadn’t told her a thing. The wall their apartments shared had shivered from Tuesday’s music for hours the past two nights, angry, thumpy electronic beats that made her father sort of bop his head even as he asked Dorry, “You like this garbage?”

  The library screamer screamed again.

  It was more of a whoop that time, and a partial phrase, —oly shi—!, followed by the sound of footsteps thumping upstairs from the librarian’s desk. Low voices met somewhere off to her left. Dorry was curled in a chair on the second floor of the Somerville Public Library – a balcony that surrounded the main floor, ringed with non-fiction stacks – with her back to one rounded window. It was that late-afternoon dip between the end of school and the time when she knew her dad would start to worry that she wasn’t home.
But she didn’t want to go home at all. It was Thursday, and she was afraid Tuesday would be too busy or too on Dorry’s dad’s side or too – whatever (even though she had a paper in English and a test in math, real reasons to meet with her tutor). Part of her wanted to be a baby and pretend that if she just stayed here in the library, hidden among the art books, she wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. Libraries had always made her feel like a kid, in a good way: secret and safe and taken care of, rocked to sleep in a cocoon of books.

  But she was going to have to deal with something, apparently. She craned her neck to listen better. The screamer had been close, in the corner to her left, and whoever it was still seemed excited, even if they’d stopped screaming. Whoops threatened to bust free from the few words she caught – sorry, understand, of course of course – as the screamer apologized to the librarian who had rushed upstairs. Then she heard Vincen – Pry – And if she’d been dreamy-sleepy before, now she was awake.

  She leaned so far over that the chair began to tip.

  She saw the librarian first. She emerged out of the far corner, turned left, headed back down the stairs to her desk. And after the librarian came Ned Kennedy.

  She knew Ned. He was in her English class, but he was at least a year older, a sophomore, probably. Dorry had tested so well when she changed schools that they’d bumped her up a year. Ned was wiry, with brown skin, black-framed glasses, and super-short hair. He didn’t say much in class, but when he did, it was funny, a joke that wasn’t obviously a joke, the kind that made the teacher (and Dorry, in her head) laugh. She didn’t know much else about him. He played trombone, she thought. Or maybe he was in the art club. She got an arty vibe from him. He was wearing a gray hoodie, unzipped so Dorry could read QUESTION REALITY – REALITY was printed upside down – on his purple T-shirt.

  He was gripping his phone in his left hand. The screen glowed between his fingers.

  She got the same tingly feeling she’d had when she told Tuesday and Archie about the first clue: a premonition that this, this moment, was a beginning. If Tuesday was shutting her out, if she didn’t want to play Pryce’s game with Dorry anymore, Dorry would just have to play with someone else.

  “Hey!” she whisper-hissed. “Ned!”

  Ned’s head whipped toward her, independent of his body, which took a beat to catch up.

  His face was blank.

  Of course: he had no idea who she was. Dorry was just the new girl who sat behind him.

  She motioned for him to come closer.

  He pushed his glasses up his nose with a finger.

  “I’m Dorry,” she said, keeping her voice as low as possible. Sound carried all over the library, over the side of the balcony, way across the stacks. “I sit behind you in English. Newish girl.” She raised her hand in an instinctive, stupid wave. “Hi.”

  “Hello,” he said. He didn’t say more, but an … and? floated on the air.

  If he wasn’t going to come to her, she would go to him. At least he didn’t back up as she approached. And though it didn’t feel as true as it had a week ago, she knew – assuming Ned Kennedy had been whooping about this Vincent Pryce, not the other Vincent Price – exactly what to say.

  “I’m a friend of Tuesday Mooney’s,” she said.

  His face changed. It lifted, like a curtain.

  “No way,” he said.

  Dorry nodded. “Yes way,” she said.

  Ned tucked his chin down and sort of laughed into his chest, like he couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. Like it was some huge lucky break for him to have run into her. Someone who knew Tuesday. A girl who knew the girl who’d uncovered Pryce’s first clue.

  “Dorry,” she said again, and stuck out her hand, because despite the fact that the most interesting thing about her was that she knew Tuesday, she had a name and she wanted Ned to know it. “Dorry Bones.”

  Ned slipped his hand into hers. It was warm and dry, and he said, “Ned. Ned Flores Kennedy. Of the Union Square Kennedys,” like it was a joke Dorry was supposed to get. She didn’t get it. But she didn’t let on.

  He propped the hand still holding his phone on his hip and shook his head.

  “So you’re really a friend of Tuesday Mooney?” he said. “I mean, I want to trust you, you’ve got a real—” Ned waved his free hand in the air, almost like he was trying to get a better whiff of her. “You’ve got a real trustworthy air.”

  Dorry didn’t know how to respond to that. She smiled encouragingly.

  “It’s just that – I guess, if you’re a friend of Tuesday’s,” Ned said, “do you know – do you know who I am? I found the secret code down the alley and posted it? I’m a Black Cat, repping the Highlanders?”

  She did not. She wished she did, for how disappointed Ned looked that she didn’t. He explained: The Black Cats were a collective of self-organized teams all over greater Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Jamaica Plain, who had agreed to share information about Pryce’s game in the hope that one of their number might solve it – and, after solving it, share the wealth. They started as an open group on Facebook, but had gone private after Ned posted that picture of the code in the alley downtown – because, as one of the group’s leaders put it, “we’re a cooperative, not a class-action lawsuit; let’s keep our individual shares healthy.” His sister, Cass, was one of the leaders, and Ned’s eyes got shiny when he talked about the other one, Lisa Pinto. (If Dorry had to guess, Ned had definitely had a crush on her at some point. Boys could be so transparent; sometimes you could see straight through them.) They’d been trying hard to recruit Tuesday, but she hadn’t responded to any of their messages or requests on Facebook.

  “We have room for one more,” Ned said, “especially if that one is your girl Tuesday.” He looked at her. “Or two more.” He sort of wince-laughed, like he was embarrassed he’d left her out, had never meant to. “I bet we have room for two more.”

  So this was what Tuesday had been keeping from her: a secret code. More players, finding more clues. Her father had asked Tuesday to cut Dorry off, and boy, had she ever. And, yes, he had asked Dorry not to get involved with Tuesday.

  But he hadn’t actually said anything about not getting involved with someone else.

  “Did you solve it yet?” she asked. Her voice rose; she couldn’t help it. “Do you know what the code means?”

  “You want to get a drink or a slush or something? At the LP?” Ned asked, bobbing his head in the general direction of Highland Ave. and the convenience mart down the street. “And no, I do not know what the code means yet. But I know something else,” he said, and smiled so brightly, Dorry caught it like a cold. She grinned back. And nodded. They tromped downstairs to the circulation desk, where Dorry checked out her book (Famous Ghosts and Where to Find Them: New England), and then they left the library. Dorry noticed that Ned was leaning closer, and realized he was looking at the buttons on her bag. All bands that Tuesday had introduced her to, because everything that was cool about her she had learned from someone who was a lot cooler: The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Cake. They stopped on the curb to let a car pull out of the parking lot, and Ned reached out and touched one of the buttons so he could read its tiny letters, which said, NUKE A GAY BABY SEAL FOR CHRIST.

  He laughed. “The poor gay baby seals,” he said.

  “My dad loves that one,” she said. “He worries that we’ve lost our sense of irony. Like, as a country.”

  “My dad would probably agree,” said Ned. “But I don’t know if he’s worried about irony as much as he’s worried about other stuff. Like coastlines. Species. He teaches biology. Right here.” He hitched a shoulder at the high school they were currently walking in front of. Somerville High was a giant stone castle spreading along Highland Avenue, between the library and the city hall, across the street from the LP convenience mart. Another thing that was way, way cooler about living in the city instead of the suburbs: you got to go to high school in a building that was old enough to be haunted. “I
spend most afternoons hanging out at the library, waiting for a ride home with him. I kind of hate the bus. And it’s getting dark earlier every day.”

  It was strange that Dorry had never seen him there before. She hung out at the library all the time too, usually in art history, because the chair was big and cozy. She told him so.

  “Well,” said Ned, “you might not have seen me, but I’ve seen you. Disappearing around a corner, sort of flashing out of sight, melting into the wall, with your boots and that bag and – kind of like Kitty Pryde.” Ned sniffed. “You know Kitty Pryde? From X-Men?” He shook his head again. “She’s wicked cool.”

  Dorry’s cheeks reddened. So he had known who she was when she introduced herself. She might not have been brave enough to say hello if she’d realized she wasn’t a stranger to him.

  The LP mart always smelled a little like her grandmother’s fridge, funky from years of cutting the moldy bits off food she should have thrown out but couldn’t, because part of it was still good. It was familiar and gross at the same time. She asked Ned what he wanted, and Ned blanked for a second, and then asked for a chocolate milk. When she brought two bottles of chocolate milk back up to the counter, he looked relieved, like he was worried chocolate milk had maybe been the wrong choice, the little-kid choice, but the fact that she had chosen the same meant it was the right choice after all.

  They sat inside the brick bus shelter across the street and clinked their milks together.

  “Do you read comics?” Ned asked. Dorry turned toward him. “If you do, you should check out Rodney’s Comics, in Davis. Rodney is the best. You’d like him, I bet. He’s super-smart and mysterious and – he’s not a Black Cat, which is too bad because he has this way of figuring stuff out. He knows everything, everything, not just about comics and superheroes and movies and TV, but the world, the patterns, the rules that everything’s constructed on. The invisible forces pushing and pulling and shaping what we all take for granted, or don’t even see.” Ned pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose again. “Like,” he said, “the first time I showed up at the comic shop with these glasses, Rodney sort of nodded at me, slow, and said, ‘The thing people forget about Superman’” – Ned paused for effect – “‘is that those red and blue Underoos aren’t his costume. Clark Kent is.’”