The Swallows

by Lisa Lutz

  The sloppiest of all had to be Kingsley Shaw, Christine’s steady boyfriend. One night, after they’d messed around, he went for a shower and left his laptop open, with Christine’s score sheet on full view. She couldn’t figure out what she was looking at, at first. She saw a lot of numbers—sixes mostly. It wasn’t until she read the comments section that the full impact hit her.

  Christine was so angry, she had trouble focusing on the big picture. She got twisted up by the whole scoring system.

  I remember Christine saying, “When you put your mouth on someone’s dick, that’s an automatic eight out of ten, with the only possible deduction coming from permanent damage.”

  Christine confronted Kingsley, who owned up to not just his record keeping but to the larger conspiracy and made some kind of joke about there always being room for improvement. Christine told Kingsley that she was going to destroy him and every one of his cohorts. But she didn’t know what she was up against. She confronted the editors, without allies or backup. The editors responded with a full-blown attack on Christine’s character. They painted her as a queen bitch who spread nasty rumors about all of her friends. She was shunned and shamed until she transferred to a local high school to finish up her senior year. I’ve learned from Christine’s mistakes.

  My little sister is Linny Matthews. Linny, a fifteen-year-old waif who wears her hair in a short bob with bangs, looks like prime bait for the editors. She’s also crazy smart, willful, and has an unusual talent for persuading people to do things they don’t actually want to do. I’ve told Linny everything she needs to know to stay out of the Darkroom, including not talking about the Darkroom. Linny’s contribution to my cause, however, is limited to a few administrative assignments. She has three years left at this school; I won’t put a target on her back.

  Linny has independent-study Latin after lunch. I tracked her down at Milton Studio, where she was lying on top of a long desk, wearing an eye mask. Stonebridge doesn’t offer any formal Latin classes, so Linny can do what she likes, wherever she likes, during that period.

  “Wake up,” I said.

  “I’m awake,” she said, as she bolted upright and whisked off her eye mask. “Quid novi?”

  Linny occasionally throws around conversational Latin to maintain her cover.

  “I need a meet with Kate Bush,” I said.

  When I saw the photo of Kate, I knew it was more than a nasty prank. I had to enlist her as an ally.

  “Tragic,” Linny said, shaking her head with a look of pity and relief.

  There’s always some grain of pleasure in another person’s shame. It’s impossible not to think, Thank God it wasn’t me.

  “Text me if you see her,” I said. “We need to have a private, unobserved conversation.”

  I knew that if I asked Linny to keep an eye out for Kate, she’d stalk Kate until she found her alone. I find it better to give Linny assignments than to leave her to her own devices.

  Linny checked her watch and slung her backpack over her shoulder.

  “That’s it?” Linny said.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  Sometimes I worry about the transactional nature of our relationship. Then again, that’s how so many of mine are.

  I left Milton Studio and returned to Headquarters to deliver my assignment to Witt’s box. As soon as I relinquished my Q&A, I had my doubts. Anonymous or not, maybe I shouldn’t have told her who I was. Besides, I am many things, not just one.

  I’m an orphan. I’m a retired pot dealer. I’m an independent contractor. I’m a double agent. I’m a dissenter. I’m a ticking time bomb. I’m the enemy who hides in plain sight, looking for others like me. I’m an agent of revenge who will bring the Darkroom to its knees.

  Ms. Witt

  At lunch, I grabbed some kind of vegetable stew from Dahl Dining Hall and strolled the short distance to Tolkien Library. The librarian sat behind her desk, hovering over a thick book with her head low and her arms guarding the edges, the posture of a convict during chowtime. I saw no reason to interrupt her, so I dropped my stew on a long wooden study desk and roamed the aisles.

  First I heard the patter of the librarian’s pumps on the linoleum floor. Then I saw her, gazing at me from the other side of the bookshelf.

  “There’s no food permitted in the library,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, framing my head between a gap in the reference section.

  The librarian leaned in with a scrutinizing gaze.

  “You’re not a student.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re Len Wilde’s daughter.”

  “I usually go by Alex.”

  She marched around the stacks to the section I was investigating and handed me my stew.

  “Hi. I’m Claudine Shepherd. Librarian,” she said, shaking my hand with perfectly manicured nails. “You can call me Claude.”

  “Hi, Claude,” I said.

  My general opinion of librarians tends to be a step above that of the rest of the population. The reasons are obvious: They’re book lovers with, often, an evangelical desire to push reading on anyone within range. I was inclined to like Claude Shepherd, head librarian (only librarian), even before I met her. And when I first laid eyes on her, I liked her even more. She was a librarian out of central casting. She wore a tweed pencil skirt, a light-blue blouse with ruffles, and three-inch pumps that echoed through the library as she stalked the aisles of her domain. Claude looked like she could rule the world without breaking a sweat. And yet there was warmth behind her sharp edges.

  “I bend the food rule for faculty, but absolutely no tuna fish. Ever,” Claude said.

  “That seems reasonable.”

  “What are you looking for, Alex?”

  “A book,” I said.

  She smiled. “You’re in the right place. What kind of book?”

  “Some kind of creative-writing exercise book.”

  “Aren’t you the creative-writing teacher?”

  “Debatable. That’s why I need the book.”

  Claude immediately pulled two paperbacks. One was called Just Write Something Already and the other In Progress.

  “This is all we’ve got.”

  “Thank you. Do I need a library card or something?”

  “Nah. I know where to find you,” said Claude.

  “See you around,” I said, as I hooked the books under the arm that wasn’t holding stew.

  “Do you drink?” Claude said.

  “I do.”

  “Excellent. The town of Lowland, Vermont, has exactly one thing going for it. A bar. You will come to love it. As it is the only place you can go to escape the students. It’s called Hemingway’s. Don’t ask. A few of us are meeting up for happy hour on Friday afternoon.”

  “I’ll try to make it,” I said.

  “You’ll try? It’s Friday in Lowland and you live in a shack. I’ll see you there,” Claude said.

  * * *

  —

  My last period of the day was something called advanced creative-writing workshop. When I reviewed my class roster, I noticed that the students were the same ones from my first-period class. I tracked down Greg to get him to explain it to me. He said the group of nineteen would be working on longer-format projects—screenplay, novel, one-woman show…anything they wanted to do.

  I couldn’t decide if having the same students twice in one day was a recipe for disaster or immaterial. But I played up my disappointment when Greg gave me the scoop.

  “You might start looking for my replacement,” I said.

  That afternoon, as the students filed into the classroom, they flouted the morning’s established assigned seats. I shook my head, said no, and waited until they rearranged themselves. I did notice that at no time did anyone sit in the front row’s window seat.

 
“Looks like we’re going to be spending a lot of time together,” I said.

  “I, for one, am looking forward to it,” Mick Devlin, the one who wore his tie like an ascot, said.

  I had no lecture prepared and they’d already completed their Q&A’s, so I just grabbed one of those writing books, leafed through it for a few minutes, and delivered their next assignment.

  “Write your origin story in five hundred words or less. This time your name should definitely appear on your paper.”

  “Origin story?” Hannah Rexall (lithe, blond) said.

  “Like we’re superheroes?” said Adam Westlake (bow tie and dimpled smile).

  “Precisely,” I said.

  Carl Bloom (red nose, allergies?) insisted that he needed more than five hundred words. I insisted that he did not. Gabriel Smythe’s hand shot up. I nodded for him to speak.

  “Five hundred words or less could mean only five words or ten words, right?”

  “Yes. Although that would probably be a crap origin story. How about we say between four hundred and five hundred words. Due Monday. One more thing,” I said, remembering my primitive living arrangement. “You have to deliver hard copies of all of your assignments to my box in admin. I can’t access Blackboard, or the Internet for that matter, from where I live.”

  I sat back down at my desk while they groaned their disapproval. My phone buzzed again.

  Jonah Wagman: Are you the daughter of Len Wilde?

  * * *

  —

  If I were to write my own origin story, I suspect it would be more about my parents than myself, which, come to think of it, is vaguely pathetic.

  My father’s nom de plume is Len Wilde. Forty years ago, my dad published his first and only novel under his real name, Leonard Witt. Darkness, Behave was well reviewed, but the sales were modest. While Dad wrestled with his sophomore effort, he supplemented his income by teaching and taking on the occasional magazine assignment.

  Dad’s popularity rose sharply, about five years after the first printing of Darkness, Behave, when a well-known filmmaker adapted his book for the screen. In the novel, people fall in love and out of love and think an awful lot about murder but never, in fact, commit murder. The filmed adaptation took Dad’s characters and gave them a plot. The resulting movie was a taut thriller and a huge box-office success, which made the paperback of Darkness, Behave a massive bestseller. While Dad relished his newfound wealth and celebrity, he was chastened by the knowledge that his success did not directly correlate with his work. Such a motif would become his lifelong curse.

  My father met my mother, Nastya Lazarov, a few weeks after she defected to Canada, while his first book clung to the bestseller list. Nastya was an alternate on the Bulgarian fencing team. She jumped ship, so to speak, the day after the opening ceremonies of the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

  My mother’s true passion was escaping Eastern Europe, not swordplay. She’d simply chosen the sport that gave her the best shot at making the Olympic team, which was phase one of her plan. My father interviewed her for a magazine piece. These were the first two lines:

  Leonard Witt: Do you like fencing?

  Nastya Lazarov: Not particularly.

  They married a year later. A few years after that, in another Olympic year, I was born. My mother never competed again. Although she occasionally gave pricey private lessons when we were low on cash. I don’t have memories of my parents during their honeymoon phase. I’m not even sure they ever had one. My mother always said that my father’s most attractive quality was being American. If pressed, she’d mention his smile and blue eyes. But marriage was simply security for her. Whenever I’d ask my dad about the early days, he’d first comment on my mother’s beauty, then he’d undercut the compliment by mentioning one of her quirkier flaws. She fenced left-handed and, according to my father, had a bizarrely lopsided musculature, which, he claimed, made her left breast at least a full cup size smaller, and significantly higher, than the right one.

  My most vivid memory of the pre–Len Wilde years was my father reading his work in progress to me at night, as a bedtime story. He’d edit as he read aloud and would often ask the seven-year-old me for her opinion. I never got a full grasp of the story, since Dad read it to me piecemeal. My best guess was that it centered on a janitor who haunts an office building and habitually relocates the personal items of the senior executives.

  Later, I learned that Dad had been at that novel for more than ten years. It had surpassed six hundred pages with no end in sight. One night, when Dad had drunk himself into oblivion after finding a gaping hole in the plot (no easy feat with a plotless novel), Mom snuck into his office and removed every digital and hard copy of Dad’s work in progress, tentatively titled The Marauders of Main Street. In their stead, she left a one-page outline for a traditional three-act plot of a crime novel.

  Mom held hostage not just the unfinished novel but Dad’s beloved Rolex, a gift from the film studio after Darkness, Behave made one hundred million at the box office.

  Dad had three months to write the draft, or both would be lost forever.

  My parents fought well and they fought often. The fight after the great delete of 1992 was the kind of childhood memory that you can never erase. It wasn’t a battle with airstrikes or grenades or even disciplined, well-choreographed domestic attacks. It was a cold war. The house had never been quieter. They plotted against and spied on each other; they played confidence games with their friends to gather information; they both thought I was their double agent. I saw myself more as a freelance mole, using my sway to both facilitate an endgame and recover whatever spoils I could.

  In the midst of their deep freeze, my father wrote the crime novel my mother had outlined. The Broken Kiss, he called it. He left it outside my mother’s door, almost three months to the day after the night of the delete. She read it in one sitting. The next morning, my mother returned the marked-up manuscript to my father.

  “It is perfect,” she said. “Other than the places that I marked up.”

  Leonard Witt now exclusively writes crime novels as Len Wilde. No matter how hard he tries, Dad will never duplicate the inexplicable success of his first novel. But Len Wilde makes a decent living when he doesn’t blow his deadlines.

  As for my parents: They divorced ten years ago, just a month after I left for college. It came as no surprise. How those two stayed married for more than twenty years is a greater mystery than anything in the Len Wilde canon.

  Norman Crowley

  MY ORIGIN STORY

  By Norman Crowley

  Freshman year I was invisible. I had one friend, Ephraim Wiener, and that was enough. Every month the editors seniors would throw a school party. The organizers and primary attendees were upperclassmen. But the entire student body was allowed access to the kegs, as long as they paid the cover charge, which was actually some kind of fucked-up balderdash pyramid scheme: $20 for freshmen, $15 for sophomores, $10 for juniors, $5 for seniors, and presumably a windfall for the editors organizers. After spending every Friday night in our room playing Warcraft, Ephraim and I decided to shake things up.

  At the time, the editor in chief man of the hour, the one in charge, was Ty Givens. He was so ridiculously white and rich and privileged and stupid. I’d heard he’d gone to Warren and was kicked out for academic in-excellence—that was his joke. Probably his only good one. Ephraim and I paid the cover charge and hovered near the keg, waiting for the tap to be free. We wanted to get our money’s worth. It was the first time I’d had two beers in a row. I was solidly inebriated.

  Ty and his crew were having a laugh about a senior named Tracy Schlitt. I used to see her around. She wore vintage dresses with flower designs and large buttons and horn-rimmed glasses with diamonds on the edge. I knew that she had won a scholarship to study engineering at MIT and she made this really cool robot for her senior thesi
s that would make coffee and tea and say good morning and keep track of your schedule. I went to her presentation in Mr. Collins’s class when she showcased her project. She called it Bitterman, based on a butler in some movie I haven’t seen. Tracy was one of the slummers.

  Ty’s friend Blake was calling her Tracy Shit; then some other guy said “slit” and added, “I heard she’s fucking having relations with Collins that guy.”

  “I guess that guy needs to take it where he can get it, but I wouldn’t get near that heifer if she were the last woman on earth,” said Ty.

  Then they said more crap about wearing a blindfold and stuff like that and Ty interrupted and said, “To quote my good friend Nietzsche, ‘When a woman has a brain, there’s usually something wrong with her pussy face.’ ”

  “How would you know?” I said.

  Ephraim elbowed me in the ribs. They were howling like animals. I’m surprised they even heard me.

  “What?” said one of Ty’s cronies, as the group fell silent.

  Emboldened by the beer and reckless because I didn’t know the ramifications, I repeated my statement and added, “No woman with a brain would ever fuck give you the time of day.”

  “Dude, dude,” I heard someone say, like a warning.

  I saw them puffing out their chests, like peacocks, but I didn’t stop. I remember the adrenaline. It was like a drug I hadn’t taken. The best I’d felt in weeks.

  “Only douchebags morons quote Nietzsche, and only megadouchebags megamorons quote Nietzsche wrong,” I said.

  I was only fourteen then. Considering what happened next, it was a mistake. And yet a mistake I wish I could make again. I had more courage in those few minutes than I’ve had in my entire life.