Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  The pep talk is my idea. And Ryan, as well as the Old Man, thinks it’s a good one. We’re all wondering if they have information about Nick, but might be unwilling to share it. The boys listen to Rollie, who sits on the hearth in the Homer House common room; he finesses them with tactful rhetoric, using humor, which never appears labored. It’s an impressive display. There are a few matters to bring up - where Nick went the night he slipped out into the dark; his relationship with Nicole D’Ambrosio; maybe even something about that Tiffany’s ring that’s gone missing.

  With drawn expressions, the boys listen. This isn’t a lecture about divvying up dorm snacks or using discretion when self-satisfying urges strike. One of their own is missing, and they know the gravity of the matter. Aside from the occasional head nod and glance at one another, they’re tuned in to what Rollie has to say. He talks about the progress Nick has made. He praises the boy’s strong personality, describing him as willful and his own man. He mentions his sick-with-worry mother back in Vermont, awaiting a phone call to tell her that her son is safe.

  Ryan, cued by the Old Man with a fleeting look, adds that our doors are open, so please be forthcoming with any information. Then, more in the spirit of inclusion than competition, Ryan asks if I have anything to add.

  “Nick’s much better off here,” I announce, “than he is wandering the streets of God knows where. This is a good place, and it’s where he needs to be right now.”

  My statements are met with silence. Not that I was expecting some tearful admission of Nick’s whereabouts, or an impassioned plea to escape consequences for withholding information. After a moment, Ryan asks if anyone has any questions. Cal’s hand shoots in the air. He asks if it’s normal to be able to pinch your testicles particularly hard without even a hint of pain.

  “Because I swear, just last night, I applied vice-grip pressure, and nothing,” he shares with deadpan delivery.

  With that, the mood buoys back to its juvenile frat house state, replete with laughter and obliterated attention-spans. Using a fraction of the austerity of his dining hall voice, Rollie dismisses the boys. A few stay behind and turn on the TV while others retreat to their rooms. Ryan, who’s on duty, produces a hacky sack and leads two boys outside to the front porch. My father follows me back to my room.

  “If they want to tell us something, they will,” he says.

  “Do you think they know anything?”

  “Hard to say. Nick is a fiercely private kid when it comes to just about everything. But if he was getting laid - and those pictures suggest he was - then chances are good that he wanted others to know.”

  “Turning those over to the cops must’ve been brutal. The girl’s family has to be devastated.”

  Rollie doesn’t respond to this. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he makes a smacking sound with his tongue and leans against the fridge in my kitchen. I recognize this coyness. It rears its head when he’s either backed into a corner or considering whether he wishes to compromise his principles. It doesn’t take him long to come out with it:

  “I’m going to handle this a little differently. A little tact and ploy.”

  “What’s tactful about not involving the cops?”

  “They’re already involved. I just don’t want them to get any wrong ideas.”

  “Like what? That Nick dabbled in photography?”

  “A little update for you, my son: In addition to the cops and the fucking fire marshall being up my ass, I now have the local health inspector threatening to shut down my kitchen. Forget bad things happening in threes - we’ll be approaching double-digits before dinner.”

  He explains how he received some phone calls over the past couple of weeks. And then surprise inspections. And then bad news. And then costly ultimatums.

  “I just need as little aggravation right now as possible. The photos are between you and me.”

  “And whoever sent them.”

  “And whoever sent them,” he repeats.

  “Nick?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s a damn rare thing for a high school kid to part with a nude photo, let alone one of the girl he lost his cherry to.”

  “I feel like it’s a damn rare thing for a high school kid to even own a nude photo. A physical one, I mean. What is this, the nineties?”

  “Good point.”

  “By the way,” I add, “no way Nicole was his first.”

  Rollie assures me that this is the case, adding that Nick is all talk.

  “You know this kid. Do you think he did it?”

  “That’s a thought in progress. I haven’t yet made up my mind.”

  Turning around, he opens the fridge and takes out my last bottle of beer; he twists off the cap and takes a long swig before handing it to me. It’s been a long time since we’ve shared a beer.

  “You took a chance that I wasn’t going to say anything to the cops about those pictures. That’s quite the display of confidence. How’d you know?”

  Grabbing for the beer, the Old Man laughs a little in spite of himself. After a long drink, he hands the bottle back to me and tells me I’m giving him far too much credit, that he’s improvising as he goes, like one of those stoned-out beat poets I used to make him read years ago. I nod over the memory.

  “The truth is, my boy, I’m about as uncertain over all of this as anyone is. Pretty fucking scared, too.”

  He’s quick to change the topic before I have a chance to respond.

  “By the way,” he says, “Are you aware of what you said to those kids a little while ago about this place? I’m not sure if you were caught up in the moment, being polite because I was right there, or listening to your subconscious. Either way, I was floored.”

  I tell him I have no idea what he’s talking about, that I have no recollection over anything I’ve said about the HAS. Cocking his head a little, he stares at me as though I’m guarding easily gotten-to treasure. I’m sure he’s looking for me to press him further. I don’t. I just stare back, waiting for him to tell me. Neither of us get our way.

  . . .

  Four days later, on a bright and breezy Monday morning, Rollie calls an emergency staff meeting before breakfast. A few therapists have already arrived on campus - at the Old Man’s request - and they, along with Louise and her security team, man the dorms while we meet in the dining hall.

  “Just last night,” he says, wasting no time, “Lindsay Lowe tried to take her own life. We received word from her mother early this morning. She found Lindsay, at a little after midnight, passed out in her father’s car, which was running in a closed garage. There was a note and an empty bottle of sleeping pills in the passenger seat.”

  Some of the faculty break down a little.

  “She’s alive. But she’s in bad shape. She hasn’t regained consciousness. I’ll make the announcement after lunch. Maybe by then we’ll have some new information.”

  No one asks questions or makes comments. Even Rollie seems at a loss for words. After a moment, he articulates what many are probably feeling:

  “There’s a goddamn wildfire burning around here. It’s contained for a day or so and then it’s raging the next. Useless analogies aside, I don’t know what else to say. We had another student withdraw yesterday.”

  Many of the kids, he warns - not all of them, but some of them - will be hit particularly hard by the news of Lindsay. Some will have real sadness, while others, referred to by the Old Man as emotional opportunists, will do their best to assimilate to the grief. Either way, he warns, some reactions will be explosive, so be prepared. Therapists will be around, he says, and the name of the game, for the next few days, will be damage control.

 
Some of the staff file out of the dining hall. Tennille and Amber walk past me, wiping away their tears. Tim/Tom puts his arm around Sandra and offers comfort as they approach the Old Man, who sits slumped forward on a tabletop, exhausted, sunken into himself, his weary face the perpetual rest stop for countless worries. I suddenly feel very aware of my own expression, which must appear stolid. And all I can think of is Matt. Hat and harmonica collector. Precocious poet. Best friend to Adam. And, of course, Lindsay Lowe devotee.

  The writers group, which initially decided to meet two times a week, begins meeting nearly everyday. Mostly it’s to discuss Nick Russo, Nicole D’Ambrosio - and now Lindsay Lowe - and any other melodrama, however minute, they collectively feel warrants some commiserating.

  “There’s your fucking study in irony,” said Adam, a few days after the news of Lindsay has been revealed. “The staff are put in place to do everything in their power to keep us from wanting to swallow a goddamn bullet, and yet it’s none other than a staff member who’s responsible for nearly destroying this girl.”

  The group has been speculating for days as to what drove Lindsay to such desperation. Some say humiliation. Some say rejection. Some say a need for attention. These are all guesses that take into account the one common denominator that is Dimitri Ames. No new information has been revealed to Rollie, and thus to the students. Lindsay’s family is no longer in contact. The last Rollie heard - two or three days ago - is that Lindsay is still unconscious.

  Adam’s comment draws lean, focused glances my way for the briefest of moments. I’m staff, and therefore on the opposing side. Yet what I have going for me, and what has thankfully become well known, is the story of my altercation with Ames. And so when his name is brought up during the writers group one afternoon, I don’t mind Dan Hart turning to me with that mordantly sober look of his and saying how he wished I had broken Ames’ neck that night. Secretly pleased over the acknowledgment, I choose to ignore it and focus instead on Matt, who has not attended the group since word first broke of his muse’s suicide attempt.

  “He’s refusing to come,” Adam announces. “Tortured artist shit aside, he’s pretty fucked up over it. I’m fucked up over it, but he’s really fucked up over it.”

  The timing couldn’t be worse, Adam explains - the boys are just beginning to wear down the Old Man into letting them take a crack at fixing the Winnebago. Not to mention, he adds, their recent dumpster diving has been fruitful, some of their best ventures yet. One in particular stands out, he says, reaping them something spectacular from behind Sali’s Pizza just the day before Rollie made his Lindsay Lowe announcement.

  “It’s got to be one of our best finds ever,” he says, beaming.

  The boys are beside themselves with excitement, Adam says. And once Matt is himself again, they’ll show off their find to the group.

  No new writing is critiqued. No comments or questions about syntax or sentence structure, either. Meredith, who’s badgered me nearly every meeting to bring in my own writing, has relented for now. The focus, for the time being, seems to be inhaling and exhaling. The kids are busy keeping themselves alive, their heartbeats strong and quick and heard, just by talking to one another. The climate of the school feels the same. Everyone waits for good news, or any news, about Lindsay.

  It’s business as usual - classes and activities and therapy - but the typically charged pace seems reset to selfless introspection. Even those who don’t know Lindsay very well take an interest. The Homer House boys, for instance, who are so often consumed with their pubescent antics and snarky belittling of everyone and everything, ask me for updates on her condition. Meanwhile, Matt has become a campus pariah. He attends classes infrequently, spending the better part of his days tramping around the school in laps, blowing lonesome notes on one of his mouth harps, listening to music, peering into classrooms with a sullen, faraway look in his eyes, and getting a special pass to shoot pool by himself in the pavilion. His dorm staff, teachers, friends, therapist, and the Old Man, have all spoken to him. They don’t believe he’s a threat to himself.

  “He’s literally placing himself at the center of the campus,” Matt’s therapist, Dr. Reynolds, observes in an email he sends to the faculty, “which, I believe, is not only deliberate - Matt, after all, is a young man who has a strong need for people - but also quite helpful when it comes to the task of us watching him. This is what he wants: to be watched. His sadness, in a sense, is on display, which I do not for one moment believe is an affectation. It is real and deep and he wants us to know it. So please know it. That’s all I ask at this point.”

  . . .

  A much needed distraction occurs a few days later when a young woman drives a chargold, dust covered Jaguar onto campus, parking it not in the guest lot, but rather in front of the SOD office, where many suspicious eyes regard it as though at any moment it might turn into a racehorse and bolt into the wilderness beyond the campus. The owner of the car is a short, thin, fit woman, probably around my age, with big, deep eyes, a tanned face and body, and short, black hair that sweeps over her forehead in breezy wisps. On the back of her neck, curling out from under her left ear, is a small tattoo of a thin, yellowish vine with a fully blossomed flower in its center.

  Lunch has just ended and the campus is strewn with busybodies, now anxiously regarding this stranger. Seemingly at ease on the HAS campus, the woman takes delight as she looks around, greeting students and therapists and administrators and anyone who passes her. She introduces herself as Vee Scarret-Rosewell, former student at the Hundred Acre School, which, she adds with less levity than one might think, makes her a HAS-BEEN. The Old Man, emerging from the dining hall in mid-argument with a female student about her downtown privileges, throws his arms around Vee and tells her she looks wonderful. She kisses his cheek and blushes a little. Then, informally, the Old Man makes an announcement - to anyone within earshot - that Vee is a distinguished HAS graduate. He turns to her so she can confirm when exactly this was. Fifteen years ago, she says proudly.

  Returning students. My father lives for this. He’ll drop whatever’s at hand and talk with them, searching for his school’s imprint on their new lives. He won’t hesitate to fire off question after question about how they’ve been getting along since they were a HAS student. He wants to know. Hell, he needs to know.

  With his arm draped over Vee’s shoulder, Rollie asks if he can escort her on one of his favorite pastimes: the campus tour. She obliges, and the two of them, in all of their energized nostalgia, part through the cast of onlookers to go view all that has changed in the past decade and a half.

  Vee’s story, which she willingly shares that night in Rollie’s basement over poker and beer, may as well have been the story of every HASER, past, present, and future. It features addiction, depression, suicidal tendencies, periods of clarity and inspiration, relapses, various therapists, various meds, more clarity and inspiration, and then, for Vee, a feverish existentialist bout of approaching adulthood and its many real and frightening responsibilities.

  “I had a baby,” she says, fingering through some poker chips. “That sobered me up pretty quickly. It scared the shit out of me is what it really did. Which I guess is what I needed.”

  Amber asks Vee about her experience at the HAS. Her response is that she put everyone, herself included, through absolute hell. The Old Man, surprising everyone this evening by playing host in the flesh rather than from afar, denies this, describing Vee as willful and tenacious. She turns to him and reminds him how she changed her name for a while, demanding everyone at the school call her by her new Celtic name, Agrona, goddess of war and strife. Laughing, the Old Man admits he forgot about this.

  Tennille asks Vee about her baby, who we learn is a little girl named Chloe who’s just turned seven this summer and is now staying with her father for the week. She scr
olls on her phone to find a photo before passing it around the table. When it gets to me, I regard the picture politely - the little girl has dark green eyes, a sinewy, devilish smile, and wears a blue dress with white butterflies on it - before passing it to Scotty.

  “I remember you,” Vee says, claiming her third jackpot in a row.

  It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking to me.

  “Really?”

  I wait for her to say something else. Anything. Like maybe how I always had my nose in a book when she saw me. Or how it was nice to see me again after all these years. But she just sizes me up from across the table, smiles a little, then takes her phone back before putting it in her purse. Maybe there’s nothing for her to say. Maybe fifteen years is too long to remember details about someone who never made much of an impression. Or maybe she did have something to say, but was being courteous. Embarrassed a little, I sip my beer and fold my hand without looking at my cards.

  The silence is broken almost immediately when Vee announces that Rollie has told her about all the recent turmoil on campus. She says that in all her time as a student, the most drastic thing that happened was when the school lost power for a few days after a bad storm. Then she thinks on that for a moment, adding a disclaimer: