Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  “I mean, aside from the sex, drugs, and drama that happened on a daily basis.”

  The Old Man pretends to block his ears over Vee’s remark. The night goes on like this. Small talk. Drinking. Texas Hold’em. I barely speak, except to make a bet or thank anyone who occasionally passes me a beer. Something about this Vee woman - or, really, what she said to me - puts me in a pensive-like state. I could’ve packed it in and gone back to my place to finish grading papers or read Vonnegut’s Jailbird, which I’m halfway through. Yet something’s compelled me to stay. Vee’s piqued my imagination with her remark. It’s made me wonder what she might’ve recalled about me, but refuses to share. It’s hard not to sit there wondering what kind of a prick I might’ve been fifteen years ago and how that left an impression on a then depressed adolescent. I could’ve thought about this back at the Homer House, but it seems more proper for some reason to do it here, in my father’s basement, with Vee Scarret-Rosewell sitting across from me, downing the fancy beer Tennille brought, hustling her way through another hand while claiming it’s all beginner’s luck.

  The evening dies down at around midnight. The staff, most of them a little drunk, thank Rollie, shake hands with Vee, and stumble out into the darkness and back to their dorms. The Old Man offers Vee - for what seems like a second or third time - the small apartment above the gym. She reminds him of the B&B in the center of town where she’ll be staying for a few days.

  “Is this what the staff did when I was a student? Got drunk and played poker?”

  “Probably.”

  It’s just the three of us. Rollie takes a break from straightening up before sitting down with me and Vee. In his hands is a bound manuscript, about an inch thick, with a clear plastic cover framing a baby blue title page. Drumming his fingers on the book, he turns to me and says that Vee has a favor to ask of me. He’s clearly pleased, smiling a great big helium-filled smile that looks so full and airy, like it might fly off his face at any moment. It was difficult, he admits, to control his excitement while the others were around.

  “Vee’s written a book,” he says. “It’s a memoir about her three years here.”

  When I turn to her, there isn’t a trace of boastful pride on her face. Rather, she seems to be beaming over her mentor’s enthusiasm. She lets him do the talking. He finished it this afternoon, he tells me.

  “It’s a hell of a read,” he declares. “Beautifully done.”

  Leaning back in his chair, the Old Man confides that he’s always secretly hoped a former student would chronicle their experiences at the HAS. This way, he says, the place would survive long after he’s gone.

  “Forever,” he adds, looking at me. “It would survive forever.”

  The memoir’s been accepted for publication, which is set for late fall. Vee’s in the process of cleaning up the manuscript, tying up a few loose ends. And what better way to tie up loose ends than by having some fresh perspective? And what better perspective than HAS students? She wants a handpicked group of them to read the manuscript - she has a stack of bound copies in the Old Man’s office - and provide candid feedback. Not on spelling and semicolons. But on her ability to capture the spirit of the school, the intensity of the therapy, the immeasurableness of the shame and guilt that are so deeply embedded in being a student at the Hundred Acre School. Vee turns to me and says it was Rollie’s idea to approach me.

  “You’ve got your writers group,” the Old Man points out, “there must be some good candidates there to read Vee’s book. I figure between that and your classes—”

  Absently nodding my head, I think about Meredith’s honesty, and Adam’s straight-faced intensity, and Dan Hart’s cool instincts. The Old Man slides the book across the table to me. It’s titled Miserable Bitch: A True Has-Been Story. I have a group of students in mind, I tell her. They’re bright and artistic and brutally candid. Vee says this probably describes the majority of the HAS population. It did when she was there, she adds.

  Three days, she tells me as we all walk up the basement stairs and outside into the pleasant night air. That’s how long the kids have. And then she’s heading back to Poughkeepsie.

  “No problem,” I tell her.

  “No problem,” Rollie repeats, adding that Vee will probably want some face time with the kids once they’re done reading.

  She agrees. The Old Man bids us goodnight, adding that he’ll see us tomorrow. Then he covers a yawn with his forearm and disappears back into the house. It’s on the tip of my tongue to now ask Vee what she might remember about me, but I don’t. Instead, something compels me to reach for the manuscript clutched against her breast and ask to see it.

  “Of course.”

  Staring at its glossy cover under the moonlight, I offer to read it.

  “You’re more than welcome to. I’d love feedback from another writer. Your dad was bragging about you earlier, Gray.”

  The way she says my name sounds melancholic. Taking a deep breath, she looks around with her eyes half shut. The night is still and cool. Summer constellations dot the sky in sharp, bright points.

  “Rollie wants you to take this place over someday, huh?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “It’s all in there,” she says, pointing to her book. “See if you can find it.”

  Then she turns away from me and walks on ground that is probably as familiar to her as it is to me. It takes me all night, and well into early morning, to finish reading the manuscript. The book is well-written. It’s clean and sharp. Vee’s style is understated. She recalls her time at the HAS with unerring clarity, musing on her medication and therapy and living away from home among “one hundred fellow fuck-ups” as she frequently dubs her peers. She explores her anger and humiliation and depression. And, practically functioning as a character unto itself throughout the memoir, there’s the school. She describes it vividly. Praises it at times. Curses it at others. Her relationship with the place, she states in the book, is like any other complicated relationship. Which is to say it’s burrowed a deep and permanent space within her, releasing itself in spurts of memory at the best and worst of times throughout the years, either inspiring or devastating, but always finding a way to break the heart.

  To my astonishment, I’m in the book. Towards the middle, a few pages into a chapter mostly devoted to the dread Vee and other students felt over being profiled by uneasy townspeople, enters Rollie’s son, Gray, described initially by the author as appearing just as tortured and troubled as many of the students I refuse to acknowledge. I’m described as handsome, brooding, too self-aware. It’s noted that I hardly interact with the students when I visit the campus, that I barely look up from my reading to regard these troubled lepers.

  The author states that it was rumored that I composed the school’s mission statement, which she prints in its entirety; she states that my authoring of this mission statement proved, undeniably, that I was conflicted. On the one hand, I had obvious contempt for the school, quietly sneering at its conventions, passively ignoring its members, but on the other, I must’ve possessed, on some level, a profound appreciation for not only the emotional strife the students endured, but of the monumental undertaking of the school’s overseer, my father, Mr. Rollie Loveland. She ends up coming to the conclusion that I’m simply resentful and probably petrified. Resultantly, her hostility towards me is tempered; by the end of the chapter, it changes into what she calls “a bizarre brew of envy and pity.”

  After lunch, I run into Vee as she’s crossing the street. Her hair is wet and slicked back and she’s wearing a yellow cotton dress. She appears somehow younger than she did the evening before. I tell her I’ve already given out the copies of her book to a group of handpicked students. Thanking me, her attention is focused on my messenger bag, out
of which protrudes the corner of her manuscript. As I produce it and turn it over to her, I briefly consider saying how I didn’t get around to reading it, that I probably wouldn’t, and good luck with its publication. But I suddenly find myself praising her efforts and even referencing specific parts. Vee says she appreciates the feedback. Writing the book, she says, consumed the better part of three years - and however taxing it was, she adds, it was worth it. She changes the topic to the Old Man, telling me she just learned he’s trying to purchase the school from J.R. III. She says it’s about time. All I can do is nod.

  “Speechless over the matter?” she asks.

  “I have more to say on it than you can possibly imagine.”

  “I have to tell you that I’m surprised to find you working here.”

  “And where would you expect to see me working? Keeping in mind that I’m a complete stranger to you.”

  “I’m sorry if that came across as rude.”

  A car whisks by. The driver, a middle-aged man, stares at us as we stand on the side of the road.

  “It wasn’t rude. I apologize.”

  Holding her book to her chest, Vee looks up at the sun for a moment. Then she tells me she’s spoken to some students today.

  “What a trip,” she says, “it’s like coming home again.”

  “I know all about that.”

  She smiles and thanks me again for helping her with the book; she’ll be in touch to follow up with her anonymous readers. Before she walks past me, she apologizes again if she was presumptuous. When she’s still within earshot, I call after her:

  “It must’ve been difficult to capture all that truth. For your book, I mean.”

  She thinks on this for a moment. Then she says it was difficult, that it was like capturing a wild animal with hopes to tame it and learn from it and even live with it for a while.

  “Sounds intense.”

  “It was, I suppose.”

  “And what’s the payoff?”

  “The payoff?”

  “What’s the end game? The point? The payoff?”

  “It’s just a map,” she says. “Nothing more. Just my own personal map. And it shows this odyssey that I trekked, this unfuckingbelievable odyssey with heroes and villains and darkness and light.”

  “And let me guess,” I said, careful to eschew any mockery from my tone, “it reminds you that you’re here, still breathing, still alive.”

  A somewhat guarded smile finds its way on her lips, which I notice are glistening a little. After a moment, she moves towards me with a couple of steps before responding:

  “Of course. Can you think of anything in this world that’s more important?”

  During Vee’s three day stay in Old Brookview, she breezes in and out of the HAS, leaving in her wake a stoic kind of hopefulness the kids are all too glad to observe. I see her walking the campus with the Old Man or Dr. Nussbaum, or talking to a group of students on the front steps of the pavilion, or listening to someone play guitar by the benches in front of the SOD office. She always looks up and offers me a warm smile. Brief, sincere, and full of self-assurance. I find myself wanting to ask her about including me in her book. And what else she remembers - fodder she may have left on the cutting room floor - or any exchanges we might’ve had back then. I clearly left some kind of impression, and I want to better understand why. We’re all fascinated by the perceptions strangers have of us. Our shrewdest mysteries are still firmly intact at such a faraway vantage point. It’s only later, upon knowing us, that myth becomes dispelled, uncertainty dissolved, and our image becomes as common as daylight.

  Vee meets with her readers for an hour during her final afternoon in town. Thanking them for their feedback, she says the book is as much for them as it is for her. With a firm promise to Rollie that she’ll send him an on-the-house published copy, she drives back to Poughkeepsie to collect her child and resume her life. I never ask about her decision to include me in the book. Her true motivation. Her actual memories. I suppose I’m content to think that her inspiration must’ve sprung from a source that holds firm to those elusive moments, the ones that try their damndest to trick us into believing that they’re nothing more than trivial; thankfully, there are those among us who know better.

  . . .

  The night after Vee leaves, at around 2:00 a.m., Rollie gets a visitor he tells the staff about the next day. Dimitri Ames. Drunk, disheveled, and reeking of alcohol, Ames showed up at his house, demanding to discuss Lindsay, claiming they’re in love, something he’s certain the Old Man is trying to stymie. He’s sick with worry, he says, since her attempt on her life. Desperate for news on her condition - the girl’s family is refusing his calls - he’s at his lowest. Belligerent one minute and weepy the next, Ames’ fickleness, according to the Old Man, was both maddening and amusing.

  Standing on the front porch of Rollie’s house, the two went at it. Ames would make a pathetic threat, retract it, bawl into his hands, curse my father, then beg for information. Rollie steered the conversation from Lindsay Lowe to another topic altogether. Nicole D’Ambrosio. Ames’ reaction to this, as the Old Man put it, was interesting: His face turned the most unnatural shade of red before he bowed over the side of the porch and threw up all over the Old Man’s bed of tiger lilies.

  “Let’s talk,” Rollie said, ignoring Ames’ vomiting. “I’m up for it. Let’s get it all out in the open. Let’s talk about all these young girls you seem to be so fond of.”

  He was bluffing, of course. But Ames didn’t know this. Wiping his mouth, he cooled off at that moment and asked for a glass of water. My father, sensing a possible breakthrough, told him to stay put. Then he went into the house for a drink; when he came back, Ames was gone, the only sign of him choking the flowerbed below.

  . . .

  More mail for Grayson Loveland. Another single white envelope with the same handwriting as the last. Again addressed to me with no return info. Inside is a handwritten letter on lined paper, composed in blue ink. It reads as follows:

  Dear HAS,

  I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking I’m a guilty piece of shit who killed that girl. Why else would I run away, right? Well, “that girl” wasn’t just “that girl” to me. She was Nikki. Yes, I knew her, which by now is probably common knowledge. Can you fucking believe it, a lowlife shitstain like me with a gorgeous girl like that? I’m not going to say we were in love. Because I don’t really know what we had together. What I do know is that it was better than anything else I’ve ever had in my life. Not that it was perfect. It wasn’t. It didn’t need to be perfect. It was just this thing that we discovered together. And this thing considered each of us a human being. Human beings who needed something we seemed to get from each other. Sound lame? Maybe. But that’s how it was. I’ve never been the kind of guy who gives a fuck what others think. And I’m still that guy. So think whatever you want. I don’t care. My purpose in writing this is to say simply that I’m still out here. And that’s enough for now. What else is there to say? Except maybe a shout out to the Homer House boys! What up, fellas!

  Nick R.

  “Does it sound like him?” I ask the Old Man when I show him the letter.

  “It’s a little angry,” he said, “so in that sense, yes.”

  “Can we be positive Nick sent this? How about a handwriting sample? Ask one of his teachers.”

  The Old Man likes this idea. We agree that confirming that the letter was written by Nick will at least tell us he’s safe. A few interviews reveal that Roger, Nick’s math teacher, oddly enough, is the only one to have a useful sample. It’s obvious from the way the ms are all pointy and lopsided, the way the capital Bs are bulbous and top heavy, the way each word is spaced o
ut a good centimeter from the next, that it’s a perfect match.

  Laughing in spite of ourselves, Rollie and I agree that though successful, we are nevertheless pathetic in our attempt at amateur sleuthing.

  “Why the hell is he singling me out? I barely know the kid. Why wouldn’t he send it to you?”

  My father has an immediate answer to this. Loyalty. Nick, despite what others might think of him, is truly loyal. And he recognizes his home on campus as being the Homer House. So it’s to the Homer House he’ll send anything he wants us to have.

  “But why to me? Why not to one of the boys, or to Ryan?”

  “Again, loyalty. It may sound strange. But I think he feels like he owes you.”

  “Owes me what?”

  “The closest thing to an explanation.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he disappeared on your watch.”

  “Seems like an odd thing for him to be considering.”

  “This kid is one for considering odd things. Anyway, there’s another matter - a more important matter.”

  Trepidation has suddenly snuck itself into his tone. He thinks for a bit. I prod a little.

  “It’s just that I can’t help but wonder why he takes the time to write and send a letter like he does - when clearly he has better things to do like staying under the radar - yet he makes no effort, none really at all, to deny the murder.”

  . . .

  Three days later, during breakfast, the Old Man takes the podium and announces he has something for everyone that’s been in short supply for far too long: good news. Lindsay Lowe has regained consciousness and is expected to make a full recovery. Applause is at first moderate, yet steady sounding and real. It then gathers momentum and soon becomes rousing. Scanning the sea of faces, I spot Matt. Seated, and still holding a fork full of food, he’s massaging his temple with his thumb, a quietly satisfied look on his meditative face.