The Starboard Sea: A Novel

by Amber Dermont

  “Come on,” Kriffo said. “The car’s waiting.”

  I tried to find Adriano but he was nowhere to be seen. We left the hotel. I thought Cakes would return to his townhouse on Newbury Street, but he asked to be driven out to his country home in Concord. It was totally out of our way, and I was surprised when Kriffo agreed. Though Cakes gave Gus directions, we mostly drove in silence. Every few minutes someone would say, “What a crazy night,” and the rest of us would murmur our agreement.

  We drove by Walden Pond, then turned off the main road and into the woods. Cakes’s house was an imposing white Colonial. I thought we’d just drop him off, but Kriffo and Taze insisted on going for a swim. I didn’t want to be near the water. While Kriffo and Taze went up to Cakes’s room to borrow swimming trunks, I waited down in the kitchen. The house was rustic and homey. Cakes told me to help myself to some food, but the refrigerator only held a carton of milk, a jar of mayonnaise, and several boxes containing glass vials of something that looked like medicine. I closed the refrigerator door and a thin, bald girl appeared before me.

  “There’s no food,” she said. “There’s never any food in this house.” Cake’s sister had large bulging eyes and gray, papery skin, but Kriffo was wrong about her being ugly. She looked like a spoiled child’s favorite doll, one that had been carried around and worn out. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not a ghost.”

  We stood there together in the kitchen for a moment. I introduced myself and she told me her name was Grace. She asked about the regatta and the parties. She said, “You know, the Head of the Charles is a classic WASP mating ritual.” Then she asked whether or not Cakes had hooked up with Fernanda.

  I told her he hadn’t but failed to mention that I had.

  “He’s crazy about her,” she said. “But Fern’s a phony. All those Le Rosey kids are total Euro-trash. I should have gone and scared everybody away. Ruined their good time.”

  Kriffo may have been wrong about Grace being ugly but he was right about her being cool as shit. She did an imitation of Fernanda smoking that was dead-on. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Do you have a cigarette, for real?” Grace asked. “My brother hides them from me.”

  I wished at that moment that I had a cigarette for her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Could you tell my brother not to bother me tonight,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.”

  I’d spent the day meeting people I’d probably never run into again. Though there was always the small chance I’d bump into Flavia or wind up at another party with Cakes, as Grace glided off to bed, I knew for certain I’d never see her again, not ever. Knowing this should have made me sad, but instead I wanted to run after Grace, to beg her to take me with her. I wasn’t sure that I believed in any sort of afterlife, but it made me jealous to think that soon Grace would be with Cal and Aidan. I wanted to tell her about them both, to be sure she looked out for my friends.

  I left the house and went out to the car. Gus was sitting in the front seat reading The Economist.

  “It’s been a long day,” I said.

  “No kidding.”

  I’d barely heard Gus speak. He had a deep, gravely voice.

  While Kriffo, Taze, and Cakes cannonballed into Walden Pond, I unloaded on Gus. Told him about Tazewell’s meeting with the president of Harvard and the tour of Cakes’s three different homes. I mentioned the stolen swan boat, the Rodin sculpture, the dying twin sister. I catalogued our entire adventure. At the end of it all, I expected Gus to say something that would help me make sense of my day. He cleared his throat and said, “Look, kid, I just drive the car.”

  We said good-bye to Cakes and drove back to Bellingham. Kriffo and Taze eventually fell asleep. As Taze snored beside me, I took out the marker I’d been given and considered writing “prick” or “douche” on his forehead. For Cal’s sake, I’d wanted to make amends with Tazewell. But as we approached Bellingham, I thought back to that mountainhiking trip Taze, Cal, and I had taken to Wyoming. I remembered how Tazewell had gone down the wrong trail and gotten us lost, how he ate the last of our food supplies, and left our sleeping bags out in the rain. In my rush to preserve our friendship, I’d forgotten that at the end of that trip, Cal had turned to me, pointed at Tazewell and said, “Never again.”

  The next morning, Chester woke me up to play tennis. It was a gray, sunless day, the hazy light reflecting off the green painted court. I was surprised that I didn’t feel hungover. Mostly, I just felt flattened and stiff. I wasn’t much competition for Chester and though I could tell he was a little annoyed, Chester seemed committed to making the game fun, giving me pointers and taking it easy on me. I stupidly resented him for not playing his best. He asked me if I knew Aidan, what I thought of her suicide.

  I told him that she was a friend and was surprised when he called her selfish. “That was a shitty thing to do to her parents,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t do that to my mom no matter how bad things got.”

  “Did you know Aidan?” I asked. “Do you know the first thing about her?” I smashed the ball across the court.

  “Nice rally,” Chester said. “You play better when you’re pissed off.”

  “You know,” I said, “she thought really highly of you.”

  “That’s funny.” Chester served into the net. “I don’t remember her making much of an effort to be my friend. Can barely recall her even speaking to me.”

  It began to rain lightly. I told Chester how Aidan had admired Chester, had talked about his strength. “She said you had to put up with a lot of hazing.”

  “Is that what she called it? Hazing? That’s a bit of a sugarcoat.”

  “That’s my word, not hers.”

  Chester told me that I kept missing the ball because I kept dropping my head.

  “Every time you look down to see the ball, you jerk your arm and miss making contact with the center of your racquet.”

  “That’s Tennis 101,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t mean you aren’t doing it.”

  The rain began to come down in thick sheets. Chester didn’t want to risk playing on a slick court, didn’t want to injure himself, and so we called it quits. We stood under the clubhouse’s awning while Chester adjusted the strings on his racquet, realigning the squares.

  I asked Chester, “So, if you weren’t hazed, what did happen?”

  Chester zipped his racquet into its leather carrier. He slipped on a red track jacket and said, “You don’t want to know what those guys did to me.”

  At that moment I realized that I did want to know. That I wanted to make something right. “Did you ever tell anyone?” I asked.

  “I’m not a snitch,” he said.

  “Telling the truth doesn’t make you a snitch.” I only half believed this. Hazing had its own self-regulating code, one that required secrecy and compliance but also the tacit understanding that certain lines shouldn’t be crossed.

  Chester looked out at the rain. “My dad, he’s built his life around the idea that there’s this thing called justice. I know better. If I told Windsor or Warr, nothing would happen to Tazewell’s crew. But my life would be ruined.”

  The tedium of boarding school could be broken down into stages of getting hazed and hazing. We took turns hurting one another not because we were mean or violent but because we were bored. “That’s why they call it boarding school,” Cal used to say. When Cal and I were freshmen at Kensington, we endured such noble traditions as having our bare asses beaten by belt lines of seniors, being forced to pound grain alcohol that may or may not have been laced with piss, having all of our textbooks glued shut, and being directed to sing and act out “I’m a Little Teapot” while wearing nothing but a jockstrap. One night a particularly dickish group of seniors busted in while we slept, held us down, and rolled each of us up into carpets that were then ducttaped shut and spun out onto the fifty-yard line.

  Cal and I held different positions on hazing. He preferred pulling pranks like inflati
ng a kiddie pool in the middle of someone’s room and loading it up with Jell-O and rubber ducks. “I like something that’s clever,” Cal explained as he covered the floor and every flat surface of our hall proctor’s suite with Dixie cups filled with india ink. It didn’t take long to set up those cups, but it took hours for our proctor to remove them one by one. I remember all of those little white cups and that dark black ink, how Cal squirted lemon juice over his hands to remove the incriminating stains. He didn’t even want credit for his pranks.

  I admired his imagination, but this is where Cal and I differed. The whole time I was trapped out on that football field, suffocating inside that mildewy rug, unable to break free, I kept thinking, “I can’t wait to get even. I can’t wait to do this to someone else.”

  At dinner that night, I sat alone at a long table by the window. There were almost no boats left in the harbor and I was oddly relieved to see it empty. I thought about the Shannon, the Formosa, and the Alden, wondering how badly the yachts had been damaged. If they were worth fixing. The only relief I’d had surrounding Aidan’s death was the realization that it had freed me, however briefly, from thinking about Cal. I’d been so overwhelmed by losing her that I hadn’t had time to feel the loss of Cal. This was how people recovered from love affairs. Replacing one lover with another. But here I was replacing one death with another. Maybe Cal’s suicide had prepared me for Aidan’s. It was possible that I would never again allow myself to feel close to anyone. I wondered why I was still alive when the people I’d felt closest to were dead. It was true that I had hurt Cal and destroyed our friendship, but I was trying very hard to make up for the pain I caused. Aidan had been my hope for redemption.

  I tore the paper napkins on the table into strips, then twisted the pieces into ropes and then knots. A simple clove hitch, a sheet bend, a figure eight. I created a tattered mess of confetti and was about to leave it all piled up on the table when Leo came by. He had on his white uniform. The front of the apron stained with something that was probably tomato sauce but that smeared red like blood. Made him look like he was a butcher. Leo carried a round tray and was busy piling up the dishes students had abandoned on the tables. I said hello, and in a quiet voice Leo said, “If you’re not busy, I’d like to take you for a drive.”

  According to Leo, Powder Point had a split personality. All the homes on the south end of the island were stone mansions with spectacular waterfront views, private docks, and beaches. “You can’t even see the houses from the road. You can only glimpse them if you’re out on the water.” Leo smelled like the dining hall, a not unpleasant mix of grease and garlic that filled up his Chevy Malibu. His cheeks were spotted with rubies of acne. “My mom’s cleaned all the houses on the South Side. She claims in the summertime, the South Siders use these high-frequency ultrasonic gadgets that chase all of the mosquitoes and bats over to the North Side.”

  On the North Side, the homes looked like army barracks. They had views of scrub pines. We drove by a neighborhood of ranch houses and Leo pointed to a yellow house with green shutters. “That’s my family’s,” he said. The home was the size of a two-car garage.

  “Looks cozy,” I said. “You have any siblings?”

  “Three. Two brothers and a sister. I’m the firstborn.”

  It made me depressed to think of an entire family living in that

  small house.

  Still, it was a strange comfort to drive around with no par ticu lar destination. Leo had invited me off campus, and because I was impossibly sad, I thought it would be a useful distraction. “Meet me at the Gas Mart,” Leo had said, and I’d walked the few blocks into town so that no teachers would see me get into Leo’s Chevy. If caught riding in a car, I might have received a few minor demerits, but Leo would have lost his job.

  At the Gas Mart, Leo tossed me a can of Budweiser. He didn’t take one himself. His Malibu was in cherry condition, and I figured Leo was too responsible to drink and drive, too worried about screwing up his car. I snapped open the beer and took a long foamy chug.

  We drove in silence until Leo pointed to a plastic case filled with tape cartridges and told me to pick out some music. I slipped Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet into the deck.

  “I love these guys,” I said.

  Leo looked at me suspiciously, like I was pandering to his taste. “I would have figured you for a Depeche Mode fan.”

  Leo and I swapped opinions on Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard. We parted ways on U2 and the Smiths but agreed on the Beastie Boys. “It’s a kick-ass time for music.” Leo drummed his steering column. I riffled through his tapes and held up an incriminating Whitney Houston album. “What can I say?” Leo smiled. “My girlfriend, Cheryl, goes crazy for that shit.” I cut loose on “Living on a Prayer,” and Leo said, “Wow. You sound nothing like Jovi.” Leo told me he played guitar and for a moment we were just two guys enjoying the glory of being young and loving rock and roll.

  My mother always warned that you couldn’t have too many friends. “People come in handy,” she would say. Leo made me feel connected to a former life. He reminded me of the locals Cal and I hung out with up in Maine. Cool guys who sold us homegrown weed, who took care of our summerhouses in the winter, and whose best hopes involved lobster pots and freezing weather. Leo explained that he planned on graduating from Bellingham’s kitchen to working at the Goodwyns’ marina.

  We’d been driving along for several miles. It was dark and there were almost no streetlights, but I could sense the landscape changing. The barrack houses disappeared as tall hedges sprouted up on either side of the road. Even the air smelled sweeter, like sugary beach blossoms. Every five hundred feet or so we passed a steel gate with a no trespassing sign. We’d crossed over onto the South Side of the island. “Some of the South Siders want to put up a gatehouse with an actual guard,” Leo said. “They’d keep the whole world out if they didn’t need someone to clean up after them.”

  I felt compelled to rock and disrupt this quiet neighborhood, so I opened my window, took another swig of beer, cranked up the stereo, and belted out, “You give love a bad name.”

  Leo pulled up in front of a wrought-iron gate. He turned down the music and said, “It’s closed now, but on Saturday night, this gate was open.”

  A large gold G swirled over the center of the iron entry.

  “Who lives here?” I asked.

  “You don’t recognize it? It’s the Goodwyn place. Biggest house on the island,” Leo said. “This is where I dropped her off. Your friend Aidan wanted to come out here to see you. I was the one who drove her.”

  Now Leo cracked open a beer. He looked straight through the windshield and told me that on Saturday, Aidan had approached him just before the dining hall closed and asked for a ride.

  “Did you know her?” I asked.

  “Not really. In the dining hall, you come to know people based on what they eat, but that girl barely ate anything. I hardly ever saw her at dinner. She was a pretty girl. I was surprised she knew my name.”

  I remembered telling Aidan the story of Leo catching me sneaking out of her room. That I’d asked his real name. “So what happened?”

  Leo turned to me. He squinted his eyes. “What happened? That’s what you need to tell me.”

  Leo had assumed I’d been at Race’s party. “Your friend told me she needed to find you. I had a sense she was worried. The storm was pretty bad by that point. Zero visibility. That girl kept bouncing her knees and tapping her fingers on the window. The only time I ever saw a girl ner vous like that was when Cheryl thought she was pregnant.”

  Leo finished his beer. We sat together in the darkness. He said, “I don’t know what you guys did, but I need my conscience cleared. You’ve got to tell me what happened.”

  “I wasn’t there,” I said. “I didn’t go to the party.”

  I made Leo describe how he drove down Race’s driveway, how he parked near the house. “The power was still on at that point. The house lit up like it was Christmas.
I offered to wait for her, but Aidan told me not to bother. I think she felt guilty. Worried she’d get me into trouble. She kept apologizing.”

  It was hard for me to listen, to hear and make sense of Leo’s details.

  To put his story into a sequence. “What are you telling me?” I asked. “What did you see?”

  “I never left the car. I saw her open the door and go inside. I sat in the driveway until the lights went out. Then the storm got bad. I worried about the roads flooding.”

  Leo cracked another beer, the foam spraying across the dashboard. He ran his hand over the leather, his fingers thick with calluses.

  “Did anyone see you? Did you see who was there?”

  He shook his head. “I should have gone in after her. Look, I don’t know what happened. I’d like to believe that you weren’t there. Cheryl told me I should confront you. She told me to drive you out here. Return you to the scene of the crime. This hasn’t gone the way I planned. I was going to accuse you of all sorts of things.”

  It took my mentioning the police to convince Leo that I hadn’t gone to the party.

  “I know this guy,” I said. “Officer Hardy. He’s a good guy. You need to tell him what you told me.”

  Leo turned the Malibu around and began to drive back to Bellingham.

  “If there’s a chance that something happened at Race’s, you need to come forward.”

  Leo said nothing. He continued to drink as he drove, raising the silvery can to his lips, belching with impressive resolve. We’d managed to go from pals back to strangers. On the stereo, Bon Jovi sang about being wanted dead or alive. Leo skidded into a blind curve, one hand on the steering wheel, fishtailing across the lane. I could taste the beer acid rising up in the back of my throat. The lingering aroma of garlic and grease made me cough first and then heave. I asked Leo to pull over. “I’m going to be sick,” I said.