Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  Mike made a quick U-turn on the road, skidding out only a little. He felt himself hunch his back as he drove toward town. Not out of fear of being hurt but out of cowardice. He might have climbed those steps and sat with Owen. Anna would not have come down, he was certain of that. But perhaps Mike would have been able to offer the most sincere of apologies and laments. Would Owen have cared? Would he have been murderously angry? Or was he unbearably lonely, too?

  With trembling hands, Mike made his way along a worsening road. He guessed that another six inches had come down since he had gone into the tavern for his evening meal. There was no evidence that any sanders or plows had yet been out. Perhaps, to save money, they were waiting for the snow to stop before they set out on their runs.

  When Mike reached Avery Academy, he stopped his car again, and this time he got out. The snow immediately grasped at his calves. He did not have boots on, and he felt the ice under his trousers. He drew his gloves out of the pockets of his coat and walked to the locked gates. He had left his hat in the car. The snow fluttered into his eyes and on his face. He peered through the gates to see if he could make out any lights at all. He hoped he wasn’t triggering some new security alarm, installed after he left. He hoped he wouldn’t see, at any minute, a dozen men running toward him from inside.

  Mike turned away from the wrought-iron fence and leaned his back against the solid stone gatepost. When had it been built? He didn’t know. The death of Silas was on his shoulders. That is what he would have said to Owen, who would not have denied it. I caused your son’s death.

  He closed his eyes.

  He thought about the tape itself, a tape that had been converted hundreds of times now into digital film and stills. He imagined the pixels still out there somewhere, floating in the universe, pixels that had combined in such a way as to cause irrevocable havoc. Sometimes he wondered if what he had witnessed on that tape had been simply rapture or abandon, no more dangerous, in the long view, than a film of kits frolicking or of animals mating. That the tape had horrified him had been true, but he wondered if his horror derived simply from embarrassment mixed with an uncertain knowledge of the consequences (and a certain knowledge that he would be at the center of those consequences). Had he viewed the tape as a private citizen, would his reaction have been as severe? Possibly, he thought. There were children on that tape. The girl was only fourteen.

  Still, though.

  When Mike opened his eyes, he walked back to his car. He would not return to Avery again. Of this, he was certain. He would drive south now to New York City and the small studio that awaited him. When he reached his car, he turned slightly so that he could take in, at a glance, the entirety of the gates of Avery — dark and shuttered and waiting for youth.

  Rob

  Rob wrote:

  Dear Ms. Barnard,

  I hope I can add to your knowledge and understanding of the events of 2006. This will be my sole academic contribution of the past two years. I hope one day to make more contributions, but in what area is unclear to me at this time.

  I began my senior year in an optimistic frame of mind. Apart from the perks that go with being top dog at any private school, I was anticipating a leading role on an outstanding basketball team. I was also looking forward to taking advanced classes with the best teachers at Avery. Though trying to decide upon and complete the paperwork for the various colleges I would apply to would take a great deal of my time, I was excited about that process as well. I knew I had an unusual academic record that included both highs and lows (the highs marginally more exceptional than the lows), and I was fairly certain I would receive at least one outstanding recommendation. My test scores were also very good. I was hoping to apply “early decision” to Brown University. I had visited the college in the spring and once again in the summer, and I felt that immediate sense of a good fit that my teachers and counselors had spoken of. I particularly liked Brown’s lack of a core curriculum. For the first time in my life, I would be able to focus on those areas that were of most interest to me. The day I got the letter from Brown was undeniably an exhilarating one for me and my family.

  I was looking forward to my senior year for another reason as well. With each successive year at Avery, students had more freedom. If that meant simply the freedom to get into a day student’s car and take a drive to buy a pizza, even that was welcome. There is a tremendous sense of confinement in any private school, and by necessity the rules are strict. But if one has a good reputation and is trusted, the rules can be bent to accommodate. On some days, I felt an almost desperate need to get away. Because I was a boarder, I couldn’t have a car, so I would take long walks — through town, along the back roads, and occasionally, on a Sunday, on a hike up the mountains. All my life, I have liked to walk. It seems to be the only time I can really think.

  I had known Silas Quinney since junior year, but I met James Robles (J. Dot) the first day of my senior year. I had heard from the coach earlier in the summer that a PG who’d been recruited by Gonzaga was coming. I worried a little bit about being overshadowed, because in general PGs ruled. They set the tone for the social life, and they were usually the stars of the various teams. I know why schools like getting PGs, but in essence these older students ruin it for the students who have been at the school for four years.

  For one thing, a lesser player who was just on the cusp of making the team as a senior will be, after having put in years on the basketball court in school and town leagues, shut out his final year because a PG has usurped a place that ought to have been his. For another, the PGs, having already been seniors and most having graduated, tended to be cynical about school. They put a damper on school events. They wouldn’t, for example, go to school dances or allow themselves to be seen at pep rallies for the football team. School spirit was beneath them. More to the point — or at least more to your point — they tended to have a lot of experience with alcohol and drugs. They knew exactly where to get them. I can’t say that without PGs there would have been less alcohol on campus, but the PGs made it more glamorous. They were celebrities of a sort, and it was hard to resist their appeal.

  It was particularly hard to resist J. Dot. He was tall and good-looking in a slightly goofy way, and he had an entertaining if vicious sense of humor. He could skewer anyone, especially the faculty, and he did an amazing impression of Bordwin and of Coach Blount. It bordered on heresy to make fun of your own coach, but somehow J. Dot got away with it. The flip side of enjoying that entertainment was the knowledge that as soon as you walked away, you were undoubtedly the target of his two-faced asides. Sometimes, as I was leaving his dorm room, I could feel my shoulders hunch against what felt like tiny darts at the center of my back. And the odd thing is, I truly think J. Dot regarded me as one of his closest friends at Avery. I don’t believe he had any understanding of what friendship or trust or loyalty really meant. They didn’t register on his radar screen. Still, I tended to hang out with him. The whole team did, even off-season. There was a definite bond among us.

  I liked Silas a lot, though I saw less of him at the end of his junior year and the beginning of his senior, since he was involved with a girl named Noelle. Silas was a good kid. The younger players looked up to him. They feared J. Dot, but they genuinely liked Silas. I’m thinking of guys like Rasheed and Irwin and Jamail and August and Perry, the juniors and sophomores on the team. They watched J. Dot and all his moves, but it was Silas they listened to. I always thought Silas would make a great coach someday. He used to say he wanted to teach high school. I don’t think he had a clue what he really wanted to do, only that he didn’t want to take over his father’s farm. He loved the farm, and you could see his pride in it and in his father. But Silas had seen the farm up close, and he didn’t want the burden.

  On the morning of January 21, I was in the locker room before the Faye game. I’d come in early to tape up my knee, because it had been giving me trouble the day before. I thought I was alone in the locker room, apart from the
trainer, whom I’d seen earlier, until I heard, from a corner, what I thought was a beating sound, like someone kicking a locker. I let it go; kids kick lockers all the time. But then I heard what sounded like crying. Angry crying: snorting and cursing under the breath.

  I found Silas in the corner, stabbing the bottom of his locker with his foot. His eyes were shut and his head was bent, and he’d been crying. Or he was still crying. His face was wet. After half a minute, I said, “Hey, man, you OK?” He looked up at me, and I’ll never forget that look. It seemed like, for a second or two, he didn’t recognize me. And then he said, “Fuck off, Leicht.”

  That was it. “Fuck off, Leicht.”

  I left, but I felt confused. I don’t think Silas had ever spoken to me like that. He was one of my closest friends. I tried to imagine what could have happened to put him in such a state. Either he had been kicked off the team for reasons I wasn’t aware of or his girlfriend had broken up with him. He was usually a pretty steady guy. It took a lot to rattle Silas. Not like J. Dot, who could be placid, almost comatose, one minute, and then frighteningly ramped up the next. I was worried about Silas that morning, and in retrospect, I should have said something to the coach. If I had, the coach might have talked to Silas and helped to calm him down. Everything that happened afterward might not have taken place.

  You have undoubtedly heard about what occurred at the game that day. It was reported dozens of times in the press. I’m not sure anyone ever got a satisfactory explanation as to why Silas threw that ball into the stands. I have to believe it had everything to do with why he was crying that morning in the locker room.

  I do know one thing, though. When we went out onto the court to warm up before the game, Silas had liquor on his breath. I thought it might have been from the night before, that he’d gotten drunk late into the night and it was still on his breath, but I wasn’t sure. I suppose that’s another thing I could have alerted the coach about, but that felt, in a way the other hadn’t, disloyal to Silas. He’d have been benched. I was counting on the alcohol and whatever else was poisoning him to have worn off by game time. As you know, it didn’t.

  The locker room was silent after the game. J. Dot came up to me at one point and just looked at me, and I could see the question on his face, and I shrugged, and he said, “I think we should find him.” And that surprised me, because J. Dot wasn’t the type to care about another person’s troubles. I guess what had happened on the court had impressed him.

  Though we had dinner first (because we were starving), we bolted our food down and then went on a search. We were fairly certain that whatever had happened involved Noelle, but we didn’t want to approach her directly, in case she was in bad shape, too. Neither one of us could remember if she’d been at the game or not. J. Dot put in a cell phone call to her roommate, but she didn’t pick up. I called Silas’s house, and his father said he hadn’t come home yet. I asked him if he’d seen what happened at the game, and he said no, he hadn’t been there. And, oddly, he didn’t ask me what had happened at the game. He didn’t even want to know the score. I began to wonder if what was bothering Silas had happened at home.

  We found Silas in the gym parking lot, in his car. He was a mess. It was freezing outside, and he didn’t have the car running, because he hadn’t wanted to attract attention to himself. J. Dot opened the door, and Silas just stared. He was drunk. Seriously hammered. As soon as he saw J. Dot, he started laughing maniacally at a joke he wasn’t going to let us in on. J. Dot pulled him from the vehicle, got the keys from Silas, and locked the car. J. Dot put the keys in his own pocket because obviously he didn’t want Silas driving in that condition. “Let’s get you inside,” J. Dot said.

  And that’s kind of when the party started.

  By eight o’clock, J. Dot’s room was filled with guys already getting sloshed. J. Dot had bought the booze earlier in the week in anticipation of a party at a day student’s house that had not materialized, and had stashed it in Jamail’s Jeep under some old blankets. We’d all gone out to the parking lot one by one with our book bags and had surreptitiously brought the beer in. You would think that any teacher with a brain in his head could have spotted us in a second and known what we were doing, but apparently no one was monitoring the day-student parking lot that night. By early in the evening, we must have had the equivalent of three cases in the room, plus half a dozen bottles of Bacardi. J. Dot had the music pounding, and no one was complaining. Not too many guys had the nerve to knock on J. Dot’s door and complain, and I think there was a sense, even among the resident teachers, that something pretty terrible had happened on that court in the afternoon, and maybe we all needed to let off a little steam. Jamail was in the room, and August and Irwin and some other guys.

  Naturally, in the way these things go, as soon as everyone had a good buzz on, girls were wanted. Since there weren’t any girls in the boys’ dorms, that meant finding them elsewhere. Because it was below freezing outside and no one had heard of an off-campus party, that left us with the school dance. The school dances were generally pretty lame, but it was the only place we were ever going to find girls.

  I keep thinking: If it hadn’t been cold that night . . . If a teacher had walked into J. Dot’s room . . . If Silas hadn’t thrown the ball into the stands . . . If the girl hadn’t gone straight for J. Dot the minute he walked in the door of the student center . . .

  In the past two years, I have been through every “what if” there could conceivably be.

  I feel reluctant saying the girl’s real name here, even after two years and even though this is for research purposes only, so I will call her “Sienna,” which I understand is the name she goes by now.

  We all knew who Sienna was. We’d all known who she was ten minutes after she’d arrived on campus in September. You check out the freshman girls early, you take stock, you talk about them that first week of school, and you form opinions. They were easy to make about her: hot and a little nuts. To be honest, I was surprised J. Dot hadn’t gone right for her that first week. You could see she was all about the PGs. But for some reason, and he never said what it was, he didn’t. And I can tell you this: I don’t believe it was because of the age difference. You might find this incredible, given what happened and the seriousness of the crime, but I don’t believe any of us — not J. Dot, not Silas, and certainly not I — gave a single thought to the age difference. We knew there was a disparity, of course, but I think because we were all part of the same community, allowed to attend the same dances, even encouraged to attend the same dances, it never occurred to us that one girl might be off-limits while another wasn’t. No one slapped our hands if we were dating freshman girls. And, as everyone knows, in most dating relationships of any duration, some form of sex will occur. I once knew of a senior girl who dated a freshman boy. Truthfully, that was a little sad, but again, there was no rule against it.

  I don’t offer this as an excuse, because there is no excuse for what transpired later that night. None. I have no desire to make excuses for myself or for anyone else. We did what we did. It’s just that I find it odd that no one at the school thought to mention to any student that it was actually illegal in the state of Vermont for a senior boy to have intercourse with a freshman girl. It seems that someone might have mentioned that.

  At the dance, Sienna went right for J. Dot. J. Dot had been drunk on a Saturday night many times since arriving at Avery, so I can’t say exactly what it was that caused him to take her hand, almost as soon as he walked in the door, and lead her out to the center of the dance floor. Was he more drunk than usual? Was he desperate to get laid? Did he find her attractive that night in a way that had eluded him before? There is no denying that she was attractive. She was the definition of hot. Pure hot. I don’t know how else to say this. She had a round face with a pretty smile. Beautiful green eyes. She had thick blond hair that she’d pulled off her face, and it made her look older, more sophisticated that particular night. She was petite and wore high heel
s, which set her apart from the other girls. Not too many girls in Vermont in January wear heels. She had a great body. Sometimes, even now, I wake up and I find I’ve been dreaming about her, but the dream is always a nightmare, and I’m always drenched in sweat.

  Next to me, I became aware of Silas making his way toward the center of the dance floor. As he went, he was doing this weird dance move, as if he were going to just segue into J. Dot’s and Sienna’s dance. Though he was quick on his feet, he walked a bit like a bear in a lumbering sort of way, and he wasn’t, by any stretch of the word, a good dancer. I started laughing at him. I was pretty drunk myself by that time. I’d been drinking straight Bacardi in J. Dot’s room. I’d done Bacardi before, so I knew how fast it could get you sloshed, but I’d just felt like doing it. I’d felt reckless that night. There was something all out about that night in J. Dot’s room, and it was starting to show at the student center. There was Silas, and he and J. Dot were dancing with Sienna, and Sienna was really turning it on. She was on cloud nine, because now she had both a senior and a PG falling all over her, or so she thought. J. Dot had this small smile on his face, and you could tell that he was half putting her on, or he was playing some private game and she wasn’t getting it. She thought it was all about her. You could tell in the way she was moving. A little wilder. A little wilder still. It was very sexy. And you just knew, you just knew, that if she were in a private room, she’d have been taking her clothes off. This might sound like pure “guy” fantasy, but I don’t think so. It’s exactly the way it was.