The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  My brother loved excavating texts, and at times he seemed to want to physically merge with the pages and ink. I once caught him with his nose shoved into a copy of War and Peace. I accused him of jerking off to it, but Justin wasn’t amused. Books deserved to be honored and cherished, he said. I replied that a book was inanimate and thus deserved nothing. But if he persisted in believing a lot of spiritual hoopla, at least he should consider the importance of the book in question. In the grand scheme of things, Tolstoy wasn’t exactly the Talmud.

  Looking back, I realize that this brief exchange over book sniffing encapsulated our entire relationship. Physically, Justin may have been larger and stronger than me, but emotionally, he was a weakling. He was obsessed with ideas—and, worse, with ideals. He not only believed in true love and pined after lost causes, but he let us all know exactly what he was feeling. Still, as much as I hated him for his vulnerability, I loved him for that vulnerability, too. He was my brother—my twin. What else could I feel for him but a combination of hatred and love?

  Our friend Hazel once told me that these emotions were the antipodes of our existence. She loved to recite this Catullus poem: I hate and I love. Why does this happen to me? I don’t have a clue, but it hurts like hell. Justin was my twin. When he hurt, I hurt. And he hurt all the time. His instability threatened my carefully calibrated emotional equilibrium. I had to fix him for my own sake. Besides, the idea that I could help him made me feel strong. It compensated for the seventy-pound, six-inch discrepancy between us. So I set about teaching Justin that cynicism was an invaluable buffer between a person’s heart and the outside world. Again and again I told him to forget the books, the ideals. And when telling didn’t work, I went further. I took extreme measures to show Justin that we lived in a world of hard evidence, of fact. If only he’d listened.

  ***

  I finished my sandwich and headed to chemistry before the bell. Ever since yesterday’s flash mob, the halls had echoed with menace. It was only 1 p.m. and already the afternoon had descended into a minor key. The English teachers in the lounge were willfully ignoring the ominous feeling that pervaded, consumed as they were by their Harold Bloom, and I envied their selfish persistence.

  “Jonah!”

  I’d just entered the main stairwell and looked up to see the exophthalmic orbs that were Pasternak’s eyes. He was rippling the tips of his fingers—index, middle, ring, pinkie—at nervous speed. He looked like a fly preening. “Can you come up here?” his voice boomed down from on high. An interrogation was at hand.

  When I finally reached Pasternak’s landing, he glanced around. Down, up, left, right. We were alone in the cold, cylindrical space. It resembled a belfry, but instead of bells overhead there was only a dirty skylight.

  “If you’d been in the refectory yesterday . . . I arrived just before the mob ended.” Pasternak looked at me like he expected me to say something about this. Like I knew something about it. “You’ve read Nineteen Eighty-four, right?” He scratched his thinning hair with a jaundiced finger. “Of course you have. It’s been on the eighth-grade English curriculum for two decades.”

  What did he want me to say? Yes, kids played pranks, but there were more than a few who yearned to be the heroes of their own epic story, who turned their books into bibles and worshiped them with religious zeal.

  “Jonah—” Pasternak pursed his lips, looked past me down the stairs. “Do you know how that recording made its way onto the intercom?”

  Why was he asking me this question? I shook my head.

  “You don’t?” His bug eyes seemed to pop inches from his face. He nodded absently. “Well, do you know how Prisom’s Party managed to hack into the Community Council’s email?”

  “Are you insinuating something about my involvement in all this?” As obsequious as Pasternak had been since my arrival, it was difficult to shake the old indignities. Sometimes he still seemed to consider me a kind of antimatter in the school, unpredictable and destructive.

  “Insinuating? Jonah, I’m asking for you to—”

  “I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “But I have students to teach.” And I left him there in the stairwell.

  Iris

  September 2012

  I COULDN’T GET a meeting with Katie Milford for a full twenty-four hours after the flash mob, and when I finally snagged five minutes with her, she rejected my proposed investigation of the event outright.

  “Do I need to break down for you what happened, Iris?” she said, shoving a stack of edited news copy off a chair and pointing at me to sit down.

  “No,” I mumbled, and sat.

  “For starters,” Katie said, pacing in front of my chair, “Prisom’s Party hacked into the Community Council’s email account and sent out instructions for a flash mob. They then asked the student body to verbally attack a weak underclassman, Marvin Breckinridge, whose sister Mary happened to be a huge liar but who himself never hurt anybody. And, finally, this action ‘proved’ that the school is full of mindless robots. Now you’re telling me you want to smear this iniquity across the front page? Do you know what will happen then, Iris? Colleges will hear about it, and the school will lose esteem in the eyes of the admissions officers. And then people like me—the seniors, who’ve been working insanely hard for years—will be screwed.”

  Katie’s face flushed red and sweat prickled along her forehead. I knew I should keep my mouth shut, but questions spouted geyser-like from my mouth. “What is the deal with Prisom’s Party? Who are they? What do they want?”

  At first I thought I’d gone too far and Katie was going to order me out, but she sank back against her desk and sighed. Prisom’s Party, she explained, was an underground society that sporadically played “arcane, pseudo-intellectual pranks” on the student body and published the Devil’s Advocate, which exposed dirt on various community members and even led to student expulsions. “Not that I read it,” she added. “Prisom’s Party bills itself as student vigilantes fighting for the underdog. But they’re really a student SAVAK, and the Devil’s Advocate is crackpot journalism. In my humble opinion.”

  “But their stories check out? I mean, if kids were expelled . . .”

  “Sometimes their stories check out. Although I already told you they invented a load of crap about Marvin Breckinridge. But let me ask you something, Iris. Did you scream and yell at Marvin?” Katie leaned toward me, her nostrils flaring. “Were you duped just like everyone else?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well then, you also have a vested interest in keeping this event out of the public eye,” she said. I began to object, but Katie only accelerated. “Back in the day, under less disciplined leadership, this paper would print every titillating detail it could dredge up. And here’s what happened. Admissions officers and internship gatekeepers stopped focusing on our academic records and our extracurricular achievements. They were distracted by all the scandals. So if you persist in this mindless idealism about exposing the truth, at best, your hard work will be taken less seriously; at worst, you’ll be guilty by association. Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not,” I said, but I was already repackaging, scouring the cutting-room floor of my brain for useful scraps. And as Katie argued on, her lips opening and closing over the black hole of her mouth, I began to fashion a new approach. The story I needed to tell wasn’t the flash mob. To focus on that alone would be to bury the lede in the world’s largest crater. The real scoop was Prisom’s Party itself. But to research it, I needed investigative free rein. And I would get that by selling Katie on a fluff piece about the life of Charles Prisom—“The Man, the Myth, the Legend,” or some such bullshit—which would provide me with an excuse to examine the Oracle archives, to open Mariana’s locked doors, to finally converse with the school’s historied halls and see what I could make them confess.

  I made my case to Katie and held my breath. She scowled at me, but then, as though Murrow had blown some magic Camel smoke over the proceedings, she nodded her
assent.

  The Oracle archives are located in the school basement, which everybody calls the Trench. People talk about the place like it’s a nuclear bunker or a secret government facility—the kind of place where very bad things happen. According to one rumor, a psychopathic drama teacher ran a sex cult out of a Trench classroom in the 1970s, seducing ingénues from the spring musical and making them perform sadomasochistic theater warm-up exercises. I’d heard talk of secret societies and suicides. All kinds of stories about why the Trench was closed to unauthorized students.

  When Katie unlocked the Trench door the following Saturday afternoon, cold, stale air blew up from what appeared to be a black cavern. “Light’s at the bottom,” she said. “Don’t trip.”

  We headed into the chilly darkness, a rotten-egg smell wafting up from below. I was trying so hard not to stumble that I didn’t realize we’d reached the bottom until I bumped into her. “Watch it,” she snapped, and I vowed that as editor I’d never snipe at my subordinates.

  Katie asked me to help find the light, so I felt along the wall until my hand brushed something squirmy and skittering. I yelped and Katie chided me. Finally the lights came on. I was standing at the end of a long hallway lined with rusty lockers and stacks of chairs. Holding my arms against my chest for warmth, I followed Katie below the crackling light fixtures, past classrooms with small windows, all of them dark. It was utterly quiet save the sound of our footfalls. Every few steps I felt a brush against my neck, and I’d whirl around to see nothing but the lonely hallway behind me. It had to be a draft, I decided, though where the draft was coming from, I couldn’t tell. There were no windows, no doors to the outside. Katie turned a corner up ahead and disappeared from view. I rushed to catch up.

  I located her in a small room with four gray file cabinets. Inside were old editions of the Oracle grouped by year.

  “Make your Xeroxes in the school office,” she instructed. “The Trench door locks on its own, so you can have my key.”

  Then I was alone in the room, listening to Katie’s shoes squeaking down the hall. I stepped out into the hallway, feeling uneasy. As an only child, I’d been alone often enough. Alone in my house. Alone in classrooms. Even alone in the woods. But the aloneness I felt in the Trench was different, like I was inside a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. The Trench felt like a time warp. When I emerged, I might have missed the next big terror attack or environmental disaster and everyone I knew might be dead.

  But these were mental digressions. Start thinking like a journalist, I commanded myself. You’re not stuck in a science fiction novel, you’re in the school basement. Clearly, because the gray-tiled floor was littered with scraps of paper and gum wrappers and soda bottles collecting dust: normal teenage stuff. A gray parka with a fake-fur hood hung on a line of coat hooks. I wondered who it belonged to and whether someone had been called out at home for losing it. It was an ugly coat, made even more so when I thought of it sitting down here for so many years. It had been abandoned, and abandoned things always seem to be worth less.

  I picked up a gnawed pencil at my feet and poked the fur hood. At that moment, a loud clang erupted above me and a burst of hot air hit me in the face. My heart practically flew out of my mouth before I realized it was only a heating vent. But I didn’t feel any better. Standing in the middle of the hallway surrounded by all those darkened classrooms, I had the feeling that I wasn’t alone in the basement. That someone or something was hidden inside, watching me. I hurried back to the archive room and shut the door.

  A quick scan of the file cabinets revealed that the years 1921 through 1940 were missing. I wondered if that could have something to do with Mrs. Kringle’s “nasty upheavals.” Then I pulled out the first paper ever published at Mariana, dating to March 1900. I couldn’t believe that something this old was just sitting in a file cabinet in the school basement and that no one had bothered to preserve it. Now small flecks of its crumbling pages sloughed off like dead skin and fell onto the carpet. I pulled out a few more early issues and carefully carried them out of the basement, making sure to shut the black door behind me. I was in the school office Xeroxing for maybe half an hour. Then I went to return the papers.

  Walking through the Trench a second time was less scary. I was just thinking how childish I’d been when I noticed that something was different about the archive room. Taped to the center file cabinet was a piece of white paper. My first thought was that Katie had left me a message, but then I remembered she’d given me her key. I pulled the paper down and opened it.

  GIRLS WHO KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR THEM LEAVE HISTORY ALONE.

  “Katie?” I called into the hallway. There was no answer. I looked furiously from left to right. The stairs leading out of the basement seemed very far away. The hall was silent and dim. The lights overhead snapped and buzzed. If someone was hiding down here, he could be anywhere. Okay, I thought, you’re going to walk, not run, down the hallway, up the stairs, and then out the door. You will not be afraid. I put one foot in front of the other, listening for anything that might be creeping up behind me. I was halfway down the hall when the vents clanged on. I burst into a run, skipped up the stairs two at a time, and slammed the black door.

  Seconds later I was on the front steps of Prisom Hall, shivering and watching for my mom’s car across the fields. The school grounds felt desolate and remote, an uninhabited planet. I pinned my eyes on the road. As long as I could see it, I could reach it and be free. I waited and waited for my mother, wondering who else had access to the Trench.

  ***

  Later that night I went looking for Charles Prisom’s letters. I’d only peeked into Elliott Morgan’s study, but now I stepped into the attic nook where the sloped ceiling and porthole-shaped window was like a ship’s cabin. I switched on the desk lamp and started opening drawers. Not snooping, I told myself, but research.

  I picked through old invoices and bills before stumbling on a drawer that interrupted my search altogether. Inside were files on all things Lily. I found her birth certificate (she was born on September 3, 1983, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Springfield, Mass., which made her currently twenty-nine years old) and her school records. She’d attended Mariana from pre-K through tenth grade, after which point I couldn’t find a single paper concerning her career there. What could possibly have happened to her in 2000? Had Lily gotten pregnant and been shipped off to a home for teenage mothers, or come down with a rare disease? Had she run away from home?

  I kept reading. She resurfaced eventually, perhaps after having her illicit child or getting cured of her ailment, or being dragged back to Nye by the police. In 2001 she went to Emory, and after four years of college she stayed on for a master’s in public health. In the same file cabinet I found a photo album of Lily’s birthday pictures, aged one to sixteen. There was something odd about these pictures, but it wasn’t until I brought them over to Mr. Morgan’s desk lamp that I began to understand what. Lily’s skin was the shade of raw milk, her hands translucent as rice paper, her hair the color of day-old whipped cream. In the light of sixteen birthday candles, her eyes flickered a disturbing ultraviolet.

  Looking at her, I shivered, as though her whiteness were infectious, and suddenly I saw Dalia standing half-naked in the snow, shaking violently, her arms stretched toward the night sky, imploring the wintry mix of black and white. “Help me, Iris!” she called as her father picked her up and put her, kicking and screaming, in their station wagon. “You have to help me! Why won’t you help me! I don’t want to go!” But what could I do? They had to take her to the hospital; it was the only way to protect her. I watched, the tears streaming down both our faces. “You’re not my friend! You’re not my friend! You’re not my—” But then Dalia’s mother slid in beside her and slammed the car door.

  I closed Lily’s photo album, wiped my face dry, and opened a browser on my phone. Albinism, I read, is a genetic condition characterized by loss of pigmentation in the skin, hair, and eyes, due to the lack of melani
n. Albinism is frequently a condition of the eyes as well, resulting in nystagmus: extreme nearsightedness and light sensitivity that causes the pupils to move quickly back and forth.

  I felt bad for judging Lily; how cruel of her parents to name her after a white flower. How awful it must have been to look so vampiric, what with her bone-white skin and violet eyes. Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall a single picture of Lily in the house. No photos of her smiling with friends. No images of her playing sports or performing in a school play. But then I remembered the inscription on the Marvelous Species title page: To Lily, marvel of my life. Justin.

  I closed my eyes and saw the bouquet of white lilies on Dalia’s coffin. One true friend, I thought, is all a person needs.

  Lily

  October 1999

  ON A FOGGY morning early in her sophomore year, Lily Morgan sat shotgun in Dipthi’s Volvo, watching the flat, dull world creep by. Lily was sixteen, and despite the fact that special driving glasses were available for individuals with moderate ocular albinism, her mother refused to even consider them. Maureen Morgan was Nye County’s premier event planner and a contingency whiz, ready with multiple solutions for inclement weather, culinary disasters, and hyperventilating brides. (Could it be, Lily wondered, that her mother was forever compensating for the one contingency that had bested her?) Thus, Lily neither played outdoor sports nor went on summer camping trips. Driving was most definitely verboten, so Lily imposed upon Dipthi to chauffeur her to and from school.

  On this particular morning, Dipthi was complaining about the recent Students for Social Justice “campaign” (a.k.a. bake sale), where the boy manning the table had refused to sell Lily a cupcake. “Can you believe he accused your father of representing the school’s hegemonic infrastructure?” Dipthi spat out, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. “I mean, hyperbole much?”