The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  Lily shrugged.

  “And when I demanded my money back, that SSJ kid had the nerve to call me ‘sister’ and tell me I was from the Third World. I mean, Jesus Christ, I was born in Boston. Really, Lily, you should have slapped that douche in the face.”

  Dipthi was a violin prodigy who loved to stand center stage in every situation. But Lily couldn’t afford to draw negative attention to herself. Though she had studied teenage normalcy with the same commitment that Dipthi had applied to Bach, she still felt like a clumsy beginner. No matter how she behaved, people refused to see past her white blond hair and unearthly skin.

  At school, the girls parted ways, and Lily headed off to first-period history. Half the class was already clustered there, furiously studying for a suspected pop quiz. Mr. Armstrong was notorious for asking questions about material covered in footnotes and docking points for grammatical mistakes. According to school legend, an erroneous “that” instead of “which” had stripped one senior of her valedictorianship.

  Lily circled the tightly locked group, seeking a way in. It was a familiar situation. Throughout junior high she floated on the periphery of the various cliques, and they tolerated her presence like a harmless parasite—a tooth amoeba that nibbled on whatever the toothbrush missed, or maybe a dust mite that made you sneeze constantly but didn’t cause any real damage. When she approached the popular girls at recess, their circle would automatically constrict like a cell warding off a virus. Once in a while Lily was able to permeate—to get a shoulder, or even a comment, through. But other days, when she approached, the cell would split, an instantaneous mitosis, and the girls would scatter. By high school, Lily no longer pursued these popular contingents, but exclusion, she’d learned, came in numerous forms.

  The study group had relaxed its perimeter, and Lily was just about to slip in when a creaking noise startled her. Justin Kaplan hovered close by on crutches, his eyes glued to her like a fly to tape. Beside him stood the voluptuous, heavily freckled Hazel Greenburg, otherwise known as Queen of the Geeks. Hazel was in the class above Lily, and though the two girls had once been friendly, they hadn’t spoken since middle school. Hazel raised her eyes at Lily as though in provocation, then abruptly strode off down the hall.

  Justin didn’t move. He just stood there, staring. “Hi,” he said, finally. “I wanted to—”

  But at that moment the bell rang. Lily hurried into the classroom.

  There was no quiz after all, but Lily felt little relief. According to a recent magazine article she’d read, people of similar attractiveness, intelligence, and social rank were romantically compatible. In light of this, of course Justin would be fixated on her. She was an albino freak and he—she glanced at the cement-like boot on his foot—well, he was a freak too. Justin was a Trench kid who spent his waking moments memorizing endless amounts of obscure knowledge and training to regurgitate said knowledge in nanosecond bursts at monthly competitions. He took failure worse than anyone she knew. Rumor had it that he was wearing the plastic boot because he’d slammed his foot against the gym wall after losing the last Academic League tournament. Some people said it was a fracture, others a full-on break.

  At this moment, Justin was charging full speed through a series of questions about Andrew Jackson, as if he was attempting to claim his own academic manifest destiny. His opponent in the conversation was his twin brother, Jonah, the epitome of trouble. He’d most recently infuriated the English department by handing in an essay titled “Gatsby’s Green Light of Greed: How Mariana Academy Destroyed the American Dream.” He goaded his classmates, argued with the faculty, and was frequently ejected from class. He was also brilliant, seeming to sail through school on a wave of easy A’s. But Jonah was also scrawny, pimply, and pale. People called him Prepubes. As in, Think Prepubes got his wet dream yet? Or, Prepubes is so skinny he can suck his own dick.

  In any case, whoever put the Kaplan twins in the same history class was seriously deranged, because the two boys fought like sworn enemies. It baffled everybody how the Academic League managed to achieve even a modicum of success with both of them vying for champion status. Right now in Mr. Armstrong’s class, they were duking it out over Jackson’s legacy.

  “You want to talk about morale?” Justin was saying. He vibrated with energy, as if he was about to spring from the chair. If only his cast wasn’t weighing him down like a rock. “What about morals? Jackson suspended habeas corpus in New Orleans! The man was a despot!”

  Jonah barely blinked as he began to tick off a series of arguments about Jackson’s excellent mix of pragmatism and idealism. In response, Justin rattled off his own catalogue of events and legislative acts. His eyes pulsed with rabid intensity, and spittle glistened on his lips. But his brother just sat back, dismissively spinning his pen, dismantling each of Justin’s arguments. By the end of class, Justin wore the pained look of a lab animal with a needle in its stomach.

  The class packed up and Justin hoisted himself out of the chair. He fit the crutches under his arms and creaked toward the door, reaching it just as the next class started to enter. Instead of letting him through, the incoming students poured around his precariously balanced body. He waited for the last stragglers to come in before he finally wobbled into the hall.

  Later that afternoon, Lily sat on a picnic table watching the varsity boys’ soccer team run laps. When the sweating pack passed by, she could smell the cleat-turned grass and almost feel the heat radiating from their faces. She saw them eye the cheerleaders as they ran by, and wondered what they were thinking. Were they imagining their naked girlfriends? The girls they wished were their naked girlfriends? Or was it only body parts flashing before their eyes: cheerleader breasts and thighs bouncing up and down. How many of them were having sex, Lily wondered. How many of them had received oral sex or given it? She remembered some of them talking in the hall a few weeks back.

  “It smelled like tuna fish,” one of the players said.

  His friend pretended to gag. “Dude, I don’t do that.”

  “Bet your mom likes it,” the first one said.

  “Hey, headmaster’s daughter,” another one said as he walked by, “how about a tuna sandwich?” And he stuck his tongue into the V of his index and middle fingers.

  Lily had once stuck her finger down her underwear and brought it to her nose. The smell was pungent and heady, but nothing like tuna. Lily wondered if all women smelled like her, but she had nobody to ask. When she and Dipthi changed for gym, they shielded even their bras from view.

  The varsity team started passing soccer balls. Alexi Oppenheimer juggled a ball from knee to knee. He was too far away to see clearly, but Lily easily summoned the image of his face: his long, thick lashes and shaggy hair. Sometimes she imagined Alexi kissing her—kissing her down there. But she wasn’t going to imagine that anymore. Because if guys thought it was so disgusting, then to want such a thing must be abnormal. Lily shifted on the picnic table. She felt wet. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Justin Kaplan was standing in front of her.

  She flushed. What if there was a wet spot on the table?

  Justin’s back was hunched, all his weight supported by his one healthy foot. He stood close enough to her that she could see a string of small pimples along the side of his chin. They were a shade redder than his hair. His face was a near-perfect oval with a straight nose and full lips.

  She shifted uncomfortably. Justin was always there, always watching from a distance, seeming to invade her space simply by looking at her. She wished he would quit trading Secret Santas so he could fill her locker with candy, wished he would stop sending her carnations on Valentine’s Day. Everyone at Mariana knew that Justin had been infatuated with Lily since elementary school. At junior high dances, popular students played a game they called Fix Up the Freaks. Packs of glossy-lipped girls would encourage Justin to ask Lily to dance, and he was only too willing to comply.

  “Tough argument in history,” she said now, trying not to look a
t his injured foot.

  Justin smiled—a rarity—and his simple face was suddenly a complicated landscape. Lily looked down at the picnic table and picked at a sliver of wood. Then she noticed an object on the ground. Lying under the bench was the largest dragonfly she’d ever seen. Its greenish body must have been three inches long, with a comparable wingspan. It was dead.

  Justin saw it too. Suddenly he was kneeling down and collecting the dragonfly into his palm with a tenderness that turned her stomach. He stroked the creature’s back, then looked up at her. Justin’s eyes, she noticed, were a shade of blue nearly as pale as her own.

  “Lily, I was wondering if you’d like to go out with me sometime.”

  Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. One second of silence elapsed. Then two. Then three. She couldn’t say yes. Not to a Trench kid, not to Justin—a kid cradling a dead insect in his palm. But what would happen if she said no? Last week after getting back his Latin exam, Justin had flung his binder against the wall so hard he broke it. She’d seen him rip up tests with less than satisfactory grades, storm out of classrooms in frustration. And of course there was the broken foot.

  “So . . . here’s my number and email.” Balancing one of the crutches in his armpit, Justin fished in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. She took the measly offering. “See you tomorrow, Lily,” he said. Then he hobbled away as if he doubted tomorrow would come.

  Iris

  September 2012

  IN ELLIOTT MORGAN’S study, I found a school invoice signed by Charles Prisom, a newspaper clipping about the school’s groundbreaking, and an old refectory menu. Otherwise, there was nothing of investigative interest. I’m stuck, Murrow, I thought as I returned to my room from the attic nook. There’s the Historical Society, sure, but I need human sources—people who might know how Charles Prisom is linked to Prisom’s Party.

  I sat down on Lily’s bed and pulled open Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth’s Mysterious Biology. Since I felt stuck regarding the Prisom case, I decided to focus on Mr. Kaplan instead. I’d discovered something unusual at the back of the book—a handwritten appendix. One that Lily had added herself.

  Titled Art Studio Life, the section catalogued the behaviors of the Studio Girls, a group of four friends in Lily’s class. Within pages labeled Habitat, Dress, Interests, Media, and Misc were descriptions of each girl, the conversations they’d had, the clothes they wore. It must have taken Lily months of observation to collect so much detailed information. It was almost like she was writing a dissertation on this particular group, or some kind of travel guide to their social milieu. Whatever her motives, she’d done her research. The magazines and music on her shelves corresponded to the lists she’d made. On the last few pages of the index were photographs of bizarre paintings and sculptures. One showed a freestanding globelike object, about the size of a large beach ball, whose surface was covered with a mishmash of obscenity—insects, oversize male genitalia, a breast with a spider crouched over the nipple. Another photograph showed the portrait of a girl with thick black bangs and raccoon-ringed eyes. The girl’s irises were white instead of black. She looked possessed.

  “What kind of girl collects information on other people like they’re scientific specimens?” I said aloud, but quietly, so my parents wouldn’t hear me through the door. I conjured Murrow into the room, and there he was on the edge of the bed, his suit jacket folded over his lap, smoke curling from his smoldering cigarette.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Biographers, detectives, investigative journalists.”

  Murrow was right. Wasn’t this the very reason I was studying Marvelous Species so meticulously—in order to glean even the smallest morsels of information about Mr. Kaplan’s academic passion? The problem was, the more information I learned about Mr. Kaplan, the more troubled I felt.

  After the flash mob, he tried to get our biology class talking about the incident. “How many of you participated in the mob?” Mr. Kaplan asked us a few days later, and of course not a single person raised a hand. “How many of you tried to help Marvin?” He waited, but nobody moved. “Were any of you thinking about Dr. Van Laark’s experiment when the mob was taking place?” A couple of people nodded. “And knowing what you did about obedience to authority, why didn’t you do anything?”

  “Because we were in a room full of screaming students,” Marcie Ross ventured. “We couldn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah,” Chris Coon complained. “I mean, if you weren’t in the center of the room, you didn’t even know what was happening.”

  “What does this have to do with biology?” Sarah Peters muttered. “This isn’t supposed to be a psych class.”

  The room fell dead quiet.

  “That’s right, Sarah,” Mr. Kaplan said slowly. “And I will be the first to admit that I am stretching the boundaries of a basic biology curriculum. Discussing the flash mob will teach you nothing about photosynthesis or cell reproduction. But I told you on the first day of school that if you are going to understand extremophile life, you must understand the basic nature of extremity. You must know it, appreciate it, strive for it!”

  Mr. Kaplan was growing progressively more animated, the color rising in his face. Sarah, I realized, was so taken aback that she couldn’t even look Mr. Kaplan in the eye.

  “If we were only talking about photosynthesis, you’d all secretly be wondering, What’s the point? What does plant life have to do with me? Even as you swallowed pages of information, even as you studied so hard for your precious four-point-oh, you’d still be wondering, WHY? So forgive me if we take a few precious class periods to discuss something that’s relevant to your lives right now!”

  I’d left class that day feeling uneasy. After researching the phenomenon of flash mobs online, I discovered that their creator—a journalist!—was inspired by Stanley Milgram’s work at Yale. This could have been a coincidence, but more likely it suggested a connection between Mr. Kaplan and Prisom’s Party. What if the flash mob had been Mr. Kaplan’s doing—another attempt to force the issue about blind obedience? This time, though, there’d been a victim: a helpless boy. I didn’t know what to think, but the dread I’d felt on my drive to Nye had returned, beating a slow and steady rhythm in my chest.

  I had to figure out what was going on, and Marvelous Species wasn’t going to answer these pressing questions. I needed to observe Mr. Kaplan in the same manner that Lily had watched the Studio Girls. Only with a teacher that wasn’t so easy. Certainly I couldn’t walk up to him and ask if he was connected to a group of student renegades.

  “You need to cultivate your sources,” Murrow said. “Get to know them. I can guarantee you’ll learn much more through casual banter than through any formal interview.”

  “But that’s like fooling people. And you’re for the truth above all.”

  “I’m for speaking truth to power, Iris. And to do that you need to be pragmatic. The truth is finicky. It ducks and hides. You must lure it out.” Murrow scratched an itch behind his ear. He coughed and his lungs sounded muddy. Then he stood up and put on his jacket. “You can’t keep carrying that thing around”—he gestured to Marvelous Species—“just hoping Mr. Kaplan will notice it. Especially when you now have a specific reason to show him the book.”

  “And that reason would be?”

  “Dr. Lucinda Starburst.”

  Then Murrow vanished, his cigarette still smoldering.

  I opened Marvelous Species to the index, and sure enough, there she was, listed under “Starburst, Lucinda,” with a dozen references. Two of these mentions came from a chapter titled “Intraterrestrials,” and the latter was accompanied by a quote: Difference is the essence of extremity.

  It turned out that I’d initially come across Dr. Starburst’s name in chapter one—read it and forgotten it. But the unusual appellation had lodged in my head anyway. Now the words “Lucinda Starburst” exploded in my mind’s eye like firecrackers. I’d been acting so precious, waiting for Mr. Kaplan to
notice Lily’s book and say something. But now I was going to treat Marvelous Species like an investigative instrument. I’d be a truth surgeon, and the book would be my scalpel. I needed only to open Mr. Kaplan up a little bit, and before long, he’d be sharing all kinds of information with me: about Milgram’s shock experiment, and flash mobs, and, eventually, Prisom’s Party.

  A few days later, I requested a meeting with Mr. Kaplan in the library after school. He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I sat down in one of the reading chairs, my eyes trained on the door. All that week I’d had the uncanny feeling that someone was watching me. Just two days before, I’d been in the computer lab, typing a paper on Wuthering Heights, when suddenly the text started spinning out of control, letters and numbers spewing from beneath my cursor. My paper had been hijacked! I kept hitting Delete, but the text wouldn’t stop. “What’s going on!” I hissed at the screen.

  The kid at the terminal next to mine leaned over to inspect. “Looks like a virus,” he said. “Your computer’s been hacked.”

  I was about to shut the computer down when the cursor spit out the last few words. “CEASE AND DESIST OR WE’LL—” I was so freaked out that I cut the power before the sentence finished.

  The library door clicked, but it was only the librarian running an errand. Now I was all alone. Outside the windows, the playing fields sprawled away from the school before finally colliding with the woods. Above the barren branches, a flock of black birds swept across the sky. I could hear the pulse of my heart, and after a while it began to sound like those very birds, each beat like a flap of dark wings. I imagined a black bird nesting in my chest, its wings unfurling inside of me. I suddenly missed Dalia so much it was like a punch in the gut.