The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  “Well,” I said, changing tack, “Mr. Kaplan’s probably the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

  “Oh.” Hazel gave one slow nod. She looked unhappy.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just that Jonah—Mr. Kaplan—used to be on the Academic League team with me. He never struck me as the educator type.”

  So they were in school together, an interesting development. Perhaps Hazel would offer up vital details about Mr. Kaplan’s childhood in Nye and I could begin to understand his strange behavior through her. “What type was he?”

  “Difficult to define.” She paused. I thought she was going to explain what she meant, but she said, “To be honest, Iris, I haven’t seen the man in over a decade. He could be a totally different person now. So tell me why he’s such a good teacher.”

  I tried to describe how different Mr. Kaplan was. How he cared in a way the others didn’t. How I suspected that if he had been running the school, Mary Breckinridge would have been exonerated.

  “He wants to run the school?” Hazel sat up.

  “Oh, no, he didn’t say anything like that. But he and the status quo aren’t exactly best friends.”

  As we talked, the sky grew progressively darker until I could see our reflections in the window, talking like old friends. Just a few hours earlier, I’d been on the road, cold and lonely. But in no time I’d made a sort of ally.

  After a while Hazel asked how I was getting home. My parents had no idea where I was, and my phone was broken. They were probably worried, but I didn’t care.

  “You look like you need a ride,” Hazel said, and before I could respond, she added, “Loneliness is worse when you’re living with other people.”

  I’d told her nothing about my mother, and yet she knew exactly what my parents were like. We bundled up and headed for her car, an old rusted Saab that was full of junk: papers, empty Coke cans, shoes, magazines, more books, and gum wrappers spewing dried-up balls of chewed gum. The car also smelled thickly of stale cigarettes, but who was I to judge? Hazel was an artist and she’d lived in Europe. She said the heat was broken and apologized. I wondered why she didn’t get it fixed, but I didn’t ask.

  We were halfway to my house when I realized we’d forgotten all about Charles Prisom’s letters. “Oh!” Hazel exclaimed, her breath thick in the air. “It completely slipped my mind. The next time you come we’ll dig them up.”

  I shivered in the cold, cramped car, but I was smiling too. Hazel wanted me to come back.

  As soon as my parents heard me come in, they rushed to the front door. “Where in God’s name have you been?” my mother demanded.

  “Out with a friend,” I said, and stormed up to my room.

  Lily

  November 1999

  LILY BELIEVED THAT Justin asking her out was only a symptom of a larger existential problem: in order to attract a different type of boy, she’d have to be a different type of person. Her experience with the popular cliques had been instructive, however, so in the weeks after Justin’s invitation, she turned her eye toward another social group—one that prized uniqueness.

  The Studio Girls were four eccentrics who walked around like movie stars, proud to have every inch of themselves sculpted for display. They discussed movies you couldn’t see at the sixteen-screen Cineplex, bands named after bizarre animals, and books written without certain letters of the alphabet. Each day they met in the art studios and threw themselves into their work. Lily wasn’t sure how talented they were, but she yearned to know their secret—how to turn her own abnormality into an asset—and so she too began frequenting the art studios at lunchtime. The Studio Girls rarely talked to her, but they weren’t usually mean to her, either.

  In order to justify her presence Lily needed an art project of her own. In fact, she had two going simultaneously, a real one and a decoy. The former was a notebook, her “sketchpad,” in which she wrote detailed observations about the Studio Girls. The latter was a painting that depicted the view from the art room windows: a small courtyard in which a family of ducks had made its home. Lily wondered why the ducks had not yet flown south for the winter and why there was no mallard. Had he run off on the family? Taken up with some hot young swan? In any case, Lily couldn’t decide how many ducks to paint. When she first started the painting in late September, there’d been five speckled ducklings waddling in line. Now there were only four. She knew there was a hawk’s nest on campus, but she had never once seen the hawk.

  Lily visited the art room at least twice a week, and the scene never lost its magic: eight long legs crossed at razor-sharp angles, eyebrows arched, paintbrushes poised like cigarettes between slender fingers.

  On this particular day, Veronica Mercy was performing a dramatic reading of the school newspaper. “Vandal Victimizes School!” Veronica read the headline in a loud, theatrical voice. She continued:

  “When Mariana Academy students walked into school after Thanksgiving break, they were shocked to find their lockers covered with images illustrating bondage, sex with animals, pill-popping, anorexia, cheating, and violent behavior toward other students.

  “Now some of these students are reeling from the consequences of having their personal lives broadcast to the entire community. Since the vandalism, two students have been admitted to a rehabilitation center for eating disorders, and disciplinary proceedings have begun for others found guilty of cheating and illegal drug use.”

  Veronica rolled her eyes, as though she considered these transgressions unimpressive.

  The other girls weren’t paying much attention, involved as they were with their own art projects, but Lily was fixated. Veronica was a beautiful mess. She was working with clay, her “primary medium,” and wore an oversize work shirt over her school uniform. Her thick dark hair was pulled into a disheveled bun. From her tone as she continued reading, she could have been on stage reciting Shakespeare.

  “The ‘Rule of Lockers’ tradition, which has flown for years under faculty radar, has long allowed students to group their lockers according to social clique. The system is run by seniors, who collect everyone’s computer-generated locker numbers at the start of each academic year and redistribute these assignments among students, based on their friend groups. The vandalism highlighted this fact with themed images: sports equipment for the athletes, easels and paints for the artists, Bunsen burners and test tubes for the Academic League, and thespian masks for the theater crew.

  “But no one was targeted with more vitriol than the students whose first-floor locker real estate is known to symbolize their prime social status. The most frightening pictures were drawn on large rectangular sheets of paper and taped to these students’ lockers, their intricacy suggesting months of work.”

  Lily had taken a good look at these images before the school ripped them down. On Katie Flannigan’s locker, a girl with Katie’s red hair spewed a thick stream of projectile vomit onto the adjoining locker of sophomore Tad Durban and into a picture of Tad’s Hummer. A line of red-eyed crabs scuttled out the Hummer’s exhaust pipe, across four lockers, and up into the crotch of a girl with junior Amanda Richardson’s black curls. On another locker, students hung from a gallows constructed of books: three torqued necks, six pigeon-toed feet, thirty clenched fingers. The figures’ lips were shaded blue. They had black X’s for eyes. Tristan Adams’s locker was decorated with a pornographic image questioning his sexual orientation. A week after the vandalism, Tristan downed a bottle of prescription sleeping pills. His housekeeper found him and took him to the hospital just in time.

  Veronica continued the recitation. “The faculty was untouched by the vandals’ brushes with the notable exception of Headmaster Morgan, who received a quotation from Percy Shelley on his office door: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’” Veronica recited this quote with a gargantuan smile and said, “And now for the best part of the story—they interviewed me! Amy, you have to rea
d it.”

  Amy Chang sat beside a large papier-mâché egg, reapplying her signature red lipstick and smoothing down the sides of her black bob cut.

  “Amy!” Veronica snapped, and waited until Amy reluctantly took the article.

  “‘The vandals don’t understand the nuance of Shelley’s Ozymandias,’ said junior Veronica Mercy, ‘and they clearly haven’t read their Foucault.’” Amy turned her big dark eyes on Veronica and cooed at her. “Oh, Ronnie, you’re so intellectual.”

  “Shut up, bitch,” Veronica said, laughing. “Keep reading.”

  Amy made a big show of clearing her throat. “Miss Mercy’s locker received an innocuous picture of a paintbrush. She said the vandals had shown a ‘lack of vision.’”

  “The hullabaloo over all this is a dreadful bore,” complained Jocelyn Simon, who, Lily noticed, always spoke like a Victorian-era British person. Jocelyn didn’t bother to look up from her own project: a miniature clothesline hung with condoms. “On more titillating topics, did any of you perchance read about that woman at university? The one who slept with all those blokes?”

  “I heard it was artificial insemination,” Amy Chang said.

  “She became impregnated on multiple occasions and then aborted the fetuses,” Jocelyn said. “Afterwards, she injected the fetuses with plasticine.”

  At that moment Krista Stark arrived carrying a pack of construction paper and crayons. Amy looked up from her compact. “They’re ironic,” Krista said by way of explanation.

  Lily scribbled down artificial insemination project in her sketchbook and crayons = ironic. Then she pulled out her own copy of the vandalism story. The story had just come out and everyone at school was reading it. Rumors about the rebirth of Prisom’s Party swirled through the halls. After decades of dormancy, some people said, Prisom’s Party had awakened to fulfill its duty of protecting the Community Code. The Rule of Lockers promoted social segregation, and so clearly violated the school’s motto of Brotherhood, Truth, and Equality for All. But darker rumors circulated as well. Others believed that the members of Prisom’s Party pledged allegiance for life and faced unthinkable punishments should they ever try to leave. According to this theory, popular students like Tristan were members of Prisom’s Party who’d made the grave mistake of trying to quit.

  And then there was Lily’s own father, who believed the vandalism was related to what he called “the Columbine Effect.” Elliott Morgan worried that Mariana’s students were starting to copycat the two murderers who’d shot up their Colorado school the previous April. “Those boys kept journals,” he told his family. “Filled with disturbing pictures that were very much like our vandalism.”

  Whether Columbine or Prisom’s Party was to blame, everyone accused the Trench kids, in particular Jonah Kaplan and Hazel Greenburg. Jonah had always been an outcast and provocateur. But what had happened to Hazel? How had the plump, happy girl who’d befriended Lily back in middle school turned into such a bizarre, intimidating Trench dweller?

  Since junior high, Hazel had grown fast, her chunky body stretching into a long, knock-kneed shape before finally settling into its current voluptuous form: all curves and freckles and flashing green eyes. She was like Alice, the way she stretched and expanded and shrunk. And she lived in the Trench, which was its own mysterious rabbit hole. Rumors encircled Hazel like dark clouds: she cut herself; her eccentric artist mother was a drug-addicted prostitute; she’d tried to rub away the multitude of freckles on her body with Clorox. In short, the girl was fucked up. Together, she and Jonah were angry and bitter enough to perpetrate a malicious act like the vandalism. They also provided Lily all the reason she needed not to attach herself to any Trench dwellers. Even kindhearted ones like Justin. Lily didn’t want to punish him, so she didn’t reject him. But she didn’t accept his invitation for a date either. She told herself this was the best approach, that she was minimizing the harm.

  Lily looked up to see Veronica Mercy sashaying between the tables. She paused briefly to run her long nails down Amy Chang’s arm and kiss Krista Stark atop the head. Then she headed for Lily. Lily shut the sketchbook with her observation notes.

  “I wish I had eyes like yours,” Veronica said, landing at Lily’s table. She gave a perfunctory glance at Lily’s duck painting. “I mean, not eyes that moved around all fucked up like that, but the color. That color is so amazingly creepy.”

  The room had gone quiet and Lily realized that the other girls were watching her.

  “Is all your hair that color?” Veronica whispered, leaning toward Lily’s pale ear. “I mean, all of it?”

  Lily blushed.

  “Wow. You’re like a totally white canvas. The living embodiment of innocence.” Veronica’s eyes flashed, and then she was sashaying away again, leaving behind the scent of musk perfume and a fluttering sensation in Lily’s stomach.

  Jonah

  November 2012

  IT TOOK OVER a week for the school’s so-called collective bullying to make the local news, and when it finally did, just after Halloween, it was a pitiful excuse of a story. Perusing the local newspaper one morning, I found a short article buried deep inside the B section: School Flames Quickly Quelled. According to the piece, there’d been a small fire at a Mariana pep rally back in October and no one was hurt. This cover-up was Pasternak’s doing, no doubt, and I was impressed by the reach of his influence.

  The day after the event took place, he’d emailed the faculty and parents:

  The fire posed absolutely no physical threat to any teacher or student. The school-sanctioned pyrotechnic display was meant to illuminate the virtues of the Community Code. We’d planned to take students into the hallway after the assembly so they could watch from a safe distance and make a public pledge against bullying. A faculty member who was unaware of the project grew concerned and called the fire department. It fills me with pride to know that our faculty are so conscientious about the students’ safety that they do not hesitate to act in the presence of a perceived threat.

  This email, in conjunction with the newspaper story, made me wonder what Pasternak was doing in Nye. He seemed better suited for a Hollywood PR firm or Fox News.

  The week after the fire took place, conflicting views of the event circulated through the school. From the number of stakes, to the real identity of the hanging figures, to whether there’d even been any hanging figures at all, to what the words in the snow had said—everything was in dispute. There’d been a lot of smoke outside, even more commotion inside, and most people hadn’t gotten a good look. Moreover, the people who hadn’t seen the fire wanted to be in on the conversation, so they pretended to be in the know.

  “Whoever’s behind all these incidents,” my department head Rick Rayburn commented one day during lunch, “are treating us like chimps. They’ve given us certain stimuli, and they’re waiting to see how we’ll react.”

  “I definitely feel pumped full of chemicals,” my colleague Stephanie Chu said.

  “Do you think we’re giving them the expected response?” I asked.

  “Even the administration is lying left and right.” Rayburn nodded at the open newspaper on my desk. “The collective conscience is poor, Jonah. Didn’t you get the memo?”

  Meanwhile, I’d willfully forgotten Pasternak’s request for a chat (in high school, “See me” is a universally accepted mark of impending academic doom), so when he unexpectedly opened the door of the teachers’ lounge one afternoon, I didn’t realize at first why he was scowling at me.

  After I stood up and followed him out, he began to speak about a number of scandals that had wracked the school in recent years. First, the three football players who’d been expelled for hazing. “Ghastly things they made the freshmen do,” Pasternak said, leading me down the corridor. “Jockstraps and some disgusting Codeine-and-cough-syrup concoction and baseball bats and a bucket of piss.” Then the students who’d been expelled after they were caught hacking into Ms. Montgomery’s school email account. “They sent
offensive emails,” Pasternak said. “Detailed sexual content to a handful of students and teachers.” And finally, Mr. Franks.

  “He was caught while—” Pasternak stopped and threw up his hands. “Suffice it to say he’s gone too.”

  Pasternak led me briskly past classrooms inside which students were guzzling information as if their brains were gas tanks. It looked far from healthy.

  “We learned about these activities,” Pasternak said, stopping at the door to the back stairwell, “because of the Devil’s Advocate.”

  Waves of sour breath blew from his mouth into my face. “That underground paper people have been talking about?” I asked, dodging the putrid airstream.

  “Prisom’s Party calls it their ‘information arm.’ Ring any bells from your student days?”

  I shook my head. “Legends are malleable,” I said. “That’s why they’re legends.”

  “Well, the paper exposed the football players and the students who hacked into Ms. Montgomery’s email. Last summer, Prisom’s Party mailed me a package containing irrefutable proof about Mr. Franks. Photographs of him in the act!” Pasternak’s body shook like an addict in withdrawal.

  So the rumors were true. “It seems like Prisom’s Party was helping you,” I offered.

  “Dammit, Jonah!” Pasty’s eyes popped, and his pupils bobbed like black egg yolks. “These kids are trying to run this school behind my back and they’ve become threatening. Before they were targeting specific infractions, but this year they’re reveling in their disobedience. Quoting Orwell is not a good sign.”