The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  “I agree,” I said. “And I’m wondering why nobody is addressing the problem.”

  Pasternak shook his head, then turned and entered the stairwell. I followed, our feet echoing against the cinderblock walls. “Do you understand what would happen if any of this wound up in the real newspapers? I can handle the local press, but only for so long. It may be a new millennium, Jonah, but there are plenty of people on the board who would be delighted to replace me with someone named Worthington or Beaumont. Capeesh?”

  He had a point. Like me, Garrison Pasternak was Jewish, and his success at Mariana, and in the conservative town that housed it, was an aberration. I had to give him some credit for managing to stick it out in an unfriendly environment for several decades. I’d spent a mere twelve years at this school and nearly went mad.

  “Now,” he said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs in front of a black door, “follow me.” He pulled out a ring of keys and inserted one of them into the lock. We entered the Trench.

  At face value, the Trench is nothing more than a long, narrow corridor that once housed lockers, computer labs, and miscellaneous supply closets. But in the biosphere of Mariana Academy, the Trench had been the emblem of Mariana’s embedded caste system, the home of untouchables like Justin and me. In some ways it resembled the real Mariana Trench—the one in the Western Pacific. Like the ocean depths, our Trench was freezing. Like the deep sea, where thermal vents pump boiling chemicals from the earth’s core, our Trench also had a unique source of heat: vents expelling a noxious cafeteria effluvium. The earth’s atmosphere may be 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and a small percent noble gases, but the air quality in the Trench was about 93 percent foul.

  The Mariana Trench (the real one) is nearly 6.8 miles below sea level—that’s deeper than Mount Everest is tall. You might wonder what can possibly survive down there, but tons of living things survive at the bottom of the sea. Our Trench was no different. Twelve years ago it was filled with all kinds of bizarre adolescent life (not to mention the hated centipedes that made the subterranean environment their home). As I’d told my class, many organisms need extreme environments to survive. The Trench was the only part of the school where I had felt at home.

  Pasternak turned to face me. “I know Prisom’s Party is operating out of here, but I can’t find them. And let me tell you, I have looked. They are invisible. They’re ghosts.”

  He continued plodding down the hallway, muttering. Finally he stopped. “I know this school wasn’t fair to you, Jonah. I know you don’t owe me anything. But I need your help. I could have brought a dozen advanced degrees back, but I brought you. Specifically.”

  Of course. The large salary and suspiciously light teaching load now made perfect sense. He wanted to make sure I signed on. “I still don’t understand what you want me to do,” I said.

  Pasternak sighed like a beaten old man. He was well past the age of retirement, yet he hung on. I looked at his ringless left hand. I didn’t know much about him, but I imagined he lived alone in an apartment with newspapers dating back three decades and brownish plants gasping for air. I guessed his medicine cabinet was full of pills for his various old-man ailments and that he ate microwavable meals for dinner. I felt a torque in my chest. How did a person end up like this, so old and alone?

  “You used to live down here, Jonah. You had plenty of experience sneaking around under the radar. Don’t think I’ve forgotten all those things you did.” Pasternak chuckled as though he found the memory of my transgressions pleasant. “Like I said, I can’t force you, but I’m asking you: perform a little detective work on my behalf.”

  “I’m supposed to be a role model. I didn’t come here to play your Eliot Ness.”

  “If you’d just consider my request. Jonah, please . . .”

  I couldn’t bear another moment of his rheumy-eyed desperation. “I’ll think about it.”

  Pasternak looked relieved, but he didn’t miss a beat. “Would you take a look around now and tell me if you see anything suspicious?”

  Physically, the Trench looked exactly as I remembered it, coat hangers and dusty chairs stacked to my left and the darkened classrooms and lockers to my right. But something was missing. As uncomfortable and dirty as this place was, it always made me feel safe. I would jump down that final flight of stairs, and as soon as my loafers hit the floor, I’d know I was home. So many years later, I felt like a tourist amid ruins.

  I walked to the Academic League headquarters, where Justin and I had spent most of our time. It was locked. I peered through the pane. “These rooms?”

  “We’ve searched. But I’ll get you keys.”

  I turned toward the end of the hall where rows of chairs were stacked over five feet high against the wall. I could just make out flashes of orange and green behind them. I turned back to poor old Pasty. “Looks the same to me,” I said.

  We stared at each other for a few moments. I wondered what he was thinking.

  “You go up,” I said, itching to get rid of him. “I’ll look around a bit more.”

  “Good. The door will lock behind you when you come out. And for God’s sake, Jonah, turn off the stairwell lights. I don’t want to encourage anyone else to wander down here.”

  Iris

  November 2012

  AFTER LISTENING TO Hazel, I knew I couldn’t let the Trench intimidate me. When an editor rejects a story idea, you must immediately send your pitch to the next publication or risk fearing rejection forever. But as soon as I garnered the courage to investigate, I was suddenly deluged with work. Perhaps to distract me from investigating the mock hangings, Katie Milford assigned me a story on the homecoming game (of course she deleted my references to chronic traumatic encephalopathy!) and saddled me with a special Halloween insert. At least I managed to get my first op-ed published: a Maureen Dowd–style tirade against the sexy animal costume phenomenon.

  Finally, after Halloween weekend, I put on my sternest See It Now face, let myself into the Trench, and marched down the dark hallway with complete confidence. Perhaps my fear was all from perception. Like Mr. Kaplan said: what humans consider extreme is normal to plenty of creatures on the earth, and vice versa. If I’d grown up down here and this dark, dank hallway were all I knew, then this would be the place I felt at home, and the upper world—sunshine, hallways packed with people, fresh air—would be terrifying. On the other hand, what if comfort was actually genetic, and no matter how you were raised, you were wired to fit in only in certain places? And what if I spent my entire life searching for the place I belonged—the place that matched who I was—and I never found it? Even worse, what if the place I truly belonged didn’t exist?

  I was sprawled out on the floor of the Oracle archives, paging through old newspapers and worrying about all this, when I heard footsteps—and voices. The fear I’d been suppressing resurged. I jumped up, flipped off the light, and stood in the dark. The footsteps and voices grew louder. I pressed myself against the wall. I wasn’t sure how many people were out there, but I could feel the closeness of their bodies in the way some animals sense predators and prey by radar.

  But then I saw Mr. Kaplan and Headmaster Pasternak come into focus through a crack in the door. And at that moment a soundtrack started playing in my head. It was on a loop, and it went like this: shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit. SHIT. I was an idiot to have hidden. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but if I suddenly popped out, how was I going to explain the fact that I’d been hiding?

  After a while Pasternak left, and I saw Mr. Kaplan moving a bunch of chairs around. Then he stood in the hallway just looking at the wall. I was dying to see what he was staring at, because he had a strange expression, like he was about to scream. He opened his mouth, but the sound that came out wasn’t angry or loud. It was a whimper. The cry of a lost child.

  I pressed my palms to my ears and shut my eyes, but the awful sound zinged around my head like a pinball.

  And then the hallway went quiet. I do
n’t know how long I stood in the archive room, covering my ears, but when I stepped out, Mr. Kaplan was gone. He’d restacked the chairs, so I began taking them down again. As I did, I began to notice something on the wall behind them. At first I only saw green and orange lines, but soon these lines assembled themselves into a kind of face. And all at once I was looking at an enormous drawing of the four-eyed demon, its mouth set in a gleeful snarl. I crept closer, remembering how pale Mr. Kaplan had looked when he saw the same image in the girls’ bathroom. Now, in the long tunnel of the Trench, I could still hear his whimper, vulnerable and raw.

  He’d seen the darkness inside of me, I realized, because he harbored a similar pain. But what had happened to him? Why did the demon plague him so?

  Jonah

  November 2012

  AFTER I ASCENDED from the Trench, I walked around in a daze. I’d been deluded, thinking I could return to Mariana and not encounter my past at every turn, but I had always imagined my adult self and my boyhood as a double helix: twisted threads that traveled in a spiral but never actually made contact. Returning to the Trench had tangled the strands together.

  Part of me wanted to bolt the Trench door tight; Pasternak was right, I didn’t owe him anything. But my conscience jabbed at me. I owed the students. I’d set myself up as a kind of educational 007, whose mission it was to short-circuit the kids’ assembly-line approach to education. That commitment shouldn’t be half-assed. Mariana’s problems were systemic, and ferreting out Prisom’s Party was the first step in targeting the school’s culture of hypocrisy. If the young renegades believed that fear was an appropriate weapon to combat immorality, then the collective conscience was indeed poor.

  I was heading toward the school office, ruminating, when a woman called my name. I turned around, and there was Hazel Greenburg, gorgeous as a modern Botticelli arisen from the faculty mailboxes. Surely I was hallucinating. But no, this was Hazel in the flesh: her hips a little wider, her face fuller, and her green eyes fiercer than the last time I’d seen her, who knows how many years ago. She looked at me with her usual mixture of interest, mocking, and omniscience. Hazel was the kind of girl who knew things about you that you didn’t even know about yourself. My heart beat at hyperspeed. I was still in love with her.

  “Hazel.” I half swallowed her name. She reached in for a hug and squeezed me tight. It was an indescribable relief. She pulled away. A few strands of her auburn hair stuck to my scruff, and she brushed them away with her long, freckled fingers. Those fingers, I remembered, moved with uncanny precision, like intelligent entities.

  “I heard you were teaching here,” she said, and shook her head. “But I seriously didn’t believe you’d step foot in this place again. How are you handling the ghosts, my long-lost friend?”

  Hazel was smiling, but my face burned like a man accused. I struggled to sort through the seemingly infinite implications of her question. “What are you doing here?” was all I could manage.

  “You don’t sound thrilled.”

  I shook my head. “Are you crazy?”

  “Well, after a brief hiatus, I’m returning to the tutoring profession.” She smirked, already over the surprise of our sudden meeting. “Classics. Pasternak and I agreed on a pretty sick rate.”

  I nodded, mute.

  “You look like you’ve been bludgeoned by a gladiator,” she said. And then in response to my frown, “Cantankerous as ever, I see. But you look good, Jonahlah. All grown up.”

  “Gee, thanks, Bubbie.”

  “Oh, Jonahlah, didn’t your mother teach you how to accept a compliment?”

  “I’m just surprised to run into you like this,” I said, hiding the fact that I’d actually been looking for her around town.

  She nodded, and her face displayed an openness that seemed new to me. Hazel’s expressions sometimes appeared to be constructed entirely from the play of light and shadow. In a moment, all of her features could reconstitute themselves, shape-shift, so you never really knew what you were looking at. But I hadn’t seen her in a decade. A lot could have changed. Bumping into Hazel now, I realized, was a great stroke of luck. She and I had once been inseparable. We’d been co-conspirators. Maybe she would help me with the task of finding Prisom’s Party.

  “I have an appointment in town,” she said. “But here’s my number.” She fished in her bag, pulled out a pen and scrap of paper, and wrote her number on the back. “Call me this weekend. Now that I’m making the big bucks, I can buy you a PBR or something . . .” She seemed to lose her train of thought, and I realized that she was just as nervous at seeing me as I was at seeing her. She was just better at hiding her emotions.

  “We’ll talk,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed, and her lips curled upward in an uncertain smile. Then she turned and walked out ahead of me, her long hair sighing against her back.

  For the rest of the day, Hazel elbowed every other thought from my head. I imagined her tutoring students, her freckled fingers correcting some poor kid’s bungling of Vergil. I pondered whether I could get her hired as a part-time Academic League consultant. It was a wonder Pasternak wasn’t already outsourcing for extracurriculars and hiring tutors to telecommute from Mumbai.

  I began to fantasize about what our partnership might be like. I imagined that we’d create mnemonic devices to help the kids remember the ancient Roman rulers and have a running bet over how long it would take somebody to say cunnilingus instead of Caligula. I saw us knocking over a shelf of Bunsen burners while making out in the school’s lab closet and cracking each other up with bad science jokes about our explosive sexual activities. But these were juvenile fantasies. Part of me wished I were sixteen again, but an alternate version of my teenage self: silly and intoxicated instead of overly intellectual and conversationally inept. I tried to conjure up a modern-day fantasy involving Hazel and myself, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know her anymore.

  Hazel and Justin and I had attended Mariana from kindergarten on, and though she was a year above Justin and me, we ended up in the same science clubs and computer electives. As kids we romped for hours in the woods behind our homes, enacting elaborate fantasy worlds, building makeshift weapons, battling imaginary Orcs. Hazel was never the damsel in distress; she was the leader of our small warrior band. She issued orders and we obeyed. She even named us. Justin was the cowardly lion, a moniker he didn’t mind, because, as he once told me, “That’s the kind of thing you expect from an older sister.” I was much less reconciled to my nickname—Mr. Tumnus, a reference to my small stature and pointy ears.

  When you’re young, you don’t realize there’s a direct relationship between your perceived invincibility and your vulnerability. I may not have had Masters of the Universe biceps, but I had a masterful mind and so, I assumed, I had the emotional armor to match. I didn’t know that with a single glance a girl could melt the strongest metal. I certainly did not believe Hazel was capable of such a thing. We were buddies, pals. Allies.

  Then one night when I was fourteen, my view of Hazel underwent a dramatic reconstruction. A few headgear-encaged geeks from the science club were sleeping over at our house, watching Mystery Science Theater in the basement. Just before this, a science experiment in our kitchen had devolved into a massive shaving cream fight, and my mother had sent us one by one to the upstairs shower. At some point I realized I’d had too much soda and skipped on up to the second-floor bathroom. I must have been in a real hurry, because it didn’t even occur to me to knock.

  Hazel was standing in the shower steam, not two feet from me, her wet hair dripping onto the bathmat, her breasts level with my face. To my fourteen-year-old eyes, her large pink areolas were like ice cream cones licked flat. She was only fifteen, but she seemed perfectly matured to me. I was struck dumb by the brown, tan, and chestnut spots that speckled her torso, stomach, and breasts. The tops of her feet were freckled as well as her toes. The freckles seemed to be moving, audibly crackling, and suddenly my eyes were drawn to the coarse conflag
ration between Hazel’s legs. The freckles were like sparks shot from that fire.

  Hazel’s nipples hardened as the cold air rushed in from the hallway, but she neither screamed nor covered herself. In fact, she looked me over like I was the naked one, her eyes zeroing in on my crotch. I wanted to run, but I could only stand there, cupping myself, listening to her hearty peals of laughter.

  After this, she acted like nothing had happened. Her laughter hadn’t been cruel, I realized years later, but joyous, as though to suggest that my embarrassment was foolish, unnecessary. After all, she seemed to say with that killer curl of her lip, what man (or boy) can look at me and not feel aroused? It would be another two years before I learned that there was one boy unsusceptible to her charms, and that, sadly for Hazel, he was the only boy who mattered.

  Still, from that moment forward, I was obsessed. By high school, we spent all our time together, meeting regularly for the Academic League. Our proximity tormented me, but I kept my frustration bottled up. I did not want to turn out like Justin, decomposing into a lovesick pile of compost. So I turned the Hazel switch to Off and engaged the security lock. I should have known that some doors don’t stay shut, no matter how much cement and steel you put over them.

  Lily

  December 1999

  LILY’S FAVORITE DAY of the week was Sunday, because this meant brunch with her grandmother. The tradition was sacrosanct. Amelia Morgan cooked a large, unhealthy meal, standing over skillets of greasy eggs and bacon in her silk charmeuse blouse and pearls. After everyone had stuffed themselves full, they lounged around the polished dining room table.

  “So how are things at school, honey?” Amelia said on this particular morning.

  “The guidance counselor asked to see Lily last week,” Elliott said, surfacing from his Times. “The teachers believe she has confidence issues.”