The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  The changing room was a maze of blue lockers, its air sharp with chlorine and filled with the noise of clanging metal and screeching children. Lily crept around the tepid puddles and wormy strings of hair. She’d never seen so many naked bodies in one place. Lily’s body was bony with nipples the size of small buttons, and she gaped at grown women with dark beards between their legs and eggplant breasts. Some of the women had fatty thighs. Hazel’s thighs touched, and her bathing suit was so tight that it cut into her plump buttocks. She wondered if Hazel would one day resemble the locker room women or, worse, if she herself might. Lily hoped not.

  Lily stood in the shade underneath an overhanging roof as her counselor, Jenny, told the group to choose buddies. Hazel grabbed Lily’s hand and thrust it in the air.

  “That’s nice of you,” Jenny cooed. “Staying indoors with your friend.” Lily pulled her hand free. Jenny bent over and rested her hands on her knees. Lily removed her thick black glasses and stared at Jenny’s white-toothed smile and ribbon-tied pigtails.

  “Now Lily, it’s very important that you stay inside,” Jenny said. “Do you understand?”

  Lily nodded. Over Jenny’s shoulder, she saw the popular girls run off into Water World’s white glare. When Jenny was gone, Lily walked to the edge of the roof’s shadow. A line ran down the pavement. On one side was cool shade; on the other side, bright sun. A concrete ocean stretched before her. She lifted a foot into the light and gingerly tested the pavement. Heat sank into the padding of her big toe and sent a flash of warmth into her foot. Wonderful.

  “Let’s go into the park!”

  Lily recoiled from Hazel’s mouth so close to her ear. She turned to find the girl smiling brightly and wondered how Hazel could be so oblivious to what other people thought of her.

  “I’ll look out for you, Lily,” Hazel said. “I’ll tell you if you’re getting burned.”

  Lily stared out at Water World. All right, she thought, and plunged into the light. The heat burned like a scalding bath. Then the sharpness broke and sunlight washed over her. A light breeze raised the hair on her arms. This wasn’t so bad. And besides, her mother had slathered her with so much sunblock, she might as well have been wearing armor.

  Hazel coaxed Lily into trying some of the slides. They started with the tubular intestines and gradually sought out the straight tongues that shot you into the water like spitballs. They tried slides that made Lily’s stomach fly into her throat and her heart sink to her feet. Slides that left her feeling simultaneously terrified and invincible. Afterward, the girls stumbled on gelatinous legs toward a bench. They sat there catching their breath.

  “You’re a little pink,” Hazel said.

  Lily took off her dark glasses and examined her arms and legs. It wasn’t so bad. Her skin didn’t hurt.

  “Let’s go swimming,” Hazel said. “Your skin’ll be more protected under water.”

  Lily slipped her glasses back on and followed Hazel to a pool in a corner of the park. She felt dizzy from the slides and heat, but the water was an instant relief.

  The girls pushed across the pool on their backs: Hazel’s pudgy, speckled body beside Lily’s skinny white one, drifting like flotsam. They didn’t speak. They moved only to keep afloat. Sometimes they collided, but they let it happen and didn’t laugh. They allowed the water to lap over them. Lying on her back under the blue sky, darkened just enough by her glasses, Lily felt an unfamiliar sense of calm. She wondered if this was how Hazel moved through the world, her green eyes protected from other people’s judgment as though by special glasses. Did it matter how other people saw you if you weren’t aware of them looking?

  Lily opened her eyes to find herself alone. Most of the families had cleared out for lunch. Her throat felt parched, too dry to cough. She started to speak Hazel’s name, but Hazel was no longer beside her. Lily spun around. At the deep end of the pool, an old man swam laps; at the shallow end, a mother bounced her water-winged baby. Then, in a corner, Lily spotted Hazel’s magenta bathing suit. She called out, but Hazel didn’t answer, so she swam over. As she neared, she could see Hazel struggling at the pool wall. Her wet hair hung in a heavy knot down her back and swayed with the motion of her undulating body.

  “Hazel?” Lily was only a couple of feet away now, treading water. Hazel’s hands gripped the edge of the pool. Her body arched, bent inward, arched again. She looked like she was having trouble holding on. “Hazel!”

  Lily kicked over to the wall and grabbed the edge with one hand. Hazel’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes clenched. She gasped, the sound so quiet Lily wouldn’t have heard it had she not been inches away. It was a sound unlike any she’d ever heard, at once feathery and full. Suddenly Hazel pushed herself away from the pool wall, dunking her head beneath the surface.

  “What were you doing?” Lily demanded the moment she reappeared. “Are you okay?”

  Hazel squinted the water from her eyes. She looked at Lily, and her face went pale. “Am I okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m fine.” Hazel shut her eyes, opened them again, as though she was expecting to see something different from before. “Lily?” she said, but Lily interrupted.

  “What were you just doing?”

  Hazel was quiet for a moment. The color rose in her cheeks. “I’ll tell you something,” she said tentatively, “but you have to promise not to tell anyone. You have to swear.”

  Lily nodded uncertainly. The water-winged baby and the old man were gone. Hazel leaned forward and whispered in Lily’s ear.

  Lily glanced over Hazel’s shoulder and saw the water jet. Small bubbles rose to the surface and popped. She shook her head.

  “You’ve never tried it in the bath?”

  Of course Lily was curious. At night in her room, when darkness hid her from herself, her fingers wandered to the edge of her underwear. Once or twice she’d slid her fingers down the white slope between her thighs, over the underwear. Because this—the M-word—was the most embarrassing thing a person could do.

  Mariana’s guidance counselor had told a room full of uncomfortable sixth graders that it was “natural.” But the lesson had upset some parents, who believed that sexual education shouldn’t deviate from strict lessons of anatomy and reproductive function. Shortly thereafter, Lily overheard her father on the phone.

  “Well, I insist the, ah, the term should be taught, though perhaps we could include its derivation. The likely etymology is manstuprare, which comes from tubare, to stir up. Manus is Latin for ‘hand,’ and stuprum means defilement or dishonor. That would send an implicit message, and no harm in getting a little Latin into the lesson.”

  This was so typical of her father, whose lifelong mission was to “get a little Latin in”—to any conversation, whether it belonged there or not. Still, Lily wanted to know what it was like. Once, riding a bicycle, she’d felt a tingle inside her body. In the darkness of her room this feeling glowed like light around her. If only she could reach out and catch it, harness its energy. And Hazel was offering her this. Without taking off her clothes or using her hands. Was it the M-word if her hands were above the water, innocent bystanders? Not according to the Latin.

  “I’ll be the lookout,” Hazel assured her. “And you can always push away from the wall into a backstroke. They’ll never know.”

  “How will I know it’s working?”

  Hazel only grinned and swam into the center of the pool.

  Lily positioned herself in front of the jet. The water beat against her stomach. She opened her knees wider, then narrowed them. She tried raising her hips, lowering them, easing them forward, tilting them back. The whole process felt oddly scientific, as though she were conducting an experiment on herself. Then bursting water hit her between the legs. She looked over her shoulder to check on Hazel. Hazel smiled and nodded, then turned away. Lily closed her eyes and felt the sun beat down on her face. Suddenly she felt an unexpected hiccup. She moved again, and the feeling disappeared. With shaking arms—the truth o
f Hazel’s confession making itself suddenly apparent—she moved until she found the hiccup again. She leaned back slightly and the sensation grew. Like small bubbles ballooning and bursting against some invisible apex of her body. And beneath these bubbles, a growing pressure, a warmth, like light, beginning to spread out from that invisible point. The sun warmed her face. Her head reeled in the darkness behind her eyes. She pushed herself into the pressure; the heat on her face fused with the heat between her legs as the largest bubble of all began to bloom. Larger and larger it grew, threatening to burst, to split her body apart. She gripped the concrete. A wave rushed upon her, thrusting her body into the bubble . . .

  “Lily!”

  “What is she doing?”

  “Wait, no! Wait!”

  Lily snapped her eyes open. Panic doused the heat in her body, and she pushed back from the edge, but it was too late. Jenny stood by the side of the pool, her face stricken. Campers gathered at her side, giggling.

  Hazel kicked over. “I didn’t see them coming.”

  Lily swam madly to the shallow end, and climbed out. Her limbs felt like wet rags. Her head spun. The campers were now silent, gaping at her like she was a hideous creature slithering from a swamp. They saw, she thought. They know. She stood on the hot pavement, her bathing suit, dripping hair, and tears forming a puddle on the concrete.

  Jenny led Lily from the pool, cursing, saying she’d be fired. Lily’s head throbbed. Her mouth felt full of water. Why would Jenny be fired? Was it illegal to do that thing with the water jet or just perverted? Would all of Camp Sunshine get kicked out of Water World?

  “I should have been watching you,” Jenny moaned. “Does it hurt? Here’s First Aid.”

  “Jesus!” the lifeguard said when he saw Lily, and led her to a chair.

  “Put your head between your knees, honey,” Jenny coaxed. “Let’s take off those glasses.”

  Light filled Lily’s eyes, and then she saw something that looked like her legs but couldn’t possibly be. Swirling waves of sickness rose in her gut. She began to shiver. Her head lolled on her neck like it was only partially attached. Then it seemed that the entire room—from the chair, to the first-aid cabinet, to Jenny herself—was tipping over.

  Lily opened her eyes to a white cubicle, a white bed, and white curtains. She was stretched out on the bed with damp white cloths covering her arms and legs. Nausea lapped at her, and she was grateful for the blandness of her surroundings. In the space between the bottom of the curtains and the floor, she saw three pairs of shoes in a triangle: her mother’s sandals with the toe that poked through the front like a little tongue, the doctor’s black clogs, heavy and hooflike, and her father’s loafers with their mustache of leather fringe.

  “There’s a good chance that whatever chemicals that place uses to sterilize its water ate right through your daughter’s sunscreen,” a male voice said. “And I’d guess she probably spent some time in direct sunlight. You’ll have to keep an eye out for signs of heat exhaustion.”

  “Heat stroke?” her mother burst out.

  “Heat exhaustion,” the doctor corrected. “Which is significantly less severe.”

  “Heat stroke,” Maureen whimpered.

  Then the feet broke formation and the curtains parted. Lily’s father approached the bed. He reached out his hand as if he was going to touch her forehead, and then quickly retracted it.

  “I want to know what she was doing in that pool!” Maureen demanded from where she cowered behind her husband. Suddenly Lily remembered Jenny and the group of kids pointing at her. She remembered the water jet. Hot, embarrassed tears filled her eyes. And then she remembered Hazel. Hazel was supposed to warn her. But Hazel had betrayed her and said nothing.

  “I want a mirror,” Lily croaked, and the doctor handed the object to Elliott.

  “I don’t want you to be frightened,” he said, and turned the mirror toward her. Maureen shut her eyes. In the instant that Lily saw herself, a billion needles seemed to puncture her arms, legs, and face. She wanted to claw her skin off, but the smallest movement sent searing pains over her body. She recognized the color immediately: Scarlet Letter red.

  After two agonizing weeks spent soaking in oatmeal baths, Lily finally returned to camp. Hazel followed her at a distance all day, floating behind her like a balloon. At the end of the afternoon, after most of the kids had gone home, she approached Lily in the parking lot.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, coming up beside Lily, who was scanning the road for her mother’s car. “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

  Lily said nothing.

  “I got scared when I saw your skin burning.” An urgency had crept into Hazel’s husky voice. “I didn’t know what to do. I’m so sorry, Lily.”

  Lily bit her lip. There was something prickly beneath Hazel’s words, a tightness she hadn’t noticed before.

  “Please, Lily, you have to forgive me!” And all of a sudden Hazel was crying, a messy eruption of tears and phlegm.

  Hazel, who had promised to protect Lily, had lured her out into the sun and then betrayed her. Was she really to believe that Hazel—the same girl who’d shown her the water jet—had been scared?

  Lily’s mother pulled up, and Lily climbed into the car. Hazel continued to weep. Lily watched the girl’s body disappear in the mirror, dissolving into the waves of asphalt heat.

  She’d never told anyone what had really happened at Water World. But the fact that Hazel knew made her feel sick inside.

  Jonah

  November 2012

  I WAS LEADING an Academic League practice after school one afternoon when the door opened and in walked Iris. We all stopped what we were doing and stared. Iris was wearing a gray suit and black heels. Her hair was done up in a bun. She looked like an adult, only smaller.

  “Can I speak to someone from PR?” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I looked at the team. They were thoroughly enjoying this.

  “You know, public relations for the Academic League.”

  “Hey!” I shook my head at the team. “Do you guys want to get back to work?” They resumed their scrimmage prep, but they were keeping one eye on the action. “We don’t have a PR rep, Ms. Dupont. This is just a school club.”

  Iris glanced uncertainly around the room. “Well, I’m considering an immersion story on you guys. I want to spend time with the team and interview them—and you, of course—to get the inside scoop. Hunter S. Thompson style.”

  “You want to write a piece of Gonzo journalism about the Academic League?”

  Iris nodded.

  “If the kids don’t have a problem with you doing some interviews, it’s fine with me.”

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Kaplan. You won’t regret—” But Iris snapped her lips together and stared at me with wide, startled eyes. She then clasped her hands primly and walked out of the room. Something odd was going on with her, but trying to pin down a fourteen-year-old girl’s problems was like trying to identify the exact location of an electron. According to the Observer Effect, the minute you actually looked at the electron, it wasn’t there anymore.

  “Wrap it up, guys. And please,” I implored, “be respectful to Iris when she comes back.”

  The team nodded, reluctantly. You’d have thought the Academic League would be more understanding of Iris’s quirkiness. They weren’t exactly the social crème de la crème. But contrary to popular belief, high school did not run according to a horizontal social hierarchy with the nerds as serfs to the popular despots. The alliances and antagonisms were more complicated than the political dealings of a Third World country. In high school, you never knew who was your enemy and who was your friend.

  Later that evening, Hazel called to make dinner plans. When she suggested the Sidecar Café, however, I panicked. The Sidecar is first-date central. This probably wasn’t a date—I hadn’t seen Hazel in years—but the mere prospect that it might be set my serotonin levels into free fall. I don’t understand your bad luck with women, J
onah, my mother once said. Your father snagged the hottest entomologist in the lab. But my father is an astrophysicist, a field that has ranked at the top of SciGuy Magazine’s Sexiest Scientific Field Index for fifteen years. (Stephen Hawking barely has the use of his hands, but to see the female PhD candidates chasing his electric wheelchair, you’d think he had more sex appeal than James Franco.) Microbiologists rank second to the bottom, only one tier above the comp sci guys who can’t get laid because they only know how to communicate in zeros and ones.

  Still, on the appointed day, I showered and shaved and drove into town to meet Hazel. I rapped my fingers against the wheel, feeling both anxious and sour. It was a dismal night, with an icy rain falling. It seemed that even the atmosphere was pissed off. But succumbing to the pathetic fallacy was my brother’s realm, not mine. I turned up the radio to snap myself out of the funk.

  I turned onto State Street, drove past the library, the Nye Grocery-Drug, Main Street Hardware, and the Decatur Pub, where the science department went to play trivia each week. Nye wasn’t exactly bustling, though we did get a student crowd from the nearby college where my parents had once taught. Tonight, the rain had kept most people indoors.

  The buildings along State Street were reminiscent of Mariana’s gray stone, though they’d been constructed more with medieval implacability than with Gothic flair. The squat, chunky blocks gave the place a thirteenth-century feel, like we were all tribal Scotsmen protecting ourselves from foreign invaders (in this case, antique-hunting Bostonians). Nye required only a fifteen-foot stone wall with flaming torches and a trebuchet plunked down outside the post office.