The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  I gasped, but Mr. Kaplan hadn’t heard me. He stood with his back to me, heaving like a boxer readying for the next round. I thought about the night I’d thrown my phone against the wall and how furious I’d been. How all I’d wanted to do was smash something to bits.

  I walked into the AL practice that afternoon terrified that Mr. Kaplan would take one look at me and know that I’d spied on him in the Trench. Instead, his face lit up like a Times Square display. “Meet your interview subject, Ms. Dupont. Our newest team member, Peter McCaffrey.”

  When I saw Peter’s rag-doll body, untucked shirt, and sheepish expression, I suppressed a groan. Peter was a couple of years older than me, and his locker was near mine. He always seemed to be hanging around whenever I retrieved books, loitering like a vagrant. Since school started, I hadn’t heard him utter so much as a compound sentence.

  I sat down at the back of the classroom and motioned for Peter to join me. I thought the kid might have potential in the looks department—if he stood up straight and looked you in the eye. So far, I hadn’t been able to test this theory.

  “Have fun!” Mr. Kaplan said, like he was sending us off on a date.

  I held out my digital recorder. “Could you please state your name, age, and year at school?” Peter mumbled his answer. He was sweating. “So, tell me why you joined the Academic League,” I said.

  Peter drew circles on the desk with his finger. “Thought I’d try something new.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m at least going to need you to speak in complete sentences.”

  A droplet of sweat rolled down the side of his face. He swept his dark hair from his eyes and waited for the next question. He had a bomb defuser’s look of intense concentration.

  “What kind of coach is Mr. Kaplan?” I asked.

  “Manic.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s on hyperdrive. Everything is super important with him, super serious, like our lives are at stake in here.” Peter glanced behind him, where Mr. Kaplan was indeed gesticulating at the team members like he was preparing them for battle. Then I saw him catch Peter’s eye and give a conspiratorial nod. Peter was so obviously a plant, chosen by Mr. Kaplan to observe my behavior. Perhaps this was the reason he’d been loitering around my locker. But I was on to him.

  I asked Peter mundane questions about the AL to throw him off track. Then I thanked him for his time and left. I went immediately to the science department.

  I walked over to Mr. Kaplan’s desk and opened the drawer. I’d become disconcertingly comfortable with snooping since arriving in Nye.

  “I’d say you’ve become disconcertingly comfortable with a number of things.”

  I turned to see Murrow smoking in a swivel chair, perusing a biology textbook. I gasped. Had I subconsciously summoned him?

  “You’re really about to search through a man’s desk?” he said. “You’re a journalist, Iris, not a detective.”

  “This is hard enough for me without your input,” I said, trying to shake my unease.

  “You can’t make good reporting out of bad practice.”

  “I have to do this. I need access. Didn’t you recently advise me not to think of Mr. Kaplan as a friend?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean you should invade his privacy.”

  “What else am I supposed to do?”

  Murrow looked around for an ashtray and, finding none, tapped his cigarette into the textbook. “The world blackens even the most innocent hearts,” he murmured.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  I whipped around. Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit. SHIT! Peter walked into the office and sat down in Mr. Kaplan’s chair.

  “Mr. Kaplan asked me to look for something,” I said, glancing at the chair where Murrow had been. It was empty.

  I pulled a stack of Oracles and old yearbooks from Mr. Kaplan’s desk, affecting an air of purpose. Peter said nothing. He just swiveled.

  “You want to cut that out?”

  Peter swiveled to a stop. “I’m not going to tell on you, Iris.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Did I offend you?”

  “I don’t like people spying on me.”

  “I came to get note cards.” Peter looked genuinely hurt. I thought Mr. Kaplan had sent him to follow me, but maybe that wasn’t true. “And anyway,” he added, “you’re a hypocrite, going through Mr. Kaplan’s desk.”

  I stared at him, fuming. I had no rebuttal. “Sorry I snapped at you,” I said.

  Peter looked surprised. “It’s okay. I’m working on a project for my engineering major on digital modeling and video surveillance.”

  “Spying,” I said, and smiled.

  Peter leaned over me. “Hey, can you hand me one of those newspapers?” But he’d already grabbed one. “These bylines say Justin Kaplan,” he said, rustling the pages. “Who’s that?”

  “Mr. Kaplan’s brother?”

  “Mr. Kaplan doesn’t have a brother. He told me at Thanksgiving he’s an only child.”

  I looked up. Peter had spent Thanksgiving with Mr. Kaplan? He’d had an opportunity to sit at the same table with Mr. Kaplan for hours, talking like two regular people? Only Peter had probably wasted the opportunity. He could have delved the depths of Mr. Kaplan’s brain, but he probably just sat there, pushing his turkey around. I was phenomenally jealous. “Maybe there were two Kaplan families at Mariana?” But I knew how unlikely this was.

  Peter knelt beside me and my pulse jumped. He reached across me—static from his sweater giving me a shock—and picked up one of the yearbooks. He flipped through the opening pages. “Look at this, Iris. Right here!” He tapped the book. The heading read, In Memoriam. Justin Kaplan: 1983–2000. Below a portrait showed a plaintive face with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes.

  Mr. Kaplan’s brother was dead? Something fluttered in my chest, something that pushed against the muscle.

  “They were twins.” Peter pointed to a photo of two boys beneath a banner that read, Happy Fourteenth, Justin and Jonah. “Fraternal.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “You know, Iris, I’m not even upset that you’re being rude. And the reason I don’t care”—Peter paused and took a deep breath—“is that I like you, Iris.”

  I looked at him, stunned. Dalia, I thought, a boy likes me. And I almost burst into tears. Because I wanted to run and tell her. Because she should have been here and she wasn’t. Keep it together, Dupont! I ordered myself. I grabbed the yearbook from Peter’s hands and returned it to Mr. Kaplan’s desk drawer. Then I jumped up and headed for the door. The song on loop in my head was: I like you, Iris. I like you, Iris. I like you.

  I should have been happy that a boy liked me, especially a cute one. But I just wanted Peter to back off. He was a distraction. He made me uneasy. He was confusing. But he followed me, trailing through the halls and into the Trench stairwell. “You’re going down there?” he asked.

  At this point I should have opened the black door and locked Peter out. But my body was jittery with a feeling somewhere between anger and elation. It was as if some other girl—a much more experienced girl—had usurped my identity. And that girl liked the thrill of taking this boy somewhere she shouldn’t. That girl liked the idea of giving Peter a hard time.

  “Buck up and be a man,” I said, and felt quite satisfied with myself until I realized that “buck up” is a cliché and, worse, refers to the rutting season for deer, when stags fight each other for the attention of fertile females. The last thing I wanted was for Peter to put me and fertility anywhere in the same Zip Code.

  “But how are you going to get in?” he asked.

  The girl, the one who was me but not me, held up Katie Milford’s key and dangled it in front of Peter’s face.

  “But the rumors . . .”

  “Poor Peter’s scared,” the new girl said, and laughed, because Peter had no idea what was really in the Trench. But I did know, so I was happy to have him with me. As much as I wa
nted Prisom’s Party to take me back into its lair, I wasn’t in the mood for a kidnapping.

  Sure enough, the Oracles in Mr. Kaplan’s desk were missing from the archives. Was grief the reason he’d removed the newspapers with his brother’s byline? Why he’d lied to Peter about being an only child? But Justin had been dead for twelve years.

  Twelve years from now I’d be twenty-six, which seemed inconceivable. I already felt that the older I grew, the farther I traveled from Dalia. I saw her growing distant in my memory, like an object in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t imagine looking back and no longer being able to see her.

  “Are you okay, Iris?”

  I’d almost forgotten Peter was there. We were standing outside the archives, so close together that I could smell the detergent on his clothes. A freckle in his left eye sparkled like a speck of gold, and the confident girl of a few minutes before had vanished. “Look at this!” I said. I hadn’t planned on showing him the demon, but I needed to squash the awkwardness between us.

  “Holy shit,” Peter said when I’d finished unstacking the chairs. “That’s the same picture as in the bathrooms.”

  “I know. But it looks like it’s been here for a long time. See how the paint’s faded?”

  “I can’t believe you’ve been hanging around down here by yourself.”

  Peter spoke with such sincerity that my stomach dropped like a water-filled balloon and went splat. I like you, I like you, I—I shook my head a little, hoping to empty Peter’s words from my brain. Meanwhile, the demon went on grinning, its mouth wide and dark. I felt an amorphous fear as though some ill-intentioned force was leading me along. And where did that path lead? Well, I thought, you’re staring at it! These four eyes, this gaping mouth. It seemed only a matter of time before the monstrous mouth sucked me in and swallowed me whole.

  Peter stepped closer. He was tall, I realized. Very tall. “Iris?” He touched my shoulder, and thousands of shocks zipped through my body.

  “I have to go,” I stammered, and fled.

  Coming out of the Trench was like surfacing from a mineshaft, and as I climbed the stairs, I realized I’d made an important discovery. I now knew the origin of my ineffable connection with Mr. Kaplan—what he’d seen in me that first day at the ice cream social and what continued to bind us together over the weeks and months. He’d lost his brother, his twin. I’d lost my best and only friend. Our pain was the same. I stopped in the middle of the hallway. Students walked by on their way to sports practices and play rehearsal. The ordinary afterschool world in motion.

  Reporter, not friend. Don’t forget what you are.

  Whose thought was this? Murrow’s or mine? There was an acrid smell in the hallway. Camel cigarettes? I looked around, but there was no one there.

  I’d come to think of the third-floor handicapped stall as my private hideaway. The stall was spacious with a wide ledge above the heater on which I could curl up like a cat. I settled in and called Hazel. I was nervous about talking to her after our awkward parting on Thanksgiving. But we were friends, I reasoned, and friends checked in with each other.

  “Are you all right?” she asked when she picked up the phone. Hearing her concern, I felt silly for worrying.

  “Actually, I wanted to ask you something.” I explained about locating Justin Kaplan in an old yearbook. “And I have this feeling that Mr. Kaplan’s trying to hide his brother, or is pretending he never had one.”

  There was a long silence on Hazel’s end. “What makes you think he’s pretending that?” she said finally.

  “Well, a friend of mine overheard him say he’s an only child. Plus he removed all references to Justin from the Oracle archives. What happened to Mr. Kaplan’s brother, Hazel?”

  “Car accident.” She paused again, and I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. “Grief has a way of worming inside of some people, Iris, burrowing into their heart’s core. Sometimes when a person’s in pain, he’ll behave in uncharacteristic ways. Dangerous ways, even.” She paused. “But you know all of this already, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” I swallowed. “I guess I do.”

  “If you need me,” she said, “you should call. Any time.”

  I thanked her and we hung up. Outside, I saw two girls walking arm in arm across the playing field toward the Outpost, the old dorm at the edge of campus where upperclassmen went to smoke. I followed the girls as they made their jaunty trip across the field, and I remembered my parents coming into my bedroom in Beacon Hill last December saying, “We have something to tell you.” I knew right away what had happened. And before they said another word, I started asking, How? But they wouldn’t tell me. They were always trying to protect me. So I screamed, HOW? And finally my dad turned his left palm over and tapped his wrist, like he was giving me some stupid baseball sign. Where is she? I screamed. I need to see her! I jumped up and ran out the front door, even though I wasn’t wearing shoes. And I started running down the street toward Dalia’s house, though she lived many blocks away. My feet burned with cold, but I kept going until my dad caught me in the middle of our street. He swung me into his arms like I was a baby, and carried me back to our house. I kicked and screamed the way Dalia had the night she’d run into the cold, wearing almost nothing. And I kept screaming for her and crying, and my parents sat in my room all night long because they didn’t trust me to be in there alone. Not long after that, they sent me to Dr. Patrick.

  Hazel talked about grief like it was a carnivorous parasite, destroying the person you’d been before it infected you. And it was true. Who was I, sneaking around and lying to people? Was I even a good person anymore? And did I even care? The girls down below disappeared into the trees. At that moment, I wanted nothing more in life than to be out there with Dalia, arm in arm, escaping into the woods.

  Jonah

  November 2012

  WHEN IT COMES to problem solving, I’ve always preferred written materials. Unless I’m out in nature or working in a lab, inanimate sources are more efficient and they eliminate the inherent awkwardness of face-to-face interaction. But sometimes you just need a live source, a conclusion I came to after rooting around in my parents’ house and coming up with nothing relevant to my Prisom’s Party mission.

  The week after Thanksgiving, I headed out to Melville, Vermont, a small, lifeless town over the state line. I was going to talk with Matt Sheridan, the student who had supposedly destroyed the Prisom Artifacts. “Melville’s worse than the state pen,” Matt told me over the phone. “This boarding school is like the sixth circle of hell. Get me out of here for a night, and I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

  I drove along winding roads, past forests of brittle trees and shadows sprawled across snow. I should have been preparing for my interview, but I couldn’t stop worrying about Iris’s drawing test. Her reliance on the scientific method reminded me of a book I’d read, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story. The author, a Scottish chemist, had conflated scientific exploration with detective work. He’d even opened his book with a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder if my curriculum—investigating the distant past—had somehow encouraged Iris to look into my past. I’d told my students to think for themselves, to strike out for the unknown. And Iris, unfortunately, was doing just that.

  The locker vandalism that she’d discovered almost caused a student’s death. If I was again associated with the incident, my PhD could not protect me from the ensuing parental wrath. At the same time, I was heartened to see Iris getting along with Peter. Individually they were unstable elements—say, sodium metal and chlorine gas. Bonded together, they’d be predictable as salt.

  Matt Sheridan was skinnier than I expected him to be. He had an archetypal prep school face—chiseled cheekbones—but with ears just a little too large for his head. The Melville School had not been good to him. He walked from the dormitory to the parking lot with the defeated hunch of a person who’d once stood up straight.
r />   “Sometimes I wish I’d stayed at Mariana,” he said, absently drumming his fingers on the window as we drove through town.

  “That bad out here?” But it was clear. The buildings were dark. A factory must have shut down sometime in the last decade and the town shuttered with it. The Melville School no longer had a good reputation.

  “Melville’s super strict,” Matt said. “But I deserve it, right, Mr. Kaplan?”

  Was he being sarcastic? This was not the jerk Rick Rayburn had led me to expect. I didn’t know how to respond. “Call me Jonah,” I said.

  “I prefer Mr. Kaplan,” Matt said. “If you don’t mind.” He turned away and stared out the window.

  The diner—the only one in town—glowed like a fluorescent fish tank. The booths were sheathed in sea-green vinyl that made a crackling sound whenever we shifted our weight. In the awful light, I could see the hollow depressions of Matt’s cheeks. His eyes were red, as though soaked in chlorinated water.

  “You look tired,” I said. Matt shrugged. The hamburger he ordered arrived on a waxy bun. It resembled a child’s mud pie. I dumped a couple thimblefuls of half-and-half into my coffee.

  “So you went to Mariana?” he said, chewing. “Did you like it?”

  “It was a good education.”

  Matt flashed a snide smile. “Exactly. A good education, and a shitty everything else.”

  “Matt, what happened with the Devil’s Advocate?”

  “Not one for smooth transitions, huh? But okay. Which version of the story you want?”

  “All of them,” I said.

  The official account was exactly what Mary Ann had described. A week after the destruction of the Prisom Artifacts, a Devil’s Advocate published photos of Matt smashing glass and burning the Community Code booklet. The headline ran: MARIANA COMMUNITY COUNCIL PRESIDENT STRIKES SYMBOLIC BLOW AT COMMUNITY CODE. “Matt Sheridan knows better than anyone that the Community Code means nothing these days,” he quoted to me now. “His violent act smashed glass and the veneer of Brotherhood, Truth, and Equality for All.” Matt snickered. “Their use of zeugma was a little forced, don’t you think, Mr. Kaplan?”