The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  “You should go,” she said, and led me to the door. I was reluctant to leave at such a tenuous moment, but at least Hazel seemed placated, no longer angry with me. “Happy birthday, Jonah,” she said. “I’m happy you’re here.” Then she kissed me a final time.

  I’d never be my brother, but I was the closest Hazel would ever get to him. Without me, I wasn’t sure she had anything else.

  Iris

  December 2012

  I WAS MAKING myself a salad in the refectory when Peter sidled up to me carrying a tray with seven glasses of juice. He didn’t play any sports, but he drank like a jock. He said nothing, just shadowed me as I piled tomatoes and cucumbers and feta cheese onto my plate. Then he followed me to the other side of the bar, where I added dressing. “Do you want something?” I snapped.

  “How’s your investigation going?”

  “You mean in the last fifteen hours? Half of which I spent sleeping?”

  I wasn’t pissed at Peter, but the video I’d watched the night before had given me awful dreams and kept me tossing for half the night. Lily was no longer a figment. She was an actual person whose skin was pale as a fish belly-up on the beach. But even though I saw her more clearly, I didn’t know her any better. Which side was she on? Was she acting or was she the victim of a cruel prank? And regardless, how could she have declared such vicious things about Justin Kaplan, even in jest? Sacrificial Lamb was like absurdist theater, and it had the mark of Prisom’s Party all over it. I tried to follow up with Veronica Mercy, but she’d turned off her phone.

  “A lot can happen in a night, Iris.” Peter’s voice shook me back to the present.

  “Is that some kind of innuendo?”

  “No.”

  Iris Dupont, you are an idiot, I thought as I headed to my table. It was the one day each month that students were allowed to sit wherever they wanted, and I’d been looking forward to forty-five minutes of uninterrupted reading. But Peter followed me and sat down.

  “You’re actually on page 623 of this thing?” He pointed to the Mike Wallace bookmark tucked inside Marvelous Species.

  I grabbed the book from him. “I’m supplementing my biology homework.”

  “Mr. Kaplan’s class.” He nodded. “I see.”

  “You see what?”

  “You were going through his desk yesterday. You’re after something.”

  I was trying to get inside Mr. Kaplan’s mind, but I couldn’t tell Peter that. “There are some people here who are suspicious of Mr. Kaplan,” I said. “But they just don’t understand him.”

  “And you do?”

  I told Peter Hazel’s theory about kindred spirits, omitting the details about Dalia and Justin’s possible suicide. As he listened, his face changed; his eyes widened like something was welling up inside of him and was about to burst out. “What’s going on?” I said. “Are you okay?”

  Peter nodded. He looked upset but asked me to continue. Finally I told him about Mr. Kaplan’s reaction to the four-eyed demon.

  “That kind of behavior is bizarre, Iris. Especially for a teacher.”

  Which is precisely why you must keep your friends and your sources separate, Murrow added, his voice floating down from the refectory’s cathedral-like windows. Your emotions will cloud your judgment. You cannot allow that to happen.

  I know! I thought back. I’m a woman of action, remember? I was frustrated with Murrow. It was worrisome how frequently he’d been popping up, whether I wanted him there or not. Was this the anxiety and depression that Dr. Patrick had warned about?

  “I’m sure Mr. Kaplan is a good person,” Peter continued. “But you don’t know what mental and emotional problems he’s suffering from. I mean crying, throwing things . . .”

  “You think he’s dangerous?”

  “Definitely unstable. What do you know about him, really?”

  I looked down at my salad. The connection between me and Mr. Kaplan was as ephemeral as Murrow’s cigarette smoke.

  “Do you think . . .” Peter began, then paused and ducked his head. “I mean—I was thinking, I could help you.”

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “I don’t think you should be on this investigation alone. Not because you can’t take care of yourself,” he added quickly. “It just seems . . .”

  I waited.

  “Well, it seems like you could use a friend.”

  I nodded, and Peter looked as though he’d just run a marathon—relieved and a little bit sick to his stomach.

  I wrote to the Party about the contents of Mr. Kaplan’s desk. We are planning to bring you back soon, they responded. Keep the intel coming.

  After school I interviewed more Academic League students, slipping in questions about Mr. Kaplan. I learned his favorite food (tuna), his favorite element of the periodic table (lithium), and his favorite extremophile (radiation-resistant, salt-loving halophiles), but no helpful clues about his past. After practice, Peter asked if I wanted to go get some coffee.

  “Like a date?” I said.

  His face colored. “Maybe.”

  “Can we go to the public library instead?”

  “Jesus, Iris. You’re a workaholic.”

  I love old libraries. Scrolling through microfilm is like hunting through history, and the clickety-click of the spool is the sound of progress. Also, if I was simply searching the Internet at home, my voicemail recording wouldn’t have to say, You’ve reached Iris Dupont, reporter for the Mariana Academy Oracle. I am out searching for the truth.

  Peter and I found a few stories about Mr. Kaplan’s dead brother. He was killed in a car crash at approximately 4 a.m. on May 2, 2000, in a “head-on collision due to severe weather conditions.” We found nothing about the location of the accident or what the car had hit.

  “I suspect foul play,” Peter joked.

  Or suicide, I thought, remembering my conversation with Veronica Mercy. My gut began doing a salad-spinner maneuver. If Justin had seen Sacrificial Lamb or found out about it, might that have caused him to end his life?

  While Peter made a phone call, I looked up information for my Charles Prisom story. In my excitement I’d nearly forgotten that this assignment was supposed to be my cover for the Prisom’s Party investigation, and my deadline was approaching. Hazel had still not located Charles Prisom’s letters, and a microfilm search yielded nothing new. Then I ran a search for Dantes and Rex. Nothing came up. Until I found this:

  PRESTIGIOUS SCHOOL REOPENS AS DAY ACADEMY

  by Charles Collingwood

  July 13, 1940

  NYE—Seventeen years ago, Mariana Academy, a boarding school for boys, closed its doors amid financial scandal. When it reopens this September, it will do so as a co-ed day school—but its new school board promises to continue the focus on academic achievement that once made Mariana one of New England’s most prestigious preparatory institutions.

  “Our student body has changed, but the values at the heart of Mariana remain,” said Edward Dumas, chairman of the school board, during yesterday’s announcement of the school’s reopening. “We expect the best of our students, both in mind and morals. That’s what Mariana founder Charles Prisom stood for, and it’s what we’re committed to.”

  Mariana closed at the conclusion of the 1922–23 school year, after its board discovered that then-board president Thaddius Reginald had covered up the school’s sinking finances—$1.2 million of debt. Reginald had already shut down most student clubs and athletics in a desperate attempt to save money, and students and faculty grew suspicious. The school board voted to depose its president, and Mariana’s headmaster resigned. Lacking leadership and finances, the board closed the school indefinitely.

  I read the article three times. Each time, the salad-spinner feeling swelled. Edward Dumas and Thaddius Reginald. A budget deficit? The Oracle shut down for financial reasons, not to suppress free speech? Was this a joke? The oppressive headmaster, the Devil’s Advocate, the tussle culminating in Rex’s gruesome death—all of it inven
tion. The microfilm article included a picture of Thaddius Reginald, and sure enough, it matched the picture of Thelonius Rex I’d seen in the Party’s book. Prisom’s Party had promised never to leave me, but these lies felt worse than abandonment.

  “Are you having fun on our date?” Peter said, returning. “We could hit the Northern Massachusetts Grammarians’ Hall of Fame or the Nye County Historical Society. I hear they have an excellent display of pewter spoons.”

  In fact, I was eager to visit Hazel. I needed her help.

  “You don’t really want to go there?” Peter said in response to my silence.

  I shook my head, because the truth was, the thought of taking Peter to see Hazel made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to share Hazel with anyone else, and, I was starting to realize, I didn’t want to share Peter either. “I’m going to take a walk,” I said.

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed, like I might be heading to a tryst at the local postage-stamp museum. I was starting to think there were two Peter McCaffreys: one of them awkward, the other confident. But there were multiple versions of me, too. The brazen girl, the shy girl, the good girl, and the grieving girl. Could all of these personalities exist in an integrated whole, or would one ultimately take over? And what if the wrong identity asserted itself?

  Peter and I stood on the library steps, our hands thrust into our pockets. “This was the best fake date I’ve ever been on,” he said.

  “Yup,” I said. “Let’s do it again.” We looked at each other.

  “Will you let me know if you find out anything else about Mr. Kaplan’s brother?”

  I nodded.

  “When I said I wanted to help you . . .” He looked at the muddy library steps, then back into my eyes. “Well, I meant it.”

  But if Dantes and Rex were lies, what was I trying to find?

  “Iris?”

  I looked up and was struck by a terrifying notion: Peter was going to kiss me. “Well,” I heard myself say, “see you in school.” Then I bounded down the steps. Idiot, idiot, idiot! I thought as I walked through town. You fumbled your first kiss. That would have been a story for your grandkids, but you ruined it.

  Dejected, I picked my way along the splotchy patches of snow, trying to keep the snow mush off my shoes. Prisom’s Party had seemed so serious about their book of historical documents, but it was all an elaborate ruse.

  Twenty minutes later, I puffed my way up Hazel’s steep, snowy drive. But when I was level with the house I froze. Hazel and Mr. Kaplan stood on the porch, kissing. I slipped behind a couple of trees. Mr. Kaplan buried his face in Hazel’s neck and she ruffled his hair. They kissed again. Then she went back inside and he drove away.

  I felt like I’d been punched in the chest and my heart had exploded into small bits of muscle and blood. It was just like Veronica Mercy told me. Don’t trust any of those Trench freaks. I dug my fists into the snow until my knuckles burned. Hazel was allowed to have a boyfriend, and why not Mr. Kaplan? But she’d lied to me too, telling me they hadn’t seen each other in years. All the times I’d worried about her, she’d been just fine with Mr. Kaplan for company.

  I scooped up a fistful of snow, packed it into a hard ball, and hurled it at the front door. It missed and hit the window. I packed another ball and threw it. I wasn’t wearing my gloves, and my fingers were red and raw. I wished the snow was harder and sharper. I wished it could cut my skin and make me bleed. I wished I had enough blood to turn Hazel’s front yard red.

  I sank into the snow. What had made Dalia slit her wrists? Was it just a side effect of the medication, or did she really believe that letting herself drain away was the better option? The only option. And how would things be different if, at the moment she decided to step into the bathtub, I’d been there?

  I wiped the tears from my face. I had no right to cry. Hazel hadn’t lied to me; she just hadn’t told me the entire truth. Well, I hadn’t told her the whole truth either. She had no idea that I was a Prisom’s Party operative.

  Jonah

  December 2012

  To our Fearless Leader, Garrison Pasternak:

  We declare a vote of No Confidence.

  Sincerely,

  Prisom’s Party

  “It was on my desk when I came in this morning,” Pasternak said, handing me the note. It was currently morning, but Pasternak arrived as early as 7 a.m., and he’d intercepted me when I walked into the building. Now he motioned me to his side of the desk, his expression grave. “I turned on my computer to find this.”

  He angled the screen toward me. I saw a grotesque caricature of Pasternak, his rheumy eyes ringed red and his teeth yellowed and rotting. A word bubble from his mouth said, Come and tour my school.

  “It’s the Mariana home page,” he said.

  The last time I’d checked, the school’s website displayed photographs of our campus, populated by children resembling a United Colors of Benetton commercial. But now Pasternak clicked on the word bubble and a new page appeared. Up came the football team’s hazing photos. Pasternak clicked again. Here were pictures of a man sitting at a computer, his hands clutching his erect penis, his eyes rolled back in his head. Pasternak clicked. Here was the wreckage from the Prisom Artifacts, over which Matt Sheridan stood with a baseball bat. Another click: the three hanged figures burning in effigy—Brotherhood, Truth, and Equality.

  “I’ve left a dozen messages for the IT guy,” Pasternak said. “He won’t pick up his cell.”

  “So you need me to take the site down?”

  “Don’t be flip, Jonah. Not now.” Pasternak paused. “You can take it down?”

  I told Pasternak what I needed to make the site go away, and he found me the relevant passwords. I sat down at his desk to operate. I typed in the FTP log-in and password, and the inner workings of the school’s website loaded onto the screen. “I’m not going to be able to put the old site back,” I said. “You’ll have to find your tech guy for that.”

  Pasternak didn’t answer. He stood by the window, watching the students get out of their parents’ cars and lumber up the steps. Each kid wore a monstrous backpack, a kind of freak-show stomach that grew from the wrong side of the body, and was grossly distended with academic glut: The Annals of America (dubbed The Anals) and the Norton Anthology of Every Last Word in the English Language.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m finished.”

  Pasternak turned, his face dour. “What happened to this place, Jonah?”

  What was I supposed to tell the man? He was talking about Mariana as though a golden age once existed. And maybe it had, early on, when Prisom’s vision was still pure. But more likely there’d never been such an era. Most good things in life came prepackaged with nostalgia; otherwise nobody would appreciate anything. But maybe I wasn’t giving the headmaster enough credit. Maybe he was only trying to survive in this hostile environment as best he could. Just like the rest of us.

  That afternoon I sat at my desk in the science department, perusing the old Devil’s Advocates that Pasternak had given me. I flipped through pictures of Matt Sheridan, a baseball bat in his hand, his face twisted in anger. In another picture he bent over a small fire smoldering amid piles of smashed glass. I looked through the photos of Jeffrey Franks. These had not come out in a Devil’s Advocate but were mailed in an anonymous envelope to Pasternak over the summer. Franks had not been set up like Matt Sheridan; months of pornography traffic showed up on his office computer. The photos before me now displayed Franks at his desk, ogling wide-eyed Japanese cartoon women, their breasts and asses like flesh-colored beach balls, their limbs entwined with tentacles. The expression on his face was nauseating. He sat right here at my desk, I thought, and shuddered.

  But where had the photos of Franks come from? Prisom’s Party could have stolen footage of Sheridan from the school’s security cameras, but there was no reason for such cameras in the science department. This meant a photographer had been in the office at the time. But that seemed unlikely. I could see someone hiding
behind Franks’s chair, snapping pictures of his computer screen, but what about the photographs of his face and lap? The only way to get those shots would be to stand in front of Franks, on his desk. This was a mystery, but one I could solve.

  When my brother died, the police called the car crash a weather-related accident. My parents weren’t convinced. They knew Justin. Only seven months earlier, he’d put himself on crutches by slamming his foot against a wall. After that, a shrink had given him a bottle of antidepressants, but Justin refused to take them. He said he didn’t need them, that he didn’t want chemicals dictating his behavior.

  “You masochistic moron,” I’d said. “You must really like being unhappy.”

  “I like being me,” he said.

  If Justin’s history wasn’t reason enough to doubt the police report, my parents also knew how distraught he was over losing the final round of the Academic League semifinals—a tournament for which he’d spent months preparing. There were enough insinuating factors to make my parents wonder whether, in the moments before impact, my brother had pressed the accelerator instead of the brake.

  The police agreed to leave the car alone for forty-eight hours, the exact period of time Jewish law allots mourners to bury the deceased. My father spent those two days in the bitter cold, measuring and analyzing Justin’s car tracks and the black ice at the crash site. He covered sheets of paper with calculations, becoming so consumed that the earth ceased to be made of hard matter but dissolved into angles and degrees. A purely mathematical plane. He was hoping to draw a line from the impact point backward up the street, thereby determining whether the crash was accidental (Justin hit black ice and lost control) or intentional (Justin hit a metaphorical wall, past which his life, the planet, the very universe, dissolved into nothing). Like my father, I would now measure the angles at which Prisom’s Party captured Franks with his pants down, and those angles would show me where the photographer had hidden.