The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

He smiled. “So are dates at the public library.”

  I didn’t laugh, and twisted away.

  “Hear me out, Iris.”

  I turned from him. My teeth were chattering and my toes felt glued together.

  “You can walk away right now. I won’t stop you. Or you can take just a few steps forward—with me.”

  “You lied to me!” I whirled around. “You made up that whole story about Dantes and Rex. I read the truth in the newspapers.”

  “Now, just a second,” he said. “We did no such thing.”

  “But—”

  “Iris, newspapers get things wrong—and they lie. You saw yourself how Elliott Morgan controlled the information about Justin’s death, how Pasternak kept the burning effigies out of the local press. If I’m wrong about all this, it’s not on purpose, and I will swear to you on Edward Murrow’s grave if you want me to.”

  I was heaving mad. “Murrow and I are on hiatus,” I said.

  “Then I swear on Prisom’s grave.”

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “You’ll see really soon.” He pulled me in. I felt small and very confused.

  “Are you—I mean, is this—part of the initiation?”

  Peter shook his head. “This was a coincidence. I’d been trying to talk to you for months. And finally Prisom’s Party gave me an excuse.”

  “Come on. You were never really shy. You were pretending.”

  Peter shook his head. “You know how superheroes are inept in their regular lives, but become extraordinary once they put on the cape? The Party changes you. You’ll see.”

  I looked up into his eyes. I didn’t want to change. But Peter gave me an encouraging nod, so I stepped away to call home and tell my mother I was sleeping at Hazel’s. She was so excited that she didn’t even complain about it being a school night.

  In silence, Peter and I continued through the woods. The darkness curved over us like a dome, the snow falling faster and faster, thousands of flakes swirling out of the black. I felt disoriented, trapped in a snow globe, frantic to figure out whether Peter had dropped any clues about his involvement in the Party. Could I have recognized his voice from the kidnapping? His body? My attraction to him had scrambled my perceptive powers. What if he was lying even now? I looked up at him and he smiled, his face dopey with happiness.

  Soon the trees parted and a stone building rose before us. Before I could get a good look at it, Peter led me down a flight of stairs and into a basement. He pulled a bandana out of his pocket. “After the initiation, you won’t need this for going in or out.” I nodded, and Peter tied the blindfold around my head. He walked me forward, up a set of stairs, and down a long hallway. I began to hear voices. A moment later, the voices stopped.

  “Voilà!” Peter pulled off the blindfold. I was standing in what appeared to be a college dorm, lit by a single desk lamp and a string of Christmas lights strung around the cinderblock perimeter. There were two metal bed frames with dirty mattresses.

  “Welcome,” Julia said. She sat on one of the beds dressed in a heavy sweater, ripped jeans, argyle socks, and, of course, the pig mask.

  “Ma fleur,” said Syme. He sat beside Julia with a beer in his lap.

  “French? That’s kind of affected, don’t you think?”

  “O poisonous flower! How she wounds.” Syme clasped his hands to his chest.

  “Shut up.” Peter took my hand.

  “Help yourself to a drink,” Julia said, pointing to a six-pack on the desk.

  I’d have expected Prisom’s Party to favor martinis or scotch, not to mention more elegant accommodations; they had seemed so mysterious and sophisticated. I felt disappointed.

  “You guys should get started,” Peter said. “O’Brien and I have some work to do, but I’ll be close by.” Peter kissed me on the cheek and left.

  Julia motioned for me to sit down on the bed. I perched on the mattress edge, avoiding a large yellow stain. I wanted some time to think things through. My mind was working furiously, trying to figure out where we were. The Outpost—the old school dormitory—seemed the logical answer, but then why had Peter picked me up from school in his car? Why not just cut across the back fields? Moreover, during the kidnapping, I was pretty sure they hadn’t carried me outside.

  “We’ve all taken an oath of loyalty to Prisom’s Party,” Julia said. She sat cross-legged on her bed, her elbows resting on her knees. We could have been college roommates sharing late-night stories, except, of course, for her mask. “Prisom’s Party learned long ago that swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not effective. People have a tendency to break their promises. So with each person we induct, we make a tape.”

  I did not like where this was going.

  “It has long been the tradition that each new member swears against the person he or she cares for most—the one individual we least want to hurt.”

  When she said this, I immediately thought of Sacrificial Lamb. Had the scene of Lily swearing against Justin been her Prisom’s Party initiation?

  “Should any of us decide we’re unhappy with Prisom’s Party or our responsibilities therein, we’ll have to think very carefully about exposing the group. Think of it as a kind of mutual assured deterrence.”

  “In the past, members wrote their confessionals in books—but of course,” Syme added gleefully, “videos are much better at keeping members loyal, what with our ability to disseminate the material widely via the Internet.”

  “But before your confessional,” Julia said, “we have something to show you.”

  She opened a laptop on the desk and turned it toward me. I was looking at an image of the school lobby. Then Mr. Kaplan walked into the frame. He glanced around and headed for the Jimmy Get Well table, where he bent over the lockbox.

  “You’re using the school’s security cameras to spy on people?”

  “These are our special cameras,” Julia said. “We’re a security force of sorts. It’s basic surveillance.”

  So the Party had been following me. All those times I’d descended into the Trench, they’d been watching. When I’d first shown Marvelous Species to Mr. Kaplan in the library, they’d been watching.

  “Keep your eye on the screen, ma petite fleur,” Syme lisped.

  Mr. Kaplan’s back was turned toward the camera, so I couldn’t see what he was doing. When he finally stood up and moved aside, the lid on Jimmy’s lockbox stood upright.

  Syme snorted. “Surprise!”

  Mr. Kaplan pulled out a bag and dumped the money in. The picture blacked out, and when it returned, I was looking at the science department office. Mr. Kaplan cleared his desk and then poured the money onto it: all the donations collected over months and including many bills.

  Mr. Kaplan ran his fingers through the pile, elated as a kid in a sandbox. Then he dumped it all back into the bag. A few moments later the screen went black.

  “Nine p.m.,” Julia said. “The school lights went out.”

  I looked at her and Syme. “It’s a mistake.”

  Syme shook his head. “This happened tonight. Do you need further verification from your lover boy? We can get Petey back in here.”

  “I could turn you all in, you know. Now that I know who ‘Winston’ is.”

  Julia shook her head. “If you tell anyone about us, Peter will have a total memory lapse. He has a video, too, and he doesn’t want it released.”

  I wondered who Peter had confessed against. I didn’t think I’d known him long enough for it to be me.

  “Your irreproachable teacher has shown his true colors.”

  That’s a fucking cliché, I thought. I wanted to punch Syme in the face.

  “You still believe he’s innocent.” Julia sat down next to me. “You believe there must be a reasonable explanation for what he’s done.”

  She was right. Could Mr. Kaplan need a couple hundred dollars so badly that he’d steal from a kid’s cancer fund?

  “And that’s because he’s the p
erson you believe in most,” Julia continued. “The whole time you’ve been working for us, you haven’t really believed Mr. Kaplan was capable of wrongdoing. And you still don’t.”

  “Confessing against Mr. Kaplan will make me a full member of Prisom’s Party?”

  “Almost,” Julia said. “Tomorrow we’re putting out a Devil’s Advocate about Mr. Kaplan’s little transgression, and you get to distribute the papers.”

  “You said you weren’t trying to get him fired. You said—”

  “That was before we witnessed his act of corruption. Circumstances have changed.”

  On a 1951 episode of This I Believe, Murrow said, “There is a creeping fear of doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.” So much of what I’d seen in the last few weeks had been false. No wonder I’d been doubting myself, fearing that the dark force of my grief was directing me. The truth lay buried beneath these indirections, beating like a heart. I needed to find it, to see it with my own eyes. Because Mr. Kaplan was right when he decried belief on the first day of school. Belief meant nothing. If you wanted to really know, you needed hard facts. I’d keep moving forward until I could look truth in the eye.

  I swallowed the sick feeling in my stomach. “What do you want me to say about Mr. Kaplan?”

  “Very good,” Syme said. “We’ve written you a script.”

  Lily

  April 2000

  THE NIGHT BEFORE final exams began, Lily lay on her bed, thinking about her first three-ring binder. It was purple with a unicorn on the cover and smelled of plastic and chemicals. Inside, a transparent pencil case bulged with gel pens and reinforcement stickers for Trapper Keeper triage. The binder was an initiation of sorts, because it corresponded with her first locker assignment. To Lily at eleven, the idea of a personal space outside of home suggested infinite promise. It didn’t matter if you were awkward or abnormal. In that brief moment when everybody had an empty locker, everybody was equal.

  The Rule of Lockers crushed this dream. During Lily’s high school orientation, a senior asked the incoming students to turn in their randomized locker assignments. Somebody protested, and the senior flashed a patronizing smile. “Don’t you want a locker near your friends?” he said.

  Lily and Dipthi were shunted into the third-floor “loner” section, the catchall locale for students who didn’t fit elsewhere. Loners quickly absorbed the Rule’s cardinal lesson, however: any place was preferable to the Trench.

  When the locker vandalism exposed the Rule to the administration, Lily’s father abolished it. With some satisfaction Lily imagined all the people who had hurt and rejected her over the years shuffling like a chain gang into the Trench. But then she tried to imagine the Kaplans and Hazel hanging out in the bright fluorescent lights of the school’s upper floors. She couldn’t. The Trench was their home. What would they do—who would they be—without it?

  Someone knocked on her door. “Leave me alone,” she said, but the door opened and Justin walked in. His face was pale, save for the blue thumbprints beneath his eyes. He had one hand tucked behind his back.

  “This came in the mail.” He handed her a CD case titled Sacrificial Lamb. “I wasn’t going to play it, in case it exploded in my computer.” He chuckled, but when she didn’t respond, his face stiffened. “I watched it eventually.”

  If only he had burst in raging, but he merely looked confused. A band tightened around Lily’s chest. She’d kept her promise to Veronica, so why had Veronica sent Justin the video? Or maybe it was one of the others? Jocelyn? Amy Chang? But it didn’t matter. He’d seen what they’d done—what she’d done—and there was nothing to do but tell the truth.

  “I’m responsible for all of it,” she said after explaining the art project. “Even for what they did to me at the end.”

  “What do you mean, ‘did to you’?”

  For a moment they looked at each other, guarded, skeptical.

  “The dye.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Justin was getting angry now. “The last thing on here is you telling those girls that you were . . . using me.”

  Lily sat up on her knees. “It felt awful, saying those things.” She began to cry, fat drops falling onto her jeans.

  “What did they do to you, Lily?”

  She shook her head.

  “What did they do?” he shouted. “What dye?”

  “My parents!” she hissed.

  Justin knelt down and pressed his palms into her thighs. She flinched. She hadn’t let him touch her since the sleepover. “You’re hurting me.”

  Justin removed his hands. “What did they do to you?” he said again, his voice stony.

  Fine, she thought, and jumped off the bed. She unbuttoned her jeans and pulled down her underwear. Justin’s face went from white to red.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Justin! Listen to me.” She grabbed his shoulders. “Just forget about it.”

  He was looking past her. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  She wanted to scream at him, but she had to calm him down. She couldn’t let him tell anyone. “I wanted to tell you, but I was too embarrassed.” She looked him square in the eyes and willed her lie into a picture of sincerity. He hugged her, and she fought the urge to shake him off. He had to believe he was in control.

  When Justin finally went home, she put Sacrificial Lamb among her music CDs, where it would blend in with all the other bands. But it would be a reminder to her, every time she came into the room, of what she’d done.

  After her math exam, Lily walked into the art studios to find the Studio Girls giving each other Marilyn Monroe birthmarks with a black Sharpie. “Hi, Lily!” Veronica said, waving. “Long time no see. You want one? It’ll look fabulous with your complexion.”

  “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  The other girls stopped and fell silent.

  “Sure,” Veronica said. They went into the hallway.

  “I was just wondering how the video turned out.” Lily tried to sound casual.

  “Fine. And we cut out the dye job. We decided it was too sensationalized.”

  “Somebody,” she began slowly, “sent Justin a copy.”

  Veronica’s face stiffened. “That bitch! Is Justin going to tell anyone?”

  “He promised he wouldn’t.”

  Veronica’s pupils hardened into small black stones. “You’d better make sure he keeps that promise.” Her voice closed up around the word “promise” like a Venus flytrap around a fly.

  Veronica returned to the art studio, and Lily watched her through the window, conferring with her cohort. If she was angry with one of them, she didn’t show it. Her calculated manner was unnerving; she was plotting a contingency plan. For the first time, Lily felt truly and deeply afraid of what Veronica might do.

  Iris

  December 2012

  DO YOU SWEAR to the truth of the story you’re about to tell?” Julia sat across from me on the bed. Syme sat beside her, holding up the video camera.

  I nodded.

  “Say it out loud, Iris.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now tell us what happened.”

  I’d read through the script a couple of times, but I couldn’t seem to make my voice cooperate. My insides felt drafty, swept through by a shivering wind. In my head, I begged for Murrow to come, pleaded for him to appear. But I didn’t want the apparition of Murrow. I wanted the living Murrow, the one Julia and Syme could see. I wanted him to melt the camera with his relentless stare.

  “Tell us,” Julia repeated.

  He’s dead, I told myself. He won’t come to help you. He never has.

  “Iris, will you please begin?” Julia said, but there was no politeness in her voice.

  I took a breath and began to speak. “This past November, Mr.
Kaplan asked me to meet him in the Trench. He said he had a special science project for me.”

  “And you went?”

  I nodded slowly, afraid of what was coming. “When I got there . . .” I swallowed. “I saw that Mr. Kaplan had set up a video screen and on the screen was Jimmy Cardozi.”

  “And how did Jimmy look?” Julia said.

  “Terrified. He was strapped into a chair and there were wires attached to his arms. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

  “So you asked Mr. Kaplan, and he said . . .”

  “He said he was conducting an experiment—on me.”

  “And what was the nature of this experiment?”

  “There was a control panel in the room, and every five seconds I was supposed to press a button on it.”

  “And then what?”

  “That was it. Just press the button. So I did, and Jimmy yelped on the screen. I asked Mr. Kaplan if Jimmy was all right, and he said Jimmy was fine. ‘No matter what Jimmy does,’ Mr. Kaplan said, ‘you must push the button.’”

  “And what did you think about this?”

  “I was scared, but Mr. Kaplan told me to push the button again.”

  “And did you?”

  I shook my head. “I refused, so Mr. Kaplan went over to the door and locked it. ‘You must continue the experiment,’ he said.”

  Julia was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning toward me, expectant. Syme was on his knees, with the video camera pointed up at my face.

  “Look at the camera,” he ordered. I didn’t move. “Look, Iris!” This time I obeyed.

  “It’s all right, Iris,” Julia said, her voice soothing. “We know this is hard for you.”

  “After he locked the door, Mr. Kaplan walked over to me and pushed me into a chair by the control panel. Then he grabbed my hand.”

  “And how did you feel?”

  “I was terrified. And Mr. Kaplan . . .” I paused; Julia nodded. “He was hurting me. He was squeezing my hand so hard I thought he was going to break my fingers. And meanwhile on the screen I could see Jimmy twisting and struggling to free himself, but he was strapped in too tightly.”