The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  Iris

  December 2012

  I DON’T REMEMBER much of what happened after Mr. Kaplan and Headmaster Pasternak dropped me off at the ER. I have a vague recollection of waking in a hospital bed—apparently I passed out a second time—and then stumbling into the bathroom and screaming at the dark slug splayed across my face. The nurses came running and found me clawing at the stitches the doctors had sewn into my cheek. There were thirty of them, black ugly things. I was given a sedative, and when I fell back to sleep, I dreamed leeches were stuck to my body, sucking toxins from my blood.

  The next day, when I was home recovering, Headmaster Pasternak came over to check on me. He explained that after he and Mr. Kaplan dropped me off at the ER, they’d driven directly to the police station. Not long afterward, the police went to the Historical Society with a warrant for Hazel’s arrest. She resisted—she’d been in the process of packing her bags—and spent the night in jail.

  I was happy to hear this, but I was disappointed that Headmaster Pasternak had come to visit alone, without Mr. Kaplan. During the hour the headmaster spent with us, my mind marched back and forth past the same questions: Where was Mr. Kaplan? What was he doing? Was he thinking about me? Surely he’d come to see me. Surely our experience with Hazel meant something to him. Didn’t he realize how I’d saved him, giving him the newspapers to destroy? And hadn’t he saved me—or made a valiant effort to—from Hazel? Wasn’t this supposed to be the moment where we finally shared the unbreakable bond of our grief?

  But Mr. Kaplan didn’t come.

  It was weeks before I saw him again. My parents decided that I was an invalid (I suspect they’d been talking to Dr. Patrick) and informed me that I was taking a break. They arranged for me to complete my midterm exams at home. In fact, for the entirety of winter vacation, they barely let me leave the house.

  Not long into my internment, the local papers sniffed out the story about Prisom’s Party and Hazel. The Nye County News ran two articles: Faculty-Student Violence Wracks Mariana Academy (talk about a sensationalized headline!) and Restraining Order Issued Against Mariana Academy Alumna. Soon after these appeared, a reporter from the Boston Globe called asking for an interview. My parents urged me to turn him down, especially after the Globe mix-up with Dalia. I had reservations about helping the Globe reporter all right, but mostly because I didn’t want him to scoop me on my own story. I gave in, though; a journalist doesn’t write hard news about herself.

  “I’ll tell you everything,” I promised the reporter over the phone. “But only if you get me a summer internship at the Globe. And I don’t mean fetching coffee for some prima donna columnist.” The Globe wasn’t keen on this at first, but after I sent them my clips and followed up with a number of phone calls, they came around. They knew well enough that prep school scandals are like cheap sex for the American public, and if they didn’t have me, they didn’t have a story.

  I wasn’t too worried about the reporter manipulating me, either. I was a journalist; I knew how this worked. So when the Globe man came to Nye, I told him exactly what I wanted him to know—the same glossy version I’d given my parents and Headmaster Pasternak. I described the kidnapping, the pig masks, and the legend of Edmond Dantes. I said nothing about my confessional or Mr. Kaplan’s brother. At times I wondered what Murrow would think about these half-truths I was telling and whether he was judging me from his heavenly press box. But these concerns were only the superficial remnants of a previous self. I’d reread Murrow’s biographies over winter break, and it was amazing how different he seemed now. I’d missed—really ignored—much of the complexity and the darkness he’d harbored. He was charismatic and moody, openhearted and selfish. A truth-teller and a liar. Like me. I’d tried so desperately to be like him, but after all my worry and ruminating, it turned out we weren’t so different in the first place.

  Iris

  January–May 2013

  As expected, the Globe story gave everyone a five-star orgasm. The AP picked up the article, and Seventeen magazine interviewed me for a piece about high school journalists. Some crackpot agent-publicist person even tried to sign me as a client, but I didn’t want to kick off my career with a memoir. Take that route and everybody would think I’d invented half the details just to boost book sales.

  Peter could have confessed much of what I’d kept secret, but when I turned his name over to Pasternak and the police, he said nothing. He refused to explain how Hazel had recruited the members of Prisom’s Party, or her level of involvement in the group. He was expelled for his silence—in addition to everything else. Hazel, too, kept mum. Mr. Kaplan told the police about Matt Sheridan—I only found out about him from the newspapers—but Hazel denied her involvement in the Sonya Stevens activities. The police searched her computer, but they found nothing pornographic.

  Both Pasternak and my parents issued restraining orders against Hazel, but the only charge levied against her was trespassing. Of course, Mariana parents became obsessed with neighborhood menaces and abusive-teacher stories. For weeks the local papers ran articles to the tune of “Let Your Children Use the Internet and They’ll Probably Die.” The Nye County News published a stream of letters to the editor arguing that the “true tragedy” of this scandal was parental neglect. Suddenly half the town seemed to think my parents and Peter’s parents were responsible for what had happened to us—Peter’s expulsion, my beating at Hazel’s hands. When I explained that I became involved with Prisom’s Party in spite of my parents, everyone shook their heads at my naïveté.

  By the time classes resumed after winter break, the school had sealed up the tunnel and razed the Outpost. They installed new lighting fixtures in the Trench and scheduled classes in the empty rooms. They scrubbed the place clean and painted over the Argus on the wall. Within a month, the Trench resembled any other floor of Prisom Hall. The Oracle also published my Charles Prisom story, clearing up all questions about the school’s legacy. “On the outside, Mariana may appear to be the setting of a gothic romance,” I wrote, “but the fluorescent lights within have not simply chased the shadows into their corners, but illuminated the corners themselves. Our legends have nowhere to hide.”

  After all this, the other kids didn’t know what to make of me. Everyone ogled my nasty stitches, and when the Globe article came out, I became a minor celebrity. Kids who’d never spoken to me before were suddenly asking me all kinds of questions about the Trench, and Katie Milford was jealous as all get-out over my Globe internship. I didn’t care, though. I no longer needed to become the Oracle’s youngest editor-in-chief. After my summer in Boston I planned to intern for the Nye County News and then Boston magazine. Maybe I’d even take a year off before college to intern at Slate or HuffPo to build up my web journalism chops. By the time I actually entered college, I’d be a working freelancer. (Not that I planned to build a career out of that soul-draining slog.) But you couldn’t get hired at the Boston Globe, or the Washington Post, or the mecca of meccas, the New York Times, without a thick stack of clips.

  The excitement over my scar and the media attention faded, and I sank into the monotony of second semester. The snow sat thick and deep on the school grounds and continued to lie there for weeks and then months, as though spring had forgotten about Nye or decided that our dreary mountain perch wasn’t worth the effort. Meanwhile, Mr. Kaplan acted like nothing had happened. When he looked at me, he tried hard to ignore my stitches. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and at night, instead of talking to Murrow, I played through “what if” conversations with him. What if I ran into him at the bookstore in town and we happened to be buying the exact same book? What if my parents invited him over for dinner to thank him for taking me to the hospital? What if we were both in the school elevator when it broke down? I had so many questions for him: about Lily, about his relationship with Hazel, about whether the Devil’s Advocate had told the truth about Justin’s death. Most of all, I wanted to tell Mr. Kaplan about Dalia and explain how he and I we
re connected in our grief. I imagined us walking along the campus paths, discussing what we’d been through. We each knew how it felt to move through the world alone, harboring dark feelings few people could understand.

  Just before summer break, I stopped by Mr. Kaplan’s classroom. He was sitting at his desk, grading exams, and I launched into an explanation of what had happened from the time I broke into his car until he found me holding the Devil’s Advocate. I watched his face, but it was inscrutable, so I explained how Hazel had made me feel visible, but she hadn’t seen me at all. “There’s only one person who really sees me,” I said, “and that’s because we share a deep and searing bond, and I—”

  “Ms. Dupont.”

  I clamped my mouth shut. The look of understanding on Mr. Kaplan’s face was so sincere that it more than compensated for the betrayal and pain I’d experienced at the hands of Prisom’s Party. All of that had been in the service of this moment, when Mr. Kaplan and I would acknowledge the bond of our grief. He pulled a packet from the stack of papers on his desk, and I waited eagerly for what he would say.

  “I’m very proud of you, Iris,” he began. “You could have used the year’s events as an excuse to shirk your academic responsibilities, but you received a near-perfect score.”

  At first, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Even as I took the exam from him, I wondered: Was this the prelude to our real conversation, the moment when Mr. Kaplan said, I know you, Iris? But then I understood. This was the conversation—the only conversation we were going to have. I stared at the bright red A inked onto the page. It might as well have been a gigantic X, the universal letter of rejection.

  “Ms. Dupont, are you all right?”

  I shook my head, too upset to speak. Mr. Kaplan looked at me, concerned. “I thought we . . .” I began—only I couldn’t say it. I probably looked paralyzed at that moment, but inside I trembled with the terrible fear that Mr. Kaplan and I shared nothing. Logically, it didn’t seem possible—not after Hazel had betrayed us, not after we’d both lost our best friends. But if Mr. Kaplan felt all of this—if he truly felt it—why didn’t he say something? Why did he sit there like he was nothing more to me than a concerned teacher and I was nothing more to him than an upset student?

  “Iris.” Mr. Kaplan reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. His palm felt so much larger than it looked. I glanced up at him, fighting to keep my eyes dry. “Thank you, Iris,” he said. “I cannot tell you how much I mean that.”

  “You’re welcome,” I replied, even though I didn’t know what we were talking about. I rushed from the room before he could see me cry.

  Lily

  May 2000

  ON THE DAY of Justin’s funeral, the Morgans took a silent car ride to the synagogue and, after the service, another silent ride to the cemetery. Now, still in silence, they joined the stream of mourners toward Justin’s grave. Lily followed her parents, staring at the monarch ring Justin had given her. A butterfly was the first insect he’d ever preserved and, according to his mother, a coming-of-age milestone on par with his bar mitzvah. Lily hated the term “coming of age” and its suggestion of menstrual cycles. But in this case, Mrs. Kaplan was right. The moment you killed something—a living creature or a false hope—was the moment you came of age. Loss of innocence wasn’t a passive experience that happened to you. It was something you gave up.

  “Lily?” Elliott’s voice was tentative. She looked up at him and followed his gaze to the grave. Was he asking her to climb inside of it? Then she understood. One by one, people were shoveling dirt into the hole. Her body protested, her limbs jelly-like. How could she throw dirt onto Justin? Wasn’t he a human being with skin, and eyes, and organs, still warm? Hadn’t he pressed his chest to her chest and put his tongue inside her mouth?

  Her heart pounded as the distance between her body and the grave narrowed. The person ahead of her moved away, and somehow a shovel appeared in her hands. She looked at the pile of dirt to her left but didn’t know what to do with it. Finally, as though of its own volition, the shovel sank into the soil. Now she was at the grave’s edge. Dirt covered the casket. Was that Justin’s head or his feet? Please God, let it be his feet. And maybe this wasn’t even a coffin. Maybe she was at the beach, burying Justin in the sand. Or maybe the earth was really a warm blanket and she was tucking him in to sleep.

  After the cemetery, Lily’s parents picked their way down the Kaplans’ ice-scabbed street and Lily wobbled behind them, imagining reporters from the Nye County News crowding the sidewalk. Ms. Morgan, how are you coping with this tragedy? Ms. Morgan, was Justin Kaplan’s death really an accident? Antique bulbs popped in Lily’s face, each flash capturing a portrait of her guilt.

  For two days after the crash, she’d stood at her bedroom window watching Justin’s father perform complicated measurements on her street. Her parents refused to say what he was doing, but she could guess well enough. Everyone wanted to know how Justin had died. Everyone had a theory. But Lily had the answer. Justin had slammed his car into the tree out of desperation and maybe, though he wouldn’t have admitted it to himself, as retribution for all she’d done to him. Because even though she loved him, they both knew her love wasn’t equal to his.

  The Kaplan house was full of people, but freezing. Lily followed her parents from the foyer to the living room and watched the sea of black-clad bodies swallow her father, then her mother. She headed in the opposite direction and up the stairs. But as she neared Justin’s bedroom, she heard arguing.

  “You have to tell me where you went after my house.”

  Lily recognized Hazel’s husky voice.

  “Home! I said that already.”

  And Jonah’s nasally pitch.

  Lily walked into Justin’s room to find Hazel on the bed, her freckled palms pressed into the mattress, her body angled forward like a runner at the starting gun. Jonah glared, his furious blue eyes full of tears.

  “You’re evil,” he hissed at Lily. “Evil!” He was about to charge, but Hazel grabbed him and led him from the room. Lily heard bickering, followed by a slamming door. Hazel returned alone and collapsed on the bed. “How long were you in the hall, Lily?”

  “Not long.”

  “Right. Sure.”

  “No, really, I—”

  Hazel shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  For a moment they were silent. Lily stood awkwardly in the middle of the room.

  “It’s so claustrophobic downstairs.” Hazel frowned. “And all those covered mirrors freak me out.”

  Lily had noticed the large front hall mirror draped with a dark sheet, though she didn’t understand the reason for it. “Yeah, it’s pretty creepy,” she said.

  “You Catholics do plenty of weird shit, too.”

  “I wasn’t . . . I just meant . . .” But Lily knew better than to argue; Hazel had a way of twisting things.

  “You’re not afraid of Justin’s bed, are you?” Hazel flipped onto her stomach.

  Lily hesitated, but the older girl smiled with such warmth that she lay down beside her. She saw how many hundreds of freckles Hazel had, how her nostrils flared when she breathed. She realized Hazel must have spent countless nights on this bed, reading Justin’s books, and breathing in the sweaty-sweet scent of his room. Lily couldn’t even claim a year. “I feel like we’re not supposed to be in here,” she said.

  “That’s strange. Of all people, I thought you’d feel the most comfortable.”

  Lily flushed.

  “I mean, you’re kind of a big deal to Justin’s parents, being his first and only girlfriend. And it’s obviously not your fault that Justin was on his way to your house. But what I really want to know,” Hazel said, propping herself on a freckled elbow, “is how he was feeling that night when he got into the car. I mean, if he was in any kind of severe distress, you would have known about it. Right?”

  Lily’s heart was pounding so hard she was sure Hazel could see it. The girls eyed each other for a long, un
comfortable moment. Then Hazel jumped off the bed. “I’m starving. I think we need some rugelach.”

  Lily nodded. She felt like she’d completed an important test but had no idea whether she had passed.

  The Morgans drove home, and as they descended the steep hill toward their house, the awful demon blazed up before them. The Studio Girls must have drawn the image, Lily thought, because her father had expelled them. They’d been responsible for the locker vandalism, too. It made so much sense now. They didn’t give a shit about exposing the hypocrisy of the Community Code, or the superficial nature of teenage social interaction, or anything else. They didn’t care who they hurt or even what message they were sending. They simply liked the idea of making a statement.

  Elliott parked in the driveway, but Lily was halfway to the house before she realized that her parents were still sitting inside the Lexus.

  She let herself in, picked up the mail, and shuffled through it. Among the bills and magazines was a letter with her name on it. In her room, she undressed, hanging up the jacket, sweater, and skirt and slipping off her dark stockings. She removed her bra and underwear and looked at her reflection in the closet mirror. Her nipples were pink as the wallpaper, and down below, what was once the fairest hair of all was the color of dirty water.

  She pulled on pajamas and then turned her attention to the envelope, mailed from Boston. The return address read, Morrissey and Associates.

  Dear Ms. Morgan,

  I am terribly sorry I have neglected to contact you for so many months. A number of Mrs. Morgan’s files were misplaced, and only now have I fully put her affairs in order. Your grandmother has left monies in the amount of $75,000 for you. She asked our offices to help you with any financial management you may need, but has specified that you—and you alone—are the sole executor of this sum. Again, forgive me for the long delay. Please be in touch with any questions.