The Writing Circle

by Corinne Demas

  “Hi,” she said, “come have a seat.”

  Paul had dark hair, left long perhaps to hide his face and his acne—though it possibly contributed to the acne problem. Rachel remembered from her own, not so far away, acned youth. He was flushed from jaw to cheekbone, either from the outdoors (he probably ran to get to her office) or embarrassment, or some combination of both. He slumped into the chair beside her desk, his shoulders so curled, his legs so sprawled, it was if he were a boneless creature who had been poured onto the seat.

  “I thought I might start by asking you about things like hockey and what bands you’re listening to these days,” said Rachel, “but then I figured you know why you’re here, so we might as well deal with it right away and get it over with.” Rachel gave a sigh. “Bet you don’t want to be talking about any of this,” she said.

  Paul looked up at her. What she’d said had obviously surprised him.

  Rachel leaned in closer to him, her voice just a note above a whisper. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t really want to be talking about this either. But Mr. Bruer”—she couldn’t bring herself to call him Bru—“asked me to—since I guess you weren’t particularly forthcoming with him, and since it’s my job . . . well, here we are.” She smiled at Paul, but he wasn’t ready to smile back.

  “What I heard,” said Rachel, “is that there are two issues in your case. One, that you turned in a paper that wasn’t entirely original work. And the other that you gave—or maybe sold—a paper to another student. Or at least that’s what he said.”

  “I didn’t sell it,” said Paul.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Rachel. “But why did you write it for him?”

  Paul looked down.

  “Okay,” said Rachel. “Guess we should talk about the first issue. Here’s what I don’t understand. You’re a pretty good student. And English is one of your better subjects, isn’t it?”

  Paul nodded.

  “So why did you need to copy stuff from the Internet? It’s not like you couldn’t come up with some ideas for yourself.”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul.

  “Have you done something like this before?” asked Rachel.

  “No,” said Paul.

  “Mr. Joralemon takes things like that pretty seriously.” Rachel caught herself. “Actually, I take things like that seriously, too,” she said. “Everyone here does. Do you think maybe you just weren’t clear about how to attribute things? Is this maybe just a case of your not knowing how to handle secondary material properly?”

  Paul was looking at his lap, studying a speck on his jeans. His hair fell forward on his shoulders. His scalp, visible along his crooked part, was painfully white. Rachel wanted to brush his hair back, cover it.

  “No,” said Paul. He spoke so softly Rachel had to lean closer to hear him. She felt relieved hearing him say that. There wasn’t a student at The Academy who could honestly claim innocence about attributing material properly, certainly none in Stewart Joralemon’s class, but half of the kids in Paul’s situation would have seized that as an excuse.

  “You know plagiarism can result in a student’s suspension or dismissal,” said Rachel. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you did it?”

  “Huh?” asked Paul.

  “You’re a smart kid, Paul, you knew what the consequences were,” said Rachel. “I have to guess that you did it for a reason. That maybe you wanted to be caught.”

  “Why would I want that?” asked Paul. He looked up at her without lifting his head.

  “So you would get suspended and you wouldn’t have to go to this school anymore?”

  “You think I wanted to be kicked out?”

  Rachel shrugged. “I was just guessing that maybe you wanted a reason to move back and live with your mother.”

  Paul’s head jerked up. He looked straight at her. “That’s all wrong,” he said. “If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be here. I could be living with my mom. I don’t need a reason.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t have time to write two papers. I had to do something.”

  Rachel turned back to her desk for a moment. She straightened the lid on her plastic sandwich container, then aligned the container with the notebook on her desk.

  She looked back at Paul. “Why did you have to write two papers? I can’t believe Thayer Henniman is a friend of yours. Why would you do a paper for him? Did he threaten you, Paul? Or did you owe him something?” As soon as she said that, she was sorry. Paul’s face looked suddenly like the face of an old man. He turned away, towards the window, but not in time. He blinked but could not stem the flow of tears.

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “It’s just that he asked me, ’cause he knows I’ve been doing okay in that class. And it didn’t seem like such a big deal.”

  “But what did you hope to get out of it?” asked Rachel.

  “I just wanted him to like me. He’s really popular. Now he’s pissed at me because he got caught because I screwed up on the paper. And now all his friends will be pissed at me, too.”

  “He deserved to get caught,” said Rachel. “And I can’t imagine that his friendship is worth very much in any case.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” said Paul. He turned back to Rachel. “It’s not like I have any real friends here.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Rachel, and she had to fight her instinct to touch Paul’s arm. She was fairly sure he would not want to be touched.

  “So is Bru going to kick me out?” asked Paul.

  “I don’t know,” said Rachel.

  “My dad’s going to hit the roof,” said Paul. “He’ll probably send me back to my mom’s even if they don’t kick me out. Unless Gillian—my dad’s wife—doesn’t want him to.”

  It seemed to Rachel that they were straying into an area she probably would be happier not knowing about, but still, she was curious.

  “Are you and Gillian buddies?” she asked.

  “No way!” said Paul. “But Gillian likes it that I chose to live this year with Dad instead of Mom. She likes beating my mom at things. Jennifer, my sister, is living with Mom. She and Gillian don’t get along at all.”

  “And you do.”

  “Sometimes,” said Paul.

  Outside, through the window, the photosensitive bulbs in the lights along the campus walkway turned on. It was still light enough so the lamps seemed pale, but Rachel knew it would get dark quickly. She looked over at the clock on her wall.

  “I think we’ve talked enough for one afternoon,” said Rachel. “You’re still in time for the van home, aren’t you?”

  Paul’s eyes followed hers to the clock, then he checked the pocket watch hanging from his backpack. “Yeah, I’ll make it,” he said. “No problem.”

  She wanted to cradle him in her arms. She wanted to tell him that it wouldn’t be that long before he was grown up, and this place and all the petty things about it would be safely stowed in his past. She wanted to tell him that Thayer Henniman wasn’t worthy of being his friend, that he was worth a dozen Thayer Hennimans. She watched him out her window as he ran along the path and cut across the lawn down towards the hockey rink, his backpack slung over one shoulder. In the distance, in the shadow, he looked like a boy with a misshapen back.

  Paul

  PAUL STARTED WALKING TOWARDS THE HOCKEY RINK, BUT when he reached the road, he hesitated before he crossed it. It was quiet on the street, and no noise came from the rink, although Paul could instantly hear the noise in his head, the swoosh of skates against ice, the hammering of puck against stick, the double tweet of the coach’s whistle. The windows of the building were set high, under the curve of the roof. Lit up now, against the white of the walls, they looked like two upside-down, glowing smiles. Practice would be over soon, and the double doors would open, spilling boys out into a parking lot beside the building. In just a few minutes, parents’ cars and the school vans would st
art arriving.

  Paul slung his backpack farther up on his shoulder. Instead of crossing the street, he turned left and headed away from The Academy. There was no way he’d make it back to campus in time for the van, and he had no idea how he’d ever get home, but he didn’t care. He was already in such deep trouble that one more thing could hardly matter. It felt for a second wondrously light, the not caring, but then terrifying, too. He wasn’t used to the lightness. He had little experience with just doing something without running through all of the possible consequences, worrying over each one.

  The sidewalk had recently been upgraded from concrete to brick, with granite curbs, but it petered out dismally, and without warning, at the end of The Academy’s property. From there on Paul had to walk along the side of the road on the uneven gravel shoulder. Most of the traffic was on the opposite side of the road, cars heading away from town at the end of the workday, but they came along fast. There was a squirrel lying in the road, squashed and bloodied. Paul didn’t want to look as he passed close to it but couldn’t stop himself from looking. Its tail was moving, and Paul thought at first it was waving it in a grotesque gesture of agony—but that was crazy, because how could the squirrel have all its insides squished out of it and still be alive? Then Paul realized it was the wind that was blowing the squirrel’s tail, and the squirrel was most certainly dead. That seemed a lot better. He shifted his backpack to his other shoulder and tried jogging along for a while, but the books in his backpack were heavy, and he was tired, and he slowed to a walk again. It was edging towards dusk.

  A few miles later he turned off on a side street, just past a church set up on a hill. The street was wide, with an island up the middle. It was planted with rhododendrons and azaleas and must have had its pine bark mulch recently applied. The smell was intoxicating, and Paul wanted to lie down there and bury his nose in the mulch. He wanted to bury himself in it completely. I could do that, he thought, I could just do that. But he didn’t; he kept walking along the street, his eye on a house close to the next corner.

  It was a large, Tudor-style house, old enough so the ornamental trees and shrubs had grown up around it, softened its corners. Paul had lived here when he was a child, when his parents were still together. He’d been here once before this year. He and his father had come out this way, and his father had decided to just drive by. No one was around now; nothing moved. Paul crossed over to the lot and stood by a hemlock tree on the side. He looked up at the brick wall. There was a small, mullioned window in the curved brick façade. It was on the landing of the staircase, set low enough so when he was little he could look out of it. He’d loved that corner of the house, a little carpeted room neither upstairs nor downstairs, with its own small window that let him see all the way down the street. Through the turned walnut spindles of the stair railings he could see across the foyer of the house to the front door and, to the right, into the living room.

  When his parents had split up, his mother hadn’t been able to keep the house because she couldn’t afford it, and then she’d moved to Connecticut for work and bought a house half the size. Paul’s father had liked the house, but Gillian wouldn’t live in it. They’d built their new house farther out in the country, a modern house where all the windows were big open spaces of undivided glass and the floors were great stretches of pale, bare wood with only a few flat woven rugs scattered here and there.

  A spotlight went on in the yard, and Paul jumped back against the branches. But no one emerged from the back door, and Paul guessed it was a light on a timer. Still, he was afraid of being caught there, and he crossed the street to the island and stood for a moment, looking at the front of the house. He hadn’t lived there since he was six or seven, but he remembered the layout of the rooms, knew which windows were which. On the left of the house was a new addition, a glass conservatory, that looked all wrong. If Paul had had a stone in his hand, he would have wanted to lob it through one of the panes. In the kitchen, on the wall behind the door to the basement, every year his mother marked his height and his sister, Jennifer’s. His mother had cried when they were leaving the house and she’d seen the pencil markings there with all the dates.

  In August, when he’d left his mother’s house in Connecticut to come live with his father, his mother had cried, too.

  “You can come home anytime you want, Paul,” she’d told him. “Just give me a call, anytime, and I’ll come and get you.” But she probably wouldn’t mean that now, not after he’d been expelled from The Academy, not after what he’d done.

  He hadn’t wanted to see her crying then, and he’d gone out to his father’s car in the driveway, leaving his father to grab the last suitcase. But he’d turned back to look. His mother’s face was all blotchy and red, like a little kid’s.

  “Come on, Linda,” his father had said, “give the boy a break.”

  And his mother had slapped his father across the face, slapped him hard.

  Now the weight of consequence, which Paul had been spared for the past hour, came back to him heavier than before. He had to get back to The Academy. He had to call his father and hope he would come and pick him up. He couldn’t call him from here because he couldn’t let anyone know that he’d come to look at the house. He didn’t even know why it was important, but he knew it was a secret he wanted to keep.

  He walked back up to the main road and started hiking back towards The Academy. His backpack felt heavier than ever, and he opened it and considered which book he might chuck. His science book was the heaviest, but he got it only halfway out of the zippered opening before he lost courage and stuffed it back in again. He had his back to the traffic now, and every time a car passed him, he felt its whoosh and smelled its exhaust. He was so tired now, and it was already dark. He wondered if he would ever make it back. He’d never hitchhiked before in his life, never dared to, but at the next cross street, where there was a circle of light, he turned to face the oncoming cars and held out his thumb. If he were caught hitchhiking, that would be one more crime added to the list. He’d been warned enough about the dangers—he knew boys could be victims, too, not just girls—but he didn’t know what else to do; he didn’t think he’d make it walking back.

  Three cars and a truck passed him by, but then a pickup truck slowed down and pulled over. Paul had been half hoping no one would, that he wouldn’t actually have to carry through with his wild idea of hitchhiking. There was a pile of demolition material in the back of the truck and a black Lab sticking its head out of the window.

  “Where you headed?” a guy called out to him.

  “Just up the road a few miles,” said Paul.

  “Hop in,” the guy said. He had frizzy brown hair and a thick, frizzy beard that so engulfed his face you’d think he’d suffocate behind it. Paul paused for a moment. The guy didn’t look like those pictures you saw in the paper of kidnappers or murderers, but with all that hair, it was hard to read the expression on his face. He didn’t seem drunk, though, and the dog seemed like a good sign. Murderers didn’t usually have dogs with them. Or did they?

  “You coming?” asked the guy.

  Paul swallowed and climbed up into the truck. The guy pushed the dog back into the small space behind the seat. There didn’t seem to be any seat belt, and Paul didn’t dare ask about it. The dog sniffed Paul’s neck and clawed the seat.

  “That’s Nero,” said the guy.

  “Nice dog,” said Paul. It seemed like the right thing to say.

  The guy didn’t say anything more. He drove fast, but he didn’t pass the car in front of them. They passed some woods, and Paul couldn’t stop himself from thinking it looked like the sort of place someone would dump a body. But soon, more quickly than Paul had expected, they were approaching the grounds of The Academy. The distance had seemed so much longer when he had been walking.

  “Anyplace along here,” said Paul.

  “You got it,” said the guy. He pulled over not far from the hockey rink and looked out across the lawns.
Paul could tell that he was taking it all in, taking in the kid he’d given a lift to.

  “Thanks a lot,” Paul said, and he got out of the truck and grabbed his backpack. The dog jumped back up into the seat, wagging its tail furiously.

  “Right,” said the guy, and he drove off. Paul felt weepy with relief. He climbed the rise and dropped his backpack on the ground. He called his father’s cell phone, and his luck still held, his father answered. He told his father he’d had to stick around late to work on a project with a kid who lived on campus. He wasn’t good at lying, but his father didn’t question him. Half an hour later he picked up Paul. He talked all the way home about a patient of his who had been a professional baseball player, a southpaw who had played a few seasons with the Red Sox. It was obvious that Bru hadn’t gotten through to him yet. Maybe Bru had spoken to Gillian. Though when they got home, she greeted them both in her pleasant, cool way, and she made no move to take Jerry aside to have a word with him before they sat down to dinner.

  But you could never tell about Gillian. She was inscrutable. She could be thinking anything, harboring anything, waiting to spring it on you, and you wouldn’t know.

  They were eating Chinese food for dinner. The table had been set with chopsticks, but Paul used a fork. He kept stealing glances at Gillian. Her chopsticks were shiny red as finger nail polish, and she was eating cautiously, the fine tips of the chopsticks pinching a mushroom, a few grains of rice. Long after Paul was finished eating, she was still working on her small portion, her arm moving slowly from plate to mouth, the chopsticks like extensions of her slender fingers.

  AFTER DINNER PAUL RETREATED TO HIS ROOM. The house was built into the side of a hill, and his bedroom and Jennifer’s were on the lowest level, with an adjoining bathroom and a large recreation room. The master bedroom was on the second floor, above the main living level, far enough away so no child could hear the sounds of adult lovemaking or, as Linda had pointed out when he and Jennifer were younger, too far away for any adult to hear if a sick child called out in the night. Paul’s and Jennifer’s bedrooms had large windows looking out across the meadow, but they had a basement smell that even dehumidifiers couldn’t successfully combat. Jennifer refused to sleep in her room, and so Jerry had persuaded Gillian to relinquish the guest room on the main level to Jennifer. Not that it mattered much, since Jennifer almost never came to stay. Linda, who was concerned about mold and allergies, said she didn’t want her son sleeping in a cellar while he was living with his father, but Paul liked his room, liked the fact that it was tucked deep in the house, out of the way of everybody. There were sliding glass doors that led directly outside, so Paul could come in and out as he pleased without really having to let anyone know. Not that he ever did.