by Laura McNeal
Patrice and Sands went to their desks. Mrs. Pardoo stood formally in front of the class holding The Yellow Paper, which she now raised for presentation.
“First of all, it needs to be said that what is written anonymously is written by cowards.” Mrs. Pardoo significantly dropped the paper into the wastebasket. “Secondly, when the persons responsible for this paper are apprehended—and please note I use the word when, and not if—that person or persons will be removed from school and turned over to authorities for legal prosecution.” Mrs. Pardoo took a deep breath. “As for Miss Newman, this school district did a thorough background check and found her not just meeting but exceeding the high ethical, legal, and educational standards required for employment.”
Which, Audrey realized, was not the same as saying Patrice never filched a sweater or two at Filene’s.
Mrs. Pardoo turned to look at Patrice. “Thank you, Miss Newman. I sincerely regret what has happened today and look forward to setting it right.”
After she left, Patrice stood up beside her desk. She seemed different, a little shorter and older than the day before. For perhaps half a minute (though it seemed longer to Audrey), Patrice said nothing and simply stared past the students toward the blank wall at the rear of the room. Finally she brought her gaze back to the students and said in a low voice, “When I was nineteen years old, I made a serious mistake.”
She fell quiet again and let her gaze move across the room, from one student to another, systematically, so no one was missed. When her eyes touched Audrey, they left behind a feeling of guilt, which, after a second or two, made Audrey resentful—she’d had nothing to do with The Yellow Paper.
The teacher said, finally, “I just want to say one thing. By the time each of you is nineteen—the age I was when I made a mistake—you will have made a mistake, too.”
Audrey expected more—when teachers made a moral point, they always seemed to lay it on thick—but Patrice was almost done. “In the future,” she said, “please address me as Miss Newman.” A pause, then: “I have nothing further to say, but I believe Sands would like to make a statement.”
Sands stood immediately, even before everyone’s gaze could turn her way. Audrey noticed that, across the room, Clyde Mumsford didn’t turn. He sat as he’d sat through both Mrs. Pardoo’s and Patrice’s speeches, leaning over his desk, doodling with one hand, the other hand draped over his shoulder. He might’ve been bored. Or sneakily amused.
Unlike Patrice, Sands was assertive and indignant. “I just want to say that yes, I got into Mount Holyoke, but if anyone had bothered to ask, my SATs are over 1800, which would’ve gotten me in easy, with or without drill team and the other stuff.”
On another day, someone might’ve made a wisecrack about the nature of the other stuff, but this wasn’t another day.
“And as for Zondra,” Sands said, “it’s not her fault her parents named her Zondra, and also, just for the record, it’s not even legal to do that kind of surgery until you’re eighteen.”
Sounds like you’ve looked into it, someone would’ve said on another day, but today the silence was so total, the quick tick of the clock almost startled Audrey.
Sands sat down.
“Okay, then,” Patrice said. Her voice sounded tired. “Enough distractions. Let’s get back to work.”
All Audrey would otherwise remember about the class was how it seemed to last a day, not an hour, and the relief she felt when she finally joined the stream of students exiting the classroom.
“Whew!” C.C. said as she and Lea joined Audrey in the flow. Lea said quietly, “Whew cubed.”
As the three girls paused on the steps before setting off in different directions, Audrey gave the others a playful grin and said she was going to go home and brush up on her physics.
“Audrey, honey, don’t forget to tell Wicked that if he needs help with French, we’re there for him,” C.C. said.
“And find out his story,” Lea said. “We want all the little details.”
As she walked away, Audrey felt ready for anything—if she hadn’t been within eyeshot of Jemison High, she would’ve broken into a run. Yeah, she thought as she walked springily along. What’s your story, Wickham Hill? Inquiring minds want to know.
Chapter 13
Dr. Yates
That afternoon, Wickham Hill sat in his bedroom on the second floor of his father’s old house and listened to his mother run the vacuum downstairs.
There was a desk by the window, and as he sat there with his unopened textbooks, he fingered the place on the black desktop where the initials J.E.Y. 5/30/56 had been scratched. James Edward Yates, of course. His actual but unofficial father, whom he always referred to as “Dr. Yates,” not “Dad” or “Father.” The next set of scratches read, First date: Elaine Harcourt. 8/2/62. That first date had started a process that led to marriage, and Dr. Yates was still married to the former Elaine Harcourt, which was why Wickham’s occasional lunches with Dr. Yates had taken place in Myrtle Beach, two hours away. Nowhere on the desk was Wickham’s mother’s name or her initials. As Wickham traced the scratches with his finger, he felt little prickles of resentment, and he imagined himself with a piece of steel wool and some acetone, expunging Dr. and Mrs. Yates.
Downstairs, the vacuum noise stopped. Wickham guessed that his mother was listening for the phone, making sure she didn’t miss its ring. After a moment, the vacuum whirred to life again.
His mother didn’t call what had happened between her and Dr. Yates an affair. She said they “saw” one another. They had been “seeing” one another episodically for eighteen years. She loved him and he loved her, but he had responsibilities. It was, as she put it, “complicated.”
It was especially complicated now. Since the big showdown in the courts, Dr. Yates wouldn’t even speak to Wickham’s mother. He wouldn’t return calls made to his office, and he’d changed his cell phone number. Two months ago, Wickham’s mother had told Wickham they were moving to a house in New York State that she had, at various times, visited with Dr. Yates. She had a key, she said. She would find a nursing job. He would enroll in school. And then his mother had said, “He’ll come to us there when he comes to his senses.”
Which, in spite of—or perhaps because of—all the times Dr. Yates had treated them badly or let them down, Wickham wanted to believe as much as his mother did.
Dr. Yates was sentimental about the house—he’d actually been born in one of the upstairs bedrooms—and he’d always told Wickham’s mother that this was where they would come and live permanently when finally they could. He’d kept his membership at the country club, and he had open accounts with the florist, the taxi company, In & Out Dry Cleaners, the Little Dragon Restaurant, and Peter’s Old Town Market, with the bills going to his office in South Carolina, where they could be discreetly paid by his accountant. For the past few weeks, Wickham and his mother had been charging their purchases to those accounts, and by now the bills should have been sent and received—which, Wickham thought, was about as close as it gets to sending up a flare identifying their exact whereabouts.
Wickham had never been sure whether he ought to like Dr. Yates for the help he provided or despise him for the distance he kept. What Wickham did resentfully understand was that they needed him. If Dr. Yates never spoke to his mother again, they were both in serious trouble. His grades were bad and, without Dr. Yates to help, college was out. What were they going to live on?
The nerves in Wickham’s temples felt compressed by the room and the wintry light, and the nausea was getting worse. He took an Excedrin in hopes that he wouldn’t need the Imitrex, which cost fifteen dollars apiece, and then he lay down on the blue cotton spread.
All Wickham really knew how to do was get people to like him. He knew how to dress, and how to lean close to girls when he talked to them in a low voice. When he’d been deferential with girls in Cypress—when he’d said “ma’am” to their mothers and “sir” to their fathers—these girls would smile a
t him; even as they stood planted on their shiny hardwood floors, he could feel them slipping out of their bodies and moving toward him. They opened their doors to him; invited him to the country club and to Sunday dinners overlooking green, glassy ponds; and afterward they kissed him with a longing he sometimes fully returned, and sometimes did not.
Wickham pressed his fingers on his temples, then shifted his body to pull out his wallet and slide from within it a photograph of a dark-haired girl who was laughing so hard she was slightly out of focus. Wickham studied the picture of Jade and thought of Audrey Reed’s finger sliding slowly, habitually, through her long hair and then, finally—already it was something Wickham had learned to watch keenly—bunching it with her hand and pulling it to one side of her head, revealing the bare white skin of her neck. He liked the look of Audrey Reed, and he liked the look of her friends. They dressed in that slyly tasteful way of preppy girls, at once prim and revealing. They wore their hair long and fixed it only with bands or ribbons. And they were girls, he could tell, who were accustomed to nice things—especially Audrey, and this drew him to her.
Wickham wondered if eating would make his headache go away. Sometimes meat helped, or sugar, and he was due at Audrey’s in less than an hour. He stood up, took the Little Dragon take-out menu from the top drawer, and dialed the number on the cover. When a man answered, Wickham said, “Mr. Wong, hey, I’m placing an order, but first I’ve got a question. I know you’re sending the bills to my dad in South Carolina, but I just wanted to be sure he was getting them and, you know, there were no snafus in getting paid or anything.”
Mr. Wong told him only one bill had gone out, but it had been paid, no problem.
Wickham took this in. “Okay,” he said, and placed his order. “But don’t send it here,” he added. “It goes to 1501 Van Buren. Around 6:45, okay?”
“No problem,” Mr. Wong said.
Wickham slid Jade’s picture back into his wallet and sat back down at the desk. He picked up the telephone and, while arranging for a taxi, heard the click of the downstairs telephone. “I’m on the line, Mom,” he said, and she quietly hung up. He knew what she was doing, because he’d seen her do it countless times.
She was making sure the phone worked.
Chapter 14
Messages Written and Not
Audrey knew she shouldn’t be secretly relieved that her father was working late that night, but she was. And she knew she should run a space heater in the breakfast room, where they could both eat and study, rather than turn on the forced-air heater, which her father was trying not to use (“Why deplete our natural resources?” he’d joked). But Audrey was afraid that using only the space heater would make the house—and, indirectly, her—seem cold and stingy.
Wickham had said “sixish,” but the doorbell rang at 5:55, and though Audrey came to the door dressed, she was still drying her hair. “Hello, you,” he said.
As she smiled and said hello, she knew she was beaming and wished she weren’t. “You’re early,” she said, and gave her hair a final toweling. “I just got out of the shower.”
Wickham laughed and, after glancing around to be sure no one else was present, drawled, “Then I should’ve come a few minutes earlier.”
Audrey felt her beaming turn to blushing. “Where’re your books?” she said, and then, seeing no car under the portico, “Where’d you park?”
“Forgot my book and I got a ride,” he said. He smiled at her for a second or two. “I know what you’re thinking.”
What Audrey was thinking was how she wished her hair weren’t wet, and how amazing it was that a boy this handsome had knocked on her door, and how strange it was that he hadn’t brought his book if he was planning on studying. What she said was, “Okay, what am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking I forgot the promised vittles.”
Audrey laughed. “Nope. I’d forgotten the vittles completely.” Then she said, “It’s okay, I can make soup and sandwiches.”
He leaned forward, and she smelled the sugary smell again. For one preposterous, fleeting second, Audrey thought he was going to kiss her. He didn’t. He simply said, “The vittles is on their way.”
She laughed again. “They is?”
“They is.”
“What kind of vittles is they that can be on their way?”
Wickham made a low laugh. “The kind that leave Little Dragon in little cartons.”
This is easy, Audrey thought. I’m here with wet hair talking to Wickham Hill with nobody in the house, and it’s easy.
As they walked down the warm hallway toward the warm dining room, Wickham Hill said, “So what were you thinking?”
She pointed him into the dining room. “When?”
“When I thought you were worried I’d forgotten the vittles.”
“I don’t remember,” Audrey said, “other than wishing my hair was dry.”
He reached out, touched a strand of her damp hair, and said, “I liked that it was wet.” He was looking at her hair, and then he was looking at her eyes. “You have nice hair.”
In the next moment, while he held her with his eyes, Audrey inhaled the sweet, sugary smell. Was it cookies? She wished it were Christmas already, and that snowflakes were piling up on the hedges and trees. She made herself break away from his gaze, opened her book to the chapter on Schrödinger’s Cat, and said, “Maybe we should get started.”
Audrey and Wickham’s first hours together slipped easily by. He said he had a little headache, so they put off talking about Schrödinger’s Cat until they’d eaten cashew chicken and considered each other’s fortunes (his was “Untended friendships bear hard fruit,” and hers was “Protect that which is yours and yours only”). Audrey tried to discuss physics then, but he kept slipping amiably to other topics, and they spent most of their time talking.
He asked about her parents, and after she’d talked awhile about them (her father worked all the time, she said, and she only really remembered her mother from photographs), she asked about his family (he was an only child, his mother was a nurse and his father was a doctor, but they were “kind of separated” right now). He was still talking when the phone rang. Audrey looked at her watch and said, “Oh my gosh.” It was already nine o’clock.
She picked up the phone and said, “Hi, you guys,” and then, “He’s still here—can I call you back in a few minutes?”
After she’d hung up, she turned awkwardly to Wickham. “My friends C.C. and Lea. We always conference-call at nine o’clock.”
He nodded. “Your good-looking girl chums.”
“Have you met them?”
He shook his head. “I’ve just seen them with you.”
That he paid attention to her unobserved was strangely flattering. She said, “Unless the weather’s bad, we eat our lunch on a little knoll above the quad. You could come eat with us tomorrow if you wanted.”
He took this in. “Tell you what. I’ll come eat with you guys tomorrow if you’ll have something to eat with me at Little Dragon tomorrow night.”
Easy. It all seemed so easy. “You’re kind of a big dealmaker, aren’t you?”
He laughed, and in his low drawl said, “All I know is, when I eat Chinese food with you, my headaches go away.”
He was looking into her eyes again, and she made herself say, “Aren’t you the slightest bit worried that you are so not ready for this quiz thing tomorrow?”
He shifted and shrugged. “I’ve failed better teachers than Mrs. Leacock,” he said. Then he let his eyes settle into hers and, in a low, sociable voice of complicity, he said, “Besides, I’ll be fine if, while you’re taking the test tomorrow, you just lean a little to the right or to the left.”
Chapter 15
A Vow
When his alarm clock sounded the next morning, Clyde Mumsford woke up happy.
He’d been dreaming of Audrey Reed. This wasn’t the first time he’d dreamed of her, but this one had been the most pleasant. He’d been riding a bicycle alon
g a sunny country road and was weirdly, almost weightlessly happy, but didn’t know why until in his dream he turned around and saw Audrey Reed on her own bike, pedaling behind him. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, and her long sandy hair streamed back from her face. I’m gaining on you, she said, grinning.
For a few minutes, while he slept, he’d known what it was like to be Audrey Reed’s boyfriend.
“Clyde? You up?” His father, from the front room.
“Getting there,” Clyde called back.
There was a freestanding Everlast punching bag in the middle of the room. Clyde got up and gave it a couple of sharp jabs. So what was he going to do about Audrey Reed? Wait around for the next good dream? Nobody said he had to be rich just to talk to her. Who said he couldn’t just ask her to study with him the next time he ran into her? Say, hey, I’m having some trouble with this whole sub-Saharan culture deal and you seem to have it down pat. Would you mind going over it with me?
He could do that. Maybe he could do that. He could tell Audrey Reed was nice, and once he’d been around her awhile, his words wouldn’t come out like croaks anymore. Diminished croakiness would evolve.
After he’d showered and dressed, Clyde went to the living room, where his father was standing at the big window, staring out. His mother was still sleeping. The TV was tuned to a cooking show, but the sound was off. A tray with yogurt and Cream of Wheat sat next to his mother, untouched.
“Going now, Dad,” he said on his way out.
His father turned and nodded. In the five years of his mother’s sickness, his father’s hair had started graying. This morning his skin seemed gray, too.
From behind them, in a dazed, soft voice, his mother said, “Going where, without . . . ?”