by K. Z. Snow
Other pieces came together, at least for me and Rider. All those evenings Tim wasn’t in the dorm, he was probably with Nancee. He’d resisted going to the dance because of her. And he’d ultimately decided to go because of her. He must’ve heard, maybe from Nancee herself, that she’d be one of the chaperones.
Had he seen her snaking around like Salome in front of Rider? That would’ve hurt like hell, especially combined with her missent e-mail.
Rider and I figured there was evidence of Tim’s doomed affair with Ms. Anderson. There had to be. Maddened by despair, he hadn’t stopped at his room last night to wipe out their tracks. All he’d done was fling his phone through the door. A journal might exist, or letters. Certainly phone records and maybe even text and e-mail messages. Carlton, school officials, or Tim’s parents were bound to find out about Tim’s hopeless love for one of his teachers. And they’d see she had encouraged it.
Nancee, however, would have wiped out her tracks. We were equally sure of that. She clearly was smart, and Rider said she was also shrewd. She’d once assured him in a boastful way that she knew how to keep information from falling into the wrong hands. But that wouldn’t do her much good if her young lovers didn’t share her dedication to secrecy or her tech expertise.
Monday was a bitch to get through. The whole student body was yammering about Tim’s drowning and pestering the fuck out of those of us who’d been on the shore that night. I’m sure people would’ve kept knocking on our doors if our house fellow hadn’t run interference.
Carlton never emerged from his room. Since Sunday morning, Ian had been bringing him eats. Brody, Rider, and I escaped back to the dorm right after dinner on Sunday and breakfast on Monday. We all got excused from classes.
But Rider and I didn’t hole up all day. When fourth-hour rolled around, we made a point of going to American history.
Ms. Anderson was a little surprised to see us but otherwise seemed unperturbed. She said a few obviously rehearsed words about “Saturday night’s tragic accident” and how “we must go on because life demands it.” After giving the class a sorrowful but consoling smile, she swung right into the day’s lesson.
My brain pulsed. My skull felt ready to shatter. I stood up from my desk. My face quivered, but I didn’t break down. Staring into Nancee’s perfectly made-up face, I heard my voice say, “You killed him. You did.” And I felt my legs carry me out of the room before I was ordered out of the room.
Rider immediately came after me and tightened an arm around my shoulders. “You’re more incredible than I thought,” he said.
The goon squad got me right after I exited the building. Nancee must’ve called the dean’s office as soon as I left her class. Rider walked with me all the way to the administration building, but he wasn’t allowed inside. Once in the dreaded Room of Doom, I waited for the swarthy, scowling Dean Pasquale to tell me what to do next.
He invited me to have a seat on the visitor side of his desk.
Calmly, I sat. My mind was empty.
Dean Pasquale sounded a lot more civilized than he looked. “I realize you’re under considerable stress right now, Mr. McCullough, but that doesn’t excuse your reprehensible and disruptive outburst. You’re normally a polite, quiet young man. What you did was shockingly uncharacteristic of you.” He relaxed into his leather throne of a chair and linked his fingers. Silvery black hair crawled along the backs of his hands. “Care to explain?”
I didn’t flinch. I felt like a dead and frozen tree. “She was fooling around with Tim. He’s not the only guy she’s done it with, but he’s—” My voice stuck in my throat. I saw Tim’s bluish face beneath the black bowl of the sky. “He’s the only one who took it to heart.”
All the blood drained out of Pasquale’s face. After a moment he pulled open a desk drawer, plucked out a wad of tissues, and handed them to me. I blew my nose.
“By ‘fooled around,’ you mean engaged in inappropriate contact?”
I nodded as I wiped my eyes. “Yes. As in sexual contact. As in a full-blown affair.”
“Those are some grave allegations, Jacob.”
“I know.”
“Do you have any proof?”
I shook my head. “Nothing I can show you. But something might turn up if you go through Tim’s room.”
“And you claim there’s been more than one such liaison?”
“Yes. That’s a fact.”
The dean rose from his desk and walked to one of the office’s two windows. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, mulling over God knew what as he stared outside.
When he finally turned around to face me, he said, “So you’re suggesting Mr. Burnett took his own life.”
“I’m not suggesting it, I know it.”
“Might there be proof of that?”
“No, aside from what I saw. And what I heard before it happened.”
The dean’s attention sharpened. “What did you see and hear?”
Shit. Why had I brought that up? It was Rider’s business, nobody else’s, and it was up to him to come forward. Or not. “Tim… confronted another guy about his involvement with Ms. Anderson. That’s all I’m going to tell you, so don’t bother asking me who the other guy is.”
Pasquale kept regarding me as he sank back into his chair. “All right. I respect your position.” He rubbed his forehead with three fingers.
“And I saw Tim jump into the fishing hole, not skid or fall into it. He knew exactly where it was. He could’ve easily avoided it if he’d wanted to, but he headed straight for it.”
Pasquale closed his eyes.
“Am I going to be expelled?”
“That’s not a decision I can make on the spot, Jacob. Especially under these circumstances.” He sounded distracted and troubled, but I sensed his kindness toward me. I’d sensed it as soon as he began addressing me by my first name. If the dean knew anything about me at all, he knew I was a good student and not some shit-stirring troublemaker with a grudge against certain teachers.
“Jacob?”
I looked up.
“I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t share your opinion regarding the cause of Mr. Burnett’s death.”
“But it isn’t my o—”
The dean held up his hand. “Yes, it is.” He leaned forward on his folded arms. “Listen to me. Absent a clear statement of intent, either written or oral, we have no choice but to assume Mr. Burnett’s death was a regrettable accident. Perhaps he was upset when he ventured onto the ice, for whatever reason, but that doesn’t mean he intended to end his life. I don’t want our students hearing the word suicide, and I certainly don’t want the Burnetts hearing it. Do you understand?”
Meekly, I nodded. I hadn’t thought about Tim’s parents and the pain it might cause them. Tim’s mother especially. She’d come to rely heavily on her son’s support during that prolonged fiasco of a divorce.
Now I felt like shit for yet another reason. “Sir, I swear to you I haven’t talked about Tim’s passing to anybody except my roommate. I actually can’t stand talking about it.”
Pasquale’s expression gentled. “It must’ve been hell for you and the other boys who were there. I’m sorry you all had to go through such a terrible experience, but you handled the situation like real heroes.” He sat back. “You can go now, Mr. McCullough. You’ll be notified if the board decides to take any punitive action against you.”
I didn’t doubt that for a second.
ACCORDING TO eyewitness accounts, as a crime reporter might say, the lights in the administration building were on well into the night that Monday. No surprise to Rider and me. Brody told us over dinner that Carlton, who’d been distraught and in virtual seclusion since Saturday night, had been boxing up Tim’s things to either turn over to the Burnetts or ship back to Iowa if they decided not to drive up here. He’d also been going through Tim’s things. And sure enough, he’d found ample proof of the affair.
“I’m gonna go to the dean right now and nail that bitch
,” he’d told Brody. “She was playing him like a cheap banjo. Even I could tell.” Neither he nor Brody was aware of what Rider and I knew. We’d never discussed it with anybody—not the critical face-off, not Rider’s history with Nancee, not Tim’s intentional leap into the fishing hole. Not any of it.
Sometime that afternoon, Carlton must’ve followed through with his vow and brought what he’d found to the administration building. Nancee was toast. Sexual misconduct by a teacher would not be taken lightly.
“Thank God I deleted that e-mail,” Rider said to me that night as we lay in each other’s arms. His face was still unusually pale. “I couldn’t handle Carlton’s reaction. I couldn’t handle anybody’s reaction right now, not to mention all the questions.”
We both slept fitfully.
Early Tuesday morning, I got an e-mail. So did Rider. So, probably, did every other student. We regret to inform you, it read, that history instructor Ms. Nancee Anderson is having a difficult pregnancy and must take a maternity leave of indeterminate length. Other members of the history faculty will be assuming her teaching duties.
Rider and I exchanged wide-eyed stares. “Do you think she’s really pregnant?” I asked.
“I hope so,” he said, “and I hope it’s Tim’s baby.” Then he added, “God, am I glad I couldn’t get it up. She said she was on birth control.”
Chuckling with the first amusement we’d felt in two days, as thin and bittersweet as that amusement was, we toppled backward onto my bed.
All we did was hold each other and murmur loving words. At that moment, nothing seemed more important.
Chapter Eleven
LIFE ON campus settled down, as life has a way of doing after any upheaval. If whole nations could recover from devastating wars, a prep school could recover from the loss of a student.
Not all of us recovered at the same rate. But thanks in part to counselors and therapists, we made progress. The only person who needed more help than Carlton was Rider, and I was glad he finally got to talk to a professional about his sister’s death as well as Tim’s. The sessions seemed to help him. He opened up to me more and more, and I to him, and that made our bond ever closer, ever tighter.
Neither of the Burnetts appeared at Ben Raphael. Bypassing an autopsy, they had their son’s body and belongings flown to Des Moines. Mrs. Burnett sent thank-you letters to the administration and “the students who tried so valiantly to save my son.” Dean Pasquale personally delivered the letter meant for us, Tim’s closest friends.
The academy held a memorial service. What remained of the All-Star Virgin Order got puking drunk afterward. The four of us were still family, but we weren’t the same family. We’d never be the same again.
Dean Pasquale met with Rider and me in private a week or so later. “I want you to know,” he told us, “that you don’t have to bear the burden of your secret by yourselves.” He went on to explain in a roundabout way that he realized Tim had been “a sensitive and troubled young man” and “could very well have resorted to ending his life.” The Burnetts also entertained the notion. Tim, they’d revealed, suffered bouts of depression and had attempted suicide twice in the past.
“Apparently he managed quite well,” Pasquale said, “when he took his medication and talked regularly with his therapist. But a concentration of triggers could overwhelm him. And perhaps did.”
Pasquale apologized for doubting me.
When word of Nancee’s shenanigans blasted through the student body, plenty of our peers, too, wondered if Tim might’ve killed himself. All kinds of speculation, from ridiculous to reasonable, ran rampant.
In a way I felt vindicated, but it was a hollow victory. It didn’t bring Tim back. And I hated seeing the toll Nancee’s new celebrity was taking on Rider. Mired in shame and remorse, he balked at revealing his own experiences to Admin. He couldn’t bear the thought of confessing that he, too, had been a willing victim, and it was his involvement with the woman that had driven Tim onto the ice.
Except, it hadn’t. Rider was wrong about that part. Again his guilt was misplaced. Tim’s own fragility had doomed him. It wasn’t just the hard, cold truth about Nancee’s behavior that had shattered his will to live. His parents’ divorce and two courses he was in danger of failing were contributing factors. Rider’s therapist and I had to keep reminding him of the perilous “concentration of triggers” Pasquale had mentioned.
At least Ms. Anderson got her just deserts. As it turned out, dismissal from the academy wasn’t the only consequence of her behavior.
Although the administration had done its damnedest to keep the Ben Raphael image untarnished, they couldn’t risk tampering with Tim’s computer or smartphone or destroying whatever other damning material Carlton had unearthed. Too many people knew about the stash.
Within a month, more nastiness surfaced involving Fancee Nancee and a Ben Raphael sophomore. Jesus, a sophomore. A fifteen-year-old kid.
The jig was irretrievably up.
Tim’s mother and the parents of the other dude insisted on bringing Ms. Anderson to justice. Sheriff’s deputies fetched Nancee, who was in fact pregnant, from the city where the Andersons had relocated. She was charged with two counts of second-degree sexual assault.
Although, by that point, Rider was tempted to come forward, he realized he couldn’t do it without getting his parents involved—a condition he found unacceptable. They might blame him, he said. Or not believe him. They might yank him out of Ben Raphael. “No good can come of it,” he told me. “Not while I’m still a minor.”
I agreed with him. He had enough issues to work through. Besides, Nancee’s goose was already cooked.
She and her husband (God only knew what that poor chump was going through) had to move back to our county to keep Nancee out of jail. After forgoing a jury trial, she was put under house arrest in lieu of serving a twelve-month sentence behind bars. Following that, she’d be on probation for five years. Her teaching certification was revoked. She had to register as a sex offender, and she was ordered to stay away from boys younger than eighteen.
“Just watch,” Rider the cynic said. “She’ll be trawling through chat rooms in no time.”
“Like an addict in search of a fix.” When it comes to human predators, I guess I’m a cynic too.
Not that we could do anything further about Nancee and her cravings. It was up to law enforcement and shrinks to keep her libido in line.
We doubted they would succeed.
Oddly enough, I still felt sorry for her.
“RIDER AND I are in love,” I said to Tim one evening in March as I stood alone near the fishing hole. “We never had a chance to tell you. It might not be smooth sailing, but I think we’re going to make it.”
He would’ve approved of our relationship. I was sure of it. Tim had been one of the least judgmental and most romantic people I’d ever known. Over the six weeks or so since his death, I’d come to think of him as our resident Jay Gatsby, blindly clinging to his impossible dream, unaware his beloved was a vain, shallow user and cheat. What an unspeakable waste that some deserving woman would never be blessed by Tim’s devotion.
He and Della would’ve made a wonderful couple. I’d even told her that, and lectured her about never compromising her ideals or letting herself be hoodwinked by some soulless ass hat. “Don’t worry,” she’d said. “This is one sistah who’s got her act together, babe. I might let them fuck me, but they’ll never fuck me over.” I’d come away from that conversation convinced she was tougher than us guys.
A mild wind stirred my hair. Soon, the ice would start breaking up, and Tim’s place of passage would exist no more. The only people who’d gravitated to it after his death were a gothy group of BR students. They’d brought candles and an Ouija board out here one Saturday night. Nobody else wanted to get near the “death trap,” around which the school had set up a sectional fence.
Tim hadn’t presented himself to the Ouija enthusiasts. I could’ve predicted that outcome. He�
��d never had patience for board games.
I thought about the one mystery that remained. Every time the hole came close to freezing over, somebody (or something) chopped away the new ice, as if to give Tim an escape route… or free his soul. Different students claimed they saw different people out there, from members of the All-Star Virgin Order to some girl from the Northern Light office to Nancee Anderson herself. But Mastodon, who’d kept a vigil for three nights running, said he saw no one at all.
I forced myself to look at the sky. The stars wheeled thickly overhead. This night, they seemed like a gateway to infinite possibilities, not a glittering veil over a dark, suctioning void. It was as if Tim were telling me You’ve made the right choices, Jake. The future will be a glorious place for you. Be brave, young man. Be brave. Do me proud.
Damn it, I would. I owed it to Tim. I owed it to Rider.
I owed it to myself.
Postscript
AT THE end of the school year, I went home for two weeks to try to strengthen my frail bond with my mom and dad. Rider came with me, but only as my friend and roommate. It was too soon to break the boyfriend news. I couldn’t deny the visit was awkward—my parents had always been preoccupied with their business ventures and making the right connections—but one evening, after we’d all been talking about Tim, I heard something from my dad I’d never heard before: “I’m proud of you, son.”
Rider was happy for me, but my heart still hurt for him. He was nowhere near reaching a peace with his family. Maybe he never would be. That was something else we’d just have to deal with—together.
We four remaining members of the short-lived Order stayed on campus that summer. I think we took comfort in being around each other, although the matter of our sexual virginity was now irrelevant. It had become irrelevant as soon as Tim surrendered to the wintry waters of the bay. At that precise moment, we’d all lost an innocence far more significant than sexual innocence. I saw a new maturity in my friends’ faces. We’d undergone, separately and together, an initiation we hadn’t anticipated.