So Shelly

by Ty Roth

  “Now, there’s only one teacher, Father Fulop, in the whole place. And, at first, he seems to be enjoying it as much as anybody. But he eventually senses that he’s in over his head, right? He goes running for help. The next thing you know, Shelly returns to her bag, spreads out the sheet like a picnic blanket in front of one of those big, square load-bearing columns in the cafeteria. She pulls out a can of blood-red paint and pours it all over the top of her head. Finally, she removes a heavy chain from the bag and motions for someone to wrap it around her and the column and to secure the chain with the biggest fucking lock I’ve ever seen. Trust me, there was no shortage of volunteers. Man, it was so Shelly. Fulop returned with Mr. Smith. Everyone was sent back to class. Even though some people hadn’t even touched their lunches. On my way, I saw the janitor heading toward the cafeteria with the most massive set of bolt cutters I’ve ever seen.” Gordon laughed out loud at the memory.

  “I wish I had been there.”

  “I can’t imagine what that stunt cost her old man in donations,” Gordon said.

  “Yeah, for all the good it did.”

  Gordon stopped laughing. Most of Shelly’s good deeds somehow ended in disaster—like her last one.

  Talk about killing the mood.

  “I guess you’re right,” Gordon said.

  To the east, the horizon had begun to darken. Massive boulders, which had long ago been placed along the lake side of Sand Road, blocked my view of what I knew to be a strip of soft brown sand on the private beaches that ran the length of that side of the peninsula.

  When I was a little boy and my dad was still in good health, he took Tom and me out on a fishing charter. Other than puking my guts up, the only thing I remember about that day was when my father pointed toward the miles of brown sugar-fine sand along the Strand, where I could make out only a few privileged and scattered beachgoers. He said, “Get a good look at it, boys. This is as close as either of you will ever get.”

  * * *

  Now that I was on the Strand for the first time, I was surprised to see that it actually contained a diverse assortment of homes, ranging from simple A-frames and one-room bungalows—most of which had been in the possession of people of modest means for generations—to the villas and two-story mansions of Ogontz’s gentry and its seasonal nouveaux riches. It reminded me a lot of Gatsby’s West Egg. All the homes were situated on the west, bay side of the road, which had to be crossed by the residents or renters to get to the private lakeside beaches.

  “It’s right here,” Gordon said abruptly, pointing with his left arm extended through my line of vision.

  I pressed heavily on the brake pedal and slid to a stop on the sandy surface. I shifted the Trans Am into reverse and returned to the wrought iron security gate between two large redbrick pillars that marked the only land entrance to Acedia.

  “Five-eight-two-six,” Gordon said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The code for the gate. Press five-eight-two-six, then star.”

  I did as instructed and watched the right side of the gate, topped with the “dia,” rise like prison bars against the orange-red gloaming of the western sky. Even intermingled with the magic colors of early twilight, the expansive, verdant cul-de-sac containing the cloistered inhabitants of Acedia dominated the scene and my senses.

  The massive and many-windowed homes lorded over a veritable orchard of Babylon willow trees. Buried sprinkler heads popped out of lush lawns and from among the manicured landscaping in a synchronized greeting in honor of our arrival. They began their frenetic oscillation, launching arched streams of water to battle the life-choking nature of the sandy and windswept soil. I instinctively turned right and followed the rotary around a centralized miniature English garden, replete with benches, a circuitous walkway, a dog park, and a fountain of three leaping dolphins spewing water from their mouths.

  “That one’s mine,” Gordon said, pointing toward a massive Georgian colonial.

  Beyond the horseshoe driveway, like sentinels, six bone-white columns rose from the front porch to a steeply pitched corniced portico high above. Paired redbrick chimneys rose from opposite ends of the roof on top of the gray-brown wide-planked wood-sided mansion. The weatherworn home was in desperate need of a refacing. Five second-story multipaned, rectangular windows encased in black shutters watched our approach in symmetrical perfection above four matching first-floor windows and centered French doors. The grounds were the only ones in the neighborhood not professionally maintained or washed in ambient landscape lighting.

  I must have looked like I’d seen a ghost or something, because Gordon said, “It’s okay, dude; they’re just houses.”

  I brought the Trans Am to a complete stop at the foot of the driveway, somehow feeling unworthy of advancing farther. I’m not sure how long I had been idling and staring, but a flood of shame washed over me as I considered Gordon’s unplanned visit to my neighborhood and home, precipitated by my dim-witted forgetting of Shelly’s disc.

  “It’s that one,” he said. “Shelly lived there.” He pointed at the monstrosity to the immediate right of his house.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve just never seen it from the front or this close.”

  It was even bigger than Gordon’s and in much better repair. There were no signs of life in or around the house, even though the wake at Trinity should have ended by then.

  “Let’s go,” Gordon announced. “We can’t have much time. Grab the disc and Shelly. I’ve got to get into Shelly’s pool shed and grab the boom box. I’ll meet you out back.”

  I snickered.

  “What?” Gordon asked.

  “Boom box?” I said. “It sounds so eighties.”

  “Says the guy with the Trans Am. What do you want me to call it? That’s what she called it. Do you want me to get it or not?”

  “Sorry,” I said, stifling my amusement and shifting into park. “What should I do with the Trannie?”

  “Leave it. My mother won’t notice or care, and by the time anyone connects it to us, we’ll be on the water.”

  I took Shelly from the Trans Am and hurried around the side of Gordon’s house to the backyard, which I had viewed from my side, across the bay, so many times. On those occasions, I never could have imagined the events that would lead to my crossing his backyard at that moment.

  Gordon reappeared from Shelly’s property carrying the boom box, and we headed directly toward the wooden docks that extended into the bay from the thin strip of beach behind the houses.

  “No trouble getting into the shed?” I asked as we reached the horizontally slotted planks.

  He unclenched his hand. Resting in his palm was a key. “I know where they hide it,” he said, before carelessly whipping it, sidearm, far out into the water. “That ought to piss off her old man a bit.”

  I gasped as if he were Sir Bedivere returning King Arthur’s sword to the Lady of the Lake.

  We both tried not to notice the vacant space along Shelly’s dock, where her sailboat, Ariel, used to be tied off. Gordon jumped down into his sixteen-foot fiberglass Byron-brand Corsair-model outboard, powered by twin Mercury motors, and placed the boom box beneath the captain’s chair. I handed him Shelly in exchange for one of those puffy orange life jackets, double-checked that Shelly’s disc was still in my pocket, and cautiously lowered myself into the boat.

  “Where’s yours?” I asked, meaning a life preserver.

  For the second time that evening, Gordon looked at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world.

  I undid the lines and tossed them into the boat while he started the engines.

  When I joined Gordon beneath a hard plastic canopy behind the steering console, where he half-sat, half-stood in the captain’s chair near the dead center of the hull, we paused, perhaps each waiting for the other to change his mind. A moment passed before Gordon said, “Let’s go, then,” and he reversed the boat out into the bay.

  After reorienting the bow, he set the GPS headings f
or North Bass Island and slowly pressed forward the dual throttles until they reached a three-quarter speed position. The Corsair gently skimmed the surface of the bay on a due north course toward the shipping channel that runs past Johnson’s Island and Marblehead Point on the left and the tip of the Strand peninsula on the right.

  The open waters of Lake Erie proved to be only slightly less accommodating than those of the protected Ogontz Bay had been. One-to-two-footers rolled in the South Passage that separates the Ohio mainland from the smattering of islands that lie in Erie’s western basin. Unimpressive wave heights for a regular Laker, but I hadn’t been on the water since that fishing charter with my dad and brother that had left me green and vomiting. As Gordon navigated through the west-to-east-running rollers, I felt the nausea beginning to percolate and rise.

  “Stare into the horizon; it’ll help,” Gordon advised, sensing my discomfort. “And eat these.” He reached beneath the stainless steel steering wheel into a bin and pulled out a bag of pretzels and a warm can of Sprite.

  Holding fast to Shelly, pressed between my left arm and side, I nibbled on the pretzel rods with my right hand and tried to maintain my balance on my landlubber’s legs. Beyond the bobbing red bow light, I watched the last vestiges of the day surrender to a translucent night. In the middle of the lake, the canopy of stars shone in a number and with a brilliance I had never before seen from land. Remembering Gordon’s lecture of several years past, I wondered which stars were already dead and which were still pulsating, and into what already-plotted future I was currently heading. Gordon steered the Corsair according to the path on the blue-lit screen of the GPS, but the moon hanging over us from the stern graciously projected its reflected light before us and illuminated a path that ran straight to the Bass Islands.

  BYRON! HOW SWEETLY SAD THY MELODY!

  ATTUNING STILL THE SOUL TO TENDERNESS,

  AS IF SOFT PITY, WITH UNUSUAL STRESS,

  HAD TOUCH’D HER PLAINTIVE LUTE, AND THOU, BEING BY,

  HADST CAUGHT THE TONES, NOR SUFFER’D THEM TO DIE.

  O’ERSHADOWING SORROW DOTH NOT MAKE THEE LESS

  DELIGHTFUL: THOU THY GRIEFS DOST DRESS

  WITH A BRIGHT HALO, SHINING BEAMILY,

  AS WHEN A CLOUD THE GOLDEN MOON DOTH VEIL,

  ITS SIDES ARE TING’D WITH A RESPLENDENT GLOW,

  THROUGH THE DARK ROBE OFT AMBER RAYS PREVAIL,

  AND LIKE FAIR VEINS IN SABLE MARBLE FLOW;

  STILL WARBLE, DYING SWAN! STILL TELL THE TALE,

  THE ENCHANTING TALE, THE TALE OF PLEASING WOE.

  —JOHN KEATS, “TO BYRON”

  8

  Looking back at the first half of Shelly and Gordon’s junior—my sophomore—year, it’s easy to pinpoint the signs of Shelly’s unraveling, which at that time, absorbed in the aftermath of my father’s death, I missed.

  By then, a full year into their time together at Trinity, Shelly and Gordon’s relationship had been mostly relegated to his hot and cold involvement with the Beacon. No amount of her less-than-subtle worship was capable of causing him to reimagine her as anything more than a childhood friend. No matter how much more she wanted, Gordon would always be Gordon. He was a lot of things, but a white knight was not one of them. Without friends her own age or boyfriends, Shelly felt freer to devote herself to her causes (thus, the red paint protest) and the Beacon.

  Then, as the universe continually proves itself ironic, Shelly made the first non-Byron friend of her entire life other than me.

  “Hey, Shelly,” I said, as she entered the media center. “You’re late again.

  “One more week of detentions to go,” she explained.

  In addition to the one-week in-school suspension Shelly had earned and already served for her little act of cafeteria civil disobedience, she’d been assigned two weeks of after-school detentions and ten service hours working with the maintenance crew.

  “I missed you at Mass today,” I said slyly.

  “Oh, yeah? I was there,” she answered, but I knew she wasn’t. Shelly may have been the worst liar in history.

  That year, for extra credit in sophomore theology, I had volunteered to film the daily Masses, from the rear balcony of All Saints. The Masses were replayed for the kids who were serving in-school suspensions. (I’m pretty sure that is some form of double jeopardy or, at least, cruel and unusual punishment.) I didn’t need the extra points, but it saved me the humiliation of, morning after morning, having to find a pew where I would be welcomed. Skipping a grade had left me a man without a class.

  The camera was stationary. Once I pressed the record button, there was little actual “filming” required, so I’d spend most of my time voyeuristically watching Trinity’s mortals below. You’d be surprised by the unholy goings-on that I regularly witnessed, such as surreptitious gaming on all sorts of handheld devices, constant text messaging, and even the occasional hand job or “stinky pinky” beneath a varsity jacket placed across a lap.

  To pass the time, I’d play “Where’s Shelly?” Since, like me, she didn’t belong to any of Trinity’s cliques, she lacked their vital membership privileges—one of which was the communally understood and enforced provision that members of said cliques were not only guaranteed but also expected to sit with fellow group members at all school gatherings, such as assemblies, pep rallies, lunch, athletic events, and school Masses. During any given Mass, I’d eventually locate Shelly anywhere from parked among the freshmen, to mixed in with the faculty, to sitting unwelcome and alone among the upperclassmen—usually with the width of a full body free on either side of her. Once, I even caught her sneaking in to hide inside a confessional. But I always found her. That day, I hadn’t.

  “Okay,” Shelly finally admitted under my accusing stare and the prolonged silence. “I ditched. But I made a friend.”

  “Who might that be?” I asked.

  “Hogg.”

  The unfortunately but aptly named Tammy Jo Hogg was a fellow outcast and survivor. She possessed the cruel combination of a beautiful face and, let’s just say, “full” figure. Everyone at Trinity called her Hogg. (According to the National Institutes of Health, an estimated three hundred thousand deaths a year in the United States are the result of obesity.)

  The contrasts in the two misfits couldn’t have been more pronounced. Shelly was slim and her hair long, black, and unruly; her face was not beautiful, but she was far from unattractive. Hogg was, obviously, overweight, blond, and had a ruddy skin tone. Shelly was deep-thinking and artsy, whereas Hogg’s next profound thought would be her first. Shelly’s fashion sense, like her retro taste in music and movies, veered toward vintage consignment shop pieces, and she loved bright colors and stripes at any and all angles. Hogg chose classic cuts, patterns, and colors that complemented rather than advertised. Shelly grew up bereft of family and largely ignored by her disinterested father, who thought her at first odd and then, later, crazy. He actually threatened to make her see a shrink after the red paint stunt in the cafeteria. Hogg, in contrast to the constant cruelty she endured from the fitness Nazis at Trinity, had a family of similarly oversized parents and siblings who loved every inch and pound of her. She was never happier than when at home in her neighborhood of modest, mostly ranch-style homes on Ogontz’s west side, watching movies, playing board games, and eating junk and fried foods at a suicidal pace.

  As Shelly explained it to me, their friendship began in the girls’ lavatory.

  Separately, they had each decided to skip the mandatory Thursday-morning Mass and were sitting—each unbeknownst to the other—on toilets in adjoining stalls, with their feet scrunched up on their respective seats—not an easy piece of contortion for a girl of nearly two hundred and fifty pounds. A female faculty member, typically Sister Margaret, the last remaining nun at Trinity, would perform a pre-Mass sweep of the girls’ restrooms and locker room, taking a quick peek under the stall walls, looking for ditchers before moving on to nearby All Saints Church. The girls had both figured out how to outm
aneuver her long ago.

  No sooner had Sister Margaret completed her casing of the restroom and closed the door than Shelly heard the unmistakable sound of a lighter being torched, followed by the smell of a cigarette burning.

  Shelly delicately slid the latch to the door, lightly placed her feet on the ground, and snuck out of the stall. Turning past the bank of stalls toward the exit, she nearly fainted when she spotted Hogg leaning heavily against a sink—cigarette to her mouth and eyes squinting hard through the rising smoke. (According to current trends, 6.4 percent of teen smokers will die from a smoking-related disease.)

  “Hi, Hogg,” Shelly said.

  Ignoring Shelly’s greeting, Hogg said, “Psycho Shelly,” while doing that trying-to-talk-and-inhale-simultaneously thing that smokers do so that their words, like firefighters in a burning high-rise, have to ascend the esophageal stairwell through clouds of toxic smoke, only to emerge spent and nearly unrecognizable in the fresh air. Hogg exhaled and offered Shelly a cigarette. Although she’d never smoked one before, Shelly took it. The cigarette felt uncomfortable in her hand, like a sixth finger, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it in her mouth, but she definitely liked the way she looked in the mirrors while holding it and placing it between her lips. She felt bad, and bad felt good.

  Shelly looked up and caught sight of the smoke detector, then looked back at Hogg.

  “Relax,” Hogg said, reading her mind and recalling Shelly’s infamous red-paint-induced probation. Between her thumb and forefinger, Hogg showed Shelly the nine-volt battery she’d removed from the smoke detector. (In approximately 60 percent of all home fire deaths in the United States, there is either no smoke detector in the home or a malfunctioning one.)