by Ty Roth
No longer feeling “cute” in her new clothes, and growing increasingly uncomfortable, Claire grew pouty. Despite having agreed, under the duress of Mr. Shelley’s insistence, on the plan to lock Gordon out of their lives, Claire was having second thoughts. Contrary to any rational consideration of his behavior, she once again began to view Gordon in romantic terms, as if he were, like Leander (my allusion, not Claire’s), being kept from her against his will.
Oblivious to Shelly’s own Gordon-centered hell, Claire cried to her and begged Shelly to talk to Gordon for her, which Shelly would promise to do but never did. She’d give Shelly notes to pass along to him, which Shelly insisted she’d delivered but had actually thrown away. So, on top of her breaking heart, Shelly added a conscience racked by her deceptions.
Before long, talk of Gordon’s hookups reached Shelly. At first, she didn’t take the talk too seriously. In time, however, she grew fidgety, nervous, and self-doubting. She squirmed in her skin as if it were lined in burlap. Shelly had never been an honor roll student, but four “In Danger of Failing” slips were mailed home at the first quarter’s midterm.
Something strange was happening to Gordon also.
“Is Gordon putting on weight?” I asked Shelly one afternoon at the Beacon, as I watched him waddle toward the printer.
“Maybe it’s sympathy weight,” Shelly said. “You know, as Claire puts on the pounds, so does Gordon.” (Talk of Gordon’s knocking up Claire was all over school.) Her tone was bitter, more sarcastic than ironic, and betrayed a resentment uncharacteristic of the Shelly I knew. “He gets it from his mother,” she added.
I looked at Gordon once more, and for the first time saw the resemblance between him and the woman I had encountered at the swim meet the previous year.
“I’ve only seen it once before,” Shelly said, “it” being the weight gain. “After he was dumped by his first love, his cousin Annesley. When he’s depressed, he eats and pouts. It’s his way of coping. But as he eats, he puts on the pounds, and he hates the way he looks, which only further depresses him. A vicious narcissistic cycle.”
It probably didn’t help that, having already won two state championships, Gordon seemed complacent and unmotivated to swim. I know he wasn’t attending preseason morning workouts, because his Hummer was never in the parking lot when I got to school in the morning. He wasn’t expending the calories that he’d typically burn in the pool, and they had begun to pad his cheeks, his chin, and his midsection. On many guys, the extra weight wouldn’t have been noticed. Gordon was now far from fat, but he was equally distant from his typical “cut” figure.
“He’s clearly depressed,” Shelly reiterated.
“Depressed?” I asked, trying to imagine how a kid who had everything could possibly be depressed.
“It’s me. It’s this whole pseudo-relationship thing. It’s killing him. He isn’t any good at it. And Gordon can’t handle not being good at anything.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
The very next day after school, as I was heading to the Beacon from the junior class hall of lockers, I surreptitiously overheard one of the junior varsity cheerleaders playfully comment to Gordon about his “man boobs.”
I ducked into a crevice formed by a break in the row of lockers near the entrance to a classroom.
“You calling me a woman, Stacy? Is that it? I’m a woman now?” His tone and posture terrified poor Stacy Bloom.
“I’m sorry, Gordon. God, I was just kidding.” She pled her case to no avail and, I imagine, tried to sidestep around him, but when I peered around the corner, I could see that he had her backed into a bank of lockers.
“If I’m a woman, Stacy, how do you explain this?” Gordon pulled his junk through his open zipper and waved it at her.
She screamed, twisted away from where he had her nearly pinned, and ran for help right past where I cowered.
I heard Gordon punch the locker. He must have split the skin of a knuckle wide open, for he left a trail of blood that I followed to the boys’ locker room before making my way to the Beacon.
In Mr. Smith’s office the next morning, I’m sure Gordon denied the indecent exposure. Since there were no known third-party witnesses, it was his word against Stacy’s. Mr. Smith assigned him an essay on sexual harassment, and assigned yet more counseling with Father Fulop. For Gordon, it meant more study halls spent in Fulop’s office, listening to Fulop brag about “sowing my own wild oats as a young man,” and, finally, it meant kneeling in front of the priest as he prayed over him. I didn’t need Gordon to describe the procedure. It was the same for every student, boy or girl, sentenced to Fulop for counseling. Every kid at Trinity knew the drill.
If nothing else, his traumatic encounter with Stacy inspired Gordon to end his pig-outs, and he returned to morning swims wearing one of those Olympic-style full bodysuits. At lunch he ate nothing but fruits and vegetables, and a gallon jug of water was his constant companion.
Before long, he had shifted his shape back into its model physique.
* * *
Mid-October. Shelly and I were in the office debating final selections for the first semester’s issue. Gordon sat across the room at a computer station, surfing the Net and oblivious to our conversation.
Out of nowhere and in a suddenly somber tone, Shelly said, “We did it.”
“Did what?” I asked, sincerely afraid that the “it” was the “it” usually meant when a teenager tells another teenager that she did “it.”
“We broke up.”
“Oh. Good.”
Naturally, she looked hurt.
“I thought you meant … I mean … It’s probably a good decision,” I said in an attempt to recover.
Shelly said, “I just couldn’t stand it any longer.”
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“Not sure. I’m thinking about trying to find Neolin. If it’s not too late.”
I was about to suggest that she stay single for a while. Maybe focus on the Beacon, get back involved in a club or two—you know, just try to enjoy her senior year—when we heard “Well, fuck me!” I turned to see Gordon leaning in close to the screen. “Hey, Shelly. Come here.” He was already his old self, acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever occurred between them.
Shelly made an unconvincing show of being put out, then rose and walked over to Gordon so that she stood staring at the screen over his shoulder, blocking any chance I had of cheesing in on what they were reading.
I watched Shelly’s profile as she read. At first she seemed mystified, but, slowly, a look of recognition dawned over her face. She exchanged a knowing look with Gordon but didn’t say a word. After Shelly backed away and returned to the table we shared, he closed the browser, rose from his chair, gathered his things, and exited the room. Shelly, no longer able to focus, soon called it a day herself.
Left alone, I reopened the browser and searched its history. The last page visited was an online English version of the Athens News. The lead article reported an explosion inside a small warehouse in Pireas that killed several people. The explosion had rendered the victims unrecognizable. The police were waiting on forensics reports to aid in their identification of the bodies. Based on the high concentration of ammonium nitrate and evidence of other “bomb-making materials,” police suspected that the detonation was accidental and that the dead were members of the Struggle, the terrorist organization responsible for the murder of two members of Athens’s riot police during an ambush the previous August.
At that time, the story was meaningless to me, but that was about to change.
None of us attended the Halloween dance. By then, an anti-Gordon vibe had begun to pulsate through the halls. He explained away his sudden social marginalization as jealousy, and to a certain extent, it was. But, to be fair to Trinity’s blockheads, it wasn’t sudden. From the string of his disconnected hookups, to his ruination of Hogg, to being Claire’s r
umored “baby daddy,” to exposing himself to Stacy Bloom, it was an accumulation of offenses. And, prudish or not, the cold shoulders were more than justified.
But most damaging to his status was a tidbit of gossip of the most pernicious sort that reached the high school and the Ogontz community. Remember, the god Rumor was the most conniving and unmanageable of all the Greek deities. Around the same time that Gordon was growing chunky, Augusta was also mysteriously packing on pounds and undergoing the throes of what would eventually be diagnosed as morning sickness. Word was that she had withdrawn from college and was in hiding with her East Coast relatives.
It was Shelly’s turn to be nauseous.
On the afternoon of the dance, clearly stung by the talk of Gordon and Augusta, Shelly asked if she could spend the night at my house. An odd request, but I didn’t need anyone’s permission, and, for reasons I didn’t yet know, it was obvious that Shelly desperately didn’t want to be at home that night of all nights in the year.
“I tried to call Neolin,” she said, “but either he no longer has his cell or he doesn’t want to talk to me. Maybe he’s gone home.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“How do you know?” she asked in a tone tinged with hope.
“Do you remember that article in the Reporter that I tried to show you, but you wouldn’t look at?”
“That was nearly two months ago.”
“I know. But it said that Neolin had refused to leave the island. The reporter called him a renegade. He may be gone. He probably is gone. But for all we know, he’s still there. Maybe it’s worth a shot.”
Shelly didn’t respond to my advice, but a plan was being hatched inside her head. “I’ll see you tonight, John.”
That evening, with a six-pack of hard lemonade, Shelly arrived at my door around eight o’clock, already tipsy. She started talking the second I let her in, sharing the stories of hers and Gordon’s summers. She didn’t stop until she had passed out dead drunk around six in the morning.
At noon, still buzzed, Shelly spoke—more like slurred—of the future—how she would graduate from high school and “leave this horseshit town,” how she planned to reunite with Neolin and “make beautiful babies,” how she would live on North Bass with him away from the “bullshit” of people and parents and Gordon Byron, and how she’d be happy.
Trust me, I heard it all that night (well, most of it), and I’ve shared it all in this book.
In school on Monday, Shelly was becoming Shelly again.
On Friday, the sixth of November, three days after the passage of the casino gambling bill by the voters of the state of Ohio, a wicked nor’easter, bringing wind-whipped rain and dark skies at noon, blew down across the lake from Buffalo and beyond. Shelly and I had taken to eating lunch together in the Beacon’s office. Glancing at the front-page headlines of the Ogontz Reporter, I read, “Island Tragedy.” A wave of portent nausea washed through me.
“Shelly?” I said. “Have you talked to Neolin like you said you were going to?”
“Not yet. I’ve tried, but he doesn’t answer his cell. I’m taking the Whaler up there tomorrow. It’s my last chance before it’s placed in storage for the winter. Why?”
“Just wondered,” I said.
As casually as possible, so as not to excite Shelly’s curiosity further, I gathered the newspaper and excused myself to the restroom. Instead, I detoured into the darkroom, where in the—appropriate for the occasion—blood-red light I scanned the article. According to the reporter, whose only source was the Ottawa County sheriff, while attempting to evict a trespasser from state-owned property on North Bass Island, a contingent of deputies had been fired upon. Following a brief standoff, the officers went all Navy SEALs (that’s my interpretation), and after a round of tear gas was fired, a sniper’s bullet brought the incident “to a tragic but unavoidable end.” At the conclusion of an autopsy, the article said, the body of Gabriel Smith would be returned to his mother and people in the Ottawa Nation of Oklahoma.
That’s as far as I read before the glare from fluorescent overhead bulbs flooded the no longer dark room. Squinting into the gaudy light and guiltily hiding the newspaper behind my back, I turned and leaned against the rusted sink baths.
Shelly stood with one hand still on the doorknob. “What you doing in here, John? I thought you were going to the bathroom. What’s that?” She indicated the newspaper in my hand with a thrust of her chin.
“Nothing. I … I … I just …”
Witchlike in her speed, Shelly closed the distance between us. She reached around me—all the time staring accusingly into my eyes—grabbed the paper from my hand, read all of the article she needed to read, dropped the newspaper, and turned and walked out of the darkroom, the classroom, and Trinity for the final time. After Shelly was reported absent by her afternoon teachers, Principal Smith eventually charged her truant and placed her on suspension.
It didn’t matter. She wasn’t coming back anyway.
That night, she penned her “The Necessity of Atheism” essay and emailed it to Newsweek. Not long after, the article appeared in the magazine. By her birthday in December, with little resistance from Shelly’s family and none from Shelly herself, she was permanently expelled from Trinity (the essay being the final nail in her cross).
I know it seems pretty shitty of me, but I never even tried to contact Shelly after that. I planned to, and I kept telling myself I would, but it’s funny how seconds become minutes become hours become weeks become months become years become lifetimes without us doing the many things we promise ourselves we will.
I spoke with Gordon on only one occasion in the weeks following Shelly’s expulsion. I was alone in the media center, cleaning up after a staff (myself, Mr. Robbins, and the two remaining Gordonettes who had discovered an actual interest in publishing) Christmas party. With his hair still damp from swim practice, Gordon appeared in the doorway wearing a brand-new red letterman’s jacket with white leathery sleeves. I think it was part of some kind of image restoration campaign he’d begun in the attempt to clean up his toxic reputation. It included divorcing himself from all things Shelly, like the Beacon. He tensely held a just-released issue like a baton, as if prepared to defend himself from a rioting rabble.
“S’up, Keats?” Gordon said by way of reunion.
“Hi, Gordon. Where’ve you been?”
He pointed to his wet head. “Swimming mostly. And working on Asmodeus. My publisher wants a draft ASA fucking P. You?”
“You’re looking at it. Put in a lot of hours here, and I’ve been working on some things of my own.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of things?” he asked, but his eyes were busy surveying the room. I imagined them landing on and highlighting little hyperlinked icons in his memory that replayed past moments.
“I got this Web—”
“That’s cool,” Gordon interrupted. “Hey, nice job.” He raised the rolled-up Beacon to qualify his compliment.
“Thanks.” I ignored his rudeness. “I just finished what Shelly started.”
“Yeah, but you’re the new editor in chief.”
“For now,” I said. “It’s no big deal.”
“Bullshit. I’m sure Shelly’s proud.”
With the mention of her name, a funereal pallor fell over the room. The very space, which she had filled so often, and the atmosphere, which she had charged with such energy, mourned her absence.
“Have you talked to her?” he asked.
“No.” For all that I criticize Gordon for his self-absorption, I didn’t prove to be such a good friend to Shelly either. “Have you?”
“No. I’m not exactly welcome at the Shelley home.”
“Did you see her essay in Newsweek?”
“Yeah. Very cool.”
“Did you hear about”—I hesitated to say the name, not sure of the degree of sensitivity Gordon felt regarding Shelly’s other love—“Neolin?”
“Yeah. It sucks. I’ve tried texting her a
few times, but she never texts me back. She probably blames me. I guess I would too, if I were her.”
“She just needs some time. You know, to sort some of this out.”
“You’re probably right, Keats.”
That was it. Neither one of us had anything more to offer regarding Shelly, or to one another.
“Guess I’ll see you around,” Gordon said, and he was gone.
In late December, Claire gave birth to her daughter and named her Allegra. Within six weeks, she was back at Trinity, haunting Gordon.
I saw Shelly alive only one more time; it was on a beautiful Saturday in late May with weather that can make you forget the crappy winter you just endured and how much you hate living in Ohio. The kind of day that makes you long for the summer in the offing. From my upstairs room, I heard a heavy, purposeful knocking on the front door. It was Shelly. She looked good, like her old self, with her hair long and undone, falling over a black T-shirt with the likeness of Jim Morrison screened in white on its front. She was in flip-flops and a pair of cutoff jeans, and she was holding a box half-full of books, mostly poetry. On a quick glance I recognized several names on the spines: Plath (of course), Sexton, Dickinson, Angelou, and Ryan.
“Hey, John,” she said as I gladly opened the door.
I invited her inside, but she declined.
“I was cleaning my room and”—she paused as if rethinking her decision to part with the books—“I’d like you to have these.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but …”
She stopped me before I could ask why.
“I saw last semester’s Beacon online; you did a great job finishing that issue.” She was changing the subject, making small talk.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thanks for keeping my stuff in. You must have gotten some grief for that.”
“A little,” I said. “I’m nearly finished editing this semester’s edition.”
“That’s great. How’s Gordon?” It took only that long for her to get to what she’d come to ask.