Echo Bridge

by Kristen O'Toole

  “You’re right. We gotta go. But I need a minute, unless you want to give me a hand with this?” Ted grinned at me and gestured toward his pup tent. I felt like exactly what Hugh had said I was: a tease. I took a deep breath and reached for his belt buckle.

  “You’re so romantic,” I said, kidding, as I unzipped his fly and reached in. If there was one thing I’d learned from reading biographies of my favorite actresses, it was that humor was an excellent tool for distracting an audience from your discomfort.

  “You’re so sexy,” Ted breathed. He pulled me close and ran his lips down my neck, from my earlobe to my collarbone, and slipped one hand under my sweater, tracing the edges of my bra with his fingertips. I closed my eyes and managed to shut the world out for a moment: Hugh, Tisch, The Crucible, everything outside the doors of the Rover meant nothing, as Ted whispered my name against my neck. Abruptly, he pushed my hand out of his boxers and finished himself off, wiping up with a filthy soccer jersey that was in the back of the car with us. He gave me a good long kiss, then fastened his pants and climbed into the driver’s seat. I followed into the passenger seat, straightening my gray wool miniskirt and pulling on my tall black suede boots.

  Ted stopped at the Kwik Pik for a Gatorade, then drove onto campus, dropping me in the circular drive in front of the main schoolhouse before driving across campus to the gym.

  “See you after practice,” he said, kissing my forehead. Ted chauffeured me everywhere. I had a license, but I hated to drive and had no car of my own, and I figured it didn’t matter. I was headed for New York City, where it was perfectly normal for an adult to have never even sat behind a steering wheel.

  I slipped out of the car and wrapped my Burberry trench coat around me, regarding the schoolhouse before walking up to its heavy, wooden double doors. Belknap Country Day was a vast stone mansion, formidable but not gloomy, its peaked roof scattered with white dormers that housed faculty offices. The campus had originally been the country estate of the Thistletons, one of the blue-blooded Boston Brahmin families. I paused under the large portico and gazed out between the columns and across the sloping lawn at the green athletic fields and woods beyond, thinking maybe I’d go for a walk before rehearsal began. I’d started smoking in secret since the night of the party, and the woods around campus offered plenty of cover. Before I could, though, Hugh Marsden’s black Lexus GX pulled up. I had to stop myself from cringing.

  Hugh honked, and I looked at him reflexively. He grinned, waved, and winked. I looked away from him, then back at the car. A blond girl with a compact, athletic build was climbing down from the passenger side, laden with two tennis racquets, a large gym bag, and the trademark backpack of any good Belknap Country Day Student: a deluxe model from L.L. Bean in unisex teal, straining around a stack of textbooks, with a nickname Magic-Markered onto the reflector strip in spite of the formally embroidered initials. MOLLY. This was Elaine Winslow’s little sister, who was a slightly shorter version of Elaine and played tennis instead of golf. They had another sister in the lower school, a seventh grader, and together they appeared as a matching set. They had actually been models for a company that made high-end silver knick-knacks; they were the girls in the photographs that come in the picture frames when you buy them. The Winslow sisters had always reminded me of The Stepford Wives. But Molly had surprised everyone that fall by auditioning for The Crucible and landing the part of Mary Warren, the maid who ultimately damns John Proctor as a witch. I was even more surprised to see her climbing out of Hugh’s car—Molly wasn’t the same as the sophomores Melissa had spit on at her party. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Molly at a party, period. But there she was, climbing out of Hugh’s car while he leered at me.

  “Hi, Courtney,” Molly said, a little hesitantly, as she walked up the steps onto the portico. “You headed to rehearsal?”

  “Yeah,” I said, opening the door for her. “Where are you coming from?”

  “I was practicing my serve at the gym.” She jostled her tennis racquets in their cases. “Hugh took me to Friendly’s for a shake before rehearsal.” She said “rehearsal” with a certain reverence; I recognized the tone from when I first began acting in middle school. She also threw an infatuated smile at Hugh’s car as it pulled away down the drive. Oh, hell, I thought.

  “So, um, are you excited for the first rehearsal?” she asked. Molly talked like she was totally thrilled that I was speaking to her and also totally terrified that it might be a joke, or that she’d embarrass herself somehow. I remembered feeling the same way when I was a freshman, talking to Lena Henson, perennial star of the class of 2008. Lena was most often seen now in bit parts on Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

  “Sure,” I said. “Abigail’s a good part. So is Mary, by the way. It’s always cool to have people who aren’t, like, the usual drama suspects in the play.”

  “Thanks,” she blushed. “I was worried everyone would think it was weird. I mean, I play tennis.” She said it like a person was only ever allowed to do one thing and nudged the tennis racquets with her hip.

  “So, Hugh Marsden,” I said, as we walked down the hall to the auditorium. I tried to sound gossipy and fun, but my acting skills betrayed me, and I knew I sounded suspicious and, weirdly, jealous.

  “I mean, I don’t know if we’re, like, going out,” Molly said, rolling her eyes. “But Jake Hobart told me that Hugh is going to ask me to the Rivalry Revelry.” And she smiled so big I thought my heart might crack in half.

  “Do you like him?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah,” she said, as if to say who wouldn’t? “It seems like he likes me, too.”

  I’ll bet, I thought. I bit down on my lip. If I came right out and told her to stay away from Hugh, Molly would probably tell him what I said. And Hugh would say something to Ted, and then I’d have to explain why I was cockblocking my boyfriend’s best friend, someone who was supposed to be my friend, too. I looked at Molly’s creamy face, her wide, guileless eyes, the short blond hair scraped back from her face with a headband. We were only two years apart but she seemed so young. I couldn’t let Hugh hurt her.

  “Um, look,” I said. “I know Hugh pretty well, and he’s not, like, the best boyfriend candidate.”

  Molly’s whole demeanor changed. “No offense, Courtney, but I already have an older sister.” She rolled her eyes. “We’ve already had this talk. He’s older, he’s aggressive, blah blah blah. He’s nice to me. If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t go out with him.”

  “Molly, I’m just trying to look out for you. If Hugh ever scares you or something—”

  “Scares me?” Molly snorted. “God, I’m not a child!”

  We had reached the doors to the auditorium, and paused. Mr. Gillison would already be inside, and maybe some of the rest of the cast. The conversation made me feel exhausted and trapped. I had gotten myself into this without knowing how to get out. I was also angry, suddenly and surprisingly furious, for the first time since the thing with Hugh. I knew Molly was the wrong target, but it felt so good to get mad, I couldn’t help it.

  “Well, actually, fifteen is technically a child,” I snapped, as if this weren’t also true of my own age, seventeen. “But I’m not treating you like one. I’m telling you that Hugh Marsden can, and probably will, hurt you. And I don’t mean metaphorically or emotionally. It’s happened before. I think you deserve better, but if you don’t—”

  “God! Senior girls hate it when their guy friends go for underclassmen. Everyone knows that. I probably will too someday. But you’re with Ted Parker. I know Hugh is his friend, but you’re not dating both of them, and this is really none of your business.” Molly sneered a little, hitched her bags higher on her shoulders, and pushed through the auditorium doors. I leaned one cheek against the cold metal door and caught my breath. I should have known better. I barely knew Molly, and there was probably some hostile history I wasn’t even aware of between my girlfriends and hers. Now she thought I was just another senior bitch.

  * * *
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br />   The theater teacher, Mr. Gillison, wanted my Abigail sex-crazed. “Her desire for John Proctor is so strong, she doesn’t care whom she hurts. Remember, before the play even begins, she’s willing to kill his wife with witchcraft. Abigail’s lust drives all the action.” He’d said this to me at the very beginning of the school year, and I’d thought that even if I’d had stiffer competition for the starring role, Mr. G would have cast me anyway, because he would have been too nervous to risk talking like this to a student he didn’t know as well as he knew me. He was basically saying, “Play Abigail horny as hell.”

  Mr. G was in some ways my mentor. I’d taken both his Theater I and II classes, of course, and been in almost all the productions he’d directed. He’d even rewritten a small part in the musical the previous spring so that I could have a speaking part but not have to sing. Of course, “mentor” implies that I aspired to his professional position, but I wanted to go far beyond it. While I could see that teaching at Belknap was probably a decent job, the idea of ending up back in high school as an adult was horrifying.

  When Mr. G had first talked to me about Abigail’s portrayal, I’d been excited. I liked the idea of female sexuality being the engine in a plot that revolved around repressive Puritans, and I loved the idea of playing a bunny boiler like the leads in Play Misty for Me and Fatal Attraction. But the night of Melissa’s party had changed that, along with everything else.

  “You’re playing Abigail in a way that makes her seem very fearful,” Mr. G told me that afternoon. “And yes, she is afraid. She’s an orphan, she’s consorted with a married man, and her uncle’s standing in the community is weak. She could easily be a victim of the various rules and constraints of society in colonial Massachusetts. By rights, she should be the first to hang as a witch. But we should only see this fear in a few glimpses, Courtney. Abigail hides it well, and it spurs her to manipulate and deceive a large group of people who hold more power than she does.” Mr. G stroked his chin, which he usually did when he was considering the merit of whatever he was about to say. “I’ve always thought Miller presents Abigail as a sociopath. She tells us herself that she saw her parents killed by Indians as a child, and this is exactly the sort of trauma that can trigger antisocial personality disorder. Why don’t you do some research? Look up the clinical definition. There’s also a great psych book called The Mask of Sanity that might be useful to look at in this respect as well.”

  Mr. G didn’t know that I was my own walking, talking example of a sociopath wearing a mask of sanity.

  * * *

  When we pulled up to my house that night, I found myself wondering if Ted felt weird about Hugh dating Molly, who was, after all, Ted’s ex’s sister. I wondered if Ted was sorry he’d ever ditched a girl like Elaine, who was never moody and probably had healthy and enthusiastic sex with Marshall Rye. Ted broke my reverie by turning off the ignition and squeezing my knee. “Courtney…are we going to talk about it?”

  My stomach lurched. I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against the cool car window. “Talk about what?” Whether to stay together in college? The panic attacks I’m not hiding very well? The fact that hearing your best friend’s name makes me want to scream?

  “You just don’t seem like yourself lately.”

  “I know,” I said. I lifted my head from the window and opened my eyes. I looked up at our house, which was neither historic (vinyl siding) nor brand-new, but large and featured a hearty lawn and a handful of dogwoods around the addition that had been built before I was born. I half-heartedly wished that the kitchen light would be on in the big bay window, but the whole house was dark. My father was probably in the shed out back, which he called his workshop. He was determined to build the perfect birdhouse to attract a pair of cardinals to the yard that winter. My mother was asleep on the couch, as she was most afternoons when I arrived home. My parents ate dinner early. They were older than most of my friends’ parents, who I imagined were coming home from work at that hour, making dinner and fixing cocktails and squinting out into the dark, looking for their kids’ headlights.

  “I’m sorry.” I rubbed my temples with my fingertips. “I’m just really freaked out,” I said. That was the truth, but then I faltered. “About the play and college and…you know, everything.”

  “Oh, Court.” Ted wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into him. I felt hideous. I was accepting Ted’s comfort under false pretenses. “Everything’s going to be fine,” Ted murmured into my hair. “Don’t worry. Your play will be great. They always have been before. You’ll get into NYU. And you and me, we’re going to work out the distance and all of that.” He slipped one hand down my side and squeezed my hip. “I just miss you, I miss really being with you.”

  “I know, me too,” I mumbled into his sweater. And though Ted’s hugs and kisses made me feel protected and cared for, I couldn’t imagine going back to how hot and heavy we’d been before. I kissed his Humphrey Bogart jaw line so I wouldn’t have to say anything else, feeling his stubble scrape my lips.

  “Revelry’s coming up. You want to go with me?” Ted stuck out his cleft chin and gave me a half smile.

  “Goof,” I said. We’d had dinner reservations before the dance in the North End since August. Ted gave me one last squeeze and then let go, brushing my hair back from my face. “We’ll do something special afterwards, just the two of us.”

  “Okay,” I breathed. The car and Ted’s embrace were beginning to make me feel claustrophobic. I climbed out and hauled my bag from the backseat. Ted started the car and flashed his lights at me as I climbed the porch steps and he backed down the driveway.

  Inside, I looked out to the lit shed in the backyard, where my father was working on a piece of pale wood gripped in a vise, and spread an afghan over my mother on the couch. I went upstairs and into my sister’s old room. I liked to sit in Anna’s room when I had the blues, or Holly Golightly’s “mean reds,” and just then I felt trapped between the two, sunk in a gloomy purple twilight mood.

  Anna’s room was all sunshine, sprigs of daisies on yellow wallpaper and a grass-green rug underfoot. The windows wore scalloped shades of pale blue. One wall was all built-in bookshelves, stuffed with crumbling college notebooks and small, shiny paperbacks, most of which were nearly a decade old. Of my three older siblings, Anna was closest to my age, but we were still six years apart. In her old room, the hoodie she’d worn almost every day in junior high still hung on the back of the closet door, and a pair of dusty, creased Doc Martens lay on the green rug by the bed, as if she’d just dropped them there and wandered downstairs to get a snack. When she came home at Christmas, she complained about her old room—“Really, Mom, most people would have turned this into a guest room by now, and the bed is awful!”—but I loved it. The twin bed had a maple headboard and a pair of friendly bears with caramel fur propped on a white bedspread. When I was about seven and Anna thirteen, she swore she couldn’t sleep unless I was in the bed, too. She kicked and hogged the covers, but it was worth it to lie in the dark while she whispered to me about the epic tragedies of the seventh grade.

  Now, I curled up and pressed my face against the nubby chenille. I needed to eat dinner and do my homework. I needed to take off my coat and heels and get in my own bed. But I was exhausted, and all of that seemed like a lot of work. Sleep was right there with me, hiding in the shadows of Anna’s room. I thought of Iago’s lines in Othello: “Not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday.” And I willed myself to sleep.

  Chapter 3

  I did everything I could to avoid Hugh, and although Belknap Country Day was a small place, I was surprised at how little I had to see him. It was just like being on stage. I made well-timed entrances and exits, considered my blocking carefully, and never, ever broke character.

  This last point was especially important in the student lounge, Thistleton Hall. It was a large, semicircular room that jutted off t
he back of the schoolhouse, with the same heavy mahogany paneling that covered the entire first floor of the building. Vast windows of many tiny panes offered a panoramic view of the courtyard and the library, which was in the old carriage house. As seniors, we laid claim to the best spot in the room—the curving wood benches built in below the windows—while the sophomores and juniors clustered in two large alcoves on either side of a massive black iron fireplace that had long been sealed off. Freshmen were required to spend free periods studying in the library. Mr. Hernandez, the younger and hipper of the two U.S. history teachers at Belknap, called Thistleton the Panopticon, a type of prison in which every cell had a view of all the others. I suppose the idea is that no one wants to misbehave in public, but that never stopped anyone in Thistleton Hall.

  On any given day, you might see someone blatantly copying their physics homework, a girl giving her boyfriend a hand job, hidden beneath a wool peacoat that belongs to neither of them, or two senior girls trying not to laugh while talking to an underclassman with her skirt tucked into the back of her tights. All of those things were happening in the fifth-period crowd around us, the first time Hugh spoke to me after Melissa’s party. It was Wednesday, the day after my conversation with Molly, and a week and a half after the party.

  Melissa, Lindsay, and I had just come up the stairs from having lunch in the refectory, and almost all of our friends were sitting on the center bench in Thistleton Hall. Ted and Hugh were shoulder to shoulder, laughing. Hilary was sitting on Will McKinley’s lap. Benji Andrews, Lindsay’s boyfriend, waved us over. As we crossed the room, I could feel their eyes on me: Ted’s appreciative and a little possessive, as ever, and Hugh’s masking whatever dark and hideous thoughts a person like Hugh harbored. I wondered if they were both picturing me naked, and immediately those images flashed through my mind: me sleepy-eyed and tangle-haired in Ted’s flannel sheets, their smell of Old Spice clinging to my skin, and me in Melissa Lewis’s guest bathroom mirror, eyes closed and face strained as Hugh gripped my arms. I tried to empty my face of any expression as we stopped in front of them. It was the closest I’d physically come to Hugh since we’d been shut in Melissa’s guest bathroom together, but I didn’t know how to avoid it without anyone else noticing.