Fell Back

by M. E. Kerr

  it’s Twilight Time.

  I opened my eyes and turned my head to see his face. “Yes, Fell, that’s for you,” he said. “You owe Sevens a Twilight Truth.”

  “I do?”

  “You do. Because you are nervy, Fell…. You never should have attended The Charles Dance as Damon Charles. That’s disrespectful, Fell. We don’t make fun of our founder!”

  “You’re not kidding, either,” I said.

  “I don’t kid about Sevens,” said The Lion.

  He wasn’t the only Sevens who felt that way. Until I went home for Easter vacation, that song was whistled at me through my door, on campus, in the dining room at The Tower — wherever I passed another Sevens.

  By the time I got back from Brooklyn, no one was whistling anymore. Maybe because of what happened at the end of those nine days.

  I spent them cooking for Mom and Jazzy, and walking around God’s country. Down to the Brooklyn Bridge, and across to the Promenade with its great view of the New York skyline. Up to the Botanical Gardens, where the Japanese cherry trees were in bloom, and over to the Brooklyn Museum.

  In Carroll Gardens I dropped in to see my grandfather in the nursing home and listen to him tell me again why he was named after Theodore Roosevelt.

  One night I made a lot of telephone calls until I connected with Nina. She was staying with her aunt Peggy up in Hartford, Connecticut.

  “I’m glad you called, Fell,” she said. “I thought you’d be mad at me. He’s called too, Eddie has. We’re friends now. Just good friends.”

  We didn’t talk about her father. She didn’t seem to want to, and neither did I.

  At the end of our conversation I said I hoped we’d be good friends too, and Nina said she’d like that.

  “Am I a good friend?” Jazzy asked me after I’d hung up. “Yes.”

  “Then do I get Mr. Mysterious if I’m a good friend?” I sat her down and talked about gift giving with her for a while. “Sometimes the best gifts are ones you don’t ask for,” I told her.

  “But I like to know what I’m getting Johnny. I always know what I want.”

  “Don’t you ever want something money can’t buy?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, what we were just talking about. Friends.”

  “Girlfriends or boyfriends?”

  “You can’t buy either kind. You can’t buy a true friend.”

  “What’s a true friend?”

  How did I answer her? I don’t remember. But whatever I said only reminded me of Dib. What had happened between us was all my fault. I’d left him out. I’d become too full of myself and Sevens. Dib had been right that morning he’d told me that I was the one impressed by the gold 7. Mom hardly ever wore it, even with the head charms hanging beside it.

  • • •

  Going back to The Hill on the train, I came upon the newspaper story about David Deem’s death. Out on bail, he was found in his Lincoln shot seven times through the heart. Neighbors heard the gun go off at five in the afternoon … At twilight, I thought.

  • • •

  Police have not determined yet if the dead rat found between his teeth has some tie-in with underworld ritual. Purportedly he had no Mafia connections.

  Lowell Hunter, alleged to be kingpin behind the DOT operation, has been held without bail charged with the murder of his stepbrother, Cyril Creery.

  • • •

  The Hill was buzzing with rumors about the three murders, Deem’s in particular, because of The Sevens Revenge.

  Since everyone in Sevens House had been on Easter vacation, far from Cottersville, it was being whispered that an alumnus had caught up with David Deem.

  But Schwartz insisted it was someone with connections to Hunter. Someone who wanted Deem silenced, and chose to make it look like The Revenge.

  There were stern notices posted everywhere on bulletin boards, insisting that more than ever now, Gardner had to put the past behind it.

  GOSSIP INNUENDO REHASHING OF OUR CRISES

  CAN ONLY DO GRAVE INJURY TO THE FUTURE

  OF THE SCHOOL! DO NOT LOOK BACK.

  GO FORWARD.

  That was my intention when I went down to the dorm late in the afternoon, after I’d unpacked.

  Dib was coming out as I was heading up the walk.

  “I want to talk, Dib.”

  “Not now, Fell. I’m going out to dinner.”

  I walked along with him, toward the familiar green Mustang parked at the curb.

  “How come Little Jack’s driving? I thought he was pulled over on a DWI?”

  “You know, Fell, I’d worry more about your crowd than mine. You could end up with a big mouse in your mouth.”

  I let that go. “Let’s get together tomorrow,” I said.

  “Maybe. If there’s time.”

  Little Jack rolled down the window and gave me a salute. “Aye, aye, sir!” he said.

  I walked up closer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Aren’t you giving my boy some orders, Fell?”

  Dib said, “He doesn’t give me orders.” He went around to get in the passenger seat.

  “I thought he did,” said Little Jack.

  He smelled of beer or whiskey; maybe both.

  “You’re in great condition to drive,” I said.

  “Cork it, Fell!” Dib shouted at me.

  “Dib, he’s drunk!”

  “Dib” — Little Jack made what I’d said into a high whine — ”he’s drunk!”

  I should have gone around, opened the door, and yanked Dib out.

  That was what I told myself as I stood there while Little Jack took off, waving at me. “Bye-bye, Felly!”

  Dib was staring straight ahead.

  I watched the car weave down the street toward the hill.

  Little Jack Horner

  Sat in a corner.

  I couldn’t remember the rest of the nursery rhyme that began humming in my head, not then and there. Just those two lines.

  But later on it came back to me. All that long, sad spring it did.

  Then, when summer came, I went looking for Little Jack.

  Oh, yes. He was still around.

  M. E. Kerr is the winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her lifetime achievement in writing books for young adults. In announcing the award the ALA Young Adult Library Services Associated cited M. E. Kerr for being “one of the pioneers in realistic fiction for teenagers. Her courage to be different and to address touchy current issues without compromising, but with a touch of leavening humor, has earned her a place in young adult literature and in the hearts of teenagers.”

  M. E. Kerr was born in Auburn, New York, attended the University of Missouri, and now lives in East Hampton, New York.

  If you liked Fell Back check out:

  Fell Down

  chapter 1

  Fell, you’re a mess,” Keats said, “and you’re wallowing in it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  “Then when?”

  The waiter asked if he could tell us the specials.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me if Keats had made him stand there while I explained all the deep trouble my mind was in, but instead she listened to him. Then she said she’d have the fettuccine with seafood.

  I ordered the Long Island duck.

  “You look awful, too,” Keats said while the waiter was taking the menus from our hands.

  “Thanks for pointing that out,” I said.

  “I should have suggested someplace tacky for dinner. Not here,” she continued.

  We were in the Edwardian Room, in the Plaza Hotel. She’d come all the way into New York City to take me out. I knew that it was really Daddy who would pay the charge: Lawrence O. Keating, an architect whose dreams for his only daughter did not include John Fell.

  He didn’t have to worry about it anymore. We were just friends, though he’d never believe it.

  “Promise me one thing before you tell me what this is all ab
out,” she said.

  “Okay. One thing.”

  “When your food comes, don’t tell me what’s wrong with it. Don’t taste mine and tell me what’s wrong with mine. If something’s overpowered by its sauce or underseasoned, keep it a secret, okay? I like to think everything’s wonderful.”

  “At these prices, I don’t blame you.”

  “Even if we were eating at McDonald’s, I’d feel the same way, Fell. Who wants to hear a whole critique? Just eat, drink, and be merry.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “I don’t complain that much.”

  “Yes, you do. If you don’t, you’ve changed.” “Well, yeah. That I’ve done.”

  “Talk!” she said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Why you’re a jet crash.”

  “I wrote you about it.”

  “You said a close friend died in an automobile accident. But since when do you go to pieces over a friend’s death? You didn’t crack up when your dad died.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Maybe if you started back at the beginning,” said Keats.

  So I did. I told her Dib was my first friend at Gardner School, and maybe my only real friend there. I told her how we grew apart when I got into Sevens, the elite club on The Hill, with its own residence and clubhouse.

  I told her how Dib took up with Jack Horner, known as Little Jack. I took the story up to the last time I saw Dib. He was getting into Little Jack’s green Mustang. Little Jack had been drinking. Little Jack was driving.

  My voice always played tricks on me at this point in the story, and I’d feel breathless, and a sting behind my eyes.

  Keats said, “So you just left school — walked out and the heck with your final exams and everything.”

  “Yeah. I just walked out and the heck with my final exams and everything.”

  “So now you don’t even have a high school diploma.”

  “Nada,” I agreed.

  “Fell, it’s not like you. You stayed together when your father died.”

  “Don’t keep saying that…. Maybe that’s why I let go this time.”

  “Oh?”

  She looked across at me. She smelled of Obsession and she had on something silky and green, to match her eyes. I was glad I was in this phony place with her, because I needed things to be familiar. I needed to believe the world hadn’t changed.

  She looked like she belonged in that roomy armchair she was sitting in, under the colossal chandelier.

  I was out of place. I had on some old seersucker suit of my dad’s that’d looked great in the ‘70s, and my bow tie was a clip-on. I didn’t have the clothes or the energy to try and look like someone who belonged with the beautiful people. Keats didn’t need any extra push to look that way. She was part of that scene. When we went someplace like that, the maitre d’ always addressed all his remarks to her.

  Keats thought a few seconds about what I’d said.

  She said, “Are you saying that you’re having a delayed reaction to your father’s death?”

  “I don’t know what I’m having,” I said.

  “I think you’re experiencing a displacement,”

  Keats said. “That means you might let something big go by, and then later on, without knowing it, react the way you should have earlier over something much less important.”

  “My shrink would love you,” I said.

  “Fell! You’re seeing a shrink? I can’t believe this!”

  “I was seeing one for a while. Mom insisted I at least talk to one. I didn’t go more than three times…. Do you know what they cost?”

  “Of course I know! I’m a graduate! I went for five years!”

  “I remember.”

  “You must be hurting, Fell.”

  “Not anymore. Not hurting.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m mad as hell, Keats. That’s all.”

  “At yourself?”

  “No, I’m over the self-blame, finally. I’m not over the feeling I’d like to get my hands on Little Jack.”

  “What would that solve, Fell?”

  “It wouldn’t solve anything. It’d satisfy something.”

  “Diogenes said forgiveness is better than revenge.”

  “You just made that up.”

  “No, he said it. I did a paper on him.”

  “I’ve never believed what The Cottersville Compass wrote about that accident. They claimed it was the guy who hit Dib and Little Jack who was drunk…. I saw Little Jack get behind the wheel drunk.”

  “Maybe they were both drunk. Who was the other guy?”

  “Some stand-up comedian from Las Vegas.”

  The sommelier was circling. I always thought I looked twenty-one and not seventeen, but he wasn’t fooled and passed on by with the wine list.

  While we ate, I told Keats what little I knew about this man named Lenny Last. I only had one write-up in The Compass to go by. I’d read that on the train when I was leaving Gardner. Last had driven his old white Cadillac through a red light just as Little Jack turned the corner. Dib and Last were both killed.

  Keats thought she might have heard the name … maybe from The Tonight Show. … I didn’t push it. I wanted Keats to talk about herself, too. Mom had pointed out that I was so wrapped up in myself lately, I didn’t show any interest in other people. I hadn’t even realized Mom was dating the guy across the hall.

  “Mom,” I’d said, “you’re dating that tailor?”

  “What did you think I was doing with him?”

  “Going to the movies with him, I don’t know.”

  “That’s dating, Johnny.”

  Keats told me she was going to become a psychoanalyst. Maybe not a psychoanalyst, she said, maybe just a therapist because she didn’t think she could go through medical school.

  “It’s too hard,” she said, “and it takes too long…. How’s your duck?”

  “It’s good,” I said. I didn’t say that there wasn’t enough sour cherry sauce on it, remembering my promise.

  Keats said anything from Long Island had to be good.

  She was most partial to her hometown, Seaville, in The Hamptons.

  For a short time it’d been my hometown, too. Brooklyn would always be my real home, but sometimes I remembered the ocean and the beaches, the roads winding through potato fields down to ponds with swans nesting there. The clean air and the blue sky and the smell of summer.

  Keats glanced across the table at me and said suddenly, “Let me drive you back there.”

  The restaurant where I worked was open seven days, so we took turns getting weekends off. It wasn’t my turn. But I wouldn’t have minded heading out to The Hamptons, where so far there weren’t people without homes sleeping in doorways and drug addicts stalking you…. All of that was hard enough to take when you were in good shape, but if you were on shaky ground, you had to wonder how long before you’d be out there, with everything you owned in a shopping cart you’d stolen from a supermarket.

  “What would Daddy say if you showed up with me?” I asked her.

  “I didn’t mean Seaville, Fell. I meant let me drive you back to Gardner School. I’ve never seen the place.”

  “I could get my clothes, finally.”

  “And you could look up Little Jack…. He’s a townie, right? So he’d be there.”

  “I’m sure he would.”

  “I think you need to tell him off.”

  “I need to wipe up a dirty floor with him, more.”

  “Whatever…. You haven’t been back at all, have you?”

  I shook my head. “If I want to graduate, I have to go back this fall.”

  “I thought Sevens was so powerful you could get away with anything.”

  “Sevens can’t do anything about academics. I didn’t take my finals.” I shrugged. I wished I’d taken them. I must have been getting better, because I couldn’t imagine myself just walking out on everything.

  “I’d love to see Sevens House,” she s
aid.

  “You’re just being nice, Keats. Thanks, but you don’t need to change your whole personality just because I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

  We both laughed. I figured that she couldn’t care less about seeing some prep-school clubhouse now that she was a college girl. In the fall she’d be a sophomore at Sweetbriar, in Virginia.

  Then she smiled at me. I’d always loved her smile. It made her look more sophisticated than she was, and gentler than she was, too, though I couldn’t fault her in that regard this night.

  “I need to get out of The Hamptons,” she said. “August is two weeks away, and you know what August is like. What we never dreamed would ever find their way out to the South Fork arrives in August, along with all the shrinks who take the month off, and all their nut cases.”

  “You should definitely be a psychoanalyst,” I said. “You have all the sensitivity one needs for that profession.”

  “Only if you’ll be my first patient and listen to me.”

  “I thought you were supposed to listen to me.”

  “Fell, be serious for a minute. Do you think you’ll repeat the year so you can get your diploma? You should. It’s a very fancy school.”

  “I might get a job as a cook’s apprentice and forget my high school diploma. All I want is to own a restaurant someday.”

  Keats nodded. “I know that. But it’d only be one more year out of your life.”

  I was working at a French place on the waterfront, over in Brooklyn Heights. It was called Le Rêve. The Dream.

  One night my boss had told me if I stuck with him, I could end up owning the place. He didn’t have a child to pass it on to.

  But you can’t step into someone else’s dream.

  I can’t, anyway.

  “You know what’s wrong with me, Fell?” said Keats, who had just set an all-time record for Keats, by going for over an hour without mentioning what was wrong with her.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m not in love…. Do you know how pointless everything is when you’re not in love?”

  I nodded. I knew.

  “I don’t even know why I’m shopping anymore.”

  “You still want to look great, and you do.”

  “Why do I want to look great?” she said. “Who for?”