“Why do you have that weird look on your face?” Taylor asked as we followed the throng of people through the front doors.
I glanced away from a group of teachers huddled together in the hallway by the front office, their heads together, whispering, and frowned at Taylor. “What look?”
She rolled her eyes and gave me a nudge with her elbow. “Never mind. Are you ready for that test in American Government today? I can barely understand what Monroe’s talking about half the time, and I swear, it’s totally pointless that we even know how many cabinet members there are or whatever, and I—Hadley, are you even listening to me?”
My focus was drawn to the pair of uniformed police officers located down the hallway from my locker, standing with the principal, Ms. Greene. By the stiff, grim expressions on their faces, I guessed they must have been talking about something highly unpleasant. But what would have brought the police to our high school?
“I’m sorry, Taylor, I’m just . . .” I couldn’t come up with a word to describe how off I felt. “I don’t know, just worried about the test too, I guess.”
Taylor snorted out a laugh as I rummaged around in my locker for my chemistry textbook. “Why are you worried, Hadley? You’re, like, the only one who actually manages to stay awake in Monroe’s class.”
“Guess I’m just lucky.” That, or I had a lawyer for a dad who would flip if I didn’t keep a decent grade in Government.
I left Taylor and made for homeroom, now feeling as though someone was following close behind me, breathing down my neck. I dropped into a seat toward the front of the class and focused on keeping my breathing in a steady pattern, succeeding until the first bell rang and our teacher didn’t appear.
Mrs. Anderson, the German teacher who ran our homeroom, was probably the nicest person I’d ever met. She was almost always humming under her breath, and had a thousand-watt smile for every person who just happened to look her way. I didn’t have the patience to learn German—I’d barely made it through my two required years of Spanish—but Mrs. Anderson seemed like a hoot, and she made homeroom bearable despite it being so ridiculously early in the morning.
The fact that Mrs. Anderson was late just added to my increasing unease. My friend Chelsea was convinced the teacher lived at JFK because she was always somewhere in the building with coffee and a sprinkled doughnut and attended every school function and football game. So where was she? It wasn’t like Mrs. Anderson to be tardy.
More than five minutes passed before the door swung open and Mrs. Anderson came walking in. There was a coffee stain on the front of her sweater, and her glasses were slightly askew as she dumped a stack of folders on her desk, saying, “Sorry I’m late, class, sorry, there was a bit of a . . .” Her voice trailed off as she bit her lip, scrubbing at the stain on her sweater with a napkin. “Something rather . . . unfortunate happened.”
In the seconds between her words, my heart picked up pace and beat an unsteady rhythm against my chest. I had no way of knowing what “unfortunate” thing happened, but a gut-wrenching feeling told me that whatever it was, it was bad.
Mrs. Anderson sighed as she tossed the napkin into the trash and leaned against her desk, crossing her arms over her chest. “Last night, one of our students here at JFK Prep committed suicide.”
I sat back in my seat, feeling deflated as I let out a sharp gasp.
What?
I’d known the moment I stepped off the bus not twenty minutes ago that something was wrong. But this? I wanted to ask who had so abruptly ended their life, but I found that I couldn’t force myself to speak. My mouth was suddenly as dry as the Sahara Desert, and my tongue felt like sandpaper.
“Who was it?” a kid sitting a few rows behind me asked after the first few moments of tense silence.
Mrs. Anderson fiddled with the edge of her sweater. “Archer Morales.”
That name was . . . very familiar. I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t put a face to a name.
Wait a minute, a small voice in my mind reminded me. Freshman English.
That’s right. Freshman English with Mrs. Casey. Archer Morales was the boy I’d sat next to first semester. I didn’t make the instant connection when Mrs. Anderson had said his name because Archer had only spoken about three words the entire year.
Mrs. Anderson’s voice faded into the background as she mentioned that school counselors would be available for the rest of the week at any time to talk about what happened. Soon, I couldn’t hear her at all, too preoccupied with trying to remember anything I could about Archer Morales.
He’d been very quiet and kept his head down most of the time, diligently following along in whatever text we happened to be reading. The one and only time I’d really gotten a good look at his face was when we’d been forced to answer a set of questions on Frankenstein.
It might have been easy to forget a guy who rarely ever spoke, but this guy happened to be the most distracting person I’d ever met. I’d become tongue-tied almost the second he’d looked at me with these bright hazel eyes that made me feel like I was being X-rayed.
Looking back on that class now, I realized I’d done my best to forget the whole experience because of the annoyed expression on that attractive face the entire time we’d worked together. What girl wanted to remember the moment a guy made it clear he’d rather be doing anything else but look at you?
Come to think of it, that had seemed to be Archer Morales’s attitude toward everything. JFK Prep was a big school, but I’d seen him in the hallways from time to time, easy to spot because of his height and tousled dark hair, but he’d always managed to be on his own, and everyone had always given him a wide berth.
Archer Morales was—had been—one of JFK Prep’s outcasts. And now he was gone.
I bolted upright in my seat when the first period bell rang overhead, pulling me out of my reverie. The rest of the class was already on their feet and filing from the room, talking quietly with one another instead of chatting and laughing like normal. It was even more obvious now, the change in the atmosphere. I trudged my way through the halls to chemistry class in a daze, unable to wrap my mind around the fact that one of my classmates was dead.
It wasn’t as if I’d really known Archer Morales. We couldn’t even have been called friends on any sort of level. He’d been all but a perfect stranger to me. So why did I feel like I was about to fall apart?
By the time school let out, the temperature had dropped outside, making the air chilly and uncomfortable as I headed for one of the buses at the curb. What I really needed was to curl up in bed and forget this day ever happened.
I took an empty seat toward the back and leaned my head against the window, closing my eyes, for once thankful Taylor had decided to ditch early to spend time with her latest beau-du-jour. None of the other girls we hung out with rode the same bus, so I was able to think in silence. The rocking of the vehicle was soothing, almost providing a distraction from the thoughts swarming around my brain like hurricane, but all too soon, the ride was over.
I pulled up the collar of my coat and crossed my arms over my chest, beginning the walk to the apartment building I’d lived in for almost my entire life. The complex was right on the edge of the Upper East Side, so it was a little more ostentatious than other buildings in Manhattan.
I often thought it was lonely, being shut up in the apartment while my parents worked impossible business hours, but I couldn’t have been more thrilled I was going home to an empty apartment that afternoon. The familiarity of my messy bedroom and the comfy sheets on my bed had never seemed so appealing.
“Evening, Hadley,” Hanson, the doorman, said as I approached the gray glass building. “Good day at school?”
I briefly considered telling Hanson what had happened. He was a nice man, and always seemed to be genuinely interested in how my day went. But I didn’t want to say the words aloud, that one of my classmates had killed himself, because I still didn’t want to believe that it had actually happened.
“I remember what high school was like,” Hanson said as I passed over the threshold. “As soon as you get out of there, the world’s a much better place.”
I had my doubts, but it was nice to hear Hanson say so anyway.
I crossed the marble-tiled, fountain-decked lobby to the elevators and rode up to the seventh floor. Heading down the lavishly decorated hallway, I pulled my set of keys out of my bag and unlocked the door to 7E.
My parents had never been what you could exactly call humble.
Our apartment was filled with pristine leather furniture, cream-colored carpets, and tasteful photos of the city hanging on the walls, which complemented the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the living room and dining room. And the state-of-the-art, chrome appliance kitchen was almost another art piece in itself. My mother spent so little time here, it was amazing she’d even found the time to decorate the place to begin with.
A lawyer and an assistant CFO, my parents had intense work schedules, and they rarely gave me a second thought when they left the city on work trips leaving me behind for sometimes a week or longer. When that happened, my eighty-seven-year-old neighbor Mrs. Ellis would check in on me every other day or so to make sure I was doing all right, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing as having a mom or dad around.
I knew I was extremely lucky to live in such a nice place and have so much money at my disposal, but the whole “rich” thing honestly made me a little uncomfortable, even if it was something I’d known for most of my life. My parents hadn’t always made stellar paychecks. Sometimes I missed the simple little townhouse we’d lived in over in Chelsea before my mom was promoted and my dad took over his firm. At least then we’d actually spent time as a family and had dinner together every night.
I breathed a sigh of relief once I shut the door to my bedroom and locked it.
My bedroom was my happy place. The Christmas lights strung up above the balcony window, the Broadway playbills and pictures of Taylor and our group tacked up on the corkboard above my desk, the rows and rows of DVDs and CDs I’d collected over the years—all of it was the perfect escape from the stuffy leather furniture and the professional photographs of the city from some art gallery in SoHo that hung in the living room.
I half-heartedly attempted to memorize some formulas for chemistry, but five minutes later I gave up, chucked my textbook at the wall, and flopped facedown on my bed.
It felt as if there was some part of myself that was missing, now that Archer Morales wasn’t alive and walking this earth anymore. It made me desperately wish that he were still here, despite the fact that he and I had only exchanged a few words. Somehow I couldn’t make sense of the fact that he was here yesterday, and now he was gone . . . permanently. Then again, I wasn’t all that familiar with death. I’d gone to my great-grandma Louise’s funeral when I was six, but that was the only time I’d ever experienced someone I knew, at least a little, passing away. But I didn’t like seeing her body in a casket then, and I didn’t like the idea of Archer’s body lying cold somewhere now.
Burrowing underneath the covers, I shoved my face into a pillow and I finally started to cry.
The Silence Between Us Page 23