Black Mirror (2 page)

And you couldn’t help feeling, for that instant, that he truly thought you were interesting. That he couldn’t
wait
to get to know you.

Of course I knew better. James Droussian had only come to Pettengill this past fall, but it was already an open secret that he dealt drugs. He never touched anything himself; never urged anything on anyone. But he always had a little something around. So it was his
business
to have people like him, to charm people, and it didn’t matter who they were, so long as they could pay. He was everybody’s friend, James, and that smile of his—it was meaningless.

I turned my back on James and his little circle of burnouts.
Then, for the first time, it occurred to me to wonder exactly where Daniel had gotten the smack he’d overdosed on. Was it possible James had sold—no. I dismissed the thought immediately. Daniel had had no more money than I had, and I’d heard that James didn’t do samples. I’d always thought Daniel had gotten his marijuana from friends, free. Someone must have given him the heroin as well. Who? And did I even
want
to know? What difference did it make, after all? It wouldn’t bring him back to life, or change the facts about me. My brother had had a major habit, and I’d thought he only smoked some occasional marijuana.

Suddenly I heard Daniel’s voice in my mind, jeering the way he used to:
Frances, cultivate mindfulness.
I felt my shoulders hunch defensively. After our mother left, Daniel had memorized literally hundreds of Buddhist aphorisms and catchphrases, from the profound to the preposterous. He had quoted them mockingly at every opportunity, driving me—and our father—nearly crazy.

I practically ran into the foyer with my now-empty plate of cookies.

I was just in time to put the plate down and greet a little circle of Pettengill teachers and administrators, who were trickling in from the front porch where they’d been stamping the snow off their boots. Headmaster Ferkell and his wife, who taught chemistry. Ancient Mrs. Kingston, Latin. Mr. Dickenson and Ms. Polke, history. Mr. Prodanas, math.

And then Patrick Leyden came in, looking thin and dapper and self-assured in one of his expensive wool suits. But,
as always, I had to work not to stare at his earlobes. They were round and fleshy and swung slightly whenever he moved his head. Even tonight my fingers itched to draw a vicious caricature.

Daniel’s voice sneered again in my head.
A disciplined mind leads to happiness.

More Pettengill teachers streamed in steadily, looking down into my face and pressing my hands (the men) or stooping to hug me (the women). All of them saying nice things about Daniel. I searched surreptitiously for my art teacher, Ms. Wiles. Finally I spotted her, looking especially young and pretty with snowflakes melting on her cinnamon hair. She was standing beside Patrick Leyden, who was talking at her nonstop. As if she felt my gaze, Ms. Wiles looked up and nodded, solemnly, directly at me. I nodded back, and the moment was like a sudden oasis in the noise and confusion and pain.

Sometimes I felt sure that Ms. Wiles could just look at me and understand things I hadn’t even fully formulated. Not that she ever said them aloud. She just … looked. As now. I can’t explain it. Yvette Wiles was just … special. We could be silent together.

Sometimes I wished I could
be
her.

As the stream of adults ended, I spotted Saskia across the room. She was with a few of her friends. Unity Service folks, as I’d expected. Wallace Chan. George de Witt, who was the Vice President of Unity. A couple others.

I wanted to talk to Saskia; I had planned to talk to her, but
my stomach roiled anyway. Shame swept over me. How could I say what I wanted to say? How would she react? Maybe I shouldn’t—maybe I couldn’t …

Unity Service. Why, freshman year, had I so stubbornly refused to help out with their food and clothing drives for the poor, their scholarship fund-raisers? Unity Service was a big deal. Although only a few years old, it had become the largest and most respected student-run charitable group in the country. They’d funded my own scholarship, among so many others, but still I kept saying no. No, no, no. Even Daniel hadn’t been able to sway me. I’d just kept repeating that I wasn’t a joiner.

If I said now that I’d changed my mind, would they scorn me?

We wouldn’t have you now if you begged to join
, Daniel had told me last year.
You’re the only scholarship recipient in Unity’s history who hasn’t joined the organization. Who hasn’t helped out; who hasn’t given back. I’m actually ashamed of my own sister! Art doesn’t help anyone, you know. It doesn’t give people jobs, or food, or clothes, or opportunities. Business joined to charity does that.

Business joined to charity. Those words were a straight quote from Patrick Leyden, and when Daniel quoted Leyden, he didn’t mock.

I wanted to talk to Saskia. Ethereal dark-haired Saskia Sweeney, unrecognizable as the poor girl from Lattimore she’d once been. Saskia, Daniel’s girlfriend, of whom I’d been so jealous. Who, I’d thought, had stolen my brother’s
companionship and love from me. I wanted to beg for forgiveness. I wanted to be her friend. But I—I couldn’t. Not tonight.

I turned abruptly and slipped past them all, outside Bubbe’s house, into the cold winter air.

B
ubbe’s house is an old Victorian with a wraparound porch. I ran quickly to the side of the house, where I was less likely to be seen and spoken to. I stood still. The cold air felt wonderful; I gripped my coatless arms and breathed it in. I stared out at the blanket of snow glittering on the ground beneath the moon and wondered: When I got up the nerve to talk to Saskia, how would she react? Did she hate me?

I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder and whipped around, my whole body stiffening with anxiety. I wasn’t ready!

But it wasn’t Saskia who had touched me so tentatively. It was only Andy Jankowski. He had taken off his coat and was holding it out to me. Behind him I saw the porch swing still moving gently and realized that he must have been sitting out here, alone.

I gathered myself. “Hi there, Andy,” I said awkwardly. “I’m not cold.”

Andy nodded as if he understood me, but he still held the coat out. He’s a big, heavy, strong man in his forties, with a deep wrinkle of worry engraved permanently across his forehead. He was wearing layers of flannel shirts; I could count at least three, all identical red and black plaid. He continued to extend the coat toward me, and after a few seconds I felt churlish for continuing to refuse. I slipped the coat on. It was a wool pea coat that fell nearly to my ankles; the sleeves went inches and inches past my hands. It smelled of recent dry cleaning.

I looked at Andy. “Thanks,” I said uncertainly, and he nodded and turned a little aside, looking out again over the snow.

I thought about urging Andy inside the house so that I could be alone. But somehow I couldn’t get the words out, so we just stood, side by side, and stared in the direction of Pettengill. In the moonlight ahead, I could clearly see the white steeple of the school chapel.

Andy is a “gifted arborist,” the Headmaster was known for saying, “whom Pettengill is very lucky indeed to employ.” The Headmaster always made a real point of this, especially with new students, though I believe it had been a long time since any students tormented Andy. In the past I had only said “hello” and “how are you?” to him and to the other “special” employee at the school, a woman who worked in the kitchen. But right now, standing next to Andy
and looking out over the snowy night, I was filled with a kind of peace. This was one person who wasn’t going to say meaninglessly: “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.” I could stand there and think my own thoughts. About … No, I would not think about Saskia. Not right now. But about my brother and how The Pettengill School had changed our lives, as freshmen, two years ago.

Pettengill is so close, physically, to the dying town of Lattimore. And yet, it’s located on a different planet.

Pettengill is a private preparatory school. It is quite beautiful. It boasts one of the most acclaimed Georgian campuses in New England. There are no fewer than five brick quadrangles, and in the summer and fall most of the buildings are covered with luxuriant old-growth ivy. The grounds—thanks at least in part to Andy Jankowski—are immaculate; the privileged students and faculty are well-dressed and energetic, full of life, vibrant.

But from the other edge of the campus, in winter, when there’s no screen of foliage, you have a clear view of the boarded-up windows of Lattimore’s old shoe factories. Nothing could look more dead than those buildings. Nothing could be more of a contrast.

When we were much younger and had just come to live in the town of Lattimore, Daniel used to stare whenever we drove by Leventhal Shoes. The name had been painted large in white on the brick side of one of the midsize factories, but by the time we moved to town, the paint had faded and a few of the letters were completely missing. Bubbe had
stayed on in Lattimore after Zayde died and the factory closed, rattling around in her big house, too stubborn and too old, she said, to go elsewhere.

When we moved in with her after our mother left, our father claimed that Bubbe needed us. “I can write my novels anywhere,” he said, “and my mother needs the company and the care.”

This last was an outright lie, though I’ve never been sure if my father allowed himself to know it. Bubbe—and I resented the fact that she’d appropriated a title that ought to be grandmotherly, affectionate—was in perfect health. Moreover, she was the most unsociable, unneedy person I’ve ever met, with the possible exception of my mother. But unlike my mother, Bubbe was cutting rather than detached. She called it honest, of course. Forthright.

It was Bubbe’s opinion that my mother’s call to spirituality was a cover for the fact that she had gotten tired of supporting my father’s delusions as he wrote one after another obscure, unreadable, low-paying, and eventually unpublishable science fiction novel. Daniel and I knew this was Bubbe’s opinion because she aired it regularly. It was one of the reasons—one of the many, many reasons—that we were overjoyed when Pettengill—well, actually Unity Service—made their offer to the dying town of Lattimore.

“Through the generous offices of our chapter of the Unity Service Foundation, headed by Pettengill board member and Internet entrepreneur Patrick Leyden, our school has the resources,” declared the announcement in the
Lattimore
Weekly News.
“And our local students have the need. We will join forces for the future so that all our children, rich and poor, have access to the best possible education.”

It was a forward-thinking, heartwarming, and generous concept on the part of Unity Service, said the local—and then suddenly the national—news media. It was a shining example of the power of young people to do good. Donations poured into the Unity Service coffers, and within months Unity chapters around the country were setting similar programs in place. New Unity chapters sprouted up overnight. There’d been articles in many major newspapers, magazines, and websites. And at the end of last year the President of the United States had actually given the organization, in the person of Patrick Leyden, a Freedom Award.

At the time, however, all Daniel and I thought about was that we were miraculously enabled to move out of Bubbe’s house. “Unity scholarship students at Pettengill will belong to the regular boarding student body, with full access to the school’s myriad programs and facilities.” It was the escape from Bubbe’s house that Daniel and I had dreamed of, and it had come years earlier than we had believed possible.

Of course, we’d had no idea how it would actually
feel
for us to be on Unity scholarships. No idea at all. Freshman year, we were completely at the bottom of the Pettengill social barrel. And we were supposed to be grateful for it too. Daniel had been. Saskia, who was also from the town of Lattimore, had been. But I—

I shivered. What was wrong with me?

“… cold?”

It took me a moment to realize that Andy had spoken. Before I knew it, he was offering to give me one of his shirts too. “No, no,” I said quickly. “I’m not cold. Your coat is wonderfully warm. I was just thinking about something.”

“Oh,” said Andy. He returned to being silent. I was abruptly aware that Andy would have given me all his shirts and never suggested that I go inside. I was filled with a new appreciation for him. Whatever his disabilities—some kind of mild mental retardation, I supposed—Andy Jankowski was a person who wouldn’t hurt, wouldn’t betray.

“Thank you for coming over tonight, Andy,” I said.

He began absently to strike his left forearm with the open palm of his right hand. “My father died,” he said. “And now Debbie is gone. She might be dead too. I don’t know.”

I looked the long distance up at him. His profile was impassive. I didn’t know what to say. Even if I had known, I was suddenly incapable of speech.

“When you’re dead,” Andy added, “people can’t see you ever again. And they miss you.”

I turned my head away. The moonlit glare off the snow hurt my eyes. I hugged Andy’s coat around myself and stood quite still next to him on the porch.

Sweet and clear came a voice behind us. “Frances?” said Saskia Sweeney. “Please, can we speak?”

E
leanor Roosevelt once said: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” I’ve read several biographies about her. She was plain and intense. When she and her beautiful, popular cousin Alice were society debutantes, Alice laughed at Eleanor and told everyone she was boring. Eleanor felt inferior then, I’m certain. She tried to hide.

I wonder—looking at pictures of the mature Eleanor, with her buck teeth and her hunched posture and her stubborn, thoughtful eyes—if her feelings of inferiority ever truly changed, at base? Completely? I just don’t see how they could have.

I know that’s not the popular view. I know that’s not what we wish to believe.