Echo Bridge (13 page)

“What?” asked Ted. His eyes were shifting from puppyish to pouty.

“Sorry. That was, um, a weird sneeze. Of course I’ll spend the night. I just wasn’t sure you were still in the mood after everything that happened.”

“I need a distraction,” he said, dropping one hand onto my leg as we pulled into the garage. “And you’re the best kind.”

We climbed out of the car and went into Ted’s house. I was more nervous than I’d been when I’d lost my virginity to him the previous spring, in the in-law apartment over Jake Hobart’s garage during his School’s Out for Summer party. At dawn, while Ted slept, I’d stood at the window and looked out over Jake’s backyard, which bordered a vast freshwater marsh. The party had been long over, and mist had curled from the marsh across the lawn, obscuring the beer cans and red plastic cups scattered there. There’d been a faint tingling in my temples, and I’d imagined that I was glowing faintly, too. Thinking of that moment as we walked into the house reminded me that I still didn’t know if Ted had lost his virginity that night, too, or if he and Elaine Winslow had gotten that far sophomore year. I could probably guess, based on how artfully he’d dodged that question in the past, but I didn’t want to think about it.

In the kitchen, Ted made us White Russians—
The Big Lebowski
, Golden Aries, Russian Guild of Film Critics, 1998—which were secretly my favorite drink, even though it wasn’t very elegant or the type of thing we drank at parties. I wandered into the den, separated from the kitchen by a breakfast bar, and turned on the lights, adjusting the dimmer switch so the mood would be romantic—and so the shadows in the half-light would obscure my face if I betrayed my fear. Ted lived in an antique farmhouse, which had been gutted and renovated with top-of-the-line everything. I glanced at the broad windowpanes, entirely and flatly black, and thought how clearly visible we must be from outside, like figures on a movie screen, even with the lights low inside. But I shook the thought from my head; who could be watching? The backyard was surrounded by trees. I was being paranoid. I had been thinking in terms of my audience for too long. I knelt and turned on the stereo, tuning to the soul station on satellite radio, silently entreating Otis Redding to get me in the mood. He usually did;
Dirty Dancing
had instilled in me a sort of Pavlovian response to “These Arms of Mine.”

“Hey.” Ted was right behind me. I started, but covered it well, I thought. I took my drink from his hand.

“Hey,” I said quietly. He lowered his lips to my neck and put his arms around me. I pressed my left hand against his back, my right hand still holding the glass. I needed to find a way to slow this down, just a bit. “Let’s dance,” I said.

Ted smiled. “All right, babe.”

I took a sip of my drink and then set it down on a side table, holding out my right hand and sliding my left up to his shoulder. At school dances, we hugged and swayed during slow songs, but I wanted this to really feel like
dancing
, even if we didn’t know any steps. Ted set his big right hand on my waist, and closed his left around my right. I pressed my cheek against his chest, and we turned in slow circles, rocking in time to Otis and Carla Thomas singing about bringing it all back home.

When the song was over, Ted took my face in his hands, kissed me long and deep, and sat down on the shabby, chic, over-stuffed couch. When I went to sit next to him, he put a hand on my hip to stop me. “Now,” he said, “I want you to dance for me.”

I stood in front of him, aware of the way my silver Marilyn dress was reflected in the window glass, as if I had a second, ghostly self in the room. Apparently, Ted was in the mood for a performance. I wasn’t sure I had another one in me that night. But this was my chance to comfort Ted, to distract him like he said and remind him that he loved me. Perhaps, I thought, renewing our physical connection would bind him closer to me and make it easier for him to take my side, if I ever let the whole Hugh thing come out. I closed my eyes and squared my shoulders. “If I Can’t Have You” was on the radio, Etta James and some guy in a duet. The verses had a little
va-va-voom
rhythm. I moved my hips. I raised my hands to my hair.
Rita Hayworth
, I thought.
Marlene Deitrich, Julie London, Lena Horne
.

“You are so gorgeous, baby,” Ted breathed on the couch. “Take off your dress. I want to see all of you.”

I sipped my drink and tried to look sexy doing so. I let the thin straps of my dress slip off my shoulders and felt the silk slide down my body. I could barely hear the music over my own pounding heart.

“Come here,” Ted said hoarsely. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled me into his lap.

He kissed me then, and I felt all the stress of the previous several weeks, all the waiting Ted had been doing for me, in that kiss. It was in the pressure of our lips and the taste of our tongues, and as our eyelashes tangled together and Ted’s palm slid up my back and his fingers twisted in my hair, I felt my fear float away.
I can do this
, I thought.

I would have done anything for Ted.

On Monday after the dance, Hugh wasn’t in school, though the grapevine was buzzing with news: he was fine and would have a hearing with the disciplinary committee on Tuesday. Those were closed-door meetings, with parents, Farnsworth, and the two senior faculty members (Mr. Churchill, who appropriately taught European history, and Ms. McGovern, who taught Latin). In Hugh’s case, Coach Jessup would probably be in attendance, but we didn’t have public disciplinary hearings like in
Scent of a Woman
(Al Pacino’s single Oscar win). Nonetheless, the tension was palpable in the halls between classes, and knots of students whispered on the landings of the stairwells. Everyone was dividing up loyalties among the various theories of what had happened, guessing at what the disciplinary committee’s ruling would be. By lunchtime I’d heard that a junior named Rory Swanson had started taking bets on whether Hugh’s sentence would be detention, suspension, or expulsion.

I sat in Thistleton Hall, nibbling a bagel, listening to Melissa and Hilary chatter. They were high on all the drama. Ted sat next to me with an arm around my shoulders. I still felt a little strange when I thought about the strip tease in his living room—it wasn’t exactly how I’d have scripted the scene. But he’d been so gentle on the couch, as if he’d known that I needed him to be as different from Hugh as possible, and it was easy to forget my unsettled feelings about a little dance. And since that night, he’d been so affectionate, almost needy. It felt good. Even if I knew, deep down, that it was his concern for Hugh motherfucking Marsden that was causing Ted to cling to me.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Melissa said lightly, “if he had some ecstasy he was saving for later, and he just took it by accident, thinking it was a breath mint or something. I mean, Hugh has never been the sharpest guy.”

“Shut up, Melissa,” Ted said. His arm tightened around my shoulders. “You’re not exactly a National Merit Scholar yourself.”

“Suck it, Parker,” snapped Melissa.

“God, both of you, chill. We’re all worried about him, okay?” Hilary snapped her gum.

“Yeah, well,” Ted muttered. I saw his eyes lock onto something across the room. “Most of us, anyway. I’ll be right back.” He pushed up off the bench.

In the sophomores’ alcove, I noticed Molly Winslow, who wore a grave expression and was surrounded by a flock of girls, the kind who act all concerned and sympathetic in order to worm their way into the center of whatever scandal is the most interesting that week. Molly was a natural drama queen, which, as an actress, actually made me like her more, in spite of the fact that Hugh was her current inspiration. I dropped my head back against the paneled wall behind me and wondered what we’d do if Molly kept dating him even after he got kicked out of Country Day.

“Oh, crap, Court!” Melissa clutched my wrist. I snapped out of my reverie and followed her gaze to the juniors’ alcove: Ted had a guy pinned up against the side of the fireplace, with Jake Hobart standing behind him for back up. I assumed this was Rory, the bookie. Everyone in Thistleton Hall was craning to watch the action, although the crowd didn’t press too close, and Ted was speaking quietly. Fights did not usually erupt in the halls of Belknap Country Day; our grudges were rarely settled physically, and if they were, it was at a party away from adult interference.

“You’re kidding me.” I leapt off the bench and pushed through the crowd. “Ted,” I said quietly but firmly, stepping up beside Jake. “It’s not worth it. Let him go.”

Ted had one forearm pressed against Rory’s throat, and as I watched, he shifted his muscles just slightly and Rory gasped, his eyes bulging. Rory was an art kid and more fine-boned than Ted, with shaggy black hair that was sticking to the wood paneling with static electricity. If you didn’t know the circumstances, the scene would have looked like the worst high school cliché: the big jock busting on the slightly effeminate painter. I cringed.

“
Ted
,” I hissed. I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Think about Cornell. Put him down before someone gets Farnsworth.”

“Cornell” turned out to be the release command. Ted stepped back and Rory slid down the wall, his feet hitting the floor. He rubbed his neck and shot Ted a glance mixed with anger and fear before picking up his backpack and booking it out of the room. Ted gave him a hard look, and then shook me off his arm.

“Let’s go, Hobart,” he grunted, and turned to go without looking at me.

“He just needs to blow off steam,” Jake said quietly to me. “I’ll take him off campus. Don’t worry, okay? He’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“That depends,” I said, “on what happens with the disciplinary committee.”

* * *

Something happened at rehearsal for
The Crucible
that afternoon that changed my performance of Abigail Williams. It felt like a strange and sudden shift inside me, like a piece of machinery clicking into place, but I knew it had as much to do with the energy in the air around school than with any internal power of my own. With Grieves’ help, Lexi, Farah, and I had managed to indirectly accuse Hugh of a crime, which was rippling through the student body and roiling everyone up. For the first time, I felt like I understood Abigail Williams. I stalked across the stage, hearing the satisfying thump of my heels on the boards, speaking fiercely about pointy reckoning and reddish work, shaking Molly by the shoulders and nearly giving the freshman playing Betty Parris a real slap instead of an illusory one. When she went limp and Rodney Fairchild entered from stage right as John Proctor, I actually managed to get into it and flirt a little. I loathed Rodney, whose greatest ambition was to make it onto
American Idol
and who believed his admittedly pretty face was God’s gift to girls. We had played opposite each other plenty of times, though, and it was a relief to once again manage to answer his devilish smile with my own and forget the world outside of the play. This was what had drawn me to the theater in the first place: the sensation of disappearing into a role, the world of the play falling like a heavy curtain over the real world. I forgot about Rodney’s ego, about Molly’s mistrust. I forgot Rivalry Revelry and what had happened afterward in Ted’s living room. I even managed to forget about Hugh.

At the end of rehearsal, as the rest of the cast gathered the coats and bags they’d dropped in the seats of the auditorium, Mr. Gillison put his arm around my shoulders. “Wonderful, Courtney, just wonderful! I take it you did the research I recommended; it’s paying off. This is the kind of work I’m used to seeing from you—scratch that, this is better. Your best work! Maybe just bring it down half a notch, at least for the first act, all right? You’re scaring the ingénues.” He laughed and squeezed my shoulders in a one-armed half-hug.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. G.”

Already, the world was rushing in, tearing through the spell Arthur Miller’s words had cast on me. I jumped down from the stage and went to get my things. Leaving a good rehearsal was as bad as the end of a good performance—a brutal comedown from the best high, a sense that whatever I’d just achieved was transitory and already past. Lexi was waiting for me outside the theater, and I was grateful for the distraction.

“What’s up?” I could tell by her face that she had news. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was twitching like she was about to go into hysterics. Even her hair was excited: the ends floated in the air, alive with static electricity.

“I heard about Hugh,” she whispered. “The disciplinary committee is out. But we shouldn’t talk about it here.” She glanced down the hall nervously.

The auditorium was just off the main foyer of the school building. It was deserted; most students were across campus at the gym for sports practice, and any faculty still on campus were in their offices on the upper floors. But Lexi was right. The old mansion that housed Country Day was full of nooks and alcoves, and anyone might be around the corner. There was even supposed to be a secret passage from one of the Latin classrooms that ran all the way down to the banks of the Souhegan River on the edge of the campus. The story went that the passage had been constructed during Prohibition, to bring in liquor that was smuggled up the river from ships in Boston Harbor. The passage was rumored to be full of some final shipment of fantastically valuable, orgasm-inducing Scotch, but no one had ever found it.

Lexi and I went out the front door, down across the lawns to the junior parking lot, and climbed into her car.

“So what happened?” I asked, lighting a cigarette as we pulled out of the drive.

“Fucking
nothing
,” said Lexi. “
Nothing
. Three days’ suspension, and yesterday and today count as time served. So he’ll be back on Thursday like it never happened.”

“What? Shit!” I dropped my cigarette in my lap and scrambled to grab it without burning myself or dropping the thing and lighting the car on fire.

“And get this: he’s suspended for the Jack Daniels only. His parents brought blood reports from the hospital that said he was clean except for the booze.” Lexi pulled out onto Route 2 and headed east, toward the city.