The Year of the Gadfly (10 page)

“You need to cultivate your sources,” Murrow said. “Get to know them. I can guarantee you'll learn much more through casual banter than through any formal interview.”

“But that's like fooling people. And you're for the truth above all.”

“I'm for speaking truth to power, Iris. And to do that you need to be pragmatic. The truth is finicky. It ducks and hides. You must
lure
it out.” Murrow scratched an itch behind his ear. He coughed and his lungs sounded muddy. Then he stood up and put on his jacket. “You can't keep carrying that thing around”—he gestured to
Marvelous Species—
“just hoping Mr. Kaplan will notice it. Especially when you now have a specific reason to show him the book.”

“And that reason would be?”

“Dr. Lucinda Starburst.”

Then Murrow vanished, his cigarette still smoldering.

I opened
Marvelous Species
to the index, and sure enough, there she was, listed under “Starburst, Lucinda,” with a dozen references. Two of these mentions came from a chapter titled “Intraterrestrials,” and the latter was accompanied by a quote:
Difference is the essence of extremity.

It turned out that I'd initially come across Dr. Starburst's name in chapter one—read it and forgotten it. But the unusual appellation had lodged in my head anyway. Now the words “Lucinda Starburst” exploded in my mind's eye like firecrackers. I'd been acting so precious, waiting for Mr. Kaplan to notice Lily's book and say something. But now I was going to treat
Marvelous Species
like an investigative instrument. I'd be a truth surgeon, and the book would be my scalpel. I needed only to open Mr. Kaplan up a little bit, and before long, he'd be sharing all kinds of information with me: about Milgram's shock experiment, and flash mobs, and, eventually, Prisom's Party.

 

A few days later, I requested a meeting with Mr. Kaplan in the library after school. He wasn't there when I arrived, so I sat down in one of the reading chairs, my eyes trained on the door. All that week I'd had the uncanny feeling that someone was watching me. Just two days before, I'd been in the computer lab, typing a paper on
Wuthering Heights,
when suddenly the text started spinning out of control, letters and numbers spewing from beneath my cursor. My paper had been hijacked! I kept hitting Delete, but the text wouldn't stop. “What's going on!” I hissed at the screen.

The kid at the terminal next to mine leaned over to inspect. “Looks like a virus,” he said. “Your computer's been hacked.”

I was about to shut the computer down when the cursor spit out the last few words. “
CEASE AND DESIST OR WE'LL
—” I was so freaked out that I cut the power before the sentence finished.

 

The library door clicked, but it was only the librarian running an errand. Now I was all alone. Outside the windows, the playing fields sprawled away from the school before finally colliding with the woods. Above the barren branches, a flock of black birds swept across the sky. I could hear the pulse of my heart, and after a while it began to sound like those very birds, each beat like a flap of dark wings. I imagined a black bird nesting in my chest, its wings unfurling inside of me. I suddenly missed Dalia so much it was like a punch in the gut.

“Sorry I'm late.” Mr. Kaplan hurried in, and I snapped on a smile. Mr. Kaplan stood over my chair. In class, he was militaristic, but outside, he was nervous, like the dorky kid who never knows what to do with his hands. Mr. Kaplan gazed out the window.

“It's bleak up here,” I said.

Mr. Kaplan didn't respond. I wished he would stop hovering and sit down.

“I'm happy I didn't grow up here,” I continued. “I spent my formative years in Boston. Which is much more cosmopolitan, you know? Do you like Nye? It must be pretty different from UCLA. Where'd you grow up?”

“Iris.” Mr. Kaplan eyed me. “Was there something you wanted to discuss?”

“I wanted to show you this.” I held up
Marvelous Species.
“I discovered another reference to Lucinda Starburst, and I was wondering if—”

But Mr. Kaplan cut me off. “Where did you get that?”

“From my house.”

Mr. Kaplan took the book and sat down. He stared at the cover, transfixed. It was clear that my previous attempts to make him notice the book had failed.

“Are you okay? . . . Mr. Kaplan?”

“What?” he snapped. “Yes.”

His chest heaved once, and I thought I detected dampness around his eyes.
Murrow,
I thought,
the book isn't supposed to upset him!

“You said you brought this from home?”

“Yes, but it's a temporary situation. I mean, it's my house but not really my home.”

“Whose house is it?”

“Elliott Morgan's. He used to be headmaster here. He's friends with my dad. I'm sleeping in his daughter's room. She must have really loved this book. She had it set up on her bookshelf like a shrine.”

Mr. Kaplan was digging his index finger into the cuticle bed of his thumb, and I couldn't tell if he was paying attention.

“Aren't you even going to look inside?” I asked.

Mr. Kaplan's nail punctured the skin, and blood welled up on his thumb.

“Mr. Kaplan, you're—”

He opened the book but stopped at the title page and ran his hand over the paper, as if his fingers were capable of erasing the text. Then he noticed his bloody thumb and shut the book. “I have to get going.” He put
Marvelous Species
on the table. “Can we finish our discussion later?”

I nodded, but he was already hurrying away, sucking on his thumb. I lifted the book cover and turned to the title page.

To Lily, marvel of my life. Justin.

An angry smear of blood ran across these words now, the stain already turning brown.

 

That night I was sitting on my bed with
Marvelous Species
when my mother came in. She'd been on the phone all afternoon with members of her many charities, and she was dressed in black heels and pearls, as if she'd actually been out visiting boardrooms and foundations. Given that she'd been conducting this business from the dining room table, she was wearing way too much perfume.

“So.” My mother folded her hands in her lap. “What are your plans for Friday?” I held up the book. “Oh, come on.” She faked a smile. “There must be something more fun than that. Why don't you call a girlfriend and go for coffee in town. I'll drive you.”

“Thanks for the offer,” I said, “but I'm really okay.”

“Iris?”

I looked up. Now my mother looked different. Her face was set—determined—and her lips were drawn tightly together.

“I know it's hard being the new kid, but you're not even trying to make friends.”

“I went to the ice cream social.”

“Iris, you should go out.”

“Okay.” I looked back at
Marvelous Species.

My mother glanced at the chapter I was reading. “What in God's name are extremophiles? Don't tell me you've become a fan of science fiction.”

“It's for Mr. Kaplan's class.” This wasn't exactly true, but it was close enough.

My mother shook her head. “Why are so you interested in science all of a sudden?”

“Unlike some people”—I glanced up—“Mr. Kaplan takes me seriously.”

“Garrison Pasternak says Jonah Kaplan was nearly kicked out of school when he was a student. Did you know that?”

“Mr. Kaplan went to Mariana?”

“And now he's brainwashing my daughter.” My mother picked my phone up from the bed. “Call a friend.”

“No thanks.”

“Take the phone.”

I didn't move. I was thinking about Mr. Kaplan's omission and how it felt more like a lie. I asked him where he was from, so why didn't he acknowledge growing up here?

“Take the phone, Iris.”

I took it. My mother smiled, but it was the expression of a 1950s housewife on the verge of a homicidal rampage.

“Now then, who are you going to call?”

“Nobody.” Was I overreacting about Mr. Kaplan? But why had he handled Lily's book like a hunk of enriched uranium? I needed to think his reaction through. I needed my mother gone.

“This is not up for discussion,” she continued. “You are not going to sit around and read about extremo-whatevers all weekend. Now pick somebody and call her.”

“Who, Mom? Who do you suggest?”

“For God's sake, Iris. Out of the hundred people in your class, there must be at least one girl you're friendly enough with to invite to the movies.” She started rattling off people whose parents she knew from the school board. Then she grabbed the phone from me and started searching through my address book. She was getting more agitated by the second. I asked for the phone back, but she ignored me. She suggested Lauren Nevins, who was my lab partner, and Amanda Petroff from my literature study group. I was starting to panic.

“Katie Milford?” my mom said. “You've mentioned Katie lots of times.”

“Mom, please,” I whimpered. “Please don't. She's editor of the—”

“All right, all right.” But she held the phone out of my reach as she scrolled through the address book, mumbling names to herself. And then she stopped. “Dalia Zalowski.” She looked up at me. “Oh, Iris . . .”

I looked away.

“I thought we talked about this, sweetie. Remember what Dr. Patrick said. You need to erase it.”

“Give it back!” I reached out my arm. Tears had begun to drip from my eyes and sink into Lily's pink comforter.

“Iris, are you listening to me?”

I looked up as if I hadn't actually heard. But I had. The black bird I'd felt inside my chest earlier that day began rustling its wings. I shook my head, crying. It wasn't my fault that I didn't have anyone to call, that Dalia's phone was disconnected and put in some box in her room with everything else she wasn't ever going to need again. Dalia's number was the only thing I had from my old life. I'd already given up the main thing—the thing that mattered—so why couldn't I just keep the number?

Frantic, I lunged for the phone and grabbed it, and before I knew what I was doing, the phone was hurtling toward the wall. It smashed and clattered to the floor. My mother looked like she'd just witnessed a car crash.

“I don't know what to do, Iris.” She was crying now. “I'm trying to help you.”

“I don't want your help,” I yelled. “I want you to leave me alone!”

My father appeared in the doorway. He looked from my mother, balanced on the corner of the bed, to me, curled up against the headboard. When he noticed the phone, he gave me an exhausted look. He walked over to the bed and helped my mother up. “I'm trying to help her,” she sobbed into my father's armpit. “Nothing's working.”

When they were gone, I felt a strange sense of calm, like my brain was an empty shell. On the floor across the room, the phone's cracked screen glowed white. I turned around to see Murrow's picture on the wall. He'd lost people, too. Jan Masaryk, George Polk, and worst of all Laurence Duggan, who'd been Murrow's first real friend in New York City. The government went after Duggan, accusing him of spying for Russia. Duggan couldn't take the intimidation, so he jumped out the window of his Manhattan office. He fell sixteen stories and landed on the sidewalk. The impact knocked off one of his shoes.

The night after Duggan's death, Murrow went on the air and told the nation about the injustice that had killed his friend. He talked and people listened. But nobody was listening to me. “You had a whole country of people who cared what you thought!” I shouted at Murrow's poster. “But I don't have anyone. Not one! Just like my mother said. So what am I supposed to do?” I waited, heaving. “Answer me!” But the room was silent.

Like Duggan, Dalia had ripped herself out of the world. The cut was sudden and messy, and she'd taken part of me with her. This hole, I realized, had filled up with shadows, with dark, beating wings. I climbed under Lily's covers and curled up with
Marvelous Species.
Somewhere inside, I reasoned, there must be a creature as misunderstood as I was.

IN NYE ALL
climatory bets are off, so I wasn't surprised to wake up one day in early October and discover a hefty fall of snow. It was the kind of morning that made you want a woman in your bed, another sleep-warmed body to pull close for just five more minutes. Of late, I'd taken to reminding myself that over 450 species of bdelloids in swampy waters and damp mosses never had sex and didn't seem to mind. My six months of celibacy was nothing extraordinary. But comparing myself to leechlike creatures wasn't exactly a mood booster.

Even worse, I knew exactly who I wanted in my bed. I'd been in Nye for two months and still had no sighting of Hazel Greenburg, the woman whose girlhood iteration I had loved, and who, before she stopped speaking to me, had been my closest friend. My mother had spotted her in Nye months ago, and yet I had not run into her at the bookstore or the bar or the pharmacy. She was unlisted and, despite my efforts, untraceable.

I stumbled into the bathroom. Without turning on the lights, I shook a couple of extra-strength Excedrin from the bottle (headache remedy and daily caffeine dosage all in one!). As I brushed my teeth, I ran a hand through the red mess of my hair. A little greasy but not too bad.

Back into the dark bedroom, I put on the week's final pre-ironed shirt and pants. I was out of clean socks, so I pulled yesterday's from the hamper. I slid on my beat-up brown loafers, then remembered the snow and pulled on a pair of boots instead. I grabbed a banana from the kitchen and my satchel from the doorknob. In the car, I turned the defrost on high and pulled out of the parking lot—thick forest swinging away from me—and onto the road. My head throbbed with sleep. Cold and wet have always been my least favorite physical states. The doleful landscape rushed past as I maneuvered my Sube around the slick contours of Mountain Road. Within ten minutes the woods gave way to Mariana's sweeping lawns, now covered in snow and blank silence.