The Year of the Gadfly (16 page)

 

Lily and Justin set their date for the night of the school's fundraiser auction, which meant Lily's parents would be out late. That Saturday afternoon, Lily prepared for the evening. She wanted to wear a new dress, but to get underneath a dress Justin would have to go up from the bottom, and that didn't seem right for a first date. He could reach under a T-shirt, but that seemed anticlimactic without some fancy bra waiting for him—something Lily most definitely did not own. If she wore a button-down, would he reach under it or undo the buttons? Lily considered each option. She was excited and wished she wasn't. This date wasn't supposed to mean anything. So why was she fussing over the details—buttons and bras?

In spite of herself, she made a mix CD and repositioned the candles on the shelf. She deliberated over whether candles were too cliché. On television, when two people came into a bedroom, the candles were already lit. She tried out lighting combinations, draping a variety of sheer scarves over her bedside and desk lamps. She made her bed. Then she showered, shaved, and rubbed on the fancy lotion Dipthi had bought her for a birthday present. When she was dressed, she looked at the clock. It was three in the afternoon.

Justin arrived early in a dark blue Peugeot station wagon. Lily, who had been standing by the window since seven thirty, saw him stop a couple of houses away and loiter there. His apparent anxiety irked her, even more so because she felt the same way. Maybe she should pretend to be sick. Maybe she could fabricate an emergency.

At five to eight, Justin pulled up in front of her house and parked in front of their large oak tree. His crutches were gone, but he was still wearing the plastic boot. He walked slowly toward the door, favoring his good foot, carrying a monstrous bouquet. She couldn't feign sickness now.

Lily checked her hair and adjusted her necklace. She wore a dark blue V-neck with three-quarter arms and jeans that Dipthi said gave her a “tight ass.” Her boots were black suede, like Doc Martens but less austere. She smiled at herself. It was possible that at this moment she was actually pretty.

“You look really nice,” Justin said, handing her the flowers. She didn't know what to do with them, so she carried them back out to the car.

 

At the pub in town, Lily checked for anyone she knew, but all of the young families who usually filled the restaurant had already finished their meals and headed home to put their kids to bed. They looked over the menus in silence. Lily kept thinking about the locker vandalism, and Jonah's culpability, and what people would say if they saw her on a date with the vandal's brother. She looked around again to make sure she didn't recognize anyone.

“Are you okay?” Justin said.

“What? Yeah.”

Justin began chatting about their Latin class, and they managed to fill the time until the waitress arrived for their orders. When she left, they circled around the Latin discussion again. It seemed to Lily they could simply keep spiraling—Caesar, Ovid, Cicero, Caesar, Ovid, Cicero—for the rest of the meal. And yet soon enough, she knew, they'd have to swim away from their small island of safety. They'd have to
talk.

The food arrived. The waitress set a grilled chicken sandwich and fries in front of Lily and a cheeseburger in front of Justin. If Justin was going to kiss her later, wouldn't he be more concerned about his breath? But he was working on the burger the way only a boy could, and for the first time the date started to feel somewhat like regular life.

“What's your favorite Latin word?” she asked, and winced at her own ineptitude.

Justin looked up from something he was examining under the table and smiled.
“Amo.”

Lily blushed.
Amo, amas, amat,
she thought.
Amamus, amatis, amant.
Their Latin teacher had made them march through the halls chanting conjugations. I love, you love, he, she, or it loves.
It
loves? That made no sense. We love. You (plural) love. They love. And then, of course, the perfect passive subjunctive—would that I had been loved—the saddest conjugation of them all.

“Did you drop something?” She noticed Justin staring at his lap again.
Please God,
she thought,
let him not have a hard-on.
After an awkward pause, Lily excused herself and headed toward the bathroom. When she returned, she saw that Justin was bent over, reading something in his hand. She crept up behind him and snatched the paper away. Then, before she knew what she was doing, she'd slid into the booth next to him. She had never made such a forward physical move toward a boy. And now their arms and knees were pressed together, their first touch all night. She smelled his aftershave and freshly laundered flannel. She felt the heat rise from his body. They looked at each other, surprised. Lily inspected the scrap of paper she'd stolen. It was covered with bullet points:
family, school, religion, parents' jobs, favorite books, religious beliefs.
He'd written a conversation crib sheet! Only instead of feeling annoyance or pity, she was overcome with relief.

“I was nervous too,” she said. “I got dressed an hour early.”

His look of humiliation deepened.

“And I changed my clothes three times.”

Justin refused to look at her.

“And I made a make-out mix CD.”

The corners of his mouth turned up just enough. He thought she was joking; now
she
was the pathetic one. “I changed my socks five times,” he said.

“I can't even see your socks.”

“My feet get really sweaty,” he said.

 

After dinner they returned to Lily's house. She'd rented a movie days ago, because on a Saturday night they were likely to encounter other kids from school at the video store. Standing among the racks, she'd debated movie selections. A comedy seemed the obvious choice, but Justin seemed too erudite for the slapstick flicks she liked. An action movie wasn't right—you couldn't make out to people shooting each other. And most dramas were too serious. Finally she chose
Dead Poets Society.
At least they could laugh at how much worse the school in the movie was than their own.

In the den, she motioned Justin toward the special loveseat near the TV. “I'm sorry we have to sit so close to the screen,” she apologized as she went to put in the movie. “My eyesight is terrible.” When she turned around, Justin was still standing. “You can sit down, Justin.” He sat, pressing his body into the couch arm as though trying to dissolve into it. She joined him, hugging the opposite arm. She reached for the remote, using it as a pretext to shift a few inches toward him. She didn't get very far. Justin was sitting stark upright, staring straight ahead.

She started the movie and edged closer to him until there was less than half a foot between them. Now they were both staring at the television, avoiding each other. Lily felt electricity vibrating between them, invisible energy shooting between their shoulders, elbows, and legs. They still weren't touching and yet she felt fused to him, as though by magnetic force. She sensed Justin trying to look at her without turning his head.

A flock of birds exploded across the screen and Lily thought about the ducklings outside the art studios. The last time she'd seen them another baby had disappeared. She felt inexplicably sad for those ducks, but there was nothing she could do for them.

“What's wrong?” Justin said.

Lily shook her head. “Nothing.”

“This is going to be a sad movie, isn't it.”

“You haven't seen it already?”

He shook his head.

“Then how do you know it's sad?”

“Unforgiving adults and bright-eyed boys. It doesn't bode well.”

She paused the video. Suddenly the house felt very quiet and still. “What are you talking about?”

“I get these ideas in my head.” He shrugged. “They don't always make sense to other people.”

“Try me.”

“There are these signs. The bells on their campus are really ominous. And those boys are so eager and naïve. I just have a bad feeling about it. But Jonah says I overinterpret everything.”

The locker vandal,
Lily thought. “Your brother—” But she stopped herself. She had nothing nice to say about Jonah. Meanwhile, Justin was looking at her.

“So which one of these guys is going to kill himself?”

“You're creeping me out, Justin. Just admit you've seen the movie before.”

He shook his head.

“Then how can you possibly—”

“Well, for one thing, it's got death in the title.” He smiled.

Lily did not smile back. “You said suicide. How could you know that?”

“It's the tone, I guess. If the movie were asking us to get angry or to grieve for these kids, then I'd put my money on an accident. A
Separate Peace
kind of scenario. But so far, the tone is setting us up for something else.”

Lily waited for him to continue.

“The movie wants us to mourn.”

“Are you always this serious?” She didn't understand the difference between grieving and mourning. She didn't understand why Justin had become all philosophical with her. Had he forgotten that this was a date?

But over the course of their discussion, they'd inadvertently shifted toward each other, and now his thigh was a mere six inches from her own. She rested her hand on the cushion halfway in between them, and electricity flowed up her arm and exploded in a starburst through her body. She did and did not want him to reach out and touch her. She focused her eyes on the hand in his lap, willing it to move, willing it to stay.

“Are you bored?” she mumbled.

He looked at her like he was staring off the edge of a cliff. Vertigo, she thought, wasn't the fear of heights but the fear of jumping. Her heart pounded. She heard bells echoing, though the movie was stopped. The flapping of wings. Justin swallowed. Then his lips were against hers. His warm tongue pressed against her own. He shifted forward, murmured a low sound, cupped the back of her head with his hand. She saw herself sitting on the picnic table watching the soccer team. She was wet again. Justin made another low sound. She shivered. His tongue was strange, so much larger than her own. Her arm, attached to the palm still pressing the couch between them, was growing numb. He pulled away and looked into her eyes. Then he began to cry. What had she done wrong?

“I've wanted to do that for so long,” he said. “You have no idea how I—”

At that moment, the sound of voices, keys. The front door opened.

Lily's parents found Justin at one end of the couch holding a
New York Review of Books,
his eyes oddly red, and Lily at the opposite end perusing a coffee-table book titled
Idyllic Greens of Ireland.

“Justin. I didn't know you were coming over.” The curve of Maureen's mouth gave away her surprise and, Lily thought, not a little disdain.

“Justin,” Elliott said with a nod.

“What time is it?” Lily demanded. How were they back already? She'd planned on getting Justin out of the house long before her parents returned.

“Nine thirty,” her father said. He took off his coat and draped it over a chair. Even across the room Lily could smell his cologne. “Your mother had a headache.”

Lily's parents turned to leave. Lily heard her mother in the hall—
Elliott! Do you think they were
—and then the creaking of the stairs.

“Fuck.”

Justin looked hurt. “I'll go.”

She nodded. They walked to the front door and stood in awkward proximity.

“I had a really good time,” he said.

“Me too.”

“So I guess I'll see you on Monday.”

She nodded.

“Can I call you before that?”

She nodded.

“Okay.” He leaned down. His lips again. His tongue. The air rushed from her chest, sucked out by the force of his mouth. Then he was closing the front door behind him. She turned off the front hall lights and watched in the dark as he drove away. She realized she'd left the bouquet of flowers in his car.

LONG AFTER MR. KAPLAN
left the Trench, I stood before the demon on the wall, transfixed. I forgot how afraid I'd been of this place. I forgot that a long and lonely hallway stretched out behind me, exposing my back to the dark. I forgot I'd been warned.

And then hands grabbed my arms, a sock was pushed into my mouth, and a black cloth was thrown over my head.

“Stop squirming,” a voice hissed. “You don't have to make this so difficult.”

Like fuck I don't,
I thought, and kept kicking. Hot tears slid out of my eyes. My tongue pressed uncomfortably against the sock in my mouth.

Then I felt somebody's breath beside my ear. “Don't worry, Iris.” This was a new voice—low and calm. “Nobody's going to hurt you.” But all I could think about were the stories of journalists gunned down in Russia or murdered in Pakistan. Anna Politkovskaya and Daniel Pearl.
Murrow,
I thought, panicking,
this can't be happening!

After what seemed like eons, the hands put me down. The sock was pulled out of my mouth. Someone led me over to a chair and pulled the black cloth off my head. I rubbed my wrists and wiped my eyes. There was snot on my face.

I was in a chair in the middle of a windowless, concrete room with a single door and a lamp in the corner. My captors sat in a line about five feet from me. There were four of them, and I could tell by their school uniforms that they were three boys and one girl. I couldn't see anybody's face, however, because they all wore pig masks. Normally, I like pigs. I once begged my parents for a micro pig. But these were not cute E. B. White pigs. These were
Lord of the Flies,
rotting-head-on-a-stick pigs: the epitome of evil.

I jumped up to dash for the door. “Sit down!” a beefy male student yelled, and I sank back into the chair. Again I ordered myself to calm down. Murrow wouldn't have cried in this situation, and if my captors were students, how dangerous could they be? “Oink,” I said, and hiccupped.