The Year of the Gadfly (44 page)

“What's wrong with you?” I grabbed Hazel by the shoulders and shook her, crazed, unable to stop myself.

“Mr. Kaplan! Stop it! Please!”

I was vaguely aware of Iris's pleading voice and her bloody face. She needed medical attention, but the urge to hurt Hazel, physically and brutally, was too strong. Hazel broke free and charged Iris.

“Don't forget your confession, Iris,” she snarled. “Don't you forget—”

Iris hesitated, her eyes bright and afraid. Then she bolted. I ran after her.

I FLED THE
Outpost, grabbed the backpack with the
Devil's Advocate
s I'd left outside the Trench, and ran for help. Headmaster Pasternak was in the lobby, still wearing his coat and a newsboy cap dusted with snow.

“They're going to kill each other!” I was breathless, half delirious. Black spots clouded my eyes, and I felt like I was going to puke out my entire stomach. My face throbbed. My neck and hands were sticky with blood.

Headmaster Pasternak was unflinching. “Let's get you to the hospital,” he said, and pulled a cloth handkerchief from his pocket. He pressed it to my cheek with surprising care. “I'll call your parents and tell them to meet us at the ER.”

I shook my head wildly. My neck barely felt attached to my body. “Come on!” I cried. I saw Mr. Kaplan hurrying toward us, and then the hallway and Mr. Kaplan and the rows of lockers melted into a hazy puddle.

 

I woke up to the smell of leather and car heat. I was leaning against Mr. Kaplan's shoulder; his hand was pressing the handkerchief to my face.

“She's awake,” he said, and I saw in the rearview mirror the headmaster's visible sigh of relief.

“You fainted,” Pasternak said. “We're going to the hospital.”

“The confessional! Where's the confessional?”

Pasternak looked worried. “Just relax, Iris,” he said.

“Mr. Kaplan,” I mumbled, my lips thick and gummy. “Where is she?”

He shook his head. “We don't know.”

I tried to remember what had just happened, but the pain was like a wall. As Mr. Kaplan walked me to the ER, I thrust my backpack into his hands. “You need this,” I said, though I couldn't for my life recall why.

Weak microorganisms that have been exposed to foreign chemicals or ultraviolet radiation will often die. But if they survive, they can mutate into a more robust version of their former selves, able to thrive under new conditions.

—Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth's Mysterious Biology

I DON'T REMEMBER
much of what happened after Mr. Kaplan and Headmaster Pasternak dropped me off at the ER. I have a vague recollection of waking in a hospital bed—apparently I passed out a second time—and then stumbling into the bathroom and screaming at the dark slug splayed across my face. The nurses came running and found me clawing at the stitches the doctors had sewn into my cheek. There were thirty of them, black ugly things. I was given a sedative, and when I fell back to sleep, I dreamed leeches were stuck to my body, sucking toxins from my blood.

The next day, when I was home recovering, Headmaster Pasternak came over to check on me. He explained that after he and Mr. Kaplan dropped me off at the ER, they'd driven directly to the police station. Not long afterward, the police went to the Historical Society with a warrant for Hazel's arrest. She resisted—she'd been in the process of packing her bags—and spent the night in jail.

I was happy to hear this, but I was disappointed that Headmaster Pasternak had come to visit alone, without Mr. Kaplan. During the hour the headmaster spent with us, my mind marched back and forth past the same questions: Where was Mr. Kaplan? What was he doing? Was he thinking about me? Surely he'd come to see me. Surely our experience with Hazel
meant
something to him. Didn't he realize how I'd saved him, giving him the newspapers to destroy? And hadn't he saved me—or made a valiant effort to—from Hazel? Wasn't this supposed to be the moment where we finally shared the unbreakable bond of our grief?

But Mr. Kaplan didn't come.

It was weeks before I saw him again. My parents decided that I was an invalid (I suspect they'd been talking to Dr. Patrick) and informed me that I was
taking a break.
They arranged for me to complete my midterm exams at home. In fact, for the entirety of winter vacation, they barely let me leave the house.

Not long into my internment, the local papers sniffed out the story about Prisom's Party and Hazel. The
Nye County News
ran two articles: Faculty-Student Violence Wracks Mariana Academy (talk about a sensationalized headline!) and Restraining Order Issued Against Mariana Academy Alumna. Soon after these appeared, a reporter from the
Boston Globe
called asking for an interview. My parents urged me to turn him down, especially after the
Globe
mix-up with Dalia. I had reservations about helping the
Globe
reporter all right, but mostly because I didn't want him to scoop me on my own story. I gave in, though; a journalist doesn't write hard news about herself.

“I'll tell you everything,” I promised the reporter over the phone. “But only if you get me a summer internship at the
Globe.
And I don't mean fetching coffee for some prima donna columnist.” The
Globe
wasn't keen on this at first, but after I sent them my clips and followed up with a number of phone calls, they came around. They knew well enough that prep school scandals are like cheap sex for the American public, and if they didn't have me, they didn't have a story.

I wasn't too worried about the reporter manipulating me, either. I was a journalist; I knew how this worked. So when the
Globe
man came to Nye, I told him exactly what I wanted him to know—the same glossy version I'd given my parents and Headmaster Pasternak. I described the kidnapping, the pig masks, and the legend of Edmond Dantes. I said nothing about my confessional or Mr. Kaplan's brother. At times I wondered what Murrow would think about these half-truths I was telling and whether he was judging me from his heavenly press box. But these concerns were only the superficial remnants of a previous self. I'd reread Murrow's biographies over winter break, and it was amazing how different he seemed now. I'd missed—really ignored—much of the complexity and the darkness he'd harbored. He was charismatic and moody, openhearted and selfish. A truth-teller and a liar. Like me. I'd tried so desperately to be like him, but after all my worry and ruminating, it turned out we weren't so different in the first place.

As expected, the
Globe
story gave everyone a five-star orgasm. The AP picked up the article, and
Seventeen
magazine interviewed me for a piece about high school journalists. Some crackpot agent-publicist person even tried to sign me as a client, but I didn't want to kick off my career with a memoir. Take that route and everybody would think I'd invented half the details just to boost book sales.

Peter could have confessed much of what I'd kept secret, but when I turned his name over to Pasternak and the police, he said nothing. He refused to explain how Hazel had recruited the members of Prisom's Party, or her level of involvement in the group. He was expelled for his silence—in addition to everything else. Hazel, too, kept mum. Mr. Kaplan told the police about Matt Sheridan—I only found out about him from the newspapers—but Hazel denied her involvement in the Sonya Stevens activities. The police searched her computer, but they found nothing pornographic.

Both Pasternak and my parents issued restraining orders against Hazel, but the only charge levied against her was trespassing. Of course, Mariana parents became obsessed with neighborhood menaces and abusive-teacher stories. For weeks the local papers ran articles to the tune of “Let Your Children Use the Internet and They'll Probably Die.” The
Nye County News
published a stream of letters to the editor arguing that the “true tragedy” of this scandal was parental neglect. Suddenly half the town seemed to think my parents and Peter's parents were responsible for what had happened to us—Peter's expulsion, my beating at Hazel's hands. When I explained that I became involved with Prisom's Party
in spite
of
my parents, everyone shook their heads at my naïveté.

 

By the time classes resumed after winter break, the school had sealed up the tunnel and razed the Outpost. They installed new lighting fixtures in the Trench and scheduled classes in the empty rooms. They scrubbed the place clean and painted over the Argus on the wall. Within a month, the Trench resembled any other floor of Prisom Hall. The
Oracle
also published my Charles Prisom story, clearing up all questions about the school's legacy. “On the outside, Mariana may appear to be the setting of a gothic romance,” I wrote, “but the fluorescent lights within have not simply chased the shadows into their corners, but illuminated the corners themselves. Our legends have nowhere to hide.”

After all this, the other kids didn't know what to make of me. Everyone ogled my nasty stitches, and when the
Globe
article came out, I became a minor celebrity. Kids who'd never spoken to me before were suddenly asking me all kinds of questions about the Trench, and Katie Milford was jealous as all get-out over my
Globe
internship. I didn't care, though. I no longer needed to become the
Oracle
's youngest editor-in-chief. After my summer in Boston I planned to intern for the
Nye County News
and then
Boston
magazine. Maybe I'd even take a year off before college to intern at
Slate
or
HuffPo
to build up my web journalism chops. By the time I actually entered college, I'd be a working freelancer. (Not that I planned to build a career out of
that
soul-draining slog.) But you couldn't get hired at the
Boston Globe,
or the
Washington Post,
or the mecca of meccas, the
New York Times,
without a thick stack of clips.

 

The excitement over my scar and the media attention faded, and I sank into the monotony of second semester. The snow sat thick and deep on the school grounds and continued to lie there for weeks and then months, as though spring had forgotten about Nye or decided that our dreary mountain perch wasn't worth the effort. Meanwhile, Mr. Kaplan acted like nothing had happened. When he looked at me, he tried hard to ignore my stitches. I couldn't stop thinking about him, and at night, instead of talking to Murrow, I played through “what if” conversations with him. What if I ran into him at the bookstore in town and we happened to be buying the exact same book? What if my parents invited him over for dinner to thank him for taking me to the hospital? What if we were both in the school elevator when it broke down? I had so many questions for him: about Lily, about his relationship with Hazel, about whether the
Devil's Advocate
had told the truth about Justin's death. Most of all, I wanted to tell Mr. Kaplan about Dalia and explain how he and I were connected in our grief. I imagined us walking along the campus paths, discussing what we'd been through. We each knew how it felt to move through the world alone, harboring dark feelings few people could understand.

Just before summer break, I stopped by Mr. Kaplan's classroom. He was sitting at his desk, grading exams, and I launched into an explanation of what had happened from the time I broke into his car until he found me holding the
Devil's Advocate.
I watched his face, but it was inscrutable, so I explained how Hazel had made me feel visible, but she hadn't seen me at all. “There's only one person who really sees me,” I said, “and that's because we share a deep and searing bond, and I—”

“Ms. Dupont.”

I clamped my mouth shut. The look of understanding on Mr. Kaplan's face was so sincere that it more than compensated for the betrayal and pain I'd experienced at the hands of Prisom's Party. All of that had been in the service of this moment, when Mr. Kaplan and I would acknowledge the bond of our grief. He pulled a packet from the stack of papers on his desk, and I waited eagerly for what he would say.

“I'm very proud of you, Iris,” he began. “You could have used the year's events as an excuse to shirk your academic responsibilities, but you received a near-perfect score.”

At first, I didn't understand what he was talking about. Even as I took the exam from him, I wondered: Was this the prelude to our real conversation, the moment when Mr. Kaplan said,
I know you, Iris
? But then I understood. This
was
the conversation—the only conversation we were going to have. I stared at the bright red A inked onto the page. It might as well have been a gigantic X, the universal letter of rejection.

“Ms. Dupont, are you all right?”

I shook my head, too upset to speak. Mr. Kaplan looked at me, concerned. “I thought we . . .” I began—only I couldn't say it. I probably looked paralyzed at that moment, but inside I trembled with the terrible fear that Mr. Kaplan and I shared nothing. Logically, it didn't seem possible—not after Hazel had betrayed us, not after we'd both lost our best friends. But if Mr. Kaplan felt all of this—if he truly felt it—why didn't he say something? Why did he sit there like he was nothing more to me than a concerned teacher and I was nothing more to him than an upset student?

“Iris.” Mr. Kaplan reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. His palm felt so much larger than it looked. I glanced up at him, fighting to keep my eyes dry. “Thank you, Iris,” he said. “I cannot tell you how much I mean that.”