Class (27 page)

The yurt was a cone of fire rising thirty feet into the air. Sea Bass and Damascus and Geoff and the three Grannies and a crowd of other students fed the fire with sticks and newspaper, trying to make it last as long as possible—anything to procrastinate.

Adam kept his hands in his pockets as they approached. Indeed, this was news. This was excitement. But he needed to go home.

“Nick!” Shipley cried when she spotted him, gazing up at the fire with his flap hat on backward, eyes bloodshot from smoke and allergies. “I’m so sorry,” she commiserated. “All your hard work.”

Eliza slipped her arms around Nick’s waist. “He doesn’t give a shit.” She lifted up one of his earflaps and licked his ear.

Nick swiped the hat off his head and threw it into the fire.

“Yes! Thank the lord!” Eliza cried. She unzipped her cutoffs beneath her long down coat and stepped out of them.

“No, not those. I love those!” Nick rescued the shorts before she could throw them into the flames.

“Aw.” Eliza cupped his rashy face in her hands and kissed him.

“Wow,” Shipley remarked. “That must have been some party.”

“I think maybe—” Nick bent down and retrieved the gigantic red bong that was lying at his feet. “I think maybe this is the dawn of a new era.” He tossed the bong into the fire and it exploded with a dramatic popping sound.

Grover threw his red bandanna into the fire. Then Liam took off his tie-dyed shirt and threw that in too. Next came Wills’s skirt. All of a sudden everyone was taking off their clothes and throwing them into the fire.

“All right, all right,” Mr. Booth, Dexter’s president, shouted into a bullhorn from the front steps of the chapel. “The fire department is standing by, but I wanted to let you kids have your fun first. I know this is a stressful time, what with exams coming up tomorrow. You’ve got half an hour to go crazy around that bonfire of yours, and then I want you all in the library, studying.”

If he hadn’t won over the students before, he’d won them over now.

“And don’t forget your coffee. The Starbucks café will be open twenty-four hours a day for the next week. The first coffee of the day is on me. Just show them your ID.”

“Yeah, Boothy!!”

Adam cleared his throat. “Hey, will you be all right?” he asked Shipley. “I mean, would you mind if I just went home? I kind of have to clean up and everything, before my parents get home.”

Shipley nodded, blushing. She wondered if Tom was watching from his window. “Good. That’s good. Go home and I’ll call you later, okay? I mean, I have two exams tomorrow, so I’m going to
be cramming, but we’ll figure something out.” She couldn’t believe how casual and distracted she sounded. “Okay?”

Adam was in too much of a hurry to even notice. He’d have to dig out his car. “Okay. So, I’ll see you,” he said, and strode away with his hands still in his pockets.

The fire burned with gusto. Students frolicked around it in various stages of undress.

“
Fire, fire on the mountain!
” Wills sang out in a high falsetto, making everybody laugh.

T
he house was just as Adam had left it except for the crisscrossing car tracks the party-goers had made on the snowy lawn. The porch steps were slippery, and he cursed Tragedy for not shoveling them and coating them with salt the way their parents had taught them to do when they were each about six.

“Hey, I’m home!” he called as he stomped into the kitchen, eager to tell his sister all about last night. On the drive home he’d imagined how he would quietly gloat at dinner that night while his mother and sister chided him about being in love. He imagined bringing Shipley home and fooling around with her in his room while his parents were downstairs drinking wine and dancing to “How Deep Is Your Love.” He imagined his sister and Shipley becoming friends and trading clothes and hair bands and jewelry, or whatever girls did with their friends. But Tragedy didn’t answer. He ran upstairs.

“Anybody home?

“Tragedy, you here?” he called, striding down the hall to her room. As usual her bed was made with perfect hospital corners. The floor was spotless. A neat stack of books far beyond her years sat on the desk. Advanced Latin. Calculus II.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.
Tender Is the Night.
Chaos Theory. Fodor’s
Greece.
Michelin’s
Brazil.
Her collection of Rubik’s cubes adorned the bureau. One of the windows had been left wide open and snow had collected on the sill. It was freezing. He walked over and tugged the window closed, brushing the snow onto the floor. From where he stood there was a clear view of the driveway and the lawn. Except for the path he’d just taken from the end of the driveway to the front porch, and the dozens of tire tracks that looped around the yard, the eighteen or so inches of new snow was immaculate and untouched. No new footprints led from the house to the barn, where Tragedy should have gone that morning to hay the sheep. In fact, the sheep were standing out in the snow by the fence, baahing like crazy. He shivered violently and went into his room to put on a sweater.

Everything in his room was just as he’d left it too—bed hastily made with clothes pushed underneath it, desk chair askew. He whirled around and dashed downstairs again. Four pairs of green-gold cat eyes stared up at him from out of a towel-lined cardboard box beneath the kitchen table. Storm, the gray mother cat, got up and stretched, then leapt out of the box and trotted over to her empty bowl on the floor beside the woodstove. She meowed plaintively.

“All right, all right,” Adam told her as he rummaged around in the cupboards in search of cat food. Where the hell was his sister anyway, he wondered, growing increasingly annoyed. After he’d fed the cat, he put on his good Sorel snow boots and went up to the barn to hay the sheep. The barn door stood open. He flicked on the light. The three spent kegs lay on their sides like abandoned carcasses. Plastic cups littered the floor like bones. He climbed up the ladder and threw two bales of hay down from the hayloft and carried them out to the snowy pasture. The sheep baahed eagerly when they saw him, crowding around the fence and butting their heads against their neighbors’ woolly
sides. They attacked the bales hungrily before he’d even cut the twine.

He watched them eat for a while, wondering what to do. How could he enjoy his feeling of elation at having spent the night with Shipley, his first real love, when there was no one there to share it with? Had Tragedy gone home with someone? Was she just out for a walk? Or had she finally done it this time, had she finally run away?

Back in the house he dialed Uncle Laurie’s number and examined the contents of the fridge while the phone rang. Save for a piece of leftover shepherd’s pie and an uncooked ham, the usually well-stocked fridge was strangely empty. There weren’t even any grapes. Ravenous, he glanced at the counter, searching for the familiar containers in which Tragedy stored her daily baking endeavors. Nothing.

“Hello, this is Laurence,” Uncle Laurie finally answered. Ellen’s younger brother was the head of the History Department at the public high school in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He’d graduated from Columbia, cum laude.

“It’s Adam. I was just calling to ask…to tell my parents something.” All of a sudden he wished he hadn’t called. If Tragedy was really gone, there was nothing they could do about it except wait for her to come back.

“They’re on their way, son. They only just left,” Uncle Laurie told him. “How are you, anyway? How’s college?”

Adam closed the refrigerator and looked out the window at his car. “College is good. College is great,” he said enthusiastically.

“Well, that’s good. Your parents said you were having kind of a hard time,” Uncle Laurie countered. “Said you were thinking of transferring.”

Adam had forgotten all about transferring. He’d even met with
Professor Rosen to discuss his options. As far away as possible, he’d told her, and she’d suggested Dexter’s brother school, the University of East Anglia, in England.

But after last night, all that was irrelevant.

“I think it’s getting better now,” he told his uncle. “Look, I had this party in the barn last night. I’d better clean up before they get home, okay?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Uncle Laurie laughed. “You take care. And say hello to your sister for me. I’ll see you at Christmas.”

“See you at Christmas,” Adam said, and hung up.

It took a long time to clean up the barn and put everything back where it belonged. Someone had thrown up into the muck bucket and on one of the old horse blankets. Rusty horseshoes were scattered all over the place, and one of the shovels was missing. When he was finished, Adam lined the kegs up by the barn door, ready for his dad to load into the pickup and return to the liquor store in town. Then he dragged the heavy-duty trash bags out to the end of the driveway and returned to the house to shovel and salt the porch steps. Back inside, he lit a fire in the fireplace, stoked the woodstove, and walked from room to room, matching up stray shoes and neatening magazines and loose bits of paper. He was just sitting down to the reheated piece of shepherd’s pie when the phone rang.

“Hello?” he answered, fork poised.

“This is Kennebec Regional Hospital. Is this Mr. Gatz?” said the person on the other end.

Adam put down his fork. “No. I mean yes. What’s wrong? Is there something wrong?”

“We have a Tragedy Gatz here. In the intensive care. I assume she’s your—”

“Sister,” Adam answered robotically. Out the window he could
see his parents’ blue pickup make the turn into the driveway and amble toward the house with Ellen behind the wheel. He could see their innocent faces behind the thick glass of the windshield and wished they’d just keep driving, past the house, past Home, to a place with better weather and better news. “We’ll be there soon,” he said before hanging up.

He stood up and put on his coat. The shepherd’s pie sat untouched on its plate. His parents were just opening the pickup’s doors when he stepped out onto the porch.

“What the hell, Adam?” Eli shouted. “Didn’t anyone bother to bring in the goddamned sheep last night?”

Ellen remained uncharacteristically silent, her mouth rigid and her cheeks pale. She seemed to sense that something was wrong.

“Shove over, Mom, I’m driving,” Adam called, waving them back with his hands to indicate that they needed to stay in the car.

Ellen scooted over to make room for him behind the wheel.

“It’s Tragedy,” he explained as he closed the door and restarted the ignition. “She’s been shot.”

22

I
t wasn’t that long ago that Nick had waited outside his and Tom’s room while Shipley and Tom fooled around, creeping back into his bed after they’d gone to sleep and leaving again before they woke up. It wasn’t that long ago that Eliza had had to suffer through lunch in Coke’s dining hall, pretending to be oblivious as she ate her peanut butter and jelly sandwich while Shipley and Tom felt each other up beneath the table. It wasn’t that long ago that Eliza had considered joining the Woodsmen’s team and becoming a lesbian, not necessarily in that order, or that Nick had considered signing up for “mental health” sessions with the nurse-practitioner to talk about his repressed anger toward his mother and his roommate. And it wasn’t that long ago that Tom and Shipley had been one of those Dexter couples everyone assumed would marry soon after graduation.

Not that long ago at all—days.

Now the tables had turned. It was Shipley who sat alone at her desk, pretending to study, while Eliza rubbed cortisone cream all over Nick’s mostly naked body beneath a flimsy cotton blanket.

“Do you shave your legs?” she heard Eliza whisper.

“No,” Nick protested.

“But they’re so unhairy,” Eliza insisted. “Are you sure?”

Nick snorted and kicked his feet. “Would you like to inspect them more carefully?”

Eliza disappeared beneath the blanket. Shipley turned up the volume on Tchaikovsky and reread the same passage of Byron for the third time.

“Hey!” Nick squealed. “Stop it!”

Shipley scraped her chair back and yanked the earphones out of her ears.

“I’ll see you guys later,” she called out, even though neither of them was listening. Out in the hall she picked up the phone and dialed the Gatzes’ number.

“Leave a message or be square!” Tragedy’s loud, cheerful voice intoned on the answering machine.

“It’s Shipley Gilbert calling for Adam,” Shipley said. “There’s no message,” she added stupidly before hanging up.

She lingered in the deserted hallway for a moment, trying to decide what to do. She hadn’t seen Tom yet—no one had—but she suspected he was still sleeping. A good girlfriend would have brought him a free cup of Starbucks coffee and a plate of toast from the dining hall. A good girlfriend would have spent the day with him writing out flash cards and testing him in Econ so he wouldn’t fail his exam. But she’d already proven that she was not such a good girlfriend.

The midday sun was high and bright. Through the hall window she could see the black Mercedes, parked neatly by Dexter Security in a spot near the road. What was the trunk full of now? Donuts? Croissants? Cupcakes?

Four months ago she would have called home to tell on Patrick, but she was not the same person she’d been four months ago.
She was not as virtuous or as loyal or as discreet. She was not the good little girl her bad older brother had either teased or ignored. She was not the little sister Patrick had hated so much. She had no idea who she was or what she was becoming, but it was possible that going to see Patrick in jail would help move things along. Never mind Byron. She’d learned enough about Romance over the course of the semester to wing the exam.

J
ail was a concrete addition to the Home police station, a low rectangular building with a wheelchair ramp leading up to the entrance. A steady stream of townspeople marched up the ramp and in and out of the door as if it were the post office. What reason did people have to visit the police station, Shipley wondered, unless they were visiting someone in jail?