Dark Rooms (7 page)

If Chandler's reputation is only a cut above so-so, its campus, which looks more like that of a college or a small university than a high school,
is anything but. The central building, aptly named Great House, is red brick, impossibly old, and covered in ivy. Great House is set among a trio of shorter and only slightly less grand buildings: Noyes, de Forest, and Perkins. To their left is Burroughs Library, pillared, marbled, silent as dust; and to its right, Amory Chapel, its bell plundered from some bombed-out church in Europe by an enterprising alum at the end of World War I; and, a little farther on, Francis Abbot Science Center and Caroline Knox Abbot Theater. Stokes Dining Hall is south. The hockey rink and tennis courts and various athletic fields are east. So is Houghton Gymnasium and the Health and Counseling Center. And way east, so far east you can't quite see it from campus, is Chandler's boathouse, the Gordon T. Pierpoint, a stone's throw from Trinity College's boathouse, Bliss, on the banks of the Connecticut River. The dormitories—there are four of them: two for the boys, Endicott and Minot; two for the girls, Archibald and Amory—are west. They're separated from the main campus by the graveyard, controversial real estate at Chandler even before Nica's body was found there. The graveyard belongs to the City of Hartford, and technically school rules don't apply to it, making it a sort of gray zone for boarders, a moral no-man's-land. It's the hub of what the administration refers to as “narcotics-related activity.” Is also the hub of alcohol-related activity. Sexual-related activity, too.

I start toward the quad, the air sharp with the smell of cut grass and lawn fertilizer, fresh paint. Campus is empty, all the students in chapel, extra-long this morning because it's the first day of the new school year. Empty except for a lone figure, a hundred yards or so ahead. And though this person has her back to me, I recognize her instantly. It's the walk, tight and clipped and harried: Mrs. Amory, Jamie's mother. She's looking primly chic in a tailored gray suit, the skirt, meant to be fitted, puckering slightly on her no-ass frame, her sheer-stockinged calves tensed and shadowed by high heels, black and wickedly pointed. She changes paths and I can see her in profile now.
Her face, behind its dark glasses, is as hard and brittle as an eggshell. As plain as an eggshell, too.

I slow down, not wanting her to spot me, though there's little danger of that, so intently is her gaze focused on the doors of Great House. It's no surprise finding her on campus. She's been in charge of the Parent Giving Association for as long as I can remember and does a fair amount of volunteer work at the school besides. Plus, she's constantly ferrying Jamie to and from his squash lessons. Or at least was until the administration agreed to let him keep a car in the student parking lot for that purpose.

It wasn't always from afar, though, that I saw Mrs. Amory. Once upon a time I saw her up close on a regular basis—in the days when Nica and Jamie were together, and the three of us would spend whole afternoons and evenings hanging out in his house. She made it perfectly clear that she wasn't wild about having my sister and me around. Whenever she happened to open the door and we were on the other side, she'd draw back her thin lips in an even thinner smile, say, “Welcome,” in a tone intended to convey the opposite.

Sometimes Jamie would use his mom's ice-cold mannerliness against her, maneuver her into asking us to stay for dinner. These meals were always weird and uncomfortable and never-ending. Mr. Amory, a handsome man, pretty, in fact, prettier by far than his not-so-pretty wife though not quite as pretty as his very pretty son, would pay excessive attention to Nica. From behind a pair of round, black-rimmed glasses, which somehow emphasized his good looks rather than obscured them, he'd watch her, stare openly. Then the questions would begin, too many of them with him hanging too eagerly on her replies. He'd invite her to borrow his cue if she and Jamie and I were going to play billiards, his desk if we were planning to study, his raft if it was warm enough for us to swim. Once he even invited her on a trip he and Jamie were taking to Maine the following weekend to hunt bobwhite quail. Mrs. Amory would observe these exchanges
from the other end of the table with eyes that were coolly detached or coolly amused—coolly something. Then she'd start in on Nica with questions of her own, mostly falsely sympathetic ones about our mom, asking how she was doing, saying how difficult her job as a high school teacher must be, how difficult both my parents' jobs, putting up with ungrateful adolescents all day, what noble work it was and yet so unappreciated, and how she could never do it herself.

Though she barely noticed me—I don't even think she knew my name, referred to me only as “dear”—I was the one she upset with these interrogations. They'd leave me shaking with anger and hurt. Nica, on the other hand, was totally unfazed. Would always answer politely, without sarcasm or hostility, never responding to the queries' spiky subtext, staying right on the placid surface. Actually seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. Amory more than anything else. “It can't be fun being her, Gracie,” Nica would say to me in the car afterward as she lit a cigarette, “uptight, everybody around her wanting to be someplace else, her husband especially.” Then Nica would do an impression of Faye Dunaway in
Mommie Dearest
that was very bad but made me laugh anyway. Usually she'd talk me into stopping at the McDonald's on Albany Ave. on the ride home. We'd split a McFlurry or a hot fudge sundae. The eggnog shake, if it was near Christmas.

I watch Mrs. Amory's straight-backed form until it's out of sight, disappearing inside Great House. The dull thud of the closing doors releases me from my stupor, and I continue on my way. As the concrete path turns into marble in front of Burroughs Library, I stop, dig an elastic out of my bag. When I've finger-combed my hair into a ponytail, I pull open the glass doors, step through them.

I step through them again two minutes later, only from the opposite direction. A crisis has arisen—burst pipe, bungling maintenance man, leak above the rare books section—and when Mrs. Sedgwick,
the head librarian, has dealt with it, she'll deal with me, she said. She said, too, that in the meantime I ought to go see Mary Ellen Lefcourt in Payroll, get started on my paperwork.

So I'm going.

I'm sitting in the Business Development Office on the second floor of Perkins, my I-9 and Direct Deposit Authorization forms neatly filled out and on the coffee table in front of me. Mrs. Lefcourt is still in her office with her nine o'clock, even though it's nearly ten now. To kill time, I'm browsing through a copy of the
Staff Handbook,
learning all about the proper protocol for reporting falsification of expense vouchers, when I hear voices rise up in anger—one voice, actually, male, young-sounding—rise up and die down almost immediately.

I crane my neck to see where it came from and notice a door at the end of the short, offshoot-type hallway. The sign outside it reads
GLEN FLYNN, DIRECTOR OF FACILITIES
. A second later, Mr. Flynn himself appears, a nervous-looking guy with fidgety hands, a red bow tie. He closes the door behind him, but not all the way, hurries over to Mrs. Waugh, the office secretary, whispers something in her ear. She shakes her head disapprovingly, either at what he just told her or at him. With an anxious backward glance, he exits. I reimmerse myself in the
Handbook,
wait for Mrs. Waugh's fingers to start tapping on the computer keyboard again. When they do, I close the
Handbook,
stand, begin walking toward the door like I'm in search of better light. Then, casually, I prop myself against the wall opposite.

The crack in the door is narrow. I can't see much through it, and what I can see tells me what I already know: that the room is an office, and that the angry-voiced person is indeed male and young. He's pacing back and forth, his gait lurching, wobbly. It takes me a second to put together that he's drunk, and I wonder if when Mr. Flynn scurried off, it was to get campus security. A slice of his body is
visible, but none of his head. I'm starting to think I'll never get a good look at him when he pauses to bend over, peel the thick fabric of his jeans from the backs of his knees. And for a brief moment, I have an unobstructed view of his face. Damon Cruz.

Damon Cruz is a day student—at least, was. He graduated in June, same as me. The term “day student” at Chandler is a tricky one to get a handle on because it doesn't mean what it sounds like it means, i.e. a student who spends his days at Chandler, his nights elsewhere. Not only, anyway. It also means a student who is on scholarship. When Reverend Chandler was writing the school's constitution, he included a clause stating that ten percent of the student body “must come from the community's deserving poor.” At Chandler's inception, “the community's deserving poor” were, for the most part, the Polish immigrants or the children of the Polish immigrants who settled in droves in Sheldon/Charter Oak in the late nineteenth century to take jobs at the local factories, manufacturers of firearms and horseshoe nails principally. But demographics have shifted radically in the last couple of decades. Hartford is now a predominantly black city with the second-fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the nation. Another thing it comes second in: poverty. The area's gone from working class—those factories shut their doors a long time ago—to under the underclass. So what was once a gap between the day students and the boarders is a gap no longer, it's a chasm.

There are day students, however, who manage to cross it. These students usually fit a certain profile—male, excel at a sport, come off as dangerous but not outright scary. Sex appeal doesn't hurt either. Damon could have been a crossover if he wanted. He was a star baseball player, a little standoffish, known to have a temper. His sophomore year, he punched a rival player in the face during a game, earning himself the nickname Demon and a two-week suspension from the team. (The incident received a fair amount of coverage, not just in the school paper but in the
Hartford Courant
as well. The suspension was originally for the rest of the season, then got dropped down, and
there were people who felt the reduction was sending a bad message, was practically condoning hooliganism, according to one editorial.) He was good at school, too, which I knew because we were in AP calculus together for a week before a scheduling conflict forced me to switch to another section.

Apparently Damon didn't want to cross over, though. Any time I saw him on campus he was hanging out with other day students or with guys on the baseball team, a team pretty much entirely composed of day students. I remember he was going to college, UConn, the Honors Program, a popular option with smart day students since it offered a first-rate education on the comparative cheap. Was awarded an athletic scholarship, too, I think. So what's he doing back at his old high school, wasted before noon, picking a fight with some pencil-neck administrator?

I take a step toward the door, bring my eye flush against the crack. Damon's no longer pacing, is standing in front of the window now. He's placed his hands on the sill so that his weight's resting on his spread fingers. When he leans forward to look out, the muscles in his arms jump. It's tough for me to believe this guy's my age. He seems so much older—a cold, confident, hard-nosed man: thick, jet-black hair combed straight back, features that are handsome in a crude way, body that's more broad than tall, bulky through the shoulders and chest, narrow at the waist and hips.

The room's warm, and his clothes are soaked through, his wife beater forming a second skin. Looking at it, I have a sudden memory. A girl on the tennis team, Sass Van Doren, saying something I couldn't hear to Nica when Damon walked by the courts in his fitted baseball pants one afternoon during practice, her low tone and sly grin making me understand that her words were lewd and complimentary. Nica turned her eyes to him, then said, “Rough trade, too rough for me,” and went back to hitting serves. At the time, I was more focused on her remark, this cool deadpan sexual appraisal of a guy she didn't even
know, the style and swagger of it, the offhandedness of its delivery, the weight of experience behind it, than I was the object of it. Watching him now, though, it's easy for me to see what she meant.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

I turn, blink into the sharp-eyed stare of Mrs. Waugh. I shake my head and start walking away. Behind me I hear her clicking her tongue reproachfully, then the sound of Mr. Flynn's door being whammed shut.

I return to my seat at the coffee table, bury my face back in the
Handbook
. A few minutes later, Mrs. Lefcourt calls my name.

The audiovisual department that I'll be running is less a department, as it turns out, than it is a room, is less a room than it is a cavern, dusty and windowless, in the far corner of Burroughs's basement. As Mrs. Sedgwick shows me around, wrinkling her nose at the dank subterranean air, the clusters of mouse—fingers crossed mouse—droppings on the floor, the shelves stacked with DVDs and VHS tapes, she instructs me on my duties, which are pretty basic: a teacher or student requests a movie or documentary or television series, I deliver it along with the equipment necessary to play it. We spend some time pretending there's more to the job than that. We can only pretend for so long, though. And finally, she leaves me on my own.

I wait until I hear her footsteps fade, then I start whatever DVD's already in the machine so it'll sound like I'm doing something, curl up on a cleanish patch of floor, the phone within easy reach in case any orders come in. Before the FBI warning about piracy has cleared the screen, I'm asleep.

At two thirty I'm awoken by the tolling of the bell in Amory Chapel, signaling the end of the academic day. I stand up and stretch, turn off
the TV, the screen glowing blackly, the DVD having played out long ago, and begin gathering together my stuff. I'd meant to stop by Shep Howell's office on my lunch hour, which I'd obviously slept through. No big deal, I tell myself. I'll stop by on my lunch hour tomorrow. Speaking of lunch, I notice that I'm hungry for the first time since last night. I'm thinking I'll just grab something from the kitchen when I go back home, pick up my car. Then I remember the linguine with clam sauce on the bottom shelf of the fridge, and my stomach does a slow roll. I decide to swing by the Student Center instead.