Dark Rooms (8 page)

The snack bar's packed, the line snaking practically out the door. I step to the end of it and look around, surprised at how few of the faces are familiar. I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, because, apart from Nica and Maddie, I never paid much attention to anybody younger. There is one person, though, I do recognize right away: Jamie. He's standing by the far wall, long-boned and slouchy, hip cocked against the foosball table, eating an ice cream sandwich and talking to Mr. Tierney.

Mr. Tierney runs the ceramics and woodworking studio and is resident faculty in Minot. He's a good-looking guy, young, only a couple years out of Oberlin. Is popular with his students, particularly the girls, and every term he seems to strike up a special friendship with one of them. Nica was a recent enthusiasm. The spring she died she was spending most of her free periods hanging out in the basement of Knox, working on her 3-D Studio Art project—a giant pinwheel with neon plastic curls and a bugged-out eyeball at the center.

When Nica broke up with Jamie and was cagey as to why, Jamie got it in his head that Mr. Tierney was the reason. He talked about it obsessively during our late-night telephone conversations. I saw the logic of his thinking: Nica, who was never close-mouthed, was close-mouthed; close-mouthed then not for herself, for another, another whose job was possibly on the line. Still, though, I doubted Nica and Mr. Tierney actually were involved. There was something about
Mr. Tierney that rubbed me the wrong way—an insincerity, acting as if he didn't know how cute he was, how excited the girls would get when he'd sit behind them at the pottery wheel, cover their hands with his. Nica had better taste than that. Jamie began watching Mr. Tierney, spying on him, basically, which is how Jamie found out that Mr. Tierney
was
having an illicit affair, just not with Nica. With Mrs. Bowles-Mills, wife of Mr. Mills, Chandler's CFO and general counsel. One night Jamie followed Mr. Tierney out of the dorm, spotted him sneaking in the back door of the Millses' house when Mr. Mills was out of town on a fund-raising trip. After that, Jamie's suspicions subsided, at least as far as Mr. Tierney was concerned.

And it sure looks like Jamie and Mr. Tierney are on okay terms now. Jamie is laughing at something Mr. Tierney's saying. And when Mr. Tierney's name is called by Mr. Wallace—the only teacher at Chandler younger than he is, as of last year not even a teacher, a teaching assistant in the English Department—to let him know his toasted bagel's ready, he squeezes Jamie's shoulder before strolling up to the counter.

Jamie stays by the foosball table. A television monitor is above his head, scrolling the intramural sports schedule across its screen, and he aims his delicate, red-rimmed eyes at it as he licks melted ice cream off his knuckles. He's wearing a yellow polo shirt, the one with the rip in the underarm, faded jeans. This is the first time I've seen him since I weaned myself off drugs. And as I watch him, I get that old familiar feeling—the quickening of my senses, the shifting of my weight to my toes, the dizzy rush I associate with going from sitting to standing too fast—and realize that the medication functioned for me like a string of garlic. It protected me from his beauty, warded it off. Now I'm once again defenseless before it.

It's not that Jamie's all I ever think about. Or that I'm never interested in other guys, never get crushes. I do get crushes. Geoff Holzheimer, sophomore year. Caleb Knapp and Tony Chen, junior year. Corey
Worman, senior year. Sometimes my crushes even get crushes back, and I wind up pressed up against one of them in the darkened corner of a party, or stretched out beneath one of them on the cramped seat of a car. These encounters, though, always end up feeling—not wrong, that's an overstatement, but not totally right, either. As if I'm settling or compromising. And before things can go too far, I slip away, pretend not to notice the baffled looks on their faces, the hurt sound in their voices as they call after me. With Jamie, though, there's nothing I don't like, no part of him I have to second-guess or make excuses for. He's the ideal, the supreme paragon, the one to whom I'm comparing everybody else.

Without making a conscious decision to do so, I step out of line, start walking toward him.

I'm halfway across the room when my stride falters. I missed her before because the foosball table was blocking my view, but there she is—Maddie—sitting at a computer in the row of computers. Buds are in her ears, and she's watching what appears to be a music video. Her eyes are on it, not me, but from the way she's smiling—lips curving up in a sort of smirk-snarl—I'd say that I've already been spotted. No turning back now.

I reach Jamie, am standing directly in front of him. He doesn't notice me, though, his gaze still stuck to the screen, now displaying the fall arts calendar. I touch him lightly on the wrist. He turns, looks down at me, lips parted, eyes glazed. Blink. Blink. Blink.

“Hi, Jamie,” I say.

A single hard blink. Then, “Grace, whoa, hey. You're not at Williams.”

“No, I left,” I say. And when he doesn't say anything back, “Not ready to do my own laundry yet, I guess,” and smile weakly.

He nods to himself a couple times, absorbing this information. “You left. Wow. Okay. That's a little, uh, drastic.”

“Yeah.”

“So you're back at Chandler. Not as a student, though, right?”

I explain to him my new position.

“What, like tapes and DVDs and stuff?” he says, when I'm done. “Nice, nice.” He leans over, and with a supple twist, plucks a bud from Maddie's ear. Through the hole in his shirt, I see a flash of blond underarm hair, a shade darker than the hair on his head. “Hey, did you hear about Grace?”

Maddie turns to me with an expression I recognize, dread: taunting time. I feel her eyes running over my face and body with gleeful dislike, looking for something to find fault with, make fun of. “Did I hear what about Grace?” she says.

He tells her what I told him.

She releases a snort of air, letting him know what she thinks of the job, of the A/V Department, of me in general. Then she says, “So you dropped out of the liberal arts college ranked number one by
U.S. News & World Report
?”

“For now,” I say.

“To come back here?”

“For now,” I say again.

A beat. And then Maddie says, “Are you retarded?”

“You should be nice to her, Maddie,” Jamie warns. “She's the one you'll be renting your porn from this year.”

“Nobody rents porn anymore,” she says, then reinserts the bud, turns back to the computer screen.

Jamie looks at me, shrugs. “Some people still do.”

“So,” I say, relaxing now that Maddie's attention's off me, “where's Ruben? Detention already?” Last spring Ruben didn't get into a single school he applied to, so decided to do a PG year like Jamie.

“You didn't hear? He's at Trinity. Got in off the wait list.”

“His dad promise to buy a wing for the library or something?”

Jamie laughs. “It was for the science center. And not a dinky little wing either, a whole new building.” He lifts his backpack off the floor, balances it on the flat of an upraised thigh as he unzips the front pocket. A zebra-striped Bic—he and Nica bought them together—falls out. Seeing it gives me a pang. It was an object I'd always coveted: cheaply cool, mysteriously cool, cool but in a way not everyone would pick up on, and thus ultracool. I'd looked everywhere for hers. So far, though, no luck.

Jamie scoops up his, continues riffling through the pocket, pushing aside a ballpoint pen, a folded-up class schedule, the Altoids tin he stores his joints in, finally coming to a bottle of Flintstones vitamins. “I'm trying to improve my eating habits,” he says, as he unscrews the cap. “You want?”

I hold out my hand. He pours a couple into it.

“Who'd you get?” he asks.

“A Fred and two Wilmas.”

He leans over my palm, squints. “Those are Bettys, not Wilmas. Wilma's got the bun.”

“Oh.”

For a minute or so we just chew, grinding the human- and dinosaur-shaped pellets into a sweet, gritty paste that coats our molars and tongues. This is the most relaxed conversation I've had with him since before Nica died, remarkable for being so totally unremarkable, both of us keeping it light, staying on the surface. And I'm reluctant to ruin it by dredging up something dark and heavy and out of the past. But I feel I need to speak while I have the chance, will regret it if I don't. Checking first to make sure that Maddie's ears are still blocked, I place my hand on his arm and say, “Listen, I've been meaning to apologize to you.”

I can feel him pulling away from me even though he doesn't move. “For what?”

“For how I acted at your party this summer.”

“Yeah, you seemed a little . . .” His eyes shift, flick off into the distance.

I drop my hand. “Yeah, I was and more than a little. I'm sorry for what I put you through. I know how creepy what I did was.”

He sighs. “It was creepy, but, no, you don't have to apologize for it or explain it or anything.”

“But I'd like to try because—”

“No, really, Grace, don't. It was a rough time. No one knows how rough better than me.”

“For me, it's still rough,” I say, my voice small.

He kicks the leg of the foosball table with the toe of his sneaker. “Yeah, for me, too,” he says, his voice just as small. Then he looks back at me. Our eyes hook into each other, and for a long moment neither one of us speaks.

And then the spell's broken by the sharpness of Maddie's tone: “Jamie, field hockey tryouts are about to start. I'm captain. I'm supposed to oversee. We need to get going.” On the word
we,
she touches his arm, the bare part of the bicep just below his shirt sleeve, with the short nail of her index finger.

I wonder suddenly if she's interested in him. Ruben isn't in the picture anymore, and neither, obviously, is Nica. And she and Jamie are already close, have probably grown even closer since Nica's death. I feel a swift spike of jealousy.

“Already?” he says to her.

“You said you'd walk me. Are you going to or not?” Without waiting for a response, she about-faces, begins striding across the room.

He nods at the space she just vacated, says, “All right, okay, sure. Let's roll.” Then he picks up his backpack, turns to me. “Well, Grace, it was, yeah, nice running into you.”

And before I can say, “You, too,” he's gone, has followed Maddie
through the door. I stand there, staring at nothing until a kid taps me on the shoulder, asks me if I'm going to be using the foosball table much longer. I step aside.

The line at the snack bar's still long. Instead of joining it, I walk into the hall, head for the vending machines at the far end, rooting around in my bag for loose change as I go.

The pack of Wheat Thins has just been released from its coil when I hear my name called. I turn. Standing behind me is a tall man of thirty-five or so. He's wearing bib overalls, and his blond hair, parted in the middle and so long it touches his shoulders, is held back by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. His smile is sweet and broad, from ear to ear: Shep Howell.

Shep's official position at Chandler might be guidance counselor, but fairy godmother is a more accurate job title for him where I'm concerned. Not only did he talk Williams out of axing me in the spring, he also convinced Mrs. Sedgwick to hire me for the A/V Department last week. So he's rescued me twice in the past six months, has gone out of his way to lend a hand. And yet, the truth is, I've never liked being around him.

He makes me uncomfortable. At least, he used to. Shep's one of those adults who seems never to have grown up, has kept the clear eye and pure heart of a child. Which, of course, is great. Only not to me for some reason. I guess I feel, felt, rather, developmentally stunted enough myself—a virgin at eighteen, for God's sake, didn't smoke or drink or do drugs!—to be put off by the quality in another. Not that I thought childlike was all there was to Shep. I knew I was missing something. Had to be. Otherwise Nica, Jamie, Maddie, and Ruben wouldn't have given him the time of day. They did, though. And this in spite of the fact that he was a hippie, a subset of humanity they normally had no patience with, tie-dyed shirts and soybeans and the word
groovy
all being things they could do without. Which made me understand that he must be cool in the same way the zebra-striped Bics were cool, as in, he shouldn't have been, but was, deeply so, only his manner of coolness wasn't visible to me no matter how hard I looked. So, as far as I was concerned, he was just yet another thing I didn't get, and I tried to be in his presence as little as possible to keep from having to pretend I did.

As I said, uncomfortable is how I used to feel around him. Well, still do feel, actually, though in a completely different way. When I got Shep to call the Williams dean on my behalf back in May, I was strung out on pills. I knew I was acting in bad faith—exploiting his pity for me, his affection for my sister, the guilt he felt at having been in Lewiston, Maine, at Bates College's Jumpstart for Juniors program the weekend she died—and that seemed like a perfectly okay thing to do. When I got him to call Mrs. Sedgwick on my behalf last week, I was stone-cold sober. I knew I was again acting in bad faith, and it didn't seem like an okay thing to do, but I was able to do it anyway because I was doing it over e-mail, no eye contact or even voice contact required. After I slept through lunch today, missed the chance to stop by his office, I'd told myself I'd get to it tomorrow. Seeing him now, though, feeling the floodgates of guilt and shame opening inside my chest, I realize that I was never going to get to it. Not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Not voluntarily.

We stand there, facing each other. I've been smiling back at him for so long now that the air has dried my teeth and my lips are sticking to them.