Paper Covers Rock (18 page)

“For what?” She jumps on it. “What did he do?”

“Well, he was drinking, too.”

“Yes?”

“And he—”

“What, Alex? What do you know?”

“What do
you
know?”

“Do you understand, Alex, that I trust you?”

“Yes,” I say.

“All I know is that I have my doubts about Glenn. And I suspect you do, too.”

Panic shoots up my spine, and I try to read her face. “What do you mean?”

“I was almost at the end of the trail when I heard the shouts, so it took me a few minutes to get back to where you all were, but when I got there, Glenn was bent over Thomas. He was holding his hand over Thomas’s face.”

“To feel if he was breathing—”

“I don’t know, Alex.” She slows down her words. “Glenn was crying. He was holding his hand on Thomas’s face, and he was crying.”

“Because Thomas was dead.”

Miss Dovecott looks at me with her Emily Dickinson eyes, and the great floodgates of the wonder-world swing open.

“You’re going to blow the whistle,” I say.

“How can I do that when I’m not sure of what I saw? All this time, I’ve wondered. All this time, I’ve been watching Glenn, thinking he might somehow reveal it to me. Or maybe he told you.” She pauses. “I thought you might know.”

Something flares inside my chest, and I turn away, the ache of truth alive in my throat. She
is
using me.

“Do you know, Alex?”

“No,” I say, choking out the word.

“Glenn never talked to you about it?”

I shake my head.

“Is there a chance you might have even seen it yourself? What I saw?”

“It was too far away from where I was hiding.”

“But in your essay, you wrote that you thought Thomas might have still been alive. You had a
feeling
, at least, even if you couldn’t see it. Right?”

I shrug. “Maybe.”

“Did Glenn have any reason, any reason in the world, to hurt Thomas?”

I run my hand along the edge of my folder of poems, praying she’ll read between the lines so that I don’t have to tell her.

“Glenn is hiding something,” she says. “Something big.”

I open the folder, refusing to look at her.

“Can you tell me what it might be? Alex?”

“I can’t tell you because it might not be the truth.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it’s rumor, not fact. And you know how boarding schools are: Rumor Central.”

I look at her now, thinking she’ll remember our conversation at the mixer and put it all together. But the pieces of her puzzle are different than the pieces of my puzzle.

“Has it not ever occurred to you, Alex, that Glenn might have orchestrated the whole thing? That whole day at the river. Getting Thomas so drunk that he couldn’t stand up straight. The jumping from the rock. Please answer my question. To your knowledge—to your intellectual
and
emotional knowledge—did Glenn have any reason to want Thomas out of the picture?”

I want to pick up the words that have fallen out of her mouth and hide them away somewhere dark, somewhere deep. My head is so heavy that it feels like a boulder, but I hold it up long enough to say what I have to say. “No, ma’am.” The words come out in a whisper, and I watch the hope that was lingering in her eyes a moment ago slip quietly away.

“You’re sure about that. Absolutely sure.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Alex?”

I do not respond because I might throw up all over my poems.

“Alex. Whatever happens from this point, there will be a silver lining—there is always a silver lining. You will learn from this. We all will. And the next time you’re confronted with a choice, maybe you’ll make the right one.”

I lift my head slightly. “I don’t know what you mean.” But I know exactly what she means. There is so much doubt in her face—doubt in me, doubt in herself, doubt in the whole world, probably.

“It’s time for you to leave,” she says, standing. “Go, do your homework for tomorrow.”

“What about the poems?” I stand, too, my knees shaking, and hold out my folder.

“The poems can wait. I’ll see you in the morning, Alex.” She shows me to the door.

Out in the night, under the pinprick stars, my life begins to rearrange itself under a different light.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 7:32 A.M
.

Hide-and-Seek

Is Male is running out of paper; Is Male is running out of driftwood. Although Is Male has not yet gone down with the ship, he can only hold on for so long. But Truth, it will survive: it treads water for as long as it needs to until it spies land, rides in with the tide, and plants its roots in the soil.

Behind
Moby-Dick
, Is Male will hide his no-longer-blank pages until the time is right. Who cares about white whales in this day and age? No one will find Is Male here with his title-less book. The title is the writer’s stamp of approval, and Is Male does not approve. Truth fights for air, and when it finds air, Is Male the Liar is going down.

Masterpiece, Timepiece

After I stop shaking, after I go to the library and write and put my journal back in its hiding place, I find Glenn in his
room. I have Clay’s Bible with me, the one he left behind, and when I ask Glenn to place his right hand on it, he does not argue.

“I swear to God that I put my hand on Thomas’s face to see if I could feel breath on my palm,” Glenn says calmly. “I felt nothing because Thomas was dead.” He hands the Bible back to me, and his eyes are so pale that I can see right through them. “What Miss Dovecott saw, she misread. It happens.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”

“You still have her watch?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I still have it.”

“Keep it,” says Glenn. “We’re not going to need it.”

I ask Miss Dovecott to take a walk with me during lunch, via an invitation scribbled on the back of the poem that I slide under her apartment door. It is time to make my move. This poem is my masterpiece. This one has a title because I approve of its coldhearted truth.

The Way Boys Read

We meet at the head of the running trail. “I liked the poem, Alex,” she says. “It may be your best yet.”

“It’s dark, like me.”

“The speaker of the poem and the poet don’t have to be one and the same.”

And over the hill we go, into the woods.

“I know,” I say. “You’ve taught me that. You’ve taught me a lot.”

There is no one running this time of day. We have the trail to ourselves. Everyone else on campus is feeding themselves. I have to keep the conversation going until we get there, until we get to the place where this is going to happen. But, really, I don’t want to talk. I want to throw her down on a bed of leaves and make my mark.

“That’s good, Alex. I’m glad. Knowledge is always a silver lining.”

I read between the lines of her words, finding justification for what I am about to do. “Speaking of that,” I tell her, “we never talked about
In Our Time.
” I read the CliffsNotes, not
the book, renting them out for a dollar an hour from a future entrepreneur who runs a business out of his dorm room.

“But I thought you couldn’t find it in the library,” she says.

“Someone had it checked out,” I say, “but he returned it.”

“So tell me about Nick Adams,” she says.

“It’s kind of a complicated book, but I guess maybe Hemingway was saying that even after war, there is morality that gives life meaning. After all of that destruction, the purity of the heart still remains. Do you think that was what he was trying to say?”

“I think that’s exactly what he was trying to say. I’m impressed.”

“The story ‘Indian Camp,’ that takes place before Nick goes to war, the end of it. It’s one of the most perfect things I’ve ever read.”

“Remind me. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten.”

“There’s that description of Nick and his father in the boat, the father rowing, the son at the stern, and the sun rising over the hills. Nick lets his hand skim across the water. The morning is cool, but the water is warm.”

“Ah, yes.” She smiles.

“I memorized the last sentence. ‘In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.’ ”

“Yes.” She nods. “Yes.”

“It’s what we all think: that we will never die.”

She touches my arm with a gentle hand. “But of course we do. It’s the one universal experience, other than birth, that we all share.”

It is the moment I knew would arrive, when we look at
each other and understand ourselves as equals on the same playing field. Her eyes are wider than I have ever seen them. “Oh, Alex,” she whispers, shaking her head, and already, the tears are in her throat. “You will recover from this. You will. Someday.”

She takes a step back, leaves rustling for a second, and then, silence in the woods, the loud sound of silence. She is floating away from me, like fog. Because of the tears, she can’t see where she’s going; there is a large branch fallen across the path, and just as she is about to stumble over it, I dash over, grab her arms, and pull her back toward me. It is all so unreal, fast and slow at the same time, and so strange that I am able, in a moment, to balance and unbalance her.

In a way it feels like the most natural thing in the world when it happens, even though it is planned, even though Glenn is crouched nearby, watching. With my hands on her arms, I draw her into me and keep her there until I have memorized the smell of her hair (pine bark), the scratchiness of her coat (tweed), the heat of her hand on my spine (like a fever). Her own spine is bony, as delicate as a bird’s, and when I feel it straighten, I bow to her face and kiss her.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 7:19 P.M
.

Green Fields Gone

Her lips were cold. That surprised me. If I said that she kissed me back, you’d be within your rights to doubt me, but she did. A full kiss, a long one, until she pushed me away with her thin arms, pushed me away, once and for all, which was exactly what I deserved. I flicked a glance at Glenn, whose bottom lip had dropped open in either shock or victory, it
was impossible to read. Fear rammed its way into my heart, and this time, I did run as fast as I could. I sprinted up to campus, to the infirmary, and checked myself in for a real-life upset stomach.

Lying there on the bed with the smell of her, the feel of her, all of her words in my head, I felt like the teacher, the one who knew everything. I thought about calling my father to ask him to come get me, to take me skiing, to take me anywhere, but I didn’t want to have to explain. Instead I spent a very long, very lonely Saturday night wondering if the minute had already passed in which Miss Dovecott had started to hate me.

On Sunday, Miss Dovecott was gone. It was all done quietly, her resignation, after Glenn went to Dean Mansfield and told him that he just happened to be running the trail when he saw Miss Dovecott kissing me, a fact that I had to confirm in Mr. Armstrong’s office, first with the Headmaster and Mr. Parkes, my advisor, and then over the phone with my father.

So many stories come full circle, and this one does, too: I spent an hour waiting on that bench in the outer hall, waiting once again to have my fate handed down to me. I had lied, yes, but only Miss Dovecott knew that for sure, and what I had stolen was metaphorical, not concrete like a can of Coke. And there was nothing in the rule book about students kissing faculty or faculty kissing students. What could they do to me when she was the one who’d initiated it?

Miss Dovecott didn’t rat me out for drinking at the scene of the accident. Nor did she rat me out for cheating at hide-and-seek. I had chickened out and hid too close to base, so
close that she could never have tagged me. No, she didn’t rat me out for anything. Glenn said with a shit-eating smirk that it was because people who live in glass houses know better than to throw stones at their own windows, but I’m not so sure. I would like to believe, in my heart of hearts, that it was selflessness. Miss Dovecott knew for a fact that she’d be fine out there in the real world but that I wouldn’t be. She had tried her best to prepare me, but I had offered her irrefutable proof that I wasn’t ready for it yet. And so, unselfishly, she let me stay. And selflessness is a kind of love.

But she probably hated me, too. An announcement was made at a special assembly that afternoon that Miss Dovecott had to leave before the year was out because of an illness in her family and that, starting Monday, Mr. McGreavey’s wife would take over as our teacher.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 7:05 A.M
.

Rock

Yesterday was the worst day. The letter I’d been dreading for a month was in my mailbox, which I discovered on my way to track practice. I hurried back to my room to open it in private. You would not believe how violently I was shaking. A folded sheet of monogrammed paper had been signed not only by Thomas’s parents, but also by his little brother, Trenton, who had, it appeared, just learned how to write in cursive. That upset me more than anything else, that little wobbly signature.