So Shelly (2 page)

Due to Shelly’s fall-semester expulsion from Trinity, the school’s administrators had hesitated to grant her father’s
request for the use of the gymnasium, which was the only venue big enough in all of Ogontz, Ohio, to accommodate the large outpouring of young mourners. I’ve learned that although there is a seemingly endless list of indiscretions that one may perform without being excommunicated from Trinity—including exposing yourself to a junior varsity cheerleader, screwing your English teacher, and stealing and consuming communion wine from the school chapel, all of which Gordon committed with relative impunity—writing a measly five-hundred-word essay on the necessity of atheism that, against all odds, gets published in the “My Turn” section of
Newsweek
is not on it. It was only Mr. Shelley’s record of consistent and generous donations that convinced the administration to allow the wake to take place on school grounds.

But his donation, of an amount that only he, God, and Monsignor Moore (the pastor at All Saints Catholic Church) knew, was not an act of selfless grief. The public wake at Trinity was a transparent ploy by Shelly’s father to keep her friends (think Gordon) away from the official funeral services. A members-of-the-family-only gathering was planned for the next evening at their home, with a funeral mass at All Saints scheduled for the morning after.

Like Gordon’s, Shelly’s family lived on a peninsular strip of beach-lined property that juts into Lake Erie, separating the lake from the Ogontz Bay. Locals call that strip the Strand. Seasonal residents from nearby Cleveland and Toledo, and from as far away as Columbus, Cincinnati, and Detroit, populate the majority of the sprawling lakeside mansions during the summer, but a handful of Ogontz’s gentry
call Acedia, a gated community on the Strand, home. The ultra-exclusive subdivision was intended to be named for Arcadia, the idyllic rural region of southern Greece, but when the wrought iron gate with the subdivision’s name artistically rendered across the top arrived misspelled, no one bothered to have it corrected or to look up the meaning of “
acedia,
” which is “spiritual or mental sloth.”

Most of the “mourners” had hardly known Shelly, but it’s hard to resist any chance for drama or dressing up when you’re a teenager in Ogontz. And drama there was.

Shelly’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her body, washed ashore on a small Lake Erie island, had earned her the sort of attention that nothing in her lifetime ever had. Several national cable networks had sent reporters and camera crews, intrigued by what they called Shelly’s “socialite” family and her connection to Gordon, but the reporters immediately lost interest when foul play was eliminated and her death was ruled an accidental drowning. (Each year, fewer than 3 percent of all deaths of teenagers between the ages of fifteen and nineteen are caused by accidental drowning.) The cameras immediately moved on to their next fatality, this one having been bled dry. (A Class IV hemorrhage, which involves the loss of more than 40 percent of a person’s blood, often results in one’s bleeding to death.)

Despite the whirring of my mind and the turning of my stomach, I sat relatively still and looked around me. Even with the ceiling exhaust fan humming, the humidity inside the gymnasium refused to vacate the premises, as if its
stultifying presence were necessary for the somber occasion and it felt obligated to fulfill its solemn duty. Oblivious to the heat, like a mannequin in some men’s boutique clothing store, Gordon lounged and waited for the opportune moment.

I sweat and bit my nails while I waited for Gordon’s cue. In my ill-fitting hand-me-down church clothes—I rarely went to church anymore, but that’s what my mother had called any pants other than jeans and any shirts with buttons—I looked like a Geek Squad trainee. Gordon, in contrast, sat unfazed inside a maroon athletic-cut dress shirt open at the collar and tucked into a pair of black designer dress slacks. Unable to subdue my admiration—even on such a somber occasion—I stole sidelong glances at his freakishly good looks. Waves of thick brown, not quite black, hair poured to midway down his ears. The tousled longish locks epitomized the cavalier nature of the mind they concealed. His muted blue eyes peered hawklike over perfectly symmetrical and impossibly high cheekbones curtained by sideburns. I realized then for the first time that it was his mouth to which one was powerlessly drawn. It was almost a girl’s mouth: lips full, moist, and ruby red that closed over and guarded the pleasures and words waiting to rise from his tongue.

“Now, Keats.” Gordon didn’t ask; he commanded and snapped me out of my reverie.

He never called me John.

“Now?” I looked around at the klatches of kids milling about on the gym floor. “There’s too many people.”

“Exactly. No one’s paying attention to Shelly.”

Before I could fire a second round of protest, Gordon was up and moving toward the altar. Like a child on parental heels, I followed. En route, I glimpsed Principal Smith with his arms crossed, standing beneath one of the side baskets and engaged in an earnest conversation with Father Fulop. (The puns are obvious and often employed: “Father Fulop Shit,” “Father Feel Up.” You get the picture.) He is Trinity’s youth minister, spiritual counselor, head of the theology department, and first-class douche bag.

We passed a group of pouty-faced senior girls actually bitching about it being “so Shelly” to upstage them on the weekend of graduation.

Without hesitation, in a sweeping three-quarters overhand motion, Gordon grabbed a glass vase filled with red and white (Trinity’s colors) roses off of one of the faux marble pedestals arranged on either side of the altar. Dumping the flowers, he continued toward Shelly’s remains, scooped the urn from the altar top, replaced it with the completely dissimilar vase, handed the urn to me, and then proceeded toward the receiving line at the gym entrance.

Struggling to match his pace and to hide in his expansive shadow, I shoved the urn beneath my arm, inside my jacket. Thinking back, I should have known better than to fear being anything but invisible next to George Gordon Byron.

With typical nonchalance, Gordon continued toward the Shelley family, who, like most in the Trinity community, had grown to hate his guts. No one, however, disliked Gordon as much as Mr. Shelley, whose loathing was well earned. More on that later.

“Sorry for your loss,” Gordon said. His extended hand was immediately rejected with an if-looks-could-kill stare from Shelly’s father, who was, as of yet, oblivious to the fact that we had stolen the last of his daughter. “Right. Well, fuck you too.”

As Shelly’s father lunged for Gordon’s throat (after accidental deaths, homicide is the most common cause of death among young adults), I managed to slip, unnoticed, out of the gymnasium with Shelly.

Seconds later, Gordon emerged with shirt tousled and neck scratched, but he smiled with devilish glee.

To even begin to understand Shelly, you have to risk knowing Gordon. To know Gordon, you have to consider the Tim Burton movie-in-the-making world that was his childhood.

Most of what I know of Gordon, outside of Shelly’s epic monologue, I learned in snippets from Shelly or gleaned from the few-and-far-between conversations I had with him, but I have to believe that much of what he shared was, to say the least, embellished. Anyway, he is not the type of person one
knows
so much as knows
of
. Some things I learned from the publicity that followed the publication of his bestselling fantasy novel. In the spring of his eighth-grade year, Gordon finished his novel and Googled New York City literary agencies until he found the one that was the largest and most prestigious. By June, Gordon and his mother had signed contracts enlisting Martin Literary LLC as Gordon’s representative.

With a keen understanding of the marketplace and the particular needs and interests of the various major publishing
houses, Ms. Mandy Martin had
Manfred
placed within a week, with a healthy advance and a major—but nonnegotiable—request from Adam Pandroth of Pandroth Publications: “Make Manfred a vampire. That shit sells.” (No one has ever died from a vampire bite.) After a quick rewrite, a professional edit, and an unusually high marketing budget for a first-time and teenage novelist,
Manfred
was fast-tracked for release the following summer.

Manfred
is the story of an American boy expatriated to the care of distant relatives after the death of the boy’s parents in an automobile accident (41 percent of all accidental deaths). Consigned to his ancestral home in the Scottish highlands, he meets and studies under the mentorship of a mountain wizard from whom he learns the secrets of conjuring, shape-shifting, and the controlling of spirits, including those of his mother and father. The novel made an impressive splash in the young-adult market. I was astounded that a boy nearly the same age as me and from my own backwater town had been allowed to swim in the deep end of literature at all. I became not only an ardent but also an envious admirer.

The remainder of my knowledge of Gordon was attained through the grapevine of rumor that sprouted incessantly around him. Regardless of the source, I have no doubt that much of what I’m about to share has been exaggerated, but, I swear, this is how I heard it.

I grew up and still live in a crowded low-class neighborhood of single-dwelling homes on the east end of Ogontz, less than a mile from the entranceway to the Strand but millions of dollars distant. If I walk one block north to the shore
on the bay side, I can look northeast across the water to see the palaces rising over their putting-green lawns. These lawns run to backyard beaches from which wooden docks extend, Gatsbyesque, lined with WaveRunners and sailboats and powerboats of varying lengths. The two most prominently visible Georgian monstrosities, at which I still sometimes stare from my cement-footed poverty, belong to Gordon’s and Shelly’s families. The families are next-door neighbors; although, you could fit ten of
my
neighbors’ homes between the two houses.

Prior to the events that followed the stealing of Shelly’s ashes, the only intimate connection between Gordon and me, outside of our unrelated friendships with Shelly, had been that we’d both lost our fathers. Gordon’s father abandoned him and his mother when Gordon was still an infant. The little that Gordon knows of him was dripped like poison from his mother’s vengeful lips.

Gordon is the final bud on his father’s Ohio branch of a patrician family of Virginia. The family’s sons, all Annapolis-trained, had made their reputations in the United States Navy and their fortunes in the boatbuilding trade in the Chesapeake Bay region and along the Ohio shores of Lake Erie, where for more than a hundred years the Byron brand of cruising and fishing boats have dominated the waters of the Great Lakes.

When he was forced to retire with a less-than-honorable discharge after a female ensign’s never-litigated claim of sexual harassment, Gordon’s father, the handsome John Byron, still in his midthirties, took his partial pension, returned home, and assumed position on America’s inland seas as
chief executive officer of the Byron Boatyards. As the incompetent father of a two-year-old daughter, Augusta (the unwanted product of his putting into port with an admiral’s not-quite-eighteen-year-old daughter between dinner and dancing at the said admiral’s ball), he was desperate to marry. In exchange for John’s assuming complete guardianship of the child (meaning the infant, not the teenager), the admiral agreed not to pursue charges.

Not long after his return to Ohio, through mutual friends at the Ogontz Yacht Club, he was introduced to Catherine Gordon, a thirty-year-old never-been-married still-living-at-home only child, and the last bearer of one of Ogontz’s most respected family names. Pale, plain-faced, and plump, Catherine was not John’s type—or any man’s type, for that matter—but she came from good stock, and the pickings were slim in Ogontz for a fast-approaching-middle-age man with a toddler and a penchant for burning through money.

Soon after the tented and trellised backyard wedding at their newly purchased Acedia home, Catherine became pregnant. When Gordon was born on a frigid January day and officially christened, according to his maternal grandfather’s insistence, as George Gordon Byron, the Byron and Gordon names were extended into the seemingly forever-rosy future. Rosy, except for one thing. Gordon had been born with a clubfoot and an underdeveloped calf and ankle, an ill-omen that Catherine thought of as the sole mark of imperfection on the otherwise angelic child. As Gordon grew older, Catherine couldn’t assuage Gordon’s own self-conscious contempt for his deformity. Despite the painful therapeutic manipulations and serial castings endured during his infant and
toddler years, and the doctors’ claims of success, Gordon developed a slight limp, which he still labors to hide.

Catherine, soon bored by motherhood, joined every social club and service organization that would have her, leaving Gordon and her newly adopted stepdaughter, Augusta, in the full-time care of Missy Fanning, a fresh-from-the-university early-education-major-turned-nanny who boarded in a guest bedroom next to the nursery.

The drudgery of permanent anchorage and the daily mundanities of running a business exacted a wearisome toll on Gordon’s father, who, during his navy years, had earned the nickname of “Mad Jack” Byron. One afternoon, Catherine returned home early from her book club to discover her husband, ten toes down on the floor of the nursery, on top of the nanny, whose bare legs were coiled around his frantically thrusting bottom, while Gordon watched, wide eyed, from behind the bars of his crib. Catherine kept the children but sent Mad Jack packing, an exile during which he managed to deplete the remainder of his, and much of her, once-substantial funds. Catherine’s remaining resources, though large by my family’s standards, barely covered living expenses and the maintenance of the surface appearances required of those living on the Strand. According to Shelly, the interior of the Byron house was sparsely furnished and no one was ever invited in. She once remarked that the mansion was nearly as empty inside as Gordon was.