Auden opened his mouth and then closed it again like a fish sucking at air.
I remembered that first night at the Ledge so clearly—Auden following Ren into the dark woods, head bowed, hands buried deep in his pockets. What did the A’s have against him? And was it enough?
“I—” Auden started. He looked out at the auditorium. For a moment, his eyes rested on me. Then he looked away.
“It was just me,” he said. “I acted alone.”
Drew exhaled loudly next to me.
Headmaster Collins sighed. He looked disappointed. “Very well,” he said. “Mr. Stein, you are hereby suspended from Knollwood Augustus Prep for a period of twenty-four weeks, effectively immediately. And you—” Headmaster Collins pointed a meaty finger out at us in the audience. He had an uncanny ability to make you feel like he was looking directly at you while staring at everyone at once. “You know who you are. Take this under advisement: in the past, this has been an administration with a bark and no bite, but no more. There will be no more warnings, no more preferential treatment given to those who threaten the traditions of this institution. Put a stop to your illicit constructions, or I will make it my mission to put a stop to you myself.”
“How’s that for a little excitement, Ren?” I heard Dalton whisper behind me.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard Ren bark softly in reply.
Twelve
Grace Fairchild
Fall 1996
When I graduated from high school, I got a small swimming scholarship to attend Trenton State College in New Jersey. No one in my family had ever gone to college, so it was no small thing for me to pack up the Oldsmobile my mom had passed down to me and drive the two hundred miles south to my dorm room in Travers Hall.
The thing was, nobody ever left Hillsborough. People were born there, they grew up there, and then they married their high school sweetheart, bought a house down the street from their parents, and repeated the cycle. But that was never going to be me. I had always wanted something more out of life. I could feel it tugging at me from the inside, almost like some sort of physical force pulling me out of Hillsborough’s orbit.
Jake was like that too, which was one reason we got along so well. He was just different from most of the people that I knew. He had big dreams, and he was really smart and driven. In high school, he got a full ride to a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire. We had an unspoken understanding between us that he would go, and that even though he was no longer living in the house down the street, the distance wouldn’t change anything between us, and it didn’t.
Jake and I were like two jigsaw pieces that fit together—alike in some ways, different in others, but our differences always complemented one another. Jake had grown up with two younger sisters, so he was sensitive in a way most guys weren’t. I’d grown up with three older brothers, so I had a toughness beneath the surface that I think took most people by surprise. Jake was book smart, while I was artsy, always sporting paint smudges on my baby-doll dresses and Doc Martens, my fingers perpetually stained with clay. And while I was quiet and reserved, Jake was the type who put you instantly at ease. He was my best friend and I loved him, more than I had ever loved anybody, but then he died.
Only, he didn’t just die, he killed himself. That was maybe the hardest part—that Jake’s being dead was not some tragic accident, but his own choice.
The other hard part was that I hadn’t even seen it coming. It happened near the end of the fall semester of my sophomore year, his junior year—right before he was supposed to come home for winter break. We had talked for the last time two nights before it happened and he had sounded so normal, so happy. I didn’t know then that that was the last conversation we would ever have or I would have paid more attention to it. I had just gotten out of the shower when he called and I was preoccupied with some fight my friend Claire and I were having; I let him go earlier than I normally would have to finish an art project that was due in the morning.
Later, when I found out that Jake was dead, I played that conversation over and over in my mind trying to figure out what I had missed. He’d seemed excited to come home; we’d made plans for how we would spend our days—sledding down Martha’s Hill, ice-skating on Langely Lake, drinking root beer floats at the old A&W. Where, in all that, was a cry for help? Where, in all that, was Jake’s goodbye?
I questioned a lot at first. I wanted to see the suicide note they’d found in the typewriter in Jake’s dorm room. I pored over it, trying to poke holes. The night after the funeral, I called Jake’s mom, and I asked her, what did Jake mean when he admitted in the note to stealing that exam? Jake had always been a straight-A student; why would he have needed to cheat? It didn’t make any sense.
My mother took me aside the next morning.
“I know you’re hurting,” she said, “but you have to have some compassion for poor Mrs. Griffin. She’s lost her child. You’re picking at a wound that’s trying to heal.”
I realized that part of what my mother was saying was true. My questions, they were coming from a selfish place. A part of me was angry with Jake for what he’d done, but a bigger part of me was angry with myself. Because Jake knew me better than anyone—I had confided in him my smallest triumphs and my greatest defeats. He had patiently listened and built me back up again when I was down. But somehow, I hadn’t done the same for him. He had been hurting, he had desperately needed me, and I wasn’t listening hard enough to know. I had failed him in the most profound way a person can fail anyone. And as long as I questioned things, as long as Jake hadn’t really killed himself, as long as there was some other explanation, I wouldn’t have failed him as profoundly as I thought I had.
But the other part of what my mother said was wrong—I wasn’t picking at a wound that was trying to heal over, because the grief I felt would be with me always. Jake had been a part of me, and now a part of me was gone. I was never going to get it back; I was never going to be whole again. I understood that somehow, even at sixteen. And I understood it at nineteen, when I dropped out of college to focus on my art. And I understood it at twenty-two, when I’d been living in Trenton for three years and I met the next man I would fall in love with.
His name was Teddy Calloway. I was shelving returns at my part-time job at the local library (my art didn’t really pay the bills), and I had my headphones on so I could listen to my mix tape in my Walkman. As I pushed my cart forward, I felt it hit something, and then I heard a muffled cry of pain. I looked up to see a young man wincing at the other end of my cart. Several books fell off the cart and made a loud clatter as they hit the floor.
“Shit,” I said.
The man looked up at me, startled, and chuckled. I didn’t know what he found so funny; I was a little preoccupied with how attractive he was. He had beautiful, piercing blue eyes and he was tall—at least a foot and a half taller than me. He put a finger to his lips in a “shh” gesture, and I realized with horror that I still had my headphones on and I must have just yelled “shit” in the quiet library, or at the very least, spoken it at an inappropriate volume.
Sure enough, an elderly woman poked her head into our aisle and said pointedly, “Please keep your voice down.”
When she was gone, I had to bite back a laugh. I looked back at the amused young man on the other side of my cart, took my headphones off, and silently mouthed, “Shit.”
He laughed.
I made my way around the cart and knelt to start picking up the books that had spilled. The man leaned down to help me.
