So Shelly (9 page)

As word spread of Gordon’s physique, his talent, and the coach’s obsessive attention to him, the number of participants at the voluntary workouts swelled with both prospective female swimmers and suddenly expendable returning lettermen.

Gordon quickly grew indifferent regarding the idol worship of his countless nereids and found his divining rod pointed in the direction of Ms. Yancey, a second-year sophomore English teacher and the advisor to Trinity’s literary magazine,
The Beacon
. I’m sure that among any gaggle of twentysomething girls, Jennifer Yancey would have been nearly invisible, but at Trinity, in opposition to the just-out-of-the-wrapper freshness of her students, at twenty-three she seemed damn near world-weary and exotic, which were vestigial attributes from her short-lived Gothic stage during her own sophomore year of high school. That dark period also accounted for her continuing penchant for black outfits and silver crosses.

Despite Ms. Yancey’s professional devotion to serious literature, her guilty reading pleasure remained young adult fiction, especially anything to do with vampires, evidenced by the occasional novel she carelessly let lie exposed on her desk or let slip from her bag. I imagined that her typical Friday
nights for the past eight to ten years had been spent inside the pages of those stories, fantasizing herself the object of vampire seduction, rather than teasing and tempting the attention of flesh-and-blood real boys. I’m sure she gasped when she discovered that the “Byron, George” listed on her third-period class roster was
the
Gordon Byron of still-growing
Manfred
fame.

For his part, Gordon knew on the first day of class that Ms. Yancey would belong to him. She tried so hard not to appear impressed, not to make him aware that she more than knew who he was and what he had accomplished. She tried so hard not to look too long into his eyes (she knew better than most not to look deeply into the soul-stealing eyes of a vampire) that Gordon knew she was already his. It was simply a matter of opportunity, surrender, and sinking in the fangs.

I was a freshman that year. I’d been allowed to skip what should have been my final year at Trinity Middle School by virtue of my off-the-top-of-the-charts test scores and my obvious boredom with the facile nature of the middle-school curriculum. My folks balked at the placement, fearing my diminutive stature, and questioning my ability to socialize with the older students, but they were too absorbed in my father’s dying to put up much of a protest. I was actually pleased with the advancement; it wasn’t as if I would be leaving behind many friends my own age. Even then I sensed the urgency of putting my life on fast-forward, for fear of never accomplishing anything of significance.

In the diminishing number of conversations I held with my mom, she continually pushed me toward becoming a doctor. After watching my father’s humanity corralled, prodded
through the chutes, clubbed over the back of the head, and processed into ground beef by the butchers of the modern American health care system, she had grown disillusioned with the medical establishment. Having been blessed with an intellectually gifted son, she thought that she might offer me as that establishment’s savior.

My entire life I’d dealt with the typically unspoken assumption of my parents, and of career-disaffected school guidance counselors, that because I was smart, I owed it to them to become a doctor or lawyer or engineer or something else with a “promising financial future.” So I humored their vicarious medical aspirations by joining Trinity’s Future Professionals in Medicine (FPM) club and by serving as a volunteer wheelchair valet at the hospital, but my own fast-crystallizing dream was to write—Novels? Movie scripts? Plays? Poems?—what, I didn’t know yet, but definitely not the fantasies of Gordon and Ms. Yancey. I knew then, and I still plan—if death doesn’t intervene too soon—to write the kind of literature that wins awards and will be read and taught hundreds of years after I’m dead. I knew that whatever form it was going to take, however, I needed to decide soon. Hell, I was nearly fourteen and one book behind Gordon. I didn’t share my plan with my mother, but I did join Ms. Yancey’s staff on the
Beacon,
where my path first intertwined with Shelly’s and Gordon’s.

Fifteen minutes late, Gordon sauntered into the second-floor corner “media center,” which housed Trinity’s literary magazine,
The Beacon;
the school’s newspaper,
The Warpath;
and its yearbook,
The Yearbook
. He came as a favor to Shelly, who believed, once the word got out of his participation, that his celebrity presence might inspire others to join. On one arm, he had a blonde; on the other hung a redhead. They seemed to be competing for the title of Miss Most Put out by Actually Having to Make a Brief Stop at the Lame Media Center Before Proceeding to Do the Cool Things That Cool Kids Do.

Despite Shelly’s plastering of the school with posters that advertised the organizational meeting, she, I, and now Gordon and his playmates were the only attendees.

Without greeting or introduction, Gordon asked, “What’s that?” He nodded toward the rear of the room, where a red light spilled from beneath a closed door.

“That,” Ms. Yancey answered, “is a darkroom. At least, it was once. We no longer use it. At least, not to develop film.”

“What
do
you use it for?” Gordon asked.

Flummoxed, yet flattered by his come-on, Ms. Yancey could only manage, “Uh … Well … We, um …”

The red lights within the erstwhile darkroom had been turned on and left for no apparent reason, an experience with which Gordon’s bookend hotties, whom he abruptly dismissed, could probably have identified.

“Ms. Yancey.” Gordon flirted and lied as he squeezed himself into a front-facing first-row desk immediately beneath her podium. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I’m the advisor, Gordon, and we’re”—she paused to indicate Shelly and me with a Vanna White wave of her hand—“glad you joined us.”

“The pleasure’s all mine … for now,” he said, causing Ms. Yancey to blush and Shelly to roll her eyes.

“Well, like I said.” Ms. Yancey, for Gordon’s benefit, proceeded to summarize the discussion points he had missed. “Our goal this year is to increase involvement and expand readership.”

Gordon interrupted her once more, as he surveyed the nearly empty room with a slow roll of his head over each shoulder. “Looks like you’re off to a good start.”

His eyes landed on me. “Who are you?”

“John.” I answered in a mousy prepubescent voice that quavered with awe. Over the summer, I had read
Manfred
and followed its trajectory up the bestsellers charts, and had followed Gordon’s increasing celebrity.

“Do you have a last name, John?”

“Keats,” I said.

“Keats,” Gordon repeated. “I like that better. It’s …” He settled on “Poetic.”

I blushed.

“Anyway.” Ms. Yancey reclaimed the floor. “So far, we’ve discussed adding visual pieces, such as photographs, political cartoons, and/or a comic strip; someone mentioned an advice column; Shelly thinks we should address more ‘socially relevant’ topics; and I’ve shared that I intend to write reviews of current young adult fiction in order to encourage students to read independently of their assigned classroom texts.”

“Maybe you could review me, Ms. Yancey. Or, at least my book,” Gordon said.

Knocked off guard, Ms. Yancey stammered while searching for an appropriate response.

“Good luck with that,” I said to Ms. Yancey, saving her. Although I was new to the high school, I wasn’t new to the culture, nor did it take supersensitivity to sense the lowly position of the arts in Trinity’s pecking order. For one thing, the whole place smelled vaguely of a locker room, and within the first fifteen minutes of the meeting, Shelly had referred to the school’s artistically challenged masses as Neanderthals, Spartans, cretins, and as having shit for brains. That last one had earned her a detention from Ms. Yancey.

In Shelly’s defense, the literati of Trinity
were
few. Ms. Yancey recounted for our benefit that when Mr. Preston, the
Beacon
’s longtime advisor, retired the previous spring, the magazine was nearly disbanded. In fact, it would have been if Ms. Yancey, with her youthful idealism and Shelly in tow, hadn’t marched into Principal Smith’s office and pleaded with him to give them one last chance to pump some fresh blood into the near corpse. Mr. Smith relented and agreed to its continuation on a probationary basis. Increased student involvement and the meeting of expenses would mean the maintaining of its charter as a school-sponsored organization. The failure to meet those goals would mean extinction.

“What about,” Gordon suggested without recognition from the chair, “an online edition linked to Trinity’s Web page? Keep it always a semester behind so as not to interfere with current sales. It could be linked to Trinity’s main page and also generate advertising revenue.”

It was the first really good idea anyone had offered. Shelly immediately seconded the proposal, and it was passed as our first order of business for the new and improved
Beacon
.

With his contribution far transcending the original
purpose of his attendance, Gordon rose to leave as abruptly as he had arrived. As a boy-wonder author, I’m sure he considered himself to be above our amateurish production. Who could blame him? But I had the feeling that he would be back, if only for the number of opportunities that participating on the
Beacon
would provide him for working intimately with Ms. Yancey.

With Gordon gone, business and hormonal levels returned to normal. Though slightly discouraged by the sparse turnout, we charged forward. Inspired by Ms. Yancey’s romantic optimism, we divided among us the responsibilities of soliciting advertisers, vetting submissions, procuring the printing at the
Ogontz Reporter,
and marketing and selling the finished product to a student body of reluctant aesthetes.

By October, we’d all settled into our separate routines. In addition to serving as the student editor in chief of the
Beacon,
Shelly had been elected president (she ran unopposed, despite the faculty advisor’s repeated begging for additional nominations) of Trinity’s Key Club, a Kiwanis-sponsored service organization full of college résumé builders and those in need of the service hours mandated for graduation. She had also begun secretly volunteering after school at Ogontz’s Planned Parenthood, where she gave several of Trinity’s (one of Gordon’s) deflowered coeds quite the shock when they walked through the door to find her answering phones or collating literature or doing mailings.

I didn’t have much of a life other than school, my for-appearance’s-sake-only involvement in FPM, and the few
hours I spent pushing wheelchairs at the hospital. I did play flag football in the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO)—for kids not involved in interscholastic athletics—and I wasn’t too bad, considering my age and size, but most of my time was spent helping Shelly with the
Beacon
or in my upstairs bedroom rereading
Manfred
—I was searching for the formula—and writing poems and stories of my own.

Gordon had begun a regimen of private workouts before school with Coach Mancini, followed by seven hours of classes, and finishing with team practice after school. Occasionally, if Shelly and I were putting in a late night at the
Beacon
’s office, he’d swing by, but he would spend most of his time leering at Ms. Yancey or flirting with the five of Trinity’s hotties (Shelly referred to them as the Gordonettes) who, she believed, had bit on her Gordon-as-bait trick and joined the staff. The truth is, concerned for Shelly’s success, Gordon had secretly recruited all five of them. If nothing else, they did take over some of the more tedious work, allowing Shelly, Ms. Yancey, and me to focus our collective attention on reviewing the occasional submissions and writing and revising our own. When he did show up, Gordon fell immediately under the intoxicating sway of the pheromonal effervescence of the fully stocked chick bar and, in general, didn’t seem to notice that I existed.

I remember only a single conversation with Gordon during that entire year. On a night when Shelly was “vegging” on a cot in the darkroom, not a single Gordonette had shown up at the office, and he sat sullenly studying Ms. Yancey.

I approached him.

“So, I really loved
Manfred,
” I said.

“It was easy,” he answered, which really pissed me off, since I’d agonized over every word I’d ever written. None of it was easy, and most of it sucked. Unlike for Shelly or me, writing was not something Gordon seemed to enjoy, or something he felt particularly inspired to do. He was simply good at it, and he would use his talent, not because it was his calling but in order to earn the spoils of fortune and fame.

Dismissing me, Gordon rose and walked to where Ms. Yancey sat at her desk. It was the first time I had really noticed his limp. I mean, I’d seen it, but I had always thought the slight hesitation in his step was part of his “cool.” I think, having grown somewhat comfortable at Trinity, Gordon was beginning to let down his guard, to ease the intensely focused micromanagement of his every movement.

Gordon stood at Ms. Yancey’s side, so that if she had turned her head to look over her left shoulder, she would have been staring directly at his crotch. I was unable to hear their conversation, but I watched as she grew increasingly discomfited, adjusting her glasses and pulling together the top of her blouse. All the while, she kept her attention glued to whatever she had been reading on her desk, but she was unable to hide the warm red blush that ran up her chest and neck into her face, like heated mercury. Beneath her desk, only one foot, inside an open-toed flat, reached the tiled floor of the classroom; the other bounced nervously at the end of her crossed leg.

Gordon eased over a pile of papers on the corner of the desk and sat down so that he was facing Ms. Yancey with his arms crossed and legs extended in a relaxed manner that penned her in the corner. He continued whatever small talk
he had begun. Eventually, she let go of the top of her blouse and lifted her eyes to make contact with his. I noticed that she had uncrossed her legs and that both of her feet were planted flat and hard against the floor. Whatever Gordon said, it slowly transformed Ms. Yancey’s face until she was smiling, brushing back loose strands of hair from over her rectangular rimless glasses, laughing, and looking more like one of the Gordonettes than the teacher.