The Princesses of Iowa (37 page)

Shanti snuck up on me a moment later, startling me. “When did you get here?” she asked.

“Twenty minutes ago?”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” She gestured to the circus around us.

“I hate it.” My voice was bare, stripped clean of its defenses. “I don’t think I can stay.” I didn’t mean to say it, but the moment I did, I knew it was true.

“You want to go find Mr. Tremont?” Shanti asked. Far overhead, a vee of geese flew across the rich-blue sky, muttering and honking.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Great,” she said. “I’ll go get Ethan.”

But of course Ethan didn’t come with us. How could he, when he couldn’t even stand to look at me? I’d been a little ways away when Shanti asked him; he was on board until Shanti mentioned that I’d be coming. Then he stammered and stuttered his way back out of the invitation. Jeremy needed him. Jenna wanted his help on a donut-and-coffee run for the gang. I had tried to fade into the tree I stood behind, had tried not to feel so thoroughly rejected.

“So how are you, really?” Shanti asked now.

Over the next rise, I knew, was a falling-down old barn, collapsing more into its gray center with each passing day. Every time I drove this road, I waited to see the barn with the thrill of things falling apart, half welcoming and half dreading the day it would finally be gone. Eventually someone would demolish it completely and clear out the rubbish, maybe build something new in its place, but for now it remained: wound in vines and wildflowers, bowed in the middle with outer beams pointing to the sky, splintered and deteriorated but remaining. I sighed. “I’m here.”

She looked at me from the driver’s seat, and for a second it was there: the recognition, the understanding, the feeling of being on the exact same page. She smiled faintly. “Me too,” she said.

Mr. Tremont wasn’t at the Java House or Prairie Lights or the Thai restaurant where Shanti said she’d run into him once before. Nor at the university library, the bagel place, the funky little record store. “This is stupid,” I said, kicking at a squarish rock on the sidewalk. I was embarrassed for us both, thinking we could just wander around downtown and magically run into him. A flock of pigeons suddenly took to wing, casting shadows against the September-bright buildings.

Shanti sighed. The sun glinted off her black sunglasses, flashing like cameras. “I don’t know,” she said, and I got the feeling that she was talking about more than whether we’d been stupid to come.

She kicked a rock next to me, and we scuffed our way down the street. Fat cinnamon squirrels hopped across the sidewalk in slow parabolas. A plane droned overhead, followed by a lazy white tail. Shanti and I matched our feet together.
Scuff, scuff. Scuff, scuff.
A man rode his wobbly bike past us, its wire basket packed full of junk. Lights turned green, red, green. Cars paused, drove. People strolled by in ones and twos, students mostly, in sunglasses and baseball caps, with their faces to the sky. It didn’t seem right that people should be moving through their daily lives like nothing was wrong.

And then we found him. He was sitting on a bench near the river, sandwiched between Padma and the bearded guy from the reading, Mason. They were watching some little kids feeding ducks by the river and didn’t see us until we were practically in their laps. Shanti cleared her throat loudly, and they all looked up together.

“Oh,” Mr. Tremont said, drawing in a breath. He looked anxious, older.

Padma clapped her hands together in delight. “Our friends!” She beamed up at us, but she looked older, too, the skin around her eyes darker and more crinkly.

“Hi,” I said, lifting my hand awkwardly, like a wave or a gesture of peace.

Mason smiled at us. “Hello, girls.”

The five of us stayed quiet for a moment, wondering how honest we could be. Shanti broke the silence at last. “Mr. Tremont,” she cried. “This sucks!”

He nodded gravely. “Indeed.”

“People are marching at school today,” I said.

Mr. Tremont sank slowly back into the bench. “Oh, God.”

Padma looked at me searchingly. “People?”

“They have signs,” I said. “They say things like ‘God hates fags.’”

“Oh my God!” Padma was indignant, horrified, but Mason and Mr. Tremont looked resigned.

“We’ve seen this before,” Mason said sadly. “In college.”

“One of our professors was going to marry her partner in the university chapel,” Mr. Tremont added. “People were protesting outside their wedding.”

“People suck!” Shanti said angrily.

“It can be difficult,” Mason agreed. A breeze kicked up, ruffling the leaves above our heads and tugging the river into long ripples.

“But it’s illegal, Cam,” Padma said. “They can’t just fire you for being gay!”

Mr. Tremont shrugged. “Allegations were made . . .”

“But they’re lies!” I said.

“Yes,” Mr. Tremont said, “but parents were calling, and Dr. Coulter . . . Well, it doesn’t matter. The point is, I chose to leave.”

Shanti’s voice was pleading. “Mr. Tremont, we need you. It’s not the same without you.”

“It’s not,” I agreed, thinking of the postapocalyptic feel of his classroom, when he hadn’t yet been gone a full day. “You made school mean something, Mr. Tremont. You changed us.”

He sighed, smiling faintly. “None of us is delicate enough to touch anyone else without hurting them a little bit.” His voice had a hollow, reflective quality, as if he were reciting a quotation only he could recognize.

Padma dabbed at her dark eyes. Mason reached down and squeezed his hand. My gaze seemed to get stuck there, staring at Mason’s furry little hobbit hand wrapped around Mr. Tremont’s perfect one. There was a tiny glint of silver from the band on Mr. Tremont’s hand, and I searched Mason’s for a matching one, but his hands were jewelry free.

“Mr. Tremont,” Shanti said again. “We
need
you.” Blocks away, the faint sound of a siren oscillated through the early-afternoon streets, bouncing off buildings and skipping across the river. I ripped my eyes from their hands and tried to focus on the conversation.

“I’m sorry, Shanti.”

“How can you stand the injustice? The hatred? Why don’t you take a stand — you could make a difference in the world! You could make the world a better place!” She planted her fists on her hips, looking just like she had on the playground in fourth grade.

“Shanti,” he said quietly, “even if they asked me back, I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t. I don’t want to be a political figure. I just want to finish grad school and live my life.”

“But you owe it to —”

“I owe it to myself to finish my dissertation. Who I love shouldn’t be a political issue. I don’t want to be a poster child for gay rights. I just want to write, to write . . .”

“A sonnet cycle about high school?” I asked.

He smiled. “Exactly.”

Shanti stomped her foot. “But it’s not fair!”

“No, it’s not,” he agreed, and looked at us. “So use it.”

He gave us his email address and phone number before we left, offering to write college recommendation letters, as if that somehow made up for abandoning our cause —
his
cause! Shanti and I took his offered scraps reluctantly and tucked them into our pockets before heading back to the car for the disappointing drive home.

We sat in silence for a long while, each of us lost in our thoughts. Finally, I gave voice to the question that had been on my mind since I saw them holding hands. “So,” I said. “Is Mason, uh . . . ?”

“Mr. Tremont’s boyfriend?” Shanti asked. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

“So he actually is gay.”

Shanti gave me her fiercest look, her eyes sparking and snapping. “Yeah?” she asked. “And?”

The
and
was that it was slightly jarring to see it up close. I’d never known a real gay person before, and while I would fervently defend Mr. Tremont to all the small-minded people in Willow Grove, it was just kind of . . . weird, I guess, to see it for real.

“Who he loves doesn’t change who he is,” Shanti said, “and if you aren’t cool with it in two seconds, I will seriously kick your ass and dump you on the side of the highway.”

I smiled sheepishly. “No, I’m cool. You’re right,” I said. “He’s still Mr. Tremont, right? Even if his boyfriend is kind of . . . boring.”

Shanti giggled. “Okay, I wasn’t going to say it. But Mr. Tremont is just so . . . It’s hard to imagine anyone being good enough for him. But you’d think it would at least be, like . . .”

“A prince?”

She laughed. “Yeah, or like, a Nobel laureate.”

“Who’s devastatingly handsome.”

“But totally humble.”

“Of course!”

“Who goes to Haiti twice a year to build hospitals.”

“Who speaks seven languages and can write love poems in each one.”

“Who built his own ark before Noah and saved the unicorns.”

We were laughing at our own stupidity and at the senselessness and futility of the entire day. Everything was so messed up — and so surreal. Our giggling finally died down, and we both sighed at the same time. “Mason’s just so . . . normal,” I said at last.

“And so short!” Shanti cried, and we were both off again, giggling and guilty and slightly crazy. It was awful, but God, was it a relief just to laugh.

We got back to Willow Grove around dusk, and Shanti pulled up alongside my car in the school parking lot. I reached for the door handle but she shifted her car into park. “Wait.”

I turned to look at her. She bit her lip. “I have to tell you something.” The radio suddenly blared the opening bars of a bouncy dance song, and Shanti reached forward to turn it off. “Um.”

I braced myself for another lecture about Ethan. She’d been mercifully silent on the issue all afternoon, and I assumed she’d gotten it out of her system. I sighed and leaned back in my seat.

Shanti looked down at her hands. “I, um.”

The last sliver of red sun disappeared behind the tree line. Out on the highway beyond the football field, the cars had their lights on, a string of traveling stars.

“I was the one,” she said at last. “Who, um, told.”

“Told what?”

Her face was creased with shadow in the fading light. She sighed. “On Jake.”

I turned. “What?”

“Don’t hate me,” she said. “It’s just . . .”

“What? It’s just what?”

Her voice came out in a flood. “He was drunk! And he could have hurt Ethan, seriously hurt him — he was out of control! He could have hurt
you
! And it’s not fair that people like him get away with everything, and they can just ignore the rules and everyone else just kowtows to them — it’s not fair! And he’s a real asshole, Paige. You should have heard what he said to Ethan when you weren’t around in school, in the hallways. He’s an asshole and you can do better and you’re in love with Ethan not Jake!”

I knew I should argue, should put her in her place. Should say:
It wasn’t your right to tell.
And:
Who are you to decide who I love? Shouldn’t I get to decide who I date, just like Mr. Tremont?
But silence fell across me like velvet, heavy on my shoulders, and I kept my mouth closed.

“You hate me, don’t you? Paige, look, I’m sorry. Dr. Coulter probably wouldn’t have even acknowledged it, but Mr. Berna was standing right there and he’d seen Jake push Ethan, had heard him yelling, and you know how strict he is about the zero-tolerance policy with the cross-country runners, and I bet he’s tired of seeing the football dudes get away with shit, too, so he jumped on it and it was out of my hands and . . . I’m just tired of watching the jocks get away with everything.”

I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t anything. I felt like a little piece of me was floating above, watching the scene, taking notes for later. Analytical.
Look at Paige. She’s not reacting at all. She’s just sitting there. That’s kind of strange.

“God, I’m sorry, but I’m not, because Jake’s a real asshole and he has, like, no redeeming qualities and I have no idea why — well, whatever, it doesn’t matter — but, Paige, seriously, I’m sorry. I am.”

I nodded. “I’ll see you later,” I said, and let myself out of the car.

I drove aimlessly, unwilling to go home, in love with the empty freedom of driving. Mr. Tremont didn’t want to be a political figure; he just wanted to be a poet. It was my fault he had to make the choice. I was the cause of the whole mess; I was at the tangled center of the web. It was my fault Jake had been drunk, my fault he fought with Ethan, my fault he got caught. My fault Shanti told on him, my fault he tagged the door, my fault he thought Mr. Tremont was gay in the first place.

I was the cause, and I could be the solution.

Twenty minutes later, I was pounding on the Austins’ red front door, with its fox-shaped knocker slamming his little chin against the metal plate behind it until Mrs. Austin appeared with her face of ice. “You’re not welcome in this house.”

“I have to see Jake.”

Her fingers curled in fists against her skeletal hips. “You are not welcome here. You may leave of your own accord or you may leave with a police escort. It’s up to you.”

“Will you please tell him to call me?”

Mrs. Austin frowned. “I don’t think so. Please leave now.”