The Tragedy Paper (14 page)

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “What took me so long?”

He grabbed her hand, wishing that they didn’t have to eat and hurry back. They had an eight o’clock curfew, and if they missed it, this privilege would be taken away for the rest of the year. He didn’t want that to happen, especially now.

“So who is Amanda again?” he asked.

“I knew you didn’t know who I was talking about,” she said, swatting him on the arm.

“I thought I knew all the seniors. I don’t know why I can’t picture her.”

“Well, she was new last year,” Daisy said. “And she
is
quiet. You know, she always wears straw hats and has the blue hair right here.” She tugged the left side of her hair near her face.

“Oh, I know exactly who that is,” he said. “You should have mentioned the straw hats sooner.”

“Actually, I think more people wear straw hats than have blue hair,” Daisy said. “I thought that would be enough to tip you off.”

“Both my grandmothers have blue hair,” Duncan said in his best fake-serious voice. “It isn’t so special.”

Daisy leaned her head into his chest and then turned it into a hug. Duncan couldn’t believe it: somehow the hug felt even more intimate than the kiss.

“So, how was Amanda when you left?” he asked when he felt her start to pull away.

“Better,” she said. “But I think she’ll go home for a while. I heard her talking to her mom on the phone.”

“That was nice of you,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Daisy said. “I shouldn’t have let her sleep. I keep thinking, what if she’d taken more and she really had slipped into a coma? I mean, it could have been much worse.” Daisy covered her face with her hands.

“Look, you did the best you could,” Duncan said. “Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

“Since when do you have so much wisdom?” she asked as they approached Sal’s.

He didn’t answer. He hadn’t meant it to sound that way. He, of all people, certainly didn’t feel very wise. He reached for the door, but this time she stopped him. He looked at her.

“It’s going to be different this time, right?” she asked.

He knew what she meant—of course he did. He also knew that a statement like that would have sent him running last year. It probably would have sent him running last week. There was so much he didn’t trust about himself, and about depending on another person. But she was so soft and easy to be with. And she had every right to ask, he guessed. Still, he didn’t know what to say.

“I mean, if we keep going with the same pattern, I’ll see you again in December,” she added.

He quickly calculated the timing. It
had
been three months, and, yes, it would be December in three more months. He was amazed that she had that information so available. It reminded him of Vanessa’s thanking Tim for the last eighteen hours.

“Forget it,” she finally said, and he realized he still hadn’t responded to her.

“No, sorry, I was just thinking,” he said. “I never meant for it to be so long. I thought about you—this summer.
A lot. I wondered what you were doing and if you were thinking about me.” He could see her relax a little. “I want to see you, all the time. Would that be okay with you?”

“That would be great,” she said.

When Duncan returned to his room, he thought he would skip the CDs. He got ready for bed, read a little, and turned out the light. But he couldn’t stand it. He wanted to lie there thinking about Daisy, but his mind constantly drifted back to Tim and Vanessa. He switched the light on again and slipped in the earbuds. His laptop was next to his bed. Then he closed his eyes and listened.

I’m not sure how much, if any, of this you might remember, or if you were paying attention to me at all, but it took about a week before people stopped looking at me like I was an alien. Most of you were actually quite subtle. You had been taught, I am sure, that it isn’t polite to stare. But none of you were very good at it. You would keep your
eyes down and then look up at the last minute, or pretend to be looking at something over my shoulder. Not you, specifically—I don’t have any memory of you then—but everyone in general.

I tried to ignore it and jump into my classes, which, I have to say, I liked even better than I’d thought I would. I worried that despite what Sid had told me, the teachers would be uptight and the subjects would be boring, but that wasn’t the case at all; it was the exact opposite. And then suddenly people seemed to be used to me.

I said I was focusing on my classes. That was really just another escape from something else: Vanessa. I began to settle into a routine. I went to classes and meals, and I overheard a lot of talk about the Game and what it should be. I started to wonder if there would ever be a decision made—or if they all just liked to talk about it and throw ideas around without ever settling on anything.

At first I was thrilled to find that Vanessa was in a few of my classes, including senior English. But after I spent the first two classes being completely distracted by her, I started to think it might not have been such good luck and forced myself to focus. It was during the third class that Mr. Simon started talking about the Tragedy Paper.

I knew about it, of course, because Mr. Bowersox had mentioned it to me in the car after he picked me up, and I had heard other students talking about it. But on that particular Thursday morning, Mr. Simon entered the classroom,
stood up on a desk, and waited for the class to settle down. Has he ever done this in your class? I wonder if he does the same things every year.

Vanessa took a seat off to my right, and at the last minute Patrick swooped in next to her.

“Tragedy,” Mr. Simon said loudly, and everyone groaned. He looked around the room, then rested his eyes on me. “Unfortunately for you, Mr. Macbeth, you do not have the benefit of having spent the first semester getting ready for this, the most important assignment of your young life to date.”

A few people giggled; there were also a few snickers.

“Though with your name I would guess you are quite familiar with the subject of Shakespeare,” he said.

Vanessa looked at me and smiled, and suddenly I was once again back at the airport hotel at the moment my life started to change.

“Would anyone here like to help bring Mr. Macbeth up to speed?” Mr. Simon asked, pulling me back to English class.

Apparently, nobody did.

“How about you, Mr. Hopkins?” Mr. Simon said. Patrick, who had been leaning over and writing something on a paper on Vanessa’s desk, looked up, caught.

“Tragedy?” he said, his voice unsure. Mr. Simon nodded, and Patrick cleared his throat.

“Well,” said Patrick, sitting up straight. “A tragedy is a
play or literary work in which the main character—that would be the tragic hero—suffers greatly and is brought to ruin. Usually this suffering and ruin come about because of the main character’s own flaw or weakness and his or her inability to deal with the lot he or she has been given.”

Patrick smiled the smuggest smile I have ever seen. I wanted to stare him down, but I couldn’t. I looked at the ground, not sure why what he had said felt so personal. We were talking about plays written hundreds of years ago, weren’t we?

“Very good, Patrick,” Mr. Simon said, getting down off the desk and standing in front of it with his arms crossed over his chest. “Now, if you could please stop bothering your neighbor, we will get on with it.”

Mr. Simon spent the rest of the period talking about the logistics of the paper, how long it should be, how it should be structured. He dismissed us with an assignment to begin thinking about the introduction and an outline. And then, “Go forth and spread beauty and light.”

As we walked out the door, Patrick bumped me. His head was turned so it seemed like he didn’t realize I was there, and then he stuck his elbow out and got me in the side.

I figured that was just how it was going to be. So it totally surprised me that the next time I saw Patrick, he was nice to me. But I still didn’t trust him. I guess I never did. I noticed the way his face looked when he turned away from me. And I saw him with Vanessa everywhere—in the
dining hall, on the quad, walking to class. But here is the strange part: somehow she always managed to find me at some point during the day—she must have known when Patrick would be out of sight—and she would make eye contact, or touch my arm gently. It was so subtle, and she was so good at it, like a fairy swooping in or a raindrop finding its way into a small space. She might pass me six times in a day and most of those times it was almost like she didn’t know me, and then there would be that one time. I never knew when it would be, but I started to crave it. I realized pretty quickly, though, that I was making no effort to get to know anyone else. After that first week or so, people were nice enough to me, but honestly, I didn’t care. It surprised me because that was all I wanted leading into my time there—to have a few friends and have a good time. But for me, even at that point, it had become all about Vanessa. And believe me, it wasn’t always a pleasure when I did see her.

One day I was walking into the dorm and I saw Vanessa and Patrick talking, leaning against the doorway below the arch. He was facing me, her back was to me. As soon as he saw me approach, though he didn’t meet my eyes, he leaned into her and started kissing her aggressively. I wasn’t close enough to see her reaction, but I couldn’t believe it. They were in public—anyone could have walked by. She was making tiny sounds. It was impossible to know if they were
because she was happy or uncomfortable. I wanted to rip my ears off so I wouldn’t be able to hear them. Patrick was moving his hands just underneath Vanessa’s shirt. And then, as I walked through the door, she opened her eyes and looked at me. Her stare lasted long enough that I thought her eyes were saying she was sorry. Maybe that was just in my head; maybe that was what I wanted her to be thinking more than anything. But when Patrick nudged her, she closed her eyes again, and Patrick moved right back in, tightening his grip on her back. I forced myself to keep walking. I couldn’t help myself—I looked back, and Patrick had stopped kissing her. He was looking right at me, smiling.

A few days later, on one particularly rainy afternoon when everyone was sitting around the halls with nowhere to go, she came up close to me, standing beside me as I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, and reached for something on the windowsill above my head. As she moved back, she brushed my hair gently, lingering for a minute, and then she was gone. I hadn’t talked to her since I saw Patrick kissing her, and I wanted to be angry, but I reveled in her touch. Another time in the line at lunch—we were having macaroni and cheese that day made with local cheese from a self-sustaining farm in Pocantico Hills and the best fresh bread crumbs from a bakery in the Bronx—she somehow cut in behind me, and I didn’t even know she was there until she moved her body up against mine. If I
didn’t know better, I could have mistaken it for a small push from someone behind her that made her get so close to me. But I was starting to know better.

And then things changed again and she started saying things to me, cryptic messages that I couldn’t make any sense of, when we walked by each other.

“It’s supposed to snow tonight,” she said once as she moved by me in the main hallway.

“They’re serving meatballs for dinner, Mr. Bowersox’s mother’s recipe,” she said another time. “There’ll be fresh Parmesan cheese on the condiments table, I hear.”

Everything was so quiet, so impersonal, that it could have been missed or easily meant for another person. Even the brushes against me could have been taken as unintentional, a simple mistake. Or even a gesture of pity. Whatever they were, I started to look forward to them. They were always different and became my favorite moments of the day. I would go over and over them in my head, daydreaming in class, thinking about them as I fell asleep at night, always later than the other students because, as Mr. Simon had promised, I was never asked to turn out the lights at the specified time. I would leave them on, stare at the ceiling, and remember how green her eyes looked that day, or how soft her hand felt on my forearm, or how sweet her voice sounded when she talked about the weather or dinner or a book that was now available at the library.

It was during that time that I really started to shut out
my mother and Sid. I still don’t know why. They had been so supportive, and so interested in how I was doing. We had set up a schedule to Skype once a week, and at first I looked forward to it. The first few weeks I used my microphone to record my voice, telling them about my schedule, my classes, what I was reading. Once I even took it along with my laptop to the dining hall so they could hear the deafening noise. Then I would burn all of it onto CDs, like I did for you, and send them to Italy. But then I stopped turning on my computer at the designated time, I never bothered to call them back, and I stopped making the CDs. My mom sent me worried emails, but I just didn’t care. I could feel myself going into a cocoon, concerned that I might throw off the balance of the strange universe I was living in if I opened up to them. I didn’t want them to know anything about it.

I started waiting for Vanessa to give me more, to ask me to go for another run, or to meet her somewhere. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I asked her to join me for something. I would conjure up a scenario: Would she like to come into town with me to buy new running shoes? Or would she help me with a science project that required a partner? Sometimes I went for a run, even through the forbidden forest, with the hope of bumping into her. But I never did, and every time I almost had the nerve to ask her to do something with me, I would see her again with Patrick. They looked happy, holding hands or kissing when
they thought no teachers were looking. So I didn’t dare—I waited for her to come to me. I told myself that a few seconds a day were enough for me. And surely she would want to talk to me again at some point. But weeks went by and she didn’t. You might want to ask yourself—was this the order or the chaos? I know what it was for me.