The Tragedy Paper (5 page)

“Oh—sure,” she said, pulling it off. “Here, put it on for a minute.” She handed me her mitten, but I shook my head.

“No, I just meant, if I could put my cold hand next to your warm hand, it would warm me up,” I said, smiling. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do if you’re freezing, body-to-body contact?”

She rolled her eyes, but there was the trace of a smile there too. She held out her hand, and I grabbed it. Those must have been amazing mittens, because that was the warmest hand I’ve ever felt. We sat like that for a while; it could have been two minutes, maybe three. When I started
to squeeze a little harder, I felt her pulling away and moving out of the igloo. I stayed put for a second longer and then I followed her.

“We should go back to the room,” she said. “But thanks for doing this with me. It was really fun.”

“Do we have to?” I said.

She stopped. “You’re the one who didn’t want to come out in the first place,” she said nicely. “But I’m ready to go in. My feet are freezing.”

I didn’t want her feet to be freezing.

“Okay, let’s go back in, then,” I said. “For the record, and I don’t usually admit being wrong to people I have known for less than half a day, you were right. This was really fun.” What I didn’t say was that I worried it might possibly be the most fun I was ever going to have.

Duncan looked around his tiny room and was shocked to see it was beginning to get dark out. He checked his watch and it was just after six p.m. Dinner had been going on for half an hour already. He wanted to kick himself for being so drawn into the albino’s story. He wanted to be done with all that and not even think about last year’s senior class. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t let any of that affect this year. This year was going to be better. Great, even. It had to be. He thought of how Tim said his going to Irving was his last chance to have a good time in high school. He didn’t want to compare himself to Tim, but he realized this was
his
last chance at doing high school right too. He wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of that.

But Duncan couldn’t help himself, and he was struck by how just minutes before first coming into the room, he’d
been thinking about that stupid Tragedy Paper, and then it ended up being tied in to the treasure Tim left behind for him. That was freaky, and just way too intriguing. It was like Tim was reading his mind. For another minute he let himself think about that last time he saw Tim, then he tried to will away the image. Duncan always thought he was odd, and, in addition to everything else, he did remember hearing about goings-on with that cute girl Vanessa, things that were never confirmed but were speculated about after what happened. There was something Duncan couldn’t quite remember, about some fooling around, or a crush. No, that wasn’t it—but there were rumors going around that involved a competition or something between the albino kid and Vanessa’s boyfriend, Patrick, who happened to be one of the most popular kids at the school. He was the one who left Tad the bourbon. That was a coincidence, too, that Tad had Patrick’s old room. Still, he told himself, he didn’t want to care, he didn’t need to know. That was then and this was now.

Duncan stopped the CD, took off his headphones, checked his face and hair in the hazy mirror over his dresser, and opened the door. It was still nuts out there. Duncan felt like he had been inside a soundproof box, he was that engrossed in Tim’s CDs. He had to shake it off. But as he walked down the hall, he kept thinking about Tim and Vanessa in the snow and about how this past spring, on the last day of classes, he and Daisy Pickett had ended up being
the only two people at the lunch table and how they had sat there for hours because neither of them had a class to go to, talking and laughing, and, by the end of the afternoon, giving each other back rubs while the kitchen staff started getting ready for dinner.

He thought that was going to be the turning point for him, the moment during his high school years when he finally got everything he wanted, especially after he came so close to losing it all. He had considered, after that amazing afternoon, asking Daisy to take a walk, or to go out to breakfast with him the next morning. Second-semester juniors were allowed to do that sort of thing with permission, and he had always wanted to take advantage of it. But then he started to think too much, wondering why she was being nice to him suddenly. Did she feel sorry for him? Or was it his new position in the class that made her like him? Or, worse, was she just curious, trying to get close to him so he would tell her about it?

By the time he saw her again that weekend, things had shifted—he couldn’t quite figure out how or why—and then on Tuesday everyone moved out and Daisy went back to Connecticut and he went home to Michigan and that had been that.

Duncan peeked in Tad’s open door as he went by and was relieved to see he was still there.

“Hey,” he called.

“Where have you been, my man?” Tad asked. “I knocked on your door but there was no answer.”

“You did?” Duncan asked, confused. “I was in there.”

“I don’t know, bro, you seem a little zoned-out to me,” Tad said, patting him on the back. Duncan had to try to relax. The last thing he wanted was for people to start asking if he was okay.

“No, man, I’m fine,” Duncan said as casually as he could. “But I
am
hungry. Have you had dinner?”

“No, I think it’s breakfast for dinner. I hate that. Who wants to eat pancakes at night? I came by before to see if you wanted to order a pizza from Sal’s. I’ve been thinking about their onion and pepper pie all summer,” Tad said, sitting on his neatly made bed with his cell phone in his hand.

Again, another crazy coincidence: breakfast for dinner. That was the last thing Duncan wanted. He felt like he had just lived it. But he wanted to see Daisy, and he knew the dining hall was his best bet for running into her.

“If I start ordering pizza the first night, I’m going to be in trouble,” Duncan said. “Plus, I want to see everyone.”

“You know what? You’re right,” Tad said, stuffing his phone into the front pocket of his jeans and standing up. “That wouldn’t be very social of us.”

He put his hand on Duncan’s shoulder and guided him out of the room.

“Hey, later I’m throwing a poker game here. I’m going to
pull my bed away from the wall and we can use it as a table. Are you in? And don’t forget I have bourbon.”

“Yeah, that sounds great,” Duncan said.

They walked down the stairs and through a round room with stained-glass windows and into the busy dining hall. They both stopped for a second. After a long summer of eating in their own quiet kitchens with their own families, it was a bit of a shock. But then they each took a deep breath and moved into the bustling room. Duncan had a routine last year—first check the entrée being offered, and then, if that wasn’t good, the soups and the salad bar, and, as a last resort, he would make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The thing was, the food was pretty good at the Irving School. They made a big deal about using fresh local ingredients, and since they were close to New York City and the Hudson Valley, there was a lot to choose from. One night a week there would be fresh pasta from Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Another night lamb chops from a farm up the road. The salad was supposed to be grown in the area too. But Tad was right about dinner: it was breakfast, which wasn’t Duncan’s favorite either. Tonight there were pancakes—blueberry or plain—just as Tad had predicted. They were being served with maple syrup; a chalkboard sign nearby said it came from a farm in Poughkeepsie.

Duncan wandered over to the soup and salad bar, absently looking at the choices, which included tomato bisque and corn chowder, when he saw Daisy across the room. He
was surprised by the physical reaction he had, completely losing his appetite and feeling an intense need to sit down because his legs threatened to give out from under him. At the same time, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was in line for the pancakes, wearing a light purple bulldog T-shirt and a pair of tight gray sweats that showed off the curve of her body. Duncan had never thought of sweats as being elegant before. And the shirt, he remembered it from last year. It was the school T-shirt—a simple bulldog on the front, no words. But every year one color would become popular and everyone would wear it. Last year it was the purple and all the kids had one—boys and girls. He wondered what the color would be this year.

He started to move toward the pancake line. He could eat pancakes tonight. That wouldn’t be so bad. He could get the plain and eat them with the Poughkeepsie maple syrup. He could talk to Daisy. He had it all worked out in his mind—he’d say hi, and ask how her summer was, and then they could talk about the T-shirts and what color might take off this year. Orange could be a nice change, he would say. He didn’t really care about the color of the T-shirt, but he knew she would. Still, he couldn’t do it. She was with her friends—Violet, Sammie, and Justine. They were all wearing their purple shirts and pajama pants, an Irving tradition for seniors when breakfast was served for dinner. He looked around. Most of the senior girls seemed to have some form or other of pajamas on, but the boys
didn’t. He saw Raymond Twinkle across the room and laughed. He was wearing red plaid flannel pajamas. But the other boys were wearing jeans or khakis.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Tad asked, coming up behind him. His tray was piled high with all the offerings—pancakes and bacon, soup, salad, the cinnamon buns that were at the dessert station.

“I thought you hated breakfast for dinner,” Duncan said, pointing to Tad’s tray.

“A guy’s got to eat,” Tad said. “Why are you just standing around? Pick something!”

“I’m trying to decide,” Duncan said. “I’ll meet you at the table.”

Duncan quickly ladled the corn chowder into a bowl and grabbed some crackers. When he checked the pancake line again for Daisy, she was gone. He headed toward the table where Tad sat, and he could see the other guys there. A few were waving and smiling at him. But he found himself thinking about Vanessa and Tim. What had Tim’s first night in the dining hall been like? He didn’t sit with a big group, Duncan knew that; he had sat mostly by himself at one of the smaller round tables in the corner by the big windows. Funny, Duncan had been here the whole time but hadn’t paid much attention to him. At least not until the end.

As he sat down, Duncan had the definite feeling that he had interrupted something. He could have sworn he heard
Tad shush Jake. But he told himself not to be paranoid. He worked hard to keep the conversation light at the table, telling what was now—with some perspective—a funny story about a fishing trip he took with his family in northern Michigan in early August. But it was an effort to stay focused, and when he got to the part about what his family now referred to as “the endless hike,” he could barely stand to continue. Somehow, even though it hadn’t at the time, it reminded him of that terrible night last February.

“So my father was, like, five hundred yards ahead,” he said. Everyone’s eyes were on him, he couldn’t stop now. “And my mother had pretty much given up. She was sitting on a rock with her eyes closed. We had been out there for hours, everyone blaming everyone else for not reading the map right. The fishing poles were heavy. We had no food. And then my father went around a bend. When he came back, he was laughing. He yelled for us to follow him. And right there, down a long hill from where he was standing, was a huge strip mall with a Target and a Burger King! We thought we were lost in the wilderness.”

“What’d you do then?” Tad asked.

“We had a Whopper,” Duncan said, and everyone laughed. But he felt empty. Not all excursions into the wilderness turn out that way. Everyone sitting at that table knew that, but Duncan had been the only one to actually see it; everyone else had just heard about it. He saw the moment when things went from good to bad. He saw the blood
in the snow. He shook his head to try to send the image back into the far reaches of his mind where it wasn’t so easily accessible. He had worked hard over the last few months to do that.

When everyone stood up with the plan to meet as subtly as they could in Tad’s room in ten minutes, Duncan already knew he wouldn’t be joining them. He had to see what happened back in that hotel room in snowy Chicago eight months before. He needed to know what led up to that awful night.

Order to chaos and back to order again. Has Mr. Simon talked about that yet? How a tragedy in literature should do that—move from order to chaos, and then, once the tragic hero has seen his fate, sometimes his death, order is restored. Keep this in mind as you listen: Was there ever really order to begin with? Did chaos ensue? Was order ever restored? I know what I think.

Vanessa and I walked back through that hotel lobby. We were good at it now, eyes down, feet moving, hands clutching the pockets that held the room keys, right into the empty elevator. We were wet and cold, she was limping because her feet hurt, and I had the distinct feeling that we were very much alone. It wasn’t a bad feeling—I didn’t feel scared. If anything, I felt free. Nobody was watching us. Nobody could get to us, for that matter.

“Next time I’m home, I’m going to build an igloo with my brothers,” she said. Her cheeks were bright red—they reminded me of candy apples. “Funny that we’ve never done that before.”

“Now you’re an expert,” I said. “But I doubt you will ever build one quite as perfect as ours. Hey, do you want to order hot chocolate?”

“Sure,” she said. “My feet are killing me.”

By then we were at the door, so I pulled out my key, my hand so red, discolored, really, from the cold, but I did my best to hide it below my sleeve. I pushed the key card into the slot and it didn’t take. I did it again, but this time my hand was shaking. Gently, she put her warm, beautifully colored hand over mine, moving it out of the way. Her key card was in her hand; I hadn’t even seen her take it out. She skillfully slipped it into the door slot, and the red light turned green. She let me push the handle down, thereby letting me be the official door opener. “Allow me, mademoiselle.”