“All right, well, see you around,” he said, and smiled at me again.
“See you around.”
I missed Elise, too. I was moved by how much Scotty must have loved her, to approach me like that, out of the blue. I wished I could conjure up something of her, but now that the school year was almost over and she’d been gone for a few months, it seemed almost like I’d imagined her—dreamed up a kind intellectual girl just down the hall who would walk places with me and read beside me at night. Maybe I had dreamed her up. She was the perfect projection of my better self, but she had disappeared right around the worst night of my life so far, the night Johnny Devereux came to my room. Even a fantasy can put up with only so much.
Then at lunch Scotty’s roommate, Gus, bumped into me, on purpose, nudging me in the side with his plastic tray.
When I turned, he was smiling.
“Um, hi?”
I’d never spoken with Gus before. He was a buddy, like Scotty, well-ensconced in the community of them. As rising sixth formers, my classmates were beginning to gather force, and Gus and Scotty, who had been well-liked by upperformers, would now be much admired as seniors. They wore a new confidence on their shoulders, and swung their hips the tiniest bit more as they moved down the halls, taking their time, ensuring they’d be seen.
“Scotty’s got a crush on you,” said Gus.
This was the last thing.
“On me? What?”
“Don’t tell him I told you.”
I was sure they were messing with me. Someone wanted to lure me somewhere, see me naked, goad me into some new and vile compromise.
“Okay, I won’t.”
Gus was grinning. “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About Scotty.”
“Oh. Um, I think he’s nice. He’s from Philadelphia. Elise loved him a lot.”
The grin wavered. “Yeah. That sucked.”
“I’m sure she’s much happier at home.”
“No kidding.”
Students were moving all around us, gathering food or dropping off their trays. Cutlery clacked and chairs scraped across the floor. Odors of tater tots and ammonia mingled and soured. The halls were a zoo. Our conversation would not go unnoticed, though—Gus talking to me, like this, in the open, would not go unnoticed. His attention would benefit me. I wondered what mine would cost him.
“Well, anyway, about Scotty,” he said.
I waited for him to say the anyway thing, but that was all he’d meant to convey.
He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it before moving away.
I found a note in my post-office box that my ISP had been approved. Advisor, the Reverend Molly Radley. A shiver ran over me. I walked out of the post office and into the sunshine. The flag snapped high on its pole. Students crossed everywhere. I was stitching hours into days like the boards of a rope bridge: I’d go to lunch, then go pick up Raz for a run through the new-leafed woods, then shower before dinner, and then when I left the dining hall to head to the chapel for choir rehearsal (we were working on the pieces for the commencement services now) there would still be lavender light in the sky and in the ponds. Then tomorrow, and the next day, and another few weeks, and this was done.
The prospect of sixth form I would tackle after I’d had some rest.
Scotty’s roommate, Gus, had gotten into the habit of knocking into me or elbowing me or in some other way offering a slightly aggressive note of affection whenever he saw me around campus. I had no idea how to react. I’d met a few of Gus’s and Scotty’s friends during the brief spell I’d dated Tim, but their attentions panicked me. I had gone from too shy and intimidated to talk to boys I didn’t directly know to paranoid about who hated me or wanted me to suck his cock. I could not tell, just looking at an approaching face, what he intended to send my way, and it seemed any given student could switch back and forth, depending on his mood and the moment when I happened to cross his path. The consequences for guessing wrong were extreme. The sixth former who lived next door to Rick and Taz, whom I had never met in any capacity, set on me daily a steady glare. And once, as I passed alone, he said simply, “You’re awful. I hate you.”
Gus persisted in his good-natured, little-brother way, and Scotty, appearing in the hallways or on the paths, would follow up with genuine questions: How was my hand? Where did I take the dog? Whose dog was it, anyway? When could I play tennis again?
Though he was not big, Scotty had a spot on the varsity lacrosse team, which made him dangerous. I was spikier than I might have been because of this. I never watched him play, but sometimes as I headed out for my runs I saw him with the rest of the boys, pouring out of the locker room on their way to the fields. Lacrosse players wore full pads above the waist but only athletic shorts below, leaving them top-heavy as bulls, the broadest and tallest among them—like Rick Banner—appearing to be superior creatures still gathering from the head down, like you’d caught the djinn just at the moment it bloomed from the lamp. Scotty’s shoulders were already surprisingly broad, given how slight his body was, and of course his hair made his head seem huge anyway. The lacrosse gear just emphasized the shape he already had. I saw him and laughed, and then, as I left through the white gates and onto state roads, I wondered about this laughing.
I was beginning to see why Elise had kept him around. His absentminded goodwill was cheering. He was an antidote to so much intention.
Scotty asked me to meet him one night at the Tuck Shop. I arrived after choir. The streams were alive in the meadow; the grass rustled. He bought a pint
