Dark Rooms

“But I’d like to try because—”

“No, really, Grace, don’t. It was a rough time. No one knows how rough better than me.”

“For me, it’s still rough,” I say, my voice small.

He kicks the leg of the foosball table with the toe of his sneaker. “Yeah, for me, too,” he says, his voice just as small. Then he looks back at me. Our eyes hook into each other, and for a long moment neither one of us speaks.

And then the spell’s broken by the sharpness of Maddie’s tone: “Jamie, field hockey tryouts are about to start. I’m captain. I’m supposed to oversee. We need to get going.” On the word we, she touches his arm, the bare part of the bicep just below his shirt sleeve, with the short nail of her index finger.

I wonder suddenly if she’s interested in him. Ruben isn’t in the picture anymore, and neither, obviously, is Nica. And she and Jamie are already close, have probably grown even closer since Nica’s death. I feel a swift spike of jealousy.

“Already?” he says to her.

“You said you’d walk me. Are you going to or not?” Without waiting for a response, she about-faces, begins striding across the room.

He nods at the space she just vacated, says, “All right, okay, sure. Let’s roll.” Then he picks up his backpack, turns to me. “Well, Grace, it was, yeah, nice running into you.”

And before I can say, “You, too,” he’s gone, has followed Maddie through the door. I stand there, staring at nothing until a kid taps me on the shoulder, asks me if I’m going to be using the foosball table much longer. I step aside.

The line at the snack bar’s still long. Instead of joining it, I walk into the hall, head for the vending machines at the far end, rooting around in my bag for loose change as I go.

The pack of Wheat Thins has just been released from its coil when I hear my name called. I turn. Standing behind me is a tall man of thirty-five or so. He’s wearing bib overalls, and his blond hair, parted in the middle and so long it touches his shoulders, is held back by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. His smile is sweet and broad, from ear to ear: Shep Howell.

Shep’s official position at Chandler might be guidance counselor, but fairy godmother is a more accurate job title for him where I’m concerned. Not only did he talk Williams out of axing me in the spring, he also convinced Ms. Sedgwick to hire me for the A/V department last week. So he’s rescued me twice in the past six months, has gone out of his way to lend a hand. And yet, the truth is, I’ve never liked being around him.

He makes me uncomfortable. At least, he used to. Shep’s one of those adults who seems never to have grown up, has kept the clear eye and pure heart of a child. Which, of course, is great. Only not to me for some reason. I guess I feel, felt, rather, developmentally stunted enough myself—a virgin at eighteen, for God’s sake, didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs!—to be put off by the quality in another. Not that I thought childlike was all there was to Shep. I knew I was missing something. Had to be. Otherwise Nica, Jamie, Maddie, and Ruben wouldn’t have given him the time of day. They did, though. And this in spite of the fact that he was a hippie, a subset of humanity they normally had no patience with, tie-dyed shirts and soybeans and the word groovy all being things they could do without. Which made me understand that he must be cool in the same way the zebra-striped Bics were cool, as in, he shouldn’t have been, but was, deeply so, only his manner of coolness wasn’t visible to me no matter how hard I looked. So, as far as I was concerned, he was just yet another thing I didn’t get, and I tried to be in his presence as little as possible to keep from having to pretend I did.

As I said, uncomfortable is how I used to feel around him. Well, still do feel, actually, though in a completely different way. When I got Shep to call the Williams dean on my behalf back in May, I was strung out on pills. I knew I was acting in bad faith—exploiting his pity for me, his affection for my sister, the guilt he felt at having been in Lewiston, Maine, at Bates College’s Jumpstart for Juniors program the weekend she died—and that seemed like a perfectly okay thing to do. When I got him to call Mrs. Sedgwick on my behalf last week, I was stone-cold sober. I knew I was again acting in bad faith, and it didn’t seem like an okay thing to do, but I was able to do it anyway because I was doing it over e-mail, no eye contact or even voice contact required. After I slept through lunch today, missed the chance to stop by his office, I’d told myself I’d get to it tomorrow. Seeing him now, though, feeling the floodgates of guilt and shame opening inside my chest, I realize that I was never going to get to it. Not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Not voluntarily.

We stand there, facing each other. I’ve been smiling back at him for so long now that the air has dried my teeth and my lips are sticking to them.

At last he says, “Miss lunch?”, pointing his chin at the Wheat Thins pack in my hand.

My “Yes” back is absurdly eager.

“On purpose or by accident?”

“The second thing. No windows in the A/V Department. Easy to lose track of time.”

“That’s right. The A/V Department’s not on the main floor. You don’t mind that you’re spending most of your day in a basement, do you?”

“I like being underground. It suits my mood,” I say, realizing a second after I say it that this could be interpreted as a complaint rather than a joke—a complaint disguised as a joke, even worse.

He nods at me seriously. “The link between emotional health and social setting has been well documented.”

I hesitate, then risk it. “Or antisocial setting, in my case.”

There’s a long silence in which he stares at me and blinks. I begin to panic: another joke he doesn’t get. He’s going to think I’m an ingrate, not to mention a bitcher and moaner. I’m about to mumble an apology, explain that I haven’t been sleeping much and it’s making me weird, not fit for human company, when a burst of laughter blows out his mouth. Then a second burst. Soon his head is thrown all the way back and he’s laughing and laughing. Finally he wipes his eyes and claps me on the shoulder. “Wow, Grace, I can’t tell you how nice it is to have another Baker on staff at Chandler.”

Pleased, I say, “Oh, well, thanks.”

“It wouldn’t feel right starting a school year without one, you know?”

I hear these words and, all of a sudden, I can’t hear anything else. A sweat breaks out under my arms, behind my knees, on the palm that holds the strap of my bag. Within seconds I’m in the middle of a full-blown flashback.

After Nica’s murder was solved and the stench of scandal grew less pronounced, the Chandler administration discovered it had another smelly problem on its hands: us, me and my parents. We drifted around campus, faces pinched and sallow, clothes billowy since we scarcely remembered to eat; and not eating enough meant we gave off an odor, the bad-breath putrid stink of bodies consuming themselves. People at school pitied us, but the pity was soon mixed with revulsion, so they looked down on us, as well. Anger was in there also, because their sense of duty obligated them to at least try to do right by us, wouldn’t let them just abandon us as they surely wanted to. I think, at bottom, they found us morbid. I can understand why. We were morbid. We were beyond morbid. We were ghouls, going about our daily routines, alive yet lifeless—sordid, unwholesome, obscene, crimes against nature.

And Chandler was stuck with us. Well, not with me. I was headed off to college. With Mom and Dad, though. Between them they’d racked up nearly forty years of service, would have to give the administration one seriously good excuse to get rid of them.

So they went ahead and did.

Mom held it together at first, arriving at the art studio on time, keeping up with her teaching responsibilities, but then she began calling in sick two, three days a week, and when she did appear, she would dismiss her classes halfway through the period. And Dad started to develop a reputation for serious weirdness. Stuff he normally did, like pounding the back of a student struggling for an answer, as if the number or equation were caught in the kid’s throat like a fishbone, would go on for too long or, worse, would turn into a hug that also went on for too long, until the kid said, “At least buy me dinner first, Mr. Baker,” or “Hey, Mr. Baker, I can’t breathe!”—something to snap him out of it. A couple of complaints were lodged and—voilà—the administration had all the ammunition it needed.

Chandler was generous in triumph, though, I’ll give the school that. Mom and Dad were each offered a severance package that included a full year’s pay, excellent references, and assistance in searching for a new position. The catch was, both had to accept or neither could. And if either did decline, both would be forced to take a one-year unpaid leave of absence. “A grief sabbatical,” it was called.

That my parents would acquiesce to Chandler’s wishes seemed a foregone conclusion. No way could they afford not to generate income for that long. Besides, a clean slate was probably just the thing for them, and for the school. It was in everybody’s best interest that they say yes.

Which, apparently, was not a compelling enough reason for my mom to do so. The fight between her and Dad over her answer was an epic battle that lasted from the day the offer was presented in mid-May to the day their response was due on the first of June, the final day of the school year. I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I was well into my drug phase at this point, and I more felt the quivering mouths and hostile glances, the barbed words and tense silences, than saw or heard them. I was on my dad’s side, of course. Not that I was much of an asset in my narcotized state. Not that I would have been much of an asset in any state. Not against my mom. She was too determined to get her own way. And I certainly wasn’t surprised when I found out that she’d won and that the severance packages had been turned down. The only surprise was that Dad had managed to hold out as long as he did.

Two days after Mom declared victory, she was gone, off to some artists’ commune. A fellowship she’d applied for at the beginning of the year had come through. Six months of room and board, plus a living stipend. It was just so typical of her. She’d made her point, her grand gesture, happy to fuck herself if she could fuck Chandler, too—who cared if she was also fucking my dad?—then ducked the consequences, left that part, the no-fun drudgery part, to him.

Shep must sense the movement of my thoughts because he suddenly turns pale. “Oh, Grace,” he says, raising a hand to his mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I say quickly.

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, I know you didn’t.” And I do know he didn’t, but he did, and I feel angry at him for it, then angry at myself for feeling angry at him. “It’s my own fault,” I say. “I have to learn to be less sensitive. It’s just”—and here my voice falters, tears sting my eyes—“the thought of my parents, of my mom, really, gets me riled up and weird.”

He starts to say something, then just nods his understanding.

“I’m not kidding,” I say. “All I have to do is think of her, and I go cross-eyed, basically.”

Softly, “Yeah, I’m sure you do. I mean, I get it, Grace.”

I drag my sleeve across my eyes, try to smile. “Of course you do. You’re a guidance counselor. You know how it is between mothers and daughters. All those petty jealousies and pent-up resentments, arguments about missed curfews and wire hangers.”

“Is that how it is between you and your mom?” he says.

I feel another kick of anger at him for not allowing me to make fun of my situation, lighten the mood, for insisting on speaking the language of the inner self at all times.

He watches me pick at a loose thread on my shirt. Then he says, “Does she know you deferred admission at Williams for a year?”

“If she knows, it’s not from me. The reason I gave the school was family emergency so maybe someone in the admissions office contacted her.”

“You haven’t heard from her then?”

My no is hard, sharp, short.