A Density of Souls (2 page)

1

C
annon School occupied an entire block of New Orleans, its sprawl of manicured lawns and neocolonial brick buildings dividing the neighborhood in half. The back end of Cannon’s football field had drained the blocks behind it of property value, turning the neighborhood into a welter of shotgun houses with crumbling front porches.

The façade of the school’s main buildings faced the wealthier Creole cottages of uptown. The school announced its name on a bronze plaque above its entrance doors, both of which bore the Cannon seal frosted onto glass panes set in polished mahogany frames. The entrance doors led into the administrative hallway where the business of the finest private school in New Orleans was conducted in gentle whispers punctuated by gracious laughs.

The commerce of the front wing of Cannon School was softened and padded by wall-to-wall carpeting in all the offices, interrupted by the occasional clicking of high heels over the hallways’ hardwood floors. Beneath crown moldings, Cannon’s finest alumni stared out from eight-by-ten picture frames.

There was no hallway connecting the locker room and the administrative offices. To get from one to the other, a teacher would have to leave the building completely and re-enter the campus through the side parking lot. This was a bone of contention for most of Cannon’s faculty, because the faculty lounge was located at the far end of the administrative hallway. Thus, there was no easy access between Cannon’s classrooms and the over-decorated faculty lounge with its worn, soft sofas and massive mahogany coffee table.

At the far end of the campus, a wrought-iron breezeway connected the three-story Athletic Complex to the smaller, squat Theatre Building; it was almost as if the athletic department were taunting its less 12

A Density of Souls

popular cousin. The handful of theatre enthusiasts at Cannon were often forced to exit quickly through the breezeway onto the side street, for fear of meeting up with the varsity football players who always seemed to have leftover steam to vent after afternoon practice. Play rehearsals in the Theatre Building were sometimes interrupted by footballs hitting the side of the building; the actors knew the field was too far away from the pigskins to be simply misdirected passes.

The Senior Courtyard sat in the exact center of campus, separat-ing the Administrative Building from the English Building and its ground floor locker room, and featured rusted wrought-iron furniture.

Fringed with yellowing banana trees, the Senior Courtyard was so exclusively reserved for the graduating class that any underclassmen found sitting in it without an invitation would promptly be shoved into the nearest empty locker. But the only way for students to reach the classroom hallways from the locker room was through the Senior Courtyard and up a concrete set of steps which led to the second floor of the English Building. During this time, nervous underclassmen would scurry up the steps, trying to avoid the glare of seniors awaiting an opportunity to assert themselves as the top echelon of Cannon’s aristocracy.

Half of Cannon’s lessons were taught by its queer architecture. Its passages and connections were illogical, subjecting its students to intermittent bursts of pain and confusion. Over four years, Cannon’s students were forced to find the proper mix of aggression and grace to guide them through passages that led from one ritual to another, in a seemingly endless succession of hierarchies, before finally depositing them back into the city that had given them birth—the same city that had given birth to Cannon itself.

As Meredith Ducote learned on the first day of her freshman year and the last day of her life as a child, students were forced to enter Cannon every morning through the side gate, rounding the outside of the main campus buildings before coming to a single entrance of glass doors. The locker room took up the entire ground floor of the English Building. Even with its expanse of benches and blue-painted lockers, it could barely contain Cannon’s three hundred students.

The glass doors were gliding shut as Meredith turned the corner of the English Building. The doors were tinted and a green poster taped The Falling Impossible

13

to them read WELCOME FRESHMAN! Its edge was torn where it had been caught between the opening and closing doors.

Meredith’s sweaty palm slid off the door handle. She gently kicked one of the doors inward with her foot. It didn’t budge. She wiped her hand across her skirt and pulled the door open, revealing what seemed like three hundred faces that all seemed to stare back at her, if only for a second, before they collapsed into laughter and conversations.

Earlier that morning, Meredith had argued with her mother about the halter top she had bought from Contempo Casuals a week before freshman orientation. The argument had culminated in a tug-of-war with the halter top during which Trish Ducote kept intoning,

“Meredith, you are fourteen!” It was her mother’s voice, high-pitched through clenched teeth, that came to Meredith through the locker room racket. The admonishment became an accusation.

Her breasts suddenly seemed huge. She could suddenly feel them pressing against the halter top and her exposed arms went hot and clammy with sweat.

She found herself paralyzed, paces past her locker and surrounded by laughing, bellowing classmates. At fourteen, Meredith had experienced few moments from which there seemed to be no escape, but this was one of them. She glanced behind her and saw a group of girls (all wearing shirts with sleeves) gathered around the door to what she was pretty sure was her locker. They looked back at her like conspir-ing thieves.

Someone brushed Meredith’s shoulder with his book bag. Meredith almost let out a startled yelp before she saw Brandon.

He was sitting on a bench against the far wall. Meredith didn’t recognize the guy next to him; his face was concealed under the bill of a baseball cap that read CANNON KNIGHTS and he was hunched over with his forearms on his knees, obviously whispering the punch line of a joke. Brandon erupted into laughter and rocked back on the bench.

When he saw Meredith, his laughter stopped. Meredith felt a smile tighten her face, but it died as Brandon’s eyes rolled up and down her body, his face suddenly expressionless. He nudged the guy sitting next to him.

Greg Darby looked up at Meredith from beneath his cap.

For a brief moment, as Greg took her in, Meredith understood what the four weeks of pre-season football training had done to Greg and 14

A Density of Souls

Brandon. It had made them men. Or at least look like what Meredith thought men should be.

When Greg smiled, Meredith felt her heels sink to the floor.

She realized she had been walking on tiptoe since she had entered Cannon.

Stephen was waiting by Meredith’s locker, trying to guard it from the posse of girls. They had giggled at his approach and whispered after his arrival, but he held his back on them. Knowing this was the only way he could wait for Meredith alone. He told himself that Meredith would hardly want to ask a bunch of strangers to move out of her way so he’d keep a clear passage open for her.

She had looked right at him. And then away.

Meredith took a seat between Greg and Brandon, and Greg curled one arm around her shoulders. She playfully batted it away. Stephen stared at them; he was perfectly within their line of vision. None of them looked his way. When the three of them finally rose from the bench, with Greg extending a hand to help Meredith to her feet, Stephen made no move to follow them out the doors into the Senior Courtyard.

Something dark uncurled inside of him.

During his first morning at Cannon, Stephen’s only companion was the collective din of whispers, snickers and openly disdainful glares he received as he passed. All of which made him acutely aware of the flop of blond bangs that partially concealed his eyes, the strain of his backpack straps as they pulled at his gaunt flame, and worst of all, the reflexive cock of his wrist as he extracted a book from his backpack during class. It all culminated in the nightmare of PE, the aftermath of which propelled him to the back freight door of Cannon’s Theatre Building and the smell of cigarette smoke wafting through the open door of a brightly lit office down the musty, darkened corridor of the backstage.

Stephen had deliberately gone to PE early. He had been frightened by the idea of having to take off his clothes, so he had planned to change quickly and make it to the gym floor before everyone else.

Then the football players had exploded into the locker room, slugging The Falling Impossible

15

metal doors and bellowing war cries intended to clear a path before them. Their heads had all been shaved during freshman varsity initiation. Stephen thought of Nazis. At Cannon, athletes were exempt from physical education classes, but the first week of the semester was dedicated to endurance testing, mandatory for everyone.

They had assembled on the gym floor, where it seemed all eyes inspected Stephen. He relaxed slightly when he saw that neither Brandon nor Greg were in his class. The football players had mangled their PE uniform shirts to protest a week of third-period gym classes. Daniel Weber had torn holes for his nipples on either side of the Cannon logo across the shirt’s breast. Coach Stubin ordered him to put duct tape over them. Stephen looked from Daniel’s nipples to the polished gym floor, where he saw his own reflection between his tennis shoes.

He lifted his head to stare off into some distant corner of the gym, and found himself taking in the series of banners that hung from the banister of the jogging track circling the gym’s ceiling, proclaiming the various District Title wins of the Cannon Knights.

But now, in the theatre, there was smoke and light, tattered costumes and old set pieces, the ragged edges of stage flats. Carolyn Traulain threw open the office door and a blinding rectangle of light fell across Stephen. She looked startled when Stephen didn’t raise a hand to block the glare from his eyes.

“Are you here for the meeting?” Carolyn asked.

Stephen stuttered a yes, hating the sibilant s on the end. She nodded and disappeared into a thicket of curtains and darkness. The overhead lights flickered to life, illuminating the theatrical debris that surrounded him. There were so many flats he could have tripped over.

Carolyn Traulain had a white scar that scooped beneath the collar of her black T-shirt before resurfacing on the opposite side of her neck.

She occasionally glanced at Stephen as she set up a small battalion of metal folding chairs, kicking each chair’s legs out. “You came from Polk?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Stephen said as he moved to a faded green sofa against the wall. It had obviously been a set piece in every production since the school’s founding in 1905.

“We get a lot of kids from Polk,” Carolyn said. She was the first person all day to speak to Stephen like an ordinary person, and he immediately loved her for it. She met his eyes with each question and he saw no laughter in them.

16

A Density of Souls

But the mention of Bishop Polk Elementary School, so much closer to home and now abruptly transformed into a memory, tugged at something in him. He brought his book bag onto his lap and began to tear at one of the seams with a fingernail he had not yet chewed off. He tried not to think of the old morning bike rides to school. As the battalion of students turned onto Jackson Avenue, they would pass beneath the bell tower, its portico towering high enough to catch the first rays of a rising sun that had not yet mounted the tree line.

Over, Stephen thought. That’s over now.

Carolyn’s voice startled him. “The first day can be rough.”

A flicker of genuine emotion softened her eyes. Stephen could only manage a forced smile in response. Carolyn nodded, as if a suspicion of hers had been confirmed.

They both jumped at the sound of the freight door thrown open.

A shadow was advancing through the darkness. Stephen could make out the bulky outline of a letter jacket and his breath caught in his throat. For an instant, he thought it was Greg.

It wasn’t. The shadow was shorter, thicker. It moved with an ease of strength over the discarded dresses and sequined shirts. A powerful arm pushed a curtain out of its way.

A short, dark-skinned boy turned and regarded Stephen with drowsy brown eyes. On the shoulder of his letter jacket a miniature cartoon Knight raised a sword.

“Wassup?” he asked.

Stephen tried a nod that resulted in a stiff jerk of his neck.

“Glad to see you could join us, Jeff,” Carolyn announced, emerging from her office with a folding chair under one arm.

Jeff looked from the chairs to Carolyn.

“Sorry, Miss T. See, Coach called this meeting ’cause we’re playing Buras on—”

Carolyn threw up one arm to steady herself, releasing the chair. It smacked onto a pile of paint-speckled plastic tarps.

“Right. No surprise,” Carolyn said, plucking up the chair and kicking the legs out.

Jeff turned to face her. “Look, I’m sorry—” he began, both arms thrown open.

“You’re always sorry and you never show up at meetings!”

Carolyn turned and disappeared into the prop closet. Jeff’s eyes The Falling Impossible

17

moved to the empty folding chairs all around him and then to Stephen and back again.

“And if you ask me about the musical again, I’m going to strangle you.” Carolyn’s voice blew in from the prop closet, followed by a metallic crash.

“You’re killing me with the waiting, Miss T!” Jeff called out.

“And you’ll wait even longer, if you keep calling me Miss T. Goodbye Jeff. Get your cudgel and go to the field!”

“What’s a cudgel?” Jeff asked with a smile.

“Bye, Jeff!”

He pivoted and found himself facing Stephen, whose presence he had apparently forgotten. Stephen looked away from the boy whose profile was broader and thicker than his own entire frame.

“Freshman?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah,” Stephen answered, dropping his voice so suddenly and ri-diculously that Jeff smiled, which made the discomfort worse.