Elliot Allagash (16 page)

“That was a close one!” she said, laughing.

Just before the train left the station, I caught sight of Elliot, standing at the foot of the escalator. It was going the wrong way; he would have to take the stairs. He shook his head a couple times in disbelief. Then he grabbed the railing, and started off alone.

• • •

I ran down the hall and burst into French class, my pen already drawn.

“Did I miss it?”

Mr. Hendricks stared at me.

“What do you mean, Seymour?” he asked, scrunching up his forehead. “Miss what?”

What the hell was I doing? It was a pop quiz. I wasn’t even supposed to know about its existence.

I cleared my throat.

“Did I miss the
lesson,”
I said, emphatically.

His eyes lit up.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh! No, Seymour. You’re just in time!”

I could hear my classmates groaning as I took my customary seat in the center of the front row. It was moments like these that made me question Elliot’s definition of the word
popular
. I’d gone
from the bottom rung of his status list to the very top. But the two slots seemed to have a lot in common.

Mr. Hendricks locked eyes with me and launched into one of his rapid-fire gibberish monologues. I smiled and nodded until he handed me my quiz. Then I filled it out, handed it in, and got out of there as fast as I could.

I compared the incident to all the other close calls of the month; it didn’t even rank among the top five. There had been a bunch of horrible moments in math class when the teacher went out for a smoke and asked me to lead the lesson in his absence. And then there’d been that nightmare conversation in the cafeteria with the lunch lady.

“I just want to thank you for everything you’re doing, Seymour. You know, my uncle suffers from Pasternak-Schwarzschild’s disease.”

“Oh! I’m sorry to hear that. Is he in good spirits?”

“He’s in a coma. I mean…obviously. It’s Pasternak-Schwarzschild’s disease.”

“Right. Of course. Right.”

I ducked into the back stairwell and slowly made my way up to the roof.

• • •

Students weren’t allowed on the roof, and the administration seemed serious about enforcing the rule. They’d lined the upper stairwell with security cameras, and if someone spotted you on the monitor, you faced an automatic suspension. But with the help of one of Elliot’s maps, I’d figured out an alternate route. First I took
the back stairwell down to the boiler room. Then I walked through the janitor’s storage room, past the rows of retired mops. There, hidden behind a discarded bookshelf, lay the entrance to the school’s old steam tunnels. At that point, all I had to do was enter the combination—I don’t know how Elliot had gotten it—and go up a whole bunch of ladders. After about ten minutes of climbing, the tunnel would spit me out of a steam vent, which hadn’t been operational in eighty years, since the school had stopped relying on coal heat.

The roof itself was bare, except for a water tower and some pipes. You could see both rivers and most of the park and the traffic was so remote, not even the most ghastly car crash could startle you very much. The black tar surface was always warm from the sunlight—but never hot. It took me about twenty-five minutes to get up there, and I went once a day, at least.

When I first discovered the route, I was so proud of myself that I immediately called up Elliot to brag about my findings. But when he picked up the phone and asked me where I was, I instinctively told him that I was home, in my bedroom. It might have been the first time I’d ever lied to him.

I was sitting in the shade of the water tower, studying for what would be my second pop quiz of the day, when I realized I wasn’t alone. I could hear footsteps behind the water tower, circling around toward me. My body performed its standard panic routine: speeding heart, constricted throat, sweaty palms.

This is it
, I thought, for the third or fourth time of the day.
This is how it ends
.

As usual, it was a false alarm. It was only Ashley.

“Seymour, hey,” she said. “You made it.”

“How did you get up here?” I demanded.

She shrugged.

“The stairs.”

“What?” I said. “Are you
serious?”

I started to gather up my stuff.

“They’re probably coming up right now!”

She laughed.

“Oh, man,” she said. “You better get out of here!”

I didn’t know much about marijuana. Elliot never used it—he classified it as a “street drug”—and in fact, it was possible that I had never even seen it before. But I could tell that Ashley was pretty high.

“I come here every day,” I told her, firmly. “I’ve been doing it for, like, six months.”

“I’ve been coming longer than that,” she said. “See? I have a chair.”

She reached under the water tower and pulled out a folded red-and-white-striped lawn chair. It did look pretty old.

“You should get a chair,” she said.

Ashley had spent the ninth and tenth grades away from Glendale. There were lots of rumors about where she had gone, and why, but no one knew any hard facts. Most people believed she had suffered some kind of breakdown, although some maintained that she had been impregnated by Han Wo, her foreign-exchange-student campaign manager, and had given birth to twins. What people did know is that when she returned, she was a completely different person. She’d lopped off her French braid and its absence
was shocking, like she had returned to school an amputee. Her grades were awful, and she never, ever volunteered for anything. I liked to think Ashley had left Glendale for a number of reasons, and not just because of that ridiculous eighth-grade election. But of course I never asked her. I doubted that anyone had, not even her old friends from the math club. Ashley never even sat with anyone in the cafeteria. She just grabbed a plate of food and left—I guess, to come here.

“I saw you outside Lance’s party on Saturday,” she said. “You were pretending to talk on your cell phone. It was pretty crazy.”

She shook her head and laughed.

“I mean, you looked like an actual crazy person.”

“I have to go.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “No one saw. Except for me.”

I reached for my notebook, but she snatched it up before I could get my hands on it.

“Give it back!” I shouted. I had meant the words to sound like an intimidating threat, but they came out as a childlike plea.

“Give it back,”
I repeated, in a deeper voice. Ashley was dangling my notebook over the side of the roof and humming some kind of off-key schoolyard taunt. Was she stoned enough to drop it? Would she use it to blackmail me into smoking her crazy drug? I didn’t think the situation could get any worse—until she flipped the book around and started reading it.

“Pop quiz in English? Holy shit.”

I started to stammer some kind of lie, but she didn’t seem to be listening.

“Why are you cheating on this?” she asked.

“That’s so hypocritical,” I stammered. “I mean—you’re doing
drugs.”

She laughed.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t cheat,” she said. “It just looks like a lot of work, is all. I mean it’s just a
quiz.”

She wiped her light-brown bangs away from her eyes and smiled at me.

“Do you need some help?” she asked. “Come on, I’ll test you.”

I grabbed the book out of her hand and crawled back into the steam vent.

“Good luck,” she said.

• • •

Terry met me at the door in a riding jacket and boots.

“Welcome!” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Did you have a nice time riding?”

“I haven’t left the house in four days,” he said. “Scone?”

“No thank you,” I said. “Listen, I better go find Elliot. James came to my study hall and told me to come right after school.”

“Elliot didn’t send James,” Terry said. “My son is having what can charitably be referred to as a ‘bad day.’”

“Oh,” I said.

There was a lull in the conversation; I heard a faint crashing noise in the distance.

“
I
sent James,” Terry said, brightly. “Just because Elliot’s feeling under the weather doesn’t mean that we can’t be sociable.”

He grabbed me roughly by the elbow.

“Let’s go to the study,” he said. “I’ll tell you an incredibly long story.”

It was only half past three, but Terry’s desk was already lined with decanters. The entire study was uncharacteristically disheveled—books on the floor, pillows strewn across the couch. The bear, I noticed, was wearing one of Terry’s top hats.

“I should probably get going soon,” I said. “I mean, if Elliot’s sick.”

“Nonsense!” Terry said. “Now, let’s think…there must be one you haven’t heard. Did I tell you about the time I spiked a ’64 Bordeaux with GHB? So the editor of
Wine Spectator
looked drunk during his annual address?”

I nodded.

“What about my fortieth birthday party? Where I made all those rock bands reunite against their will?”

“You showed me the tape,” I said.

“Did I tell you about what I did to that snooty literary magazine?”

“You mean when you bought an ad on every page? To turn it into a flip book?”

“Yes, but do you remember what
kind
of flipbook?”

“Was it…sexual?”

Terry sighed.

“You’ve heard all of my good ones.”

I had never been in Terry’s study this early in the day. It was strange to see it so brightly lit. Terry’s leather chair looked almost
red in the sun’s glare and I could see flecks of dust swirling all over the room. Terry picked up a scone, looked at it for a moment, and then put it back in the basket. He leaned toward me.

“How is he?” he asked.

“Elliot? He’s…well…I guess he’s sick.”

Terry took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted his bloated, red face. I felt a sudden urge to leave, but I had no idea how to do it politely.

“I know he’s sick,” he said. “What
else?”

I remembered the note Terry had slipped into my birthday present back in the eighth grade. It had taken four years, but we were finally having the conversation he’d requested.

He looked me up and down, like he was trying to decide something.

“All right, Seymour,” he said, finally. “Here’s one you haven’t heard.”

• • •

“My wife, when I married her, was hilariously younger than I was. I won’t use exact numbers. Let’s just say that the age difference was so extreme, my priest refused to conduct the ceremony, even though my family had paid for the construction of his church.

“She was technically a princess, although she would blush and protest whenever anyone referred to her by her official title. I met her in Monte Carlo, at either a wedding or a funeral—I was too enraptured to focus on anything but her. There’s a solid-gold statue of her in the Vatican, in the center of the holy courtyard.
Well, according to the plaque, it’s the Virgin Mary. But the Pope instructed his sculptor to use my young wife as his model. She had the kind of face, you understand, that demanded simple worship.

“She had no real schooling, at least not in the academic sense. She was raised in a castle, you understand, by servants. She could play the harp, but she couldn’t drive. She was fluent in Spanish, German, French, and English, but she counted on her fingers. Which was, of course, adorable. Her father was extremely old—she was his eleventh child. I offered to hire him a nursing staff when we got married, but she insisted he move in with us. She wanted to take care of the old man herself. By the time he arrived at our house, he had gone completely mad. He was a decorated World War II veteran—he had received the Croix de Guerre in 1939 while serving under Charles de Gaulle—and he believed the war was still in progress. He used to flip through the daily tabloids in disgust, furious that no one was covering the European conflict. When his delusions persisted, my wife called a house meeting and begged the servants not to contradict her father. If he asked for an update on the war, they were to say, ‘The Russian army’s closing in,’ or, ‘Hitler is on the run.’ He always went berserk when he saw women wearing nylon, since the material was needed ‘for the war effort.’ So my wife banned stockings in the house. She also outlawed televisions, which my father-in-law found confusing. It was World War II in our home for that entire year, and on his deathbed, she told him we had won. She was that kind of woman.

“A few years after Elliot was born, she fainted on a cruise to Greece. She had gone up to the deck for some air, and if I hadn’t
taken to following her, who knows how long it would have been until someone discovered her. The ship’s doctor, an incompetent, monkeylike idiot, prescribed aspirin. And the captain, trusting the medical man’s expertise, refused to divert his course. I reasoned with him, threatened his life—but he wouldn’t budge. In the end we settled on something like four hundred thousand dollars.

“We docked within an hour and took a cab to the closest hospital. My wife insisted she was feeling better, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.

“It turned out she had kidney problems that had gone undiagnosed for some time. Every doctor I flew in agreed: She needed to find a donor, within weeks. The best specialist, a surgeon on Park Avenue, told me there was a shortage of transplants in the United States—and that my wife would have to go on some kind of government waiting list. I nodded and reached into my pocket, assuming he was signaling for a bribe. But apparently the list was real and somewhat ironclad.

“Within hours, James set me up with a prize-winning professor from Oxford, named Dr. Highsmith. He had been medical council to the Royal Family, among other nobility, until he had his license revoked for taking tips from his patients. I jetted out to England and handed him a single blank check.

“The doctor telephoned forty-eight hours later, from Thailand. He had found a Christian convent in the countryside. There were forty nuns, and all were in perfect health, thanks to a life of abstemious humility. Eight shared my wife’s blood type, and four of those were sufficiently impoverished to sell a kidney. He compared
and contrasted their vital statistics—their age, genetic histories, etc. But ultimately, he confessed, he couldn’t determine the quality of their kidneys without removing them from their bodies and examining them directly. He couldn’t tell me which nun to dissect.