Men and Dogs (13 page)

It has often struck Hannah that important days, the ones that change things forever, feel like any other good day. You’ve just found $20 in your pocket, and then a bus hits your car; you’re eating blackberry ice cream in the sun, and a piano falls on your head. The third Sunday in February was such a day. Hannah went to Warren’s for dinner. Virginia always welcomed Hannah with a slight air of triumph. She didn’t appreciate Daisy’s objections to her son, and so she always loved that Hannah would rather be at her house than at her own. When Hannah came in, Virginia was poring over the newspaper, her fingers wrapped around a large glass of white wine.

“These are tricky,” Hannah said. “Remind me to show you the parabola stuff before the test.”

A few minutes of silent working passed. Warren was jiggling his foot, which he did only when something was bothering him.
Is Dostoyevsky that bad? she remembers thinking. Finally, without looking up, he said, “Hannah, I’m going to Chapel Hill.”

At first, she didn’t understand.

“It’s about money,” he continued. “I got a Morehead Scholarship. I can’t turn it down.”

She shook her head, refusing to believe him. She thought about how a snake’s body still moves back and forth long after its head is cut off.

“But you’re going to Harvard,” she said. “With me.”

“I’m not. I’m not going.”

“But you can’t go to North Carolina.”

“Chapel Hill’s a good school.”

“It’s not Harvard.”

“They have plenty of good professors there.”

It would be all right. That was what they told each other over and over in the next hour, facing cross-legged on the bed.
They wouldn’t date other people. They’d visit all the time—there were direct flights between Raleigh and Boston—and their parents wouldn’t even have to know. They decided not to talk on the phone; they never really connected unless they were in person. Warren said he had heard of some new way of sending letters on the computer, so they’d figure out how to do that and write every day.

By the time Virginia called them down to dinner, everything felt settled. Hopeful, even. They ate and talked about the news.

“So he told you, huh, sweetie?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Hannah was trying to be brave, but her voice wavered.

“Don’t worry, Hannah. It’ll be OK.”

Hannah hates lies. It’s why she can’t stand politics; empty words instantly depress her. But this. She really, really wanted to believe it. So badly that she chose to ignore the fact that, for the first time in her experience, Virginia’s voice hit the zone of the superficial, her tone as delicate as a bubble of dish soap—thin, shiny, ready to pop.

And then, April, a month Hannah has always hated. To any other teenager, April meant the long-awaited arrival of warm weather and kissing outside. But to Hannah, the month of her father’s disappearance six years before meant thirty days of waiting for something horrible to strike. This April, though, things were looking bright, and hadn’t she already endured an entire month’s worth of disaster back in February, when Warren announced he was becoming a Tar Heel? In fact, so far, this April—sleepy and naked—had been just fine. Great, even.

Then the last very good day: the thirtieth of April, the Tuesday before the senior prom, which had always been Senior Cut
Day at Charleston Prep. This was an unofficial holiday when, instead of driving to the cigarette-littered school parking lot,
the seniors turned their cars east and headed out to Sullivan’s Island, a three-mile strip of sand buffering Charleston from the ocean. It was a tradition started by the Class of 1962. Buzz Legare’s class, as a matter of fact. According to Virginia,
the whole thing had been his idea.

The Class of 1991 was particularly lucky, in that Tommy Nelson’s parents happened to be in Bermuda for the week, rendering the Nelsons’ old, rambling beach house available for the day’s festivities. A little after eight, the Nelsons’ neighbors were just ambling out onto their porches, clutching cups of coffee; upon seeing eighty-six girls and boys disembarking with kegs of beer, they retreated into their houses, shutting their windows and doors for the day.

A perfect day, April 30, 1991. The sun was high, though it was still chilly for the thin-blooded teenagers who’d grown up in 102-degree summers. Instead of going to the beach, they chose to gather on the Nelsons’ large deck. They shed their wraps and shirts, baring just-shy-of-twenty skin. It’s something to celebrate, being that young. It’s the kind of thing that gives one a reason to drink before nine in the morning.

It wasn’t long before the bounds of long-established social divisions began to loosen. Melvin Bovine, the class nerd, shared a cigar with the quarterback. Warren, usually a reticent loner outside of his relationship with Hannah, sat talking with Jenny
White, the airheaded homecoming queen. By noon, everything had escalated: Ella McCarthy, the drama nerd headed for Wesleyan,
was making out with Joe Coleman, a notorious redneck whose truck was decorated on both sides with huge Confederate flag decals.
A beer funnel was rigged up off the deck, manned by a group of bikini-clad girls. They fed warm Bud Light through the hose to a line of boys at the bottom, their faces shining up, eager as hungry chicks.

A few couples had claimed rooms upstairs in the Nelsons’ house for the afternoon, but for once Warren and Hannah abstained from sex, choosing instead to stay outside and talk to classmates they’d mostly ignored for the last two years. The Boone’s
Farm wine was causing Hannah to feel true love for these people she had overlooked for so long—even Joe Coleman, even shit-for-brains
Jenny White, even Tommy Nelson. It made her wonder, as her skin turned browner and the shoulder straps of her bathing suit grew looser, why she had been so determined to cut these nice people out of her life.

Toward the end of the day, over a second Apple Blossom bottle, Hannah fell particularly deep in conversation with Charlotte,
a druggie girl she’d always kind of liked.

“I thought you were a bitch,” Charlotte said. “Or a slut. You used to be sort of slutty.”

“It’s not a crime.”

“No! No way. It’s just that you seemed so . . . unfriendly, you know? But it turns out you’re just fucked up like the rest of us.”

“Thank you.”

“Is it because of your dad?”

“Probably.”

“You should work on that,” she said. She was pretty high. “You know? That shit’ll screw you for life.”

“Yeah,” Hannah replied. And then the conversation turned idly to gossip—who was going where for school, who was screwing whom. Eventually their talk petered out, but Hannah felt good about it. It was the closest she had come to a female connection in years.

After the party Warren drove Hannah back to town, windows open, cool spring air roaring sweet and heavy into the car. Before dropping her off, he took Hannah around the Battery so slowly it felt like they were idling. She stared out the window happily.
She loved this boy beside her. She wanted to turn into smoke and drift into Warren Meyers’s pores.

The next day, the Class of 1991 filed back into the cinder-block halls of Charleston Prep—tan, nervous, slightly sheepish.
The administration was annoyed, but it was no different than the problem they faced every year. There was no way to suspend eighty-six students. Just in case, Hannah had DeWitt write a note. From the start of the marriage, she’d learned to go to
DeWitt when she needed things like money and notes to get out of class. At 10: 43 in the morning, she had seven precious minutes left in her midmorning break, just enough time to deliver the note to the principal’s office and find Warren to say hi before
AP History.

The office was down a long hallway, but she saw immediately that Warren was standing in the breezeway just outside. He had to be the only person she could recognize at that distance: the thin, slouching silhouette, the olive smudge of a flannel shirt.

Even after two years of dating, the sight of Warren at the end of the breezeway caused Hannah to hurry. She threw her books into her locker and walked down the hall, slowing when she got close. He was talking to a girl. Hannah saw blond hair, a pink polo shirt tucked into a khaki skirt. Jenny White.

As Hannah got closer, she remembered Charlotte mentioning just yesterday that Jenny was headed to North Carolina for college,
too. It wasn’t that she had the grades, Charlotte had said. Duh. Shit for brains. But that’s what being a legacy will do for you.

Hannah was too close to run. So she just said, “Hi.”

Warren snatched his hand away.

“Hey,” Jenny said, giving her a pleasant look as irritatingly empty as a golden retriever’s. “Oh, my God—my trig homework!
I totally spaced. OK, we’ll talk later, Warren.” Jenny gave a maddening little wave and glided away.

Hannah looked at Warren, setting her face in a pleasant expression. Though what she wanted to do was scream. Because Hannah knew Warren Meyers better than anyone in the world. She knew him better than she knew her mother or brother. She knew his habits, his likes and dislikes. When his eyes twitched, it meant he was sleepy. He was always on time, sometimes annoyingly so. He got grouchy when he was hungry, without even knowing he needed food. (Hannah stored candy bars in her backpack to ward off those sugar lows.) In his pockets he kept notes written on tiny scraps of paper to remind him of things he needed to do. And when he thought another girl was pretty, he slouched slightly and looked at the ground, studiously avoiding Hannah’s face until the moment had passed.

The thing was, Hannah didn’t care very much about Warren flirting with Jenny White. Sure, it hurt, but it was OK for him to find other girls pretty. She knew that it came with the territory of being a boy. Besides, Hannah did the same thing.
Warren was hardly the best-looking boy in school. He’d gotten better-looking, sure; his arms and shoulders had filled out a bit, and his acne had all but faded. Still, there were other boys around—cuter boys—and Hannah thought about them, sometimes even pausing to watch them at soccer or football practice as they swarmed by in spectacular herds.

So it was all right for Warren to think Jenny White was pretty, and even to wonder what she looked like under those perfectly coordinated ensembles from Banana Republic. Hannah wasn’t the hysterical type. And she certainly didn’t want to be like one of those cheerleaders who flew into a rage at a party when she saw her boyfriend grabbing a beer for another girl. Intelligence,
one hoped, could override jealousy. If you weren’t the prettiest, it paid to be the smartest, because you could train your mind to understand these things.

What was not all right today was that, aside from slouching and looking at the ground, Warren now began to talk.

“Yesterday’s party was so fun, wasn’t it? Even though Tommy was being weird. Are you hung over? God, I am. I still feel like shit. I went to bed at eight. Crazy.”

It wasn’t completely off, what he was saying. It wasn’t offensive. It was just that the Warren she knew always chose silence over chatter. And so, as he went on, barely allowing her to answer, Hannah began to feel physically ill. Because what this meant, of course, was that, on top of thinking lusty thoughts about Jenny, Warren was ashamed. Shame was different than lust.
It meant that while he might not already have done so, he would, at some point, betray her.

“She’s really pretty, isn’t she?” Hannah interrupted.

“Who?”

“Jenny White.”

“What? Oh—no. Not really. Why?”

It was the lie that tipped it. Of course Jenny White was pretty. His saying otherwise was like suggesting that Strom Thurmond would be voted out in the next election.

It was still early enough, so she called Harvard and told them thank you, but no, she wouldn’t be coming to Cambridge in the fall. Then she called Stanford and told them she’d be thrilled to accept a place in the Class of 1995. She didn’t tell anyone except her mother that she’d done these things. Throughout the summer, when she spoke of school, Warren would have assumed
Hannah meant Harvard. She never actually lied about it; she’d just say, “When I go off to school.”