So Shelly (10 page)

“What was that all about?” I asked when Gordon returned.

“Turning over the soil,” he answered as he slid into one of the desk/chair torture devices the school still used to rack their students. Somehow, as he situated himself by slouching his upper body and elongating his lower, he still managed to look Abercrombie cool.

“But how do you do that?” I asked, sincerely befuddled, amazed, and curious to know the secret. “I mean, how can you just walk up to all these girls—and Ms. Yancey!—and be so cool and know just what to say and how to act?”

“It’s cake,” he said.

I wanted to punch him. I wondered what, if anything other than walking without a limp, came hard for Gordon Byron.

Then he explained his philosophy. “You see, Keats, your problem, like almost everyone else’s, is that you think you’re in control, that what you say or do in an instant actually has some impact on what happens in that instant and the ones that follow. That kind of thinking puts way too much pressure on a person. It’s paralyzing.” He took his eyes off of Ms. Yancey, still glowing from across the room, and directed his blue-eyed gaze at me.

“Now, me, I don’t think like that. I believe that whatever is going to happen is going to happen whether I do or say anything at all. I’m just playing my part in a cosmic drama that I didn’t write and in which there is little room for ad-lib. So, if I fuck up, it doesn’t get me down. I was going to fuck up no matter what I did. You see, it isn’t my fault. I’m just reading my lines. You, on the other hand—again, like most people—overthink everything; you place the weight of the whole world on your shoulders, believing what you do or say actually matters, actually changes things and determines outcomes. Which, I think, is pretty fucking arrogant of you and your kind. Don’t you think?”

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “Who wrote this ‘script’? God?”

“If that helps you to sleep at night, that’s fine. You call it God. I don’t waste time thinking about it; I just know the script exists.”

“That’s fate. You believe in
fate
?” I was incredulous. Although I’d known him for less than two full months, it seemed too romantic for a guy like Gordon.

“Whatever. My point is that I don’t worry because I believe the future is already past. We just don’t know it yet. Kind of like … Here, come with me.” Gordon slid out from beneath the desk, walked to the window, leaned his head against the cool glass, and gazed up into the cloudless night sky. “Look up. What do you see?”

“I don’t know,” I said, afraid of saying the stupidly obvious. “Stars?”

“Correct!” Gordon said as if I’d answered a double bonus question on some television game show. “Stars. But do you
realize that some of those stars may already be extinguished, and we’re just now being washed in the light that took … who knows how long to reach us?”

My confused expression betrayed that I understood the physics but not the point.

“Some of those stars are dead—in what we mistakenly think is the future because of our perspective but is actually the past—but as far as we can tell in the present, they are still putting off gas and heat and light. Do you get it?”

“Sort of,” I lied.

“You see, if astronomers just knew what the signs were inside of the particles of starlight we’re currently looking at, maybe they could identify which ones have been long dead, which ones are still pumping, and which ones still have eons to burn. You following?”

“I guess. But what does all this have to do with talking to girls?”

“Oh, Keats.” He actually draped his arm around my shoulders. “You just aren’t paying attention.”

“No. I am,” I said, a little too enthusiastically, for fear of Gordon’s cutting the lesson short.

“With girls, I can read the signs. I don’t know how, from where, or why I can, but I can. It’s kind of like, why can one person sing so prettily or jump so high or solve complicated math problems in ways that most people can’t, when they don’t look any different from anybody else?

“When I meet a girl, I know instantly whether or not she’s doable. What I don’t know is whether or not I will do her. That’s in the yet-to-be-read pages of the script and outside of my control. My role is simply to show up every day
and play my part. But either way, it isn’t to my credit or fault.”

My head spun as he walked me back to my desk next to Shelly’s. “What about Ms. Yancey? Is she?”

“What? Doable?”

Gordon didn’t answer. Instead, he smiled, grabbed his denim jacket, walked to Ms. Yancey’s desk, leaned over and whispered something, and then left the room.

After a few moments of hard thinking, I got up to go, but was stopped by Shelly’s ambiguous comment. “He’s good.” She said it with just a tiny hint of jealous longing clinging to her voice. I hadn’t noticed her return from the darkroom cot, but she must have been watching.

“You really believe that?”

“Yeah. I mean … Gordon can be shallow, narcissistic, even destructive, and he tends to eventually piss everybody off, but … I don’t know … there’s just something … necessary about him. He makes things … interesting. You know what I mean?”

“No,” I lied. “I don’t, and you shouldn’t make excuses for him.”

She shook her head. “Don’t you see? He’s a kind of measuring stick. He’s a guardrail, a Mr. Bad Example. He’s a flashing red light, a siren, a warning bell … the scarecrow.” She threw up her arms to pantomime a scarecrow in cruciform position as she finished her exercise in metaphorical free association. “We need Gordon. Without him we couldn’t fantasize or define ourselves or know when to stop or when to seek shelter. He’s the stove on which we burn our hands. He’s the almost that counts.”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“Hang around long enough, and you will.”

“What I really don’t get is the way he treats you. He completely ignores you, when you’re clearly the most interesting girl in the room.” My previously unspoken—hell, unthought—thoughts completed an end run around the filter separating my brain from my mouth.

Shelly took her eyes from Gordon’s exit stage right in order to look at me for the first time in the conversation. Her unkempt long black hair spilled from underneath the rainbow-colored horizontally striped toboggan that she slipped over her head the minute the final bell rang each day, along with the matching fingerless gloves. The look in her eyes couldn’t have been more different from the longing one I’d watched her give Gordon a thousand times; it wasn’t condescending so much as it was appreciative.

It sucked.

I wanted to puke.

“He ignores me because he loves me.”

I paused to consider that unwanted pearl of wisdom before I said, “That makes a lot of sense.”

Ms. Yancey was gone by Thanksgiving and was replaced by the reluctant Mr. Robbins, a senior English teacher already overburdened by club advisory positions. It left Shelly with the job of putting out the fall semester’s edition of the
Beacon
almost entirely on her own. Apparently—at least according to the rumors that ran amok in the Trinity community—a night janitor, who, unbeknownst to his
bosses, occasionally used the darkroom cot for napping, was an unobserved spectator one night when Gordon turned on the lurid red light and led a coy Ms. Yancey into the darkroom. The janitor wasn’t discovered until Ms. Yancey and Gordon, both shirtless, tumbled onto the cot and on top of him.

After much pleading from Ms. Yancey and “good old buddying” by Byron, the janitor compromised—largely for fear of losing his unsanctioned napping privileges and station. His conscience and state law demanded that he report the incident, but he’d swear that all that he had seen was the two of them kissing if they’d say nothing of his napping.

Ms. Yancey’s contract with Trinity was immediately terminated—something about a morality clause. A criminal complaint was never filed nor a report made to the state board of education (of course, to avoid the publicity and the embarrassment for Trinity).

Gordon and his mother were called to Mr. Smith’s office, where the principal apologized profusely for Ms. Yancey’s having “taken advantage” of Gordon. Mr. Smith pleaded with them (for Gordon’s sake) not to seek litigation or in any way go public with the incident. Coincidentally, they were told, Gordon had just recently been chosen as the recipient of the newly instituted Novitiate Scholarship to be given annually to the most promising transfer student of the year. It would cover full tuition and fees for the entire duration of the recipient’s years at Trinity.

Mrs. Byron hemmed, hawed, and made a good show of righteous indignation, but in the end, she more than gladly took the scholarship and ran.

“Nice ride,” Gordon said, checking out the red interior of the Trans Am. I wasn’t sure if he was being sincere or sarcastic. With Gordon, it could be nearly impossible to tell.

“You know, I never would have guessed,” he said.

“It’s not mine. It was my dad’s car. I think he loved it more than me.” I should have known my whining would fall on unsympathetic ears.

“I don’t mean about the car. I never understood why Shelly liked you, but I’m starting to get it. You’re all right, Keats. Nowhere near as much of a loser as I thought.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“It is.”

“Then, thanks.”

“Put the disc in,” Gordon said.

I laughed and pointed to the dash, where the original eight-track player mocked us.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said. “What is that?”

“An eight-track player. The car’s more than thirty years old. What’d you expect? Look in the glove compartment.”

Gordon reached inside and pulled out a handful of eight-track tapes, holding them as if he were handling recently unearthed dinosaur bones.

“Got them five for a dollar at a garage sale. Put one in.”

“Which one?” Gordon asked. He read the titles: “Foghat? REO Speedwagon? Styx? Lynyrd Skynyrd? Or Journey? Dude, I know Journey.”

“Put it in.”

“How?” He took a few stabs and flipped the case over a few times before it took.

“ ‘Just a small-town girl,’ ” the song began, and we joined in singing what may be the most cheesy yet somehow poignant song ever written, yelling as much as we were singing—“ ‘living in a lonely world’ ”—while bobbing our heads in rhythm. I couldn’t help but think of Shelly as that lonely small-town girl, and I wondered what, if anything, I could have done differently.

The song played through. The lyrics’ incongruous mixture of despair and hopefulness washed over and soaked us through in one of those moments that two people share, each knowing that he is experiencing the same thing as the other guy without having to say a word.

As I turned left onto Sand Road, aptly named for the fine layer of the stuff that perpetually coats it, and the small dunes that form sporadically along it, we entered the Strand. I pretended to be transfixed by the bay waters on my side, which lay as flat as I’d ever seen them, but I was actually hiding my
reddened eyes and muffling occasional sniffles that, thankfully, were drowned out by the nervous drumming of Gordon’s fingers on the passenger side of the dashboard.

Finally, I decided to break the tension. “What’s your favorite Shelly story?”

“Oh, man.” A smile broke across Gordon’s face. “There are so many.” He hesitated. I imagined him pressing the Main Menu button in his brain and scanning the scene selections. “You know about the skinny-dipping?” he asked, followed by a sidelong glance and a stifled laugh into his balled right fist.

“Yeah. Shelly told me.”

“What about Johnson’s Island when we were kids?”

“She talked about that too,” I said.

Gordon hadn’t noticed, but Shelly and I had grown close during our countless hours of compiling editions of the
Beacon
. Maybe it was the two-year difference in age (teen years are like dog years: seven teen years to one human year), or maybe it was the difference in social classes—if so, it was my problem not hers—but we never hung out anywhere else or at any other times. We were friendly and all in the hallways, but we never stopped to talk. In a way, it made our time in the media center special.

The best times were the nights when we’d stay late and order pizza delivered. She always paid, and I always apologized and promised to get the next one. We’d get sodas from the machines in the cafeteria, sit cross-legged on the floor with
the pizza box between us, and play “What If? Past, Present, and Future.” It was a stupid game we’d made up. We each had to answer the three questions in a series.

For example, Shelly would ask, “What if? Past.”

I’d answer with something like, “What if I’d been born to different parents?”

Then she’d say, “What if? Present.”

“What if … 
I
lived next door to you instead of Gordon?”

“What if? Future.”

“What if … I die before I do anything that matters?”

You know, she didn’t patronize me as if I were being irrational when I hit her with that one. She knew I meant it, and she respected my intuition. I really appreciated that. I guess it’s kind of ironic now.

Then it was my turn to ask the questions. “What if? Past.”

She’d begin “what if” riffing about her childhood with Gordon and Augusta. Before long the pizza would be cold and the soda warm. That game is another reason why I know as much as I do about when they were kids. Now that I think about it, I never got to ask her the “present” and “future” questions.

Gordon was continuing his internal probing of his catalog of Shelly stories. “How about, do you remember at the beginning of my and Shelly’s junior year, your sophomore, when she went all sixties, protesting Trinity’s sports team names?”

*    *    *

That incident occurred shortly after my father’s funeral. My mom had gone off the deep end, beginning the process of willing herself to death. Tom and I were taking turns staying home from school, babysitting her for fear of what she might do. (That was when Tom was still relatively healthy and taking classes in radiology at a nearby branch campus of the Ohio State University.) My father had died in September. Nothing dramatic. One morning, he just didn’t wake up.