So Shelly (8 page)

“What’d he say?” one of the girls asked.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about him,” Gordon said. “He’s an asshole.”

Gordon looked to me on the porch. The temporary diversion had ended, and an earnest look had returned to his face. “Keats, we need to go.”

He was right. It was only a matter of time before Shelly’s disappearance would be discovered. Her father would know exactly who took her, and Claire could identify the car we were driving. Whenever the inevitable call came out over the radio, even Officer Marks would be able to do the simple math and pin us to an exact place and time with a fairly good fix on the direction we were heading.

“We need a different car,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Gordon agreed. “Any ideas?”

“Hold on,” I said before disappearing into the house. Within minutes I was reversing out of our detached one-car garage in the back of the house. I was sitting behind the leather-covered steering wheel of a black ’78 Trans Am with a gold eagle, wings spread, emblazoned on the hood, my dad’s onetime prized possession. Inconspicuous it wasn’t, but it didn’t need to be. The cops and Shelly’s father would be looking for a black BMW.

“Genius,” Gordon muttered. “Fucking genius.”

Without a word, a warning, or a worry, Gordon tossed his keys to T, who, with as many others as could fit, was out
the driveway and into the slowly descending Ogontz night, playing the wild goose.

Inside the Trannie and heading toward Gordon’s once again, I pointed toward the fuel gauge, where the red needle was nearly flatlined.

“No problem,” Gordon said. “We’re running on karma.”

“Right,” I said, and actually believed it.

I asked him, “How’d you know those guys?”

In typical Gordon fashion, he answered, “Just do.”

We left it at that.

For Gordon, the month after his expulsion from the Rood began the summer of
Manfred
. His debut novel made the “Must-Read” lists of several national magazines and was picked as one of
USA Today
’s Hot Summer Reads for Young Adults. Reporters from a variety of teen-oriented magazines and websites interviewed Gordon and featured his photograph in their articles. His stock quip was “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”

Gordon spent much of those months driving with Catherine from one bookstore to the next for signings and meets and greets. She was the mother of all cock blocks; Catherine intercepted or fished from his pockets every phone number slipped to him by members of his largely female fan base.

In the fall, Catherine enrolled him for his sophomore year at Trinity Catholic, a school primarily populated by the children of Ogontz’s shrinking middle class, who were desperate to avoid the blacks and Hispanics now constituting
the majority of students in the Ogontz public school system. At Trinity, based upon his filial heritage, Acedia address, and burgeoning celebrity, Gordon was immediately welcomed as a member of the noblesse oblige.

I’m sure that secretly Catherine was relieved by the reduction in tuition costs afforded by Gordon’s departure from the Rood. The cost of maintaining two children in private boarding schools had depleted her cash reserves and she had nearly exhausted the generosity of her parents, who actually still blamed her for the demise of her marriage and, therefore, her current financial shortfall. As a result of her divorce settlement, she’d received substantial shares in the Byron Boatyards. However, consumers’ discretionary spending on luxury purchases is often the first to be cut in tough economic times; therefore, her dividends fluctuated wildly. Lately, cash flow had been tight. Despite Catherine’s legitimate legal access to his earnings, Gordon maintained tight control over the advance he’d received for
Manfred,
and since his homecoming, he had taken to intellectually bullying his emotionally fragile mother, and saw no good reason why he, as a minor, should be expected to reduce her financial responsibility to raise and educate him.

After his termination from the Rood, Gordon possessed even less regard for formalized schools and the fascists who administer them. To his mind, he’d done nothing wrong; each so-called offense had been victimless. Caroline? Mrs. Guiccioli? He’d liberated them. He’d given them what they wanted. If anything, he was the victim.

Therefore, Gordon was relatively indifferent to his enrollment at Trinity. He would never conform his intellectual
or existential pursuits to their narrow-minded curriculums or reading lists, anyway. His interest
was
piqued, however, by a photograph in a full-color Trinity brochure, which his mother left conspicuously open on the island in the kitchen, of a fully extended swimmer diving off starting blocks. Beneath the photograph the caption read “Twelve State Swimming Championships!” Browsing a list of extracurricular sports offered at Trinity, Gordon was disappointed to find lacrosse absent, but he was impressed by their athletic success in general and was especially intrigued by the swim program. His aquatic prowess was entirely natural and, even worse, unheralded. Despite his stubborn independence and aversion to authority, Gordon wondered what he might accomplish as a swimmer if he only had a little coaching.

When she heard the news of Gordon’s enrollment, Shelly was nothing short of euphoric. She had attended Trinity’s schools since kindergarten. Her father was a product of the school himself and a staunch supporter of All Saints, tithing ten percent of his income to the church since his first paper route; however, despite her father’s wealth and standing in the community, or maybe because of it, she had never fit in with the other kids at Trinity. She’d always been picked on, always been alienated, nicknamed Psycho Shelly.

Though bright, Shelly had the focus of a gnat, and was almost entirely uneducable. She hated the indoors; her attention was always directed out the classroom window, and like Gordon, she had little respect for or fear of authority. She could have been the poster child for ADHD, if she could have sat still long enough for the photograph. Having grown up in the relative isolation of Acedia, with only the equally
eccentric Byron children as playmates, Shelly was already socially dysfunctional when she was thrown into the survival-of-the-fittest world of elementary school.

She did herself no favors, however, when in first grade she liberated the class gerbil, Brownie; or, when in second grade she convinced her classmates of the implausibility of Santa Claus; or, when in third grade she was caught with a consecrated communion host under a microscope, searching for evidence of the transubstantiation; or, when in fourth grade she temporarily earned the nickname Lorax by climbing a tree in a field adjacent to the playground and refusing to come down because it had been marked for removal for the expansion of the jungle gym; or, when in the fifth grade she became a proselytizing vegan; or, when in the sixth grade she shamelessly explained the process of tampon insertion (complete with visual aids) to a group of mortified boys; or, when in the seventh grade she was thrown into the boys’ locker room after gym class by some of the “cool” girls, and she laughed at all the tiny peckers; or, when in the eighth grade she attempted to form a FLAG (Friends of Lesbians and Gays) Club; or, when as a freshman she contributed an article to the school literary magazine critical of the “obscene expenditures” earmarked by the school for the state powerhouse football program and the award-winning cheerleading and dance squads in comparison with the paltry amount spent in support of Trinity’s service organizations or in the actual “feeding of the hungry, clothing of the naked, or housing of the homeless.”

But now, with Gordon about to join her at Trinity, she wouldn’t be so alone—or so she thought.

*    *    *

The truth turned out to be that Gordon had little time for Shelly, her causes, or her peculiarities once he stormed into Trinity. A summertime friendship in the relative anonymity of Acedia was one thing. The real world was something else. It didn’t take him long to understand that an affiliation with Shelly would keep his hands out from under more skirts and from inside more blouses than he cared to miss, for he was immediately impressed by the Amazonian bodies of the daughters of Ogontz’s plebeian class, and he longed to sample as many as possible.

By the first day of school, Gordon had earned his driver’s permit, which, by Ohio law, enabled him to operate a car at fifteen, as long as he was accompanied by an adult licensed driver. With Catherine’s promise to make the subsequent monthly car payments herself, he used part of his advance to make a down payment to lease a black Hummer H3, in which he pulled into the student parking lot at the nearby All Saints Catholic Church.

According to Shelly, he made his mother slouch in the backseat under cover of the tinted windows in order to save him the embarrassment of her accompaniment. She waited until well past the opening eight a.m. bell to climb into the front seat and drive home, only to return to the same location before the final bell at three, or at whatever time Gordon assigned, when she would resume her crouched position in the backseat. This routine they continued until Gordon earned his actual license on his sixteenth birthday in January. I don’t know why she tolerated it. Something about
Gordon made women want to please him, protect him, save him, and, in general, do for him. If you could have bottled Gordon’s charisma, you could have made a fortune doing creepy late-night infomercials in between the even sadder ones for
Girls Gone Wild
and for male “enhancement” pills.

You know, it’s ironic. Shelly’s mother killed herself before Shelly’s baptism and left her in the care of a disinterested father, yet Shelly loved her. My mother couldn’t put her smokes down long enough to make me a toasted cheese sandwich, yet I loved her. There was nothing Gordon’s mother wouldn’t do for the boy who’d grown into the spitting image of the man who’d nearly destroyed her, yet Gordon loathed her very being. I don’t know. Just saying.

Gordon’s body rocked the school-mandated white polo shirt with the Trinity crest and the khaki uniform pants like they had never before been rocked. Word of his enrollment had preceded him. Even I, then the lowliest of freshmen, had overheard the news of his arrival. On the first day of school, I stood, rising to tiptoe and peering between bodies, to get a peek as packs of his less-than-peers parted from his path and then re-formed in his wake as he entered the building and walked the main hallway of Trinity in search of the guidance office and his schedule of classes. The girls parted their lips and dropped their chins while the boys either did the same or clenched their fists according to their respective unconsciously inspired first desires.

“Jesus” was the ambiguous reaction of one unidentified voice nearby.

Gordon was especially surprised and disappointed by the rampant homogeneity of the male members of Ogontz’s
chapter of the Benedict Youth. The school uniforms certainly contributed to their sameness, but it was more than that. There had been a dress code at the Rood, but the boys had been somehow able to rebel and to resist the school’s attempt to dehumanize, whitewash, and control them, primarily through constant, even if ineffectual, complaints and small bits of civil disobedience: low-hanging ties, untucked shirts, sockless feet, and hair grown beyond the established parameters. All petty but clear “fuck you’s” directed at the administration and the slavery of institutionalized conformity. The mannequins of Trinity, however, appeared happily anesthetized, except for Shelly, of course, who Gordon passed in the main hall that first day. She was wearing a black “Save the Planet” T-shirt over her white blouse, an offense for which she was summarily sent to the office by her homeroom teacher.

Trinity was a jock factory, one that would have done cold war East Germany proud. Ironically, a large percentage of Ogontz’s population are descendents of German immigrants, who came too late to the American party and were forced to leapfrog the already immigrant-saturated East Coast and settle in Ohio in order to pursue their dreams of New World prosperity. Every parent in the four-county area, Catholic or not, sent his or her child to Trinity—if the parent had even the slightest hope that his or her son or daughter had college athletic scholarship potential.

The halls were yearly stocked with long, lean, broad-shouldered, and graceful demigods. To the contrary, most of the kids at the Rood had been rather anemic, bookish, and soft—absolute pussies by comparison with these Warriors, which just so happened to be the name of Trinity’s sports
teams. Gordon must have immediately determined that it would be impossible to impress these roboteens by mere physicality; nor could they be intimidated by intellectualism. For they were the most unquestioning party-line-swallowing irony-deprived adult-pleasing collection of kiss-asses Gordon could have ever imagined, and their Teflon-coated psyches were angst resistant and oblivious to both his superior erudition and his sarcasm.

The purchase of the Hummer, however, had been a stroke of accidental genius. He would soon discover that the lever that would move these lumps of clay and undo many a button, zipper, and Velcro strap was good old-fashioned American materialism and class envy.

It was common in those first days at Trinity for Gordon to be regularly asked—exclusively by girls—to sign copies of
Manfred
or one of the various magazines in which he had been featured. His cell phone fast filled with girls’ numbers that he couldn’t match to faces, so he took to taking a photo with his cell and loading it with the girl’s corresponding phone number. By the end of his first two weeks at Trinity, he’d compiled a sheik’s harem’s worth of available ladies. All of which was fine, since he was finding the girls of Trinity to be nearly his equal in their concupiscence.

On the second Monday in September, Gordon stuffed himself confidently inside his first Speedo, joined the swim team for its preseason conditioning sessions, and made a Vesuvius-sized splash. He was a raw but powerful swimmer, who, compared with the technique-driven swim team members, bludgeoned the water’s surface rather than carved his way through it. Regardless of his lack of technique, he was a
tsunami-like force in the water. (The chances of dying as the result of a tsunami while on the American mainland is more than half a million to one.) Coach Mancini saw the
David
inside the Gordon block of granite and went to work immediately to streamline what he could only classify as a gift from Poseidon himself.