Black Mirror (6 page)

Well. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known.

I put everything back in the box and closed its flaps.

I crossed to the closet and opened it. Dust bunnies on the floor; a very few things hanging from misshapen metal hangers, including a navy wool Pettengill blazer that Daniel had looked great in last winter. I felt my shoulders move a little in distaste as I looked at it. I raised my eyes upward. On the top shelf, some old games: Monopoly, a big tub of Lego. And next to the Lego, half hidden by the tub, Mr. Monkey.

Mr. Monkey! I felt my mouth shape itself into a smile. So this was what I was searching for.

A small brown molded-plastic squeeze toy covered with fake fur, Mr. Monkey had accompanied Daniel everywhere when we were small and lived in Cambridge with Sayoko; a whole family. Famous family story: At the age of four Daniel had tucked Mr. Monkey into an enormous teddy bear display at FAO Schwarz, and then couldn’t find him again. Six store clerks had been pressed into service, ripping the display apart, while Daniel wailed and wailed. I wasn’t sure if I really remembered this incident; I would have been only three years old. But I felt like I remembered. I could almost see Daniel and the teddies … and his face, transcendent, when Mr. Monkey was restored to him.

I stretched up for Mr. Monkey but couldn’t reach it, and, too impatient to go get a chair or step stool, I jumped. On the second leap my fingertips grazed Mr. Monkey, so I gave it one more try and triumphantly managed to knock the toy onto the floor.

Mr. Monkey’s head bounced off and rolled among the
dust bunnies. I knelt and grabbed both pieces. Surely I could easily pop the head back on …

I paused. Mr. Monkey’s hollow body was not empty. Still on my knees, I backed out of the closet and peered more closely. A couple of small plastic bags were tucked inside the fur-covered plastic shell.

My hand was perfectly steady as I reached and pulled them out.

I breathed then. It was not cocaine. Not smack. Not uppers or downers or anything that really would have scared me. It was just pot. It was just a few ounces of marijuana in one Ziploc bag and, in the second, some cigarette papers.

It might have been there for years. It was possible. I unzipped the bag and touched the grains. I sniffed. It smelled sweet, heavy, unmistakable. I sat back on my heels. I thought about flushing it down the toilet. I thought about making muffins with it, and giving them to Bubbe. No. To Saskia, and all the Unity people. They’d catch me, though. They’d catch me, and I’d be expelled.

I might want that. I tested the thought. I whispered it out loud. “What if I were expelled?” But no, of course I didn’t want that. There was nowhere else for me to go. There wasn’t even a public school option in Lattimore anymore.

It was still amusing, though, to imagine pretty, perfect Saskia, high. Saskia, giggling senselessly, discovered by her hero Patrick Leyden in a completely wasted state. I hated her again suddenly. I hated her, and Patrick Leyden too. I hated all of them, everyone who’d been at that meeting. Yes,
even Ms. Wiles! Everyone but Andy. I’d slip them all worse than marijuana if I could. They could all die horribly, as Daniel had! I’d—I’d—

And now my hands
were
shaking. I clenched them tightly over the Ziploc bag. This was a stupid, useless fantasy; the only person it was harming was me.

In my head Daniel’s voice gibed.
Mental activity is the supreme suffering.
I winced.

I ought to go and flush the marijuana down the toilet right now. Or I could give it to James Droussian for resale. I hated him too, though I did recognize that he had tried to help me in the Unity Service meeting. Sort of. Maybe this would even the score. I did not want to be in his or anyone’s debt. There was only one person in the entire world who I could stand right now, and he was retarded.

I found I was wiping furiously at my cheeks.

I felt humiliated. I needed—I really needed—

I looked down again at the two halves of Mr. Monkey. At Daniel’s Ziploc bags.

I wondered if Andy had ever gotten high. I wondered if he would like to try. I imagined us getting high together. It was the kind of thing you did with your friends, right? Share?

Andy might like it. I might like it. Daniel had liked it. Everybody liked it.

Around me Bubbe’s house felt heavy as ever. Nobody was coming up here to Daniel’s room. I could stay all night if I
liked, and walk back to Pettengill in the morning for classes.

I don’t remember deciding. I got up and turned off the overhead light. I turned on the smaller lamp on the floor and sat on Daniel’s mattress.

I had once seen others do this, and it wasn’t hard at all, rolling the cigarette paper tightly around a small amount of weed, then twisting the ends. I was quite satisfied with the result. There were matches too in Mr. Monkey. Very considerate of Daniel.

He’d be laughing right now. Especially as I carefully fitted Mr. Monkey back together and set him down beside me on the mattress. Then, and only then, did I lean against the wall with Daniel’s pillows behind me.

I knew not to inhale too sharply, too deeply, at first.

I
’d never even tried to get high before, so all I knew was what Daniel had said and what I had occasionally seen. I had nothing to compare my experience to. Still, waking in Daniel’s room the next morning and breathing in the stale, sweet air (which lingered even though sometime in the small hours I’d forced the old window open nearly three inches), I decided that the marijuana simply hadn’t had much effect on me. I had not collapsed into paroxysms of giggles. And I’d had no deep feelings of relaxation; if anything, I’d remained alert and even a little tense as I smoked first one and then a second handmade cigarette. I’d been entirely focused on accustoming myself to the smell. To the tight, hot feeling in my lungs as I figured out how to inhale, how to draw in the smoke and hold it in my lungs. How to
gradually exhale. I’d felt a mild pleasure at my progress. But that was it.

Maybe it was old stuff after all. Or I was immune. Or it took a few tries.

Maybe I was relieved.

Maybe I was disappointed.

I curled onto my side on Daniel’s mattress and blinked at the red neon numbers of his digital alarm clock. One good thing was that I had slept well for a few hours. I knew I ought to get up now—it was only six, but I would need to shower, wash my (no doubt) reeking hair, and put on different clothes before heading back to Pettengill. Idly I hoped there was something reasonable in my closet to wear; something warm. Of course, if worse came to worse, there was always Daniel’s wool school blazer, hanging across the room in his closet.

I wondered if Mr. Monkey would fit in the blazer’s pocket. Then I forced myself to get up and head down the icy hallway toward a hot shower.

Always before, when alone, I had walked between Bubbe’s house and Pettengill using the main roads. But Daniel had preferred the shortcut path through the woods, the one that went very near the spot at which, the other night, I’d encountered James Droussian and whoever it was he’d been with. This morning, defiantly, I took that route. And somehow I was not surprised to come upon James just before the
woods ended and the smooth snowy grounds of the campus began.

James was sitting alone on a rock. From where I stopped, a few yards behind him, I could see his profile clearly; see the way his left cheekbone stood out in sharp contrast to the background of tree bark; see the intent way he’d drawn his brows together and was staring toward the campus.

What did I have to lose? I stepped forward. I cleared my throat. I spoke perhaps more loudly than I normally would have. “James.”

He leaped off the rock and whipped around toward me almost before the first vowel sound had left my lips. Again I felt that abrupt sense of dislocation, of things somehow wrong, that I’d felt when with him the other night. But a bare instant later as he recognized me, his body relaxed. “Frances, hey,” he said affably. “Fancy seeing you here, huh? You got both mittens today?”

I nodded. I regained my own mental balance and my resolve. “I just, um, wanted to say thank you, James. For yesterday.” He stared at me, his face expressionless, and I had trouble stumbling on. I did it anyway. “At the Unity Service meeting, I mean.”

“Oh,” said James after a second. Was his body ever so slightly tense again, or was I imagining that? “Right. No problem.”

I fidgeted. There was more to say. “And I’m sorry about hitting you. I was—I’m sorry.”

He didn’t reply immediately. The moment stretched,
and my stomach twisted, and once again I felt his words from the other night, his dumb, thoughtless words about Daniel. About me. And I felt something else too, something I didn’t understand, something coming from James. I thought of the way he’d jumped up from the rock a moment ago, been suddenly in my path. I found myself swallowing.

“Okay,” James said finally. But his tone was even, too even, and while it should have been enough for me to hear that one word, somehow it wasn’t. I didn’t feel forgiven. I wasn’t forgiven. I knew it.

I found myself stepping forward. “I apologize. I shouldn’t have done it.”

I searched James’s face for forgiveness and still didn’t find it. Anger flicked at me then. So the large manly drug dealer didn’t care to forgive small, weak, kitten-like Frances for slapping him? Well, he could go directly to hell. I straightened my shoulders and walked past him.

“Frances.”

I took another two steps before I stopped and turned. Now it was my turn to say nothing and look blank.

But James clearly wasn’t impressed. And I saw now that his blankness wasn’t blankness at all. It was something I recognized. Something I knew all about.

Control.

“I’m going to tell you something,” James said. “And you’re going to listen, and one day you’re going to be grateful that I told you this, because you need to hear it. For your own safety. Are you listening?”

His voice wasn’t loud. And he was standing at least five yards away from me. But I felt as constrained as if he’d been in my face, with both hands heavy on my shoulders.

I nodded like a spring-necked doll.

James said, “You believe that because you’re small and female, no one will take you seriously. The other night you assumed you had the freedom to hit somebody bigger than you if you chose. You thought it was safe. I’d never hit back.”

“No,” I said, confused. “No, that wasn’t what I was thinking—”

“Shut up,” said James quietly. “I’m talking.”

I shut up.

“Then you weren’t thinking,” he said. “Which is actually worse. In this case, you were right. I would never hit you back.” And then suddenly—without rising in volume—his voice lashed out. “But I am not everybody. And your size and your sex are no guarantee of safety.”

In that moment, if my brother’s life had been offered to me in exchange, I couldn’t have moved my eyes from James’s face.

“It’s a dangerous world, Frances. Don’t go around thoughtlessly creating opportunities for violence.
Ever.
Because if you do, I promise you: Violence
will
occur. It will come looking for you.”

James didn’t move a step closer. It only felt as if he had.

I stared at him. I felt my rage kicking in my gut, and my despair looking for a place to go. I was full of confusion. Why had I slapped James? It had seemed clear to me at the
time. I had felt that I had to do something, make something change, or I would explode—implode—

One of Daniel’s hated quotes echoed within me.
One should not use violence or have it used.

Abruptly, the little scene was over. James brushed past me. He walked rapidly away, toward Pettengill. Still confused, uncomprehending, I watched him go.

Gradually my mind cleared. My first coherent thought was that, post-grad or no, James Droussian was definitely not dumb. And then I knew something else too.

That hadn’t been a kid talking to me just now.

I
hadn’t
made a mistake in the woods the other night. I had seen exactly what I thought I’d seen: two men. Two men, one of whom was James.

James looked young. Looked eighteen or nineteen. But he wasn’t.

James Droussian—if that was his real name—was an adult.

A
minute later I knew I had to be crazy. Daniel’s death, the awfulness I felt—it was making me imagine things. Because really, what would an adult James Droussian be doing at Pettengill? Why pretend to be a teenager? To set up a prep-school drug business? Ridiculous.

However, as I trudged back toward my dorm, I allowed myself to linger on the drug business idea, because it didn’t seem
entirely
ridiculous. It was impossible not to know that at least half to three-quarters of the Pettengill student body used something, sometimes. Weed and mushrooms for the burnouts. Diet pills for girls like Brenda Delahay, desperate to get or stay thin. Steroids for the jocks. Amphetamines for some of the fiercely competitive studiers. Cocaine and meth and ecstasy for the partiers. Very few people had a real
problem, of course, but there was quite a lot going on, and surely it had to be lucrative for somebody. Maybe James—

But then I just shook my head. Obviously at some level there had to be adults providing all this stuff, but they certainly didn’t need to be right at school, masquerading as students. There were plenty of kids ready to do the work themselves. And last year James hadn’t been here, and I didn’t see that his presence had changed anything. My little theory just didn’t hold water. It wasn’t even worth being called a theory.

Commentary from Daniel again.
The mind creates the reality, and reality creates the mind.
He’d used the aphorism mockingly, but there actually was something to this one. I was discombobulated, creating my own stupid version of reality that had nothing to do with what was real.

Feeling even more depressed than usual, I slipped back into my dorm.

I had art class that morning, with a full two hours of clay sculpture scheduled. Normally I’d have looked forward to it; to spending time doing the one thing that made me feel entirely comfortable in my own body. Not to mention the fact that it didn’t matter, in art class, if anyone wanted to talk to you or not. If you belonged or not.