The Society of S (11 page)

“I’m home-schooled,” I said.

She didn’t seem convinced. “Do your parents know that you’re here?”

I thought of telling her the truth: my mornings were my time in which to study as I pleased, before I met with my father after lunch. For some reason, I didn’t think she’d believe me. So I said, “Of course.”

“What’s your home telephone number?” she asked. And like a fool, I told her.

Next thing she was talking to my father. While we waited for him to arrive, she had me sit on a chair before her desk. “I’ve seen you in here many times,” she said. “Are you always Googling vampires?”

Like a complete idiot, I smiled. “I find them interesting,” I said brightly.

I must confess that when my father finally swept into the library, his long black coat buttoned to the chin and black hat pulled almost to his eyes, the librarian’s reaction was something to see. Her mouth dropped open, and she let us leave without saying another word.

But on the drive home, my father said plenty, ending with: “— and so you have managed to disrupt an important experiment, whose results may now be compromised, and for what? To annoy a librarian with questions about
vampires
?” But his voice held no emotion; only his choice of words, and the slightly lower tone of
vampires
, let me know that he was angry.

“I never asked her questions,” I said. “I was trying to do some research on the computer.”

He didn’t say more until we were back home, and he’d put the car away. Then he came into the front hallway and began to unwind the scarf from his neck. “I suppose it’s time we talked” — he paused to remove his coat — “about giving you your own computer.”

By the time Kathleen called a few nights later, I was the proud owner of a sleek white laptop with a wireless Internet connection. I told her the story of its acquisition; it was rare that I had anything interesting to talk about lately, and perhaps that’s why her calls had grown infrequent.

Kathleen responded to the tale of the evil librarian with appropriate “You did not!”s and “Really?”s. “You should have lied,” she said when I’d finished. “You could have given her the wrong phone number. You could have given her our number, since nobody’s at home during the days.”

I admitted that I hadn’t been clever with the librarian.

“But it all worked out,” Kathleen said. “Your dad’s not mad — he bought you your own computer. You’re so lucky.”

I didn’t think luck was a factor, but I kept quiet. The computer, it occurred to me, was a convenient means for my father to avoid answering my questions. He seemed to want me to find the answers on my own.

It was around this time that I attended my first dance.

Michael telephoned (for the first time ever) to invite me, and he sounded nervous. “It’s just a dance,” he said, sounding needlessly argumentative. “It’s the stupid school Halloween dance.”

Halloween was not celebrated at our house. Every October 31, Root pulled all the window shades and locked the door. No one responded to the occasional pounding of the door knocker. Instead, my father and I sat in the living room playing cards or board games. (When I was younger, we’d also played with a
Meccano
set, which we used to build a machine that moved pencils from one end of the dining room table to the other.)

We were particularly fond of
Clue
, which we played in rapid games never lasting more than three turns each; at the McGarritts, I learned that others took much longer to solve the crimes.

I told Michael I’d have to ask my father’s permission. When I did, my father surprised me. “It’s your decision,” he said. “It’s your
life.”
Then he turned back to his reading, as if I weren’t there.

Kathleen found time to talk to me about what to expect at the dance. She said she was busy after school most days with rehearsals for a class play and with flute lessons. But as it happened, she would be free on Wednesday after school, and we could meet downtown at the thrift store to hunt for costumes.

I was examining a rack of dresses when she rushed in. She’d had her hair cut so that when she stopped moving, it fell to frame her face. “You look cool!” she said to me, and I said, “So do you.”

But I thought that the Kathleen who met me at the thrift store wore too much makeup. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, and her hair had been dyed black; it was darker than mine. “You’ve changed,” I said.

She seemed pleased to hear me say it. “My new look,” she said, lifting her hair to show me her ears. Silver hoops and studs punctured her lobes and upper ears — I counted seven on each ear.

We hadn’t met for nearly two months, and I’d begun to think our friendship was at an end. But her eyes glistened with affection.

“I have so much to tell you,” she said.

We worked our way through the clothes, pulling out hangers, nodding or grimacing, as she talked. The smell of mothballs, stale perfume, and sweat was intense, but somehow not unpleasant.

The news from the McG house wasn’t all good. Bridget had developed asthma, and her wheezing kept Kathleen awake some nights. Mr. McG was being treated badly by the local supermarket where he worked; they made him work weekends now, because someone else had quit. And Mrs. McG acted “all worried” about Michael.

“Why?” I asked.

“That’s right, you haven’t seen him lately.” Kathleen shook a pink satin dress, then shoved it back into the rack again. “He’s let his hair grow, and he’s got into some trouble at school. He’s developed a major attitude.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. “Do you mean he’s a bully?”

“Michael a bully?” She laughed. “No, more kind of uncooperative and intense. He’s reading about politics a lot. He acts mad most of the time.”

That could be interesting
, I thought. “What’s he wearing to the dance?”

“Who knows?” She pulled out a tight-fitting black sequined dress. “You are so trying this one on.”

I ended up wearing that dress. Kathleen found one in red satin, vnecked front and back. She said we should wear masks, but I preferred not to.

On Halloween night, Michael showed up at our front door wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with the word ANARCHY painted across it. He didn’t wear a mask, either. We looked at each other with relief.

His hair had grown past his shoulders, and he was thinner than I remembered. His dark eyes seemed larger and his face smaller. We stayed in the doorway examining each other, not saying a word.

Some movement behind me made me turn around. My father stood by the wall, watching us; on his face was an expression of utter revulsion. I’d never seen that face before. His eyes and mouth turned downward at their corners; his shoulders pulled back, rigid, and his chin jutted forward. I said something inane (“Hello?”), and he twitched — an odd spasm that briefly convulsed his face and chest. I must have blinked, I thought then, because he suddenly wasn’t there.

When I turned back to Michael, his eyes were still fixed on me. “You look,” he said, “different.”

Michael drove us to the school.

In the backseat, Kathleen and her friend Ryan, a short, blond-haired boy I’d met the previous summer, talked incessantly, often at the same time. Ryan wore a devil’s mask.

“Bridget whined all through dinner. She really wanted to come tonight,” Kathleen said from the backseat. “She felt she deserved it. This afternoon, when the school held the Halloween parade, she won a prize for best ghoul.”

Kathleen said that some parents had wanted to cancel the school’s Halloween events, claiming that they celebrated Satan. She and Ryan laughed loudly at that.

“It’s all my work,” Ryan said in a raspy voice, stroking the horns of his mask.

Michael and I didn’t say much. Sitting next to him excited me. I stole glances at his hands on the steering wheel, at his long legs.

I noticed that Kathleen had put on plenty of makeup; her face was white, her eyes were ringed with black, but somehow tonight the makeup made her look younger. I felt I looked much older. The black sequins outlined my body, showing the world a self I’d barely glimpsed before. The previous night, I’d had fantasies of sweeping across a dance floor, enthralling everyone in the room with my presence. The fantasies seemed possible, now.

The dance was held in the school gymnasium, and an enormous statue of Jesus, arms outstretched, welcomed us. As we walked in, everyone did seem to watch us. Michael and I didn’t look at each other.

The room was hot, and the smells of the people in it were overwhelming. It was as if every scent Kathleen and I had ever sampled at the drugstore — the shampoos, the deodorants, the colognes, the soaps — simmered in the dimly lit room. I took shallow breaths, afraid that I might faint if I inhaled more deeply.

Michael steered me toward a row of folding chairs against one wall. “Sit here,” he said. “I’ll get us some food.”

The music boomed from enormous black speakers set in the corners of the gym. The sound was too distorted for me to discern a tune or lyrics. Kathleen and Ryan were already gyrating on the dance floor. Kathleen’s dress picked up the ever-changing glow from a color wheel on the ceiling. The fabric looked as if it were on fire, then doused by blue water, then engulfed again by yellow and red flames.