The Wood of Suicides (7 page)

It was a half-hour walk from our side of the lake to the heart of Trinity Catholic College. Along the way, they pointed out an old building to me, boasting the ballroom where Homecoming, Winterfest, and other such events typically took place. “Homecoming is in the first week of October,” Amanda informed me. “You can only go if you’ve got a date, but don’t worry—we’ll get you one.”

Constructed a few decades before Saint Cecilia’s, the boys’ school was, according to Lee Walden, “Pure Collegiate Gothic.” Boys got about on bikes or loped along with gym bags, occasionally turning their heads at the group of us—though most of them, evidently, had somewhere else to be. When we reached the central plaza, however, with its low steps and decorative fountain, I was struck by the sheer number of boys in the area and how magnetically their eyes seemed to be drawn to our faces, chests, and legs. Suddenly, I felt exposed in my short, black skirt. “Of course, Siobhan and Hannah are right by the fountain,” Amanda said hypocritically, “They’re practically
begging
to get their T-shirts wet.”

“Look! Look! Tracey is talking to James Pemberton.” Marcelle waved gleefully across the plaza, “Trace-
yyy
! Hi-
ii
!”

“Shut up, Marcy. You’re going to get us kicked out.”

“Kicked out?” I ventured, timidly.

“Well,
technically,
we’re not supposed to be here without a visitor’s pass,” Amanda explained. “Really, we’ll be fine, as long as Marcy stops screaming and we stand off to the side somewhere. What about those trees there?” Without waiting for our approval, the busty Queen Bee led us into the shade beneath some yellow-green maples to the side of the plaza.

“Make sure you tell us if you see someone you like, Laurel.”

At Amanda’s behest, I cast my eyes over the smorgasbord of young males in the vicinity, attempting to control my under-enthusiasm. Flat-bellied. Spotted. Smooth-cheeked or, worse still, sporting pathetic pubic down. Every one of them lacking in the sublime qualities that made a man. Though my expression was hardly encouraging, my indifferently wandering eye seemed to be enough to make one boy nudge another. After a moment of conspiring, the pair were swaggering toward us: both tall, lean, brown-haired, unremarkable. “That’s Roy Chalmers, and that’s—oh, hi, Larry.”

“Mandy, Marcelle.” They grinned and nodded. Then, one of the boys—not the one whose eye I had caught, but the other—addressed me politely. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.” “

She’s our German friend!” Marcelle lied, laughing ecstatically.

“Guten tag,”
the eye-catcher said flirtatiously, with a solemn incline of his head. I glanced away, embarrassed for him. The other gave a Hitler salute, causing my friends to erupt into giggles.

“She isn’t really. She’s from Sacred Heart,” Amanda elaborated, once their laughter had died down. Before they could ask anything else about me, she changed the subject. “Hey, have either of you seen Seamus Head?”

“Who’s asking?” the saluter responded. He received a playful wallop.

“If you want, we can tell him you were looking for him,” my admirer offered.

“We’ll tell him you were
desperate
to find him . . .”

“Yes, tell him!” Marcelle nodded fervently.

“Shut up, Marcy,” Amanda scowled, “and Roy, don’t you dare. I just want to ask him if he’s signing up for Model Congress again this year.”

Across the plaza, Hannah Williams let out a squeal as one of the boys by the fountain attacked her with a spray of water. A grim-faced Trinity worker, some kind of groundskeeper or guard, emerged from behind the fountain and, with dark looks, sent Hannah and Siobhan packing. He began stalking across the plaza, toward our maple grove. “Oh,
merde,”
said Amanda. “Sorry, guys. We have to go.”

W
E
LEFT
Trinity the same way that we’d come, avoiding trouble by taking the rapid downhill path to the athletic fields. The only adult we saw between there and the plaza was a small, worn woman, walking two boys who seemed far too young to be of Trinity age. “Good morning, Mrs. H.!” Marcelle greeted her, as we passed her by outside the basketball courts. Mistrustfully, the mother looked up, then went back to wiping a snotty nose.

“Mr. Higginbottom’s wife,” Amanda explained. “It’s disgusting how many children they have.”

Marcelle disagreed: “When I’m married, I want a hundred babies!”

“Maybe you should ask Mr. H. if he wants a second wife,” Amanda said, provoking Marcelle into a fit of scandalized giggles.

The lake came into sight: a smudge of dark blue-gray beyond the gym and rowing shed. As luck would have it, three young males with overdeveloped deltoids, dressed in sweat-pitted tank tops, were filing out of the gymnasium. They spied us. They conferred briefly among themselves and, in a matter of seconds, were upon us. One of them swept Marcelle up in his arms, swinging her around, before passing her onto a friend, who did the same thing. Meanwhile, another boy—Seamus, presumably—was advancing on Amanda, attempting to cover her face with his stinking armpit. Both girls squealed in protest.

Suddenly as they had come, the young men were off. “Where are you going?” Amanda called after her beau. “Lunch,” he grinned over his shoulder. She stared after them, arms akimbo. Marcelle lay panting on the grass, where the boys had set her down, her denim skirt raised to her crotch.

F
OR
ALL
their antics, my friends were busy girls, with extracurriculars to occupy them in the hours between lunch and dinner. Amanda left with dull Graziella for clarinet practice; soon after, Marcelle went to her flute lesson, to be followed by an hour and a half of drama. Finally, divinely alone, I walked the red-azalea path to the library and borrowed a volume of Wordsworth, which I took along with me into the woods.

My laurel trees were just as they had been on Monday, listing toward one another, a shady and aromatic arbor. They grew among live oak, big-leaf maples, Pacific madrone, on the outer limits of the forest. In this part of the woods, there was still sunlight to be seen, falling in narrow, dusty beams through the canopy. I nestled into place between the two trunks and turned to the first page of
The Prelude.

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings . . .

At what point I set my book down, and abandoned myself fully to the heady scent of the leaves, the heady thoughts I had gone there to entertain, I don’t know. Suffice it to say, I remembered little of what I read that day.

D
OUBLE
MATH
on Monday mornings was a painful way to begin a week, if there ever was one. I had no friends in Mr. Slawinski’s math class, so was alone when I emerged back into the hallway at morning break, fuzzy-headed from too much algebra. On a whim, I decided to visit the English department.

I crossed to the humanities wing just in time to see Mr. Steadman’s blue-shirted back disappearing into the faculty lounge. The effect this had on me was entirely disproportionate, as I found myself beaming into the distance, long after he’d gone inside. A whack in the side from somebody’s satchel was what brought me out of my daydream. I moved along, only to spy an empty locker one classroom down from his.

I can’t overstate the important role that locker played for me over the following weeks. It was because of that locker that I was free to visit his department as often as I wished, even on Mondays, when my timetable was sadly Steadman-free. That day alone, I must have passed by his classroom four or five times. The movement aroused little suspicion, though Marcelle did furrow her brow when she came with me to dispatch some books before art class that afternoon. “I don’t remember your locker being up here.”

It was because of the locker that I came to know his timetable: to witness the ninth-graders lining up outside his room, as I collected my textbook for history on the floor below with Mr. Henderson; to slam the door and press my
Trésors du Temps
to my chest, arming myself for when I’d see him pass by, carrying a crate of books to his juniors. When I had math, gym, and biology, however, his room was always empty: the door open and the ceiling lights illuminating his absence.

I was purposefully forgetful, prancing off to French class with Amanda and Marcelle, then cursing myself (“
merde
!”) and telling them I’d once again forgotten my homework, my dictionary. It didn’t matter that I was earning myself a reputation for absentmindedness—the extra glimpse of him was worth it. Sometimes, passing each other in the hall, I would get more than a glimpse. Our eyes would meet and, for that brief moment, I knew that he saw me, that I was in his thoughts, whether he admitted it or not. Once or twice, a greeting was attempted, but this never worked out well. His mouth formed the words and my head jerked away, in what was meant to be a nod but looked more like a gesture of avoidance.

When walking with my friends, I ignored him entirely. I hoped to convey an aura of mystery and inaccessibility, as well as conforming to the accepted etiquette between teachers and students outside of class hours. No matter how well liked he was in the classroom, in the hallways he became invisible, as every other adult was, among the throngs of uniformed girls. There were some exceptions to these rules, but I didn’t understand them; didn’t understand how some could skip up to their favorite teachers and start conversing, right there in the open. I was distressed one day to witness from afar beautiful Kaitlin Pritchard, with her hair loose, talking to Mr. Steadman outside the English department. She was holding a box and shifting her weight from foot to foot; he was leaning close and, even from that distance, I could tell that he was laughing, enjoying her shiny presence. Did she know him, I wondered, or did she simply know, with the confidence of a girl much prettier than myself, how to charm him? I turned over both possibilities in my mind, unsure of which depressed me more.

I
HAD
questioned my friends about Steadman with little success, receiving only the vaguest replies when I asked them what they thought of the tall, dark, forty-something-year-old charmer who taught us Romantic poetry. “He’s okay, maybe a bit weird,” Amanda and Marcelle answered in more or less the same terms. “Why weird?” I tried not to look offended. “Oh, you know, the way that he goes on about things,” Amanda said. “Like he’s trying to show off how much he knows,” Marcelle added.