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Prologue
The man introduced himself on the phone as Michael Tayson, the new Swithin headmaster. “We haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet,” he said.
“Ah, yes, of course,” Sylvie said quickly, sitting up straighter. It was almost 9 p. m. on a Sunday night. A strangely intimate time, she thought, for a chat. “What can I do for you?”
“We have a bit of a situation,” Michael Tayson said.
For a moment, Sylvie wondered if she’d fallen through a pocket in time. Her sons, Charles and Scott, were still teenagers. They were upstairs in their rooms, doing their homework—or, in Scott’s case, not doing his homework—and it was Jerome Cunningham, the old headmaster, on the phone instead. He hadn’t retired yet, the boys hadn’t graduated yet, and James … well, James was still here, too, upstairs behind his closed office door. He could walk downstairs and she could still talk to him.
“One of our students passed away this morning,” Michael Tayson went on, bringing her back to the present. “We’re not sure how, but there are suspicions it might have been a suicide. His name was Christian Givens, a freshman. One of the scholarship boys. ”
Sylvie murmured how terrible that was, how sorry she felt for the family. All her years on the board, they’d had a few deaths—some car accidents, a case of Hodgkin’s lymphoma—but never a suicide, thank God. Was he looking for suggestions about memorial services?
The church clock down at the end of Sylvie’s drive bonged out the hour. “He was a wrestler,” Michael finally said. “Your son coached him. ”
“Oh,” Sylvie whispered.
“This is a delicate situation, obviously. We know how much you and your family … we know what you’ve done for us. But there might be questions. We’ll try as best we can to keep things out of the spotlight, but you have to understand that it might not be possible. ” He took a deep breath. “Scott’s job is all right for now. The season’s finished. Next season, we’ll have to see. This might blow over. ”
Sylvie stood up. “I’m sorry, what does this have to do with Scott?”
She heard a chair creaking and imagined that the man on the other end, a man she hadn’t yet met, was leaning back. Sylvie had been in the office the school reserved for the headmaster plenty of times, especially when Scott was a student. Jerome had never suspended Scott for anything, even though Sylvie assured him that he should treat Scott the same as any other student. She knew why he let Scott’s transgressions slide.
“There’s a rumor going around,” Michael Tayson said. “Apparently, there’s a lot of pressure among the wrestlers. Some of the boys couldn’t handle it. ”
“The weight-loss pressure,” Sylvie ventured, “to make their weight class. But doesn’t that happen on all wrestling teams?”
“This wasn’t the typical weight-loss stuff, no. ”
“Okay …”
He coughed weakly. “I’m not saying it’s true. I’ll say that up front. But I’ve heard that if a boy doesn’t perform well in the match, the boys … I’m not sure exactly what they do. There are beatings. Sometimes brutal, though you know boys—they hide these things if they can. No one wants to be the snitch; no one wants to look pathetic. There’s humiliation as well. I’ve heard … well, I’ve heard all kinds of things. It’s hard to say who’s doing it. It may be just a few boys, but we suspect the others stand around and, well, watch. It’s definitely bullying. Some may even call it hazing. ”
Sylvie felt dizzy. “Hazing,” she repeated slowly.
“I also heard that Christian was one of the boys who … didn’t perform well,” the headmaster said. “I doubt you would remember him from the matches—he was awfully small, didn’t get to compete much. Kept to himself. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for the wrestling team but, as you know, we encourage our boys to participate in sports …”
Outside, the porch light made the wet tree branches glitter. “How many people know about this?” She thought of this getting out, the community talking—people outside the Swithin family. Some would grab onto a story like this and hold tight. The school’s reputation suddenly felt delicate and precarious.
“We’ve tried to keep it quiet,” he answered. “Bullying is such a sensitive topic right now …”
Suddenly, Sylvie scoffed. “Who told you this crazy idea?” It couldn’t be true. Not at Swithin.
“I … I can’t say. ”
There was a tingling sensation in her stomach. “And are you implying Scott encouraged these boys to … ?” She trailed off, touching the mantelpiece.
“Of course not,” Michael said. “That’s not—”
“What about the head coach? Mr. Fontaine? What does he have to say?”
“He’s in England, visiting his mother. He left after the season ended. We’re trying to reach him. ”
“And how many boys on the team have corroborated this story?”
“I didn’t hear it from any of them, Mrs. Bates-McAllister. ”
“Well, there you go. ” Sylvie’s heart was beating fast. “Someone made this up. You know how teenagers get with rumors. You know how they embellish things. Something is whispered to one person and by lunch it’s a huge scandal. ”
There was a long pause. “I’m not suggesting I believe it,” the headmaster said. “I’m just explaining what I’ve heard. We take everything seriously, as you know. For now, I’m arranging for a few people to meet with Scott. It will be an independent council of teachers, none of your colleagues on the board. I don’t want this to get out of hand, either for us or for you. Your family has done so much for the school, after all. And I know there have been some attempts at … how shall I put this? Some attempts at character assassination, I suppose, regarding certain members of your family in the past. I assure you that I intend to be discreet. ”
Sylvie ground her nails into the fabric of the sofa. Character assassination. Discreet. He had a way of making the words sound so dirty. “This is unprofessional. ” She paced around the room. “You can’t call a coach in to talk to them about a ridiculous rumor. And you shouldn’t come to me with something like this unless you know. ”
“Calling Scott in to talk seems fair. If there was a rumor going around about someone else on the staff, another teacher, another coach, you would want us to feel that person out about it, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Bates-McAllister?”
When Sylvie pressed her hand to her forehead, she felt a muscle in her temple throb, a tiny flutter under her skin. She glanced out the window in the kitchen; Scott’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She dared to think of what he was doing: lifting weights at the gym, playing video games, driving the Mercedes too fast, whipping around the turns and grinding the gears. She thought of the jobs he’d held: the stint as an auto mechanic, mostly learning the ropes so he could soup up his own car, which he’d since crashed. Pouring concrete, coming home covered in gray film. Even that time he caddied at James’s golf club, though that had lasted only a day; he’d said the golfers were racist, giving him accusing looks as if he was going to walk off with their clubs. She’d felt urgently optimistic with each job he took, praying that this one would be his true path, the thing that set him straight. He quit each job after only a matter of weeks.
Something else appeared in her mind, too. When Scott was ten or eleven, she had come upon him in the basement. He was crouched in the corner, watching something. A mouse was trapped under a large glass vase, slowly suffocating. It clawed the sides of the vase, its little paws scrambling. How had it gotten there? It took her a few moments to understand. “Scott!” she’d cried out, but her voice was so weak, so ineffectual. Always so ineffectual. When he didn’t do anything, she’d pushed him aside, lifted the v
ase, and let the mouse go. Scott had looked at her like she was crazy. She complained about mice in the basement all the time—didn’t she want them dead? But it was Scott’s expression, as he’d watched the mouse flail under the dome that had made her set it free. The look on his face was one of iron-cold indifference, like he’d almost enjoyed the poor creature’s suffering.
Oh God, she thought now, a rushing feeling between her ears. Oh God.
“Mrs. Bates-McAllister?” the new headmaster said softly into the phone. “Are you still there?”
“Thank you for calling,” she said in the strongest voice she could muster. “But I think what you’re suggesting—”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” he broke in. “You’ve misunderstood—”
“—is a mistake,” she finished and hung up.
The living room was foolishly quiet. The antique armchair was tilted toward the bookshelf at a rakish angle. The old etchings of the Swithin School, commissioned by Sylvie’s grandfather and handed down to her when she had inherited this house, were at perfect right angles on the walls. Sylvie looked at the framed photograph of her grandparents that sat on the top of the sideboard. Her grandfather’s cunning, sepia-toned eyes seemed more narrowed than usual, as though he’d heard both sides of the phone conversation.
Oh, how she’d cared for everything in this house. How she’d taken pride in all its details, preserved it to the letter, thinking that keeping everything exactly the same would embalm the spirit and ideals of her grandfather forever. After all, this house essentially was her grandfather—the local press had dubbed it Roderick, the middle name he often went by. But the resemblance didn’t stop there. The old leather books on the shelves were like the wrinkled tops of her grandfather’s hands. The curled vines that climbed the stone walls were his thick mass of hair. The scalloped cornices on the porch resembled his mustache. Sometimes when Sylvie walked through certain rooms, she could still smell her grandfather—spicy, yet clean, like tobacco, and books and linen. She sometimes glimpsed a flicker out of the corner of her eye, a glimmer in a mirror, the wattage in a lightbulb adjusting— all signs, maybe, that he was watching.
Hazing. She couldn’t quite connect it to the meaning the new headmaster had given. She saw a fogged window instead, fresh with dew. A method used by pastry chefs to brown the top of a creme brulee. Hazing. It was too artful a word to have such a connotation.
“Well,” she said aloud, and brushed her already-clean hands on her pants.
She climbed up the staircase and stood in front of James’s office door. It had become her ritual to linger there for a moment before going in. Sometimes she even knocked, as if he were still inside. The room was colder and darker than the rest of the house. James had only been gone for two months, but the office had lost his essence—the general chaos of his papers, the constantly illuminated message light on his office line’s phone. All the books had been put away on the old bookshelves. James’s desk—a clean, modern thing of glass and metal that had long ago replaced Sylvie’s grandfather’s old, mahogany mammoth—had been wiped down weeks ago, not a fingerprint marring its surface.