Mr. Flannery sighed. “I wish you sounded more like you really were sorry,” he said, “but maybe the honesty’s preferable; I get little enough of that in a day. Let’s hear your version of what happened out there and for God’s sake keep it short so I don’t have to be too late for my next class.”
Not ‘so we don’t have to be late,’ Ronan thought, not ‘our next class,’ and got a chill down his back. His Da was going to be furious; he could see it coming. But there was no help for it now. So Ronan told his story, and kept it short.
While this was going on Flannery turned himself away in the swivel chair and left Ronan looking at his profile, absolutely immobile, just an expressionless silhouette against the bright window. When Ronan was finished, Mr. Flannery let out a long breath as if he’d been holding it.
“Right,” he said at last, and turned back toward Ronan. His expression was peculiar: not angry, just his mouth drooping a bit at the corners. He looked disappointed, though at whom it was impossible to tell.
“I have to suspend you,” he said. “I don’t have a choice at this point; we’ve been down this road before, and anyway you picked the wrong target. Three days.”
Because of Seamus’s dad, Ronan thought, but didn’t say. “I understand, sir.”
“Problem is, I think you really do,” Mr. Flannery said. “Mr. Nolan, not that I make a habit of passing comments like this where the subject can hear them, but you’re not an unintelligent lad. Your grades are above average, which is disappointing when what I hear from your teachers is that you don’t seem to be working particularly hard or for that matter showing much interest in anything. Either you’re hiding your intellectual struggles unusually well, or we’re not working you as hard as you deserve in order to come up to your full potential. …Whatever that might be. Hard to get a sense of it when you mostly seem busy demonstrating how completely the worm’s turned since you’ve put on three inches and half a stone.”
Ronan could have said something pointed about none of the teachers doing that much to keep the worm from being stomped on previously, but for now he concentrated on keeping his mouth shut. In those few moments he became aware that Flannery was watching him do this, and seemed to be approving of it.
“You want to watch out for that,” Flannery said. “Don’t let vengeance turn into a habit. It’s fun at first, but it’s a drug. You start needing more and more and eventually you find no matter how much you get, it’s never enough.”
This time there was a sense that the man was waiting for an answer. “Yes, sir.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Flannery said, standing up and picking up one of the dictionaries. “You’re excused. You know I’m going to have to write to your parents about this.”
“Yes sir.” Ronan couldn’t quite keep himself from making a face.
“Such is life,” Flannery said, and made a face of his own, a grimace of faint disgust. “That’s your cross to bear. Go on now. But Nolan? One thing.” Flannery’s eyes were hard as they caught him turning toward the door. “Your version of what happened matches all the others I’ve heard except McConachie’s, which didn’t mention so much as word one about what he’d been saying to make you go off pop. So good on you for showing him that that kind of garbage may fly some places but not everyplace. Get out of here now and keep a low profile for the rest of the term, and it’s possible that letter I have to write will fail to make it into your permanent file at the end of the year. ”
“Uh. Thank you, sir,” Ronan said.
“For God’s sake don’t thank me, you’re making my teeth hurt,” Mr. Flannery said. “Just go now.”
Invocation
So Ronan went to his locker and got his coat, and then did the only thing he could think of to do: he got out of town.
There wasn’t that much choice about which direction to go, really. If he went anywhere near Bray’s busy high street he’d inevitably be seen, and somebody his family knew—either just passing through, or in one of the shops—would tell his folks. If with some thought of lying low he went home, his Da would know he was there, because their house alarm was on text alert during the daytime, and Ronan’s unlock code was different from the carer’s. And no point in making up some story about being worried about Nan, because Da’s suspicious enough that he’ll call the school and find out what happened.
There was nothing for it but to go right out of town the back way, toward Bray Head. There were all kinds of tracks and outlook spots up there: he could sit there and wait until the school day was over, then make his way home on his usual schedule. When Flannery had said “write to your folks” he’d most likely meant by post instead of email: the school was still old-fashioned that way, something to do with email notifications not being legal enough. So if Ronan kept his mouth shut, he had at least a chance of one more quiet evening at home before the axe fell with the breakfast-time post. Tomorrow morning early, before it arrives, I can tell them then….
At that thought the feeling of immediate dread that had been twisting Ronan’s guts up receded a little. For the moment, tomorrow morning seemed a long way off. Until then he could do what he liked.
Right, then. He cut across the grounds to one side of the drive, heading catty-corner for where the school’s road hit the main one. There he hopped the low wall around the grounds and started heading off in the direction of the crossing he and Pidge had used that morning.
Of course he then had to deal with someone he always passed on the way to school. This morning, when the emotional weather had been fair and he’d been busy chatting with his friend, he hadn’t even noticed her. But sure enough now as he came to the corner he felt her eye on him, and stopped for a moment.
It was the statue of the Holy Virgin, of course, that belonged to the church next door. Presentation College was after all named after the feast day of the Presentation in the Temple, and after Our Lady of the Presentation. So there Herself stood in one of the traditional statue poses, arms a bit out as if saying “Look what they made me stand on, could I ever have a flat floor for a change,” and under her feet was the globe of the world. Between her and it was a fairly dispirited-snake, standing in for Satan and looking a bit squashed. The height and size of the statue, though, and the angle of the tilt of her head, made it look as if Herself was looking down at Ronan, and with a slightly severe expression.
“And what’re you lookin at?” Ronan growled.
After a moment, though, he felt shocked at his rudeness, considering what his Mam would have said if she’d heard him. She always stopped and crossed herself when she passed the statue, and sometimes (if she wasn’t in a rush) had brief conversations with it, always being careful to make sure no pedestrian was close enough to see it happening: as careful as Ronan was about not having his talking-to-himself overheard. But though his Mam’s respect had rubbed off on him a bit over time, right now Ronan’s foul mood left him unable to quite stop scowling.
The Blessed Virgin stood there looking unmoved by his snit, the statue’s half-closed eyes and neutral expression leaving him feeling as if he was being not-too-positively judged. Ronan let out a breath and sagged against the low fence there, and glanced down at the snake. “Just wasn’t your day when you decided to get troublesome, was it,” Ronan muttered. “Mine either at the moment.”
The snake remained squashed-looking and oblivious to this sentiment. Nearby the light changed and traffic started going by as usual, and Ronan just stood there feeling sore and raw around the edges—strangely bare and exposed for some reason.
It’s because I’m not where I’m supposed to be.
Wherever the feck that is.
“Sorry,” he said to the statue after a moment, not looking up. “Not your fault. Just a bad day. See you later, yeah?”
He turned away from the statue and started making his way up along the road, hardly noticing as it gently began to climb. Landscape too familiar to pay attention to—occasional houses and vacant lots and the small industrial e
state that housed the old hard-drive place—fell away behind him unnoticed on either side as he walked and thought. His mood was darkening again; not so much with thoughts of what had gone wrong today—that was just a set of predisposing factors—but of things that were wrong generally: in his life, in the world.
It was something he usually gave no more thought to than he had to, but today the sad and angry thoughts seemed to be pressing themselves in on him, as if taking revenge for being too often pushed away. No matter what I do, Ronan thought as he stalked along with his hands shoved in his pockets, no matter how I act… it’s no use. I just don’t fit in. Anywhere… anytime. I just don’t fit.
He couldn’t remember when that idea had first come to him, or when he’d first realized clearly enough what was going on with him to express it to himself that way. It was so private a realization, so intimate, that he’d never mentioned it to another soul… and in a way it was worse because of that. But Ronan could just hear the easy denials that would come out of his Mam or Da if he said something like that to them. He could just hear Pidge’s complete incomprehension. And there was no one else in the world who was anything like close enough for Ronan to dare to tell.
Because all of them, even the closest ones, they all have these expectations of me. All these ways they think I will fit in, eventually, if I just do what they tell me. He sighed, pausing for a moment at the roundabout where Briar Wood Road came up from his left to meet the main road, and stood there gazing up at the patched green and brown and stone-gray of the Head sloping steeply up and away from him. Trouble is, when I do try doing the things people want, it never seems to work. They get disappointed, I get mad…
A couple of cars came down the hill on the main road, heading down toward town, passed him by. Their sound faded into silence behind him. Ronan glanced up at the Head again, noting some tatters of gray cloud blowing past: not rainy looking. Okay, he thought, considering his next move.
When he’d walked out of Flannery’s office and started planning where he’d go, Ronan would have preferred to stay in the school grounds and go straight out the back to Newcourt Road and then to Briar Wood Road, which led by small house-lined cul-de-sacs to the walking trail that climbed up to Bray Head Cross at the hill’s top. That way he wouldn’t have to pass the turnoff for his own house, and maybe have one of the family’s near neighbors see him. But the wall between the school and the Newcourt Road neighborhood was too high to get over without drawing a lot of attention. Of course, the route he was taking right now had its problems, too. One of the roads he’d need to take to get up onto the Head went through the edge of the housing estate where Pidge lived. If anybody there saw Ronan, especially during school hours, they might tell Pidge’s Mam, who’d tell his Mam… “Who needs security cameras around here,” Ronan muttered, “we’ve got our own local intelligence community…”
He made his way to the left around the roundabout and on down Briar Wood Road. Briefly before the road curved and the view was blocked by houses, he could see the Irish Sea, looking flat and gray and unremarkable except for occasional sliding patches of light where the sun had managed to break through the low cloud. Away out across the dull pewter-gray surface Ronan could see a white scratch on the water: the wake of the big catamaran ferry from Dun Laoghaire as it started one of its daily runs to Holyhead in Wales.
The sight of it brought up in him a sudden irrational desire to be on that boat—to be going somewhere else, being somewhere else, anywhere else besides where he was and what he was stuck being and doing. But that was about as likely to happen as Ronan was likely to suddenly win a trip to the Moon. I’m here, he thought, scowling again, and I get to go up and sit on the hill for the rest of the afternoon, and then go home.
So on he went through the day’s gray light, with every now and then a patch of sun sweeping by, there and gone again, always swallowed up again by the gray within seconds: a frustrating reminder of all the bright things it seemed just wouldn’t or couldn’t last. The houses Ronan passed looked gray and everything was dulled as he made his way around the curve and down to the cul-de-sac at the end of Briar Wood Road. It ended in a downslope and a hedge and a breezeblock wall separating the housing estate from the road up the Head on the far side: but there was no need to deal with those.
Off to Ronan’s right was a field just sheening over in new green, the fresh grass coming up through last winter’s worn-down, faded-beige stubble from when the hay was cut. He headed across that field to another hedge, hawthorn mostly, and pushed his way through it at one of the thin places, swearing at the thorns as he did his best to keep them from ripping his coat to ribbons.
A few of them got themselves well snagged into his coat regardless, and Ronan could just hear what his Mam would say when she saw the tears, even though they were only small. But that they’d happened at all just added insult to injury. One more thing, he thought, fuming. One more thing I don’t need right now.
Even the few patches of sunlight now lost themselves in the high featureless gray of the sky as Ronan made his way across the field and toward the gravel road that zigzagged up the northwest side of the Head, toward the low nondescript County Council road maintenance buildings up there. He had no intention of being seen anywhere near there—it would probably just get him in more trouble. He worked his way eastward and upward along that road, and at one point where it doubled back on itself and kept climbing, he crossed it and ducked into the cover of the scrubby gorse-ridden woodland on the far side.
Here Ronan felt he could breathe a little as he got out of sight among the skinny straggly pines. There were a lot of places up here where you could avoid being seen, if you knew where to hole up: spots from which you could watch one or another of the network of tracks that ran up to the top of the Head, and be completely overlooked by the passing tourists and walkers even when they were practically looking at you. Even here, from so close by as the narrow hikers’ track that ran alongside the woods, if you didn’t want to be seen, you wouldn’t be.
To Ronan’s annoyance, he found the feeling of relief shortlived. Shortly it began to morph into something like loneliness. Which is stupid, since I came up here to be alone! But it seemed like almost the whole day had been like that so far, as if something was working to frustrate his attempts to change his mood. Ronan stood there under the eaves of the wood with his hands shoved in his pockets, feeling twitchy in his skin.
Feck it all anyway, he thought. Holding still isn’t going to work. Just walk it off. He headed down to the east-running path, which was mercifully empty of any other traffic, and started to climb.
There seemed to be nothing interesting about the walk today, though, nothing that caught his interest: gray sky, gray sea, broken gray stones to either side, dulled-down half-brown grass and weeds to either side, gloomy woodland that hissed in the annoying sea wind that was hitting him in the face. And yeah, a spit of rain on it too. One more thing I didn’t need. Anything else going to go wrong? Because why not? Everything else has.
Ronan fell into a grim marching rhythm as he slogged upward and eastward along the track, and in time with the frustrated rhythm fell into a kind of silent recap or recitation of all the things that were wrong with life, that were wrong with him. School, of course. But then came the things that were wrong with home life, too. He thought of his Nan upstairs, getting less comfortable and less Nana-like all the time. He was filled with fear at the thought of the day that would eventually come when she wouldn’t be able to speak so easily, or maybe at all: when she’d look at him and not know who he was. The family would have to do what they’d been wanting so much not to, what Seamus had taunted him about: put her in a home. And she’ll die, Ronan thought. She’ll hate it so much that she’ll check right out.
He could think of no way that this could be stopped…no possible cause for optimism. It was as if Ronan could see it coming a long way off, unavoidable, like the light at the end of the tunnel in the old cruel joke: not a sign of anything
getting better, but actually an oncoming train.
He stopped short at a bend in the track and stood there staring out toward the water, upset enough at the moment that he hardly even saw what was out there. Ronan realized that he was shaking, and wondered how long that had been going on. Sea spray or the first hint of rain—hard to tell which, this close to the shoreline—sporadically blew fine and cold in his face, his eyes. All of a sudden Ronan felt like walking it off wasn’t an option: he just wanted to sit down somewhere and try to feel stable again.
There were benches down along the cliff walk that ran along the east side of the Head, but the cliff walk was the last place Ronan wanted to go, because there were likely to be people on it, tourists and whatnot. And the last thing he wanted to deal with right now was people.
Up the hill, he thought. There was a place further along toward the coast side of the Head where some big cracked rocks stuck up out of the broom plants and the scrubby furze, half concealed by them and overshadowed by a cluster of the skinny pines. More than once he’d sat up there on hotter, brighter days and found some shelter. Unless it really started pouring down, he’d keep dry enough there while he got a grip on himself again.
Ronan had to scramble a bit to get up the steepest part of the slope right near him, but a few minutes later he was nearly around the shoulder of the hill and in among the rocks he’d been heading for. It was easy to mistake them as a bunch of boulders from a distance, but they were actually frost-shattered fangs of gray limestone that had been left exposed years before when some of the hill slid away in the middle of a wet spring. The rough sharp-edged slabs made a kind of three-sided enclosure open toward the eastern side, with the biggest slab at the back leaning a little forward and giving partial cover. Pine needles from the trees nearby had blown through the gaps between the stones and had piled themselves deep between them over time, a brown springy cushion now a foot or so thick.