"Ah yes." She kept glaring but a slight grin crept up. "Another illustrious member of the female student body bites the dust following your charming send-off lines."
"You don't know what she did first."
"Tell me," she said. I didn't think I could tell the principal that Callie McCabe sang the onion-ring underarm song right in the face of a sophomore with some sort of constant body rash.
"Let's just say I ought to listen to Emmett more about why he doesn't get in relationships. He keeps saying that really nice guys often find themselves attracted to really mean girls."
I looked at my watch without seeing the time, and forced myself back into composure, using my "nerves of steel," as my friends loved to call it. I looked Mrs. Ashaad dead in the eye until we'd both blinked about three times.
Her face relaxed finally, the smirk turning to a smile. "You'd be amazed at what your fellow students confess to when the principal calls them to the office for one thing, and they think it's something else. Out it comes. They're defending themselves before I ever have any idea what it is they've done."
I'd heard this about her. Somehow the rumor of her little tricks didn't prevent people from having vacuum-head when they got in here and spilling their guts about God knows what. Expulsion always hangs over your head in a Catholic school. I doubted kids in public school pissed themselves so easily in the principal's office.
"I'd say right now you're not looking too guilty of anything." She was opening a folder on her desk, but I didn't want to look down at it because she wasn't looking down yet. I was amazed at how other people could not read eyes like I could. This was the principal, for God's sake, and she couldn't see the sparks and seizures of guilt flying through my head. She looked down finally.
The upside-down Kids Helping Kids logo stared at me from a form.
"I want you to do a KHK service project for me, Evan." Mrs. Ashaad was filling out the form now, not looking up.
See, Barrett? You're having a lucky day. My only bad thought was that I wasn't sure I needed my heart to grow another three sizes, which is one of the "joys" of KHK projects. And I didn't see the need to shrink my kickback-and-relax hours three sizes again.
"God knows you did enough with little Miguel. I wouldn't ask you to do another long-term mentoring project this year. There's certainly not as much time involved in this one. A couple of visits should do it. I'm not saying it will be easy for you..."
She looked up at that point, but I was hung up on the statement before the last one. "A couple of visits? Doesn't foster care tell you that's not the way to approach a little kid?"
"This one isn't from foster care. It's a seventeen-year-old girl. She's in Saint Elizabeth's."
I just stared at her. Then I started shaking my head, though I wasn't sure which I was wary of: the seventeen part, the girl part, or the Saint Elizabeth's part. Saint Elizabeth's.
"She's in..." I almost said, the nuthouse. I shoved my fingers up to my lips. "What could I possibly do to help somebody like that?"
"Somebody like what?"
I got her gist pretty quick—people in mental-health facilities are not something to be stereotyped—but I was still completely baffled.
"I know she is not babbling and cracking into walls, if that's what you mean, Evan. I went to see her yesterday."
Mrs. Ashaad went to see her ... so this was a student from here. Maybe somebody I knew. "Mrs. A, if I were up in Saint Elizabeth's, I would not want anybody from school knowing where I was. I can't believe that she would want some guy to—"
"She asked for you."
I sat there in stunned silence, all What the hell?
"Her family spends the summers in West Hook." She watched me, and I stared just as blankly. So I had lived in West Hook a long time ago. That didn't make me a psychotherapist.
"And?"
"She was out sailing, and there was an accident. She hasn't been able to get past it."
She kept staring, and behind her eyes I could see only black, like a major disturbance in the Force. I kept shaking my head because I didn't get how this related to me, and then suddenly I did. But it still didn't make a whole lot of sense.
I laughed a little, then quit to say, "Okay, so you think ... because I lost parents in a boating accident way back, half my lifetime ago ... that I could be of some help to a girl who had a boating accident last summer?"
She nodded, watching me. I thought of my parents sometimes. When I did, I usually saw one thing in my head: the color gray. Like a gray door; like a hatch onto a roof that was gray, locked, nailed shut. I mean, I had nice little^ memories of playing Frisbee with Dad, and Mom making me laugh sometimes. I wasn't some total repressive. I just liked my life with Emmett and Aunt Mel and didn't feel the need to go into that memory bank very often.
I got sort of edgy watching Mrs. Ashaad fill out something that said "Underage Visitor's Pass" at the top. I tried to stay calm but couldn't help remembering last year: I'd had some very bizarre memory surges after some poor excuse for a human being actually slipped me acid at a party. I was too drunk for it to register until I was home in bed. Some totally great memories from my childhood surprised me by showing up ... and then they changed.
At that point I figured somebody must have messed with me because I'm not normally so mentally energetic. But I got up out of bed and wrote down every last thing about my parents' deaths like it was happening again before my eyes. I thought it had to be some bizarre truth serum, some memory drug that someone had slipped me. But Emmett hauled me down to Pennsylvania Hospital the next afternoon because I was remembering some shrieking so plainly that I was actually holding my ears. He didn't like to talk about West Hook any more than I did, and he was also scared shitless that I might be dead of some drug poisoning by nightfall.
The hospital lab showed it was just a small dose of LSD-25, which usually wears off in three to four hours. It had worn off. The only problem was that I was left with these awful memories. They didn't wear off so easily.
I spent the school week zombified, then took my first trip to West Hook in a long time. I had such a bizarre experience down there that whenever I thought about it, it still seemed like a dream. The only important thing is, I came back with my sanity again, with a sixteen-year-old head on my shoulders, no longer wondering if my parents could have been eaten by something I had at one time called The She.
Emmett would not have approved of my methods for getting my sanity back. So I never told him about going to West Hook. I never told him about the writing I did under the influence, either.
"I don't see how I could help some sick girl, Mrs. Ashaad. I was just a little kid who, you know, saw it through a little kid's eyes, and eventually forgot a lot of it."
"She's getting professional help. No one expects you to be a shrink. She just seems to want to talk to someone who's been through something similar to what she's been through. That's a normal, human response. I'm assuming it wouldn't hurt you to talk to a person in need."
"No ... no," I muttered, but my mental alarm bell was going off madly. Emmett explains away my intuition as just me having a really keen perception for small details. Maybe a lot of the time that's true. Like I noticed Mrs. Ashaad had been careful not to mention the person's name—almost as if it was important for me to commit myself before she said who it was. Like maybe I knew this person and wouldn't want to go.
She tore me off a yellow copy of the form, and I saw "Grey Shailey" written there, and the walls moved three feet inward. Her best friend's voice whizzed through my head with some tale of Grey being in Maine for the past three weeks because her grandmother was dying. I dropped my hand on my knee, thinking, Your lucky day, huh?
I do feel like an extremely lucky person, but I'm also aware that there's a catch. When I'm unlucky, it's almost beyond human comprehension—like losing both parents.
"Grey Shailey had a boating accident, and somebody died," I heard myself say, and didn't quite believe it. So I repeated it. "A boating ac
cident."
"Yes."
"Jesus. That's almost enough to make you believe in—"
I stopped short of saying "the she-devil of the hole," because I'd just taken the Lord's name in vain, and sometimes Mrs. Ashaad could write you up for that, depending on her mood. I just sat there apologizing, trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe.
I've solved a few mysteries since I sat staring at this form and this visitor's pass. But I'll admit, there are some things that will never be explained to me, maybe because the answers don't exist. I can't explain how the girl who was responsible for my acid-inspired memory surges ended up in a boating accident nine or ten months later. It ranks right up there with your mother accidentally sending her Mayday over the ship-to-shore instead of the ship-to-ship, while you're playing with your toys on the floor.
"I'll go," I told Mrs. Ashaad, and stood up. I had a thought that maybe this wasn't so unlucky. I wasn't concerned with Grey Shailey messing me up. She'd thrown me for a loop by slipping me acid and thinking she was so goddamn funny. But I got past it; I'd been fine about West Hook again for nearly a year: I was more concerned with how gratifying it might be to see her in hospital clothes, not looking so beautiful and stuck-up for once.
TWO
When I got home after soccer practice, the light was on in the study. "Emmett?"
"I'm here."
I wandered in and threw my backpack and coat down beside his reading chain He was facing his monitor with his back to me, looking at a page full of small type.
"Aren't you supposed to be teaching tonight?"
"The week before Thanksgiving, the university does a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday schedule on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It's something I don't quite understand. It must have to do with dollars and cents." He beckoned at me without turning around. "But it means I can sit here and start the final chapter of my dissertation. Read that line."
I looked where his finger pointed and read, "'Saussure discovered that the relation between the sign and signifier is arbitrary.'"
"Do you have any idea how significant that has long been to literary theory? To philosophy in general?"
I patted him on the head, watching him stroke his beard contentedly. There was a bowl of pears on top of his bookshelf. Aunt Mel was great for putting bowls of fruit around. I reached for one, felt it was soft, and bit into it, sucking the juice down the back of my throat.
"And if the university thinks it's Thursday, I take it Aunt Mel is teaching."
"The university doesn't think; the university knows. If the university says it's Thursday, then it's Thursday." He turned and looked at me, his eyes glowing with pride over his dissertation.
He pointed to my pear. "The way we think of and speak of this pear, that is known as the sign," he said, then pointed to his mouth. "The word alone, pear, is a signifier."
I stuck the juicy thing to my mouth for another bite. "If it is Thursday, how come we're not sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner? You hear from Opa yet? We doing dinner at the Hyatt as usual?"
He sighed. "I wish. Opa's having problems with his diabetes again. Circulation. He's having some pain in his legs and doesn't want to drive up here on Thanksgiving."
I flopped into Emmett's reading chair and groaned. Opa had open-heart surgery the year our parents died, which had thrown his diabetes over the top, forcing him to sell his business and take it very easy, though he still enjoyed monthly trips to Philly to see us. I didn't like to think of Opa in pain, but I liked my family traditions un-tampered with. Opa had taken Aunt Mel, me, and Emmett to the Park Hyatt for Thanksgiving dinner for the past seven years. It was a great spread, with everything from turkey to Maine lobster on the buffet.
"He can get a massage in the spa before we eat," I argued. "Besides, he doesn't drive. He gets driven. What the hell is the difference?"
"I guess that's what happens when one lives in a society where some have more money than others. Those with the money get to make all of the decisions. The decision is ... drumroll ... we are going to East Hook. He's having dinner catered at the house."
I shuddered, watching Emmett's back as he turned to face his monitor again. Aunt Mel was a philosophy professor who had "discipled" Emmett, as they loved to joke, and both were socialists. It sounds crazy to your average American, and I'd found out not to broadcast it. But it seemed there were a lot of people like that at universities, especially in the philosophy departments. What made our situation even funnier to average people was Opa. He had an endless, sprawling house and had owned an endless, sprawling business. We're talking major capitalist here. Emmett told me once that his wealth exceeded that of two recent presidents.
Emmett disliked my grandfather's house even more than I did. The place was right on the bulkhead of the harbor and it had huge windows in every room. If you looked out any one of them, you would think you were on a boat.
"I hate being inside that house," I told him, shaking my head in disgust. "Everywhere you look, there's water."
"Yes. It could make you seasick. I'll pack us some Dramamine." He typed a few words and stuck up one finger: "Actually, the water doesn't make me as bilious as the collections. It's inconceivable to me why one man needs fifteen ship models, and all the while his housekeeper has to rely on that ridiculous excuse for a public school down there to educate her offspring." He spun around and grinned sympathetically, watching me glare and chomp. He pointed again. "Sign, signifier. If the relationship between the thing and its word is arbitrary, that makes language everything."
"I don't want to go. Maybe I'll go to Harley's. Thank God I never went out with her. That's one friendship I'd hate to ruin."
"Everything, Evan. You don't get it." He spun back again, having some sort of subtle, educated glee-fest. "It means that if we didn't have language, we couldn't think, at least not in concepts. We wouldn't know anything."
"So?" I turned the pear around and looked at the chomped part. I didn't know if I agreed with him. "I'm starved. And even if I didn't know this pear was called a pear, I would still eat it. Aunt Mel leave anything in the microwave?"
"She said to order in Chinese."
I groaned and reached to pick up the cordless beside him. "I'm going to turn into a Chinese person if I eat any more beef and broccoli."
"Now, now." That was Emmett's shortened version of a lecture on how Americans ought to not complain about all their food choices. "If you're sick of Chinese, try Japanese. That sushi place is delivering now—"
I shook my head at his brilliance. "Why would I want to eat raw fish tonight, when I've just been informed I'm going to the shore on Thursday, and I'll have to smell it wafting off the beach?"
"Then get a pizza! It's food. Food is for the belly. Language is for the mind. And that's what I mean when I say everything is learned through language. If language is the source for every idea you have, then there is no other source."
I hit speed dial ten, which was pizza. "Pepperoni?"
"That's fine. I'll have to try this out on Mrs. Ashaad next time she asks why I won't say grace at her table."
I had about ten seconds to figure out he was saying that God is a man-made concept that came with language. By the time I ordered a pizza and hung up, I could barely remember Emmett's argument leading up to it. That's how philosophy was for me. It was like chinning yourself on a bar with one arm. You can't stay up there for too long.
"Why is it so important to you to disprove Mom and Dad's Catholicism and everything else, Emmett?"
"It's not," he said, typing a few more words. "I just want to understand what's completely true. The religious angle just happens to be a by-product."
I finished my pear, staring at his back, not exactly believing him. "Nah. You're on a soapbox. That's what I think. And I think you ought to leave Mrs. Ashaad alone and let her believe whatever she wants to believe. That's one thing about America. We've all got rights."
"True."
"Mrs. Ashaad gave me a new KHK project today, speaking o
f her." I tossed the pear core into the wastebasket, choosing my words a little carefully. "Only, it's not mentoring this time. If you can believe this, she wants me to go see a girl up in Saint Elizabeth's. She had some sort of a boating accident in West Hook last summer. Mrs. Ashaad says she's haunted by it, though I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it."
"Haunted. That's such a dirty, nasty, little word. In other words, there's a deceased."
"Yeah."
"And Mrs. Ashaad thinks you can help her?" He spun slowly this time and stared at me. No smile.
I nodded. "Actually, it's worse than that. She said the girl herself asked for me. She must have heard about Mom and Dad somewhere along the way."
"I can't tell you what to do, but ... I really wish you would pass this one up for something else."
I could think of a dozen reasons why I shouldn't go, but nothing he would know too much about. I had always been careful not to mention Grey as the source of the acid I took last year. After taking me to the hospital screaming about West Hook, Emmett might have found some enjoyment in calling the cops on her. I had wanted to kill Grey, but I wasn't sure I wanted to get her expelled and busted, if that makes any sense.
"Why shouldn't I go?"
He drummed his fingers on his jeans, almost nervously. Finally, he said, "You were very young, Evan. Even with your bad experience last year; there's a lot you still don't remember. Believe me, it was a very, very bad business down in West Hook. Aunt Mel and I have done our best to create a very nice life for you up here. I don't want any girl perchance throwing you into another tailspin. I'm sorry for her, but there are plenty of professionals available for her to talk to."
A very, very bad business. I thought that was a good expression for an atheist to come up with, somebody who could no way, no how, consider the existence of some superstition about the canyons off the Jersey coast. Well, I didn't believe in any she-devil, either—except maybe the one I was going to visit tomorrow.