The Year of the Gadfly (2 page)

***

The next morning, I woke up inside the cotton-candy cyclone of Lily's pink sheets. Sun streamed through the window, illuminating just how little unpacking I'd accomplished the previous night. The problem was Lily's stuff. Glossy magazines lined the shelves along with stacks of CDs including the likes of Pink Floyd, the Ramones, and some heavy metal–type album hand-labeled
Sacrificial Lamb.
I wondered if Lily was schizo, because frilly room + hipster culture + metalhead = Total Confusion. There was only one empty shelf in the whole room: directly across from the bed and bearing a single book, its cover facing out like a bookstore staff pick.

I climbed out of bed and pulled the book down. The dark blue cover bore an ornate faded script:
Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth's Mysterious Biology.
I gently opened the flap, and the book released a puff of dust. Coughing, I turned to the title page and read the inscription:
To Lily, marvel of my life. Justin.

A boyfriend,
I thought, swallowing a pebble of bitterness. But there was no reason to feel competitive. Just because I was living in Lily's room didn't mean I had to be her equal in all things. Not to mention the fact that my journalistic ambitions gave me little time for boys.

I replaced the book and moved on to Lily's dresser. Was I supposed to pretend my underwear wasn't sharing a drawer with somebody else's? I fingered a plain cotton bra (34A) and a pair of cotton undies (size Small). I was smaller than her, but my breasts were a lot larger—so there! Only then I felt guilty; Murrow would not approve of petty snooping.

 

Later that day, my parents drove me to school for the pre-frosh ice cream social. The buildings on Mariana's campus were 150 years old, according to my new-student packet, and they loomed before us like a nineteenth-century castle upon the English moors. The majestic green fields and Gothic edifices (stone arches, ribbed vaults, and what looked like a couple of flying buttresses) were beautiful, but I felt a pang of paranoia. The place screamed asylum more than school.

We passed through the iron gates and parked outside Charles Prisom Hall. This was a fortress in its own right, and I imagined a dungeon below it, naughty students shackled to the walls. According to my packet, Prisom Hall included the main office, a refectory, and classrooms. But instead of bustling life, stillness prevailed: if I yelled, the walls would not only swallow my voice, but steal it from me.

Beside Prisom Hall sat Mariana Quarters, home to the library, Admissions, the Diversity Center, and the Development Suite. (What in God's name were they “developing,” and why did the activity require multiple rooms? It was enough to make a reporter shudder.) The final building was Henry Prisom Gymnasium, its synthetic tennis bubble a glaring aesthetic anachronism. These three structures, as well as the adjacent lower/middle school campus, were connected by a maze of slate walkways that bisected and intersected at the buildings like rivulets. According to my campus map the walkways stretched even farther, beyond the soccer goalposts, past the archery range, and into the woods that lined the school's eastern rim. Eventually they pooled together, dead-ending at a single dormitory.

“Known colloquially as the Outpost,” the student packet read, “this former dorm houses the occasional visiting sports team. Our students relish scaring their opponents with ghost stories about the Outpost's historied halls.” Talk about overselling a place. But the immediate buildings objected.
We are
all
historied,
their stone façades seemed to say,
and who are you to dispute it?

Suddenly a girl rushed by me, so close she brushed my sleeve, and jumped into an embrace with her friend, who was coming from the opposite direction. Their thin arms and long hair entangled, and laughter spilled from their mouths. Dalia and I used to laugh so hard we worried that our stomachs would explode. My nose twitched, the precursor of tears.
Keep it together, Dupont,
I thought, and put on Edward Murrow's
See It Now
stare, an expression that said,
Back off.

My parents were returning to the car. “See you in an hour!” my mother called. My father waved too, but he looked relieved, as though the car were suddenly lighter without my emotional burdens. The two girls had skipped off. I was stranded. What would Ed Murrow do, I wondered, and turning around, spotted a pale, skinny man not ten feet away. He had a sharp, devilish chin and a burst of flame-colored hair, and though he resembled an awkward schoolboy all the way down to the hands stuffed in khaki pockets, his expression of displeasure and intelligence suggested a serious adult. He scanned the crowd, shaking his head. He was upset. Here was a potential friend, I thought, someone who felt as out of place as I did. I shuffled a few feet closer. “Are you all right?” I asked.

The man snapped his head in my direction. “Excuse me?” His voice was inexplicably indignant.

I steeled myself against his scowl (now clearly directed at
me
) and reminded myself that it was a reporter's prerogative to address total strangers. “I didn't mean to pry,” I said.

“Oh, but you did. The empirical evidence of prying is quite clear.”

The man fixed his blue eyes on me, and I had the feeling that they were zooming in like camera lenses. I shrunk into myself. The way he stared at me, his unblinking eyes sliding over my face like some kind of retinal scanner, reminded me too much of Dr. Patrick. I shuddered at the thought of this stranger navigating my cerebral topography. I wanted to run away, vaporize if possible, but I couldn't move.

Then the man blinked. Now he was an ordinary person with a bored expression. “Shouldn't you be off chatting with your friends?” He nodded toward the ice cream tent. I detected more than a little disdain in his voice, as though to have friends among this crowd was the worst of all options.

I considered responding that I didn't have any friends here, but I didn't want to provoke him. “Sorry to bother you,” I mumbled, and hurried away without looking back.

The line in the ice cream tent was long, which was good, because it gave me something to do. I wondered what kind of ice cream Edward Murrow liked but decided he probably wasn't a dessert person. I wondered about Lily Morgan's pre-frosh social. As the headmaster's daughter, she must have had people flocking to her, if only to ingratiate themselves with her father. I imagined Lily as a girl whose life was a string of parties, dances, and dates. And at least one person had been genuinely in love with her.
Lily, marvel of my life.

At the front of the ice cream queue, the scooper—an older student who looked like he'd rather be spending his last days of summer freedom playing violent video games—handed over my cone and nodded for me to scram. I peeled away from the line and was again stranded alone. I edged through the tent until I found an empty spot from which to scan the crowd. The groups of students seemed to break apart and reconstitute in new configurations every few seconds. It was dizzying to watch. There was just a single person who wasn't moving: the red-haired stranger. His gaze zigzagged through the crowd, but when he found me, his eyes slammed into mine. He shook his head like I'd disappointed him—like I owed him something. This made no sense, but I felt rattled anyway.

When a student moved in between the stranger and me, I ducked into the crowd and tunneled through, moving away from his skinny body and red hair. Then I turned and fled. I spent the rest of the hour in the girls' bathroom, eating my ice cream in slow bites, waiting for my parents' return.

 

Ever since my mom caught me talking to Murrow, I'd been forced to confer with him on the sly. I stopped speaking to him aloud each night before bed and instead directed silent thoughts and questions his way. Maybe talking to an apparition was abnormal, but I didn't care. I'd read enough biographies and broadcast transcripts to fill in Murrow's side of the conversation, and if I was ever in doubt, I had only to follow one dictate: tell the truth, no matter how much it hurts. With this knowledge, I'd imagine Murrow in the room with me, the two of us speaking frankly about school, or the despicable state of the broadcast media (always a favorite topic), or my journalistic ambitions. It was a stark contrast to my conversations with other adults. Back in Boston, you could put a teacher or a parent within three feet of me, and within seconds I'd be drowning in pep talks and sympathetic smiles.

The night before I started school, I was in need of an intelligent exchange, something to distract me from the strange man at the ice cream social. I could still feel his gaze worming through my head, yanking at my secrets and fears like loose threads. I was hoping he worked in the creepy Development Suite and I'd have to see him approximately never.

It was easy to conjure Murrow. I thought about him for a minute and then there he was, standing on Lily's pink carpet in a Savile Row suit and his signature red suspenders. The glowing eye of his cigarette pierced the dark. It winked at me like it knew something I didn't.

“Thank God a person doesn't have to smoke three packs a day to be considered a real journalist anymore,” I said. “It's a disgusting habit.” Sometimes I called on Murrow for commiseration and ended up getting persnickety with him instead.

Murrow exhaled a cloud of cancerous smog.

“You lost a lung—or did you forget that little tidbit of your biography?”

Murrow pulled on the cigarette and said nothing.

“And you weren't even sixty when you died, which makes you pretty selfish. Think about how much more you could have done for journalism, and political integrity, and—”

“Iris.” Murrow's face hovered in the dark, close enough for me to smell his cigarette breath. “I know you're unhappy about being here. But think of Nye as a challenge. Have you ever known me to rest on my laurels?”

Even Edward R. Murrow sometimes spoke in clichés, which only proves how ubiquitous and insidious they are.

“What kind of challenge?” I sat up in bed.

“Well, I suppose”—and here Murrow spewed a stream of reeking effluvia from his lips as he considered his answer—“that your new home presents a challenge to do more than merely survive.”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“I know you plan to join your school newspaper,” he said. “But think beyond participation. Your goal should be revolution.”

“You should be careful with that kind of commie talk.”

Murrow chuckled. “Good night, Iris,” he said, his figure growing hazy. “And Iris?” Murrow sounded thoroughly pleased with himself. “Good luck.”

The room was silent. The darkness pulsed with tiny crackling dots. My eyes finally heavy, I drifted off to sleep, wondering why I really could smell Camels in the air.

 

The next morning, my dad dropped me off at school on his way to the hotel, and I walked through the long, vaulted corridors of Prisom Hall, my trusty briefcase at my side. Uniformed figures were everywhere, like in a room of mirrors, endlessly reflecting pleats and plaids. Comedians joke about members of other races looking identical, but they hadn't seen anything like this.

Inside my wood-paneled locker sat a sheet of paper with a newspaper-like masthead.

 

THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

“Carrying the Torch of Prisom's Party since 1923”

New-Student Edition

 

The rest of the page was blank. Then I noticed a small index card.

 

Dear Ms. Dupont. Welcome to your very first day at Mariana Academy! We are certain you will find this school to be everything you expected. Breathe deep.

 

I breathed.

 

You are smelling the rarefied scent of privilege being taken for granted. Your copy of
The Devil's Advocate
is blank as a symbol of your own clean slate at Mariana. For the sake of this community (and for your personal safety), we implore you: don't give us any muck to rake.

Sincerely,
The Editors

 

I looked around. A tall, dark-haired boy stood a few lockers down, organizing his books. “Excuse me,” I said, following the length of his gangly body until I located his face. (The face, it should be noted, wasn't unattractive.) “Do you know what this is?” I held out the blank newspaper.

“New students get those.” He resumed putting away books.

“But what's Prisom's Party?” Whoever they were, I didn't like the fact that they knew which locker I'd been assigned before I did. Meanwhile, the boy didn't turn his head, and I couldn't tell if he was rude or just shy. “I'm Iris,” I said.

“Peter,” he mumbled, still focused on his books. “Just don't cheat or lie and you'll be fine.”

Was the presumption at Mariana that I would? The indignity!

 

I walked into biology, and like a smack in the face, there stood the austere man from the ice cream social, his orange hair a volcanic eruption atop his pale forehead. He lorded over the teacher's desk, his eyes following me to my seat.

The man cleared his throat, kneaded his hands together, and ran his fingers through his frantic hair. He looked angry, as though we'd already done something egregious.

“I'm Dr. Kaplan,” he said, his voice grainy. “I hold a PhD in microbiology from UCLA. For the purposes of this class, however, you can call me
Mr.
Kaplan. I know there are English faculty who insist on the title ‘Dr.,' but as far as I'm concerned, such an appellation is bullshit unless you can save somebody's life, which I most probably cannot.”

Mr. Kaplan paused, then nodded slowly. “I raise the topic of bullshit—because I will not tolerate it in this room.”

The double mention of bullshit made a couple of kids snicker.