know if I think one of these rich kids is getting away with murder?” She craned her neck to give herself room but managed to get the microphone in front of his mouth. “The answer is, yes, I do. Jamie Amory. My daughter dumped him months ago and he couldn’t handle it, couldn’t handle being said no to, so he decided to make her pay.”
“But Jamie Amory has an alibi,” she pointed out.
“His alibi’s shit! He’s shit! A rapist and a murderer!”
Hearing these words, the reporter’s sympathetic cow-eyed expression vanished and she smiled. When she did, I saw her teeth, and my heart sank. They were small and sharp and inward-sloping: the teeth of a predator. The smile didn’t last long, though. Was wiped off her face when Dad threw down the garbage lid, wrapped his fingers around her wrist.
“Shit!” he said, squeezing. “Do you hear me? Shit, shit, shit!”
She began to arch backward, a panicky look in her eye.
“Hey, pal,” the cameraman said, “hands to yourself, okay?”
Dad spun around. “Who are you calling pal, asshole?” And, letting go of the reporter’s wrist, he swung out.
Unbelievably, he connected with the cameraman’s jaw. There wasn’t much force behind the punch. It probably didn’t feel too nice, though, and, once the cameraman shook it off, he carefully placed his equipment on the ground and threw a punch of his own. He was a middle-aged guy and out of shape. Still, he had a good three inches and thirty pounds on Dad. But as he pitched forward his suede boot slipped on the grass, so that his punch ended up being even weaker and more off-target than Dad’s. Until that moment, I’d thought all violence was agile and sure-footed, almost balletic-looking, as it was in the movies. I was surprised to see how awkward it really was, how clunky and no-rhythm. The two men, panting and grunting, taking time out from combat to bend at the waist, wheeze and suck air, exchanged graceless blow after graceless blow until, finally, Dad fell on the sidewalk with a thud, not because the cameraman landed a KO, but because Dad took a wild overhand right that missed everything and lost his balance.
For a while he lay there on the asphalt, either resting or passed out with his eyes open. Whichever it was, he looked strangely at peace, his chest rising and falling gently. Then the cameramen leaned over to touch him, make sure he was okay, and he let loose with a howl, a gross moan so dense with pain and rage and sorrow that it just stopped time.
I yanked the window curtain from inside my cheek, belatedly aware that I’d been chewing the fabric. I ran downstairs and out the door, pulled Dad away from the cameraman in whose arms he was now sobbing, and took him into the house.
Dad cried for five hours straight. Cried until his eyes dried out and he wasn’t crying tears anymore. Cried until Mom turned on the TV to cover up the ragged, torn-off sounds he was making, after which he was too shocked to cry. There he was on the local morning news, cheeks clogged with blood, mouth frothy with saliva, eyeballs like the kind you buy in a gag shop, calling Jamie Amory a rapist and murderer. Mom and I exchanged sleepless, dread-filled glances. I flashed on a T-shirt that Ruben once wore to class, was ordered to go back to his dorm room and change. Scrawled across the chest in sky-blue letters was the phrase SHIT, MEET FAN.
Only for Dad it never got the chance to because later that morning Manny Flores was discovered in his room by a dorm monitor after he’d missed his first and second period classes. He was hanging from a beam, a ripped-up bedsheet cinched around his neck. Not quite hanging, actually. His room was in the attic, and the ceiling was sloped, making it impossible for his feet not to touch the ground. So he improvised, thrusting his body forward, cutting off his air supply. At any point he could have stopped the strangulation by simply standing up. It was an agonizing—and agonizingly slow—way to die, which means he must have wanted to very badly. Lividity indicated that his death occurred between nine and eleven P.M., several hours before Dad’s run-in with the reporter.
Manny was a day student who’d been living in Endicott House since Christmas when his mother ran off with her boyfriend, basically dumping him on the school’s doorstep. I didn’t know him. Not many people at Chandler did. He kept to himself, didn’t play sports or participate in any extracurricular activities. No gun was found in his room, but, as I said, he was a day student, a local, from the kind of neighborhood where getting your hands on a .22 wasn’t a big deal. And since Chandler was less than half a mile from the Connecticut River, getting a .22 off your hands wasn’t a big deal either.
The papers didn’t print his suicide note, but the police showed it to my family as a courtesy. Here’s what it boiled down to: he loved Nica, Nica didn’t love him. Unrequited affection, the oldest one in the book. As an explanation it was both lucid and murky, coherent and incomprehensible, profound and banal. I wished he hadn’t said anything at all.
The whole thing went to a fast fade from there. The publicity had already hurt Chandler. Several parents, feeling the environment unsafe, had insisted on yanking their kids out, midsemester or not. Something like twenty percent of incoming freshmen had rescinded their acceptances. The school wanted the case closed as quickly as possible. The police couldn’t have been more cooperative. And just like that, it was all over. “Justice was served” when “confessed murderer” of “homecoming queen Nica Baker” acted as his own “judge, jury, and executioner.”
Sound of two hands slapping dust off each other. Done and done.
When I returned to Chandler, everyone was nice to me: students and teachers, administrators and maintenance workers. And all day long I sat in class, in the dining hall, in the library, hunched under that niceness, cramped and stiff. I expected things to be easier, or at least more natural, with Jamie, Maddie, and Ruben, but they weren’t. The three of them rallied behind me, made a point almost of claiming me, of showing everybody at school that nothing had changed, that we were still best friends, though we’d only ever been sort-of friends, me never quite able to fit in or keep up. They loyally sat with me at lunch, walked with me to class, saved me a seat in the snack bar. Yet when we were alone, there was a tension, a hostility even—all of us trying to sound polite, but with an edge, my edge just as sharp as theirs—and it surprised me because I didn’t know what it was or where it was coming from.
Until, all of a sudden, I did. My dad, what he said to the reporter about Jamie—that was the source of tension between them and me. Actually, not what Dad said, but what I didn’t say in response to it: that I never believed it. Which I never did, not for a second. (Jamie rape and murder Nica? Not in a million years!) And in the conversation we were having under every other conversation we were having, the one that was conducted in tones of voice and pauses and breaths rather than spoken language, they were asking me to say it. Not publicly. There was no need to embarrass my dad further. Not even out loud. A nod or a look at the right moment would have been enough. It was fair and valid and entirely within reason that they wanted me to say it. I didn’t want to, though. I don’t know why I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to and, what’s more, I wasn’t going to. And no matter what words I was saying to them on top, underneath I was only saying one word, No, and they heard me loud and clear.
A week or so into my return to Chandler, I was sitting on the quad with Maddie during a free period. The school newspaper was between us, opened to the horoscope page, and we were splitting a kiwi-strawberry Italian ice. Our sunglasses were on and we were talking. She was talking anyway, telling me about a trip she was planning to take to Glastonbury to pick up a pair of pants for Ruben for his birthday, or maybe a pair of pants for herself to wear to Ruben’s birthday. One or the other.
Maddie was a pale girl, angular and beaky-faced, but she had a body that was blade thin and a gaze that was cool and contemptuous, which was better than pretty somehow, and in her presence I usually felt self-conscious to the degree that eye contact was difficult. Usually but not that day. That day, I guess, I couldn’t be bothered. I looked down. Saw ants marching out of a crack in the pavement in an orderly black line. I poked at them