The Marriage Lie(31)

I’m saved from another round when Dave’s phone beeps, indicating we’ve arrived at our destination. He hits the brakes in the middle of the street, gesturing beyond me out the window.

Hancock High School is a massive complex of brick and mortar in Seattle’s Central District, a downtown neighborhood on the confused end of gentrification. It’s a neighborhood with multiple personality disorder—housing projects on one block, hulking renovated Victorians on another, boarded-up convenience stores on the next. We park on the street in front of the main entrance and make our way up the cement steps.

Like any other school in the country, Hancock has had to respond to the rash of shootings and stabbings with increasingly drastic security protocols, especially in a neighborhood like this one. Theirs include locked doors, a camera whirring above our heads and a uniformed guard stationed just inside, staring us down. I wave, and he buzzes us in.

“Can I help you?” he says, standing so we can see that he’s armed.

I show him my Lake Forrest badge, stamped with the school’s emblem and featuring a full-color photograph of me, right above my title as school counselor. Lake Forrest is a small enough school that staff are not actually required to wear them on campus, but I’m suddenly glad I keep mine in my bag.

“My name is Iris Griffith, and I’m a faculty member at Lake Forrest Academy in Atlanta, Georgia. I am looking into the background of one of your alums and was hoping to take a peek in your library. I assume that’s where I’d find copies of all your old yearbooks?”

Sure enough, the man points us across the lobby to the main desk. “You’ll need a visitor’s pass first. Library is down the hall to your left. Can’t miss it.”

I thank him, and a few minutes later, Dave and I are bellying up to the library’s information desk. The woman behind it is barely visible over the piles of books and papers, a leaning tower of brown boxes and a computer screen so old it should be in a museum.

She also looks nothing like a librarian. Her hair is a wild cloud of corkscrew curls, she’s covered in leather and tattoos, and it’s a good thing this school doesn’t have metal detectors, because there’s no way she’d make it through one with all those piercings. They line her lobes and nostrils and brows, and when she gives us a smile, two tiny silver balls peek out from under her top lip.

“You’re not students,” she says, sizing us up. “Let me guess. Journalists? College recruiters? Neighborhood activists?”

I flash my Lake Forrest badge, launch into my spiel, but she waves me off before I’ve gotten through the first sentence. “Bummer, I was really hoping you were recruiters. Our seniors are at a sixty-two percent college acceptance rate and holding, and if we don’t raise it another ten percent by graduation, I’m going to spend my summer months mowing lawns. Anyhow, what can I do for you guys?”

“We’re looking for a copy of your old yearbooks—1999, maybe a year or two before.”

“Who you looking for?”

“My husband.” I swallow down a searing pain that I know must melt my features. “His name was Will Griffith.”

One of her brows arches at my use of the past tense, but she doesn’t ask for details. She pushes to a stand, gestures for us to follow her down to the right, to where an open and bright reading area darkens into the stacks. “Name’s India, by the way.”

“I’m Iris, and this is my brother, Dave. Thanks for your help, India.”

“No problem.” She walks fast, her motorcycle boots making dull thunks on the ratty carpet, talking the entire time over her shoulder. “Hancock opened its doors in the ’20s, but the first yearbook didn’t appear until 1937. I guess it took them that long to get their you-know-what together. Back then we weren’t much more than a twelve-room building with a couple hundred students, most of them Jewish, Japanese or Italian.” She gestures to the far wall of framed photographs, dozens and dozens of more recent graduating classes, a sea of brown and tan faces punctuated by the occasional light-skinned one.

I stop and scan them for the Class of 1999. The picture’s too high for me to pick out Will, but it’s the same racial makeup, more dark than light.

India takes a hard right into the stacks, stopping at a shelf packed with hard, burgundy covers, many of them held together by Scotch tape. “What year did you say you were looking for?”

“Graduating class of 1999.”

“Oh, that’s right. The year we got our first National Merit Scholar, our football team took state and a burst pipe flooded the gym right in the middle of a basketball game.” At our raised brows, she lifts a shoulder. “I’m the unofficial school historian. Comes with the territory of running a library, I guess. Anyway...” She runs a black-painted fingernail down the spines until she finds the right one, then pulls it out and hands it to me. “Here you go. There are a couple of tables around the corner. Take as long as you need. I’ll be holding down the fort up front.”

Dave thanks her, and I carry the book with shaking hands to a table at the end of the stacks. The design is classic ’90s. Fat gold letters and the outline of a wildcat on satiny maroon, and the few bites of Chex Mix in my belly push up the back of my throat. I shove the book at my brother. “I can’t. You look.”

We sit, and I study the tabletop’s ballpoint graffiti while Dave flips through the yearbook’s pages. He stops on a spread of seniors, full-color shots of kids in burgundy caps and gowns, the bright gold tassels hanging alongside smiling cheeks.