Love in the Time of Serial Killers(19)
“So in other words, neighbor threat not neutralized.”
I shrugged. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of Sam standing in another group, facing us, but I didn’t dare turn my head. I didn’t know why it even mattered to me, to know if he was paying attention, if he was as attuned to where I was in the room as I couldn’t help but be of him.
“But okay,” I said grudgingly. “Maybe he does actually play that piano.”
* * *
?BARBARA TURNED OUT to be the fifth grade language arts teacher I wished I’d had, and once Josue had introduced us, we spent an enjoyable twenty minutes talking about the Harry Potter books and what a shame it was that the author was such a TERF. I congratulated Barbara on her retirement, and she showed me pictures of the grandkids she was moving to Indiana to be closer to.
We were in the middle of an energized conversation about the three-paragraph essay when suddenly the never-ending Beach Boys were turned way down. I glanced up to see Sam standing at the front of the room, tapping a plastic fork uselessly against the side of his beer bottle.
“Uh,” he said, and someone in the crowd encouraged him to climb up on a chair to give a speech. To my surprise, he did. No way would you ever catch me trusting all my weight and balance to a regular old dining chair, much less in front of a roomful of people.
Now I had to crane my neck to see Sam, but I liked this arrangement—where I could feel free to observe as openly as I wanted, because everyone’s attention was supposed to be focused on him. He shouldn’t be that attractive, objectively speaking. His nose was crooked and a little too big for his face, his hair skated a fine line between bedhead and bedraggled, and the hot pink of his shirt gave me corneal flash burns.
And yet there was something about him that made me want to figure him out.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said now. “And thank you, Terry, for tenting your house just in time to force the location change.”
A few chuckles and titters from the crowd, and an older dude I assumed to be Terry raised his plastic pineapple cup in acknowledgment. Barbara leaned in toward me. “For the best,” she said. “The only reason Terry hosts in the first place is to show off his latest renovation project. We’re lucky this current undertaking precludes anyone from entering the house.”
“Anyway,” Sam continued, “we’re all here of course to celebrate our favorite champion with a red pen, a gifted reader-alouder whose British accent is almost BBC ready, the only one of us who could get eighty fifth-graders to stand still for a group photo, the keeper of the teachers’ lounge Diet Cokes”—here Sam pointed at someone in the audience—“abandon all faith, ye who drink what’s clearly labeled in Sharpie. So give it up for a lovely person and colleague who will be missed . . . Barbara!”
And I hadn’t thought this through, because I was standing right next to Barbara, which meant that Sam was now gesturing right at me. Not me, obviously, but I felt conspicuous as all eyes turned in my general direction. I tried to step subtly away from Barbara, out of the metaphorical spotlight, as I clapped along with everyone else.
Only when I glanced back at Sam, he’d jumped down off the chair, his chest rising and falling. He went to take a sip of his beer, before seeming to realize that it was empty. He had barely set it down before Barbara crossed over to him and enveloped him in a big hug.
“That was a wonderful tribute,” she said. “I’m going to miss working with all of you.”
From my vantage point, I could see his arms go around her, could see the way the tips of his ears went pink as she said more to him that I couldn’t hear. He squeezed her shoulder, glancing around the room until his gaze landed on me. I startled, turning on my heel to find wherever Conner and Shani had gotten off to. Suddenly, I was desperate to leave.
SEVEN
CONNER CAME THROUGH on the dumpster and boxes that weekend, which was almost a shame. I’d half expected him to forget or order the wrong thing, and then I’d have an excuse to spend the whole time hunched over my Edgar Allan Poe desk, typing away on my analysis of In Cold Blood.
Which was basically all I’d done since Sam’s party earlier in the week. Despite normally having a strong constitution for the stuff, I had to admit that it was hard to read Capote’s true crime classic late at night when I was in a house all by myself. I’d shifted my work schedule to do more during the day, leaving my nights free to wander from room to room and think—arguably, a more frightening place to be than with Dick and Perry on their way to the Clutters’ home in Holcomb, Kansas.
My dad had never been a super-demonstrative guy, and there hadn’t been a lot of evidence around the house that he even had kids even when we were young. No school pictures hanging on the wall, no artwork on the fridge, no pantry door marked with our heights throughout the years. My mom was more sentimental, but appearances were also important to her, so she’d cultivated a very chic and sophisticated look to our living spaces after the divorce that didn’t allow for mismatched tchotchkes or DIY decorations. Every Christmas now that she and my stepdad, Bill, were together, she decorated her fake silver tree with only white and silver ornaments, a Waterford crystal star at the top. I didn’t even know where stuff like Conner’s clay handprint ornament from kindergarten would be at this point.