Mrs. Fletcher(33)

*

That night I went to the library to do my homework, which I hardly ever did. I was trying to read this book about climate change, how it was almost too late for humanity to save itself, but maybe not quite, not if we all made a decision to change our wasteful lifestyles immediately. It was pretty interesting, but I had trouble keeping my focus. For one thing, I was sitting at a big table in the main reading room and the girl next to me was chewing her gum really loud. And this dude across from me kept sighing hopelessly as he erased the answers on his problem set, like he wanted the whole world to know he was struggling.

But all that was just background noise. What was really bugging me was the phone call I’d just had with my mom, which hadn’t gone the way I’d expected. I figured she’d be happy to hear from me, since we hadn’t spoken in a couple of weeks. But she kind of blew me off.

“I’m on my way out the door, honey. I have class tonight.”

“What?”

“I told you about my class. At ECC? Gender and Society, every Tuesday and Thursday night?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, though it was news to me. She’d been talking about going back to school for so long I pretty much just tuned out whenever the subject came up. “How’s that going?”

“Great. It’s really exciting to be back in the classroom.”

For a person who was on her way out the door, she had a lot of time to rave about her class. Apparently, the teacher was a really unique person, the students were super-diverse, and the reading was challenging and thought-provoking, exactly what she needed at this particular moment in her life.

“Cool,” I said, though it bugged me to hear her talking about college like it was the greatest thing in the world. I was the one who was really in college, and in my humble opinion, it was a mixed bag. Also, she was taking one fucking class. Try taking four, and then tell me how much fun you’re having.

“Oh, by the way,” she said. “One of the other students said he went to high school with you. Julian Spitzer? That ring a bell?”

I froze for a few seconds, trying to convince myself I’d misheard. But I knew I hadn’t.

“I remember the name,” I said, after a long pause. “But I didn’t know him that well.”

“He told me to say hello.”

I seriously doubted that Julian Spitzer had asked her to say hello. Unless he was fucking with me, in which case I couldn’t really blame him.

“Hey,” I said, trying to change the subject. “I got another email from Dad about Parents Weekend—”

“You know what, honey? I really have to go. I’ll call you back tomorrow, okay? Love you.”

*

Technically speaking, I wasn’t lying to my mom about Julian Spitzer. I really didn’t know him that well. He’d moved to Haddington in seventh grade, too late to make much of an impression on me and my buddies. In high school he was part of the skater posse. You’d see them cruising through town sometimes, zipping down the middle of the street in a big pack, like they didn’t give a fuck about oncoming traffic. I remember Julian standing up really straight on his board, hands on his hips, long hair streaming behind him like a girl’s.

I didn’t witness the incident at Kim Mangano’s house. I was upstairs with Becca—it was the first time we hooked up—in a bedroom that belonged to Kim’s little twin brothers. Meanwhile, Wade was in the kitchen, trying to talk to Fiona Rattigan, his on-and-off girlfriend who’d broken up with him a few days earlier. I guess she was ignoring him, and he got kind of upset. He grabbed her by the arm and wouldn’t let go. She said he was hurting her. A couple of people tried to intervene, but Wade told them to mind their own business.

He’s abusing me! Fiona said, in a really loud voice. I think she was pretty drunk herself. Somebody call 911!

Julian Spitzer happened to be in the kitchen, because that’s where the keg was. When he finished filling his cup with beer, he walked over to Wade and tossed it in his face.

Are you deaf? She asked you to leave her alone!

It took Wade a couple of seconds to wipe the beer out of his eyes and recover from the shock, and by then a couple of our lacrosse teammates had grabbed hold of him so he couldn’t do anything stupid. It was the middle of the season and our team was doing really well. The last thing we needed was for the party to get busted, and a bunch of our best players to get suspended for drinking and fighting. But Wade was furious.

For a week or two it was a big deal in school, like, Hey, did you hear about Wade and Spitzer? But then it just kinda died down. There were other parties, other incidents. Wade got back with Fiona, our team made it to the state quarterfinals, and then it was summer vacation. The whole beer-in-the-face thing seemed like ancient history, except that Wade couldn’t stop brooding about it. We ignored him, because everybody knew that Wade could be a nasty drunk. When he’s sober, he’s one of the sweetest, most laid-back guys you could know.

*

It was just bad luck that night in August. Wade and Fiona were on the outs again, Becca and I were fighting, and our buddy Troy hated his camp counselor job, which required him to spend his days with whiny five-year-olds. We tried to cheer ourselves up by drinking a bottle of Popov vodka in the woods by the golf course, but getting wasted didn’t improve our mood.

Afterward, we drove around in Troy’s Corolla for a while, circling past the same familiar landmarks over and over—the high school, the cemetery, the lake, the high school again—because nobody felt like going home, and at least we could be bored together, and complain about the songs on the radio.