Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [39]
Then he stuck his head under the faucet, letting the warm water wash the hair down the drain. He looked in the mirror. He was round and pink, like a baby. A blue vein swam up his neck from his collarbone to his temple. He was tired and sweaty from the steam.
He took another shower, scouring himself with the fresh bar his mother had stocked in the soap dish. He remembered all the ways she’d looked after him—bringing him meals, folding his laundry, the pairs of socks curled up like snails. His father had never done those things for him. That was what was so strange about imagining Les with Johnny McNicholas, comforting him after Teddy died. Until now, clean and clearheaded, Jude hadn’t thought that someone else might have needed taking care of.
Six
The classrooms were cold, the buildings square, the grounds skirted by leafless bushes as stiff as coral. The teachers were overdressed. The kids were gloomy and skittish, with poor posture, aggrieved by their low PSAT scores. Eliza decided if she heard one more person say “I’m just not good at taking tests,” she would hang herself. Every weekend she could, she took the train from Jersey an hour back to her mom’s place in New York.
Perhaps because the curators of the school were accustomed to this breed of luckless, moneyed offspring—those plagued by attention deficit disorders and indiscreet drug habits—they were as surprised as Eliza herself that she was, when she applied herself, good at taking tests. She was good at reports and papers and presentations, a diorama of the Globe Theatre, with a square of tissue paper for each window, canary yellow. To say that she had lost herself in her studies would imply a surrender, an accident; she was lost, but she had lost herself willfully, as one does when being chased. Into each fluorescent classroom she leapt sharpened pencil first, into Western Civ and British Lit and Algebra II and Attic Greek, into the labyrinth of protasis and apodosis and second aorist subjunctive active and her favorite, the optative of wish:
May we be killing / kill the goat.
If only we may be killing / kill the goat.
I wish that we may be killing / kill the goat.
Cocaine had been until then purely recreational; only now did she understand its functional power. She stayed up late, long after lights-out, listening to the Buzzcocks on her headphones and studying flashcards by flashlight until her contacts burned her eyes; she woke early, read The Canterbury Tales in the dining hall over breakfast: a cinnamon-raisin bagel, dry. It was all she could get down. For her intramural, she swam lap after lap. That she had no friends was of help. She didn’t bother making any. She was glad enough to be rid of the old ones. She sniffed around only enough to find some Izod who sold coke, which she cut in her dorm room on a Bakelite hand mirror while her roommate Shelby Divine was at squash practice or in the bathroom, or behind the sheet Shelby had hung on a clothesline between their beds, for privacy. The most skin Eliza had seen on Shelby was her wrists. “I’m not a lezzy, you know,” Eliza said, the first time Shelby had disappeared behind the sheet in her bathrobe. “Oh, I know,” Shelby had apologized. Shelby was from Charleston. She had a voice like sweet tea.
One evening late in January, as the two of them lay belly-down on their beds, the curtain drawn back, textbooks spread before them, Shelby asked, “Who’s T.M.?”
On the front of her chem folder, Eliza had drawn a pulpy heart, stabbed with an arrow, Teddy’s initials bleeding fatly inside. She slipped off her headphones. “Teddy,” she said, surprising herself. “Teddy McNicholas.” She hadn’t spoken his name aloud before, and the peal it produced was more solid than the hollow sound that had tolled and tolled in her head.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
Shelby was wearing an ankle-length nightgown of virginal