The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [43]
Maybe pizza will win him some points. From the good place, which he thinks is Fortunato’s. He better check with Arlene, though. Fortunato’s was the good pizza place last month, but things change so quickly.
Chapter Fourteen
September 5, 1979
Gwen was the only one of us queer enough—that’s what we called it then, sorry if it offends—to look forward to the first day of school. Perhaps Sean did, too, but he had the good sense not to say as much. Tim, in his Tim-like way, accepted school as a fact of life. Couldn’t get out of it, so why waste energy complaining. Then again, he wasn’t about to celebrate the fact, either. Let Gwen and Sean grade-grub. Tim had carved out a groove for himself as a B student, the path of least resistance, as he saw it. To be an A student would have required more work, to slide down to C’s would risk his father’s ire. That was Tim’s particular genius at the time, getting by. Doing just enough, but never too much.
Poor Go-Go had no genius, except for destruction, with a subspecialty in self-destruction. He was miserable in school, and if there was some root cause that might have been treated—attention deficit, dyslexia—the nuns of that particular time and that particular school weren’t inclined to investigate or address it. Go-Go was told he was lazy, incorrigible, bad. Work harder, try harder, think harder, his teachers lectured him, and he would see results. He was almost grateful for the reprieve of Mass, boring as it was. Go-Go could fake his way through an hour of Mass.
As for Mickey—she hated school because she hated being indoors. Ironic, one might think, given her later choice to spend her working life inside a long narrow tube, but Mickey would argue that she never felt freer than she did on a plane, thousands of feet above the ground, hurtling through the air. Free, if she chose, to disappear into a new city, to start life over again in Chicago or Seattle or Dallas. Not that she ever did, but the opportunity was there. She could grab her wheeled suitcase and disappear.
So: Gwen was the only one who cared that summer, in 1979, when Hurricane David began moving up the coast over Labor Day weekend, threatening the first day of school. Well before it reached us, David was a monstrous storm, destined for the history books, killing more than two thousand people in the Dominican Republic. But all Gwen cared about was the possibility that she would be denied her triumphant return to school. Triumphant because she had a boyfriend now, one that almost any of her classmates would envy. Good-looking, a grade ahead of her—a high school freshman yet. She had a photo of Sean in her new wallet, ready to go. In a photo, Sean was perfect. Did this imply he was not perfect in the flesh? As the first day of school drew closer, did Gwen start to notice the things about Sean that her private-school friends would find uncool? His politics, for example, inherited from his father, were conservative. The way he dressed, almost as if he wore a uniform even when not in school. Plus, his family didn’t have money, which everyone at Gwen’s school professed not to care about, but—everyone at Gwen’s school had money.
Yet, no, that can’t be. Gwen could not have had any doubts about Sean because that foils the before-and-after symmetry of our story, in which everything was perfect until the moment it wasn’t. Gwen and Sean were still in their honeymoon period, although perhaps understandably with some trepidation about whether this was a flimsy summer romance or something sturdier. Tim and Sean, good soldiers, marched off to the first day of school at Cardinal Gibbons. Gwen, giddy with reinvention, rode in her father’s car to Park School. For the second year in a row, Go-Go was alone at St. Lawrence, where Sean, and even Tim, left behind long, long, long shadows that the nuns kept holding up to him, like some Punch-and-Judy silhouette on the wall, a play in which Go-Go was always