You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [49]
No one translated for the audience after the singing ended. Boys and their parents filed from the chapel into the courtyard. The women from the kitchen removed cling wrap from platters of sandwiches and began pouring the tea.
MR. JEVINS HAD died only a month into the school year. The headmaster conducted the Latin classes until Christmas, doing a poor job of hiding his shock at how little the students had been taught. After the holiday, there was a new man, younger than Kinnet he looked, and not easily fooled.
By the time Samuel came home for the summer, his parents appeared to have forgotten his teacher’s death, as though it were just another term-time event, a cricket match won or lost. He spent a week lying around the house, then at last Trevor returned.
He was sixteen now, five years older than Samuel. He seemed taller and thinner than he had at Christmas, his acne a bit worse. Usually when they returned from school they would spend at least a few hours rigging traps for the cat, books pulled off tables by strings soaked in tuna water or obstacle courses of cosmetics items taken from their mother’s cupboard and arranged on the stairs. But each holiday Trevor seemed less interested and this time he didn’t want to do it at all.
He’d got his learner’s permit and three mornings a week he had driving lessons. The rest of his time he spent in his room at the computer, programming in some machine code, the screen covered in lines of numbers and symbols. Newsletters from American software companies and product literature covered his desk and floor. Samuel watched his brother work, or just hung out in his room and read or played on the game station.
It didn’t matter that Trevor only half listened to him or that when he did listen he often made fun of him. His brother being there, the sound of his voice, it was enough. The distance from things he’d kept experiencing during the year, that odd retreat from the physical world, it diminished with Trevor around. Lying on the floor beneath his brother’s window, staring up at the sky on those summer afternoons, listening to Trevor’s fingers on the keyboard, Samuel understood with a secret embarrassment that he loved his brother.
One afternoon, their mother banned Trevor from the computer for three hours and told them both to go outside. Under a tree in the orchard, Samuel sat cross-legged while Trevor lay closer to the trunk in deeper shade, his eyes closed, trying, as he’d told Samuel, to retain in his mind the next line of his program.
Samuel watched huge clouds float on the horizon, taller than churches, vacant palaces in the sky.
“Trev?” he said. “You know that teacher of mine that died last year?”
“Hmmm.” An American baseball cap shaded his brother’s face; he wore trousers and long sleeves, determined that if he had to be outside he would at least prevent himself from getting a tan.
“When he died?” Samuel said. “I knew. Right when it happened.”
“Huh-uh.”
“But it was before anyone else. We hadn’t been told. The school didn’t even know. Not till the next day.”
“Hmmm,” Trevor said. “Maybe you dreamt it. Like Dad and that cousin of his.”
“I wasn’t dreaming, Trev, I was playing football . . . What about Dad’s cousin?”
Trevor pulled tufts of grass from the orchard floor