“Can we just get out of here?”
As Stephen pulled toward the exit, I asked if he could take us to my place instead of his. He paused a moment, considering. “Sure, I can stop back at home in the morning. I don’t have an early day.”
“Oh.” He’d misunderstood, or I’d been unclear in my asking. “Could you just drop me off? I think I need a night alone.”
His head ticked, just slightly. “Are you sure?”
I nodded.
We drove in silence. At the front of my building, Stephen kissed me, hand against my face. The seat belt sliced my collarbone. It would be easy enough to take him upstairs, get into bed, fold against one another. But instead I said, “Let’s make another plan soon,” and bolted from the car.
I lay on the couch, staring across the room, and noticed the box from the cell phone store. I sat up and opened it. The phone felt strange in my palm, surprisingly weighty, my thumb slippingacross the slick surface. It hummed to life and I moved around its layers. I opened the camera and found the way to flip it around, so my face filled the screen. I scowled at my image and clicked it shut. And then I saw the little square for Facebook. I had an account I never used—someone in my grad cohort had insisted we all sign up. I guessed at my password, the same one I used for everything. People I hadn’t spoken to since coming to Sawyer populated the little screen. Someone had landed a new job, the announcement followed by a chorus of praise. There were photos of babies and somebody’s dog that had just died. That seemed an odd thing to broadcast to the world.
There was a message at the top asking me to update my information. My location was still set to New York. It felt sad to put in Sawyer; like accepting defeat. But then it occurred to me—would Tyler be on here? It took three attempts to type his name into the tiny search bar—how did people get used to a phone without keys?—and then his page appeared. A whole world revealed itself to me, but in a code opaque and undecipherable. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what Tyler and his friends were talking about, although Sawyer and what it meant to be a Sawyer student was a running dialogue. What they took for jokes felt harsh or inexplicable. Tyler posted photos that had nothing to do with him, spelled things wrong on purpose, made bold proclamations and then contradicted himself on the next line—about television shows, bands, food, anything. There was something annoying about it, or cloying. Something typical of his generation. A performance for its own sake.
Moving backward in time, I got to Tyler in high school, in Charlotte. Some photos from soccer, overblown snapshots with friends at house parties. A mound of bodies squeezed into a car. Agathering in a clearing in the woods. In almost every photo, six-packs and enormous plastic handles of cheap liquor. Lit joints lifted in grand, hubristic gestures. Did none of these kids have parents? It wasn’t my idea of fun, but there was a togetherness, and I felt a kind of envy. This had been Cassie’s life, perhaps, but not mine. Not then, not now.
I clicked another photo: Tyler prone across the roof of a car, arms spread wide, reaching through the black surrounding space. Looming above him, a shirtless guy in baggy khaki shorts gripped a bottle of something at his crotch, fat tongue spilling out. Liquor streamed from the bottle into Tyler’s mouth, like piss. It seemed embarrassing for Tyler, playing at masculinity to fit in. In the comments someone had called him a “homo,” but he replied with a joke, a funny admission. And I understood: Tyler wasn’t trying to fit in, he just did. There was no secret here, nothing to hide. And then I felt embarrassed for myself.
I opened another album. Childhood photos. I clicked one. A picture of Tyler with a woman. Even in the small, grainy scene, the resemblance was immediate. His mother. It looked like a camping trip: a hardscrabble of trees, gray river just visible in the background. Other Sawyer students had spent their childhood summers on Martha’s Vineyard, at art camp in Italy. His mother’s mouth was set in a thin line, hand at her hip. I could imagine Tyler’s father coaxing one more shot, the mother impatient. Beside her, Tyler crouched on the ground. Twelve, maybe thirteen years old. His child’s face had not yet grown around his changing features, which looked misplaced or uneven, stretched out like putty. That distorted look of early puberty, his next self straining to emerge. Tyler held a snorkel in hands too large for their skinny arms, clutched in front of a bare, concave chest, his skin flush withsunburn; a pink ring marked where his shirt had been. I stared at the photo, my chest buzzing—and then a tidal wave of surprise crashed over me. I tossed the phone, hurling it away. What the hell was I doing?
I looked up at the clock on the opposite wall. Over an hour had passed. It was like I had blacked out and just come to. I reached for the phone and picked it back up. I pushed on the Facebook app, like the guy at the store had shown me, and deleted it. It melted into the ether, making a small, satisfying sound, like completion.
CHAPTER 4
We moved into October. The air shed its summer stickiness as the temperatures dropped. I gave in to the rhythm of the semester and let it organize my weeks, pulling me along. I taught my classes; I hung out with Safie, I hung out with Stephen. He and I had recovered from the situation at the movie theater (and that is how I thought of it—the situation). Or I had, and he had accepted my tacit plea that we not speak of it. We did a weekend away in central Pennsylvania, at a cabin in the mountains Stephen booked for us, taking turns picking CDs for the drive out. Stephen grilled and I mixed us drinks and we made a fire, reading until we were drowsy and going early to bed. I worked in fits and starts on my book. My talk at Fall Fest loomed, a specter of regret. Feeling ambitious, I had proposed presenting a new chapter, yet unwritten. I thought the deadline would offer some momentum, but I felt stalled out, my attention watery and thin.
Tyler showed up each class with Kennedy. They would arrive with coffees in hand just before the start and take their same seats toward the back. Kennedy chimed in more as the weeks went on. She was smart (majoring in Classics, I learned) with a funny, unexpected edge—I could see why Tyler liked her. And she knew how to handle the boys and their egos. She’d even gotten Constantine to back down. One discussion, she cut him off, saying, “I really don’t think everything we read needs to be compared toInfinite Jest.” Iwould see her and Tyler around campus sometimes, always with Addison, the roommate. They were a striking trio—they had a way of carrying themselves apart from their surroundings. I’d never had that kind of thing in college, my friendships all felt somehow interchangeable. Meanwhile, in class, Tyler always got caught up in his own thing, scribbling notes and scanning pages of the books for who knows what. Despite his thoughtful showing that first day, he never again participated. Many of his classmates stayed quiet, but this felt different somehow. College students were so much more like children than they realized, just playing at adults. And, like children, they were chemically attuned to their peers—for acknowledgment, approval, acceptance. You could sometimes feel the anxiety of those needs fueling class discussions. But with Tyler’s way of being alone in the room, it felt like he didn’t care about anyone else. He was figuring it all out on his own. He never lingered after class, or showed up at my office with questions or concerns. I got an email from him one afternoon, but it was only a forward, a message from the athletics department with a schedule of away games:Students’ first priorities are their educations, they should be held accountable for any missed sessions, we appreciate you working with them, and on and on.
When the class submitted their first assignments, Tyler’s stood out. He was doing some real thinking. There was nothing superficial—he made keen, attentive observations. And his writing had a light touch, unusual for his age. Most of his peers struggled to string together a meaningful sequence of words. The more competent ones, trying to sound smart, constructed complex, labyrinthine sentences, clauses opening upon one another like a series of corridors their author got lost within, so the meaning at the end bore no obvious relationship to where they’d begun. Tyler’s essaycarried no trace of effort, the easy flow of an intellect that felt no urge to prove itself.
The quality should have pleased me; it demonstrated a serious engagement with the course. But I was strangely annoyed. I felt excluded from an experience he was having all on his own—it felt like it had nothing to do with me. At the bottom of the final page I scrawled,Nice work, well written and conceived. You might push the analysis a bit further next time.The latter, I knew, was unkind: vague and impossible to apply. I gave it an “A” and then in a rush added a minus and shuffled it to the bottom of the pile.
I was working at home one Thursday evening—well, working is an overstatement. I sat in front of my laptop, staring at the screen, when I received a message from the library. Another book I’d requested had come in. I jumped up, grabbed my jacket and keys, and headed out. I had gotten what I wanted: a reason to give up for the night.
Campus had a muted gray quality of desertion, the stone-faced buildings tucked quietly back from the empty paths. It was almost nine, I was rarely here so late. I entered the library—hushed and practically empty, the lights tawny and warm. A familiar, comforting musk washed over me: the sweet, pitched scent of softened leather and mildew. All my life, libraries had offered sanctuary. While other kids rejoiced at the end of school years, facing the interminable summers of my childhood filled me with dread. My father found virtue in the mere fact of being outdoors and would cast me from the house, chastising my deficiencies of sun and air, my body a wan and wasting thing to him. I would wander our suburban streets for hours. I dragged a stick along, the knobby end catching against the rough asphalt, talking to myself. I rejoiced when a summer storm would overtake the skies, driving us indoors. My motherwould load Cassie and me into the minivan—“I can’t be cooped up in the house with these kids all day,” she’d announce. She’d drive us to the local branch of the library a few miles away. We’d dash across the lot through torrents of rain and into the bracing cold of the air-conditioned rooms. During these years when they still got along, Cassie and our mother would settle into the upholstered club chairs by the periodicals, wordlessly passing magazines between them. I spent the hours on my own, huddled on the floor in a low-trafficked stretch deep in the furthest stacks, books piled in my lap.
A student was alone behind the circulation desk, highlighter skimming photocopied pages. I gave my name and she returned a moment later with the book. I thumbed through it. It was an autobiography published in the 1940s. Its author, a Chicago industrialist, lived a life less compelling than he imagined: I could find only a single copy in print, sent over from a university in Montana. I was not interested in the author himself but the fact that a second cousin’s son was Nathan Leopold, the subject of the chapter I was currently struggling through. In 1924, Leopold and his rumored lover Richard Loeb, just teenagers themselves, neither yet twenty, had kidnapped and killed a fourteen-year-old boy. For decades the industrialist kept a daily journal. After his death, his estate ended up with a sister, a philanthropist whose marriage took her to Columbus. I had just learned that her papers had landed at Ohio State, his diaries among them. I was planning to make a trip to the archives in the next few weeks to see if the diaries held some account of the trial, which had been closely followed in the media, but of which few firsthand accounts existed. I hoped the autobiography might give a sense of where to begin.
I turned to place the book in my bag and saw the three of them, huddled around a long table heaped with backpacks, books, andpapers: Addison, Kennedy, and Tyler. Addison and Tyler sat side by side, Kennedy across from them. They each leaned forward, heads close, deep in conversation; a rapt energy rippled off them. Kennedy was talking, head bobbing in emphasis, hands like fins slicing through the small space between her and the boys, nodding along. She finished whatever she was saying and shook back her hair without touching it, shiny waves across her shoulders. Addison said something then, tipping back in his chair and spreading himself like wings, and made the group of them laugh.
A moment later, Tyler shot up, lifting his jacket from the back of his chair. He pulled it on and stepped from the table, leaving behind the papers arrayed before him.
I turned and hurried from the library, hoping I hadn’t been seen. Outside, the black and quiet of night were a startling calm. I stopped, halfway down the steps, unsure why I was rushing. And then I found myself unable to move, my feet weighted in place. I heard the whoosh of the door opening and then Tyler’s voice.
“Professor Lausson, is that you?”
I turned and squinted into the lights of the library entrance—framed by grand white columns on either side, the golden outline of him stuttered and fuzzed.
“Tyler. Hello.”
“It’s funny seeing faculty on campus so late. What are you doing?”
“I was just grabbing a book and—it’s such a nice night, I suppose I wanted a moment to enjoy it.”
“It’s gonna get cold soon. I hate it. We have winter in Charlotte, but not like here.”
“And you? Are you leaving?”
