Black Mirror by Nancy Werlin
Then she looked again at me, and Ms. Wiles put an encouraging hand on my arm.
I bit my lip. Please, I prayed silently, though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was praying for. Not to be kicked out? Not to be humiliated? My eyes met Saskia’s. I don’t know what she read there. She looked again toward Patrick Leyden. Then she said hurriedly, “Welcome, Frances. Just to catch you up. We want to do something—select a special project—to memorialize Daniel.”
Air returned to the room.
Saskia went on more calmly. “Let me go over the top ideas, and we can discuss them as a group. Then we’ll have a straw vote, after which the officers will meet with Mr. Leyden.” All the heads in the circle moved as one to look at Patrick Leyden, who simply waved a hand, as if he were the President coming off Air Force One. After allowing the moment of adulation, he nodded at Saskia, and she continued. “After that, we’ll come back with a decision, oh, within a day or so, and get started on implementation.”
My stomach had begun to roil again. But the worst was over, surely? I watched my hands in my lap. I listened to Saskia talk about a big fund-raising drive. About using the money to purchase a van for the food pantry, Daniel’s name to be painted on its side. Or purchasing large quantities of coats for the poor. Saskia read the suggestions and their benefits off a clipboard, and people added more pros and cons. It was all very orderly and, in its way, impressive. I felt another pang of guilt at my previous nonparticipation.
I wondered too how this all felt for Saskia. She seemed very composed, but beneath that it must have been hard for her. She and Daniel had been inseparable for two years.
When Patrick Leyden made some comment, my brain flitted off to think about how much Daniel would have loved it—that the great Leyden himself was working on a memorial for him. Before we started at Pettengill, Daniel had actively hunted down information on Leyden and Cognitive Reach, Leyden’s successful Internet company. He’d shown me articles from Fortune and Business Week and The Wall Street Journal.
Think of it, Frances. Leyden flies here from New York in his private jet a couple times a month! He’s very involved with Unity. We’ll probably even meet him. Isn’t that incredible?
Yeah, but … don’t you think he looks kind of like a rodent? I could draw him a tail. And those ears—
Daniel had turned sharply away from me, snatching the newspaper out of reach of my pencil. Oh, grow up, Frances.
“Are you okay?” whispered Ms. Wiles. She squeezed my arm slightly.
I nodded. I forced my attention back to what Saskia was saying.
“Okay, there’s one more possibility, and—everyone should know—this one is actually Mr. Leyden’s idea. It’s ambitious, but, well, I’m excited about it. And I know Daniel would approve.”
There was a pause. Again I watched all the heads swivel toward Patrick Leyden. He held the moment, seeming to enjoy it. Then he said indulgently, “Go ahead, Saskia.”
For a split second before she spoke, Saskia glanced at me. Then she looked down at her clipboard and read aloud: “Education doesn’t begin with high school. But by the time a kid is of high school age, he or she may already have picked up bad intellectual habits and a negative attitude about the future. This is especially true for children that come from disadvantaged backgrounds like, well, like—” She swallowed. “Like Daniel’s.”
I sat up in my chair. I stared at her, disbelieving. Like Daniel’s? Well, and like mine! And like Saskia’s, for that matter! How could she publicly say—?
She was still reading from her clipboard. “But for these children, a terrific education can still make a difference—if it begins early enough.” She looked up. “So, what Mr. Leyden is proposing is that we expand the concept of the Unity scholarships to younger kids. We’d start, again, right here in Lattimore. There are some parochial schools around here that aren’t bad—elementary and middle schools. So: The Daniel Leventhal scholarships, endowed and in perpetuity for the kids of Lattimore.”
Saskia had finished. I took a deep breath. Okay. I was oversensitive and wrongheaded about the scholarships; I knew that. I listened while the circle began to applaud. When Patrick Leyden stood up, the applause continued even more strongly, until he raised a hand. They obeyed him like an orchestra obeys its conductor.
“Of course, we’d have to raise quite a lot of money for this,” he said. “We’d need an ambitious capital campaign. But the fact is, we have some very wealthy alumni out there, and, frankly, I have a bit of influence.” He smiled. Everyone smiled back at him.
“Also,” he said, “I’m thinking that now we have a high enough profile and reputation to get big donations elsewhere as well. Huge donations. Because this isn’t just a worthy project, it’s a saleable one, like the original Pettengill scholarships. But this time we’d be in an even better position with respect to publicity.”
“The Presidential Freedom Award,” someone murmured.
“Yes, that will certainly help quite a bit. Quite a bit. And that was my first thought. But I have just in the last few minutes had another idea that I think will garner us a lot of press as well. Frances?”
Suddenly he was looking right at me. Patrick Leyden was looking right at me. And everyone else was looking at me too.
“Frances,” said Patrick Leyden pleasantly, “would you be willing to head up this capital campaign? Not really ‘head up’—I’ll do that, behind the scenes—but sign the fund-raising letter and provide the public face of the campaign?”
I froze in my chair.
“Because the fact is, Frances, I’m hoping that this thing will really take off. Just the same as it did with the high school scholarships. And we’d have Unity scholarships at private middle and elementary schools all over the country, not just here in Lattimore. It could happen, if we have the right media hook—and Frances, your name, your story about Daniel, could make that vital difference. Could be that explosive media hook.”
I felt everyone’s eyes on me.
“Frances Leventhal,” Patrick Leyden continued pompously, “this is your chance. You can lead our campaign in your brother’s name, for the sake of all those kids who, like him, could have been saved by earlier exposure to more of life’s, well, possibilities.”
I couldn’t look away from Patrick Leyden’s big bobbling earlobes. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Finally I managed to look desperately over at Ms. Wiles. Help, I thought. Help me.
She smiled. “What an opportunity, Frances!”
At that moment James Droussian spoke. “Come on, Mr. Leyden,” he drawled. “That’s, like, vampiric. You can’t expect Frances to diss her brother publicly.”
Stark silence again in the room.
Then: “Vampiric?” said Patrick Leyden.
James stood up. He faced Patrick Leyden across five yards of the circle. “Yeah. You know, like a vampire.”
“I am aware,” said Patrick Leyden, “of the definition.”
“Well, then,” said James, “you understand that—”
Next to me, Ms. Wiles said sharply, “Both of you, stop it. I think Frances is capable of speaking for herself here. Frances—”
“Bull.” James turned directly to Ms. Wiles, who was glaring at him. “Take one look at her.”
Everybody did. I couldn’t help it; I cringed. My mind was swooping in dizzy circles.
“Frances—” began Ms. Wiles.
“Frances looks like a kicked kitten,” James interrupted. “This is just wrong. Forget it.”
I thought about invisibility; about ways to disappear. I noticed that Saskia had hunched her shoulders up to ear level and was clutching her arms. Her eyes darted from Patrick Leyden to James to me and back.
Patrick Leyden took a few steps forward and stabbed a finger toward James. “Who are you? You’re not a regular member of Unity!”
“My name is James Droussian. I’m a post-grad. I’m a friend of Frances’s.”
“Oh, get real,” said Wallace Chan viciously. “Yo
There was some murmuring, some movement. Then James laughed, sounding genuinely amused. “Oh, I’ll presume. Believe me.”
Ms. Wiles had put her hand on my arm again, but somehow I didn’t want to look at her. I moved so that her hand fell off.
Wallace Chan swiveled toward me. “Frances, you haven’t said what you think.”
An uncomfortable minute passed in which everyone looked at me. No one is. I heard it again and again. No one is.
Then George de Witt cleared his throat and said, “You know, James does have a point. Frances doesn’t look comfortable, and—” He glanced nervously at Patrick Leyden. “What if we just tabled this for now and went back to the van idea? We could really use another one for the local food pantry, and we could easily raise that sort of money without Frances. Maybe we could even get several vans. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Nobody else said anything and, after a moment, George visibly deflated.
Then I felt a slight touch on my shoulder. I looked at Ms. Wiles, but she had half turned in her chair and was looking behind me, frowning in puzzlement.
Andy Jankowski was suddenly looming over me. With one hand he was holding his coat out to me again. Even though I was still wearing my own.
“Frances Leventhal?” he said carefully. “I would like to leave now. Would you like to leave too?”
And all at once I could talk. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
My legs worked. They supported me as I got up. I put on Andy’s coat on top of my own. I just wanted to, right then. I buttoned it, slowly and carefully, all the way to my throat. I stooped for my backpack and found that Andy already had it. “Thank you, Andy,” I said. My voice sounded fine. It carried across the whole room.
The silence was thicker than oil paint. I didn’t care. I walked with Andy. I didn’t even look back at Ms. Wiles. My footsteps, and Andy’s, echoed all the way out of the room, all the way to the chapel’s heavy double doors.
Andy reached out and pulled one of the doors open easily, as if it were made of rice paper.
CHAPTER 8
After dinner that evening I sneaked away from campus and went to Bubbe’s house. I don’t know why I went; they weren’t expecting me. Or maybe I do know. Maybe I thought I might find Daniel there. Oh, not for real, of course. But maybe I hoped I could find some memories of him there. Something to take away the feeling of that awful meeting.
Did they do it on purpose, to make me go away? Saskia had said I wasn’t welcome.
“Andy?” I’d said, as Andy Jankowski and I walked, together, away from the chapel, across the snowy quadrangle.
“Yes, Frances Leventhal?”
I took a deep breath. “How—how did you know I wanted to leave that meeting?” I watched his profile closely.
The furrow deepened on Andy’s brow. “They were all looking at you,” he said. “They were all talking about you. Not to you. I learned how to leave when that happens to me.” He suddenly looked very earnest and he turned toward me, though he didn’t meet my eyes. “It’s not hard. You can get up and go, Frances Leventhal. Nobody stops you.”
With difficulty I said, “You showed me. Thanks.”
We were silent some more. And then Andy said, “Also. That one boy said you didn’t have any friends. I didn’t like that.”
I couldn’t reply. My throat had closed.
Still cringing a little at the memory of my talk with Andy—and yet warmed as well—I slipped in the front door of Bubbe’s house as quietly as I could. But my father heard and looked up from the shabby wing chair in the parlor, near the entry. He might have muttered hello at an inaudible level. I nodded just in case he had. At least Bubbe was nowhere to be seen, though it was impossible to enter her house without being aware of a certain baleful heaviness in the air.
“I just came by to pick something up,” I improvised. My father nodded slowly. Indifferently? Open on his lap, but turned over so that it was clear he wasn’t reading it right then, was an ancient hardcover copy of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. I felt my lips tighten. The book was, in part, about a very lonely man. I wondered if it was helping my father somehow to reread it. I doubted it. I had read it three years ago, when I was working my way through the authors my father most admired. I was past that now, naturally.
Rapidly, feeling his eyes, his silence, I shed my coat and Daniel’s scarf and reached down to tug off my wet boots. When I looked up, my father was still watching me, but his expression was blank and he didn’t say anything. I straightened. My father cleared his throat. Bit his lip, for all the world as if he wanted to initiate a conversation and was finding it difficult. But nothing came out.
I knew it must be a tough time for him. He had lost his wife, his son. He wasn’t a bad person, just … who he was. I wished I cared. No. No, I didn’t. I didn’t even care enough to try to hurt him, as I could have done easily by asking how his writing was going. That was always good for a little blood, as Daniel had often demonstrated.
I turned and went upstairs. I felt him watch me go.
I went, not to my own old room, but to Daniel’s. Entering, flipping the light switch, closing the door behind me, for a moment it was almost as if my brother were still alive. I was grateful once again for Bubbe’s arthritis, which kept her mostly on the main floor of the house. Otherwise she would have ruthlessly sorted through and thrown out Daniel’s things.
I looked around. In a way, the room was a time warp from when Daniel was fourteen, the year we went to Pettengill. Over the ancient flowered wallpaper that Daniel had so hated were his calendar photos of naked and semi-naked women, each one meticulously affixed to the wall with tape. The one real poster was a colorful and explicit medieval crucifixion, which Daniel had purchased from a mail-order art catalog solely to piss off Bubbe. You had a great view of Jesus’ incongruously serene face when you sat on Daniel’s narrow mattress, which lay directly on the bare wood floor. Also typically Daniel: The top dresser drawer had been shoved closed so carelessly that it gaped an inch at one side. Even the dust seemed normal, because no one ever cleaned in this house.
Disadvantaged backgrounds, like Daniel’s.
It was sort of the truth. But it was so patronizing. And how could Saskia—she came from Lattimore too! I sighed. So much for my plans to atone.
I went to the dresser and gently pulled Daniel’s drawers open one by one, looking inside but not touching. Underwear, socks. His socks would probably fit me, I thought. I left them. An MIT sweatshirt, a forest green tee, even a once-beloved pair of footed pajamas from maybe ten years ago. I closed each drawer gently, thinking of how Daniel would have slammed them.
There was a box in the corner, containing hastily-packed things from Daniel’s dorm room. I knelt and—feeling a kind of defensive guilt—rifled through it. Clothing, of course. Books, including some graphic novels; Daniel had had a major obsession with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman books and had even, I saw on close examination, stolen a couple from the library. I pulled the library books out, wondering if I ought to return them, and noticed a small package tucked in between the side of the box and the books. Condoms.
Well. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known.
I put everything back in the box and closed its flaps.
I crossed to the closet and opened it. Dust bunnies on the floor; a very few things hanging from misshapen metal hangers, including a navy wool Pettengill blazer that Daniel had looked great in last winter. I felt my shoulders move a little in distaste as I looked at it. I raised my eyes upward. On the top shelf, some old games: Monopoly, a big tub of Lego. And next to the Lego, half hidden by the tub, Mr. Monkey.
Mr. Monkey! I felt my mouth shape itself into a smile. So this was what I was searching for.
A small brown molded-plastic squeeze toy covered with fake fur, Mr. Monkey had accompanied Daniel ever
I stretched up for Mr. Monkey but couldn’t reach it, and, too impatient to go get a chair or step stool, I jumped. On the second leap my fingertips grazed Mr. Monkey, so I gave it one more try and triumphantly managed to knock the toy onto the floor.
Mr. Monkey’s head bounced off and rolled among the dust bunnies. I knelt and grabbed both pieces. Surely I could easily pop the head back on …
I paused. Mr. Monkey’s hollow body was not empty. Still on my knees, I backed out of the closet and peered more closely. A couple of small plastic bags were tucked inside the fur-covered plastic shell.
My hand was perfectly steady as I reached and pulled them out.
I breathed then. It was not cocaine. Not smack. Not uppers or downers or anything that really would have scared me. It was just pot. It was just a few ounces of marijuana in one Ziploc bag and, in the second, some cigarette papers.
It might have been there for years. It was possible. I unzipped the bag and touched the grains. I sniffed. It smelled sweet, heavy, unmistakable. I sat back on my heels. I thought about flushing it down the toilet. I thought about making muffins with it, and giving them to Bubbe. No. To Saskia, and all the Unity people. They’d catch me, though. They’d catch me, and I’d be expelled.
I might want that. I tested the thought. I whispered it out loud. “What if I were expelled?” But no, of course I didn’t want that. There was nowhere else for me to go. There wasn’t even a public school option in Lattimore anymore.