It must have been an hour later when he heard the door open again, and the lights turn on. When Joan came around the shelf in the middle of the room, she gasped a little and pressed a hand to her chest. She was smiling, and so was he, and he knew that all was right with the world. She came to him and took both his hands and pulled him up so that they were hugging, tightly, his hands around the small of her back, her face against his neck. They were like that for a moment.
Before they parted that night they’d made an agreement. They told each other that when they got back to high school they would pretend they didn’t know each other any better than they ever had. They would be strangers. That was the most important rule.
But they also agreed that if they ever needed something, or maybe just needed to talk, they could simply make eye contact with the other one. In a hallway or the cafeteria. That would be their signal. And if that happened then they’d meet that night, at the town library, an hour before closing time. Richard knew he would never make eye contact with Joan after they returned to school, but the thought that she might initiate contact with him—just the thought of it—would be enough, he knew, to get him through the next three years.
A little over a month later he started his sophomore year. There was a gaming club that Richard joined because it was better than going home immediately after school let out. They met in Mr. Kaufman’s science room and played either Dungeons & Dragons or World of Darkness, but one kid, James Pursall, introduced them to an RPG called Violence that wasn’t a particularly good game, but it was pretty funny. He became friends with James, an even bigger outcast than him, and got to know the other gamers. There were bullies in the high school, but Richard had continued to grow and was now over six feet tall, and they pretty much left him alone.
He saw Joan all the time, in the hallway, and for half the year they had the same lunch schedule, so he’d see her sitting with her gymnast friends in the cafeteria. They never made eye contact, never acknowledged one another at all. Richard could feel the reality of what had happened over the summer slipping away, becoming more and more dreamlike, even though he knew it hadn’t been a dream.
By junior year Richard was made the president of the gaming club, and he and James were best friends, or at least James seemed to consider Richard his best friend. James told him everything, all his fantasies about killing the biggest assholes in the school, and how he had access to a handgun. Richard listened to James’s stupid rants and never once told him that he had actually killed someone. He could only imagine the look on James’s ugly face if he gave him details of that night in Maine, him partnering up with Joan Grieve, one of the hottest girls in their class, to kill his jock cousin. He doubted James would even believe him, and it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to tell him, anyway. He wasn’t ever going to tell anyone.
Joan was in his European history class their senior year, sitting up in the front row so that he could watch the back of her head during lectures, her glossy black hair, her hand rapidly taking notes in green ink across her notebook page. Some days, the days she was wearing sweatpants or tights, her hair was pulled back and he could see the white flesh of her neck and the curve of her ear.
They never spoke. They never made eye contact.
Then in mid-December after an essay test, Richard had walked to the front of the room to hand Mrs. Mathur his exam, and on the way back Joan’s eyes had flicked up suddenly and caught his. By the time he got back to his seat, his heart was racing. He kept his eyes on Joan, hunched over her paper, writing furiously. Occasionally her head was angled so he could see her profile, the tip of her tongue poking through her teeth as she concentrated. When she’d finished the test she got up from her desk and delivered it to the teacher, then she turned around briefly, and this time stared directly at Richard. He stared back.
They met at Middleham library that night, one hour before closing time. Joan was there first, and he found her in one of the narrow aisles in the basement, where nonfiction was kept. When they were face to face she put a finger to her lips, then quickly checked the aisles on either side of them.
“No one else is down here, I think,” Richard said.
“I’ve missed you.”
He smiled, and started to say something back, but it didn’t come out. She laughed, in that way he remembered, but also that way he’d seen a hundred times at school in hallways and the cafeteria, her mouth wide open, head tossed back.
“Look,” she said. “I want to make this quick, but I have a question.”
“Okay.”
“Do you remember back in Maine when we were talking about the people who would be on your list . . . you know . . .” He was nodding, and she continued. “Do you remember you mentioned Madison Brown?”
“I don’t really remember,” Richard said. “But I’m not surprised I named her. Are you and her still best friends?”
“Oh, no,” Joan said, shaking her head a little. “Not since the summer. It turns out—no big surprise—that she is a terrible person.”
Richard shrugged and raised his eyebrows.
“Right,” Joan said. “Go ahead and say it: No duh.”
“You said it, not me.” Richard thought it was like no time had passed at all since they had last talked, in another library, in another state. “What did she do to you?”
“I thought she was my best friend, but now all she cares about is popularity. She’s been talking behind my back.” Richard must not have responded properly, because she added, “No, really. She is awful. I realize that now.”
Richard nodded, then said, “No duh.”
Joan smiled. “So what I was thinking,” she said. “Is that you and I could team up again and do something about it.”
Chapter 22
Kimball
The following day, back in Cambridge, I received Elizabeth Grieve’s two books of poetry. Her debut was called Variations on a Theme. She had won a first-book contest from a small university press, and there was a glowing blurb on the back by the judge of the contest, saying that the book “heralded a stunning new voice that will challenge readers’ notions of how a poem is even created.”
I did my best to erase that sentence from my mind as I read the poems, some of which I quite liked, and some of which read to me like products of poetry workshops—free verse, present tense, the speaker of the poem obviously the poet herself—and if that sounds like bitter criticism coming from an unpublished poet such as myself, I imagine it is. My favorite poem in the collection was the title poem, which was quite funny, a long list of lines all playing on the famous quote, “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” There was also a rather touching poem called “Wild Hospital Nights,” about her bout with cancer, and how a nurse had given her a book of poems by Emily Dickinson.
Sea Oat Soup was a chapbook printed by a letterpress printer, the image on the cover a line drawing of a dissected horseshoe crab. These poems were slightly different from the ones in her debut. They were more surreal, none of them were about cancer, and they seemed to coalesce around a theme, although all I could tell you of that theme was that it was the intersection between the ocean and a lot of sexual imagery. The penultimate poem was the one that interested me the most. I read it three straight times.