“No, he knows already,” I said. “I tried to kill him when we were leaving chapel, and a bunch of his friends saw me.”
“These were other junior boys?” It was astonishing-Madame seemed genuinely interested.
“Yeah,” I said. “Mostly guys from his lacrosse team.”
“Well.” Madame nodded her head once, decisively. “I think we teach these boys a lesson.”
And then all three of us, Amy, Sin-Jun, and I, were following her out of the common room and down the basement steps, and it turned out the fishing poles weren’t where we remembered, and we paused, momentarily stumped, and then I said, “We don’t need a fishing pole. We could just use a broom or something,” and we were climbing the stairs and crowding around the common room closet, then hurrying down the hall to Heidi’s and Alexis’s room and as we explained the idea again, this time with Madame joining in, their expressions shifted from confusion to amusement to enthusiasm, enthusiasm that seemed as abrupt and as weirdly sincere as our own.
“You know what you should use is a pillowcase,” Heidi said. “Then you can write really big.” She rummaged in her laundry bag, and this seems distinctly Aultish to me now, the casual sacrifice of a pillowcase in the service of a joke. There was so little attention paid to the fact that pillowcases, like everything else, cost money. Heidi tossed it to me, and Alexis passed over a black marker.
With the cap off, I paused. “What am I writing?”
All of us were silent, a loaded, electric silence. “I know where you live,” Alexis suggested.
“I see you when you’re sleeping,” Heidi said.
“I smell your blood,” Amy said. “And it smells”-she glanced at Madame-“très délicieuse.”
“We will not bring the French into this,” Madame said.
“So far, I like ‘I see you when you’re sleeping’ the best,” I said. “But does that sound too Santa Clausy?”
“I am always watching,” Sin-Jun said.
We looked at one another, the six of us-it felt, with this number of people, not unlike a meeting convened to make a serious decision-and as Heidi and Amy nodded, I said, “That’s good. It’s simple but creepy.”
Amy moved several books off a desk so we could spread the pillowcase flat. Then I wrote, in capital letters, I’M ALWAYS WATCHING.
“Draw an eyeball,” Heidi said.
I made the almond shape, the iris and the pupil, the lashes on both the bottom and the top.
“You must sign it as well,” Madame said.
I hesitated. “With my name? Or no, what about-” I wrote, Love, your assassin, and Sin-Jun clapped. “It is perfect.”
When we taped the pillowcase to the broomstick, it was obvious that it would work better with two poles; Alexis ran off and returned with a mop. Heidi lifted the screen and Amy and I-I knew she wanted to be directly involved in the dangling, I could feel how focused she was on McGrath-stuck our upper bodies out into the night. I was holding the broom upside down, clutching the neck of it near the bristles, and she was holding the mop. Light emanated from the window below us, which meant their shades weren’t down. Leaning over, Amy knocked the mop handle against the brick exterior of the building. “Yoo-hoo,” she called. “Special delivery, boys.”
Ten seconds passed. I felt a rising worry that neither McGrath nor his roommate, Spencer, would notice, and my apprehension was not even really for them but for us in the room, how our plan would have come to nothing. And then I heard shuffling down below, a few male voices. “Hey, Mills,” someone called, and a few seconds later, unmistakably, there was the sound of McGrath’s laughter. He poked his head out a window one over and twisted around, looking up at us.
“Hey, baby,” Amy called. (I would never, ever have said Hey, baby to Cross Sugarman.)
“Hi, McGrath,” I said.
“What the hell is going on out here?” McGrath said. “Y’all are crazy.”
Another guy stuck his head out and said-not to us but to someone back in the room-“This is hard-core.” Behind me, Alexis and Heidi and Sin-Jun and Madame crowded close. Heidi opened the other window, and after a moment she also was hanging outside the building.
Then a third person-there seemed to be a group in the guys’ room, too, at least three or four of them-reached out and grabbed the pillowcase.
“Hey!” Amy said. “No touching!”
“That’s not what you tell most guys, Dennaker,” said the guy grabbing the pillowcase; it was Max Cobey.
“Bite me,” Amy replied.
“Who else is down there?” Heidi asked.
“Who else is up there?” Max said. “It sounds like a herd of elephants.”
“As a matter of fact, it’s a bunch of incredibly hot women wearing nothing but G-strings and lipstick,” Amy said. “And for only ninety-nine cents a minute, you can call up and talk to any one of us. Operators are standing-”
“That is enough for now, Amy,” I heard Madame say, and I was half-relieved and half-disappointed. “We will leave the boys alone.”
“We gotta go,” Amy called down. “Farewell, so long, auf Wiedersehen, good-bye.”
We began pulling up the mop and broomstick, and McGrath, who had disappeared into the room, stuck his head back out. “I don’t get to keep it?” he said. “After all that harassment?”
“You can keep it,” I said, as if it were my pillowcase to give away. “But only if you promise to use it tonight.”
“I’m gonna use it every night,” McGrath said, and that was the last I heard before I was back in the room and the night was outside again.
On Friday morning after Latin class, as we were collecting our books, I said to Martha, “You’re going tomorrow, right? With Conchita?” Martha and I had hardly spoken before, and initiating conversation made my heart pound. But it would be weird to ride into Boston together, never really having talked, when we’d spent the last seven months sitting side by side in Latin. Especially when I had the feeling that the reason we’d scarcely talked was because of me-on the very first day of class, when I was so terrified to be at Ault that I could barely make eye contact with people, Martha had said, “I’ve never taken Latin. Have you?” and I had said, “No,” looked away, and folded my arms. A few months later, Tab Kinkead had farted while standing at the chalkboard translating the sentence Sextus is a neighbor of Claudia; most people hadn’t heard, but when I’d seen Martha try without success to stifle her laughter, I’d known for sure that I’d made a mistake-she was someone I could have been friends with.
In the hallway, Martha was saying, “Conchita’s mom is super-nice.”
“Do you know where we’re eating?” I asked. Logistical questions were, in my opinion, the best questions of all; they were the most innocuous.
“We’re meeting at Mrs. Maxwell’s hotel, so we’ll probably go somewhere around there,” Martha said. “You’re on the lacrosse team with Conchita, aren’t you? She really likes you.”
I could feel what I was supposed to say in response-Conchita’s great, or I really like her, too–but I just couldn’t form the words. Martha’s remark made her seem, not in a bad way, like a camp counselor: generous and encouraging, happy to see people getting along.
“What sport are you doing?” I asked.
“Crew, and actually I’m pretty sure this’ll be my only free Saturday for the whole spring, so I’m glad to be going somewhere.”
“Is crew as intense as everyone says?”
“It’s beautiful to watch, but when you’re in the boat, you’re basically grunting and sweating the whole time.”
“Whenever I see people rowing, I always think of Jonas Ault in, like, 1880,” I said. “I can picture him wearing one of those unitard things and sporting a handlebar mustache.”
Martha laughed. Later, one of our jokes was that she was an easy laugh, a laugh slut. But something I always appreciated about her was how she made you feel witty. “Oh, yes, “ she said, adopting an affected tone. “Crew is very civilized.”