“A sport for gentlemen, “ I said, and I wondered why I’d never spoken to Martha before.
I knew from the list posted outside Dean Fletcher’s office that McGrath was a server at Ms. Prosek’s table this week, and it was this knowledge that had helped me, as I’d lain awake around four o’clock in the morning, formulate a plan to kill him. Like all servers, McGrath would arrive to set the table twenty minutes before formal dinner started. When he did, I decided (and it was a decision so thrilling, an idea so perfect, that after it came to me, I did not fall asleep again before my alarm clock beeped at six-thirty), I’d be waiting beneath that table to place the sticker on his leg.
After lacrosse practice, I rushed to the dining hall and arrived by five-thirty, ten minutes before McGrath was due. Only five or six students were in the dining hall, including that night’s dining hall prefect, a senior named Oli Kehlmeier. (Being one of the three dining hall prefects was actually desirable-they oversaw the waiters at formal dinner, which meant they could boss around the younger boys and flirt with the girls.) Oli was busy spreading white cloths on the tables-it surprised me to see a dining hall prefect in fact working-and I decided to take a cloth myself from the stack near the doors to the kitchen.
I smoothed the cloth over Ms. Prosek’s table, then scanned the dining hall. No one was paying attention to me. I moved a chair out of the way, crouched, crawled under the table, and pulled the chair in. I was sitting with my heels pressed to my rear end, my knees forward, but that quickly became uncomfortable, and I switched to sitting Indian-style. There wasn’t much room to maneuver. My elbow knocked a chair, and I froze, but I heard nothing from the outside-no proclamation of poltergeist, no face appearing at the level of my own to ask what the hell I was doing-and I relaxed again. A few old-looking globs of gum were stuck to the unfinished underside of the table, I noticed, and I could smell both the table and the floor, though neither of them smelled particularly like wood; they smelled more like shoes, like not-so-dirty running shoes, or a child’s flip-flops.
At twenty of six, I tensed, anticipating McGrath. As more and more servers arrived, I felt certain that every set of approaching footsteps was his. All the tables around Ms. Prosek’s appeared occupied, and surely, I thought, they would see me, surely they’d notice the pale blue fabric of my skirt (was it gross that I was sitting on the floor in my skirt?), or see my sandaled foot. But no one approached. At the table to the right of mine, the server, I could tell by her voice, was Clara O’Hallahan, and she was singing to herself; she was singing the Jim Croce song “I Got a Name.” A little later, I heard a boy say, “Reed was in a bad mood today, huh?” and a girl said, “No worse than usual.” I waited to hear someone mention Assassin, but no one did. Eventually, the voices all became a blended, increasingly noisy hum, punctuated by the clinking of silverware and glasses. It was ten of six. McGrath wouldn’t dare miss formal dinner when he was serving, I thought, or would he? Just for skipping, you got table wipes, but if you were the server, I was pretty sure you got detention.
He arrived at four of six; well before he’d gotten to the table, I heard his cheerful drawl. Someone must have remarked on his lateness because he was saying, as he came closer, “It’s the two-minute method. Watch and learn.” Above my head, he set down what sounded like plates, then silverware. Before I could stick him, he’d left again, and he returned with a tray of glasses. His calves were mere inches from me-he was wearing khaki shorts, his leg hair was blond and thick-and he was whistling.
There were two entirely discrete feelings I had at this moment. The first was a disbelieving glee that I was really about to kill McGrath Mills. When you are accustomed to denial and failure, as maybe I was or maybe I only believed myself to be, success can feel disorienting, it can give you pause. Sometimes I found myself narrating such success, at least in my own head, in order to convince myself of its reality. And not just with major triumphs (of course whether I’d ever experienced a major triumph, apart from getting into Ault in the first place, was debatable) but with tiny ones, with anything I’d been waiting for and anticipating: I am now eating pizza, I am now getting out of the car. (And later: I am kissing this boy, he is lying on top of me.) I did this because it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of the thing than the thing itself.
The second feeling I had at this moment was a sad feeling, an abrupt slackness. I think it was McGrath’s leg hair. Also, his whistling. McGrath was a person. He didn’t want to be killed, he didn’t know I was waiting underneath the table. And it seemed so unfair to catch him by surprise. I didn’t want to win the whole game, I knew suddenly. I wanted admiration, of course, schoolwide recognition, but I couldn’t possibly get through all the little moments it would require, just me and the person I was supposed to kill. With Devin, it had been okay because he’d been such a jerk, and with Sage and Allie, because it hadn’t mattered to them if they remained in the game or not. But McGrath was nice, and he seemed to care at least a little about staying alive, and yet it would have been ridiculous for me not to take him out, with the opportunity quite literally in front of me. And it wasn’t even that I entirely didn’t want to. It was just that it seemed complicated. From now on, I thought, I’d do whatever was necessary to get to Cross. But I wouldn’t be zealous, I wouldn’t think the game itself actually mattered. This was the decision I was making as I extended my arm and placed the sticker on McGrath’s calf-I placed it just to the side of his tibia bone, almost exactly halfway between his ankle and knee. Then I pushed out the chair in front of me and emerged from beneath the table on my hands and knees. Looking up at McGrath from that position, I couldn’t help feeling a little like a dog.
His expression, as I’d feared, was one of naked surprise. I am not even sure he recognized me immediately. I stood, and said, uncertainly, “I just killed you,” and though McGrath broke out laughing, I think it was only because he was a good sport.
“Oh, boy,” he said in his Southern accent. “You nailed me. Man, did you get me good. How long were you under there?”
I shrugged.
“That’s a well-deserved win. Hey, Coles, look who was under my table. I know, she was stakin’ me out!” McGrath turned back to me.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry. What are you sorry for? You got me fair and square. I gotta give you my stickers, right? But you know what?” He felt in the back pocket of his shorts, and in the pockets on both sides of his blazer. “I left ’em in my room,” he said. “Can I give ’em to you later? I’ll come up to your dorm and do a hand-delivery.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Anything’s fine.” (Of course he didn’t have his stickers. The game didn’t really matter to him.)
I knew right away that I had ruined it. Whatever jokiness had existed between us-I had killed the substance of it. McGrath would be friendly to me from now on (and I was right in thinking that, he always was friendly, for the year-plus that remained before he graduated from Ault) but the friendliness would be hollow. In killing him, I had ended the only overlap between our lives. “Assassinate anyone lately?” he would ask, months later, when we passed each other, just the two of us in a corridor of the third floor between fifth and sixth periods. Or, “How are your pillowcases holdin’ up?” I might laugh, or say, “They’re okay”-something short. McGrath didn’t want to talk, of course, it wasn’t as if we had anything to say to each other. I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.
On Saturday morning, I waited outside the dorm courtyard; Conchita had said her mother would send a car to pick us up at eleven. It was seventy degrees, sunny and breezy, and I thought of how Martha had said she was glad to be going somewhere; I was glad, too. I could see a black limousine across the circle, and on the circle itself, two boys tossed a softball. I tilted my face toward the sky and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, perhaps a minute later, the limousine was in front of me, and Conchita’s head was poking through an open window in the back. “Hey, Lee,” she called. “Climb aboard.”