A bell rang to mark the end of class. The big Bap! Bam! Bap! of doors flung open and hitting walls rang out everywhere. Kids flooded into the halls with the manic, jailbreak energy that comes from being held prisoner in algebra class for forty-five minutes. Cliques gathered like metal filings pulled by a magnet, bodies bumped or crashed into each other on their way to anywhere. Shouts and whistles, crazy laughter came from all over. Three minutes of freedom. Lovers met for intense head-to-heads before the next class, like an undertow, pulled them apart and shoved them back into Yawnsville for another forty-five.
I remembered all of it. How could you ever forget being sixteen and full of equal measures of hope and shit?
“Hey, Chief.”
“Hey, Mr. McCabe!”
I recognized a few of the students. Some bad boys looked away as soon as we made eye contact. I gave a wink and two small “hi there” waves to other kids—nothing else. Those who greeted me didn’t want more. I knew how this worked: proper high school etiquette. No matter how well we knew each other outside the building, this was their turf and their rules. I was an adult and a cop. Read “outsider.”
I slowed a little on realizing I was doing one of those weirdo speed walks you see on the summer Olympics. That is, right before you switch the TV channel to anything more interesting than a bunch of adults walking like ducks in Nikes. It made no sense hurrying to Antonya’s locker because I couldn’t open it until the kids were gone again. There was no telling what was inside, and I didn’t want others around for any more ugly surprises.
About twenty feet away I caught sight of Pauline. She stood off to one side of the hall talking to some girls. She didn’t notice me until I was almost past.
“Frannie! Is it true about Antonya Corando?”
I stopped and nodded hello to her pals, who were watching me with a mixture of interest and distrust. “What do you hear?”
“That she’s dead.”
“It’s true.”
The girls looked at each other. One put a hand over her mouth and closed her eyes tightly.
“Did you know her, Pauline?”
“A little. Sort of. Sometimes we were in the computer lab together. We’d talk.”
“What was she like?”
“Intense. I heard she was a good artist, that she could draw really well. But I almost never saw her because she was always studying.”
One of the other girls said in an accusing voice, “Sounds familiar!” as if Pauline was guilty of the same crime. The class bell rang again. As they were walking away, one of the girls said way too loudly, “Your stepfather’s cuuute.”
“Don’t be perverse!” Pauline’s voice was outraged.
I stood looking out a window until the halls were empty and quiet again. Down in the parking lot the ambulance was pulling out onto the street. I imagined the girl’s body on the gurney, Doc Marten’d feet open in a F, arms crossed on her chest. There was that small red bump on the inside of her left arm. Tell my mother I didn’t do this. They did it to me.
Years ago after Magda and I first became lovers, we spent an especially frenzied afternoon in bed. When we were done and shiny wet—sated, finished, filled–her face four inches from mine—she looked me ten miles deep in the eye and said, “Remember me like this, Frannie. No matter what happens, no matter how long this lasts between us. I want you to remember me like this, the way I look right now.”
Antonya? I would remember her head against that white tile wall, the dead eyes opening slowly to tell me her last fact. Ididn’t do this.
Locker 622. I’d once kept a loaded pistol in there for two weeks. A pistol, then a deadly brown recluse spider in a Jif peanut butter jar, a homemade Molotov cocktail I whipped up in shop class and dropped in the window of a teacher’s car. Later I hid the stolen grade-book of my American History teacher in that locker and a signed first edition of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales our English teacher had brought in to show the class. As a teenager I stole everything because I thought everything I wanted should belong to me.
Instinctively I put my thumb against the lock and my other fingers behind it. Turning the wheel back and forth, I put in the combination. After the last number in the sequence, the lock gave a slight click. I slid up the handle and swung the door open.
A kid’s school locker is her inner sanctum. In it she builds a shrine to her dreams, her everyday, her wannabe image of herself. Antonya Corando’s was no exception. Inside the door was taped a black-and-white Calvin Klein ad torn from a magazine. On it a handsome guy wearing extremely white underpants stared at the horizon. Maybe he was looking for the rest of his clothes. On the walls inside the locker were many other pictures—puppies, fashion models, bad Polaroid snapshots of family and friends looking pleased or silly. Nothing special, everything sad now in light of what had just happened. Who would take these pictures down, her mother? I imagined the poor woman opening the door, seeing this sweet little world and staggering for the hundredth time since learning the news of her daughter’s death. Would her mom know why each of these pictures had been important to the girl? Would she save or throw them away because they were radioactive with her Antonya?
The same thing had happened to Magda’s mother thirty years ago after her daughter was murdered. The woman saved everything. Only after she died was I able to convince Magda to put her sister’s stuff in boxes and store it far away from our house and our life.
Geometry textbook, world history, jazzy blue calculator, a comic book called Sandman, gym clothes (nothing flashy or expensive), almost too many pens and felt-tip markers. Two CDs: Willy DeVille and Randy Newman—interesting taste in music.
“What’s this?” Lying way in the back of the locker was a large black ring binder. Sliding it out, I assumed it was Antonya’s class notebook. But wouldn’t she have carried that with her? Why was it here? I opened the book and the first few pages were only that—class notes. In careful italic handwriting were extensive notes (with important passages highlighted in yellow) on Plato, Sophocles, the Hellenic Empire, yada yada. I almost stopped flipping pages because it all looked like Greek to me and who cared?
At the bottom of the next page was the drawing. Like an afterthought, a doodle, a two-minute mind nap during class was an absolutely terrific pencil sketch of Old Vertue. What’s more, he was sitting in the same pose I had seen in the painting George Dalemwood showed me at his house. What’s more, on the ground in front of the dog was the feather.
I turned the page.
The Hangman’s Shove
“They’re absolutely amazing.”
“George, I’m glad you like them. But what the hell do they mean?”
As usual my good friend ignored me, not even looking up from Antonya’s notebook when I spoke. He wore his square Clark Kent reading glasses—the ones with frames so thick and black they resembled two small TV sets joined over his nose.
“And she said they killed her?” He stared at a detailed colored-pencil drawing of Frannie Junior and me looking at the Schiavo house wrapped in its metal spiderweb scaffolding. Everything about that night was in the drawing, even Smith the cat at our feet.
Antonya Corando’s loose-leaf binder contained six pages of meticulous notes about the rise of the Greek Empire. Another twenty pages were her drawings depicting what had recently been going on in my life. Later I spent a long time trying to find if she had done other relevant drawings. After searching everywhere it appeared these were the only ones.