I remembered the interview, which I’d given the previous January, just a couple of months before my agent had dropped me and things with Michele had really started falling apart. I’d been tentative about doing the interview in the first place. It would be my first real connection with Blackburne since graduation, for one thing. For another, I worried about what the interview could reveal, as if I would be submitting to an interrogation. In the end, all it involved were some e-mail exchanges and one longish phone call with a woman in Blackburne’s alumni office. It wasn’t an investigative piece by any stretch of the imagination, but more of an overview of my writing career and a few standard questions about my novel and how I’d come to write it. And now Sam Hodges was offering me a job to teach at Blackburne. Jesus.
If I hadn’t been desperate, I would have laughed at the irony. But there wasn’t anything left for me in New York, except a propensity for accumulating debt, both financial and emotional. There was no new novel coming, Michele was most definitely out of the picture, and I needed to get my shit together. I actually had some teaching experience, too—a couple of comp and lit courses while I was in grad school, nothing extensive, but I hadn’t been horrible at it. Also, at some level, I felt I owed Blackburne. I’d grown up there, written my first fiction there. And I had turned my back on the place. I had not been to my five-year reunion, nor had I seen any of my classmates since graduation except for the handful that had gone to UVA with me, and even then I’d consciously avoided them as much as I could without being openly rude. I’d cut Blackburne off like pruning a blighted branch from a tree. And now I, the product of that school so dedicated to rigorously training its students to achieve success, had soared out into the wider world, briefly scaled the empyrean heights, and then plummeted to Earth. In short, I had failed. Perhaps by returning to Blackburne I could start over.
Downshifting around the final turn before the edge of the wood, I almost didn’t see it in the fading daylight. But as the fields beyond became visible through a glimmering arch in the trees, I glimpsed movement among the gray trunks to my left. It was as if someone had suddenly shouted in my ear. Everything else fell away. I slammed on my brakes, my seat belt locking across my chest. Something next to a tree raised its head and gazed at me. I registered a long neck, a black nose, ears wide and alert above a pair of dark, cool eyes. I stared at it for a few heartbeats, and even as I thought the word deer it turned and leapt gracefully between two trees, then bounded away into the woods, its tail flashing into the dark.
I let out a shuddering breath, and as I drew air into my lungs I felt a pang of anger so fierce that I had to squeeze my steering wheel. I told myself it was because I could have hit the deer, that I could have seriously damaged my car, or killed the deer, or me. After taking a couple of deep breaths and peering carefully into the trees on both sides of the drive, I drove on, finishing the final curve. I resisted the urge to glance in my rearview mirror.
My car burst out from the protective cover of the trees onto the hard, flat playing fields. I slowed to bump gently over a speed trap, stopped briefly at the new security booth to give my name to the guard, a polite and efficient stranger, and then rolled on when the gate lifted. I cruised past the soccer goals, skeletal without their nets, and then the newly refurbished track that ringed the old football field. Next came the low field house with its roof proclaiming, in red and yellow paint, “Lions Number One!” While I had braced for it, seeing Blackburne after all that time was almost a physical shock, as if I were standing under a great bell that had just struck the hour. And then I saw up ahead, past the boxwood shrubs that lined the upper part of the drive, the gleaming white columns and Colonial brick of the Hill, and as I watched, the setting sun touched the front of the buildings with a departing glow, melting against the windows and setting them afire with a golden light.
CHAPTER TWO
Almost fourteen years earlier—half my life ago!—I’d stood in the center of my new room at Blackburne, holding a suitcase in each hand and staring around me in disbelief. The room was empty save for a bunk bed, two desks, a wooden dresser, a closet alcove with a single rail but no door, and a window that looked painted shut. The window was covered on the outside with mesh wire, presumably for security or to keep the glass from breaking. To me it looked like a cage.
My father, hands in his pockets, was doing much the same thing as I was, but I could tell, even without looking at him, what he was thinking. His first words confirmed it: he was going to look at the bright side, find the silver lining. “Well, your roommate’s not here yet,” he said. “Looks like you get to choose which bunk you want.”
I just looked at him. My parents were going to leave me here, abandon me in this cell, and my father was cheerfully offering a choice of beds. “Doesn’t matter,” I muttered.
“Sure it does,” Dad insisted. “Bottom bunk’s easier—you don’t have to climb in and out of bed—but then you’ve got somebody sleeping on top of you, and you’re staring at the bottom of a mattress all night—”
I tuned him out and continued to stare miserably around me. I couldn’t believe they’d talked me into this. “Blackburne will be a whole other world,” my mother had said. “You’ll have so many opportunities.” Words like opportunities and education and personal growth had floated around my house for months. My teachers had been highly impressed that I was applying to Blackburne. Even my small group of friends, who I thought—with a tinge of desperation—would miss me if I went to boarding school out of state, had started looking at me the way I imagine people who wait tables in L.A. look at one of their waiter buddies who finally lands a small TV role: with a combination of amazement, suspicion, and mute respect. All this had been wrapped up in the kind of mumbled good wishes fourteen-year-old boys give to one another. When I’d gotten my acceptance letter from Blackburne, I had thought, like an idiot, that this was a good idea.
As my father listed the pros and cons of bunk beds, my mother unzipped my bags and started hanging shirts and pants in the closet. Dad was a pediatrician, much beloved by his patients back home in Asheville. Mom had been a nurse’s assistant and now managed my father’s practice. They were both good, decent people, obvious in their care and love for each other and for me, their only son. At fourteen, I thought they were completely mortifying. I even hated them a little, not just for threatening to drop me off here and drive away, but because, deep down, I loved them fiercely and was stunned to realize this as I stood in that room, imagining our good-byes.
I probably would have started weeping, maybe even thrown myself onto the floor at their feet, pleading to go home with them, if my roommate hadn’t shown up just then. I was suddenly conscious of a tall, muscular boy standing in the doorway, his hair in cornrows and a tiny diamond stud in his left ear, a duffel bag slung over one arm. “Hey,” he said to me, jerking his chin up in greeting. “ ’S’up.”
“Hey,” I said.
“Guess we’re roomies, huh?”
“I guess. Yeah.”