“You can’t do that!” I said. “Please, Fritz. It was an accident, I swear.”
“You cheated by accident?” Fritz looked at me as if I were a stranger, someone contemptible. The pain I felt from his look was so bright and immediate that I was unable then to consider whether or not he was right to judge me that way. He was right, of course. But at the time, all I could see was a rejection of nearly four years of friendship. “Was it an accident when you lied to the Judicial Board?” he said. “When you lied to me?” He raised his hands to his head as if he would pull out his hair. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s too much. It’s too goddamn much. I can’t trust anyone.”
Something in me gave way, a floodgate opening to vent my fear and self-loathing. “Don’t give me that holier-than-thou crap,” I said. “You’re telling me you haven’t ever made a mistake?”
He stared at me. “I’ve never cheated,” he said. “Not once.”
“Because you haven’t had to,” I said, warming to my ugliness as if I were holding my frozen hands over a fire, gathering comfort from its heat. “You’re a fucking genius who’s going to get into college. Yes, you are,” I said as he opened his mouth. “You are. And so am I. But the difference is that you don’t have to worry about paying for it, or even getting in. You’ve got the grades and the extracurriculars and all that shit. I mean, Jesus, look at your family. You think your father and your uncle won’t pull strings for you if they have to? Stop being such a fucking drama queen about it. God.”
For a few frozen seconds, we stared at each other, stunned and hurt, but only one of us in the wrong. A jay cried in its harsh voice from the darkening wood. Aside from that, we were alone, locked into a terrible moment at the edge of our friendship.
Fritz made the first move. He let the Saint Christopher medal drop from his fingers to dangle on the chain around his neck; then, without a word, he turned and began running up the drive, back to school. Within ten seconds, he was among the trees, and then the drive curved and Fritz curved with it, vanishing from my sight.
After a few more precious seconds passed, I, too, began running, trailing my roommate. My breathing was harsh in my ears as I ran down the drive, leaving the lions behind. I entered the trees, the air beneath the boughs dank and dim and slightly chill. There was a damp, organic smell to the oaks, an earthy scent like ground coffee. I glimpsed Fritz ahead, his tee shirt a white blur, and then he was gone again. I ran after him, my feet and legs registering each impact with the pavement. I felt uneasy, as if I were missing something, or about to. I couldn’t see Fritz. Ahead of me, the drive straightened into a short stretch before the final curve, and after that curve, the trees would fall away before the playing fields. The road was empty—no Fritz, no anybody. An invisible hand threatened to squeeze my heart, my stomach. My lungs began to burn as I started sprinting. It wasn’t just that I wanted to catch Fritz. I had the distinct feeling that I was chasing him, that I had to catch up with him, before something caught up with me. The trees loomed around me; the road seemed to buckle at my feet. I would have sworn something was behind me, but terror seized me at the thought of turning around to look. To say that I thought the lions had finally leapt off their perches and come bounding after me would sound insane. But I ran up the last hundred yards of that driveway as if I had to outrun whatever imagined thing was pursuing me, or be caught and suffer some horrific fate.
I burst out of the trees and into the wide, sheltered bowl of the playing fields, gasping like a man emerging from a forest fire. I stopped and bent over, trying to catch my breath, hands on my knees. My pulse sledgehammered in my temples. I looked up to see the drive stretch before me and up the Hill, a good quarter mile of asphalt bordered by the track, the golf course, and various dotted stands of trees. Fritz was nowhere to be seen. I turned back to face the wood, half afraid of what I might see, but it was simply a belt of trees that stood there, silent, unrewarding, a dark green forest wall shaded with black as the sun fell. “Fritz?” I called out. “I’m sorry. Where are you?” Nothing. There was no way he could have already made it up the Hill. I could see a few people at the track, but none of them was Fritz. Where the hell had he gone? Maybe he was in the trees behind me, hiding. Or maybe he had made it to the track and I just couldn’t tell—the light was dim, fading moment by moment, except for the bright red bars of the clouds overhead, glowing like a grate in a forge with the light of the setting sun.
I gave up. Fritz was hiding, or he had run faster than I thought. I’d apologize to him later, somehow. We would fix this. It would be okay. So I tried to convince myself as I began walking, slowly, up the Hill and to the dorms.
I DIDN’T APOLOGIZE TO Fritz that night. Not because I changed my mind or didn’t need to. I still need to, all these years later. I didn’t apologize to him because he wasn’t there to apologize to. No Fritz at dinner; no Fritz at study period. He was gone.
By lights-out, the sheriff had been called. By the next morning, searchers were combing the campus—every building, every subbasement and attic, every shed and grove and hillside. We weren’t allowed to join in the search. Dr. Simmons, the headmaster, insisted that we continue with classes, maintain our routine. I think the sheriff probably didn’t want us involved, anyway, especially if—as the prevailing theory came to be at the time—Fritz had killed himself. No one wanted a student to stumble across a classmate’s corpse.
It would have almost been better to find his body. Instead, Fritz ran into those woods and off the edge of the earth. Police and search-and-rescue groups descended on Blackburne, upending everything. In a way, it was almost exciting, except for the reason they were all there. I was questioned four separate times, including one painful time by Fritz’s father, who was almost unhinged with rage and grief. And it was all useless. Every lead, every possible trace, went nowhere. It was like Fritz had been deleted, erased. We didn’t even get the scant comfort of a funeral service. We grieved, sure. Boys cried; I was one of them. But at night, alone in my room—our room—for those last terrible weeks of school, it wasn’t grief that kept me awake until the deep hours of the night. Two feelings, each contradicting the other, swept through me. First, I was afraid that, because of what I had done and could not confess to doing, whatever gods there were had taken Fritz as punishment. But more than that, I felt jealousy, a bitter jealousy mixed with anger at the fact that Fritz had gone, without me. He had left me behind.
CHAPTER ONE