The Swallows Read online

  “Oh yes. I met with him today. I think he’s transferring into your writing class,” Primm said.

  I really didn’t want another student I had to see twice a day. I took the piece of paper with the list of the Ten and asked for their general opinions of each student. There was a shocking lack of consensus, with the exceptions of Adam Westlake, Emelia Laird, and Rachel Rose, who scored generally positive reviews, and Tegan Brooks and Jack Vandenberg, who drew negative ones. Their assessments of the rest of my class were all over the place. For instance, this was their take on Gemma:

  Primm: Rude, no respect for authority.

  Evelyn: Clever.

  Finn: She’s up to something. But I don’t know what.

  Claude: My interactions with her are limited. Can’t comment.

  On Jonah:

  Primm: A very troubled boy.

  Evelyn: Adorable and brilliant.

  Finn: He’s just a jock.

  Claude: Smarter than he looks.

  I asked about Kate and got the usual mixed bag of responses. Not one of my colleagues hinted at knowing what had happened to her.

  Finn then inquired about my elective class, which ranged from freshmen to juniors. I showed him the roster and asked the table for any further insight. Again, there were inconsistent reports on the few students who had made an impression over the years. Alyson Mosby (junior, second period, row 2, aisle 3) came up because she was in a relationship with a notable attractiveness imbalance. Claude and Evelyn then took a deep dive, trying to discern what qualities the boy possessed to compensate for whatever was lacking.

  Primm suggested he had a good personality. Claude and Evelyn had a laughing fit and I decided to shift my focus for the night from intelligence gathering to drinking.

  Finn then inquired about cottage living. I mentioned the generator issues and he offered to do something I can’t recall because right after that Primm’s pint glass suddenly tipped over and a good eight ounces of beer landed on my lap. The rest splashed onto Finn.

  “Oh my God. I’m so sorry,” said Primm.

  “Grow up, Primm,” Claude snapped.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s just beer.”

  Rags from the bar were delivered. Evelyn and Primm began the cleanup. Claude ushered me into the bathroom and told me to take off my pants. While she flapped my jeans under the hand dryer, I tried to wrap my head around the tension at the table.

  “I’m going to call it a night,” I said.

  “But I didn’t get to ask you any of my questions.”

  “Lightning round,” I said. “Go.”

  “Did you really spend your summer in a monastery?”

  “Just three weeks. And I’ll never go back. Next question.”

  “Why’d you leave Warren?”

  “I needed a change. That’s all,” I said.

  I could tell that Claude wasn’t buying my answer.

  “Why?” I said. “What did you hear?”

  “Nervous breakdown,” she said.

  Nervous breakdown. I didn’t like how it sounded, but I had to admit it sounded better than the truth.

  * * *

  —

  I stopped at the corner service station and purchased a gallon of gas for my generator and a flashlight for the walk home. Then I crossed Hyde Street and hoofed it up the winding drive to the gates of Stonebridge. I signed in with the security guard and followed the fire road that ran to my cottage. As I strolled farther away from the center of campus, the lights of Stonebridge no longer illuminated my path. My new flashlight probed the ground in front of me as the sounds of my feet crunching on dirt and my own breath joined the complex orchestra of the woods. I heard a long howl. But the howl didn’t sound right. It wasn’t a coyote or a wolf. It sounded vaguely human.

  As I approached my current home, my flashlight illuminated an S-shaped path edged with small stones that bridged the end of the dirt road and my doorstep.

  Those stones hadn’t been there when I left in the morning. My gut did a single flip and I took a breath to calm myself. I walked alongside the path to the front door. On top of a brand-new welcome mat sat a paper bag with a giant red happy face.

  I shouted hello into the woods. I don’t know why. If someone was lying in wait, it wasn’t like he’d answer me. I dropped the gas can next to the door and reached for the knob. I found some comfort in finding the door still locked. I picked up the paper bag, unlocked the door, and entered my cottage, quickly securing the deadbolt behind me.

  Inside, I said hello again, as I turned on the lamp. Then I searched every dark crevice, like a child hunting for monsters. Once I was satisfied that I was alone, I lay down on the mattress like a corpse and stared at the ceiling. I had that vague feeling of emptiness, where you know something is wrong but you can’t name or fix it.

  I remembered the bag. I retrieved it from the table and hesitantly peered inside. I found a single brownie wrapped in cellophane and a small square of paper with a note.

  Find Whitehall

  As I contemplated the purpose of this note and the one before it, I ate the entire brownie. It had an odd aftertaste, but I was starving. Maybe you’re asking yourself, What kind of person eats food delivered by an anonymous stone-path-making lunatic?

  Now you know.

  Gemma Russo

  Just one week into the school year and I felt like running again. It’s like I’m a snake with a tight layer of skin that I need to shed. I sometimes imagine hitching a ride to a town that keeps its lights on all night long.

  Instead, I headed to the nonstop celebration of life that is downtown Lowland.

  At the end of Hyde Street was a brick box with a faded blue awning that read only MO’S. Outside was a sandwich-board sign that oversold Mo’s interior. BOOKSTORE AND CAFÉ. There were bookshelves and books at Mo’s, all used and not all available to buy—depending on Mo’s mood. In the back of the shop there were a few old schoolhouse desks, a pot of coffee always on the burner, powdered creamer, packets of sugar, and a general assortment of store-bought cookies. It was an honor coffee/cookie bar. A Post-it stuck to an empty can suggested you should give whatever you could afford. Mo’s coffee was usually burned and the cookies stale, but almost no one from Stonebridge frequented the store.

  Mo generally closed at 8:00 P.M. Sometimes 9:00 or 10:00, if he forgot to look at the clock. The place stank of cheap cigars and an odor I could never pin down—although I ruled out putrefying corpse. Mo’s was the only place I could run to anymore. I couldn’t risk expulsion. Stonebridge had to be my past, present, and future.

  Sitting in one of those old-school desks—the kind where the seat and writing area are conjoined—I finished typing up the origin story for Ms. Witt. I worried that it hewed too closely to the truth, but I’d been keeping up my lies for so long, it felt good to be almost honest for once.

  THE ORIGIN STORY OF GEMMA RUSSO

  By Gemma Russo

  [Ms. Witt: Don’t ask me to read this aloud in class.]

  I was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I never met my father. My mother wasn’t a bad mother, just a broke one who developed something of a drug habit. She cycled through a series of loser boyfriends until she met Homer—real name, I swear. Homer wasn’t like the others. He was a grad student in philosophy when they met; he was also an addict. That was the main thing they had in common.

  Homer’s family was rich, and he went to boarding schools for his entire adolescence. Not just one boarding school. I think the final count was nine. Now, that’s rich. Homer, at my prompting, would often regale me with stories of the antics he got up to back then. At night, in bed, I would imagine that one day Homer and my mom would get their shit together and send me to one of those schools.

  They got married and clean, in that order. We moved to Springfield, Massac
husetts, at some point. Homer couldn’t find work and my mother wasn’t good at keeping the work she got. They both had an entrepreneurial spirit and started a meth lab in our basement. Amazingly, they remained clean the whole time. At least I remember them being pretty normal and lucid that last year.

  Everything was pretty good until the basement exploded. I was nine. I remember my social worker asking me if I knew what was going on down there. I said I didn’t. Sometimes you don’t know what you know.

  I was at school when it happened. I remember it took a couple of weeks to track down my mom’s mom. I had never met my Grandma Lucille, even though she only lived a few hours away in a suburb of Boston. She wasn’t awful. But I think I reminded her too much of my mother, whom she liked to remind me I was no better than. I believed that for a while. Lucille died when I was thirteen. After that, I cycled through foster homes just like Homer and his boarding schools. I even tried to petition the court for emancipation, but they rarely let thirteen-year-olds do that, unless they’re the star of a TV show.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about those schools Homer went to. My junior high school guidance counselor suggested I apply for a private school scholarship. Over the next three months, I researched schools on the sluggish IBM in the computer lab. I applied to every school that looked like it could double as a movie set. I got some kind of offer from five of those schools. But there was only one place, or person, who was willing to give me a home year-round.

  Dean Stinson drove all the way to Boston to interview me. At least, I thought it was an interview. We met at the school library, talked for fifteen minutes. He shook my hand and offered me a scholarship.

  Two months later, I was on a bus to Lowland, Vermont. Dean Stinson suggested a summer program might help me assimilate. I think he was just trying to get me out of the group home. That was the first time I saw the campus in real life. It looked so perfect, I felt like I shouldn’t be there. The uniform only amplified my impostor syndrome.

  Scratch that. You can’t have impostor syndrome if you really are an impostor.

  I didn’t belong then. I don’t belong now. The only difference is that I don’t care anymore.

  * * *

  —

  That was the end of my five hundred words for Ms. Witt, but there’s more to the story.

  That first summer at Stonebridge, I hung out exclusively with the orphans. In Stonebridge lingo, orphans are the students whose parents leave them on campus during school breaks. That first summer, I made fast friends with Mel Eastman, Amy Logan, and Jonah Wagman. I also remember Carl Bloom being around. We ate meals with him, but not much else. He was desperately trying to catch up on his science courses, all of which he’d failed freshman year.

  I didn’t even know about the Ten back then. None of us thought about status or popularity. We were just teenagers who had free rein among acres of land. During the day, we had about two hours of class, and then we’d hang out in Flem Square or Fielding Field or take a swim at Stevenson Falls. Mel made up scavenger hunts at least once a week. Half of them were a total bust. Mel liked to hide clues inside people’s pockets or on the bottom of their shoes. But if someone didn’t wear the right item of clothing that day, we’d get stalled out in the middle of the hunt. At night, Mario taught us how to make a few dishes for ourselves. We’d spend hours cooking feasts from the school’s pantry. Jonah was the best cook, and he was always so thoughtful about each person’s dietary concerns. Bloom was allergic to everything. He kept a piece of paper on him at all times because the list was so long even he’d forget. And Amy had this whole texture problem and Mel suddenly kept kosher, even though she was not Jewish. Sometimes Jonah and I would have a second dinner, late at night, so he could cook whatever he wanted.

  When Jonah first kissed me, I felt a happiness so intense that it twisted into sadness. My life had become too perfect and I knew that it wouldn’t last.

  I heard about the Ten a week before the term started. Apparently, every class had their Ten. According to Mel, there were a handful of promotions over the four years, to compensate for the statistical failure rate of approximately fifteen percent every year. Mathematically speaking, that meant by the time senior year rolled around, only six to seven of the original freshman Ten survived to the end.

  The orphans started acting weird as more and more of the regular-term students began to arrive on campus. It was like the rain had washed away the fairy dust of summer. After the Ten of that year (which was actually nine) had arrived, I came into Dahl Dining one morning and saw the sudden divide. Mel and Amy sat with a group of girls I didn’t know and Jonah lunched with the Ten of the sophomore class, which has mostly remained intact, plus Gabriel Smythe.

  I didn’t want to pick a side. Some days I hung out with Mel, Amy, and all of the non-Ten, and other days I sat with Jonah. There was a tension that I didn’t understand. Even if Jonah invited me to sit with him, he was reluctant to talk to me in front of this new crowd. In fact, Adam Westlake was the only member of the Ten who gave me the time of day. Adam was a curious fellow. He asked more questions than any boy I had ever met. Also, there was something about his ridiculous outfits—those bright pastel shirts, and his assortment of bow ties. He was always scribbling something in his leather-bound notebook. I asked him once what he wrote in there.

  “My to-do list,” he said. “I wouldn’t wake up unless this thing told me to.”

  Adam was kind of like an old man in a boy’s body. I liked him, as a friend. But the more Adam talked to me, the less Jonah did. I couldn’t figure Jonah out. At first I thought he was jealous. Then I figured he’d lost interest.

  Maybe a month after we’d quit hanging out, I was studying alone in Milton Studio. Jonah had the same idea. When he saw me, he apologized for interrupting me and started to leave. I didn’t know what his deal was, but I was tired of guessing.

  “What is wrong with you?” I said. “We used to—you know—and now you can’t even be in the same room with me.”

  “That’s not it,” Jonah said.

  “Then what is it?” I asked.

  “It’s better if we’re not seen together,” he said.

  He kept glancing at the floor, like it contained crib notes for the conversation.

  “Whatever,” I said as I shoved my books into my bag.

  “No. You don’t understand. Look, I really like you,” Jonah said.

  “You just don’t want to be seen with me?” I said.

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said.

  “Don’t bother,” I said, leaving the room.

  That conversation predated my knowledge of the Dulcinea Award or the Darkroom. When Christine told me what was going on, Jonah’s behavior finally made sense. He was protecting me.

  I might have remained part of the proletariat through graduation. I might never have discovered my purpose here. But then one small thing, probably not unlike whatever it was that caused the basement explosion, sealed my fate.

  Sometime during the second semester of sophomore year, I was returning to Woolf Hall from a long training run in the northwest woods. The trail end is just outside Milton Studio. Bent over, hands on knees, I was spitting up a piece of dirt or a bug that ended up in the back of my throat. I heard a few voices and then I saw Adam emerge from Keats Studio, which was just a few yards away. He saw me and then looked nervously over his shoulder. I waved. He didn’t wave back. He turned around and walked briskly away.

  The next day, I found a note from Adam in my mailbox in AA. It just said: Please meet me at Mudhouse, 2:00 p.m.

  The Mudhouse was the only proper coffee shop/bakery in town. Adam was casually seated at a table when I arrived. He bought me a giant mocha with a tower of whipped cream, a chocolate croissant, and an éclair. Adam didn’t eat. He just sipped green tea and asked softball questions, which I answered with softbal
l lies.

  After about an hour, Adam said, “What did you see?”

  I finished chomping down on the éclair and said, “Huh? I didn’t see anything.”

  Adam smiled. “I like you, Gemma Russo.”

  I laughed.

  “Can I get you anything for the road?” he said. “I know you’re on a tight budget.”

  Even though Adam was suggesting he knew my secret, he didn’t say it like an asshole. The offer felt more like an old relative picking up the lunch tab.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “You should say yes to the next invitation you receive,” Adam said.

  A handwritten invitation came later that afternoon, delivered by none other than Emelia Laird. The sophomore Ten were having a soirée in Keats Studio, 8:00 P.M., black tie optional, which I was certain was a joke. It was not.

  Emelia looked me up and down and said, “Come to my room in an hour so I can fix those horrid eyebrows.”

  My initiation into the Ten was thirty minutes of torture, as my thick eyebrows were shaped into a high arch one labored pluck at a time. I later learned that Adam had put a good word in for me with Emelia. I know he did that because he thought I was keeping his secret. It’s strange how a small misunderstanding can turn your world upside down.

  The weird thing is that I didn’t see anything. I had nothing on Adam. Not then, anyway.

  * * *

  —

  It was past nine when Mo woke up from his nap and kicked me out of the bookstore. I shoved my laptop into my bag and grabbed a couple of his stale Oreos for the road. I checked my phone on the way out and saw that Linny had sent a text.

  Linny: KB alone on BB.

  I walked briskly up the main drive to Flem Square, eyed the perimeter, where Byatt Bench stood. Kate Bush was sitting there, frozen, staring into space. Her profile was mostly hidden behind hair, which she always wore down, long, with bangs that hung curtain-like over her eyes. She wasn’t not-pretty. But, as Emelia might say, she didn’t do herself any favors. I took a seat next to her. The bench was damp—like really damp. She could have warned me.