“William Watkins,” he said. “Just the person I was hoping to see.”
Keller’s body was angled toward Will, but not so much that he shut the rest of us out completely. Will looked up nervously.
“Me?”
“Indeed. I meant to ask about those papers I gave you. You’ve not had a chance to go through them, I assume?”
This caught our interest. There was a persistent rumor that Keller was working on a project and that he selected certain students to serve as research assistants. Some people said you got money for doing it, like a sort of work-study. Others said it was more the honor, the prestige—that if he chose you, you were pretty much guaranteed an acceptance to the college of your choice. We all wondered if this was what Keller was referring to now.
“No, not yet,” said Will. His face had a scrunched-up look, as if he was trying to contain something—shock, or maybe pride.
“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Keller said. “I’ve made adjustments, so we’ll have to scrap them. Bring them to me when you can and I’ll go over what’s changed.”
“Yeah, okay,” Will said.
“Right, then,” said Keller, before turning, for the first time, to the rest of us. “Afternoon.”
We all made our feeble hellos, and he nodded amicably before disappearing into the atrium of the library.
Whether Keller really had given Will something to work on or not, Will’s troubles faded shortly thereafter. So on that day at the end of the Thanksgiving break, when Keller followed Gabe outside, I was almost relieved; I hoped he could diagnose whatever was going on with Gabe and bring it to an end.
He walked to Gabe and put a hand on his shoulder. An expression of nervousness and new clarity came over Gabe, as if he now understood he might really get in trouble.
“Mr. Lennox and I were just having a conversation.” Mr. Keller spoke softly, but his voice was a blade. “A conversation about boundaries.”
“I couldn’t sleep so I went for a walk,” said Gabe flatly. “I went out of the dorm and across the field. I meant to go into the woods but when I came to Mr. Keller’s house I got curious about his garden and stopped. I walked into the garden and looked at all the plants. I was only going to stay for a minute or two but I know it was wrong and I shouldn’t have.”
The whole speech of apology was so continuous it seemed programmed. Maybe this was something he’d decided he would say if he got caught. But if that was the case, I couldn’t understand why he was telling me.
“Also known as trespassing on faculty property,” said Keller. “Now, it’s a very nice garden, I won’t deny that; I’ve spent years raising my little collection, and you’re not the first young botanist to show an interest in it. You’re perfectly welcome to stop by during the day and have a look, with permission. But not this way.”
He walked to Gabe’s other side, his hands clasped behind his back. My heart was throbbing. All I wanted was for Keller to get to the end of the speech so Gabe and I would know what his consequences would be.
“Secrets,” said Keller. “Mr. Lennox and I were having a talk about secrets. I invited him inside; I saw no reason to leave him out in the cold. So we sat down in my dining room and had a very frank talk about secrets and what comes of them.”
I looked at the house. The shades on the first floor were drawn and rimmed by light. I caught a sliver of the living room, though I didn’t see any furniture.
“Consequence number one,” Keller said. “Reduced night privileges. I expect Mr. Lennox to be in his room without visitors by eight thirty P.M. The monitors will see to that.”
That was to be expected. We waited mutely for what would come next.
“Number two. An essay of at least one thousand words to the tune of what it means to be a respectful citizen in an academic community. Typed, carefully proofread, et cetera, with points deducted for each word misspelled.”
Mr. Keller was standing at Gabe’s side. Instead of his usual daytime uniform—black suit pants, a navy button-up shirt—he wore scrubs and a green sweater with ragged edges. It was unnerving to see him dressed so casually, though of course it made sense: he had probably been in bed. Gabe’s expression was blank. But every so often, he looked at me, and some muscle seemed to flicker.
“Number three,” Keller said. “He has agreed to convey these rules to his peers. It’s now Gabriel’s responsibility to make sure others don’t repeat his mistake. I’ll rely on him to serve as an example, and if I find someone else out of bounds—in my garden, say—Gabriel will be the person I turn to first.”
Mr. Keller fell quiet. The only sound was the wind threading through the trees, and I felt even more alone. But I was not just uneasy for Gabe. The more I stood there, the more I seemed to remember something about the place we were in, like the edges of déjà vu.
Gabe and I walked back to the dorms without speaking. There was a bright ball of fury in my chest, and I knew it would burst if I opened my mouth. But it was something deeper than anger that made me quicken my pace until Gabe, scrambling behind me, gave up and hung back. I felt betrayed. We had chosen each other: we had lain in my top bunk twined in conversation, our secrets loosening through the night like slipknots. He knew me as well as Hannah—maybe better. But he had lied to me about where he went at night, and for no reason better than his own pathological need to stick his nose where it didn’t belong. His dogged interest in Mr. Keller’s garden was so peculiar that it made me feel humiliated—for believing that he was different from other boys, for believing that he had grown up.
Classes resumed the next day, and I avoided him. When I did see him—sitting across the room in physics or walking to the dining hall, lagging behind his friends and trying uncertainly to catch my eye—my stomach vaulted, and I looked away. I spent most of my free time with Hannah in the workshop, a high-ceilinged warehouse at the edge of campus. During the day, it housed art classes, but in off-hours it was available to students. In our first year at Mills, Hannah and I signed up for Introduction to Painting. We thought it would be a steal: two periods a week to mess around with color, periods when we wouldn’t have to use our minds. But it was the hardest class I took. Physics required logic, but the logic of painting was different—one that came from a place below the neck rather than above it and required hours of experimentation.
“I want you to mix a color,” Ms. Mildanovich had said, winding her way through our tables. “A color only you know.” I chose the dusty gray-blue of my old baby blanket. And though I could picture this color exactly in my mind, everything I mixed looked wrong and too potent on paper. The blanket was airy, diffuse, a tone I could better describe by feel than color. It was twilight, soft and shadowed; it had volume, like sheep’s wool. Later that semester, I found an old sponge beside the workshop sink and layered paint until I got it right. That was when I realized that colors had shapes as well as tones. To find them, I had to use touch as much as sight, invention as much as memory.
Now I abandoned the painting of objects—the curved bowls and closed hands, the hard little apples—and studied Nocturne in Black and Gold, a crinkled page in the “Abstract” section of our art textbook: its smear of fire and light, its luminous darkness. To see it, I had to use my imagination more than my eyes. The appeal of abstraction was psychological, too, for I could paint a piece whose true subject only I knew. I could hide things there: the angles Gabe’s body took in bed, or the way I felt when I woke from my dreams of him. Sitting on the pale floors of the workshop, I did more than tell those stories: I encrypted them. Beneath layers of oil, in a box within a box, were shapes only I could read.
Now that I knew what Gabe had been doing with his nights—or at least where he’d been going—the idea of him was tainted for me. There seemed to be something shameful about him, something sordid with which I had unwittingly become involved. He’d plucked me out from inside the person I’d always thought I was
and made me question my own judgment. But I cared too much to let go of him. I was insatiably curious, hysterical with late-blooming girlhood. What was he doing? Was there someone else with him? I pictured him clasped in the woods with Diana Gonzalez, the curviest girl in our senior class, or exploring the garden with Nina; once, I dreamed of her pearl-gray eyes, iridescent as nail polish, her bare body pressed to his.
In a strange way, I felt I had a responsibility to protect him. Nobody else knew where he went at night, and after Keller’s warning, I wanted to make sure he didn’t sacrifice his tenuous parole. I woke each morning around five, when the mountains were barely outlined in light, and sat at the window. For three nights, I didn’t see him. But on Thursday, at five thirty, he came around from the back of the house and walked swiftly toward the dorms. There had to be a pattern, I thought, and I was right: he was gone over the weekend, but he was back on Tuesday and Thursday. This schedule continued for two weeks, during which the vivid dreams I’d been having, and their strangely correlating physical injuries, were absent—which made me even more convinced that something about my relationship with Gabe had inspired them.
December brought no snow: in Humboldt County, winter was cool and wet. At forty-five degrees, you could get away with a sweater, though the moisture in the air would cling to it as it did to the soft, bright bark of the redwood trees. Among us students, there was an atmosphere of feverishness. We had gotten a taste of vacation over Thanksgiving, and December was a mad dash to winter break, hurdled with final exams. During our history exam—rain splashing the windows, the furious scratch of thirty pencils on paper—Gabe was absent. I rushed through my essay on Spanish colonization and slapped it on Ms. Callaghan’s desk, Hannah staring at me in wonder. Then I stopped by the dorm for my raincoat and set out in search of him.
I found him in the attic of the library. He was leaning against one of its octagonal walls with a physics textbook in his hands.
“So you ditched our history final, and now you’re studying for physics,” I said. “Waste of time. At the rate you’re going, I doubt you’ll even make it to the end of the semester.”
Gabe looked up. His knees were tucked in toward his chest, and notebooks were spread out around him. Faint light shone through tower’s windows, and his eyes looked bare and squinty, as they did in the morning.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen you,” I said. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork. You’re lucky if Keller hasn’t spotted you again, but he will. The thing I can’t understand is why you keep doing it.”
Gabe put the physics book down and straightened his legs.
“It wasn’t me,” he said.
“Please, Gabe.”
“It wasn’t.” He raised his eyebrows. “How can you be sure? It’s dark out at that time of morning. Have you ever seen my face?”
“You sound pretty defensive for someone who supposedly wasn’t there.”
“Hardly.” Gabe’s features relaxed, as if on command.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Who else could it be?”
“David Horikawa. Michael Fritz. It was Mike who told me about Keller’s flowers, you know—those ones with the doubled discs. He’s been convinced for months Keller’s running experiments in that garden. I’m not the only one curious about it.”
“You expect me to believe there’s a whole band of kids running around Keller’s place at night?”
“All I’m saying is it wasn’t me.”
“But I know you,” I said. It was the only thing I could hold on to, the only thing that convinced me I wasn’t delusional. “I know the shape of your body, what it looks like when you walk.”
I was almost crying. After the months we’d spent together, this cool confrontation was excruciating. I knelt down in front of him, putting my palm on his knee.
“Gabe,” I said.
But he only looked out the window, putting his hand over his eyes like a visor. When he turned toward me again, his face had the same blank look I’d seen that night at Keller’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to work.”
He picked up the physics book again. When he opened it and began to read, underlining every so often, it was as if I wasn’t even there.
•••
That evening, I collapsed in my bunk. Hannah was out, and being alone made me cry even harder; I blew my nose so loudly that someone in the room next door banged on the wall and shouted, “Je-sus Christ, cut it out with the foghorn!” I fell asleep in my clothes, my eyes swollen shut. When the door opened, I thought it was Hannah, coming back from the common room at lights-out. But when someone climbed up to my bunk, the wooden ladder creaking more than it ever did beneath Hannah’s ninety-five pounds, I realized it had to be Gabe.
He was disheveled, greasy haired, and his eyes were bloodshot. He stopped in front of me and knelt.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, scrambling into a sitting position.
“I can’t stay for long, but I needed to see you. I have to tell you something.”
He exhaled, looking up at the ceiling. When he faced me again, his jaw was set.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Okay.” My head was pounding, and I wasn’t sure exactly why he was apologizing. “For what, exactly?”
“For acting like a total weirdo. For freezing you out in the library. For—for not being honest.” He put a hand on my knee. “The truth is, Sylvie, I’m not doing so well. My head’s in a funny place. But I don’t want to lose you.”
“Then don’t,” I said.
“It’s not that simple.”
“What’s wrong? Is it your mom? Or your grades? Did you hear from your dad?”
“No, no.” Gabe shook his head.
“What, then?”
He seemed more impenetrable than he ever had before, and I was exhausted. Embarrassed, too, that he had seen me this way. The waistband of my jeans had ridden up, digging tracks into my stomach; one sock had fallen off and somehow wound up on my pillow. I hadn’t bothered to take my hair out of its bun, and now it sagged over the side of my head, bobbing above one ear whenever I spoke.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I want to.”
“Well, can you try?”
“I have been trying.”
I could feel my eyes filling again. Stop it, I told myself. You’re being a girl, a stupid girl.
“Hey,” Gabe whispered. “Don’t cry”—and his thumbs were below my eyes, scooping the moisture off my cheeks and wiping it on his jeans. He was frustrated, thinking hard; when we spoke again, it was labored.
“All I need is a few days. A week, tops, to sort everything out. Then we can go back to normal—to how things were. I’m serious this time.”
I stared at him, trying to understand. For a moment, I almost gave in, but I was still angry: at his audacity and his withholding, his request for me to trust him when he wouldn’t tell me anything. I pushed him by the shoulders, pulling my knees up to my chest so he couldn’t come closer. But he pushed back, and we struggled against each other, Gabe trying to calm me while I wrestled even harder. I shoved my knee into his stomach, and he made a low noise of pain, but he didn’t pull away. Thick, sloppy tears rolled down my chin and onto the chest of his T-shirt.
Gabe was making snuffling noises, noises that I thought were from exertion before I realized he was crying, too. His head was limp, hanging forward from his neck like a scarecrow’s, but he held me just as strongly.
I had never seen him cry before. Against my better judgment, my resistance softened. What did I know of his secrets, and what right did I have to know them yet? Gabe laid his forehead on my chest, wrapping his legs and arms around me until I stilled. I don’t know how long we stayed like that; the next thing I remember, it was the middle of the night, the moon a sliver of fingernail in
the window. We were lying down, Gabe breathing steadily with sleep. His knees were tucked behind mine, and one of his arms was around my waist. I must have moved slightly, because he stirred and looked at me, his eyelids flickering.
I turned to face him. There were four inches, maybe less, between us.
“Are you sure you don’t want to break up?” I asked, keeping my voice low so I didn’t wake Hannah.
“I’m sure.”
“Why?”
“Why am I sure I don’t want to?”
He grinned at me, lopsided.
“Yeah,” I said. “Because it kind of seems like you don’t know what you want.”
“Sylvie,” Gabe whispered. He tucked his forehead into the nook of my shoulder; I could feel his breath against my ear. “You’re my person.”
The words vibrated inside me, and I grinned despite myself. You’re my person: he was mine, and I was his. But when I woke up the next morning, I wondered if I’d dreamed it. The light was pale and bluish as water, Hannah was snoring softly below me, and Gabe was gone.
•••
That day, he wasn’t in the dining hall at breakfast. I thought he was avoiding me until he was absent at lunch, and again at dinner. Gabe could scarf down three sloppy joes before belching loudly and declaring himself satisfied; there was no way he’d subsisted for an entire day on granola bars from the dorm vending machines. That night, I stood in front of the dessert window, staring at that night’s special—whipped-cream-topped Jell-O in plastic cups—while feeling increasingly nauseous. There was a whiff of perfume, and then Nina, Gabe’s ex, appeared at my side. She grabbed my arm.
“Sylvie,” she said. Her long, dark hair fell forward in a sheath, and her silvery eyes were wide with urgency. “Have you heard?”
“Heard what?” I asked, but my stomach was already curdling.
“He’s gone,” Nina said.
It spread through the dining hall within minutes. The rumor was that Gabe had been asked to leave after he ditched our history exam, but that didn’t make sense—Mills would never expel someone because of such a minor transgression. Everyone asked me what had really happened, and the fact that I was just as clueless made me burn with resentment. How could he have told me nothing? I was convinced his departure had something to do with Keller, but I shared this with no one and couldn’t prove it even to myself. After dinner, I ran to Gabe’s room, but when I burst inside, it was empty: his bottom bunk stripped of sheets and his dresser bare. Beneath a pushed-up window, one open drawer rattled in the wind.