“I’ll tell you what love is,” said Martha, gazing at the ceiling. “It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Once you think it’s there and give voice to it? It’s not there anymore. It’s over here. Then way over here. Then here. You can’t trap it or contain it no matter how hard you try.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard Martha speak in such a way—the first time for the others too, if their surprised glances were any indication. Being allergic to romance was her shtick. If ever you asked her whom she had a crush on, she’d blink at you like you had three heads: “Why would I waste time—a highly precious, constantly diminishing resource—on transitory neurological fluctuations of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin?” When she saw couples holding hands in the halls, she gave them a cartoonishly wide berth.
“In case they’re contagious,” she said. And she wasn’t joking.
The conversation meandered on as rain peppered the windows.
At one point Kip started calling me Sister Bee again, which made Cannon blurt that I was the one person at school no one, not a teacher or student, a parent, a maintenance worker, or even an ant, could ever say anything bad about.
“And your nice isn’t even irritating,” said Cannon.
“Remember how in biology,” said Kip, smirking, “Bee didn’t even tell Mr. Jetty that Chad Burman had just thrown up his entire lunch all over the back of her blouse? She just sat there heroically answering his question about osmosis and then excused herself.”
“And the field trip to D.C. when Mr. Miller had to go home to his pregnant wife, and rather than summon another teacher from campus to chaperone, Ms. Guild just asked Bee.”
They cackled with laughter.
“It wasn’t that big a deal,” I said.
During this conversation, Whitley remained tellingly silent, a smug expression on her face as she stared at the floor, as if she begged to differ, as if she wanted to laugh.
When is it coming? I wondered with a shiver. The conversation about Jim?
The absent leader. The sixth member. The killed one.
Weren’t they dying to talk about him? Jim, whose shadow stretched behind him long and dark, as captivating dead as he was when he was alive. Jim the poet. Jim the prince.
Of course they were thinking about him. How could they not?
Yet it seemed he was the locked shed on the forsaken property everyone was too scared to approach, much less peer inside all the filthy windows.
Not long after, I passed out. When I woke up, peeling my cheek from the couch cushions, Whitley and Cannon were asleep under a blanket in front of the fireplace. Kip was snoring on the love seat. Only Martha was awake. She appeared to have sobered up and was sitting across the room in a club chair, reading with her chin in her hand.
“Hey,” I croaked, rubbing my eyes. “What time is it?”
“Four-fifteen.”
It was still dark out, and still raining.
“Can’t sleep,” Martha said with a wan smile. “It’s that old man. I feel like he’s still out there.”
Her remark made me glance out the windows, shivering.
Whitley had turned on every light, and I could see the giant fallen branch, the gardens and pool, the stone path leading down to the dock.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I whispered.
We went on talking, though eventually the silences between our words stretched out farther and farther, like the distance between a final chain of tiny islands before the open sea.
Martha and I had never been close, though by rights we should have been. As the only scholarship kids at Darrow, we were two rescue mutts of humble bloodlines and skittish temperaments thrown into a kennel of world-class purebreds.
She’d attended Darrow on a physics scholarship established by a genius alumnus who’d worked on the God Particle. She’d been the first winner in twenty-eight years. Valedictorian of our class, she went to MIT on a full ride for mathematical engineering.
She’d been raised in South Philadelphia by a single dad, and her family was even poorer than mine. I never met her dad, though Cannon once said he owned a gas station and went by the nickname Mickey Peanuts. Jim told me Martha had had a considerably older sister who’d died of a drug overdose, and that death was the reason Martha’s mother left. But Martha never mentioned a sister, and any talk of her mom was in connection with a single trip to Alaska she’d taken when she was ten.
I’d spent hours in her company, yet I couldn’t tell you who or what Martha ever loved beyond this weird underground fantasy novel called The Bend. The book was why she wallpapered her dorm room with mysterious posters of steam trains and scoured Reddit forums for other megafans, known as Benders. She even dressed up—with a surprising lack of embarrassment—once in a top hat and spectacles, or a gray barrister’s wig—to celebrate the apparent birthdays of the characters. She always kept a copy of the book at the bottom of her backpack, pulling out the doorstop of a thousand torn-up pages—crudely Xeroxed, bound with frayed twine—at the start of class, reading, it seemed, to avoid talking to anyone.
At heart she was Jim’s friend. They’d met when they were kids at some invitation-only camp for the gifted, housed in a nineteenth-century mansion in upstate New York called Da Vinci’s Daughters and Sons. Jim was there because he’d composed an entire musical about Napoleon, which had been staged at his Manhattan private school and gotten him profiled in New York magazine. Martha was there because she’d built a working airplane engine in her garage.
It was Jim who urged Martha to apply to Darrow, Jim who sought to have her around. Over the years she’d become an integral part of our group, giving every situation its deadpan punctuation or making some awkward reference to a chapter in The Bend that no one understood. And yet I always suspected Jim had been her only true champion, that Cannon, Wit, and Kip accepted her the way one accepts a lifelong inconvenience, like asthma or a spouse’s beloved cat. He never stopped insisting she was amazing, that one day when we were sixty we’d look back and think with disbelief, I was friends with Martha Ziegler.
“Which will be like saying you were friends with Steve Hawking. That’s how big she’s gonna be.”
The two of them had a shabby shorthand, laughing at things only they found funny, arms slung around each other’s necks like old cardigans. While it didn’t make me jealous per se, it could lead me to notice something Martha did—heavy glance, weird remark—that would set off alarm bells, and I’d entertain my long-standing suspicion that she was harboring a burning secret: she was in love with Jim. It was why she’d never liked me.
I could only assume she’d been heartbroken by his death. In the aftermath—the ten or so days before summer break—she was glum and taciturn, scuttling out of Final Chapel ahead of the entire school like some startled attic bat. She was agitated. Dimly I recalled how she’d left school suddenly the day before I did, vanishing without saying goodbye. Whitley, ever attentive to the embarrassing things people wished to hide, couldn’t stop saying, “Something’s up with Martha.”
Now here she was, staring at me with that stark telephoto stare I’d always found nerve-wracking. Whatever she had felt about Jim’s death, whatever had been uprooted, was hidden now, like a pod of blue whales thundering through the depths of an ocean with a still surface.
I realized that she’d just asked me a question.
“What?”