Everyone looked again at the boy’s photo. Unnatural hair colors weren’t allowed at Swithin; teachers were required to immediately send home anyone who wasn’t adhering to the dress code. So how had Christian’s hair gone unnoticed long enough for him to sit for his picture? Maybe Christian was the type of boy who fell between the cracks, even with acid-green hair. Sylvie thought about what Michael Tayson had said on the phone: You probably wouldn’t remember him from the matches. But Sylvie did remember him, an image of him with the wrestling team flashing through her mind.
“So what about the boy’s mother?” Geoff looked at Martha. “You only mentioned the dad. Are they divorced?”
“Out of the picture for some reason or other, I guess,” Martha said. She looked at the piece of paper, presumably some kind of dossier on Christian. “He’s a scholarship boy. Was. The address we have on file has him living over at Feverview Dwellings.” She flipped a page. “It doesn’t list an employer for the father.”
“Maybe he’s unemployed,” Jonathan suggested.
“Or on disability,” Martha said.
“Do we remember admitting this boy?” Dan asked. “What’s the father’s name?”
“Warren,” Martha read.
“Warren … Givens,” Dan repeated. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Everyone looked around, sheepish. Sometimes they had a say in admitting students, especially those receiving scholarships. But there was a separate committee for that, people with actual credentials to judge one candidate from another.
“If we wanted to set up a scholarship in his name, what could it be for?” Geoff said quietly.
Martha picked at her cuticles. “Well, we’d do the standard scholarship, of course. Needs-based, I would imagine. How does that sound?”
“Or we could make it kind of specific,” Dan suggested. “You know, according to what he was interested in. Do we know if he liked particular subjects in school? Art? Music?”
“He doesn’t look like he’d be too involved in anything,” Jonathan said, holding up Christian’s photo. “I suppose we could look for his transcript …” He started to leaf through the papers.
“Good Lord, stop,” Sylvie blurted out.
They all paused, raising their heads.
“I mean, the poor boy died only days ago.” Sylvie’s voice was a tautly held string. “We should have some respect.”
The grandfather clock in the corner bonged seven times. Sylvie had to stop them. If they looked through his transcript, they’d see that he’d wrestled. Then the conversation would turn to Scott, the tape recorder still rotating, still capturing everything. She could picture their faces. Did Scott know this boy? Funny he was on the wrestling team … he doesn’t look like the type. She had no idea what would come after that. She had no idea what she might say after that, either. She kept thinking about the look on Scott’s face when he’d tried to suffocate that mouse in the basement. And all the times he’d dressed up as slashers from horror movies for Halloween. And his aversion to children—especially babies. Once when a teenager, he had even chuckled over a news story about a pit bull mauling a toddler. Jesus, what a mess, he’d said, as though he was commenting on an unkempt room, a ramshackle house.
Geoff sat back. “Goodness, Sylvie. You’re right.”
Martha coughed quietly. “Of course.”
The others hung their heads. They don’t know, she thought. She wondered instead if they thought she was sensitive about them talking behind this boy’s back because so many people had talked behind hers. It was what Michael Tayson meant by character assassination—all those rumors about how her grandfather selectively chose who did and didn’t get to attend Swithin. All that tut-tutting that Scott was so unruly and different. And what was with that ring Sylvie had started wearing, they might have hissed more recently. What do you think that means? They probably even gossiped about how James died—on the floor soaked in urine. It had gotten out, she knew it had. So many things had gotten out.
Dan leaned over and patted Sylvie’s hand. Jonathan brought her a box of tissues from the librarian’s desk. Or maybe they thought that with James’s passing so recent, Sylvie couldn’t talk about death right now. If that was the case, it was wrong to accept their pity.
The topic moved off Christian immediately, and the rest of the meeting bumped along. They made decisions and doled out who should do what. As they were finally leaving, Geoff reminded them of the cocktail party at his house next week for his wife’s birthday. “The party’s on a Monday,” he warned. “But she insisted on having it on the day.” He rolled his eyes as if to say ah, youth. This was Geoff’s second wife; she was twenty years younger than he, than all of them.
From there Martha caught up to Jonathan, and they walked out of the library together, rehashing the laptop details. Geoff and Dan were already on their cell phones. Sylvie lingered behind, gazing after them. All of her colleagues walked with such assured entitlement. But my grandfather told me all this was mine, she wanted to tell them. I’m the rightful owner of this place, not you.
And she wanted to say something else, too. She wanted to yell out to them to be careful—their good fortunes might be more precarious than they thought. It could blow away in the blink of an eye, especially when they weren’t paying attention.