She shakes her head, somehow frowning and smiling at the same time. “I don’t need to,” she says. “I was there.”
Colborne’s eyes narrow. Unperturbed, she touches my arm, says, “I’ll see you tonight,” and walks out of the refectory, Colborne’s unasked questions hanging in the air behind her.
He watches her leave, then asks, “How much does she know?”
“She knows everything.” He frowns, eyes nearly disappearing beneath his thick brows. “People always forget about Filippa,” I add. “And later they always wish they hadn’t.”
He sighs, like he doesn’t have the energy to be really disgruntled. He contemplates his coffee for a moment, then abandons it on the table. “Well,” he says. “Lead the way.”
“Where?”
“You’d know better than I would.”
I’m silent, thinking. Then I sit. It’s as good a place as any.
Colborne chuckles reluctantly. “You want some coffee?”
“I wouldn’t say no.”
He disappears into the kitchen, where two coffee urns stand in the corner. (They’ve been there at least fourteen years. They’re always full, though I never—even as a student—saw who filled them.) He comes back with a full mug, sets it in front of me. I watch the milk swirl as he sits down in the same chair he just got up from.
“Where do you want me to start?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Wherever you think is best. See, Oliver, I don’t just want to know what happened. I want to know the how and the why and the when. I want to make sense of it.”
For the first time in a long time, that little rip in the middle of me, the black bruise on my soul that’s been struggling to heal for nearly a decade, throbs. Old feelings come softly thronging back. Bittersweetness, discord, and confusion.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” I tell Colborne. “It’s been ten years and I still can’t make sense of it.”
“Then maybe this will be good for both of us.”
“Maybe.”
I sip my coffee pensively. It’s good—it has flavor, unlike the brownish slime we drank in prison, which only vaguely reminded me of coffee, even on good days. The heat soothes the swelling pain in my chest, for a moment.
“So,” I say, when I’m ready. The mug warms my palms, and the memories flood through me like a drug, razor sharp, crystal clear, kaleidoscopic. “Fall semester, 1997. I don’t know if you remember, but it was a warm autumn that year.”
SCENE 1
Two weeks before opening night we had our photos taken for publicity, and the FAB was an absolute madhouse. In order to take photos we needed costumes, and everyone was running back and forth from the dressing rooms to the rehearsal hall, changing ties and shirts and shoes until Gwendolyn was satisfied. The previous year’s election had inspired Frederick to do Caesar as a presidential race, so we were all dressed as White House hopefuls. I had never worn a suit that really fit me in my life, and my own reflection surprised me more than once. For the first time, I entertained the idea that I could be handsome, with enough effort. (Previously, I’d thought of myself as attractive only in a forgettable, inoffensive way—an idea reinforced by the fact that the few girls I’d been mixed up with inevitably seemed to realize that they liked me better onstage as Antonio or Demetrius than offstage as my mild-mannered self.) Of course, among my classmates I might as well have been invisible. Alexander looked like a mafioso in shimmering charcoal gray, an onyx tiepin glinting on his chest. James, immaculate in deep ink blue, could have been the heir apparent of some small European monarchy. But Richard, in pale pearl gray and a blood-red tie, cut the most impressive figure of us all.
“Is it just me or does that suit actually make him taller?” I asked, looking through the door of the rehearsal hall, where they’d set up a black screen to be our backdrop. They wanted Richard first, for the “campaign poster shot,” as Gwendolyn kept calling it.
“I think his ego just makes him look bigger,” James said.
Alexander craned his neck to see between us. “Maybe so. But you can’t deny, the guy looks good.” He glanced at me and added, “So would you, if you could learn to tie a Windsor knot properly.”
Me: “Is it still crooked?”
Alexander: “Have you seen yourself?”
Me: “Just fix it, will you?”
Alexander tipped my chin up to adjust my tie and carried on whispering to James. “Honestly, I’m glad we’ve got a night off from rehearsal for this. Every time we do The Fucking Tent Scene with Gwendolyn’s commentary, I just want to lie down and die.”
“Arguably, that’s sort of how you should feel.”
“Look, I expect to be emotionally exhausted after a show, but she makes that scene so real that I look at you offstage and I can’t decide if I want to kiss you or kill you.”
I snorted out a laugh and Alexander jerked on my tie. “Stop squirming.”
“Sorry.”
Filippa appeared behind us from the girls’ dressing room. (She had at least three costumes; at that particular moment it was a pin-striped pantsuit, not flattering.) “What are we talking about?” she whispered.
Alexander: “I might make out with James tomorrow.”
James: “Lucky me.”
Filippa: “Could be worse. Remember Midsummer, when Oliver head-butted me in the face?”
Me: “In my defense, I tried to kiss you nicely, but I couldn’t see because Puck squirted his love juice right in my eye.”
Alexander: “There was so much innuendo in that sentence I don’t even know where to start.”
Across the room, Gwendolyn clapped her hands and said, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to get anything better than that. What’s next? The couples? Fine.” She turned toward us and called, “Filippa, go and find the other girls, won’t you?”
“Because they couldn’t possibly want me here for any other reason,” Filippa muttered, and disappeared into the dressing room again.