No. Yes. Maybe. “I don’t know.”
“Fair enough.” She turns to her bag again and starts rifling through a folder packed with worksheets and student compositions. “If you want to stay away from Lord Byron, I’m going to give you something else to work with.”
I hold very still. If she pulls another poem about death out of her bag, I’m out of here.
She slaps a photocopied piece of paper on the table in front of me.
Invictus, it reads. By William Ernest Henley.
“My AP students are reading it,” she says, “but I think you can handle it.”
I’m scared to read the first stanza. I want to crumple it up and bolt out of here.
I’m such a wuss. I look at the corner of the paper so I don’t have to read any more. “You want me to read it now?”
“No. Take it home. Write me two paragraphs about what he’s going through.” She pauses. “I think you’ll identify with it.”
“Sure.” I shove it into my bag. “Whatever.”
“Declan.”
My name is weighted, but not with warning. It makes me hesitate. “What?”
“Give me a chance. Okay?”
“Sure.” Then I yank the zipper on the bag, throw it over my shoulder, and walk out of the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
From: The Dark <[email protected]>
To: Cemetery Girl <[email protected]>
Date: Monday, October 7 2:15:44 PM
Subject: Poetry
Have you ever read “Youth and Age” by Lord Byron? It’s the worst poem in the world. It’s all about the decay of death.
My mother read it at my sister’s funeral.
I wanted to rip it out of her hands. I mean, who reads something like that at a funeral? I would have preferred a passage from the Bible, and if you know me, that’s saying something.
We read the poem in English this morning. Well, I didn’t read it. I walked out.
So I can relate to your near miss with detention.
You asked if anyone else knows the whole truth about what happened with my family. My best friend knows most of it. I don’t think he knows how long it all went on, but that doesn’t really matter now, does it?
I appreciate all the vehemence on my behalf, but you’re wrong. It might not have been all my fault, but some of it was.
It’s absolutely killing me that I don’t know who he is. I take AP English, but we’re not reading Byron, so that only eliminates about fifteen guys.
I try to think of who in the senior class could use a word like “vehemence” but still be defiant enough to walk out of class. The obvious answer is right in front of me: I could just ask him. But that would mean ending this. I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Maybe the mystery is part of what’s so attractive about him. Maybe I’d meet him and he’d be horrible.
He wouldn’t be. I just know.
But still.
He said once that Mom probably wouldn’t like him much, but he’s wrong about that. I think she’d like him a whole lot. She’d find him fascinating.
I find him fascinating.
Mr. Gerardi has a group of students at his desk when I find him after the final bell. I linger in the back of the classroom, looking at the photographs stapled to the wall. These must be from the beginner photography elective, because I remember the assignment. The photographs are all simple shots of nature, but a few stand out with creative use of light. One in particular, a shot of an ant crawling through grains of sugar on wood, catches my eye. I love the composition, with a torn-open sugar packet blurred in the background.
“I love that one, too,” says Mr. Gerardi behind me. “I hope she sticks with it.”
“Freshman?” I ask.
“Junior. She was trying to fill an elective, and discovered she has a flair for it.” He pauses, and I keep my eyes on the photography exhibit. I don’t want to look at him, because I’m still so uncertain about what I’m doing here. He speaks to my shoulder. “Did you want to see the photo I had in mind for the yearbook cover wrap?”
Being here after staying away for so long feels like I’m somehow betraying my mother’s memory, but curiosity keeps driving me forward. I wet my lips. “Sure.”
He turns, leaving me to follow him, and I do. At his desk, he turns the monitor around so I can see.
I stop breathing. There on the screen is the first photograph I took on Thursday. Declan and Rev sitting on the quad on one side, the cheerleaders practicing a routine on the other.
I knew. Somewhere inside me, I knew it would be this one.
“I love it,” Mr. Gerardi says in a rush. “I think it’ll make a perfect cover, because of the negative space in between. The cheerleaders symbolize school spirit and togetherness, and their half of the photo could be on the front, while the boys could be on the back, symbolic of friendship, of the isolation everyone occasionally feels in high school—”
“I don’t know.” My voice comes out as a croak.
“You don’t know?”
“I’ll have to ask them.”
“The girls? Do you know them? Parents sign a disclaimer at the beginning of each school year. We don’t need individual permission for yearbook shots—”
“No.” My voice cracks again. Rev said I didn’t need to delete the photograph, but that doesn’t mean he’d be okay with it splashed across the cover of the yearbook for our graduating year. I have no idea how many yearbooks are produced on an annual basis, but there are over eight hundred graduating seniors alone. “No, the boys.”
“Okay.” He sounds puzzled. “Do you think it would be a problem?”
I keep thinking of my conversations with The Dark about our roads in life and whether they’re predestined. Fate seems determined to send me careening through the paths of Declan Murphy and Rev Fletcher. “I don’t . . . I have no idea.”
Mr. Gerardi hesitates. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
His words are guarded, and it pulls my attention off the screen. “What?”
“This seems like it’s a big deal. I’m trying to figure out why.”