Once I started, I fell into a grim, methodical rhythm. The dresser seemed to empty out itself, one drawer at a time, into the blue duffel I had found under the bed. The pile of laundry in the closet was daunting, but it turned out that Terence’s mother had, in fact, ironed in name labels, so I sorted his clothes and put them into the duffel as well. The composition notebook on the desk was stacked next to his schoolbooks—perhaps I could find a cardboard box to put them in. I took the Snoop Dogg poster down, rolled it up, and placed it on the desk next to the books. All the while the sunlight grew brighter outside the window until it seemed to take almost physical form, its warmth washing over the room.
With the clothes packed, I felt weirdly inert, my earlier sense of purpose having evaporated. Idly I glanced at Terence’s composition notebook on the desk. It was the same kind of notebook I had written in during my student days, a journal in which students wrote their responses to reading assignments by hand—a throwback in an age of laptops and blog posts. It occurred to me that I had no memory of Terence’s written work. I remembered him getting the Akhmatova poem in class a few weeks earlier, but I couldn’t remember a single thing he had written for my class. This seemed wrong, a crime against his memory. Had I not read Terence’s notebook? I had spent several nights going through my students’ notebooks, poring over them as if I were reading their souls, writing comments and responses in the belief that I would be opening up a valuable communication with them. Instead, I had drowned under the sheer number of their words, their thoughts about the works we had read, the observations they made about school, movies they had seen, their own lives. Eventually I had skimmed the notebooks, just adding a check mark or a brief Good work in the margins. It was entirely possible I had read Terence’s notebook the way I read tweets or Facebook status updates, like glancing at the sky to see what the weather was like. Good writing had mattered to me—still mattered—and it was highly probable that my own teachers’ comments and encouraging words had helped propel aloft my own dreams of being a writer. How hard was it to take two or three more minutes to read what a student had dutifully written? I had been his English teacher, for God’s sake; the least I could do was make sure I had read what he’d written for class. So, writhing with guilt and self-loathing, and not a little self-righteousness, I opened Terence’s notebook and began reading the pages, slowly turning them over one by one.
It soon became apparent—and this caused yet another spasm of guilt—that Terence was not some adolescent Montaigne. He had written perfunctorily about his reading assignments, employing the same style used by veteran texters who cared less about syntax or spelling than they did about getting to the final period, shedding grammatical rules like a marathoner tossing away a water bottle as he nears the finish line: I didnt care to much about Oddysseus, he was hard to understand sometimes but the gods and the Cyclops were cool. Most of the notebook’s pages were blank. But then I turned a page and read this:
The steel wheels
Turn and turn and turn
In the night
Shining with light
As if they burn
There was more, all in cryptic fragments of verse as if Terence had tried out an idea and then abandoned it to try another:
Floating away
On a hazy day
Above the plain
Above the pain
Guitar solo like a loud laugh
summer smoke sounds
The crows fly overhead like black clouds
burning wheels light up the bricks
as fate rolls down the path toward me
Unsettled, I closed his notebook and stuck it on top of the other books stacked on the desk. I wasn’t sure what the poems meant, but I felt like I shouldn’t be reading them.
I roamed around the room, looking for anything else that may have been Terence’s, and I came across the lava lamp shoved in the corner. The wax in the lamp had formed a single purple mass on the bottom. I picked up the lamp and peered at the base to see if Terence’s name was on it, too. I’d forgotten how heavy lava lamps were. The liquid stirred sluggishly inside. There was no name on the base, but the bottom was covered in gray duct tape. As I looked at it, the duct-taped bottom fell to the floor, surprising me so that I almost dropped the lamp. I clenched it with both hands, imagining Terence’s parents finding me in their son’s dorm room, frantically trying to clean up his broken lava lamp. “That was a gift from me!” his father would say, balling his fists.
I knelt to pick up the bottom of the lava lamp, and then I noticed the plastic bag shoved into the lamp’s base. When I pulled it out, I saw that the bag contained clumps of what looked like leafy moss. It wasn’t moss. I opened the bag, and a potent, organic smell a little like fresh dung wafted out. Now I understood why the lava lamp didn’t work. Someone had removed the heating bulb inside the base to make a crude storage place for what looked like some very dank pot. I knelt there, staring for a long time at the three marijuana buds in their plastic bag.
THE SMART THING TO DO, of course, would be to go to Ren Middleton or Sam Hodges, immediately, and show them what I’d found in the lava lamp. Then they could talk with Brian Schue, Terence’s roommate, to learn what he knew and find out who else was smoking or holding or dealing, and I would go back to my English essays and writer’s block.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way.
I did go to Ren’s office that morning, carrying the duffel and a box of Terence’s belongings, with the buds safely stowed in my pants pocket. My plan was to show Ren what I’d found, answer whatever questions he might have, and then leave the whole business in his capable hands. I’d just like the record to show that.
What happened instead was that, when I knocked on Ren’s office door in Stilwell, I heard Ren call, “Come in!” and I opened the door to find him sitting with Terence’s parents. They turned to look at me as I stood, gawking, in the doorway, a cardboard box in my hands and a duffel bag full of their dead son’s clothes slung over my shoulder. The Jarrars were Lebanese, with dark hair and pale olive complexions. Mrs. Jarrar was one of those women whose obvious grief simply made her more beautiful. She seemed far too young to have a teenage son. Mr. Jarrar was balding and wore a dark suit and, aside from a stiff nod and a weak handshake, did not look at me the rest of the brief time I was in Ren’s office; the tragedy of his son’s death had apparently struck him mute.