Ren murmured introductions, and I put the duffel and box down before greeting the Jarrars. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Jarrar clasped my hand firmly and looked me full in the face. Her tearful eyes were a deep amber, and they held me suspended, as if I were holding my breath. “Thank you for your kindness, Mr. Glass,” she said. “We appreciate all that you and the school have done for us.”
For a couple of seconds I was unable to speak. This woman had just lost her son, and she was thanking me for bringing his belongings to her. Lies are potent things—as I have come to know so well—but so is honesty, and this woman’s straightforward thanks nearly undid me. By contrast, Mr. Jarrar’s silence was almost worse than his wife’s sincere candor. He stared into some middle distance, and I could read in his face how he struggled to hide the deep, terrible grief that threatened to consume him. The idea of pulling Ren aside at that moment to let him know that I had found weed in Terence’s room was ludicrous. “Thank you,” I finally managed to say. “And I’m so sorry.” I glanced at Ren, who nodded at me, which was enough of a signal for me to retreat, leaving Terence’s things, his sadly smiling mother, and his grim, silent father behind.
SUNDAY WAS MISERABLE. IT would have been better, perhaps, for Terence’s death to have occurred during the week, because then students would have had classes and the regular school-day routine to see them through. I spent most of Sunday grading papers and rereading Beowulf, which I would start on Monday. I ate a quick lunch of rubbery chicken drumsticks with Gray and Porter. Gray and I murmured at each other about how we thought the boys were doing while Porter stared at his plate and pushed his food around with his fork.
The pot I had found in Terence’s room lay in its plastic bag in the top drawer of my dresser. I knew I needed to tell Ren about it, or Sam, but something kept me from going to talk to them. I’d like to say it was out of some misguided sense of respect for Terence or his family, but it was more that I wanted to avoid being a narc and getting involved in what would undoubtedly be a messy situation. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t just keep the pot. I even ridiculously considered smoking it just to get rid of it, which gave rise to all sorts of imagined scenarios with students, or Sam Hodges, or even Ren Middleton stumbling across me as I toked on a fatty. As absurd as that image was, it stirred up memories of my time in New York that I wanted to keep buried—Michele doing lines of cocaine on a bathroom counter and then handing me a silver coke straw—which may also be a reason why I was ambivalent about the pot. Even stashing the pot in my top drawer showed my ambivalence, not to mention a certain sense of paranoia or conspiracy-theory thinking; I didn’t want to leave it lying around in plain view, yet if someone searched my apartment and found it, I could claim that I wasn’t trying to hide it at all, because really, who hides three good buds of pot in an unlocked drawer next to his boxers? In the end, I decided to wait for Terence’s roommate, Brian, to return from his weekend out with his parents; when he came back, I would go talk to Ren, hand over the pot, and let him talk with Brian about whose pot it was and whether he had known about it. So I left the pot in the drawer.
Later that afternoon, as I ironed a dress shirt for the formal sit-down dinner and the following chapel service, I realized with forehead-smacking clarity that Chaplain Joyner would undoubtedly turn chapel into a memorial service for Terence. The idea of this made me pause, hot iron in hand, and close my eyes. Chapel service was mandatory for all faculty and students, but at that moment I would rather have eaten a handful of cigarette butts than attend. I could picture it quite clearly: the solemn hymns, the pious dogma about Terence having gone to a better place, the personal testimonies and vignettes about Terence on dorm or in the classroom. It would be ripping a barely formed scab off a recent wound. Jim Joyner was a good-enough guy, and his sermons were usually short and occasionally relevant or even faintly amusing, but he was one of those people who blink with surprise at the evils of the world and fall back on oft-repeated bromides that a teenager would dismiss out of hand. Looking back, I realize that the students might actually have appreciated some sort of formal ceremony for Terence that could give them a kind of closure.
Dinner was a forced, awkward affair in which everything, even the clash of the serving trays, was muted. The boys were tense; when Hal Starr in an overly loud voice asked Paul Simmons to pass the biscuits, Paul literally jumped in his seat, knocking over his water glass. Stephen Watterson’s halfhearted teasing of Paul, who dabbed at the spilled water with his napkin, seemed worse than if the entire table had roared with laughter. As I helped Paul wipe up the spilled water, I glanced down Graveyard Alley at Porter Deems. He was gesticulating at his advisees as he told a story, as if trying to animate them like some sort of demented puppeteer. His advisees looked blankly at him, an unappreciative audience.
After dinner, walking out of Stilwell with the students to chapel, I moved to catch up with Porter. “Nice story you were telling to your table,” I said. “You looked like you were conjuring something.”
“Ungrateful bastards,” he said. “I’m telling them about climbing Grand Teton and rescuing this gorgeous girl and her dumbass boyfriend—they had the wrong gear, started too late up the mountain, all sorts of idiotic shit. I mean this is a great fucking story. And they just stare at me like a bunch of goddamn cows looking at a new gate.”
I was relieved. Porter sounded more like his profane, funny self. “They’re just thinking about chapel, probably,” I said. “Terence and everything.”
Porter stopped in his tracks. A pair of students behind us bumped into him and apologized as they stepped around. He didn’t even notice. “Oh God,” Porter said. He looked stunned. “I didn’t even . . . aw, shit.”
Guilt washed greasily over me. “Hell, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think about it until just before dinner.” I paused. Porter’s face—it was hard to tell in the dimming light—looked pale and drawn. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head, more like shaking off an irritating thought than saying no, and then looked directly at me. “Look, you didn’t do anything wrong that day,” he said. “You know that, right?”
I stared at him. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Thanks.”