“You studied in France?”
She nodded. “In college. I spent two summers in Paris, and then a semester in Lyon.”
The whiskey sours had begun to rise to my head, creating a warm glow. “They let you do that at Juilliard? I didn’t know they let you all out of the music hall.”
Abby’s expression was still. “I didn’t go to Juilliard,” she said.
A bit too late, I recalled the dance at Saint Margaret’s, me asking Abby if she still played the cello and her redheaded friend—Kelly? Kerry?—laughing in disbelief. Music? Abby hates music. Embarrassed, I rubbed my eyes. “Sorry,” I said.
Abby shrugged. “Things change. How’s the writing going?”
I shrugged back. “Things change,” I said, smiling. It wasn’t convincing. Abby looked disappointed, as if I’d failed to live up to her expectations. Which I probably had. “Did you read my book?” I asked, and then immediately regretted the question. I never, ever asked people if they had read my book.
Abby shifted on her feet, gazing somewhere off my shoulder, and then looked me square in the face. “No.”
I nodded. “Thanks for the honesty.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Abby asked.
I sipped my drink, stalling, and realized my cup now held only ice cubes. How to answer that question? My choice was, as usual, avoidance. “Why did you all declare Fritz dead?” I asked. My voice was hard, callous. It wasn’t me speaking, I thought.
Abby stared at me. I crunched an ice cube in my mouth, waiting for an answer. The moment yawned before us, as if I had just taken a step and only now understood that I was falling.
“Wow,” she finally said. “That’s amazing. We’re having a nice . . . moment, or whatever this is, and you just kill it off with a handful of words.” She was furious, tears filling her eyes, although she looked as if she were refusing to cry.
“Do you think he’s dead?” I asked. “Because I don’t.”
“Go to hell,” she said. She threw her can of Diet Coke at me. I ducked late, and the can skipped off my shoulder. Coke fizzed down the back of my coat, although most of it splashed on the ground. When I looked up, Abby was stalking out of the tent into a crowd of people who had suddenly appeared from the stadium. Halftime.
I gathered a handful of napkins and was wiping off my coat when Trip appeared. “Was that Abby Davenport who just walked out of here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “We said hello.”
Trip took in my coat and the napkins in my hand, and then apparently decided not to ask. “Look,” he said. “About . . . in there. I’m sorry. I heard about the boy who died at school. That must have been rough.”
I sighed. “No, man, I’m sorry. I was a complete asshole. No excuse for it.”
Trip raised his hands in appeasement. “We’re good, then.”
I continued to wipe off my coat, not looking at Trip. “Did we score before the half?” I asked.
“Yeah, touchdown. Our guys looked like they were about to apologize for it, too.” He hesitated. “You want to get out of here?”
I wadded up the napkins and threw them into a nearby trash can. “Absolutely,” I said.
WE FOUND AN APPLEBEE’S two blocks away, and Trip ordered a burger and a beer while I prudently ordered iced tea and a club sandwich. We avoided talking about Blackburne. Instead, I asked Trip more about his life since graduation. He told me about going to school in Missouri, switching from political science to journalism, meeting his fiancée, Mary, and then moving with her to D.C. where she took a job as a nurse anesthetist and he started writing a financial blog for a nonprofit. He’d been among the first professional bloggers to write about the subprime mortgage crisis and the ensuing tsunami that wrecked the financial world, and he’d been able to parlay that into a job as a staff reporter at the Post. It sounded both extraordinary and normal, a life with a person he loved and marriage and kids on the horizon, and as I bit into my club sandwich, I felt a pang of jealousy.
“I thought newspapers were dying,” I said. “Print journalism is a dinosaur, and all that.”
“You mean like book publishing?” Trip said.
“Touché.” The third whiskey sour had turned my earlier warm glow into an angry burn behind my eyes. I scanned the restaurant for the waiter to order more tea.
Trip smiled. “It’s bad, and it’s changing. Newspapers can’t keep up the old business model. People get their news off the Internet for free.”
I finally caught our waiter’s eye and held up my empty glass. He scurried away. “So you did this sort of backward?” I asked. “Starting as a blogger and then moving to print?”
Trip picked up his burger in both hands. “Oh, I still write a blog,” he said. “On the side. The Post might eventually pay me to write one for them. Although what’ll probably happen is I’ll get an offer from somewhere else, maybe an online magazine.” He took a bite of his burger, savoring it the way a man who is pleased with his life can enjoy little things like his lunch.
I shoved some fries into my mouth. “I can’t balance my checkbook, let alone figure out Wall Street,” I said around the mouthful of fries. “Nice to know they’ve got somebody with brains writing about finance so the rest of us know what the hell to do.”
Trip wiped his mouth with a napkin. “You must have done all right with your novel,” he said. “I heard film rights can sell for good money. If you like, I could set you up with a financial planning guy I know. He could talk to you about investments.”
“You’re about a year too late, my friend,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant but unable to keep a bitter note from creeping in. The burn behind my eyes refused to die down. “Which is why you now see me as a humble teacher of English at our alma mater.”
Trip looked at me quietly as the waiter came back and dropped off another glass of iced tea, whisking the empty one away. As I took a bite of my sandwich, Trip said, “It must be hard, teaching at Blackburne.” The quiet way he said it made it clear he wasn’t talking about classroom management.
Slowly, I nodded. An idea had been forming in the back of my mind, although I hadn’t been sure how to broach it with Trip. His comment provided an opening. The bite of club sandwich had turned to sawdust in my mouth, and I concentrated on chewing. When I’d swallowed, I said, “I’ve learned some things. About Fritz.”
Trip didn’t move other than to blink, but I could sense the excitement and dread stirred in him by my words. Fritz was a taboo subject, and therefore talking about him, crossing that boundary, had caused a thrill to run up Trip’s spine, the same thrill I was feeling. It was a little like we were teenagers again, both eager and frightened as we talked behind the closed doors of our rooms about sex or drugs, hoping the teachers wouldn’t overhear us.