Trip’s eyes flashed with anger. “That’s not fair. Of course he was my friend! We were all devastated when he disappeared. You weren’t the only one.”
I placed my palms on the table, forcing myself to calm down. “I never said I was the only one hurt by Fritz disappearing. We all were, I know that. But that doesn’t make how I felt any better. How I feel. It’s . . .” I took a deep breath. “Look, I cut myself off from everyone at Blackburne. You, Diamond, everybody. I tried to move on like it was just a—a bad accident, some car wreck I had to get over. And I fucked up everything in my life. My relationships. My friends. I wrote a novel, but now I can’t write anything anymore. It just—doesn’t come. My agent dropped me, my girlfriend and I imploded . . .” I paused. “Nothing’s good,” I said. “Except I think I might actually be good at teaching. I took the job because I was a fucking mess and had nothing else, but I like it. I like the kids. I like talking about poetry with them, for God’s sake.” I paused and closed my eyes. “But everywhere I turn, I see Fritz, or something that reminds me of him. Christ, the fucking Manassas wide receiver reminded me of him.” I opened my eyes. Trip sat stricken across from me, but I plowed on. “The night Fritz vanished, when I talked with you in the library?” Trip barely nodded. “The night before, I cheated on a take-home test.” Trip’s eyes grew wide. A heavy, crushing weight sat on my heart, and I kept talking, hoping I could dispel it. “I had to go in front of the J-Board, with Fritz right there, and I lied and said I didn’t do it, and they found me not guilty. I walked around all that day feeling like such a liar, a fraud. And when I ran into Fritz that afternoon, down at the lions, I was drowning in it, in my own guilt. He—he told me he knew I hadn’t cheated, and I couldn’t fake it. He took one look at my face and he knew. He looked so hurt, like I’d stabbed him in the back. Which I guess I had.” I took another deep breath, this one shuddering a bit, but I held it together. “We fought about it. And then he turned and ran away. He ran away from me. That was the last time I saw him. I don’t want that to be the last time I see him. The last thing he remembers about me. If I don’t . . . put him to rest, I’m going to fail at this, too. I’ve fucked up almost everything else, and I can’t fuck this up. I have to find out what happened to him. I have to.” I sat back in my chair, suddenly exhausted, emptied.
After a minute, I realized Trip had stood up and was laying cash down next to his plate. I looked up at him.
“I’ll get those articles for you,” he said. He kept his voice neutral, calm. “But the Davenports . . .” He shook his head, clapped me once, hard, on the shoulder, and left.
I didn’t feel especially relieved about disclosing everything to Trip. What I felt was a certainty that Trip would help me, and while the heavy weight on my heart was not gone, it was a bit lighter nonetheless.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On Sunday, my head pounding after three hours of grading papers, I threw on my barn coat and headed out into the chill air for a walk. The windows of the Brickhouse were steamy from the students gathered inside for fries and Cokes, and a couple of new boys were halfheartedly throwing a Frisbee on the Lawn, but otherwise a kind of limp exhaustion had settled over the Hill, as if even the few leaves left on the trees were too tired to let go and sail to the grass below. Sundays were for doing laundry, catching up on homework, or watching an old movie for the fourth time in the A/V center. Students were bored and already mourning the weekend that was not yet over, watching with dread the hours tick by toward Sunday dinner, chapel, and study hall.
I didn’t want to just take a short stroll around the Lawn and head back to the dorm, so I walked past the chapel and Sam Hodges’s house, thinking I might stop by the infirmary and see if Porter was in. But the porch was empty and Betty Yowell’s kitchen window was dark, so I decided to wander down the drive to at least the start of the trees. It was brisk, a light wind cooling my breath. Low gray clouds hid the sun, although you knew it was there, like a lamp held up behind a shade. If it had been colder, I would have thought of snow, although we were a few weeks away from that at least. In that strange, soft light, I cast no shadow as I walked down off the Hill, the drive a ribbon of asphalt at my feet.
I reached the grove of hickory, oak, and poplar that were older than the trees by the lions at the other end of campus. Rather than a manicured green lawn, the ground underneath these trees was blanketed in dead leaves. This drive was used more as a service entrance, a back door that did not require the same attention to appearances that the lions’ entrance did. As a result, the woods here were more like an actual forest, wilder, more real. The light dimmed around me as I continued to walk down the drive that led to the bridge and the river, where Porter and I had spotted Terence’s body. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the gentle slope that rose to Saint Matthew’s Chapel and the rest of the brick-and-columned Hill. Then I turned my back on it and walked on into the trees.
When I had been a student, this had been a favorite run of mine in the spring, when flowers bloomed in the undergrowth and the oak trees rose like gray columns wreathed at their crowns by golden-green leaves. Now in mid-November, the leaves scorched and the bushes bare, the branches were more skeletal and angular, like the naked limbs of an older woman stripped of her finery. Still, there was a melancholy beauty in the fading gold leaves and the stark branches, and the trees still held a sense of majesty, if less splendid than in early fall or spring.