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  FOR PENNY

  SOPHOMORE YEAR

  Stare. It is the way to educate your eye.

  —Walker Evans

  Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life. . . .

  —Ryan McGinley

  1

  I remember the morning Antoinette became a “known” person at our school. I was in Mr. Miller’s geometry class. It was first period and everyone was half asleep. Kaitlyn Becker was scribbling in her math book, her head sideways on her desk. Someone was whispering in the back row. I was sitting by the window, staring out at the courtyard. A thick fog had settled in, which made the trees look ghostly and mysterious. The benches and walkways looked like they were from another time. What made it do that? The moisture in the air? The blurriness of the light? Fog made things look sad, I thought. Like a memory. Like something that had happened a long time ago and could never be undone.

  There was an announcement, which I didn’t quite hear, and when I turned back toward the room, our teacher was gone.

  “Hey,” I said to the boy next to me. “What happened to Mr. Miller?”

  “He went to the office.”

  “What for?”

  “I dunno.”

  I looked around. The whole class had been left sitting at our desks, with no one in charge. That was unusual.

  Then we heard adult shoes clacking down the hall. An adult voice called out. One of the kids stuck his head out the door to see what was going on. A teacher yelled for him to go back in, sit down, and close the door.

  Something was definitely up. We sat in our seats, looking at each other, wondering what had happened.

  • • •

  In the hallway after class, everyone was buzzing about a girl named Antoinette Renwick. She had been taken to the office by the principal. A police car had been seen in the parking lot. People weren’t sure what had happened. Had she done something wrong? Was she under arrest?

  I vaguely knew who Antoinette Renwick was. She was one of the new kids that year. She had black hair and thick dark eyebrows. She also wore weird clothes: old sweaters and skirts and non-Nike tennis shoes.

  Like everyone else, I spent the rest of the day wondering about Antoinette. Had she brought drugs to school? Maybe she’d stolen something. I didn’t know where she came from. Texas, someone said, but they weren’t sure. Maybe she was poor or came from a messed-up family.

  • • •

  After school, the news went around that Antoinette’s older brother had jumped off the Vista Bridge and died. A suicide. Everyone was stunned by that. Nobody knew this older brother, Marcus Renwick. He was nineteen, someone said. Everyone felt bad for Antoinette, but there wasn’t much they could do, since nobody really knew her. And anyway, she was long gone by now, since the cops had come and taken her that morning.

  Before I left, I heard some girls mention the street she lived on. It wasn’t that far from my house. When I got home, I decided to ride my bike over there and see what was going on.

  I found her street. I didn’t have the actual address, but it was obvious which house it was. A police car was in the driveway, and a bunch of other cars were parked around it. I rode up on the sidewalk across the street and stopped and stood there, straddling my bike.

  I couldn’t see anything, really. Everyone was inside. The house looked pretty normal: two stories, a small yard, a tree, a garage.

  Then a taxicab came around the corner. I tried to look inconspicuous. The taxi stopped in the street. An older woman holding a wadded Kleenex got out. She was crying and trying to talk on her phone at the same time. She nearly dropped her bag as she went inside.

  I felt a little weird then, like if the neighbors saw me it might seem strange that I was standing there, spying on the Renwick house.

  • • •

  Then the front door opened again. This time Antoinette came out. I thought about taking off, but she didn’t see me. She didn’t even look up. She was wearing one of those oversize arctic parkas. She sat down on the front step. She pulled her knees up into her chest, tucked her hair behind one ear, and stared straight down at her feet.

  After a minute she checked behind her, and when she saw no one was watching, she pulled a cigarette from her pocket and slipped it in her mouth. She lit the end. That was pretty weird. Nobody at our school smoked. And definitely no sophomores did. Maybe kids smoked in Texas. She took a drag and blew out the smoke. She flicked the ash.

  Then she suddenly looked up. Her eyes went straight to me. She must have sensed she was being watched.

  I was busted. I didn’t know what to do. I gripped my bike handles and swallowed.

  “Hello?” she said. “Can I help you?”

  I shook my head no.

  She studied me for a moment. “You go to my school,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “What? You can’t talk?”

  “I can talk,” I said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gavin.”

  She took another drag of her cigarette and squinted at me. “My brother died today,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Antoinette stared in my direction. But she wasn’t seeing me anymore. She was seeing something else. I don’t know what, the harshness of life, maybe. She took another drag from her cigarette. Her hand was shaking now. Her lower lip began to tremble. Her face seemed about to collapse.

  I felt my heart nearly leap out of my chest for her.

  Then the door made a noise. Someone was trying to open it. Antoinette quickly slipped the cigarette under her shoe and ground it out. She tossed the butt into the bushes. The door opened and a woman’s head appeared. She said something I couldn’t hear. Antoinette stood up and went inside.

  • • •

  It was almost dinnertime when I got back to my own house. My mother asked me where I’d been. I told her the whole story, about the cops coming to school and the new girl and how her brother had killed himself. And how I rode my bike to her house to see what was happening.

  “So you know this girl?” asked my mom.

  “No,” I said. “I just wanted to see the house.”

  “What for?”

  “To see what it looked like.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Like the house of someone who died.”

  My mother gave me one of her looks. Then she told me to get ready for dinner.

  2

  I also had an older brother: Russell Meeks. He was seventeen, a senior at my same school, Evergreen High. He was working on his college applications, so that’s what we talked about at dinner that night. Russell was very smart and ambitious. He wanted to be a lawyer, like my dad, so there was a lot of focus on what college he would go to. The Ivy Leagues were what everyone was thinking, since they’re supposedly the best.

  I ate and listened. My brother had recently started talking in a new way. It was a very clear and careful way of speaking, but it also had this special nasal quality to it, like he was smarter than you, like you probably wouldn’t understand what he was talking about, that’s how smart he was. Nobody else in my family mentioned this new tone. Maybe they didn’t notice it. Or maybe they accepted it as part of Russell’s gradual changing from normal kid into Ivy League college student.r />
  It was mostly him and my dad talking. My dad had gone to college back East. And then to New York City for law school. He always brought this up when he talked about his past. What New York was like. How different it was from Portland, Oregon. How you didn’t know how the world worked until you’d lived back there, where the important people were, where the real stuff happened.

  Anyway, Russell was saying something about a friend of his who was applying to Cornell. So then my dad had to give his opinion on that. They got in a big debate about which was better, Harvard or Stanford or Cornell. That’s when I realized Russell had learned his new tone of voice from my dad. It wasn’t the exact same style of talking, but it conveyed the same basic message of I’m a douche bag.

  • • •

  As she cleared the table, my mother brought up the news about Antoinette. So then I had to talk. I told about the suicide in my mumbling way, which, as usual, drove my father crazy. “Speak up, Gavin!” he said. “Nobody can hear you!”

  “I said,” I repeated. “That a girl in my grade got taken out of class because her brother killed himself.”

  “Was that the jumper?” said Russell. “I heard about that. The guy who jumped off the Vista Bridge?”

  I nodded that it was.

  “Do you know this girl?” said my dad.

  “No,” I said.

  “Who’s she friends with?” asked my mother.

  “Nobody, really. Her family just moved here.”

  “That’s so sad,” said my mother.

  “Who are his parents?” asked my dad. “What do they do?”

  “What difference does that make?” I mumbled into my plate.

  My dad didn’t bother to answer. This was the kind of thing he hated to talk about. Suicidal teenagers. People who had problems. People who weren’t achieving and succeeding and going to top colleges and New York law schools. Russell, too. They would much rather go drink brandy in the den and talk about whether Cornell was better than Stanford.

  • • •

  After dinner I went upstairs to my room. Tennis was my thing. That was where I’d achieved and succeeded. I’d won a bunch of local tournaments in the twelve and unders, so my room was like that: a bunch of trophies lined up on a shelf and my walls covered with posters of my favorite tennis stars. Roger Federer. Andy Roddick. Rafael Nadal. There were lots of Nike swooshes everywhere. Sometimes at night I’d practice my serving motion in my room, while I listened to music. Sometimes I would bounce a tennis ball on my racquet face. I had once done that 1,217 times in a row, which was still a record at my tennis camp.

  But that’s not what I did that night. A couple weeks before, my mother had bought some old art books at a rummage sale. One was a book of landscape paintings from the 1700s. These showed scenes of cows and fields and little valleys. I’d brought this book up to my room and cut out one of the pictures and thumbtacked it to the wall above my desk. I did this as a joke, really. I wasn’t into art. I just felt like looking at something different for a change.

  But that night, after the encounter outside Antoinette’s house, I found myself looking through the art book again. And then I decided to take down my Roger Federer poster. I was bored with it. I unstuck it from the wall and went through the art book and found two more paintings that I liked, one of a road going past a farm, with a huge sky and clouds above, and another of a harbor, which also had clouds and a big sky. I cut them both out, trying to keep the cut line as straight and neat as I could. Then I thumbtacked them to the wall where the Roger Federer poster had been, one on top of the other, keeping them just the right distance apart.

  Once I’d done that, I started looking at my other posters. One of my oldest ones showed the history of tennis in the United States. It was pretty lame, with all these old dudes and their old-style shorts. So I went back to the art book with my scissors and slowly turned the pages, looking for something to replace it.

  I was listening to the college radio station while I did this. They were playing good electronic stuff, like they do at night. So I had this fun night of redoing my room and listening to music and cutting these pictures out of this art book. The other thing was: I kept thinking about Antoinette. Not like anything in particular, just having her in the back of my mind. As the night went on, I realized I was doing this for her. I was making my room into something she would like.

  3

  It took a couple days for Antoinette to come back to school. She showed up on a Friday morning and a hush fell over the frosh/sophomore wing. People wanted to talk about her and gossip, you could tell. But nobody really knew her. Nobody knew what had happened exactly.

  The teachers tried to act like everything was normal. During first period, Mrs. Hennings was teaching her class, but then Olivia Goldstein asked her point-blank what was the best thing to say to someone if a family member had committed suicide. So then there was a big discussion about that. According to Mrs. Hennings, the proper thing to say was, “I’m sorry for your loss,” just like you’d say if someone died some other way, like getting hit by a bus. For some reason that was the example people kept using, “getting hit by a bus,” as if that were the most normal way to die.

  Other people didn’t need to be told what to say. They went right up to Antoinette and said how sorry they were and offered to help in any way they could. These were the weirder, less popular girls. They were eager to be part of something so serious and dramatic. Like finally someone needed their help, finally they had a role to play at their school.

  • • •

  I had my own feelings about the situation. Mainly that it might seem weird to people that I went to Antoinette’s house that day. People might talk. I decided I should say something to Antoinette to make her see it wasn’t a big deal.

  I waited a couple days for things to calm down. Then I saw Antoinette waiting after school for her ride. She was sitting on a bench, by herself, which was rare, since she now had this little group of girls following her around. These were those same girls who had offered their condolences the week before. They were like a gang all of a sudden. Antoinette’s “suicide friends,” people called them.

  I walked up to her, making sure to be extra polite. “Hi,” I said, without sitting down.

  Antoinette glanced up at me once, then looked away.

  “My name’s Gavin. I don’t know if you remember me—”

  “I remember you,” she said.

  I very slowly sat down beside her. Not too close. For a moment we didn’t speak. We watched the other students, freshmen mostly, walking out to their parents’ cars.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  Antoinette did a little shrug.

  I nodded my head a few times. “I know it must have seemed weird,” I said. “Me showing up at your house the other day.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It did.”

  “What happened was . . . well . . . I heard about your brother . . . and I felt bad, of course . . . and I was in the neighborhood anyway and I decided to swing by . . . not for any reason, you know . . . and then you happened to come outside at the exact moment—”

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  “Someone said the street,” I told her.

  That seemed to satisfy her. A silence fell between us. I felt like it was a good silence, a positive silence. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “That’s what everyone says.”

  Some of Antoinette’s new friends were standing nearby. They were watching me talk to her. They were trying to decide if they should come to her rescue or not.

  I figured I’d said enough. It was time to go.

  “Anyway . . . ,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “Thanks for stopping by, Gavin,” said Antoinette.

  I nodded once and walked away. Behind me, I could hear Antoinette’s friends hurrying to her aid, questioning her about me.

  “Do you know who that is?”

  “That’s Gavin Meeks!”

  �
�Do you know him?”

  “What did he want?”

  “Oh my God, Antoinette, he was totally talking to you!”

  4

  That’s probably another thing I should mention: I was one of the popular kids at Evergreen. This was partly because Claude Leon, my best friend and tennis partner, was the most popular person in my class and had been since fourth grade. And also, it was just how things worked out. I was good at sports. I dressed a certain way. I lived in a certain neighborhood. So those were the people I naturally hung out with.

  Once the shock of her brother’s suicide wore off, my friends forgot about Antoinette. She was far away from us socially, being new and unknown and not being friends with anyone we were friends with. I never did tell anyone about going to her house the day of the suicide.

  When things returned to normal, our group went back to our usual business of goofing around, having fun, and thinking up new ways to hook up with each other. In terms of romance, I had lagged behind my other friends. Plenty of girls liked me, or would have liked me if I liked them, but I was shy about these things. I hadn’t figured out how to close the deal and get an actual girlfriend.

  Claude, who had been with super-hot Petra Roberts most of freshman year, had recently paired up with Hanna Sloan, who was the other great beauty of our grade. Maybe that was what held me back: watching my best friend work his way through all the most desirable girls in our school.

  Now, though, as we were getting further into sophomore year, people began plotting to get me a girlfriend. “It’s a waste of a cute guy to have Gavin not be with someone,” Hanna told people.

  After a lot of discussions, it was decided Grace Anderson was the girl I should be with. Grace was perfect for me, they said, never mind that we’d known each other since kindergarten and had barely spoken. That didn’t matter. Grace was getting more into boys now, and she was very cute, and also certain parts of her had “grown” recently. Most important: she and Hanna were practically best friends. And since Claude and I were best friends, it made for a logical match.