I’ll be serving my country,” he said. “JAG Corps. The minute I finish law school. And you know what? I hope they send me to Vietnam. I hope I get killed.”
Teddy, who’d been feeling sorry for him a moment earlier, was incredulous in the face of such obviously bogus emotion. “You actually believe lawyers are dying in Vietnam?”
Vance didn’t seem to hear this, which was probably just as well. “Tell me something,” he said, standing at faux military attention, chin jutting out, in full-sneer mode. “Guys like you and your friends? What right would you even have to fall in love with a girl like Jacy?” Planting both hands onto the table, he leaned forward aggressively, right in Teddy’s face. “You were fucking hashers.”
And then he was gone, the tinkling bell above the front door signaling his departure. A moment later, their waitress arrived with the check.
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS AFTER MEETING Jacy’s fiancé, Teddy had another of his chronic spells, this one a paralyzing panic attack. Unable to sleep, his tortured mind on a loop, he checked himself into Mass General, cutting short by a couple weeks his Globe internship. Had this been brought on by the meeting with Vance, or by the mental switch that got tripped earlier, his brain finally acknowledging that Jacy might be gone for good? All summer he’d been haunted by the same questions that were clearly tormenting Jacy’s fiancé. What could have happened to her after she left the island? Instead of taking the bus back home, had she decided to hitchhike? Had she been picked up by some predator? Teddy didn’t want to believe that she’d met with such a fate, but if she was alive, where was she? Why couldn’t the police find her? Why hadn’t she contacted her parents or any of her Theta friends? Or, for that matter, himself at the Globe?
In the hospital he received the usual antianxiety medications, which allowed him to sleep, though whenever he woke up he had the impression that his dreams had been struggling to address the same unanswerable questions. Worse, he could feel himself slipping into a kind of narcotics-induced solipsism. As if Jacy’s fate wasn’t really so much about her as about himself. It had been a summer of losses. Lincoln had gone back West, which probably meant the end of their friendship. Mickey was also gone, though not to Vietnam as they’d feared. A few days before he was to report for duty, he’d apparently changed his mind and fled to Canada, just as he and Jacy had been begging him to do for so long. Yet another loss, though this one was an ongoing feature of his life, was the unrelenting aloofness of his parents. Teddy had let them know when he checked himself into the hospital, and his mother had come to visit him there. She’d stayed only a couple days, however, claiming that the fall semester was bearing down and she had classes to prepare. Though he vowed to refuse, he’d expected her to invite him to come stay with them in Madison until he managed to get back on his feet, but the invitation never came, and that had wounded him more deeply than he would’ve predicted. Maybe the time had come to stop expecting things to change. He was clearly destined to live a solitary life. Wasn’t this what his infatuation with Merton had been signaling? Hadn’t Tom Ford, who also lived alone, intimated as much at Minerva? What had happened with Jacy at Gay Head, coupled with her subsequent disappearance, now made a kind of bitter sense. Because her continued existence was at odds with his own solitary destiny, Jacy had to disappear. In a sense, he’d killed her.
Something else occurred to him, too. What if he was going about everything all wrong? In the past, whenever he went down this now-familiar rabbit hole, his first order of business had been to somehow gather himself and climb back up into the light, gradually restore his mental health, get his routine back to normal, or anyway what was normal for him. But was normal—his normal—a state worth preserving? Was he, normally, a person worth much effort? Replaying his encounter with Jacy’s fiancé, he was surprised by how little real empathy he’d shown. Okay, sure, Vance was an asshole, but that was hardly the point. The guy had obviously been suffering, and it had been within Teddy’s power to set his mind at