the same person—IceVirgin33. I click on the name, hoping to find out who IceVirgin33 is, but I get an ambiguous photo of a glacier on his profile page and an even more enigmatic bio: Historian, Seeker of Truth, Explorer of Depths Unknown.
Certainly pretentious enough to be a student. Maybe I can ask Jill Frankel later who IceVirgin33 is.
When I look up from the screen I’m shocked to see it’s already eleven-fifteen. I’ve somehow lost a whole hour and fifteen minutes to mindless scrolling. It’s just a big time waster, Harmon always says about the Internet, no wonder our students never have time to finish their homework or read a book. Now I barely have time to shower and dress for the faculty meeting.
I run upstairs but stop outside Rudy’s door. I pause, listening . . . for what? Sobs? What I hear instead is the ping of a message alert. Whom is he texting? I knock on the door and hear a grunt I choose to take as permission to enter. His room is dark, blinds drawn against the day, the only light the glow of his laptop perched on his chest as he lies in his rumpled, unmade bed. He may have showered but he’s still wearing the sweatshirt I gave him last night.
“Hey,” I say, “I noticed that people are already posting about Lila. It must be hard to see—”
He makes a face. “They’re a bunch of fakes and hypocrites. Half of the people posting didn’t even know Lila.”
“Everyone feels vulnerable when something like this happens,” I say, sitting down at the foot of his bed.
“Dakota Wyatt tweeted”—he changes his voice to a Valley-speak falsetto—“‘Heaven has a new star.’ This after she called Lila a dyke bitch at the Spring Fling.”
“Dakota Wyatt is an idiot,” I say. “She probably can’t even spell dyke.”
This earns me a smile. I know I shouldn’t discuss other students with Rudy—I certainly shouldn’t make fun of them—but sometimes it’s the only way to get his attention.
“Anyway,” I say, “I have to be at a faculty meeting at twelve so I’m getting in the shower. If you want to drive in with me we’ll need to leave in thirty minutes.”
“I can walk,” he says.
“Okay, but make sure you get there. It—” I’m about to say, It won’t look good if you’re not, but say instead, “It’s to honor Lila, after all.” To which he makes a grunt I choose to take as assent.
As soon as I’m in the shower I wonder why I waited so long; the hot water feels so good. It releases the tension that has built up in my back and shoulders these past few hours . . . and the hold I’ve put on my grief, which comes spilling out of me now in long choking sobs that sweep over me like waves, relentless as the tide that would have washed over Lila’s body. It’s a relief to cry for her even if I know that she’s not the only one I’m crying for.
Chapter Four
Built in 1811 by hardy Congregationalists, the Haywood chapel is a plain white clapboard meetinghouse. Entering it, I always feel like I’m about to be tried for witchcraft. I bring my students here when we read The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter and ask them to sit in silence for a few minutes, to imagine that there is nothing outside the little circle of houses but wilderness and the sea. If you’re cast out of here, there is no place for you to go.
During that session this year Paola Fernandez started crying. I took her aside and brought her into the back room, where she told me, over hot chocolate and cookies provided by our pastor, Celia Barnstable, that she was afraid that if she didn’t get her grades up she would lose her scholarship. “My parents will be so mad. This is supposed to be my big opportunity to make something of myself, but it’s so hard. All the other kids, they just know stuff I don’t. My teachers in Yonkers hardly even showed up. How am I supposed to catch up?”
Although her writing was full of grammatical and spelling errors, she was a smart girl and if she worked hard with me she would be all right. I told her that I would tutor her after class and talk to her other teachers, feeling guilty about the lesson that had caused such stress.
“I terrorized the poor girl,” I told Harmon that night, “all in