The Headmaster's Wife(2)

He looked out the window again and for the first time thought it was odd. There was a … person … lying there in the snow, alone, under the trees. It was a person dressed in black, but there was nothing unusual about that. Half the school liked to dress in black and to pretend to be alienated from all things material and capitalistic. Maybe whoever it was had passed out. It was Friday, and the school was supposed to be drug and alcohol free, but Mark knew what that was worth. There was enough marijuana in Hayes House alone to supply a hospital full of terminal cancer patients. If you got caught at it they sent you to intervention, and after a few months they asked you to write up the story of how you beat addiction for the Windsor Chronicle. Mark knew people who had beaten addiction three or four times, although they’d only been allowed to write about it once, at the beginning. It was like the pictures the Chronicle ran about the memorial service for 9/11. The real pictures had been ruined somehow, and so the school had had them all go back into the quad and pretend to be doing it again, so there would be photographs for the story about how sensitively the school was handling terrorism issues.

Everything about this place is fake, Mark thought—and he was almost himself again for that split second. Then the feeling faded, and the insight along with it, and he pressed his face to the glass and tried to get a better look at the person in black lying under the tree, not moving.

If he lies there long enough, he could freeze to death, Mark thought, but there was something wrong with that, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. There was something wrong with the body lying under the trees. Mark was sure that it wasn’t a student, although he wasn’t sure why he was sure. The person was big, but a lot of the seniors were bigger. He tried to imagine a Windsor Academy teacher getting smashed on vodka and grass and passing out on the ice twenty feet from Maverick Pond, but it didn’t compute. The faculty drank mineral water they bought from a small local company run as a cooperative and talked about how important it was not to allow the liquor companies to invade the rain forest. They didn’t wear black either. They preferred earth tones and Polo shirts and books most people found too boring to read.

Something is wrong, he thought, but he was drifting in and out of consciousness again, in and out of coherency. If he didn’t get moving, he’d find himself trapped up here after lights out. He’d already done that once this term and been handed sixteen hours of work jobs because of it. They had been absolutely convinced that he’d done it on purpose because they’d rung the bell three times and sent a librarian through the stacks calling out for anybody who might not be paying attention. He hadn’t done it on purpose though. He’d just zoned out. He’d just stopped existing in this body and been somewhere else, except not, because he couldn’t remember anything else. If he’d believed in ghosts, he would have thought he was one.

He took another look out at the black figure under the trees, then bent over and picked up his book.

If he went the long way around back to Hayes House, he could stop to see if whoever it was needed any help.





2


Marta Coelho had been grading papers for four hours, and she still wasn’t close to done. Her eyes hurt. Her arms hurt, too. Mostly she found herself thinking obsessively about the fact that she had never spent a Friday night not working, at least not during term time, in this entire academic year. It was the kind of thing that, phrased in the right way, she would have thought of as a good thing about Windsor Academy before she had come to it, but like most of those things—and there had been a lot of them—it now felt egregiously wrong. She found it hard to believe that she had defended her dissertation only eighteen months ago, and that her dissertation committee—at Yale—had been absolutely certain that she’d find a faculty place within the year. If you couldn’t find a university job with a degree from Yale, what did you need to do to find one? It was hard to remember, now, that this particular job had seemed like a godsend when it was offered to her because she was up to her eyeballs in debt from college and grad school and close to being evicted from her apartment. It was hard to remember the things she had told herself when she’d written the acceptance letter and walked down Chapel Street to mail it. Bright, committed prep school students had to be better to teach than bored, not-so-bright college students stuck at a fourth-rate state college and wanting only to get through their core courses as quickly and painlessly as possible. A school committed to equality, diversity, and truly innovative ideas in education had to be better than the routinely brutal mediocrity of the high school she had escaped for Wellesley and then the Ivy League. Had to be, had to be, she thought now. There was nothing that anything had to be. Life sucked, as the kids liked to say, and you couldn’t even make yourself feel better about it by thinking about sex.