“Look,” he said, “he’s here because I needed somebody to hold my hand, and I didn’t want it to be my mother because I thought she’d get all upset and want to haul me out of school. She is all upset. I’ve talked to her twice.”
“And you don’t want to be hauled out of school? I find that a little surprising. You don’t seem to like it here.”
“I like it fine,” Mark said. He didn’t know if that was true.
“Most of your teachers think you’re completely out of place here, and I have to say I agree. You don’t fit the school very well.”
“Thank you.”
“You must know that we talk about it. And evaluations are coming up. It will be part of the meeting the faculty has on you.”
“I’m sure.” He shifted in his seat. The coffee was almost gone. He was sucking it down like air. The head fuzz wasback in force. So was the feeling that he had lost control of all his muscles. He was twitching. “I’ve got to get more coffee and go back to the house,” he said. “Sheldon’s going to have a fit as it is. I might as well not keep him waiting.”
“I want to talk to you,” she said again.
“You are talking to me,” Mark pointed out. “You’ve been talking to me. You’ve been telling me I don’t fit the school.”
“I was thinking that there might be another reason for you to ask Mr. Demarkian here. Not because you had reason to think that Michael was murdered, but because you wanted to expose me.”
“Expose you?”
“I know that you were … a little jealous … of Michael’s relationship with me,” Alice said, very carefully. “I know it felt like favoritism to you, that you would have taken his place if you could have. He told me—”
“He said I had the hots for your
“I don’t think ’had the hots for’ is an accurate description of what he meant or of what I saw. And I did see it, Mark. It was impossible to miss, even if you’ve never admitted it to yourself.”
Mark started to get up. “I have to get another cup of coffee,” he said. “I’ve finished this one. I’ve got to go back to Hayes House.”
“Sit down, Mark.”
“I’m not going to continue this conversation, Mrs. Makepeace.”
“Alice. You know to call me Alice.”
“I don’t want to call you Alice. I don’t want to call Miss Wardrop Cherie. I don’t want to call Mr. Hallwood James. I just want to get my coffee and go back to my dorm. Get out of my way.”
“You can barely stand up,” Alice said. She put the palm of her hand against his chest and pushed gently. He sat back down again. “You’re dizzy as hell.”
“I haven’t been feeling well all day.”
“It matters that you don’t fit in at this school,” Alice said.
“You don’t have the loyalty to it that we expect of students here. And that’s what worries me. That you’re angry with us; that you’d like to see us fail—”
“Fail at what?”
“Fail as a school. Close down. Or be mired in an enormous scandal. That’s why you’ve brought Gregor Demarkian here, to bring the attention of the press on the school. To tell tales about what may or may not have been going on between Michael and myself.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Mark said, “my mother writes a regular column for The New York Times. She’s a talking head on CNN three times a week. If I wanted to bring the attention of the press on Windsor Academy, I wouldn’t have to go roundabout by bringing Mr. Demarkian here. I could just call Dan Rather and talk to him. He was at my christening. And my last birthday party. And everybody knows what was going on between you and Michael.”
“I don’t think they do, Mark, no. I think they thought as you do, that it was merely a physical thing. It wasn’t. Michael was very important to me.”
“I have to go back to Hayes House.”
“Have you any idea how hard it is to find somebody who completes you, who makes you the human being you thought you never would be able to be, and to have that someone be beyond your reach? Repression and social convention are terrible things, Mark. They’re much more tyrannous than dictatorships, or poverty, or war. They’re worse because they come from inside yourself.”
“I can’t believe you think that you’re worse off because people would laugh at you if you left your husband for a sixteen-year-old kid than you would be if you’d lived under Hitler.”
“It’s one of the reasons you don’t really belong here,” Alice said; “you don’t understand the hermeneutics of oppression. You really don’t. We’ve tried to teach it to you, but you resist it. You’re like so many people. You aren’t willing to give up your white skin privilege, your white male privilege. Michael wasn’t like that.”