Chapter 16 #3
Cece sits at the tiny desk in the opposite corner of the room and watches him sleep.
She can’t remember the last time he was hungover.
He’d never been a big drinker—something Cece had appreciated about him.
Everything in moderation, he always liked to say.
Maturity and sense—these had always been Jonathan’s calling cards, and Cece is happy to have come back, to have embraced the good between them.
Perhaps if she were a more reckless woman, a stronger woman, she might have thrown caution to the wind, run off with Morgan and dedicated herself to oyster farming without a safety net, but this is not her; she understands this about herself, and unlike in the past, when she’s grown disappointed in her shortcomings, Cece is perfectly happy where she is.
Despite reeking of alcohol, Jonathan has an angelic quality about him, a certain innocence painted on his slumbering face.
It’s difficult imagining him playing any role in getting someone wrongfully expelled from school.
Cece’s already determined not to bring it up.
It isn’t her place. After all, she was the one eavesdropping.
And what would come of it? She knows Jonathan is a good person.
He’s never given her a reason to think otherwise.
In truth, he’s the one who should be questioning Cece’s morals, except he hasn’t.
He’s been here this whole time, waiting for her to finally make up her mind about what kind of life she wants, and she has. She has!
Jonathan emerges, pushing himself up on one arm, hair mussed, eyes bloodshot. “I’m sorry. I’ll be useless to you this morning.”
“It’s your reunion. I’d be worried if you weren’t hungover. Best rally for tonight!”
Jonathan groans and folds the pillow over his face.
“You need sleep.”
More whimpers. “I should be good in a few hours. What’re you gonna do?”
“Check out the library. Dig through the archives.”
“I believe it took us until 1976 to racially integrate. Not our finest moment.”
Cece waves him off and gathers her things to leave, but not before pulling the blinds down and patting Jonathan’s clammy forehead. He’s fallen asleep again before she gently closes the door.
The library is not the monastic, sunless building Cece had expected.
The red brick with its Colonial Revival columns exudes a quiet sense of assurance.
The space must have been renovated at one point, and Cece finds herself in awe of the perfect blending of old and new: enormous windows filtering natural light, wood-paneled walls adorned with oil paintings of old, dusty White men, a circular staircase that reminds Cece of something out of a science fiction movie.
The school archives are stowed on the lower level, where the air grows musty and damp.
The aroma brings Cece a strange sense of comfort.
She’s missed the smell of old books, of cracking glue and ageing paper.
In college, she practically lived in the library, hording the small study rooms, roaming the stacks of the quiet study floor to stretch her legs.
Things were simpler then, when she used to think a 4.
0 GPA would ensure a life without trouble, when she was convinced one’s future might be charted out on graph paper.
It takes some searching, but eventually Cece finds the yearbook section—a seemingly endless row of green-and-black-bound books.
She traces the golden lettering with a finger until she arrives on 1999, when Jonathan would have been a freshman.
Senior-year Jonathan can wait; Cece’s more interested in seeing a gangly, awkward version of him—if such a thing exists.
The first book disappoints, and all Cece finds is a stock-looking photo of a young Jonathan in a blue blazer, green tie, and khakis, standing in the back row with his classmates.
All the boys stand in the back rows, their faces youthful and optimistic.
In front, the girls in white dresses, their hair blond as wheat in the summer sun.
If Cece was hoping for something to give Jonathan grief about—an ill-fitting suit jacket, an adorable cowlick—she’s sorely disappointed.
There’s an uncanny maturity and professionalism to the class picture, as if the participants were aware it might be dug up by nosey investigative journalists when they invariably run for US Senate.
Cece decides to speed up the process and skips a year.
She holds out hope for a photo of interest and pulls Jonathan’s junior-year yearbook off the shelf.
Thumbing through the thick pages, she’s pleased to find a photo of young Jonathan playing chess.
Now this is the kind of detail she’s been looking for—something she can tease him about.
She takes out her phone and snaps a picture for later use.
There’s more gold in the subsequent pages: Jonathan standing on the sidelines of a lacrosse game, mop of hair covering his face, shoulder pads comically large on his skinny frame; Jonathan acting in a play, a newsboy cap on his head.
The full class photo arrives in the middle, and Cece presses the pages down on either side of the spine.
In the back row, it’s easy to make out Logan with his shock of red hair.
There are a few other familiar faces from the lobster bake.
At the far end of the top row, she spots Jonathan—taller and more filled out.
She’s surprised at what two years does—how quickly he seems to have gone from boy to man.
Her eyes drift to the girls in front, bosoms fuller, legs longer.
They are not yet women, and yet they very much are.
Cece is about to close the book—her curiosity sated—when something catches her eye.
A boy, two rows down from the top, his blazer dull and shabby, his face somber and unsmiling.
It can’t be. It’s impossible. Cece hunches over the pages to get a closer look, back aching, heart hammering.
The broad shoulders, the square jawline—it’s unmistakable.
It can’t be, and yet it is. A young Morgan, lost among the swirling crowd of green ties and white dresses, looks at the camera, at Cece, his eyes narrow, almost angry, and even though he’s surrounded by his classmates, there’s a loneliness about him, as if everyone is leaning just a few inches away from his invisible ignominious sphere.
Cece snaps the book closed. Don’t be ridiculous.
It’s only someone who looks like what Cece imagines a young Morgan would look like.
A doppelg?nger, a bizzarro version of him, a scholarship kid, evidenced by his worn jacket and unruly hair.
Cece looks at the photo once more and confirms her mistake.
For whatever reason, she’d wanted it to be Morgan, but now she sees—the face is all wrong, the shoulders too hulking.
To put her suspicions and paranoia at ease, Cece flips to the back of the book to read through the class names.
She runs down the list with a thumbnail, hair in her eyes, nerves tittering.
She suspects that if anyone comes across her in this moment, they will think her mad.
She stops. Her thumbnail is white and ghostly. Morgan Wells.
Cece reaches for the following year. A terrible lump lodges itself in her throat.
Only after opening the book and riffling through the pages does she notice the blood trickling from a paper cut on her fingertip.
She finds the class photo and sits down.
She spreads the book out on the floor while sucking on her finger to stem the bleeding.
Everyone is where they should be. Logan with his red hair, Jonathan on the far end, his remaining youthful features now given way to a professional exterior, the girls in front in their white spring dresses.
No Morgan. Cece searches the faces again.
Nothing. She feels like she’s out at sea, the waves rolling, the deck pitching back and forth, her stomach sloshing, threatening to come up.
The boy Logan and Jonathan were talking about last night, the boy they got expelled. It was Morgan.
She understands now. The look on Morgan’s face upon seeing Jonathan at the cul-de-sac, one of recognition and contempt. Worse—Morgan had recognized Jonathan almost instantaneously while Jonathan had barely registered him.
It wasn’t jealousy, then—the reason for Morgan’s silence. It was something else entirely. It was hatred for the man and profound disappointment in Cece for choosing him and abandoning whatever it was, however tenuous and ephemeral, between them.
Cece deserts the yearbooks—pages smeared with blood—scattered on the floor.
She feels filthy and ashamed, an accomplice in some terrible wrong she doesn’t fully understand.
She makes her way upstairs and staggers out of the library and into the bright, unforgiving sun and wretches, hands to her knees, into a freshly mulched bed of roses.
“Looks like someone had too much fun last night,” a stranger says as they walk by.
Eyes burning, mouth sour, Cece ignores them. Her mind drifts, nothing to nothing, an ocean of blank space. Legs numb, heart thrumming, she zigs and zags back to the dorm with some vague idea of what she thinks she should do, what she wants to do.