Chapter 26
I didn’t do it, Vail. I didn’t knock on your door.
See, I never had a Nintendo, but I had a neighbor that had one, and sometimes he let me come over to play Super Mario Bros.
A skinny older guy in his thirties or some shit.
Stefan. A Nordic dude who was always talking about his visa running out.
I was young. I thought he meant his credit card.
Anyway, my dad didn’t like him. Called him a creep.
He was pasty and nervous and always squinting because he couldn’t afford new glasses.
My dad, my booze bag, screaming vicious dad, he thought he was better than Stefan because he had someone to fight with.
Stefan wasn’t creepy. He was just alone.
But it’s a thing about the world, isn’t it?
When you’re alone, people assume it’s because you can’t get anyone to be with you.
That’s why I didn’t knock, Vail. I felt too alone in the hallway and it’s kinda like Mario and the princess. One time I told Stefan I was sick of the game. He said that’s the point: “You don’t get to be with the princess until you beat all the bad guys.”
It’s the same in your rom-coms. And it’s the reason I am on East Eighty-ninth Street across the street from the Dalton School wearing a Dalton ID and a Big white button-down that looks good under the blazer I picked up at Goodwill.
The ID isn’t the best, but it’s still kind of cool what you can do with a laminating machine at a fucking Kinko’s.
It’s almost three o’clock, almost go-time.
I toss my hacky sack like a carefree boy just back from Turks and Caicos and I’m on the move.
I spent a couple of hours watching these kids and I think I’m a pretty good mimic.
I know how to contort my face, how to hold my head back like the world is mine, the street, the front door of the Dalton School, the girls in plaid skirts passing by, playing a dangerous game of Who Would You Rather?
, but wisely choosing David Letterman over Rudy Giuliani.
I know, Vail. You have a crush on our former mayor. Yawn. But I swear, there’s something about that guy. Something I don’t trust.
And here we go. The first level of the game. The front doors of the Dalton School.
It’s a little scary to be trespassing, but a little scary is good for a guy.
That’s how you save the princess. And I did it, Vail.
I waltzed in here and breezed by a nervous-looking teacher who probably lives in a place like yours.
She didn’t card me. For a school that’s so hard to get into, it’s pretty easy to get into, and I’m not dumb.
I know the man in the yellow hat doesn’t go here anymore—he is older than I am, same way everyone is older than I am—but he was wearing that Dalton shirt, wasn’t he?
If I can dig up his yearbook, I can learn his name.
I’m sure his parents bought him an apartment when he graduated from college and I’m sure the apartment is in the actual fucking white pages and when I hunt him down…
MAYDAY.
There’s an adult coming my way, a real all growns up teacher type of guy and he’s flagging me down and I’m freezing up but then it happens….
The bell tolls for me.
The hallway fills up with kids out of Kids who make me feel old and young all at once.
I take a second. I need a second. I can’t pretend to be one of these pricks if I don’t walk among these pricks.
They’re all so relaxed, Vail. They’re going to the Meadow or they’re going to KK’s place because her parents are in Rome, and me… I’m going to the library.
Level 2. My next obstacle is the librarian.
I have to channel Angus’s entitlement in order to get past the watchdog, to make it to Level 3.
And I can do it. After all, if I really were one of these kids, would I let some librarian who makes $30K a year get in my way?
I open the door, and the librarian could be your age, maybe a little older, and for a moment, it bumps me the way a video game will do that.
You really are older than I am, Vail. I’m a long way from twenty-five.
I nod the way Angus would, like she’s beneath me, and the librarian seems sick of it, her life, and who wouldn’t be sick of dealing with the likes of me, but she doesn’t stop me, and hell yes, I’m on to Level 3. God bless librarians!
Already, I feel better. Hunkered down in the stacks, surrounded by great works of literature…
as well as Alumni Reads. My school barely had a library, let alone a section like that, and I feel good, Vail.
Full of purpose and pride and there they are, the fucking yearbooks, and you graduated high school in what—1994? ’95?
Much as I hate to admit it, girls tend to like older guys—I would so do David Letterman—so I grab the ’94 yearbook.
Except it’s not a yearbook. It’s something better that must only exist in rich kid schools.
The cover says it’s Dalton Faces and Names.
Kinda like a phone book with addresses accompanied by something you don’t see in the white pages: pictures.
Game on. I sit down at a table that’s nicer than all the tables in my school combined.
It doesn’t wobble, and it isn’t warm and sticky.
I turn the pages and confront the faces of all these kids who hit the jackpot before they were even born.
Some look like assholes, and I’m sure they are, but some of them…
I dunno. Some of them don’t look so bad, and it makes me worry.
What if the man in the yellow hat is one of the good ones?
Is he? Could he be? I move through the alphabet, and he is not a Broder or a Calder.
He is not a Souther, and you probably had sex with him last night.
For all I know, you could be having more sex with him right now and he is not a Tester or a Von Feller and what time does this library close?
I assumed the man in the yellow hat took advantage of you and your perfectly imperfect little foot.
I assumed you felt so guilty about the sex that you chased it with Sex on TV, but what if I’m wrong?
What if he really is one of the outliers in this facebook?
One of the few who doesn’t look like a total fucking date-raping douchebag?
What if I’m the douchebag because I let you go down on me in…
the bathroom when you were wasted on cosmos and Pop Rocks?
Me, the guy who stood you up at your birthday party.
What if you prefer his chopped-up Portnoy over mine and what if he’s so big that you realized I’m not Mr. Big and—
Gotcha. Level 4 unlocked.
Harris Wesley Walker IV is a total fucking date-raping douchebag.
I can see it in his eyes, in his three last names.
Dick and Schlitz are all talk. They would never, you know, actually do that to a girl.
But the monster who occupies the upper right-hand corner of page 87 is bad to the boner.
And I hate it, Vail. I hate this for you.
His pooka shell necklace and his rumpled fucking hair and his upturned collar and a smug, uneven smile like he knows how to save the princess, like his daddy gave him a secret illegal playbook.
That aristocratic streamlined dildo of a face, even clearer in this photo.
He looks like he has forebears who pillaged with abandon.
He looks like he uses that word, forebears.
Baby-soft brown hair—no lead in his fucking lunch meat or his pipes at home—and I am sure of it. I’d bet my life on it.
Harris Wesley Walker IV is a prick. A prick who took advantage of you.
Better yet, my love, Harris Wesley Walker IV will pay for what he did to you.
He will pay because of me—my forebears were ragpickers—and by the time I’m done with him, his face will be a rag.
Bloodied. Torn. I swallow and flinch. Would I? Could I?
It’s funny, Vail. A lot of authors touch on the fact that hostage negotiators will say the name of a hostage because it humanizes the hostage, because it makes the kidnapper remember that the hostage is a person.
And as it turns out, authors don’t know everything, because sometimes, sometimes when you say a name, when you know a name, sometimes it makes you want to kill them even more.