Echo Bridge

Chapter 3

I did everything I could to avoid Hugh, and although Belknap Country Day was a small place, I was surprised at how little I had to see him. It was just like being on stage. I made well-timed entrances and exits, considered my blocking carefully, and never, ever broke character.

This last point was especially important in the student lounge, Thistleton Hall. It was a large, semicircular room that jutted off the back of the schoolhouse, with the same heavy mahogany paneling that covered the entire first floor of the building. Vast windows of many tiny panes offered a panoramic view of the courtyard and the library, which was in the old carriage house. As seniors, we laid claim to the best spot in the room—the curving wood benches built in below the windows—while the sophomores and juniors clustered in two large alcoves on either side of a massive black iron fireplace that had long been sealed off. Freshmen were required to spend free periods studying in the library. Mr. Hernandez, the younger and hipper of the two U.S. history teachers at Belknap, called Thistleton the Panopticon, a type of prison in which every cell had a view of all the others. I suppose the idea is that no one wants to misbehave in public, but that never stopped anyone in Thistleton Hall.

On any given day, you might see someone blatantly copying their physics homework, a girl giving her boyfriend a hand job, hidden beneath a wool peacoat that belongs to neither of them, or two senior girls trying not to laugh while talking to an underclassman with her skirt tucked into the back of her tights. All of those things were happening in the fifth-period crowd around us, the first time Hugh spoke to me after Melissa's party. It was Wednesday, the day after my conversation with Molly, and a week and a half after the party.

Melissa, Lindsay, and I had just come up the stairs from having lunch in the refectory, and almost all of our friends were sitting on the center bench in Thistleton Hall. Ted and Hugh were shoulder to shoulder, laughing. Hilary was sitting on Will McKinley's lap. Benji Andrews, Lindsay's boyfriend, waved us over. As we crossed the room, I could feel their eyes on me: Ted's appreciative and a little possessive, as ever, and Hugh's masking whatever dark and hideous thoughts a person like Hugh harbored. I wondered if they were both picturing me naked, and immediately those images flashed through my mind: me sleepy-eyed and tangle-haired in Ted's flannel sheets, their smell of Old Spice clinging to my skin, and me in Melissa Lewis's guest bathroom mirror, eyes closed and face strained as Hugh gripped my arms. I tried to empty my face of any expression as we stopped in front of them. It was the closest I'd physically come to Hugh since we'd been shut in Melissa's guest bathroom together, but I didn't know how to avoid it without anyone else noticing.

"You've got to hear about this," Benji said. His dreadlocks quivered with his laughter. "The most hilarious thing happened in my English class."

"So tell us already," Lindsay said, sitting down next to Benji and wrapping one arm around his waist. Melissa and I dumped our bags on the floor and stood facing the boys on the bench. Ted reached for my hand, but taking it meant standing right in front of him and Hugh. I squeezed Ted's hand and then dropped it and shifted backward, trying to put a few more inches between Hugh and me. Hugh grinned at us the same way he always did, but it was hard for me not to see it as knowing, threatening. I took a deep breath and tried to think of all of them as my audience, with me in the role of a carefree teenage girl.

"So, we're doing The Scarlet Letter, right?" said Benji.

"God, I hated that book so much," said Melissa. We'd all read it the year before; Hawthorne was part of the standard junior English curriculum.

"Same here. Did any of you guys have Selinsky? She splits you up into assigned groups and makes you write and act out a scene based on a chapter in the book. Damn, Courtney, I wish you were in my class. We totally would have gotten an A."