Barrington Whelk was feeling less than sprightly as he slouched down the hall of Whitman House, the Aglionby admin building. It was five P.M., the school day well over, and he’d only left his town house in order to pick up homework that had to be graded before the next day. Afternoon light spilled in the tall, many-paned windows to his left; on the right was a hum of voices from the staff offices. These old buildings looked like museums at this time of day.
“Barrington, I thought you were out today. You look terrible. You sick?”
Whelk didn’t immediately formulate an answer. For all intents and purposes, he was still out. The question asker was Jonah Milo, the well- scrubbed eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher. Despite an affinity for plaid and thin-legged corduroy pants, Milo wasn’t unbearable, but Whelk didn’t care to discuss his absence from class this morning with him. St.
Mark’s Eve was beginning to have a sheen of tradition for him, one that involved spending most of the night getting smashed before falling asleep on his kitchenette floor just before dawn. This year he’d had the forethought to request St. Mark’s Day off. Teaching Latin to Aglionby boys was punishment enough. Teaching it with a hangover was excruciating.
Finally, Whelk merely held up the grubby stack of handwritten homework assignments as answer. Milo’s widened his eyes at the sight of the
name written on the topmost paper.
“Ronan Lynch! Is that his homework?”
Flipping the stack around to read the name on the front, Whelk agreed that it was. As he did, a few boys on their way to crew team practice crashed past, pushing him into Milo. The students probably didn’t even realize they were being disrespectful; Whelk was barely older than they were, and his
dramatically large features made him look younger. It was still easy to mistake him for one of the students.
Milo disentangled himself from Whelk. “How do you get him to come to class?”
The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey, and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost.
Whelk struggled to remember if Ronan had ever missed a class with him.
The days of the school year blurred together, one long and unending day that began with Whelk parking his crappy car next to the beautiful Aglionby cars, shouldering his way past laughing, thoughtless boys, standing in front of a room of students who were glassy-eyed at best and derisive at worst. And at the end of the day Whelk, alone and haunted, never, ever able to forget that
he was once one of them.
When did this become my life?
Whelk shrugged. “I don’t remember him skipping.”
“You have him with Gansey, though, don’t you?” Milo asked. “That explains it. Those two are tight as ticks.”
It was a strange, old expression, one that Whelk hadn’t heard since his own days at Aglionby, when he, too, had been tight as ticks with his roommate Czerny. He felt a hollowness inside him, like he was hungry, like he should’ve stayed home and drank more to commemorate this miserable day.
He swam back to the present, looking at the attendance sheet the substitute teacher had left. “Ronan was in class today, but Gansey wasn’t.
Not in mine, anyway.”
“Oh, that’s probably because of that St. Mark’s Day hoopla he was talking about,” Milo said.
This got Whelk’s attention. No one knew that today was St. Mark’s Day.
No one celebrated St. Mark’s Day, not even St. Mark’s mother. Only Whelk and Czerny, treasure hunters and troublemakers, cared about its existence.
Whelk said, “Beg pardon?”
“I don’t know what all’s going on,” Milo replied. One of the other teachers said hi to him on the way out of the staff room, and Milo looked
over his shoulder to reply. Whelk imagined grabbing Milo’s arm, forcing his attention back his way. It took all of his effort to wait instead. Turning back around, Milo seemed to sense Whelk’s interest, because he added, “He hasn’t talked to you about it? He wouldn’t shut up about it yesterday. It’s that ley
line stuff he’s always on about.”
Ley line.
If no one knew about St. Mark’s Day, truly no one knew about ley lines.
Certainly no one in Henrietta, Virginia. Certainly not one of Aglionby’s richest pupils. Definitely not in conjunction with St. Mark’s Day. This was Whelk’s quest, Whelk’s treasure, Whelk’s teen years. Why was Richard Gansey III talking about it?
With the words ley line spoken aloud, a memory was conjured: Whelk in a dense wood, sweat collected on his upper lip. He was seventeen and shivering. Every time his heart beat, red lines streaked in the corners of his vision, the trees darkening with his pulse. It made the leaves seem like they were all moving, though there was no wind. Czerny was on the ground. Not dead, but dying. His legs still pedaled on the uneven surface beside his red car, making drifts of fallen leaves behind him. His face was just … done. In Whelk’s head, unearthly voices hissed and whispered, words blurred and stretched together.
“Some sort of energy source or something,” Milo said.
Whelk was suddenly afraid that Milo could see the memory on him, could hear the inexplicable voices in his head, incomprehensible but nonetheless present ever since that failed day.
Whelk schooled his features, though what he was really thinking was: If someone else is looking here, I must have been right. It must be here.
“What did he say he was doing with the ley line?” he asked with studied calm.
“I don’t know. Ask him about it. I’m sure he’d love to talk your ear off about it.” Milo looked over his shoulder as the secretary joined them in the hall, her bag on her arm, her jacket in her hand. Her eyeliner was smudged after a long day in the office.
“We talking about Gansey the third and his New Age obsession?” the secretary asked. She had a pencil stuck in her hair to keep it up and Whelk stared at the stray strands that wound up around the lead. It was clear to him from the way she stood that she secretly found Milo attractive, despite the
plaid and the corduroy and the beard. She asked, “Do you know how much Gansey senior is worth? I wonder if he knows what his kid spends all his time on. Man, sometimes these entitled little bastards make me want to slit my wrists. Jonah, are you coming with me for a smoke break or not?”
“I quit,” said Milo. He cast a quick, uneasy glance from the secretary to Whelk, and Whelk knew he was thinking about how much Whelk’s father had been worth, once upon a time, and how little he was worth now, long after the trials had left the front pages of the newspapers. All the junior faculty and the admin staff hated the Aglionby boys, hated them for what they had and what they stood for, and Whelk knew they were all secretly pleased that he had fallen down among their ranks.
“How about you, Barry?” the secretary asked. Then she answered her own question: “No, you don’t smoke, you’re too pretty for that. Oh well, I’ll
go myself.”
Milo turned to go as well.
“Feel better,” he said kindly, although Whelk had never said he was sick.
The voices in Whelk’s head were a roar, but for once, his own thoughts
had drowned them out.
“I think I do already,” said Whelk.
It was possible that Czerny’s death wasn’t for nothing after all.
