The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Why this fact filled me with shame in Babs’s presence, while Babs herself took no notice of it at all, I can’t explain.

Adolescence! Happiness for some, poison for others. The killer’s heart is forged in adolescence. Sobering for R_ in his rented tuxedo, gold cuff links gleaming, to recall that fifteen years ago he would have eagerly exchanged his privileged life as a small-town physician’s brainy, beloved son, destined to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Michigan, for that of Babs Hendrick’s boyfriend Hal McCreagh, a good-looking football player with a C average, destined to work in an Indian River lumberyard for life. If I could be you. And no more me. Mostly I managed not to think of Hal McCreagh at all, but solely of Babs Hendrick, whom in fact I saw infrequently. When I did manage to see her, in school, in passing, I was so focused on the girl that she existed for me in a rarefied dimension, like a specimen of some beautiful creature — butterfly, bird, tropical fish — safely under glass. I saw her mouth move but heard no sound. Even when Babs smiled in my direction and gaily murmured Hi! in the style of popular girls at Indian River High who made it a point, out of Christian charity perhaps, to ignore no one, I scarcely heard her. In a buzzing panic, I could only stammer a belated reply, half-shutting my eyes in terror of staring at Babs too openly, her small shapely dancerlike body, her radiantly glistening pink-lipsticked lips and widened smiling eyes, for in my paranoia I was convinced that others could sense my yearning, my raw, hopeless, contemptible desire. I imagined overhearing, and often in my fever dreams I did actually hear, voices rising in derision, “Roland? Mm?” And cruel adolescent laughter of the kind that, decades later, still reverberates through R._’s dreams.

For this I cannot truly blame the girl. She knew nothing of her power over me.

Did she?

Babs was a senior, and I was only a sophomore and did not exist to her; to be in close proximity to such a girl, I had to join the Drama Club, in which Babs was a prominent member, a high school star, invariably cast in student productions directed by our English teacher Mr. Seales. Onstage, Babs was a lively, pretty, and energetic presence, one of those golden creatures at whom others gaze in helpless admiration, though to be truthful, and I mean to be truthful in this narrative, Babs Hendrick was probably only moderately talented. But by the standards of Indian River, Michigan, she shone. In Drama Club I was an eager volunteer for work no one else wanted to do, like set design and lighting; I helped Mr. Seales organize rehearsals. To the surprise of my friends, who had no idea of my infatuation with Babs, I spent more and more time with the Drama Club crowd, comfortable in my relatively invisible role, happy to leave the spotlight to others.

In that context, as a kind of mascot, Roland became Rollie. What a thrill.

For Babs herself would summon me, “Rollie? Would you be a sweetheart” — with what ease and unconscious cruelty murmuring such words to me! — “and run out and get me a cola? Here’s some change.” And Rollie would go flying out of the school and down the street a block and a half to a convenience store, to bring back a cola for Babs Hendrick, thrilled by the task. More than once I’d run to fetch something for Babs and when I returned to the rehearsal room, panting like a good-natured dog, another of the actors would send me out again, and Rollie would fly a second time, not wanting to protest for fear of arousing suspicion.

Almost, I overheard behind me Babs’s musical voice: “That Rollie! I just love him.”

Between Clifford Seales and certain of his girl students, particularly blond, effervescent Babs, there was a heightened electric mood during Drama Club meetings and play rehearsals; a continuous stream of bright, racy banter of the kind that left the girls pink-cheeked and breathless with giggling and Mr. Seales (though long married and his children grown) grinning and tugging at his shirt collar. Perhaps there was nothing seriously erotic about such banter, only playfulness, but unmistakably flirtatious undercurrents wafted about us, for most of the Drama Club members were not ordinary students but students singled out for attention; and Mr. Seales, in his fifties, thick-waisted, porcine, with a singed-looking face and wire-rimmed bifocals that shone when he was at his wittiest and most eloquent, was no ordinary high school teacher. He cultivated a brushlike rufous mustache and wore his hair long, past his collar. He’d been an amateur actor with the Milwaukee Players in his early twenties, and he’d impressed generations of Indian River students by hinting that he’d almost had, or possibly had had, a screen test with Twentieth Century Fox in his youth. Babs daringly teased Mr. Seales about his wild Hollywood days when he’d been Clark Gable’s double. (Mr. Seales did resemble, from certain angles of perspective and in flattering light, a fleshier Clark Gable.)

After the tragedy, and the scandal that surrounded it, rumors would fly through Indian River that Mr. Seales was a pervert who’d insisted on his girl and boy actors rehearsing passionate love scenes in his presence, to prepare them for acting together onstage. That Mr. Seales was a pervert who rehearsed passionate love scenes with his girl students, private sessions. That he had “brushed against,” “touched,” “fondled” Babs Hendrick before witnesses, and made the girl blush fiercely. That Mr. Seales carried, in his briefcase, a silver flask filled with gin, and out of this flask he secretly laced coffee and soda drinks to give to unsuspecting students, to render them more malleable in his pervert hands. In the seven months I belonged to the Drama Club I’d seen no evidence of any of this, and so I would testify to the Indian River police in Mr. Seales’s defense (though my father was furious with me afterward). Yet how strange: Never had I witnessed Mr. Seales pouring anything into any drinks, including my own, but somehow I was inspired to such an action myself, out of despair of my obsession with Babs and out of (how can I explain, without seeming to be trying to excuse myself?) a conviction of my essential helplessness. For never would Roland have believed himself capable of what he dreamt of committing: never would he, who believed himself a victim, have imagined himself so powerful, and lethal.