The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Joyce Carol Oates The High School Sweetheart

From Playboy

There was an intensely private man whose fate was to become, as year followed year, something of a public figure and a model for others. Nothing astonished R_ more, and more alarmed him! Relatively young, he’d achieved renown as a writer of popular yet literary novels; his field was the psychological suspense mystery, a genre in which he excelled, perhaps because he respected the tradition and took infinite care in composition. These were terse, minimally plotted but psychologically knotty novels written, as R_ said in interviews, sentence by sentence, and so they must be read sentence by sentence, with attention, as one might perform steps in a difficult dance. R_ was himself both choreographer and dancer. And sometimes, even after decades of effort, R_ lost his way, and despaired. For there was something of horror in the lifelong contemplation of mystery; a sick, visceral helplessness that must be transformed into control, and mastery. And so R_ never gave up any challenge, no matter how difficult. “To give up is to confess you’re mortal and must die.”

R_ was one of those admired persons who remain mysterious even to old friends. By degrees, imperceptibly as it seemed to him, he became an elder, and respected, perhaps because his appearance inspired confidence. He had fair, fine, sand-colored hair that floated about his head, a high forehead and startlingly frank blue eyes; he was well over six feet tall and lean as a knife blade, with long loose limbs and a boyish energy. He seemed never to grow older, nor even mature, but to retain a dreamy Nordic youthfulness with a glisten of something chill and soulless in his eyes, as if, inwardly, he gazed upon a tundra of terrifying, featureless white and the utterly blank, vacuous Arctic sky above. One of the prevailing mysteries about R_ was his marriage, for none of us had ever glimpsed his wife of four decades, let alone been introduced to her; it was assumed that her name began with “B,” for each of R_’s eleven novels was dedicated, simply and tersely, to “B,” and it was believed that R_ had married, very young, a girl who’d been his high school sweetheart in a small town in northern Michigan, that she wasn’t at all literary or even interested in his career, and that they had no children.

In one of his reluctant interviews R_ once admitted, enigmatically, that, no, he and his wife had no children. “That, I haven’t committed.”

How proud we were of R_, as one of the heralded patricians in the field! When he spoke to you, smiled and shook hands, like a big animated doll, you felt privileged, if only just slightly uneasy at the remote, arctic glisten in those blue, blue eyes.

R_ was often nominated to run for office in professional organizations to which he belonged, yet always he declined out of modesty, or self-doubt: “R_ isn’t the man you want, truly!” But finally, at the age of sixty, he gave in and was elected by a large majority as president of the American Mystery Writers, a fact that seemed to both deeply move him and fill him with apprehension. Repeatedly he called members of the executive board to ask if truly R_ was the man we wanted; repeatedly we assured him, yes, certainly, R_ was.

On the occasion of his induction as president, R_ meant to entertain us, he promised, with a new story written especially for that evening, not a lengthy, rambling speech interlarded with lame jokes, like certain of his predecessors. (Of course there was immediate laughter at this remark. For our outgoing president, an old friend of R_’s and of most of us in the audience, was a well-liked but garrulous gentleman not known for brevity.)

Almost shyly, however, R_ took the podium and stood before an audience of perhaps five hundred mystery writers and their guests, straight-backed and handsome in his detached, pale, Nordic way, a fine figure of a man in an elegant tuxedo, white silk shirt, and gleaming gold cuff links. R_’s hair was more silvery than we recalled but floated airily about his head; his forehead appeared higher, a prominent ridge of bone at the hairline. Well back into the audience, you could see those remarkable blue eyes. In a beautifully modulated, rather musical voice. R_ thanked us for the honor of electing him president, thanked outgoing officers of the organization, and alluded with regret to the fact that “unforeseen circumstances” had prevented his wife from attending that evening. “As you know, my friends, I did not campaign to be elected your president. It’s an honor, as the saving goes, that has been thrust upon me. But I do feel that I am a kinsman of all of you, and I hope I will be worthy of your confidence. I hope you will like the story I’ve written for you!” Almost, R_’s voice quavered when he said these words, and he had to pause for a moment before beginning to read, in a dramatic voice, from what appeared to be a handwritten manuscript of about fifteen pages.

At this apparent misstatement, R_ paused in confusion, peering at his manuscript as if it had deceived or betrayed him; but a moment later he regained his composure, and continued—

“To give up is to confess you’re mortal and must die.”

Forty-five years ago! I wasn’t yet R_ but a fifteen-year-old named Roland, whom no one called Rollie, skinny, gawky, self-conscious, with a straight-A average and pimples like hot little beads of red pepper scattered across forehead and back, lost in helpless erotic dreams of a beautiful, popular blond senior named Barbara, whom everyone at Indian River High School called Babs. Now that I am no longer this boy, I can contemplate him without the self-loathing he’d felt at the time. I can feel a measure of pity for him, and sympathy, if not tenderness. Or forgiveness.

My high school sweetheart was two years older than I, and, I’m ashamed to confess, didn’t realize that she was my high school sweetheart. She had a boyfriend her own age, and numerous other friends besides, and had no idea how I secretly observed her, and with what yearning. The name Babs — unremarkable, yet so American and somehow wholesome — makes me feel faint, still, with hope and longing.

In high school, I came to dread mirrors as I dreaded the frank assessing stares of my classmates, for these confronted me with a truth too painful to acknowledge. Like many intellectually gifted adolescents I was precocious academically and retarded socially. In my dreams, I was freed of my clumsy body and often glided along the ground, or soared, swift as thought; I felt myself purely a mind, a questing spirit: it was my own body I fled, my base, obsessive sexual yearning. In actual life I was both shy and haughty; I carried myself stiffly, conscious of being a doctor’s son in predominantly working-class Indian River, even as I saw with painful clarity how my classmates were only polite with me when required, their mouths smiling in easy deference even as their eyes drifted past me. Yes, you’re Roland, the doctor’s son, you live in one of the big brick houses on Church Street, and your father drives a new, shiny black Lincoln, but we don’t care for you anyway. Already in grade school I’d learned the crucial distinction between being envied and being liked. Where there was laughter, there, Roland, the doctor’s son, was excluded. Of course, I had one or two friends, even rather close friends, boys like myself, brainy and lonely, and given to irony, though we were too young to grasp the meaning of irony: where heartbreak and anger conjoin. And I had my secret dreams, which attached themselves with alarming abruptness and a terrible fixedness, at the start of my sophomore year in high school, to beautiful blond Babs, a girl whose father, a carpenter and stone mason with a good local reputation, had worked for my father.

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.

Not gin out of a silver flask, but a heavy dose of barbiturate from my mother’s crammed medicine cabinet. It was an old prescription; I took the chance that my distracted, nervous mother would never notice.

It was not my intention to hurt my high school sweetheart. For I so adored her, I could not imagine even touching her! In my sickly, fevered dreams I “saw” her vividly, or a female figure that resembled her; beneath layers of bedclothes, as if hoping to hide myself from my father’s suspicious eyes that seemed to penetrate my bedroom walls, I groaned in anguish, and in shame, in thrall to her female beauty. I was the victim, not the girl. I wished to free myself from my morbid obsession, and I became desperate. For had not my father (reading my thoughts? identifying certain symptoms in my person, my behavior?) warned me with much embarrassment of the danger of “unclean practices,” “compulsive self-abuse”? Had not my father turned aside from me in disgust, seeing in my frightened eyes and inflamed pimply skin an admission of guilt? And yet I could not beg him for mercy claiming I am the victim!

In high school life, Babs Hendrick existed in a rarefied dimension, inaccessible to someone like me; I might brush against her in a corridor, or descending a flight of stairs, might sit on the floor of the greenroom backstage, six inches from her feet, yet this distance was an abyss. The girl was invulnerable, immune to anything Roland or Rollie might say or do. At such times I knew myself invisible, and though lowly, in a way blessed. Unlike other, older and more attractive boys, I had not a chance to compel this girl to love me, even to notice me, thus I risked little, like a craven but faithful mongrel. Even when someone called out “Rollie!” and sent me on an errand, I felt myself invisible and blessed. During rehearsals on the open, bare stage, which was often drafty, I liked it that Babs might send me for her sweater, or her boyfriend’s jacket; I loved it that, in this place devoid of glamour, Babs yet exuded her innocent golden-girl beauty, which (I came to think) no one really appreciated but me. At such times I could crouch on the floor and gaze openly at Babs Hendrick’s flawless heart-shaped face, her perky, shapely little body, for she was an “actress”; in fact, and this was a delicious irony not lost on Roland, Babs and the other Indian River stars were dependent on people like Roland, an admiring audience for their self-display, or what was called “talent.” And so I made myself more and more available to the Drama Club, and to the rather vain, pompous Mr. Seales, as a way of making myself liked and trusted. How quiet Roland was, and utterly dependable! No one else in the Drama Club was either, and this included Mr. Seales himself. I was always available if, for instance, Babs needed someone patient to help her with her lines, in the greenroom, or in an empty classroom. (“Gosh, Rollie, what would I do without you! You’re so much sweeter and a darn sight smarter than my kid brother.”) Mr. Seales had cast, or miscast, Babs as the wan, crippled, poetic Laura in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie; this was a plum of a role for an aspiring actress, but one for which Babs’s healthy, wholesome golden-girl looks and childlike extroversion hardly suited her. Her superficial facility for rote memory wasn’t helping her much with the poetic language of the Williams play, and she was continually baffled by its emotional subtext. Even Mr. Seales was beginning to be impatient with her tearful outbursts and temper tantrums, and several times spoke cuttingly to her in front of others. These others were to be shortly designated as “witnesses,” even I, who had no choice but to tell police officers all that I’d truly heard.

One of my frequent errands was to fetch quart plastic bottles of a certain diet cola, explosively carbonated and artificially sweetened, from the convenience store up the street — a vile-tasting chemical concoction that my father claimed had caused “cancerous growths” in laboratory rats, and that, though I exulted in going against my father’s wishes whenever I could, I found repellent, undrinkable. Yet Babs was addicted to this drink, kept bottles in her locker and was always running out. The fact that the cola was in a quart bottle and not a can, and that I was often the person to open it, and pour the drink into paper cups to pass around to the actors, gave me the idea, and an innocent idea it seemed to me, like a magical fantasy interlude in a Disney film, of mixing something in the fizzing liquid, a sleeping potion it might romantically be called, that would cause Babs Hendrick to become sleepy suddenly, and doze, for just a few precious minutes, and I alone might observe her close up, watch over and protect her: If needed, I would wake her and walk her home.

Babs Hendrick, walked home by Roland, the doctor’s son.

This was a fantasy that sprang from one of my fevered erotic dreams. I both loathed these dreams as unhealthy and unclean, and craved them; I both wished to rid myself of them forever, and cherished them as one of the few authentic creations of my lonely life. Out of this paradox grew, like poisonous toadstools by night, my compulsion to write, and to write of certain subjects the world designates as morbid. Out of the tragedy of that long-ago time grew my obsession with mystery as the most basic, and so most profound, of all artistic visions. Out of my obsession with my high school sweetheart, the distinguished (and lucrative) career of R_, newly elected president of the American Mystery Writers! Though R_ is far from fifteen years old, he is not so very distant from the fifteen-year-old Roland secretly planning, plotting, rehearsing his deed of great daring. He seemed in his sex-obsessed naivete to think that he could accomplish his goal without having the slightest effect on reality, and without consequences for either himself or his victim.

Of course, fifteen-year-old Roland did not think of Babs Hendrick as a victim. She wielded such power!

And so it happened, as in a dream, one bleak, gunmetal-gray afternoon in March, in that limbo season poised between late winter and early spring, when the temperature seems frozen at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, that rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie broke off around five o’clock, and Mr. Seales sent everyone home except for Babs, with whom he spoke in private, and twenty minutes later Babs appeared in the corridor outside the classroom, wiping at her beautiful downcast eyes. Seeing me lurking nearby (but Babs wouldn’t have thought her friend Rollie was capable of lurking) eagerly, she asked would I help her with lines? Just for a half-hour?

Murmured Rollie shyly, “Sure.”

Babs led us to the greenroom backstage. As usual, she stood as she recited her lines, and moved about restlessly, trying to match her gestures with Tennessee Williams’s maddeningly poetic, repetitive language. She scarcely glanced at me as I read lines, or prompted her, as if she were alone; I was Laura’s mother, Laura’s brother, Laura’s caddish gentleman caller, yet it was exclusively her own image she gazed at in the room’s long horizontal mirror. Even in this fluorescent-lit, stale-smelling room with shabby furnishings and worn linoleum tile, how beautiful Babs was! Far more beautiful than poor doomed Laura. I loved her and hated her. For the sake of the Lauras of the world, as well as the Rolands.

The other day, in the leafy, affluent suburban town fifty minutes north of Grand Central Station where I live, as the irony of circumstance had placed me, on Basking Ridge Drive, which intersects with Church Street. I was walking into the village to pick up my newspapers, as I do every day for the exercise, and I saw her. I saw Babs Hendrick: a lovely girl with shoulder-length wavy blond hair and bangs brushed low on her forehead, walking with some high school classmates. I stopped in my tracks. My heart clanged like a bell. I nearly called out to her — “Babs? Is it you?” But of course, being R_, and no longer naive, I waited until I could ascertain that of course the girl wasn’t my lost high school sweetheart, and didn’t truly resemble her. I turned aside to hide my grief. I limped away, shaken. I took solace all that day in writing this story, for I no longer have lurid, delicious erotic fantasies by night, beneath heavy bedcovers: the only fantasies that visit me now are willfully calculated, impeccably plotted contrivances of my writerly life.

I repeat: It was not my intention to hurt my high school sweetheart.

In my anxiety, I must have mixed too much of the barbiturate into the cola drink. I’d taken a number of capsules from my mother’s medicine cabinet, broken them, and carefully poured the white powder into a tissue; this tissue, wrapped in cellophane, I’d been carrying in my pocket for what seemed like months, but could have been only two or three weeks. I knew that my opportunity would come if I was patient. And that March afternoon, when Babs and I were alone together in the greenroom, and no one near, and no one knowing us, and she sent me to her locker to fetch her opened bottle of cola while she used the girls’ backstage lavatory, I knew that this was meant to be. Almost, I had no choice. I siphoned the white powder into the virulent dark chemical drink, replaced the top, and turned it upside down, shook it gently. Babs took no notice of the barbiturate, for she drank the cola in distracted swallow’s while trying to memorize her lines, and was on her feet, restless and impatient, haring decided that the secret to Williams’s heroine was her anger, hidden beneath layers of girlish verbiage of which the playwright himself hadn’t been aware. “Cripples are always angry, I bet. I’d sure be, in their place.”

Roland, sitting on an old worn corduroy-covered sofa, waiting anxiously for the sleeping potion to take effect, murmured yes, he guessed Babs must be right.

She continued with her lines, reciting, forgetting, and needing to be prompted, remembering, reciting, moving her arms, making her face “expressive”; the more she rehearsed Laura, the more Laura eluded her, like a mocking phantom. Ten minutes passed, with excruciating slowness; I felt beads of sweat break out on my heated face and trickle down my thin sides; fifteen minutes passed, and by degrees Babs appeared to be getting drowsy, murmuring that she didn’t know what was wrong with her, she was feeling so tired, couldn’t keep her eyes open. She knocked the cola bottle over; what remained of the liquid spilled out onto the already stained carpet. Abruptly then she slumped down at the far end of the sofa, and within a matter of seconds was asleep.

I sat without moving, not even looking directly at her, at first, for some time. The magic had worked! It wasn’t believable, yet it had happened; Roland could have had no real power over a girl like Babs Hendrick, yet — this had happened. Yes I was elated. Ecstatic! Yes I was terrified. For what I had done, the crudest of tricks, I could not undo.

Not scrawny brainy Roland, that shy boy, but another person, calculating and almost calm, moved at last from his position on the sofa and stood trembling with excitement over the sleeping girl. Beautiful when awake, and animated, Babs was yet more beautiful in sleep; waxy-skinned and vulnerable, she seemed much younger than seventeen. Her face was pale and slack and her lips parted, like a sleeping baby’s, her arms were limp, her legs sprawled like the legs of a rag doll. She wore a pale yellow angora sweater with short puffy sleeves, and a charcoal gray pleated skirt. (This predated the era of universal blue jeans.) I whispered, “Babs? Babs?” and she gave no sign of hearing. She was breathing in deep, erratic, shuddering breaths and her eyelids were quivering. My fear was that she’d wake suddenly and see me standing over her and know what I’d done, and begin to scream, and what would happen to Roland, the doctor’s son, then? I dared to touch her arm, and shook her gently. “Babs? What’s wrong?” So far, what was happening wasn’t suspicious exactly. (Was it?) Kids often fell asleep in school, cradling their heads on their arms in the library, or in study hall; in boring classes nearly everyone nodded off, at times. Self-dramatizing young actors, complaining of exhaustion and overwork, stole naps in the greenroom, and tales were told of couples “sleeping” on the infamous corduroy couch when they were assured of a few minutes’ quick-snatched privacy. Babs, like her popular friends, stayed up late, talking and laughing over the telephone, as I’d gathered from overhearing their conversations, and she’d been anxious about the play, and sleep-deprived, so it wasn’t so unlikely that, in the midst of going over her lines with me, she might become exhausted suddenly and fall asleep. None of this was suspicious. Not yet!

But Roland’s behavior was beginning to be suspicious, wasn’t it? For stealthily he went to the door, which had no lock, and dragged a heavy leather armchair in front of it to prevent the door being opened suddenly. (There were likely to be a few teachers and students remaining in the building, even past six o’clock.) He switched off all the lights in the windowless room except one, a flickering fluorescent tube on the verge of burning out. He spoke gently, cautiously to the deeply breathing, sleeping girl, “Babs? Babs? It’s just me. Rollie.” For long mesmerized seconds he stood above her, staring. The elusive girl of his fever dreams! His high school sweetheart, whom his father tried to forbid him. Unclean. Compulsive. Self-abuse. Daringly Roland touched the girl again, caressing her shoulder, like a film lover, and her arm in the fuzzy angora sweater, and her limp, chill fingers. He was breathing quickly now, and he’d become sticky with sweat. If he leaned closer, if he kissed her? (But how did you kiss a girl like Babs Hendrick?) Just her forehead? Would she wake suddenly, would she begin to scream? “It’s just me. Rollie. I love you.” Suddenly he wondered, with a stab of jealousy, whether Hal McCreagh had ever seen Babs like this. So deeply asleep! So beautiful! He wondered what Hal did to Babs, when they were alone together in Hal’s car. Kissing? (Tongue kissing?) Touching, fondling? Petting? It excited Roland, and infuriated him, to imagine.

But Hal wasn’t here now. Hal knew nothing of this interlude, this “rehearsal.” There was no longer any Hal. There was only Roland, the doctor’s brainy, beloved son.

He was trembling badly now. Shaking. A powerful throbbing ache in his groin, which he tried to ignore, and a rapid beating of his heart. This could not be happening, could it? How could this be happening? Bringing his lips against the girl’s strangely cool, clammy forehead. It was the first true kiss of his life. Babs’s silky blond head had fallen back against the soiled armrest of the sofa, and her mouth had dropped open. Her eyelids were oddly bluish and fluttering as if desperately she wanted to open them but could not. “Babs? Don’t be afraid.” He kissed her cheek, he stooped to kiss her mouth, which hung open, slack, helpless, a string of saliva trailing down her chin. The taste of her mouth excited him terribly. With his tongue he licked her saliva. Like tasting blood. Roland, the vampire. That first kiss! His brain seemed to go black. He was seized by a powerful need to grab hold of the girl, hard. To show her who was master. But he restrained himself, for Roland was not such a person; Roland was a good boy and would never harm anyone. (Would he?) Babs Hendrick was, he knew, a good Christian girl, as he was a good Christian boy. What harm could come to them really? If he meant no harm, harm would not ensue. He would be protected. The girl would be protected. He’d begun to notice her strange, labored breathing, audible as a grown man’s breathing in stress, and yet he did not somehow absorb the possible meaning of such a symptom, though he was (but right now, was not) Roland, the doctor’s son. He was trembling with excitement. His hand, which seemed to him slightly distorted as if seen through a magnifying lens, reached out to smooth the silky blond hair and cradle it in his fingers. He stroked the nape of the girl’s neck, slowly he caressed her shoulder, her left breast, delicately touching the breast with his fingertips, that fuzzy pale yellow angora wool that was so beautiful; he cupped his hand (but was this his hand?) beneath the small, shapely breast, gently and then with more assurance he caressed, he squeezed lightly. “Babs! I l-love you.” The girl moaned in her heavy, stuporous sleep, a sexual moan it seemed to Roland, who was himself whimpering with excitement. But she didn’t wake. His power over her, Roland’s revenge, was that she could not wake; she was at his mercy, and he would be merciful. She was utterly helpless and vulnerable, and he would not take advantage of her as one of the crude Indian River High boys would have done in his place. (Would he?) In even the most lurid of his dreams he hadn’t defiled his sweetheart (at least that he’d allowed himself to remember). In a cracked, hoarse, half-pleading voice, whispering, “Babs? Don’t be afraid. I would never hurt you, I love you.” And the blackness rose, swooning in him a second time, annihilating his brain, and he would not afterward recall all that happened in that dim-lit windowless room, on the shabby corduroy sofa, or was caused to happen, perceived as through a distorting lens that both magnified and reduced vision.

When again Roland was able to see clearly, and to think, he saw to his horror that it was nearly six-thirty. And still the stricken girl slept on the corduroy sofa, the sound of her breathing now filling the airless room. Her head lay at a painful angle on the soiled armrest and her arms and legs were limp, loose as those of a rag doll. Except now her unseeing eyes were partly open, showing a crescent of white. Anxiously he whispered, “Babs? Wake up.” He felt panic: hearing voices in the corridor beyond the backstage area, boys’ voices, perhaps basketball players leaving practice; and Hal McCreagh was among these, or might have been, for Hal was on the team; and what would Roland do, and what would be done to Roland, if he were discovered like this, hiding, guilty-faced, with Babs Hendrick sprawled on the sofa, helpless in sleep, her hair disheveled and her clothing in disarray? Hurriedly, with shaking fingers, Roland readjusted the fuzzy angora sweater, and the pleated skirt. Whimpering, pleading for the girl to wake up, please would she wake up, yet like Sleeping Beauty in the Disney film, she would not wake up; she was under a curse; she would not wake up for him.

For the first time it occurred to the trembling boy that he might have given his sweetheart too strong a dose of the drug. What if she never woke up? (But what was too strong, he had no idea. Half the bottle of six-milligram capsules? That odorless chalky white powder?)

Panic swept over him. No, he wouldn’t think of that.

On a shelf amid the tattered copies of play scripts he found a frayed, light wool blanket to draw gently over Babs. He tucked the blanket beneath her damp chin, and spread her blond, wavy hair in a fan around her head. She would sleep until the drug wore off, and then she would wake; if Roland — “Rollie” — were very lucky, she wouldn’t remember him; and if he were unlucky, well — he wouldn’t think of that. (And he did not.) Stealthily then he fled, and was unseen. He would leave the single fluorescent light flickering. He would slip from the greenroom to the darkened backstage area and make his way out into a rear corridor, not taking the most obvious, direct route (which would have brought him into a corridor contiguous with the corridor that led to the boys’ locker room), and so, breathless, he would flee the scene of the crime, which in his heart he could not (could he?) acknowledge was a crime, even into his sixty-first year, when R_ had long replaced both Roland and “Rollie.” Contemplating then through the distorting lens of time the pale, calm-seeming doctor’s son safe in the brick house on Church Street, and safe in his room immersed in geometry homework at 8:20 that evening, the approximate time that Babs Hendrick’s heart ceased beating.

The Glass Menagerie would not be performed that spring at Indian River High.

Clifford Scales would be suspended without salary from the school, and his contract terminated soon after, during the Indian River police investigation into the barbiturate death of Seales’s seventeen-year-old student Babs Hendrick. Though not enough evidence would be gathered against him to justify a formal arrest, Seales would remain the prime suspect in the case, and his guilt taken for granted. Forty-five years later in Indian River, if you speak of Babs Hendrick’s death, you’ll be told in angry disgust that the girl’s English teacher, an alcoholic pervert who’d molested other girl students over the years, drugged her with barbiturates to perform despicable sexual acts on her, and killed her in the process. You will be told that Seales managed to escape prosecution, though of course his life was ruined, and he would die, divorced and disgraced, of a massive heart attack a few years later.

Ladies and gentlemen, you will ask: Had the Indian River police no other suspects? Possibly yes. Practicably speaking, no. Even today, small-town police departments are ill equipped to undertake homicide investigations in which neither witnesses nor informants come forward. Dusting for fingerprints in the greenroom yielded a treasure trove of prints, but all of these, even Seales’s, were explainable. DNA evidence (saliva, semen) would have convicted the guilty individual, but DNA evidence was unknown at the time. And the boy, the shy bespectacled doctor’s son, Roland, was but one of a number of high school boys, including the dead girl’s boyfriend, whom police questioned; he was not singled out for suspicion, spoke earnestly and persuasively to police officers, even defending (in his naivete) the notorious Seales, and was never to behave in any way that might be labeled suspicious. In a state of suspended animation. No emotion, only wonder. That I. Roland, had done such a thing. I, a victim, to have wielded such power!

If my mother had ever discovered that a bottle of prescription sleeping pills was missing from her medicine cabinet, she never spoke of her discovery and what it might mean.

It would be rumored (but never printed in any newspapers or uttered on radio or TV) that “sick, disgusting things” had been done to Babs Hendrick’s helpless body before her death; only a “pervert” could have done such acts upon a comatose victim. But there would never be any arrest of this criminal, and therefore no trial. And no public revelations.

(What “sick, disgusting things” were done to my sweetheart, I don’t know. Another individual must have slipped into the greenroom between the time Roland fled and Babs died later that evening.)

The sick horror of mystery that remains unsolved.

You will ask: Did the killer never confess?

The superficial answer is no, the killer never confessed. For he did not (did he?) truly believe himself a killer; he was a good Christian boy. And he was (and is) a coward, contemptible. The more complex answer is yes, the killer confessed, and has confessed many times during his long and “distinguished” career. Each work of fiction he has written has been a confession, and an exultation. For, having committed an act of mystery in his adolescence, he understood that he’d proved himself and need never commit another; forever afterward, he would be an elegist of mystery, and honored for his style. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this new honor.

In the sudden silence, R_ self-consciously stacked the pages of his manuscript together to signal that “The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery” was over, as we in the audience, his friends and admirers, sat stunned, in a paralysis of shock and indecision. R_’s story had been compelling, and his delivery mesmerizing — yet, how should we applaud?