Fates and Furies Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a tough skin? Felt down. Felt leather. Laces? Shoe? He was dabbed in the teeth.
    He crabwalked backward, a high-pitched keening noise coming from somewhere, and moved wildly down the walls, and after an eternity found the light switch, and in the horrible bright found himself looking at the boat suspended from the ceiling, tipped down on one side, dangling the worst Christmas ornament ever. A boy. Dead boy. Blue-faced. Tongue out. Glasses cocked. In a moment came the recognition: oh, poor Jelly Roll, hanging from the bow ball of a sweep eight. He’d climbed up, tied the noose. Leapt. Mint brownie from dinner all over his shirt. The sound died out of Lotto’s chest. He ran.
    —
    A FTER THE POLICE , the ambulance, came the dean. He brought Lotto doughnuts and a cup of cocoa. His eyebrows danced all over his face, chewing on lawsuits, copycat suicides, leaks to newspapers. He dropped Lotto at his dorm, but when the taillights winked away, Lotto came out again. He couldn’t be near all the other boys, who were, justthen, dreaming innocent anxiety dreams of girl bits and summer internships.
    He found himself sitting in the auditorium on the stage when the chapel bell chimed three AM .
    The long sweep of seats held the memory of bodies. He pulled out the joint he’d been intending to smoke just before he touched the barrel to his teeth.
    Nothing made sense. There was an airy whistling off stage right. Denton Thrasher, sans glasses and in frayed plaid pajamas, crossed the stage, dopp kit in hand.
    “Denton?” Lotto said.
    The man peered into the shadows, clutching the bag to his chest. “Who’s there?” he said.
    “Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself,” Lotto said.
    Denton padded upstage. “Oh, Lancelot. You startled the sap out of me.” He gave a cough and said, “Do I scent the sultry waft of cannabis?”
    Lotto put the joint into his outstretched fingers, and Denton took a drag.
    “What are you doing in your pajamas?” Lotto said.
    “The question is, my dear, what you are doing here.” He sat next to Lotto, then said, with a sideways grin, “Or were you looking for me?”
    “No,” Lotto said.
    “Oh,” Denton said.
    “But here you are,” Lotto said.
    When there was no more joint to smoke, Denton said, “Saving my pennies. Crashing in the costume room. I’m resigned to a destitute old age. It’s not the worst. No bedbugs. And I like the constant bells.”
    On cue, the three-thirty bell chimed, and they laughed.
    Lotto said, “Tonight I found a boy who hanged himself. Hung himself. Hanged himself.”
    Denton went still. “Oh, child,” he said.
    “I didn’t really know him. They called him Jelly Roll.”
    “Harold,” Denton said. “That boy. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he was so sad. You boys were terrible. Savages. Oh, not you, Lotto. I never meant you. I’m so sorry you had to be the one to find him.”
    Lotto’s throat filled with something, and he saw himself swinging from the scull until the door opened, the light flicked on. It came over him that even had he crept up the stairs and found the dean’s office unlocked and opened the drawer and felt the weight of the gun in his hand, something in him would have resisted. It would never have ended that way. [True. It was not his time.]
    Denton Thrasher gathered Lotto in his arms and wiped his face with the hem of his pajama top, revealing a furry white belly, and Lotto was rocked on the edge of the stage, smelling witch hazel and Listerine and pajamas worn too many times between washes.
    —
    T HIS L ANCELOT CHILD in Denton’s lap. So young, crying past the point of immediate sorrow into something deeper. It frightened Denton. Four o’clock. Sweet Lancelot, so talented, but this was a little much, even if Denton saw in him the rare spark. His looks were both promising and as if some essential promise had fled and left wreckage in its wake, which was odd, the boy being fifteen at most. Well, beauty could come back,