What We Hide (14 page)

“It’s pretty much a law around here,” said Percy. “That Nico gets what Nico wants.”

Yeah, but what Nico wanted was to kiss me.
Me
. Even if it was partly showing off for those other jerks, Nico was the cutest boy who had ever even flirted with me, let alone … did stuff.… But because of Matt, I had to pretend I didn’t care. I’d lied myself out of the chance to … to what?

Two or three times a week I used Assignments Hour to write a funny letter to friends in Philly, sometimes to Mom, or, most often, to Matt. I drew pictures of the teachers and told him gossip and included an entry in the gross-food contest. I tried not to think about what he was seeing. How he might be crawling around with enormous deadly spiders or lying sick with a tropical fever. Firing bullets at other boys far from home. Just plain miserably lonely and scared.

But still no letter back. Obviously Matt had better things to do with his evenings than write to friends’ little sisters. As if
evening
had any meaning in war. As if he were lying on a couch after basketball practice instead of huddled in some bog with mosquitoes the size of bats, and bats the size of eagles. Evening probably meant that dark was coming, and dark in a jungle must be … I shuddered. Sometimes I’d wake up, imagining that it wasn’t a dormitory around me, but a dark full of slithering ghosts and creeping invisible enemies and sudden noises that made your earlobes vibrate and your stomach twist and your eyes blink in gratitude that it was a noise and not an end. An explosion that scared you to bits instead of killing you was what you hoped for.

I’d got into the habit of Matt being almost a diary. I didn’t even expect him to answer anymore. I tried not to think it meant he was dead. What was he supposed to say? War sucks?

I thought about him every day.

It was almost Halloween at home, but here they were collecting wood for a colossal bonfire on Guy Fawkes Day. On November fifth all of England celebrates the demise of some bloke who tried to blow up King James a few hundred years ago.

“The rule is to build the fire in the middle of the playing field,” explained Kirsten, “so we don’t burn the school down.”

Middle of the playing field meant a long way to drag branches from the woods, but it was Kirsten’s favorite night of the year, so she corralled her brother and a few other boys, including Nico without his shirt on, to do the major hauling. His shoulders were just about as broad as Matt’s.

“Did you tell Matt about your liaison with Nico? Is that why he never writes?” Penelope was having a smoke. It was past dark and the last few of us were huddled together at the Swamp, keeping her company and waiting for the Cocoa bell.

“He’s in Vietnam,” I said. “Remember? It’s not like there’s regular mail service on the battlefield.”

“I don’t think Vietnam has battle
fields
,” stuck in Percy. The boys in his dorm were being dicks again, while we were nice, plus full of gossip for his movies. “Vietnam has thick hideous jungles full of razor-edged elephant grass and teeming with poisonous snakes.” He got up and hunched over, pretending to hold a rifle, darting crazy-looking eyes
as he went into narrator mode: “The enemy, more determined than fire ants, stake out the undergrowth, silently waiting for you to fall into a pit full of sharpened bamboo spikes guaranteed to rupture your innards and expose your intestines to—”

“Thanks, Percy,” said Kirsten. “Very sensitive.”

“I’m sure it’s wretched,” I said. “So how could he write that? He wouldn’t want to bum me out with horrendous details. He not a whiner.” He was the most uncomplaining person I’d ever met.

“But true love manages to conquer all?” Penelope needled. “Including interludes with tall Greek boys at your end? Including blatant silence?”

“I’m not going to answer that.” I made my voice careless. “Who knows how anything turns out?”

The bell clanged, sounding mystical from this distance. Penelope ditched her cigarette. It was generally agreed that Cocoa was Vera D’s best offering and not one to miss.

Guy Fawkes night included a raging, and then a glowing, bonfire, a later-than-usual curfew, chocolate biscuits, silly dancing, and a starlit sky that seemed to reflect the sparking embers. All of it was ignored by the faculty who were off having their own party in the maths room.

Nico and I ended up, accidentally on purpose, on a bench in the tangled and neglected rose garden. What if I pretended to get a letter in which Matt broke up with me? I’d
have to be heartbroken for a while, but then … Nico was
so
cute. I was letting him kiss me again, and it was … so
nice
, and took us from sitting on the tilting wooden bench to lying down on the mossy ground.

His hand was under my T-shirt, roaming around near my skipping heart. It slid around to the back and began to fiddle with the band of my bra. Except it was the bra with a hook at the front, under a tiny silk bow, so he wasn’t making any progress. His kissing got sort of … distracted, him not being able to find the fastener. I heard a roar of laughter from the kids by the fire. I imagined for a second that they were watching us, laughing their heads off. That they all knew I was a big fat liar. The moss was suddenly damp and chilly.

“How do you undo this thing?” He sounded like a grumpy little boy grappling with the top of a cookie jar.
Nico gets what Nico wants
.

“You don’t.” I rolled away from him, scrambled up, brushing off dirt and leaves, tugging down my T-shirt. “Sorry,” I said. “No cheap thrills here.”

“Hey, wait.” He was bent over, awkwardly getting up. “You can’t just walk off!”

“Sorry. No, actually”—I had a flash of my mother’s libber jargon—“I’m
not
sorry. I’m … I’m … voicing my right to refuse.”

“Is that another way of saying prickteaser?”

All I wanted was to not be there. Nothing clever, no smart words to end the conversation.

“G’bye,” I said. “I made a mistake.”

“Nico already has a girlfriend,” said Penelope, back at the Swamp a few days later.

“Uh-huh.”
She’s delusional
, I thought. “And I have a boyfriend.”

“Her name is Sarah and she left at the end of summer term, in July. Her parents wanted her to do her final year at home in Toronto. It was dead sad, them saying goodbye to each other. I’m sure he still thinks about her all the time.”

“Despite,” said Kirsten, “multiple efforts to distract him. From multiple sources, including one whose name begins with a
P
.”

I laughed. Penelope scowled. “I’m only telling you so you don’t go and compromise your true love with Matt for some futile attempt to seduce Nico.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I said. “Please stop being a nutjob. Nothing’s going on.”

“So why do you make a point of looking everywhere in the room except at him?”

She might have been a nutjob, but she paid attention.

“Kind of hard,” said Penelope. “To break up with someone who’s away fighting a war.”

“I’m
not
breaking up with him!”

“Ohhh, so you have, like, an
open
relationship, the way the hippies do? Free love?”

“You’re driving even
me
crazy,” said Kirsten. “And I’m not the one under the microscope! Penelope, shut it!”

The letter came on a Monday, a heavy post day. Hairy Mary could barely keep order during distribution. The exotic stamps on my airmail envelope stood out, however, so I was surrounded at the Swamp. I wished I’d sneaked into a toilet stall to read alone, but they forced me to tear the flap and see Matt’s boy-scrawl across the page.

Dear Jen-Jen
, it began.

“Aren’t you going to read it aloud?” said Penelope.

“Yeah, come on,” said Oona.

“Nnn. Don’t think so.”

“Leave her alone,” said Kirsten.

Sorry for not writing before. It’s because the whole thing just stinks and I didn’t want to fill up a letter with bad vibes or the lies I have to tell my mother. But I thought of you today when they served up breakfast. The eggs come in a powder that the cooks stir with water before pouring them into the pan. Re-vol-ting! We are definitely bad-food soul mates!

I feel like I’m ten years older just since getting here. I’ve seen stuff I could never tell anyone at home. Me and the other grunts (that’s what we’re called) eat more secrets than scrambled eggs. Last week the worst thing happened so far. Middle of the night, the VC (that’s Vietcong—we have initials for everything) attacked our base, no fooling around, just bam bam bam, WE were the targets. The jungle is so close and dense, you can never see what’s coming or who’s out there. Anyway, our guys were ready or lucky or maybe it was just a few rogue soldiers on their side, but it was over pretty quick. The bad part was in the morning, going out to find the bodies, moving them, thinking about how it could have been us. Knowing they had mothers too, you know? Someone writing letters. And then the worst thing, we recognized one of them. It was Binh the barber, he was with our camp and we all knew him, but here he was VC all along, waiting to kill us
.

Turns out we’re not fighting for our country or any noble reason. We’re fighting each day to get to the next day, and that’s it
.

What we’re doing is terrible. This is a beautiful country. We’ve even been to the beach a couple of times. They’ve got palm trees crammed full of monkeys. You’d go wild for the monkeys. They wake us up screeching and laughing every day, like we’re living in a zoo
.

Even though I was kind of mad in the beginning, I know Tom did the right thing staying far away from Nam. I’ll tell him to his face when I get out of here in 302 days
.

Please write again. I’ll try to be more cheerful next time!

Your friend
,
Matt

“Does he still love you?” said Penelope.

I used the letter to fan my burning face. Matt was alive. Tears prickled up in an instant. He’d been under attack, he
was scared silly, it was horrible, but he was alive. I had to call Tom. I had to be alone to read it again.