last visible dog chapter 1

[figureofdismay]

The summer break after his Junior year at Rawlings Academy started early because, as far as Roman could tell, he’d pulled one inconvenient stunt too many and the headmaster didn't want to deal with him anymore. Even Kellman, the school doctor, and her nurses had had good reason to be sick of him, what with how much time he'd spent over his school career at their tender mercies and making their lives annoying with his flirting, ranting and sulking. Because he was too stupid to stop picking fights and too small to finish them and the other boys were too stupid to stop busting their knuckles while trying to break his bones. Mostly it was the other bigger boys who got in trouble, not because he grassed up but because it didn't take a genius to look at the boy taken down to a meaty pulp and the boys twice his size with bruised knuckles and bite marks on their arms – somehow he was always in trouble for the biting even when it was self defense – to figure out who did what to who. What no one, not the school doctor or the headmaster or the chaplain there kept sending to talk to him could figure out why he kept coming back to dig the knife in to get more and more.

"You're like one of those fucking stupid inflatable clowns," Reed, the big, broad ringleader told him with a strange combination of exasperation and bewilderment near regret had told him once, while sitting on his chest, just after giving him a nose bleed and knocking the wind out of him, "You won't stay fucking down. Why can't you just stay down there where we put you? If you wouldn't keep popping back up we wouldn't have to keep doing this so many times."

Roman had wheezed his refusal but it hadn't been intelligible at the time, probably, because Reed had eased off ahead of discovery by the hall monitor rather than pressing his point home further. Roman didn't know why he kept popping back up either, but he knew that he would, driven at intervals by a high wild vibration in the back of his mind like a wind-up toy careering mindlessly towards a table’s cliff edge

And then there had been a couple of other infirmary visits that didn't have anything to do with anyone else's fists, at least not directly. Those times were a blur to him though, submerged in swampy unplaces at the edges of his mind, thoughts he tried to unthink if he ever tripped over them. Those visits were followed by awkward non-conversations with the deputy head, and the school chaplain, a short run of something from the ‘pam family, and vitamin shots to counteract undernourishment, as Dr. Kellman so tactfully put it.

This infirmary stay wasn’t one of those, though, this one was fairly simple, stupid and straightforward rib fractures and cracked collarbone. This one was even mostly his fault, not from winding himself up and taunting the dog at the top of the pack (Reed) but because he’d accepted an stupid dare (climb the lead roof along its gothic spines and put his palms on the long spindle top) in stupid clothing (maybe if he’d changed into his keds from of his uniform oxfords) for stupid reasons (his cronies were watching, a bigger, sportier boy had done it the weekend before and was unbearable about it, the smuggled whiskey they’d taken swigs of earlier, one of the boys had a camcorder so of course no one was going to back down). there was now presumably shaky footage of him making his initial bold, scrabbling assent, getting 3/4rs of the way up the slick, sunwarmed metal and then missing his handhold, losing his footing, missing his handhold again as he grabbed for the gutter and then dangling like a dead duck on a hunter’s line from the rope they’d strung around his middle for safety. None of them were suicidal after all, and you had to make the ascent to the roof by climbing the stone fretwork that ran up the corner of the tower, out beyond the parapet wall. The bigger boy with longer, stronger arms had done it just fine, and Roman thought his fleetness and lightness would make it perfectly possible if he didn’t get overconfident, and maybe it would've been with a shot less whiskey or rubber soles.

The boys anchoring his rope hadn’t let him plummet, but the rope itself had done some damage when it took his weight, and so had the stone bird-head gutter spout when he hit it on the way down. He’d also hit his head a little on god knew what, a goose egg blooming and bleeding under his bangs. The wind had been knocked out of him but he’d been with it enough to help the other boys drag him back over the parapet wall and down flat on the stone floor while Stills, Deverre, Burrows and Archie Grey stood over him and swore. Then he’d passed out. Somebody must have gone for help, because when he came to he was being carried down the tower stairs on a stretcher, a tilting, jouncing ride that went on for a million years and was maybe worse than the sheer, quick terror of the drop. Even as he’d slid into open air, before the biting grip of the rope knotted around him took him, he never really thought he was going to die, but the jostling of his giant, swimming head and aching sides as he was carried on down by the EMTs made him kind of wish he had died after all.

Then there'd been a trip to the hospital he didn’t really remember, where they scanned his head, finding his brain not entirely missing, and pronounced his concussion mild, and had strapped up his shoulder and given him a sling. They told him he’d fainted from shock more than anything but told him he wouldn’t be up to reading much for a while and should absolutely keep still and calm for a few days to a week. Roman realized he’d never had such a good excuse to be let off of sitting his finals and wondered sluggishly how long it would take his father or somebody to accuse him of getting hurt just for that reason. Somebody must have called someone back home to get the releases faxed or something, so he’d probably get an outraged phone call soon or get yanked back to New York. Maybe. The next morning he’d been pronounced fit enough to be moved back to the school infirmary and he was bussed over after a breakfast tray he couldn’t face eating.

Doreen, the day nurse at the school, who he’d long since annoyed out of any real cloying, doting, motherish feelings, collected him with a wheelchair at the front loop and rolled him back to the infirmary ward, which was thankfully on the ground floor. He protested at the gross indignity of being wheeled around with two working legs, but even the effort of complaining made his ribs ache even more so in the end he let himself be wheeled, and then shuffled, groaning into bed. His bed, as he thought of it, the one at the end closest to the toilets and shower room, by the wall with the bookcase, with the metal tubing and white laminate headboard backed up to the windows, so he could watch the blocks of sunlight from the high, transomed windows arc slowly across the old plaster of the opposite wall.

Dr. Kellman came by then to shine a penlight in his eyes and glare at his chart, and then stand for a long, mutely disapproving silence. Dr. Kellman was not very tall, but she had the knack of projecting her presence, or her aura of stern rebuke upwards and outwards in an outsized, inescapable thrust. Her hands were fisted deep in the pockets of her powder blue lab coat with rigid, disappointed precision.

“What the hell were you thinking, Roman,” she demanded, without raising her voice – what a voice it was, a small, soft honey voice that yanked at his guts and his heartstrings even when she was disgusted with him – but with a sharpness that still stung his head, “You could have cracked your head open like a melon. You could have snapped your spine. You’ll be lucky to not get sent down.”

“Brian Stills did it first last week, no problem, and I’ve seen him trip over his own giant fucking feet walking across the quad,” Roman protested, and then winced and dropped his head back against his pillow with a theatrical groan, watching to see if Dr. Kellman’s firmly pursed mouth softened at all. She was wearing a rosy nude colored lipstick that was matronly and professional but didn’t really de-emphasize that expressive cupid’s bow. Her small, pointed chin was set firm – really furious then, he thought sadly.

“Brian Stills is up before the probationary board for sheer pigheaded stupidity, possession of contraband, and nearly getting the kid of our biggest current donor killed.”

“Oh. Shit, really?”

“Yep. Really.” She bit off, dry as dust.

“God damn. Poor Stills. It’s not really his fault, you know.”

“Hmm. If you say so. Doreen will be around with your water pitcher and your mid morning dose in a few minutes, I'm sure.” Dr. Kellman stalked off a little way and then turned around and stalked right back, staring down at him with pale, furious eyes. “I’ve put a lot of effort into you these last three years, Roman Roy. Keeping you from dying of sepsis or pneumonia or malnutrition before you reach your majority. Even though you’re a rich asshole kid who can’t be bothered to apply himself or learn to stop taunting the bear. I’m even willing to admit that it’s good you’ve found yourself a place among Brian Stills’ little gang instead of letting Reed keep using you as a boot scraper. But I know for a fact you’re smarter than these idiotic displays of arrogance and school boy bravery, and if I ever hear of you trying something so singularly moronic again, I’ll never forgive you. Nor will I lift a finger to stitch you back together again. Do you understand?”

Roman couldn’t speak around the strangling pressure in his throat, simply nodded, and then winced as the headache rebloomed across the top of his head.

“Good,” said Dr. Kellman, and then took a steady breath, calming herself. The late spring sunshine glowed across the soft planes of her face, just a little too bright for him to look at. He watched instead where her honey colored curls brushed against her shoulder. “I’m not sure if they told you. Your mother called, she said that this… accident is unfortunate but since it’s not that serious, and since the rest of you Roys are settled in Dubrovnik for the month, and since the jet wasn’t scheduled to come for your for thirteen days anyway, she doesn’t see a reason to alter the plan.”

“Okay. Well, that’s fine, just as well. As if my mother was ever going to be anything but unbearable at that hand holdy bedside vigil shit. I’m fine anyway.”

“You’re not that fine, Roman. You absolutely need to keep still and rest. And let someone know immediately if you feel you’re about to lose consciousness. But in any case…” she paused, mouth quirked with dismissal as if stopping herself from continuing whatever she wanted to say, “I have paperwork.”

She stalked away again then, and then disappeared through the door to her private office at the far opposite end of the ward. Even concussed and aching, he cursed the boxy, vague silhouette of the customary doctor’s coat, keeping him from watching the hourglass shape of her he was speculatively, painfully aware of underneath her usual sober, loosely tailored slacks and crisp, high buttoned blouse.

Doreen came by with pills in a cup and a glass of water and a stainless steel pitcher of more ice water, beaded with condensation in the humid warmth of the June day. “Stay hydrated,” she told him, “but go slow. Concussion makes some people queasy, you know.”

“Yeah I noticed,” he snarked, but Doreen was a nice lady who, unlike most of the adults in the school aside from doctor kellman, didn't look at him like he was a bug under her shoe so he smiled and thanked her and asked after her grandbaby, who it turned out was cutting a tooth and not very happy about it. Given how sometimes his dad's displeasure had sent him to emergency dental, he sympathized viscerally though he didn't phrase it to Doreen just that way. People got weird about that, especially women, and he knew Pop never really meant it, it was just that Roman had a type of way about him that got under people's skin. It made life interesting.

Doreen offered to send a fresher runner up to his dorm to get him a book or something, but Roman didn't think he was up to it. Just keeping his eyes open in the bright morning light was making his head ache more. The nurse patted his shoulder consolingly and left him to get some rest, though she warned him that she'd be coming by later to wake him at intervals, standard procedure with concussion, until the danger had passed. Roman hadn't been aware that there was still a danger of brain bleed and coma, took this with mute concern and tried to shrug it off.

He dozed. He woke at the gentle touch of a hand to his wrist. He was too drowsy to notice whose touch, but he knew who he pictured from under his blearily hardly cracked lids.

He dozed again and dreamed in shapes dappled hotly with light and black shade, as if he was being slow roasted on the bright summer lawn with the sun burning through the oak tree out back – out back at the Hamptons house where they used to summer, underneath which he and Shiv used to while the mornings away until mummy got up and – and burned through his eyelids too, shut tight as they were, like the blind bright heat of a comet flaring inches away. He felt himself exposed, like a bug on a sundial, the Collingwood place had a sundial, he remembered, though he mainly saw it on overcast winter days, left to bake with the stone grinding into the back of his head and searing in the open air despite the black obliterating splotches of shade from the tree, gone from venerable to prehistorically monumental in his mind. He tasted bitter blood in his mouth, wetting his lips.

The arches of his shoulders ached and twitched, he wanted to roll over away from the bruised sensation of them but he couldn't move, and yet he had the feeling of motion, himself and the stone beneath him rotating slowly while sunlight and shadow whipped menacingly down at him almost near enough to smother him. Then the precipitous shift of the ground beneath him tilting away, of sliding down and down over nothing, like the earth shrugging him off into space, but space was a blaring white flare that would incinerate him, and he could do little more than clench his fingers at the hard gritty surface beneath him as he was tipped forward and fell, and fell.

Roman woke yelling and blind with his mouth filled with sour air and the taste of bile, limp and flinching from everything he must have jarred when he sat up. There were cool hands on his arms, his cheeks, the flash of a penlight in his eyes, Dr. Kellmans soft sweet voice calling his name, quiet but increasingly firm.

He focused his eyes on the sweet round tip of her nose, and then the wide pale blue of her eyes. He followed her small neat finger side to side and forward and back like it was the most interesting thing in the world. He swallowed miserably against the revolting taste in his mouth. Kellmans free hand was cupping his chin gently to hold him still while she looked in his eyes and deliberated.

He could smell her perfume, this close, cool spicy pink roses and green dewy freshness and white soft powder that made him think of one time he'd snuck into his nanny's room once when he was small and saw her in her slip and big, mummifying white bra dabbing a powder puff across the pale round skin of her chest and under her plump arms. Jilly Thrup had been a sweet soft round presence in his life and he remembered her soft hugs and pink cheeks and her hands holding his, ushering him in and out of rooms and soothing him in the night when he was sick much more clearly than he could call to mind Caroline's touch. Caroline had objected heavily to clingy hands and to puke or tears in the night, and had never known when bored children should be ushered firmly out of a room.

The soft firmness of Jilly's touch had nothing on the smooth capability of Dr. Kellman’s though. Nonsensically, Roman thought that the Doctor's skin was probably softer, too, looking so translucently creamy and luminous. He wanted to lean forward and bury his face in the cleft of her blouse and breathe in her powder sweetness and go back to sleep for a thousand years. He realized too that she's shed her lab coat, so he could see more clearly the narrow slope of her shoulders, the long arch of her neck. She nodded and let his chin go and helped lower him back against the pile of pillows with her small, strong hands behind his shoulders in a stunningly intimate embrace that he felt wonderfully at the base of his spine and awfully in all his grinding bones and bruises.

“Getting pretty handsy today, aren’t you, Doc, got a thing for bruised up boys these days?” he joked in a mumble, breathing through it. He couldn't help giving in briefly and leaning his forehead against her shoulder, taking a fleeting breath of the warmth at the notch of her collar bone before settling back.

"I didn't ralph on you did I?" He asked, processing and flapping a limp hand to indicate her missing lab coat.

"No. The nurse brought a basin in time. Not her first rodeo, hmm."

"Ugh, sorry Doreen," he called vaguely in the direction of the nurse's station on the opposite side of the room where he could see her hovering if he squinted. Probably waiting by the phone in case they had to call the ambulance again.

"Well. How are you feeling, Roman? Are you with us?"

"Yeah. I mean I feel like shit, but you know. I know when I am and what test I'm missing this afternoon, so think I'm not a gonner, am I, Doc?"

"Your pupils are responding normally, and you were slow to wake up but you seem present now, so I'd say you're right about that," she smiled a wry, closed lipped smile that seemed to include him in the joke. Then she nodded over to Doreen to stand down. "I don't think there's cause for alarm, Roman. You’re doing okay. You'll just feel like shit for a while, as you say. That was some dream though, I guess. You were really shouting. Do you want to talk about it?"

"Fuck no," he said, and laughed bleakly, "it wasn't even a real dream, but like when you have a fever and you get hounded by weird shapes and spinning things and lights. Also falling but, uh, doesn't take Freud to guess about that one."

"A fever dream..? Do you believe you have a fever, Mr. Roy?" She reached out to touch forehead and then pulled a digital thermometer from her trouser pocket, sliding it under his tongue before he could protest. He waited out the electric beep by watching her frown from under his lashes.

Sometimes he thought he was her favorite patient to fuss over. He'd never seen her frowning and doting so comfortably with the other boys, and Roman had been in the infirmary enough to see other boys coming and going. When she reached for his wrist to take his pulse he wanted to preen.

"Couple of tenths," she pronounced, going for the disinfecting fluid, "But not a real fever. You're stressed and it's too hot inside today. Maintenance is late putting in the window units again. I'm surprised you don't have company out here, I usually get fainters and vomiters when finals are this hot. In a way you can consider yourself lucky you're not up there sweating."

"That's me, Lucky Roy, with the granite head and the sterling fucking timing, once again," he said wanly. "Can I get a soda or something, do you think? My mouth tastes like it died and went to the Sahara."

"If you think you can keep it down, it would be good to get your blood sugar up," Dr Kellman agreed.

"I don't feel sick now, I think it was just the dream, the reaction, you know. Or maybe the pills on an empty stomach, you know I don't do great with that."

"They should have fed you at the hospital if they thought you were fit to leave."

"They did but it was disgusting so I didn't eat it." he aped his usual impish smile, though the muscles of his face felt sluggish.

She shook her head at him but got him a cold can of coke from the staff vending machine and handed him a wax paper sleeve of Ritz crackers, both of which he approached with slow cautious determination until he fell asleep again, soda can set aside and cracker sleeve tucked in his sling. At some point in the evening Archie Grey came by and showed him the the blurry mess he'd recorded of the incident on the camcorder and absorbed the fact that the gang had all shouted and lept into action to save him and cursed at volume, but Roman had scrabbled and grunted but had not cried out when he'd been falling.

“Don't you think that's weird?” asked Archie, “who knew you were such a badass.”

"I think it's just the wind was knocked out of me," he said.

Shortly after that Dr Kellman came out of her office and told Archie to leave him in peace and go have his dinner or she'd report him as out of bounds.

"It wasn't Archie's idea, Dr. K," he said to her when Archie had skedaddled. "He was just the dweebie toadie with the video camera, in this particular instance."

Dr. Kellman had stared at him thoughtfully for a heavy, quiet stretch where he heard the crickets and the evening chorus through the windows she'd opened late in the afternoon. Her hair was pulled off her neck in a high, frizzy little ponytail, ringlets escaping and clinging to her forehead and the sides of her neck. He guessed that her perfume, her skin might smell warmer and saltier now. He wondered if she knew that cleaning his cuts and tending his fevers the last three years didn't actually make him her responsibility outside of the infirmary. Maybe it would have been nice, but it didn't mean that it was her place to judge his friends or feel like she'd not done enough to keep him from being a little fucking idiot with no sense of self preservation.

"Archie's a good guy," he added, "he's why I'm not failing calc. Fucking calc, I don't know why it's a requirement, what am I even going to do with it? It's not like Royco builds bridges, or whatever you do with fancyass math. But Archie walked me through it. And he thinks I'm a badass now, did you hear?"

"I heard," she said, dry as dust, but then she shook her head and shrugged off whatever bleakly concerned mood she'd been in and told him he could have as many pudding cups for dinner as he wanted.

**

Roman lazed away three more days in the infirmary, his vision slowly clearing and firming and the bright, almost-summer days no longer seeming to burn their way monstrously against his retinas, his stomach settling to his usual mulishly unwilling appetite instead of outright rejection. He had company a couple of afternoons, the predicted finals fainters, but they were overwound nerdy boys who looked at him with a combination of curiosity and scorn even while coming down from their panic attacks, recognizing him as one of Stills’s set and not a worthy academic achiever like themselves. He still felt shaky and weak and shuffling his way out of bed to take a leak jarred his cracked collar and bruised ribs with fresh misery enough to wind him. The bruise on his forehead looked nasty and he had a couple of stitches he had to keep clean, he’d stared his pale, mottled looking reflection in the infirmary bathroom mirror, the fluorescent bar light uniquely unflattering even at the best of times, and wondered if a rakish little scar would make him look more grown up and mannish. He didn’t think it was an improvement overall.

But on the other hand he’d gotten the sympathy pass on his final grades without sitting a single exam, and he was finishing his junior year with a solid B, which was a happy middle ground between embarrassing failure dullard and unmasculine tryhard swot, something he could take to Pop on the yacht, when he eventually got there, without having to worry too much. Seemed like a pretty fair tradeoff when he hadn’t actually crammed enough to swing more than a C if he’d actually taken the finals himself. And in any case, Dr. Kellman was hanging around and being nice to him, too, which offset the sheer stultifying boredom of the infirmary by a lot.

Archie had come by again a couple of times, the first time to tell him that Stills really had gotten the boot, he’d just seen the taxi man come cart him and his luggage off to the little airport where the out of state kids all flew in and out. Stills had taken it with his usual sang froid and had apparently taken the opportunity to call out some choice insults as he left, to most hated teachers and to Reed and his cronies now that there was no opportunity for retaliation and the underdogs of the student body were taking some vicarious satisfaction, which was cool and all but it still sucked majorly that Stills wouldn’t be around in Roman’s final year. The second time Archie came around it was to drop off Roman’s backpack, which held his magazines and comics and his walkman and his gameboy, a precious hoard he bribed the hall prefect to let him keep every year, and as usual, very little in the way of academic texts. Dr. Kellman, who’d been keeping an unsubtle eye, plucked the gameboy out of his hands and sent it back away with Archie for safe keeping, but Roman hadn’t minded because he could barely grip the stupid thing with an arm in a sling, and because he had his music to listen to instead of boys yelling in the halls and the white noise drone of the AC units.

Then, on the day he was going to be released back to his dorm, he was summoned to the Headmaster’s office, sling, cracks and bruises no longer a good reason to not appear and answer for his crimes. The headmaster, Trevellian, took a line somewhere between scolding him for setting a bad example to the younger students and almost getting himself killed – though he protested that Stills and the boys had a guyline on him at all times so he wasn’t ever really in mortal danger, if he’d thought that he never would have done it in the first place, boys honor or no honor – and just enough leniency to make it clear that he didn’t want Logan Roy suing his head and dick off and pulling his funding from the school. Roman was told that he’d be allowed to come back next year, on academic probation, but for the last ten days of school he would be excluded, and should either remain in his dorm room aside from meal times (this was not a vacation, Trevellian stressed, not a time to play with his friends and distract those at their exams) or, in deference to his injuries, he might make arrangements with his family to leave for the summer early, provided he understood the severity of his actions.

Trevellian tried to get him to agree to another parent-teacher conference about his risk taking and his grades and his lack of seriousness, etc, etc, the same old speech, but Roman told him straight that Logan et al were already on vacation and were not going to interrupt themselves on account of him, and Caroline was vacationing adjacently because she knew it drove logan nutsballs that she could guilt the kids to coming to visit her on his time, and on top of that had declared after the last time that her parent-teacher conference days were over (it’s not like they actually accomplish anything, do they? She’d said, you know how little interest I have in pointless exercises).

“So it’s your choice to serve your exclusion in your dorm, Mr. Roy?” Trevellian asked, with deep annoyance at his rambling and intractability.

“Um, no. I didn’t say that. Mr. Trevellian. I’m supposed to make my arrangements out to the mediterranean, I’ll just do that early and stop being a bad influence. Sir. I just don’t have a parent to offer right now for a conference…. Uh,” he added, over-earnestly and intentionally jumbled, “I could probably get a family lawyer, if you wanted? Guardian in something or other, in-loco-ad-parentis?”

Trevellian, who was not at all interested in any lawyers getting involved, sharply ordered him to go pack and get on with his exiting the grounds with as much speed as he could reasonably do so.

“Good luck with that arm, Mr. Roy,” Trevellian told him with a paternalistic nod, “I’m glad to see, at least, that you’ve finally learned your lesson.”

So that was how Roman found himself, 17 and a half, with a sling and a headache, let loose on New England with a school trunk and a backpack and nowhere to be for 10 days until the jet came for him. In the back of the taxi he considered making a break for it. He had plentiful pocket money and a credit card he was authorized to use, though Logan or somebody at Waystar, maybe Karl, had somebody who kept track of what he did with it. He fantasized about going back to New York and recuperating in his own old bed at the brownstone for a few days – logan was talking about selling it so who knew how much longer he could do that – or booking a normo schlub flight out to los angeles and squatting in the western modernist palace they used doing studio business, LA heat was drier than eastern seaboard heat at least, and he could nap on a pool floatie provided he could get on and off it with the sling without drowning.

Maybe he could take Dr. Kellman with him, he considered, she could help him with the sling, like she had today after he put on his uniform shirt, easing the strap over his head and then doing up the other half of his shirt buttons he’d been unequal to tackling. He’d been grateful for the bulky pleat of his uniform trousers, with her neat, hot hands so close to his skin. Maybe she could help him on and off the pool floatie, too. She could have one of her own, and a supply of fruity tropical drinks, or no, he doubted she was a girly drink lady, old fashioneds maybe or martinis, maybe even whisky neat, something for a classy lady who was one of the guys – weren’t lady doctors supposed to be wild at school? Stills had said something like that once, when they used to speculate about Dr. Kellman and the other Dr. Kellman, Boring Baird The Tortoise Man of Classics and Rhetoric (how cloistered and retro was that, Rhetoric was an actual class at Rawlings Academy) Tudor Prose, and The Divorce. He lost several minutes of the ride to the airport thinking about Doctor Gerri Kellman’s potential wild school days, and then about if she would be too much of a classy lady doctor now to wear a two-piece if he, in a fantasy world where he was un-concussed, and suave and persuasive and had a deep manly voice that didn’t make him sound squeaky when he was stressed out talking to a pretty girl, managed to bribe her out to LA to be his concierge physician until he recovered– stupid, pointless, ridiculous, but it did make a kind of point to him. A kind of nagging, idiotic, skin buzzing point.

Roman told the taxi man to turn around and take him into town instead of out to the airport. He wasn’t even really supposed to be flying yet anyway.