The Secret History

'So it's not about money?' I said at last.

'Nope.'

'Then what is it about, if you don't mind my asking?'

Bu

That night, as I was lying on my bed reading Greek, I was startled by a flash of remembrance, almost as if a hidden spotlight had been trained without warning on my face. Argentina. The word itself had lost little of its power to startle and had, due to my ignorance of the physical place it occupied on the globe, assumed a peculiar life of its own. There was the harsh Ar at the begi

I put down my book and went over and sat in a chair by the window, and didn't work for the rest of the night.

The weekend passed, as they will do, and for me it went by in Greek, solitary meals in the dining hall, and more of the same old puzzlement back in my room. My feelings were hurt, and I missed them more than I would have admitted. Bu

I awaited Greek class, on Monday, with acute curiosity. I woke that morning at six. Not wanting to arrive insanely early, I sat around my room fully dressed for quite some time, and it was with something of a thrill that I looked at my watch and realized that if I didn't hurry, I'd be late. I grabbed my books and dashed out; halfway to the Lyceum, I realized I was ru

I had caught my breath by the time I opened the back door.

Slowly, I climbed the stairs, feet moving, mind oddly blank – the way I'd felt as a kid on Christmas morning when, after a night of almost insane excitement, I would walk down the hall to the closed door behind which my presents lay as if the day were nothing special, suddenly drained of all desire.

They were all there, all of them: the twins, poised and alert in the windowsill; Francis, with his back to me; Henry beside him; and Bu

The twins glanced up, startled as a pair of deer. Except for a certain tightness around the jaw, Henry was as serene as the Buddha, but Francis was so white he was almost green.

'We're just chucking around a couple jokes before class,' said Bu

"Well, then," says the warden, looking at his watch, "hardly worth going back to your cell then, is it?"' I Ic threw back his head and laughed, pleased as all get-out, but no one else even smiled.

When Bu

I went over and sat between her and Charles. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. 'How are you?' she said. 'Did you wonder where we were?'

'I can't believe we haven't seen you,' said Charles quietly, turning towards me and crossing his ankle over his knee. His foot was trembling violently, as if it had a life of its own, and he put a hand on it to still it. 'We had a terrible mishap with the apartment.'

I didn't know what I'd expected to hear from them, but this was not it. 'What?' I said.

'We left the key back in Virginia.'

'Aunt Mary-Gray had to drive all the way to Roanoke to Federal Express it.'

'I thought you had someone subletting,' I said suspiciously.

'He left a week ago. Like idiots we told him to mail us the key. The landlady is in Florida. We've been in the country at Francis's the whole time.'

'Trapped like rats.'

'Francis drove us out there and about two miles from the house something terrible happened to the car,' said Charles.

'Black smoke and grinding noises.'

'The steering went out. We ran into a ditch.'

They were both talking very rapidly. For a moment, Bu

'… so after that,' Charles was saying, 'we had to walk to Francis's and for days we called Henry to come get us. But he wasn't answering the phone – you know what it's like to try to get in touch with him '

There was no food at Francis's house except some cans of black olives and a box of Bisquick.'

'Yes. We ate olives and Bisquick.'

Could this be true? I wondered suddenly. Briefly I was cheered – my God, how silly I had been – but then I remembered the way Henry's apartment had looked, the suitcases by the door.

Bu

There was the slight sound of a throat being cleared and I looked up and saw Julian closing the door behind him.

'Goodness, you magpies,' he said into the abrupt silence that fell. 'Where have you all been?'

Charles coughed, his eyes fixed on a point across the room, and began rather mechanically to tell the story of the apartment key and the car in the ditch and the olives and the Bisquick. The wintry sun, coming in at a slant through the window, gave everything a frozen, precisely detailed look; nothing seemed real, and I felt as though this were some complicated film I'd started watching in the middle and couldn't quite get the drift of. Bu