Page 82 of What We Bury

The teen mom raises her hand. “That’s worse than being a coward.”

“Why?”

“Because the coward at least knows he failed. The enabler builds a whole story where he’s the hero of it.”

“I agree.” I hold up my battered paperback. “The book is his alibi. The narration is unreliable because his truth is told through this lens of self-preservation. He wants you to believe the version of himself he’s spent two hundred pages constructing. It’s the version that requires him to have done nothing.”

The clock ticks. I’m aware of my own breathing.

“The coward fails despite himself. The enabler succeeds. That’s the horror of him. Nick gets exactly what he wanted. He gets to leave New York intact. He gets to be the only honest man he knows. The cost of that purchase is Gatsby and Myrtle’s death, and Daisy’s indifferent callousness. Nick paid for his clean conscience with their lives, and at the end of the book he doesn’t even acknowledge he made the trade.”

I am, I realize, no longer talking about Nick Carraway.

I’m Nick.

“For next week,” I say, as if hearing myself from a long distance. “A thousand words. The case for Nick as enabler. Defend it from the text. Don’t be polite about it. If you want to argue back—coward, or honest narrator, or anything else—do so but justify it.”

The bell rings. They pack up slowly. The argument follows them out the door. I can hear two of the older students still going as they cross the threshold.

For almost five years I’ve told myself that what we do is justice. That hanging the Brocks of this world is the act, the verb, the thing that separates me from every man who knew and didn’t move.

But Nick thought he was the honest one, too.

The hangings let me sleep. That’s what they’re for. They’re the receipt I keep so I never have to be the man who stands in the rubble of someone else’s life sayingwhat a shame, if only the system were better.And the price of that receipt is that I can’t let anyone close enough to see the math. Because Micah’s already seen too much, and Sage walked in swinging, and if either of them gets a clear look they’ll find what Oliver just found in two hundred pages of beautiful narration.

Nothing underneath. A man who built a story where he’s the hero of it.

I went cold Monday because cold is cheaper. It doesn’t feel, doesn’t need, doesn’t lose anything when the people around it bleed.

I stare at the board, chalk dust on my hands, feeling like every cell in my body is vibrating at a different frequency. The whiplash of Micah’s mouth, the memory of Sage’s voice, the way my self-control keeps folding around the same two Molotov cocktails as if that’s ever gone well for anyone.

Oliver is the last one to leave. He shoulders his bag and stops at the door.

“Mr. Ward?”

“Oliver?”

“Which one do you think he is?”

I look at him. I think about lying. I give him the truth.

“Enabler,” I say.

He nods.

“You good?” I ask. It’s the thing I always ask him when he hovers at the door.

“I’m good.” He adjusts his bag. “Are you?”

“I’m good, Oliver. Have a nice night.”

He looks at me for half a second longer than he needs to, then he goes.

I drive homeand for once, I don’t drive past Sage’s apartment.

I want to. I plan the route in my head before I’m out of the parking lot. Down Pacific. Past her building. Slow enough to see if her light is on, fast enough she’s unlikely to see me.

I drive home instead.