Michael Marshall: The Intruders

Like all schools we had a pecking order of looks, but Donna somehow wasn’t on the same scale. Her skin was pale and her features fine-boned and evenly spaced, faultless except for a crescent scar to the side of her right eye, legacy of some toddling collision with a table. The eyes themselves were inky-grey and very clear, and on the rare occasions when you got to look into them you received a vivid sense she was real after all – which only made you wonder what you thought she was the rest of the time. She was a little skinny, maybe, but otherwise slightly cute in every way except that she somehow just … wasn’t. It was as if she released no pheromones, or they operated on an inaudible waveband, broadcasting their signal to sexual radios either out of date or not yet invented.

I found her attractive, nonetheless, though I was never really sure why. So I noticed when it looked like she was hanging out with – or in the vicinity of – a guy named Gary Fisher. Fisher was one of the kids who strode the halls as if accompanied by fanfare, the group that makes anyone who’s been through the American school system instantly wary of egalitarian philosophies later in life. He played football with conspicuous success. He was on the starting basketball line-up, played significant tennis too. He was good-looking, naturally: when God confers control of sport’s spheres he tends to give the package a buff too. Fisher wasn’t like the actors you see in teen movies now, impossibly handsome and free of facial blemish, but he looked right , back in the days when the rest of us stared dismally in the mirror every morning and wondered what had gone wrong, and whether it would get better, or even worse.

He was also, oddly, not too much of an asshole. I knew him a little from track, where I had a minor talent for hurling things a long way. I’d gathered from the jock grapevine that a realignment had taken place among the ruling classes, principally that Gary’s girl Nicole was now going with one of his friends instead, in what appeared to be an amicable transfer of chattels. You didn’t have to be too keen an observer of the social scene to perceive a degree of interest in taking her place – but the truly weird thing was that Donna seemed to believe herself amongst the runners. It was as if she had received intelligence from somewhere that the caste system was illusory, and actually you could fit a square peg in a round hole. She couldn’t sit at the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up on one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer bumps in the corridor, but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks a deal was done in some gilded back room – or the back seat of a gilded car, more likely – and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.

For most of us.

Two days later, Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was it could not have been a fast way to go – despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a hand-written letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water which had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But as far as I know, none of this was true.

News spread fast. People went through the motions and there were outbreaks of crying and prayer, but I don’t think anyone was shaken to their core. Personally, I was not surprised or even particularly sorry. That sounds callous but the truth was it felt like it made sense. Donna was a weird chick.

A strange girl, a dumb death. End of story.

Or so it seemed to most of us. Gary Fisher’s reaction was different, and at the time it was the most surprising thing I had ever seen. Everything was new and strange back then, events backlit by the foreshortened perspective of a fledging life. The guy who did something halfway cool one time became our very own Clint Eastwood. A party that happened a year before could take on the status of legend, generating nicknames that would last a lifetime. And when someone went haring out into the farther reaches of left field, it tended to stick in your mind.

On the following Monday we heard Fisher had quit the team. All the teams. He withstood being bawled out, and walked away. Maybe these days you’d get some kind of slacker kudos for that kind of shit. Not in the 1980s, and not in the town where I grew up. It was so out there it was disturbing – the Alpha Teenager Who Resigned. Fisher became the guy you’d see wandering across the campus in transit between the library and class, as if he’d slipped into Donna’s slot. And he worked. Hard. Over the next months he hauled his grade point average up, first a little, and then a lot. He went from being a C student – and some of those had been massaged through sports prowess – to Bs and some regular As. Maybe he was getting parent-funded extra tuition after school, but actually I doubt it. I think he just jumped tracks, decided to be some other guy. By the end you hardly ever saw him except in class. The masses dealt with him warily. No one wanted to get too close, in case the madness was catching.

I did see him this one afternoon, though. I’d been out training for our last ever track meet, and stayed on after the rest of the team left. Theoretically I was practising the javelin but really I just liked being there when no one else was around. I’d spent a lot of hours running that track and it had started to dawn on me that the end was coming and some things were happening for the last time. As I pounded up the approach, back and forth, refining my run-up, I saw a guy walking from the far end. After I while I realized it was Gary Fisher.

He wandered the periphery, not headed anywhere in particular. He’d been one of our star sprinters before he quit, and maybe he was there for the same kind of reason that I was. He wound up a few yards away and watched for a little while. Eventually he spoke.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Not going to win, though.’

‘How’s that?’

I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing, but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.

He shrugged. ‘Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.’

For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a while longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.

‘She was provisional,’ I said, suddenly.

It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. ‘What’s that?’

‘Donna,’ I said. ‘She never really … locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.’

He frowned. I kept going.

‘It was like … like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.’