Chapter 6

I looked up from my reading as Larry came into the room. “Where’s Laney?” I had rarely seen them apart over the last two years.

“She’s at the Dean’s office, making arrangements to see her family over the weekend. I’ll be going with her. I ... Well, I wanted to ask you something.”

I frowned. I couldn’t remember seeing Larry nervous like this. I noticed that he was holding a file folder, almost out of sight behind him. “What is it, Larry?”

Larry’s eyes were flitting around the room. “I, ... uhhh ... asked the Dean if he’d relieve me of being a dorm parent. I’ll still teach classes, but I...” He fiddled with a pencil on Grant’s desk. “I’d need a new roommate to go on with that, and I didn’t really want one.”

Easy enough ... I choked back the words that were ready to spring out of my mouth: I’d need to talk to Grant first. I looked across at Grant, trying to decide how to maneuver Larry out of the room so Grant and I could talk in private. And Grant caught my eyes and smiled, and looked at Larry and said, “So stay with us, then.” He looked back at me. I blinked in astonishment, and he said, “I’m assuming that’s okay with you.”

I moved my mouth in silence, then shook my head to clear it. “Oh, definitely!” I looked back at Larry. “Room with us, hon. Okay?”

Larry half-smiled. “I knew you’d say that. We can talk to the Dean about it later.”

I craned my neck, trying to get a better look at the file folder. “That’s not why you’re here, though, is it? What’s in the folder, Larry?” I spoke in a soft, coaxing voice. Whatever it was that Larry wanted to talk about, he couldn’t quite make himself do it.

Larry finally brought the folder out into full view, looking at it as if he’d only just now discovered it was there. He sighed heavily, and closed his eyes. “This is a client folder. When a client wants to buy a graduate for a hanging, they fill out a form, file some letters of reference, whatever else they want to submit, and it all goes in here.” He flashed the half-smile again. “You’ll look at a bunch of these next year.”

I tried to help Larry along. “So ... you’ve got a hanging you might want to do?” I frowned. “That’s good ... isn’t it?” I was having a harder time reading Larry than I could ever remember.

Larry finally pulled out Grant’s desk chair and sat heavily on it. “I ... well, I do. It is. I mean...” He looked at the folder again, and giggled unexpectedly. “If you ever wanted real proof of how weird I am ... This thing...” he shook the folder, “ ... has been sitting in the Dean’s office for more than a year. It’s a request for a NooseBoy from a local woman—Steffi Bloom. She picked out three or four boys from last year’s class, one after another, and asked them if they’d be interested, and they all said no. The Dean finally told her he’d keep the request on file, and have all the grads look it over and think about it.

“They all passed on it. And now our class is looking for buyers, and I think most of us, by now, have looked at this one. I thought it was nuts, like everybody else, but it’s kept nagging at me since then. And I started having fantasies about doing it, and what it would be like.” He gave me a look that told me he was amazed at himself. “Amy, I can’t stop thinking about it. I think I want to do it!”

I clenched my fists and rolled my eyes in exasperation, “Larry, what the hell is wrong with it?”

Larry looked inside the folder, as if making sure its contents were still there. Silently, he handed it across to me. I beckoned with my finger, and Grant came over to sit beside me on the bed. I opened the folder with the name “Steffi Bloom” on the tab, and we began reading.

My brow furrowed, and then my jaw dropped gradually open as I read. I handed it to Grant, and picked up the photograph that accompanied the application, a smiling face shot of a very cute man, his red hair cut short in a style once known as a ducktail—Zeke Hillcrest, the actor, his face familiar to anyone who had seen the most popular movies of recent years. I examined the picture, unconsciously shaking my head, and traded it to Grant for the application, which I read again. At last I looked up. “Larry, this is really nuts.”

Larry laughed, in a pained way. “Is there an echo in here? I already said that.”

“How could this lady even afford this?”

Larry blinked. “I thought you’d recognize her name. Steffi Bloom? She’s...”

Grant sat bolt upright. “Oh!! Right, that dot-com millionaire. She started that social networking site on the Net, and sold it a few years ago for this humongous amount of money.”

I nodded my head. “Yes! I remember that now. She’s one of the richest people in town! I think my dad met her at some big party. He said Steffi was ... kind of cold.”

Larry nodded. “I’m getting a feeling for why that is.” He reached for the photograph that Grant was now holding. “This Bloom lady must know Zeke Hillcrest personally. And Zeke pissed her off to the absolute max.”

I snorted. “What gave that away? Was it when she said she wants to ‘terrify and humiliate’ Zeke before hanging him?”

Larry half-smiled. “That was a clue, yeah.”

“And you want that?”

“To pretend to be terrified? Don’t we do that in most of the hanging scripts?”

I gestured with the folder. “Have you talked to Steffi Bloom yet?”

Larry shook his head. “She doesn’t even know I’m thinking about doing it.”

“What does Laney think about all this?”

Larry looked down at the floor. “I haven’t ... uhhh, exactly told her.”

I gaped at him in astonishment. “Huh??” I couldn’t imagine Larry withholding anything from Laney, especially possible plans for his own hanging.

“Amy, you know what she’s going to think! The same thing you and Grant and everybody else thinks about it. And I couldn’t find a way to tell her, but now her hanging is coming up in a couple of weeks, and that all got suddenly so real to me sitting in that room today with those fraternity boys.” He clenched his fists, and pounded one softly on his thigh as he spoke. “Laney’s going to be dead in two weeks, and if I know what’s going to happen to me, I have to tell her! She has to know what my own hanging is going to be like!” Larry suddenly reached for my hand. “Amy, I know what you think about this now,” he waved with his other hand at the folder, “But you’ve always been ... such an understanding person. You can figure out why I want to do this. I need you to help me tell Laney. It’s not enough for her to know what I’m going to do. She has to understand!”

I was silent for a long time. I looked at Grant, who held up his hands in a helpless gesture. I looked back at Larry, and finally said, “Okay, talk some more then. I’m still not getting it. What is it that’s making you want to do this?”

Larry sighed with relief. “See, that’s already different. Laney is going to start by telling me all the things that are wrong with it. I knew you’d listen first.” He straightened up and spent a moment collecting his thoughts. Then he began talking.

At the knock on the door, Larry spasmed so violently that I thought he might bounce off the ceiling. I chuckled at the thought, and relaxed a little. Larry took a deep breath as Grant said “Okay!” and Laney entered.

Laney grinned at Larry. “It’s all set. We’re going to my house Friday morning, and my dad will take off work, and my brothers will stay home from school, and Emil and his wife will be there, so I can show him the script, and then Saturday night we’ll go over to your house and I can meet your dad, and then we’ll come back here Sunday night...” She stopped suddenly, aware now of the look on Larry’s face. “What?”

I waited a moment to see whether Larry was up to explaining, then spoke up. “What would you think if Larry might have a line on his own hanging?”

Laney put one hand over her mouth, and squealed, “That would be so cool!” She ran over to throw herself on the bed next to Larry, wrapping her arms around him, babbling, “I was hoping so much you wouldn’t have to wait long after I went! Why didn’t you tell me before? Is it all set up? Which scene are you going to do?” With no responses from Larry to keep her going, Laney gradually ran down. She sat back at last, frowning at Larry, then looking at Grant and me. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

Still without a word, Larry handed Laney the file folder. Grant and I came over to sit surrounding them on the bed. I sat next to Larry, rubbing his back to try to relax him; Grant sat beside Laney.

Still frowning, Laney looked at the name on the folder tab. “Isn’t this that one Blaise told us not to bother with?”

Managing a small smile, Larry spoke at last. “Ummm, yeah. I kind of bothered with it anyway.”

Hunching over the folder, Laney began reading. Within ten seconds, she sat bolt upright. “Larry! This lady wants...”

Larry leaned against her. “Shhh. Just read all of it before you say anything, okay? Then we can get it all out in the open.”

Laney looked at him doubtfully, and finally nodded, resuming reading. Her frown deepened still more; she looked behind the front sheet and found the photo, looked at it in disbelief, and read the first sheet again.

At last she put it down and sighed heavily. “Okay, I read it. Are you crazy?”

Larry giggled, high-pitched, nervous. “What, you didn’t know that after three years?”

Laney goggled at him. “Larry, this woman wants to hang you alone! With no witnesses! You know she can’t do that!”

“Fine, then there’s nothing to worry about. Let’s assume that’s worked out somehow. What else?”

Laney looked exasperatedly up at the ceiling. “Where do I start?” She picked up the photo, a publicity shot of the actor. “She wants a Nooseboy to pretend to be Zeke Hillcrest! You don’t look anything like him! How are you going to pull that off?”

“You read where she says she’ll pay for plastic surgery, right? I’m within a quarter inch of Zeke’s height. My head is the same shape as Zeke’s, and we have the same overall body shape. I can be made to look like him.”

“What the hell does this Bloom woman have against Zeke, anyway? Get pissed off at one of his movies?”

“It doesn’t say, in there. I’d have to find that out.”

Laney’s hand holding the photo was shaking, and she took a deep breath to try to calm herself. “Okay, look. Suppose you could do what she wants. Suppose you changed your face so much you could fool Zeke Hillcrest’s own mother. Suppose the Dean will let this Bloom woman hang you alone, somehow. That’s just the point, though.” She turned fully toward Larry. “After all we’ve done, how can you be hanged for just one person? Everything we’ve worked toward, everything we’ve ever dreamed about, is to put on a big show in front of a hundred people, a thousand people! All those people watching us kick, getting themselves off, remembering us for the whole rest of their lives! We’ve worked so hard to become what we are, and in the end we affect so many lives! It’s like you want to ... throw the dream away!” Tears were seeping out of the corners of her eyes.

Larry was trying to speak, his mouth working but nothing coming out. I slid closer to him and put an arm around his waist. “Tell her exactly what you told us, hon.”

Laney suddenly jerked her head fully upright, glaring at me. “I knew it! He told you all about this, and Grant too. Everybody else too, probably, and I’m the last to know!”

“Of course he told us first, because the person he was most scared about was you! Because the person he cares about the most is you!”

Laney stared at me, her jaw working, then looked back at Larry. They stared at each other for what must have been a full thirty seconds. When Larry at last reached for Laney’s hand, she let him take it, and returned his squeeze.

Larry smiled at her shakily. “Okay, will you listen now?”

Laney brushed tears from her eyes, and managed a tiny smile of her own. “Can you explain it in less than two weeks?”

Larry wiped away his own tears. “I’ll try.” He sat upright, sighing heavily. “Okay. I understand what you’re saying about the dream. We all have that.” He paused. “But I’ve got another version of it.”

I rubbed his back encouragingly as he went on. “I guess I always had it in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t have put it into words until I saw this.” He jiggled the folder. “It called out to me, somehow. I started thinking ... What if, instead of affecting a hundred people so much that they always remembered me, what if I could affect one person, so deeply, that it actually changed his life? I think that’s what I was looking for all along, when I felt like I didn’t really like any of the hanging scenes, and I kept rejecting all the proposals from people who wanted to do the usual stuff.

“But this one ... It’s exactly what I want! This Steffi Bloom—I mean, you can tell she’s got this obsessive fantasy. Think how she’ll feel when she really gets to play it out! Talk about affecting somebody deeply!

“And as I’ve been thinking about it, I realized there’s also other stuff in it that is just right for me. Whenever I’d read one of the hanging scripts, I’d think, well, that’s kind of cool, but it’s ... well, it’s scripted, obviously. But this...” he shook the folder again, “This one can’t go by a script. I can’t fulfill her fantasy nearly as well if I’m just reciting lines she told me to say. She’ll want to really get into it and imagine it’s really happening, and what I’ll need to do is find out more about what she knows about Zeke and what their relationship is, and improvise based on that. And since I realized that, my mind’s just been spinning with all the things I’ll need to ask her when we meet, so she can give me all the information I’ll need, and how I’ll be able to use it and how the scene will go...” Larry laughed. “I’m almost as obsessed as she is, with the whole thing!” He sat further upright, stroked Laney’s arm with his hand. “Can you understand what I’m saying? This is what I want! I want it so much I can’t think now of going out any other way. Do you see?” He looked tensely into Laney’s eyes.

Laney looked doubtfully at him. She turned toward Grant on her other side. “Grant ... You’re our Hanging God. You’ve thought about hanging more in your lifetime than anybody else in the school—anybody else in the world. What do you think about this? Hanging for just one person?”

Grant bit his lip absently, thinking, looking up at the ceiling. At last he spoke. “When I saw my Uncle Seymour’s hanging, it was the usual thing, that ‘dream’ we’re always talking about—lots of people there, watching. But I only know firsthand how I felt about it myself, and to me ... it was like I was the only person there. I felt like he was hanging just for me, and showing me what it was all about.” I was surprised to see tears in the corners of Grant’s eyes—the first time he had cried since that night so long ago in the Hall of Honor. “I’m sure everybody who was there remembers it, like you were saying, but as far as I know, I’m the only person whose life it changed. And I think...” his voice shook slightly, “I feel pretty sure, in fact, that, out of everybody’s reaction to his hanging, the one that would mean the most to Uncle Seymour was mine, because it did hit me so deeply, and it did change my life. When we hang, we can’t know for sure that we’ll hit somebody that hard, and do that much to them. But I think it’s really what we all hope for.

“When all of us hang, we’ll be happy if we get the big crowd and they all remember us. But deeper inside ... I think we all want to have what Larry’s going to get. That one person whose life changes.”

I suddenly jerked as if an electric shock had run through me. Miranda had that too! I thought. Her hanging completely changed one person’s life.

Laney looked down at the floor, and gradually lifted her eyes up to meet Larry’s. Larry gave her a tense smile. “So do you understand now?”

Laney nodded slowly, fell toward Larry and wrapped her arms around him, laying her head on Larry’s shoulder, sobbing openly now. Both of them held each other for awhile, each with their shoulders heaving, each rubbing the other’s back.

At last Larry sat up, tried to wipe away the latest set of tears, and coughed, sniffling. “Okay,” he said huskily. “I’m going to ask the Dean tomorrow to get hold of Ms. Bloom and get a meeting set up. And I want all of you,” he looked around at each of us, “All of you to be there, and to help me find a way to make this happen. We know about the problems with the proposal, so we need to try to think of how to make it acceptable to the Dean and still make Ms. Bloom happy. Laney?” Larry looked at him. “I know you can’t be there to help with the hanging, and we won’t even make much progress toward it by the time you have your own. But will you help while you can?”