"The Truants"

[fiefoe]

Kate Weinberg's campus murder mystery/psychological novel is easy to get into. The first part reads like "Secret History" with British sass and eccentricity, less the class critique. But of course the first-person narrator had to fall for the guy who drives a hearse and get the murder on -- certainly that's one way to deal with toxic males. Much fan service for Agatha Christie junkies, (not a bad thing.) Also pro-choice.

• Yes, I coveted her, too, right down to the old-fashioned bicycle she rode about campus, whose basket always held some oddity: a bag of quinces, a staple gun, or a part of a garden hose—objects that always led you, in some obscure way, to want to protect her.
• It was a stupid letter, a childish, petulant letter, written on the back of four days of stomach flu and a wobbly trip to the bar that Georgie had talked me into “because there’s only so much Ava Gardner you can get away with before you become Howard Hughes.”
• (“Don’t knock it. I’m related to half of them and have kissed most of the rest. Look at this guy, Tristan Burton-Hill. He’s so posh he can’t actually close his mouth . . .”)
• handful of wildflowers that looked like dirty daisies, which she had picked by the lake on campus. “They’re called sneezewort, for your dribbly nose.


• “Wow.” I took a gulp of the vodka. “I always thought my parents were at their best when the builders were in. They used different voices. Offered to make each other tea.”
• But the music buoyed me up to float a few inches above any angst or self-consciousness, like the false courage of your first vodka shot on an empty stomach.
• Masochistically, I wanted to tell him I liked his T-shirt. What is it about beautiful, mean people that makes you want to please them?
• “Does anyone really like house parties unless they are seriously drunk or hooking up?” I wedged Amelia Earhart back down, my nail making a little sickle-shaped indentation on the Blu Tack. “It’s only ever fun if you’re in The Room. But no one knows which one that is. So everyone keeps wandering around, pretending they know where they’re going.”
• I grinned. “Either you stick with whoever you go with, have a shouty conversation you could have had somewhere quieter, in more comfortable clothes, or you meet some new people when they’re being least themselves and end up playing ego tennis . . .”
• Alec paused, changing gears. His words felt sharp-edged. I felt them lodge in the air, take hold. He’s doing what he did at the party, I thought dimly. This is what he does. He makes stories into weapons.
• said Georgie, looking horrified. She rummaged in the bottom of her bag of chips. “Do you really think that can happen? People can pick up personalities by mistake, like being handed back the wrong coat from the cloakroom?”
• due to a strand of humor they shared and I never quite understood—in which dark things could be said in a careless, lighthearted way,
• “What you said about Christie’s ability ‘to read the reader’—it really made me think.”
• “Don’t mind me, I’m incredibly nosy. Hugh is always giving me lectures about boundaries. Such a boring way to live, though, don’t you think? Like we’re all playing a giant game of cricket. I tend to think most of the magic in life happens just outside the lines, anyway.”
• His thumb kept tracing the length of my index finger, and then it moved round and started probing the soft pouch of flesh between my finger and thumb. Tiny circles now, incredibly gentle, like he was stroking the dust off a butterfly’s wings. I stared into his mismatched irises. Every fantasy that I had tried to box away over the past two months seemed to bloom in the space between my ribs so that there was an exquisite kind of pleasure-pain pushing up against my lungs.
• A combination of trying to impress Lorna and disguising my longing for Alec had exhausted my adrenal glands. Then there were the runs, which, despite the weather, had become longer and more frequent and begun to contain—though perhaps they always had—an element of self-punishment.
• Like on Christmas Day when he sent me a message: Happy Christmas. I’m not a believer, but it’s a good excuse. Then I would allow myself to replay the moments when our eyes had met over the heads of our lovers. The tiny hesitations in his voice, which I had filled with romantic subtexts, the brief moments of casual intimacy,
• The introduction to Lorna’s book posed its central argument: that writers needed to break the rules to be brilliant. ... all that dissolute, sometimes deranged behavior was vindicated through their art. Thank God, in other words, that they were arseholes or liars. Because what was forged in their destructive fires, in their escape from obligation, their dismissal of the rule-book and playing truant from their lives was an understanding of the very deepest drives in humanity. It was because of these moments that the devil became divine.
• I felt my stomach tighten. What was he going to say? He still had feelings for Georgie. He didn’t see us having a future. “Don’t trust Lorna.” A pigeon exploded from behind the ruins with a wheeze of flapping wings, and we both whirled round, startled.
• How ironic would it be if I got caught un-shoplifting? I was barely out of the shop, mission accomplished—a tiny drop of satisfaction in the deep, echoey well of guilt—when I spotted Nick.
• “But I came across this poem the other day. This guy talking about loving someone through the ages. From when we would have been fish or tadpoles in the ocean, and then as life forms evolved and human beings emerged, right through to the moment when it’s just his girl and him sitting here.
• “When I saw you two together, I hated you both. And I do still now, don’t think it’s stopped. But I also . . . I did some thinking and I realized”—he gave a helpless little gesture with his hand—“you’ve probably been feeling a little like I do. In which case, there’s nothing much sadder in the world than not saying it.”
• A shrug, a faint, crooked smile. “I can’t help it. You must know. Love’s just too painful a secret to keep.”
• I felt the lack of Alec constantly, as if someone was following me around pinching the back of my neck.
• hadn’t reckoned on the fact that, trapped in a Groundhog Day of guilt, anxiety, and longing, every aspect of a shitty, provincial pet shop seemed designed to amplify despair.
• Not having told anyone yet made it feel more intense, like I was carrying around a stolen item in my pocket.
• Tuesday was one of those high spring days that feels like an insult to a crisis.
• To my surprise, Lorna laughed at this. “If there is one thing Dame Agatha taught me, it is that murder is a relative concept. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ seems so black and white in writing. But what if killing prevents more suffering? Having a child conceived in error can be a recipe for untold pain.”
• The villages: some pretty, some not, little redbrick houses with their gardens and washing lines, TV satellite dishes on their roofs. People leading ordinary lives, eyes turned away from Death, who was waiting, waiting everywhere.
• I thought that it was because you were better than me. Because you weren’t blinded by your ego. You didn’t have the vanity the rest of us do, that makes the world a mirror.
• One of them shot us a curious glance. Perhaps this isn’t unusual, I thought dimly. Showdowns at funerals. Like breakups at weddings. Death and time, putting the screws on.
• The day began to whirl through my mind, like a reel of badly cut film. The sea, the walk, the ghost village, Lorna’s voice, her fingers rolling the cigarette. Or was that Alec? Alec’s ghost walking through the room.
• “Heavens, no,” I said. Heavens, no? Did I really say that? I sounded like my mother being offered a second slice of cheesecake. Half an hour ago I was lying in my bed thinking you were a murderess and now here we are skinny-dipping.
• Anything to stop this grotesque scenario unfolding in my head. Help me back to what life was a few minutes before, grief-stricken but orderly.
• The crazy mess of freckles, the green in her amber eyes, her hair darkened by the rain. I hated her beauty then. It was a false alibi.
• Each woman had her own stash of poison inside. He didn’t have to administer it—he just had to knock over the bottle. Which he did, time after time . . . with his sister, his mother. Georgie. You.
• I had braced myself to resist the propaganda of her beauty, but the Lorna who opened the orange door looked like a bad facsimile of the woman I knew.
• “I’m over Christie. Trying to make a feminist revolutionary out of a woman who wasn’t one. She might have been, she could have been, but she wasn’t. In the end she balked. Made her life and work about restoring order on the surface. The chaos and heartbreak underneath frightened her too much.”
• By using my own words against me. His point was, just as The Truants was true to everything I believed, my Christie book was symbolic of the compromise I had allowed my life to become.”
• She told me about him going away with you. And I saw that it was happening again. Just the same. Deadly triangles, using one point to stab the other.”
• “Did I tell you about oxbow lakes?” I shook my head, the warmth spreading through me. “It’s when the river meanders to such an extent that it cuts itself off from the main stream and creates a little separate pool of water. I find them beautiful, but a little sad, too,” said Nick. “Because it’s like time standing still. And a part of me, a big part of me, wants to help it start moving again.”
• Had she, in that moment, devised the perfect crime, in which the murder weapon was not the poison but the antidote? After all, who was ever convicted for administering a cure?
• Because in solving something, in pinning it down, in reducing it to one reality, something of the magic is lost. Don’t we all hope, even the fiercest realists among us, that there is another answer that transcends our understanding? A heaven above us, after all. Did Lorna leave us wondering, with no clues left behind, because it made her own self into a myth? Or was it for our sake that she’d left no trace?