Read Online The White Devil by Justin Evans - Free Book Online Page B

Fawkes was unfirable due to his commission from the school governors (those shadowy, superrich aristocrats who managed the school’s investments and affairs) to write the play. Never mind that Fawkes wanted to commit the whole draft to the fire, and that he had been avoiding sharing the current manuscript with anyone even though it was months late. As far as the great Harrow School was concerned, Fawkes was vain, sloppy, unqualified, and detached. A hiring mistake—now exposed by a boy’s death.
    Bad luck? Or bad housemastering? The facts, Fawkes suspected, would not matter. He would take the fall for it. Maybe not sacked publicly—Jute was too shrewd for that; that would be admitting that the school had been at fault—but vilified, scorned. Blamed.
    Fawkes angrily stubbed out his cigarette. He would leave. He would take the tube to London. He would call his old friends—the filmmakers and painters and editors and writers he’d come to London to be with and to be. He would get loaded—pints, smokes, pubs, clubs—and dine out on stories about the Hill, a Jurassic Park of British aristocracy. Just walk away, put it all on a credit card for a while, deal with the consequences later. Yes. He breathed deeply, happily. It was the right decision. He felt a sense of elation, as if he’d been trapped in a stuffy room and someone had just thrown open the windows. Oxygen at last. He jumped up to fetch his coat. Snatched his keys. Felt his trouser pocket—wallet, a few bills. All systems ready. He was seconds away from freedom.
    And that was when the doorbell rang.
    TWO PALE FACES. The porch light cut their features; they seemed to peer, half materialized, from another dimension. Fawkes was prepared to slam the door on them. But it was Persephone Vine, under bedraggled heaps of dark hair, and another Harrovian; Sixth Form, judging from height.
    “What do you want,” he grunted.
    “That’s not much of a welcome,” said Persephone.
    “It isn’t. Because you aren’t.”
    “I told you I was dropping in. Are you really going to send us back out into this?”
    Fawkes had a soft spot for the girl. Not only because she was beautiful and exotic and delightful to look at—no, that was another liability he was conscious of and, thankfully, able to manage (the notion of sexual frisson between them was ludicrous; Fawkes had a saggy behind and love handles and a tragicomic view of his own former sexual conquests)—but also because she was fun. All these teenagers were desperate for attention. They looked at you with faces like empty plates, wide, open, eager, wanting you, willing you to tell them who they were; Persephone was as bad as the others. But she had a saving feature: she pretended that she and Fawkes were equals. Pals. It was presumptuous, impertinent, and—given that it sometimes involved inappropriate drinking and smoking together—also a great relief. They had met the previous spring when she was cast in the Byron play. She would come to Fawkes’s apartment to talk about The Play—or as she had it more often (and more annoyingly), our play —and he would give her smokes. Soon their project would be long forgotten, and she would ramble about her interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra or yet another chapter in her parents’ epic dysfunction, and he would catch himself: he had been listening. Actually enjoying himself.
    “I’m going out for smokes, P,” he lied. “Can’t we do this later?”
    “No, we can’t.”
    Persephone, clearly and inconveniently at her most insistent, wedged herself and her guest into the hall. Fawkes felt his moment of decisiveness slipping away. She and this stupid boy were blocking his escape. He was about to tell her so.
    And then Fawkes saw the face.
    He had passed over it at first, distracted by his thoughts. But he doubled back now.
    The boy looked at him, strands of hair dripping down over his eyes, not understanding yet that he was being stared at. He had long hair, which only