There wasn’t. Johnny Harrington left, and life went on as normal. For a time, there were whispers among the boys. Spikely also left midterm, with no word of explanation from his parents. But staff at St. Oswald’s rarely leave. We tend to go the distance. Chained to the same oar, we find our comfort in each other. Harry and I remained good friends, though some colleagues removed themselves. Devine was one of them; Eric too; so was Satanic Mr. Speight. But School scandals come and go, and all but the most judgmental eventually got used to the fact that one of our number would never look at a Mulberry girl with interest.

As for Harry, as far as I knew, he never had a relationship. Like myself, he was chained to the oar, and St. Oswald’s demanded our loyalty. But he and I stayed friends, in spite of our many differences, and together we watched the passage of years, steady and, at the same time, so fast that we could barely grasp how those twenty terms had managed to slide so unobtrusively past us.

I was forty-eight. Forty-eight is the age at which we close up the shutters behind the house and watch the shadows lengthen. It is an age of uncertainty, of crow’s-feet and gray hairs and fast-expanding waistlines. It is the age at which past mistakes return to claim their pound of flesh, and at which we begin to see our parents’ faces instead of our own in the bathroom mirror.

But things were different in those days. Nowadays, fifty is young. Then, I was already Old Quaz to most of the boys in the Middle School. Harry Clarke, at fifty-three, was still younger than we were, somehow; maybe because of that smile of his. Still as popular with the boys; still with that sense of the absurd. He still wore those tweed jackets with the elbow patches; still listened to his records at Break and wore his hair a little too long—hair that was going rather gray, but not enough to make him old.

Over the years, Harry had become a living part of the Bell Tower, just as I had. We sometimes used to joke about what would happen when we died; whether we would be buried in situ, or mortared into the parapet with the other gargoyles. But we didn’t believe it. We were still young enough to believe that death would make an exception for us; that somehow, the sun would never set, but would shine on us forever—

And then, in the autumn of ’88, Harry was arrested.