In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  “Dude, I told you not to touch anything,” Delaney says, without looking up from her laptop screen. She enters something and moves back to her microscope.

  “I’m not.” I wouldn’t dare. The Middleford Science Center is an intimidating place—everything gleaming new and antiseptic, brushed steel and LED lights. It feels like being on a spaceship.

  “I know. But by the time you do, it’ll be too late, so I’m reminding you,” Delaney murmurs, staring into the microscope. “Anyway, yes, horseshit is a greater degree of lying than bullshit.”

  “I just disagree. I think they’re the same.”

  “Horseshit is more emphatic.”

  “Says you.”

  “You’ve heard of people referred to as ‘bullshitters.’ ”

  “Sure,” I say. She’s setting the trap.

  “You ever heard of someone referred to as a ‘horseshitter’?”

  “No.” And I walked right in.

  “There you go. It’s too harsh. Not affectionate.”

  Of course she’s right.

  “What are you working on?” she asks.

  “My Social Ethics homework.”

  “How’s that treating you?”

  “Pretty ethically, I guess. What are you doing?”

  “Observing cell growth. We put lung cells in nutrient gel to grow them into the architecture they’d have in the body. Then we can test stuff on them to see how they respond.”

  “That sounds pretty advanced.”

  “Hence why I wanted to come here, buddy.” Delaney goes back to her laptop, makes another entry, and exhales through pursed lips.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be wearing a lab coat or something? Like on TV?” I ask.

  “Naw. Just gloves and eye protection when you’re working with dangerous stuff.” She picks up her phone and starts scrolling. “So…”

  I look up when, after an extended time, she still doesn’t finish the sentence. She’s fixed on her screen, chewing on the side of her left thumb, her face draining of color.

  “Red?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Hey.”

  “Nothing,” she says. She closes her laptop brusquely and jams it in her backpack. “Tell you later,” she mumbles, eyeing the other students at work in the lab.

  Her legs are shorter than mine, but still I have to hustle to keep up as we leave the science center. “So?”

  Delaney looks down and slows her pace. “The other night, I followed one of the girls in Biology Club on Instagram, and one of her pics just popped up in my feed. In it, she’s hiking, and she’s captioned it, ‘Hey guys, just going for a hike in the woods. Maybe I’ll find a magic mushroom that cures cancer and they’ll name it after me and it gets me a cool scholarship that makes everyone think I’m a genius.’ Full-on shit-talking me. And all these people from Biology Club and STEM were liking it and commenting and laughing.”

  “Wow. Assholes.”

  “And, like, I’m trying here, you know? Back home, I didn’t give a shit who liked me and who didn’t. But I’ve been trying here.”

  “That’s amazingly shitty and immature behavior. The kind of people who sit around and talk trash on other people who have accomplished more than them are the worst.”

  “I mean, I thought I might fit in here? Turns out it’s just a different kind of hater than in Sawyer.” Delaney sounds despondent.

  “I don’t know. In Sawyer, the haters hate because you’re smarter and more awesome than them. Here, same deal.”

  Delaney gives me a half smile. “Very comforting.”

  “Petty people are petty wherever you go. No matter where they’ve gotten in life.”

  “I guess.”

  “What do you want me to do about them?”

  “I want you to not kick the shit out of them like you did with Jaydon Barnett.”

  “I could take them.” I drop into a fighting stance and do some quick shadowboxing.

  “Dude, Madeline Scott and Edward Hsu would team up and destroy you. They’re small but vicious. Like honey badgers.”

  “Isn’t that why I’m here? To whup ass on your behalf?”

  “Ideally, no,” Delaney says.

  “What can I do? You want me to get Papaw on the phone? So he can give you a—”

  “Cash.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “What I know you’re about to do. I’m warning you.”

  “So he can give you a…Pep talk.”

  “Damn it, Cash. You dad-joking piece of shit.” But now Delaney is fully smiling.

  “Hey,” I say, my voice serious. “Don’t let this get to you, okay?”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “That’s why I’m saying it. We still have a half hour before dorm check-in. Wanna go to the lake?”

  “Yeah,” Delaney says. “Let’s go skip some rocks.”

  “Or in your case, throw rocks squarely into the water.”

  “Now, dude? You’re gonna crap on my rock-skipping abilities now? While I’m vulnerable?”

  I motion her toward me. “Come get you a big old hug.”

  She comes in for an embrace, and I pick her up and spin her around. She squeals. “Cash! Don’t make me drop my shit.” But it seems to lift her spirits.

  We arrive at the lake and sit side by side on a bench. We’re quiet for a while. Finally, I say, “I hate for you that you have to deal with this. I guess being a genius has a downside.”

  Delaney nods.

  “By the way, I was talking about how my being a genius comes with the downside of me hating this for you,” I murmur.

  She backhands me in the thigh. “You are such a jackass. Let’s skip some rocks.”

  We skip rocks for a while. Or, more accurately, I skip rocks while Delaney throws rocks in the water.

  “Did you know you can’t fold a piece of paper in half more than eight times?” Delaney says.

  “You serious? That can’t be right. What about a super thin piece of paper that’s, like, a mile wide.”

  “Nope. And if there were a way to fold a piece of paper in half one hundred and three times, it would be as big as the universe.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yep. Exponential growth.”

  We throw rocks for a while and talk until it’s time for us to check in.

  “Thanks,” Delaney says, hugging me.

  “You feel better?” I rest my cheek on top of her head.

  “A little. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I always got your back. You know that, right?”

  “I know. See you at breakfast?”

  “Yep.”

  I watch her until she gets into her building safely. I think on the wonder of things expanding to fill the universe, even as they’re being folded in half.

  Middleford students have a saying: A day feels like a week and a week feels like a day.

  Over the weeks, I settle into an uneasily steady routine. Roll out of bed. Rush to get ready. Go to morning assembly. Go to class. Go to lunch. Go back to class. Go to crew. Go to dinner. Hang out with Delaney, Vi, and Alex. Talk to Mamaw and Papaw. Study. Sleep. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. In the mornings, my breath mists silver and the air pinches at my skin. All around, the leaves are beginning to turn and drop. The New England autumn is dazzling—I’ll give it that. Here I thought nothing could rival an East Tennessee autumn.

  I continue my Game of Thrones watch with Raheel. I make a few new casual acquaintances. Nobody I’d share any of my big secrets with, though. I deflect, divert, and outright lie when the subject of parents comes up. Everyone knows I’m close with my grandparents, but I’ve never said why I’m so tight with them.

  Alex clear
ly has loving, if demanding and tough, parents. Vi’s parents sound busy but doting. Delaney’s pretty open with the state of her homelife: “My mom sucks.” I’m not totally sure Delaney has talked to her mama even once since she got to Middleford.

  On Saturdays, we go into New Canaan or laze around campus. I’ve come to prefer the latter because going into town means pressure to spend money I don’t have. Neither Alex nor I have the laundry service, so on Saturdays, we do laundry and ironing in Koch Hall’s basement. One day after crew practice, Alex eyes me in my rumpled khakis and wrinkled button-down shirt and says, “Man, I’m giving you an ironing lesson.” What he says without saying it: We may be scholarship kids, but we don’t have to look like it. Alex’s clothes aren’t much nicer than mine, but he looks much sharper. He teaches me the finer points of stain removal, learned on the white tablecloths and napkins of his parents’ restaurant.

  On Sunday mornings, I go with Alex to a sparsely attended nondenominational Christian worship service on campus. Church is something I can take or leave, but it brings back fond memories of going with Mamaw and Papaw, and I like hanging out with Alex.

  Vi’s and my friendship grows tighter. We talk a lot, when we can. She’s a diligent student, and when she’s not studying, she’s teaching herself programming and working on one of her video-game projects. I imagine learning to speak Portuguese. I wonder if she’s a different person in her native tongue. I want to know that person. I look at photos of Rio and imagine sitting on the beach beside her, talking and listening to the waves breaking on the shore.

  In my classes, I struggle to stay afloat. I’ve never had so much information crammed down my throat at once. At night, I dream about class. It’s an improvement from my normal nightmares, at least. The hardest part is the contrast with Delaney. She’s not foundering like me. She’s flourishing, like I knew she would. No, actually, that’s second place. The hardest part is the constant fear of letting down Papaw and Mamaw and revealing how unspecial I am.

  If I had to choose, my favorite class is poetry, of all things. Not that I’m much better at it than my other classes. If anything, I’m further behind than in my other classes. But there’s something about Dr. Adkins that puts me at ease. And her love for poetry is contagious.

  I do a lot of my studying in the lab with Delaney, where she spends most of her free time during the week. She’s pretty secretive and vague about what she’s working on. I wouldn’t understand it anyway. The science program and Biology Club are taking up more and more of her time, even on weekends. I live with an ever-growing, constant buzz of fear of Delaney’s ditching me finally for her science friends. She must get more from hanging out with them than I can offer.

  Tripp remains aloof. He’s constantly surrounded by a cohort who also sweat the smell of money. He only talks to me when he can’t find something he misplaced (basically accusing me of taking it) or when he’s complaining. Generally these gripes take the form of a teacher or fellow student having ventured to challenge something he said. A couple of times he’s made cracks about my being on scholarship, as though his being born into wealth isn’t its own sort of luck-based full-ride scholarship to life. I seethe quietly, trying to keep the peace. I have more to lose, and he knows it.

  For the first couple weeks of crew, it’s one grueling erg workout after another in the sweaty, stuffy gym, while sparkling early-autumn days pass by outside. But on one such perfect afternoon—seventy-four degrees, the sun shining—we hit the water. Coach Cartier shows us around the shells. We hoist an eight-seat shell off the boathouse rack and onto our shoulders, carry it down to the dock, and place it in the water. The coxswain sends half of us to get the oars, while the remaining rowers open the oarlocks and hold the shell in place. Alex and I ask to be assigned to the same shell, and Coach Cartier shrugs and says, “As long as you’re good at working together and working hard.” We sit in the “engine room”—he’s on port in three seat, and I’m sitting on starboard in four seat. After a shaky shove-off at the dock, we embark gingerly onto the Five Mile River.

  At first, we’re slow to synchronize our movements, despite our coxswain sitting in the stern shouting commands, and we wobble all over the river. It’s unnerving how tippy the shell feels—so different from a canoe.

  We get splashed a lot with cold water before we learn how to feather and bury the blades cleanly. Pulling an oar is different from using the erg or paddling a canoe. But I learn quickly, as do my teammates, and we fall into a rhythm. Catch drive release recover catch drive release recover catch drive release recover catch drive release recover. We’re able to maintain a straight(ish) course and pick up a little speed. The prow of the shell shushes through the water. Sunshine filters through the trees on the riverbanks. A clean, aquatic smell surrounds us.

  Over the barked orders of the coxswain, I hear Alex murmur, beneath a grunt of exertion, “Finally, bro. This is where it’s at.”

  I nod and smile and quietly say, “Yep.”

  Catch drive release recover catch drive release recover catch drive release recover. Every muscle in my body a component of a machine. My body a cog in a larger gearwork. I sweat and cycle clean, fresh air through my lungs. By the time we put in, the sun is low in the sky, kissing the treetops. My heart still pounds and my brain is awash in endorphins. When I first saw the video of the crew team, it looked like their arms were doing all the work. But the reality is that your legs do most of it, so my quads feel rubbery afterward. Even though I have calluses on my hands, blisters form on my palms from gripping the wet oar handle. But I feel pure joy for the first time since arriving at Middleford. I don’t expect it to last, so I chisel it into my mind to run my fingers over later.

  Most nights I videochat with Papaw and Mamaw, at least for a while, if she’s not closing at work. Delaney joins in when she can. Our chats have been getting earlier, as Papaw’s been running out of steam sooner in the day. He laughs less now. I guess partly because it runs such a risk of sending him into a coughing vortex he can’t escape. His eyes are glassy and dim. His voice has taken on a more wheezing quality.

  Something I imagine a lot lately is Papaw sitting on the porch alone and counting each dwindling breath as it flares in the yellow porchlight and disappears. I wonder if he sees his final October in the falling leaves.

  Last night Papaw couldn’t talk for more than a couple minutes. I talked with Mamaw for a bit, and she said wearily that she expected he’d rally soon. Her purple-rimmed eyes lied. Afterward, I sat quietly with Delaney for a long time by the lake. He was just having a bad day, she said. I only nodded.

  Now I’m trying to pay attention to Dr. Adkins, but there’s a tight knot under my solar plexus and anxiety shortens my breath. Is it asking too much to have one whole hour when I don’t think about the sword hanging over my papaw’s neck?

  Outside the window is a stand of flame-hued maple trees, and the sight of it soothes me. It reminds me of the time Delaney, Papaw, Mamaw, Punkin, and I sat on our porch on a biting and gray Saturday morning toward the end of last October. The smells of wood smoke, coffee, frying bacon, and cold dew on grass hung in the air. Mist threaded through the hills like cobwebs. Delaney explained why leaves change in autumn. I don’t remember the explanation, just the perfect feeling that my life, encircled as I was at that moment by beauty and people I loved, had become fuller than I’d ever hoped it could be.

  And now it’s slowly becoming bare again, leaf by falling leaf.

  “…and, Cash, will you read the next stanza, please?” Dr. Adkins says.

  It feels like being stung by a bee. I look left, heart galloping, where Holden, one of my classmates, offers the book to me expectantly with a sympathetic look.

  I swallow hard. “Sorry. I’m—Where?” My voice cracks. My classmates avert their eyes, justifiably embarrassed for me. So far, I’d somehow managed to avoid too much public shame in this class. No more.

 
Dr. Adkins rises and comes over to me, brushing a piece of hair from her face. She takes the book from Holden, finds the stanza, and points to it. “Here you go.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “No worries.” Her tone is gentle, which makes it worse somehow.

  I read the stanza, my face blazing to match the trees I was just staring at. I stumble over words and lose my place, reading the same line twice. Why does humiliation always seem to come in six-packs? By the time I’m done and I pass the book to my right, my heartbeat throbs in my temples. I pray that Dr. Adkins doesn’t ask me to offer an interpretation of what I just read, and she doesn’t. We finish passing the poem around the circle and start analyzing it when we’re done.

  I have nothing to add to the conversation, but I will myself to stay engaged (or at least looking like it) as best I can. The refrain of Why are you here? Papaw is dying while you’re gone, and you’re not even good at this plays on a loop in my head.

  Class ends and everyone starts filing out, chatting happily. Mini cliques have formed in the class among those with similar tastes in poetry. This has left me—with no particular poetic inclinations—in the cold. I bring up the rear, with Dr. Adkins behind me.

  As I’m about to leave, she says, “Cash? Can you hang on for a sec?”

  I turn and meet her eyes, a sharper and more insistent apprehension replacing the dull hum of anxiety and embarrassment. “Yeah. Sure.” She’s going to ask you why you’re here. She’s wondering if maybe you wouldn’t be more comfortable in more remedial classes.

  I follow her back into the classroom. She sits and crosses one leg over the other. I sit also, staring at the table, fidgeting.

  She’s wearing all black, like usual. I’ve never sat this close to her. She smells like a bonfire made of cedarwood soaked in smoky vanilla.

  We don’t speak for a second while she fixes her gray eyes on me. I quickly crack. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I should’ve been paying attention. I won’t—”