In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  I want to knock his teeth out. My blood rises as I put my book down. “Naw. No neighbors who own slaves. Just neighbors who fly Confederate flags.”

  “So?”

  “People remember stuff for generations. There are folks in Sawyer who hate their neighbors for things their great-great-great-great-grandparents did to each other. And if there are people still flying the flag of ancestors who owned slaves, maybe slavery still affects people whose ancestors were slaves. All I’m saying.”

  Tripp snorts and shakes his head. “All the rednecks in Tennessee, and I get the one snowflake for my roommate,” he mutters.

  “I know plenty of racist-ass people back home you could be roommates with instead.”

  “You’re totally missing the point, but whatever. There’s not a racist bone in my body.”

  I get up with my book under my arm and grab my notebook.

  “Going to your safe space?” Tripp asks with a sneer.

  “Got shit to do.”

  Tripp gives me an okay sign. “Go get untriggered.”

  I don’t respond.

  * * *

  As much as I love the lake, I don’t normally study by it. The light is dim by study time. I figure, though, if I’m just writing a poem, I don’t need a lot of light. And I need a place that inspires me, that takes my mind off Delaney and is far from Tripp.

  My mind’s full of words from my reading. But they’re fruit hanging from a branch that’s just out of reach, my fingertips brushing them as I try to grab hold. Dr. Adkins’s voice sounds in my head. You have a truth.

  What is true in me?

  I love my home. That’s true. I write the first line that comes to me:

  Ask me where I’m from.

  I sit frozen for a half hour. My fear and frustration start congealing into anger. Intro to Poetry was my one class where I briefly didn’t feel like the biggest idiot in the room. Dr. Adkins must have seen it and thought, “Better put an end to that.” I sit for another half hour. Nothing.

  I feel like I’m pushing on a door someone has died against.

  I look at my page.

  Ask me where I’m from.

  What a stupid line. I’ll tell you where you’re from. You’re from Sawyer, Tennessee. You have no mother or father. You have a roommate who hates you and many other kinds of people. You’ve maybe lost your genius best friend forever and you’re about to lose your papaw, but first you’re going to disappoint him and your mamaw by showing them exactly how unspectacular you are at a school where you don’t belong and don’t deserve to be.

  You’re sure as hell no poet.

  Someday you’ll be back in Sawyer, mowing someone’s lawn or painting their house, and you’ll stop to mop the sweat off your brow with the faded bandana you keep in your back pocket. And the way the light hits will remind you of walking from the dining hall to class when you were a kid at Middleford Academy. And you’ll laugh at the great accident of how you ended up at that school. Maybe you’ll have enough distance to forget the humiliation and failure you met there, but probably not. You’ll stuff your bandana back in your pocket and return to work.

  That’s where you’re from. Never forget it.

  “Where’s Alex?” Vi asks as she sits down with her tray.

  “Not sure. I kinda remember him saying he had to crunch on a group project for his Law and Government class.” And you know why Delaney isn’t here.

  My mood lifts to see her. It was looking like I’d be spending this Friday night dinner alone. Ever since Delaney and I stopped talking, Delaney hasn’t been showing up for dinner.

  “Just us?” Vi asks.

  “Apparently.”

  A ribbon of tangerine-colored sunset light falls across Vi’s face. I’ve never noticed before now, with the sun illuminating it, how many shades of red, bronze, copper, and gold thread through her hair. “What are you doing after dinner?” she asks.

  “Dunno. Chillin’.”

  “There’s a football game tonight,” she says.

  “Here?” I look at her for a second, fork suspended over my teriyaki bowl. She returns my look expectantly.

  She nods. “We’re playing against Deerfield Academy.”

  “You wanna go?” I ask.

  She clasps her hands in front of her chest. “Yes! You’ll go with me?”

  I smile and set my fork in my bowl. I don’t have much of an appetite anyway. “Yeah. I’ll go.”

  * * *

  I stand in front of Vi’s (and Delaney’s) dorm. Part of me is hoping Vi returns with Delaney in tow. I guess the next best thing would be if Delaney learns we’re hanging out and gets jealous. I hope she at least misses spending time with me.

  Vi emerges, ebullient, practically skipping, grinning widely. She’s wearing a Middleford hoodie and a wool beanie. The day was warm, but a chill fell like a curtain when the sun dipped below the horizon.

  “Man, you are really pumped for this game.” We start strolling in the direction of the stadium.

  “I’ve never been to an American football game before. I hope it’s like the show Friday Night Lights.”

  “Who knew you were a big sports fan?”

  “In Brazil I would go with my dad and brother to watch my favorite soccer team, Flamengo. They play in the stadium of Maracanã, and it holds seventy-eight thousand people.”

  “Whoa. When I was younger, my papaw took me once to see the University of Tennessee play football. That’s a huge stadium too.” I google quickly. “Holds one hundred thousand. Bigger than—”

  “Maracanã? It used to hold two hundred thousand.”

  “Well, well.”

  “Flamengo was a crew team before they became a soccer team. Like you do.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Delaney told me.”

  I feel a sharp pang of sadness mingled with regret at the reminder that Delaney’s not here and someone else is getting her supply of random factoids tailored to their interests. “Did you see her tonight?”

  “Yes. I invited her, but she said she had to study.”

  Even here Delaney doesn’t need to study on a Friday night. “Oh.” I don’t have the energy to pretend it doesn’t ache.

  Vi hears it. “Are you two okay?” She asks it like she’s walking on a frozen lake.

  “We will be.” Hopefully. “Did Delaney say anything?”

  “She never says anything to me about you that isn’t good.”

  Oof. “Can we change the subject? We’re hanging out now.”

  “Okay.”

  An infectious energy permeates the air as we approach the stadium, a halo of artificial daylight above it from its blazing white lights. Packs of students in Middleford gear chatter animatedly as they file in.

  I flash to a memory of going with Papaw to see Sawyer High play. How he’d clap me on the knee when Sawyer would make a good play. I loved seeing how young he seemed when he got excited. It made it feel like he would live forever.

  Vi and I find seats. She sits closer to me than I expect. The sides of our legs touch. But I don’t scoot over. Her thigh is warm against mine and I like it. She smells like smoky jasmine and spiced vanilla.

  I scan the bleachers as the game kicks off. I spot Tripp and his crew. Palmer and Vance, his two minions, sit behind him. He’s taking a selfie with Dewey Holmgren, his current fling. Since one of the only reasons he’ll talk to me is to boast, I know she spent last summer in Milan, modeling. I suddenly want Tripp to see me, so he knows he’s not the only one out with a pretty girl tonight.

  Almost as quickly, I realize how long it’s been since I was on something resembling a date—which is what this has started to feel like. My romantic life has mostly gone as my life generally: unspectacular. In July between seventh and eighth grade, I kissed Syvana Swindall at an Independence Day church potluc
k, around the side of the church house, while the ramshackle HVAC unit clattered over the noise of people laughing and playing horseshoes. The preacher’s brother’s wife almost caught us, and that spooked Syvana enough that it ended things before they started.

  In ninth grade, I had a twenty-three-day thing with Jade Sutton—holding hands in the hall, kissing goodbye after school. But then she pronounced an ultimatum: her or Delaney. I tried to explain what Delaney and I were, but Jade was having none of it. And so ended my brief fling with Jade Sutton. As a parting shot, she said, Just FYI, you’re a good-looking guy, but no one’ll want to be with you long as you’re always with her. Y’all spend as much time together as if you were boyfriend and girlfriend. I literally don’t get what you see in her. She’s weird and rude. Delaney thought even less of Jade and wasn’t afraid to show it. I didn’t regret my choice. I sure hope Delaney and I start talking again so I didn’t dump Jade for nothing.

  Without Delaney and Alex around, Vi and I trade flirtatious smiles and find excuses for unnecessary touching. Sometimes she flips her hair out of her face, and her scent wafts over to me and makes me woozy. At halftime, I buy her a hot chocolate. We laugh a lot. I love her laugh—a radiant sound as good and pure as the best and purest things: A puppy licking your face. Eating the point of a piece of pie. Remembering it’s a three-day weekend on Thursday night. Delaney’s and my feud melts away. Papaw’s illness melts away. All my struggles with my classes and homesickness melt away.

  The crowd rises as Middleford scores in the final moments of the game, putting us on top. The seconds tick down and we roar. Vi whoops and we embrace in jubilation. The game ends and we join the ecstatic crowd strutting back to the residence halls. It’s rare that I feel any sense of belonging at Middleford, but I do right now.

  As we walk, I graze her hand with mine. That small contact feels like the thrill of crossing an empty highway at night and pausing in the middle—something forbidden and delicious. It’s still early enough that we don’t have to be back in our rooms quite yet, so we stroll a few laps around the lake. The stars are endless and sparkling in the black sky. The air is that ideal crisp temperature where you need a jacket and the minute you take it off you’re cold, but as long as you have it on, you feel perfect.

  “Did you know that a Brazilian invented the airplane?” Vi asks.

  I study her face for some hint of a joke but see none.

  “I’m serious,” she says.

  “Delaney tell you that?”

  “I learned it in school. The name of the man was Alberto Santos-Dumont.”

  “Pretty sure it was the Wright brothers.”

  “They taught us in school that Americans think that. But it was Santos-Dumont.”

  “Yeah, well, they teach us in American school that Brazilian girls will lie to you and tell you some Brazilian dude invented the airplane.”

  Vi laughs and pushes me. “Do they also teach you in American school that root beer tastes like medicine?”

  “That’s it. Now you’ve gone too far.”

  We walk and talk for a while more before it’s time to head back. I accompany Vi to her residence hall.

  “Thanks for inviting me to the game,” I say. “I had a really fun time.”

  “Me too. I like American football, even though it’s named wrong.”

  “I’ll take you to a UT game sometime.”

  Her eyes sparkle and she smiles, showing both of her dimples. “Serious?”

  “Yes.” I am now.

  “Are you going on the trip tomorrow?” Vi asks.

  “Apple picking? I was thinking about it.”

  “I’m going. You should.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  We smile at each other for a couple of seconds before we each avert our eyes bashfully.

  Maybe it’s my imagination, or wishful thinking, but there seems to be something here between us. Some electric space of possibility, like the moment when you start to hear a waterfall before you come around the bend and see it.

  She hugs me before we part—it lasts slightly longer than it ever has before—and as I get on the elevator, I notice a bit of her perfume lingering on my shirt collar. I sniff at it again and again as I ascend, until I get light-headed, committing it to memory before it disappears.

  “Your favorite fruit is apples?” I ask, plucking a particularly nice one and tossing it gently into my basket below.

  “Why is that weird?” Vi asks, scanning the branches above her.

  “I mean, in Brazil, don’t you have, like, fancy fruits?”

  She giggles. “Fancy fruits?”

  “Mangos. Coconuts. I don’t know.”

  “Those are normal fruits.”

  “Not to me.”

  “That’s how I feel about apples.”

  “I guess.” I call out, “Alex?”

  “Yo,” Alex calls back from a few trees over.

  “You hear what Vi and I were discussing?”

  “Wasn’t paying attention. I’m in my apple-picking zone. No distractions, baby. Game face all the way.”

  “Guess Vi’s favorite fruit.”

  “Uh. Pineapple?”

  Vi rolls her eyes.

  “Close, dude. Apples.”

  “What?”

  “I know. They’re for her like mangos and coconuts are for us.”

  “Eating apples makes me hungrier,” Alex says. “I’ve read it’s because they’re a negative-calorie food.”

  “Do what?” I say.

  “Your body burns more energy digesting it than it gives you.”

  “So if you were stuck on a desert island full of apple trees, you’d starve to death?” I ask.

  “Guess so,” Alex says.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” I say.

  Alex shrugs. “Maybe not. I don’t care enough to research it more carefully.”

  “I’m going to ask Delaney if it’s true,” Vi says.

  Alex yawns and stretches. “They’re running a great racket here. We provide them with labor and we pay for the pleasure.”

  It is pleasure, though. Apple picking is exactly the sort of frivolity I shouldn’t be spending my money on. But I wasn’t going to miss a chance to be outside on a mild October day, with friends, the blushing, heady freshness of sun-warmed apples perfuming the orchard around me. I could do this forever, I think. This could be my job and I would never want more. But I guess it’s hard to get paid to do something people will pay to do.

  This is the sort of thing I’d write poems about if I could.

  Vi comes down her little stepladder and sits cross-legged under her tree. She rummages through her basket for an especially choice apple.

  I walk over. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Sit,” she says.

  I do, leaning against the tree, the roughness of the bark a prickle on my back through my T-shirt.

  Vi and I look at each other and smile. She hands me the apple she’d picked out for herself. “Here. You need to learn to appreciate apples more.”

  She rummages in her basket and comes up with another ruddy, perfect specimen. She twists off the stem and takes a big bite from the top. She sees my quizzical look. “Do you know this way of eating apples?”

  “There’s a secret method?”

  “You eat from the top, and the middle part—”

  “The core?”

  “The core disappears.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Try it.”

  I do. True to her word, as I eat from the top down, the core seems to simply vanish. I spit out a couple seeds. “That’s wild.”

  “Pretty cool, yeah?”

  “When I was a kid, I’d sit on the porch with my papaw, and he’d get an apple and cut slices of it with his pocketknife and hand them to me.”


  Vi scoots backward to lean against the tree beside me. “See? You should like apples more.”

  We sit without talking, the crunch of apples and the wind the only sounds. Then we hear the honking of geese in the distance. It crescendos as they near and fly over us in their triangular rank. They fade from sight and hearing, into the distance.

  Vi sighs wistfully. “I wonder where they’re going.”

  “South. Don’t know where exactly.”

  “Where we’re from,” Vi says.

  “That’s right.”

  “How do they know where to go?”

  “That’s another question for Delaney.” I hope I get to ask her someday soon.

  Vi sighs again, but less wistful and more sad.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I had a big fight with my parents this morning and didn’t think about it until now. When you said to ask Delaney that question, it reminded me of how I asked my parents things before I knew how to look online.”

  “What was the fight over?” I ask.

  She picks up a fallen twig and starts breaking off little pieces and flicking them away. “They don’t like that I want to develop video games. My father wants me to study business so I can help with his company.”

  “That sucks.”

  “I told him, ‘I won’t be helpful to you if I don’t love what I’m doing.’ ” Vi gets to the end of her twig.

  “You deserve to do what you love in life.” I pick up another twig and hand it to her.

  She gives me a melancholy smile and accepts my offering. “I love my parents, but I think they don’t always know who I am very well.”

  “There anything I can do?”

  She snaps off a piece of the twig, reaches over, and gently sets it upright in my hair. “Let me grow apple trees on your head so every time we hang out I can have free apples.”

  My entire body hums at her closeness and touch. The crackle I felt last night at the game is still present. I sit stone-still. “Anything you want.” I’ve never meant something more.