“In the way I want you to,” says Thomas, and she smiles at him with all of her teeth to let him know that he is right.
Does Kelly know now that the boy who touched her is dead?
What I Think About in the Hall Outside English
Thomas had an irrational fear of squirrels (which I made merciless fun of him for).… One winter night during our sophomore year, Thomas and I took a taxi all the way into town just to eat Chinese food. We gorged ourselves, and he paid for it, both the cab fare and the meal, and afterward, back in his room, we listened to Steely Dan albums. Thomas owned every single one. Thomas will never hear “Reelin’ in the Years” again.… Thomas will never again steer himself across these sidewalks, never again move like the rest of us, hard-faced as the bricks beneath our feet, without peripheral vision, back to our dorms, to the post office, to class, going through the motions.… The two of us when we hardly knew each other, sitting in Mr. Parkes’s freshman English class our very first week at Birch. Our homework had been to read “The Lottery,” a short story about this town that stoned to death one citizen a year simply because it had always been done. The discussion afterward wasn’t about plot or structure or boring stuff like that; it was about traditions—what role they played in civil societies and all that—and Thomas and I talked afterward about how cool Mr. Parkes was not to force his opinions on us like teachers at our old schools back home.… I can still read, but Thomas’s eyes are closed.
In English Class, Part One
In I walk, my head bowed, my books packed neatly in my L.L.Bean backpack. We all have L.L.Bean backpacks, just as we all have L.L.Bean sweaters and L.L.Bean moccasins. We are interchangeable, and because I am of average height (5′ 10″), though a bit on the thin side for a sixteen-year-old, I’ve gotten used to guys on my hall borrowing my clothes. It will get sorted out in June, when we have to pack up again.
If I am still here in June. If I don’t get found out. I am playing it cool. Playing it cool when I feel as uncool as I have ever felt in my entire life.
It is everyone’s first class of the day. Mine just happens to be English. Miss Dovecott tells us we can lay our heads on our desks or stand at the windows and stare at the trees. We all feel how Thomas is not here with us. His desk is full of empty.
“Do you want to talk about it,” she says, “or ask questions?” Some of the guys look over at me or Glenn expectantly, but most of them drop their heads into their hands.
“I guess we could all use some quiet time,” she says. She returns to her desk and lays her head down on it, hoping we will take her lead. We don’t. Her shoulders move up and down slightly with her breathing. She has great shoulders.
Rock, Paper, Scissors
5. At 1:00, Glenn and Clay arrive, and my dear ol’ roomie pulls the fifth of vodka, which he has been hiding in his closet for weeks, out of his backpack. We all pass it around until it is half empty. The leaves, with the last of their green, filter the sun. That thin thread of sun is the only thing that finds us. We are deep in the woods on the last day of September.
6. This next move is Clay’s idea. His father had a club when he was a student here in the 1950s, and, according to Mr. Claybrook, the initiation for the club required its members to jump into the French Broad River from the high rock. Which three of us have done before and one of us hasn’t.
7. Glenn tells Thomas, “You have to jump out far. Jump, not dive. Got it?”
8. Thomas says, “Got it,” and drinks vodka with the rest of us.
9. The four of us walk to the rock.
10. The rock is exposed, like we all are about to be.
11. Glenn says he’ll go first, to show Thomas how it’s done.
12. Thomas says, “Okay, but I’m not scared.”
13. Thomas takes another chug of vodka.
13. Thomas takes another chug of vodka.
13. Thomas takes another chug of vodka.
In English Class, Part Two
I’m still staring at her shoulders when, at 8:16 a.m., Miss Dovecott rises, walks to the chalkboard, and erases it from top to bottom, from side to side, wiping out every remnant of word, every stray comma. By the time she turns back to us, Joe Bonnin has fallen asleep. Some guys laugh, but none of us do anything to stir him, so Miss Dovecott walks over and shakes Joe’s shoulder. He doesn’t wake up, so she has to shake him again. That’s when Glenn and I catch eyes, understanding. Miss Dovecott is afraid, afraid to touch him. By the time she returns to the front of the room, her armpits are wet, and it is the thing that draws me out of myself, the thing that calms me down: the realization that a teacher could be more scared than the students—and scared of the students.
“Under the circumstances,” Miss Dovecott says, “I think it only fair that I give you an extra day on the essay that was due today, and I’ll talk now about the story you’ll be reading tonight.” Some of us reach into our backpacks and pull out our books. On any other day she would require us to hold the text, as she calls it, in front of us and take notes in the margins, but today, she says nothing. Time hulks over us. Miss Dovecott plays with her watch, takes it off her wrist, and swings it gently from side to side. I study it; it looks old-timey. I try to hypnotize myself.
Out the window a robin keeps returning to an unsteady branch. What is the robin looking for, its head ticking around, its black eyes blinking? Why doesn’t it chirp?
I want to hear something other than the inside of my head, something other than Miss Dovecott rambling on about the story. “Let us say, then, that Miss Emily represents the South, the pre–Civil War South, so if she is on this end of the spectrum”—and at this point Miss Dovecott draws a straight line across the smooth board, labeling one end “Emily”—“then who is on the other end?”
She doesn’t slow down for an answer because we haven’t read the story yet. A couple of guys turn their notebooks sideways and draw the line across the page. “Homer,” she says. “Homer Barron, the healthy, hearty Yankee whom Miss Emily—daughter of the Confederate South—poisons.”
“She poisons him?” Joe Bonnin, now awake, asks.
“Why?” says Auggie van Dorn, who looks like a Cabbage Patch doll. “Was he mean to her or something?”
“No,” says Miss Dovecott. “You’ll have to read the story tonight and find out for yourself.”
“What kind of poison does she use?” asks Jovan Davis, a black kid from Atlanta.
“Rat poison,” Miss Dovecott answers.
I look at Glenn; he looks at me.
“Does she sprinkle it on his dinner or something?” Joe is clearly intrigued by this whole poison thing.
“Glenn,” says Miss Dovecott, “do you happen to know how poison might be best administered?”
“No, ma’am.” He is staring at his hands, which are flat on the desk, palms down.
Joe clears his throat. “Glenn was with Thomas,” he says.
“I know that,” she says to Joe, but she is looking at Glenn, and when he looks up, some inexplicable electric knowledge passes between them.
Glenn Albright Everson, III, Class of 1984
Glenn is the sort of guy other guys respect. For one reason, he doesn’t make excuses for himself, but most of the time he doesn’t need to: he earned a perfect score in math on the PSAT. Glenn is a top scholar and all-conference athlete. Glenn does not argue with adults as some students do; I think it’s because he doesn’t want to be that involved with them. He is the most self-reliant guy I know; he does things his way, and that works out for him 99 percent of the time. He doesn’t seek the spotlight, yet it finds him. Thomas wanted to be Glenn’s best friend, but Glenn doesn’t play those kinds of girl games.
Alexander Stromm, No Middle Name, No Roman Numerals, Class of 1984
Alex is rarely in the spotlight, and that’s the way he likes it, though he wishes he were funnier because at Birch, funny is revered, funny is cool. Alex is a good audience for other guys’ jokes, and other guys seek him out to tell him jokes because he is appreciative and he h
as a great laugh that makes a weird little dimple in his lower right cheek. Alex stays out of the spotlight by being Above Average, except in math. Numbers don’t make sense to him even when you turn them into letters like “x” and “y.” He has learned that if you don’t talk much in class, the other guys think you are either really smart or really dumb, and so when he knows he can answer a question correctly, he raises his hand, but no more than once per class period, because then he would be in the spotlight.
In English Class, Part Three
“Alex was with Thomas, too,” Auggie says, unnecessarily, because the students, the teachers, everyone, knows who was where on Saturday at approximately two o’clock in the afternoon. I want to shoot Auggie a dirty look, but I’m lying low. Besides, how do you shoot a dirty look? Do you take out your eyeballs and pocket them into a slingshot, and pull back the rubber band, and …
Miss Dovecott is gazing at me, and I forget all about my eyeballs. To her credit, she does not tell the class that she was there at the river that day, too. Our screams led her there.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. “For our loss,” she corrects herself, glancing over at the oxymoronic desk, the one full of emptiness.
Postscript
Even though other boys in other classes sit in that desk, I expect Miss Dovecott to remove it, to store it in the attic or something, but the next morning, Thomas’s desk is still there. In other classrooms, too—history, chemistry, pre-calc, Spanish—there are still desks.
Are the green fields gone?
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 8:05 P.M.
Yes, Mr. Melville, they are gone, long gone, which is why I must sit here in this library and write about them, just as you did before me. Your novel is art. My novel is the sloppy work of a guy trying to fill up a journal with inadequate words.
Green Fields
Now and then are two opposite places, two different time zones. Then was a lifetime ago. Then, I ate that lunch. Then, I rhymed my poems. Our first homework assignment in fifth-form English (pretentious boarding-school speak for eleventh grade) was to write a poem that evoked the mood of autumn. Here is mine, copied here for posterity, now that the green fields are gone.
The geese are on the wing,
And cold has settled sternly,
A moon mocks its own low calling,
I wrap my throat in yearning
For a song no longer mine.
Where had it gone, that tune?
I once sang it soft and fine;
it rang of crystal June
when I had basked and dipped
and thrown the fishes back,
and daylight didn’t slip,
and dreams were true as fact.
But now there’s only sand
and water shrunk with dread,
and nothing I had planned
still strums inside my head.
By Alex Stromm
9/4/82
An eerily foreshadowy effort that Miss Dovecott chose to read out loud to the class the day I turned it in. After she did, I was out in the open, I was someone with a name, and I knew I would be called a few other names once I returned to the dorm that afternoon. For a second, I was mad at her. And then she wrote some of my poem on the board, underlining words, and I think that’s when I fell in love, though it didn’t feel like falling. She asked us questions about diction and placement, the same as she had done the day before with poems by actual writers. It’s difficult to put into words on a page, but before this moment, I was not actual, or not full, or full of shit. Miss Dovecott made me real.
“The poet chose to leave this untitled,” she said, making it seem as if I’d done the exact right thing. “But if it were your poem, if you had weighed your choices and ended here, what would you call it?”
She made us write our titles on scrap paper—“To keep you honest,” she said—and then she circled the room with her lilting voice, pecking the board with chalk as we, one by one, offered up our ideas. The title she liked best was “Sand,” which connotes a desert, the opposite of a garden, cradle of paradise. But contrary to the sentiment contained within my waltzing stanzas, I felt—for the first time at Birch—a future rising up inside me.
And then she turned to the board and erased, and wrote another boy’s words across the dust left behind by my poem.
But that was then, before the accident. Miss Dovecott—without whose existence the filling of these pages would not be possible; without whose existence this story would remain untold. I am in love with Miss Dovecott. And she might, just might, be in love with me. She writes about me in her journal the same way I write about her in mine. At least I dream she does.
If you think about it, it’s kind of weird that Miss Dovecott would sign on for a job here. A young Yankee female in an age-old Southern male institution. Even English-teacher bookworms need friends and bars. The campus is more beautiful to adults than it is to us: we see it as a fishbowl, and they see it as a nest, with the stone buildings tucked inside the rolling hills at the feet of the Blue Ridge Mountains, supposedly the oldest chain of mountains in the United States. To adults, old is cozy. To us, old is something we can’t imagine we will ever be.
Miss Dovecott isn’t old; she’s right out of college, probably twenty-two, maybe only twenty-one. My father says he admires the Birch faculty because they give so much of themselves to the place—seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Of course he’s aware of the free housing and food they receive in addition to a teacher’s salary, but that doesn’t compensate for a lack of privacy and time to themselves. He could never work here, he says, and I certainly haven’t encouraged him to apply.
I have seen Miss Dovecott talking with Mr. Parkes, my advisor. Sometimes they sit together at lunch, but it doesn’t look like love, except for the fact that when they talk, she plays with her watch and smiles. Maybe they drink wine together at his apartment. Maybe they read poems and stories out loud to each other.
Scissors Cut Paper
Poems and stories: NOT the newspaper version of things. There is a boarding school version of things, too, and it’s like the newspaper version, only more deliberate. The boarding school version, sent out ASAP in a letter written by the Headmaster’s secretary and signed by the Headmaster, is there to soothe the parents, who pay shitloads of money to send their sons away. The letter is sent so that, even in the wake of disaster, parents will keep sending their sons to, and I quote, “a community who makes it not a business but a moral duty, an obligation, to prepare boys for life.” My dad bought into this, literally and figuratively.
My dad calls me several times on the day of the accident, the last day of September, after he receives a call from Mr. Armstrong. (Later in the week, he receives his own personal copy of the soothing letter.) There are three messages tacked to my door, scribbled in sloppy handwriting, when I return to the dorm Saturday night after holing up in the janitor’s closet. The last note says to call my dad no matter how late, but by that time, the school switchboard is closed, so I get permission from my prefect, a senior I’ll call Bob Dylan (just because I can), to use the pay phone in the gym. Glenn wants to go with me, but Bob Dylan won’t let him because it’s after check-in.
The basement of the gym, night or day, is like a dungeon and smells worse than one. Dad answers on the first ring.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” I say, lying. “I’m not fine right this minute, but I will be.”
“I’m coming to get you.”
“No, Dad, please. Everything is under control. You know this place. It’s like the army. They don’t let anything slide, least of all a potentially troubled young man such as myself.”
My dad tells me he’s talked with Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Parkes, but he still isn’t sure that in loco parentis is the proper modus operandi. “The first flight I can get out of here is Monday morning.”
“Don’t waste your money, Dad.”
“Then will you call me tomorrow and the day after that and the day aft
er that? If I’m not in, keep trying. Better yet, call me as soon as you wake up. That way, I know I’ll be here.”
I tell him I will, but I do not tell him that I won’t be sleeping tonight, tomorrow night, or probably ever. Before I leave the gym, I grope my way to the corner bench in front of my locker, put my head in my hands, and cry myself a river. When I get back to the dorm, I check in with Bob Dylan, who offers me a fatherly pat on the back.
Clay Claybrook: not fatherly. Not brotherly. Hardly human. I got stuck with him. Thomas and I had planned to room together, but then Glenn’s chosen roommate got kicked out at the very end of our sophomore year for stealing another guy’s Coke out of the dormitory refrigerator. Birch has a strict code of honor—no lying, no cheating, no stealing, and no second chances—so Claybrook, otherwise known as Gaybrook, got assigned to him. When Glenn found out, he asked Thomas if he wanted to switch, and Thomas said yes, basically screwing me over. Thomas explained that he had asked Glenn first, in the spring of our sophomore year before the Coke incident, but that I had been his next choice.
Good, Solid Kids don’t mind playing second fiddle to Golden Boys. Golden Boys have it hard, too. One false move gone public and not only do you lose your chance at prefect, but you are out of here. When it comes to honor, Birch doesn’t believe in second chances. Which is why it is a good thing that Clay left the river before the jumping began and took his bottle of vodka with him, which is why Miss Dovecott didn’t see it when she came on the scene. Clay left because of something Thomas said. Clay is a very touchy guy.
When I come back to the dorm after talking to my dad, Glenn is sitting on Clay’s bed. Clay is in the bathroom.
“You’ve been crying,” Glenn says.
“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” I say.
“Thomas’s parents came by after chapel and took some of his stuff home with them.”
“What about the rest of his stuff?”
“Dean Mansfield told them he’d box it up and save it for some scholarship kid,” Glenn says. “His mom stayed at the hospital with the body. They’re doing an autopsy.”
Paper Covers Rock Page 2
