Paper Covers Rock

by Jenny Hubbard

  Rock, Paper, Scissors

  19. Thomas is drunk, way more drunk than Glenn and I.

  20. We take off our shoes (but leave our shorts and boxers on).

  21. We climb onto the rock. Glenn and Thomas have grown up pulling stunts like this. Being a cautious only child, I just pretend that I have. There are no guys from my hometown around to call my bluff.

  22. Glenn jumps.

  23. Thomas and I do Rock, Paper, Scissors.

  24. Thomas dives.

  25. Before I even realize it, I jump, too.

  As If the Top of My Head Were Taken Off

  Miss Dovecott tells us that Emily Dickinson posed for the daguerreotype when she was seventeen. She passes it around the classroom Friday morning and asks us to stare into Emily Dickinson’s eyes. When it gets to Auggie van Dorn, he starts giggling. Emily is homely. She has fat lips, a bunch of moles, and hair that looks oiled to her head. She is seriously unattractive.

  Except for the eyes. They are black, they are deep, they know all.

  After the Walt Whitman failure, Miss Dovecott knows we will protest Emily Dickinson and her poems. We will say she is a crazy woman who never leaves her attic; we will say she aches for the Grim Reaper to sneak into her bed at night and ravish her. Miss Dovecott knows she is going to have to wow us to get us to like anything at all about Emily.

  “So much of Dickinson,” she tells us, “is about what is left unsaid and what is left unclear. What we aren’t able to articulate, what we aren’t able to find the words for—that’s what underscores these poems and what, as Dickinson so aptly perceived, lies beneath all of our experiences.”

  Uh-huh. We nod.

  “Because Dickinson’s poems were written in the form of hymns,” Miss Dovecott explains, mapping out iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter on the blackboard, “we can sing them, and as we sing them, we can hear where the rhythm slips, where Dickinson disregards, maybe even snubs, that sacred form.” So many eyes glazed over; Glenn Everson, dutifully taking notes or plotting a murder—it’s hard to tell. “What else might she be snubbing?”

  No one answers, no one is going to answer. She repeats the question. No hands go up. So Miss Dovecott starts singing poem #389—“There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House”—to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme song.

  By the time she reaches the fourth stanza, we are laughing.

  The Minister—goes stiffly in—

  As if the House were His—

  And He owned all the Mourners—now—

  And little Boys—besides—

  We are laughing at the minister’s stiff entry; we are laughing at Miss Dovecott because she can’t sing. Suddenly our teacher seems like the weird girl in junior high who wore granny dresses.

  At the board, she points to what is written there. “So iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter is a common form in all types of songs.” She puts her hands on the back of her chair. “Now. Even though the death happened in the ‘opposite house,’ it still affects the speaker. How?”

  Andy Hedron raises his hand. “She sees the aftermath of it.”

  “Right, Andy, but why do you think the speaker is female?”

  Auggie jumps in. “Because Emily is a woman. Although she kinda looks like a man.”

  We laugh, but Miss Dovecott ignores us. “Can you find any evidence in the poem itself that the speaker is female?” The room is so silent that I can hear the fluorescent lights overhead. A couple of guys are gazing out the window. “Okay. Everybody. Look at the poem. It’s there. See if you can find it.”

  “What are we looking for again?” asks Jovan Davis.

  “Is it in the third paragraph?” asks Malcolm Marshall.

  “Third stanza, Malcolm.”

  I look at the third stanza, singing it to the Gilligan’s Island theme in my head:

  Somebody flings a Mattress out—

  The Children hurry by—

  They wonder if it died—on that—

  I used to—when a Boy—

  I don’t get it, so I study my corduroy knees.

  “What is that last line saying there? Can you put it in your own words?”

  Colin Bates (nickname: Master) raises his hand. “ ‘I used to when I was a boy’?”

  “Good. Used to what?”

  “Used to imagine that the mattresses thrown out of windows were deathbeds,” Glenn says. I jerk my head to look at him. He is giving her his cool eyes.

  “Well done, Glenn,” she says.

  “I don’t think the speaker is a boy,” says Malcolm. “I think he’s a man. Because of ‘used to,’ like he no longer is a boy.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “I was wondering about this,” Auggie says. “I think the Minister is God. The way she capitalizes His.”

  “The house is the church,” says Master.

  “The house can’t be a church,” says Jovan. “The house is a house, man.”

  Suddenly I get it, I get it. I raise my hand. She calls on me. “In the boy’s eyes, the minister is like God. When he was a boy, not a man. So it’s like when the minister enters the house, the house becomes a church, you know, God’s house.”

  “Good, Alex,” Miss Dovecott says, clapping. “Very good. Keep going. So what, according to this poem, does this minister-God own?”

  “All the mourners,” I say. “And little boys. Dickinson is saying he owns all of us.”

  She claps again—we are in the swing of it now—and then Glenn says slowly, with eyes as pale as water, “God does not own you, Stromm. God does not own any of us.”

  Miss Dovecott stares back at him, but his gaze does not waver. “Let’s back up now,” she says, “and talk about that window.” But she can’t get us to do it, to explain why it opened like a pod, abruptly, mechanically. The mighty Achilles has silenced us, and Miss Dovecott has to stand there and watch her students fold into themselves, hunching away from the window in the poem, from the windows in the classroom, from everything. One of these students, the one who lost five dollars for believing in the woman he loves, wants desperately to come back to her world—her heavenly wide-open world—but it is roped off now, like an unsafe balcony.

  Our World

  Ten p.m. Friday night (last night). Outside the freshman dorm, upperclassmen in masks and no shirts stomp in unison. “New boys! New boys!” they chant, shaking their lit torches. Two years ago, at my first pep rally, I was afraid to come out of my dorm.

  “Here they come!” someone shouts, and torches flare as the third-formers creep out the front door. Their hands fly to their foreheads, shielding their eyes, as they get absorbed by the mob. The crowd lurches across the quad, down the hill, and into the end zone of the football field. The cheer masters leap onto the wooden platform built especially for these occasions. When they raise their torches, the muscles in their biceps and shoulders harden.

  “Are you ready?” the head cheer master, Ted Ferenhardt, shouts. Tonight he is a giant in an Afro wig, cutoff jean shorts, and combat boots. His chest is slick with Vaseline. The crowd roars back. “Are you ready?”

  On the sidelines, a flock of frightened faculty children take a few steps back into the shadows where their parents are huddled.

  “Chase Harper!” the cheer masters yell and clap in rhythm. “Chase Harper!” The quarterback of the football team hops onto the platform. One of the cheer masters hands him a torch.

  “New boys!” shouts Chase. “You see this torch? This is what you are going to have to be for us tomorrow. Every single one of you better be in those stands cheering your guts out. If you don’t, you run the gauntlet, and you all know what that means. Now, let’s hear it! Go, Bulldogs! Go, Bulldogs!”

  All of the new boys are yelling it now. “Go, Bulldogs!” The defensive line of the football team mobs the stage: more guys with painted chests, more guys with wigs and masks. Out of the mass rises a new chant, a slower one that folds on itself one screeching letter at a time: “B! U! L! L!
D! O! G! S! Gooooooo, Dawgs! Dawgs! Dawgs! Dawgs!” The guys on the stage erupt into chaotic barking, and Ted silences them by raising his torch.

  “Who’s ready to kiss the Buddha?” he shouts. Chip Donnelly, with his jiggling stomach, struggles onto the platform, and Ted puts his hand on the other boy’s shoulder. The two of them scan the crowd with demonic eyes. “Where is he?” Ted shouts. “Where’s the Little Dipper?”

  The Little Dipper is the younger brother of the Big Dipper, who got caught dipping tobacco during the first week of his new-boy year and racked up sixty demerits, which took five months to work off. Eyes wide, Lane Carter raises his hand, shaking, and he climbs onto the stage. His big brother, Silas, a cheer master, stands at the back of the stage, laughing his head off while the Little Dipper drops to his knees in front of Chip’s sumo wrestler stomach.

  “Kiss the Buddha!” the crowd is shouting. “Kiss the Buddha!” The Little Dipper bows his head and puts his hands over his mouth, and Ted jumps behind him, arms spread and flapping like wings. He screams into the back of Lane Carter’s head, “Kiss the Buddha!” When Lane looks up, there are tears on his cheeks, and the Buddha grabs Lane’s head and pushes it into his stomach. The cheer masters hop up and down, and the crowd roars.

  Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror. One of the little kids standing next to Miss Dovecott runs back to his father, a chemistry teacher, and lifts his arms to the sky, begging to be picked up. Miss Dovecott crosses her arms and hugs herself.

  Green Fields

  My new-boy year, to avoid the second pep rally because the first one was so scary, I snuck out of study hall one Friday night ten minutes before the bell rang and hid in the chapel until I knew it was over. I sat in the back of the room in study hall. Mr. Lyme, the proctor, could hardly see his own wrist-watch, not to mention what was happening where I was. I slid to the floor and crawled out. No one ratted on me. Other guys in study hall saw me do it and laughed, but they never turned me in, and Mr. Lyme, who was ancient, didn’t hear them, just as he didn’t hear me zip up my backpack and drop to the floor like I was escaping from an ambush. Which, of course, I was.

  Our World, the Sequel

  Last year, I played Would You Rather all the time on dorm. Now that Miss Dovecott has become a piece on the game board, it is much less funny.

  Basically, the game goes like this: you sit around in someone’s room with the door closed and offer up a scenario involving Birch School characters and/or movie stars. Sex is almost always involved.

  For example, Would you rather watch Mrs. Davido give a blow job to the Buddha or Mr. Lyme? The best answer in this case is “Neither,” but in the world of Would You Rather, that is not an option.

  I am with Joe Bonnin and Andy Hedron after the pep rally, before Lights-Out, when I have to be back in my room. Their room is so different from most guys’ rooms. That is to say, it is not wallpapered with posters of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. Joe owns one poster of Brooke Shields in her Calvins and two of the UNC basketball team, and Andy has got to be the only guy on campus with a poster of Audrey Hepburn à la Breakfast at Tiffany’s—very understated foxy.

  “Would You Rather?” Joe says.

  “Here we go,” says Andy.

  “Would you rather watch Miss Dovecott give a blow job to Gaybrook or Everson?”

  “Who cares about Gaybrook?” I say. “He’s gone.”

  “Gaybrook,” says Andy. “No way she could get him off. Hey, but I bet Everson could.”

  “Gaybrook,” I say, and nod.

  “I’m going with Everson,” says Joe. “He’d splooge in about two seconds.”

  “So would you,” Andy says.

  “Yeah, I know, but it’d be interesting because Everson can’t stand her.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, but I know exactly what he means.

  “He’s the only one in this whole school who doesn’t want to do her.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t like English,” I say.

  “She’s cool,” said Andy. “I’d definitely do her.”

  “Me too,” I say, but it’s not exactly what I mean. What I mean is, I would like to lie on a bed with her, her face an inch from mine.

  “Hey,” says Andy, “would you rather watch Mr. Olson or Reverend Black roasted alive over a slow-burning fire?”

  “Black,” Joe and I say in unison.

  “Juicier,” adds Joe.

  “Ballpark franks,” says Andy. “Plump when you cook ’em.”

  Hide-and-Seek

  Miss Dovecott finds me this morning at breakfast. I am sitting by myself at the head of a long table, cramming for my Latin test.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she says.

  I smile a closed-mouth smile to keep scrambled eggs from falling out.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  I nod.

  “Finish your breakfast,” she says. “I’ll be in my classroom.”

  But when I get to her classroom, Mr. Henley, the head of the English department, is there. They are looking at a sheet of paper that Miss Dovecott is holding in her hand. When I knock, they look up like they’re accusing me of something. Miss Dovecott comes to the door.

  “Alex,” she says, “we’ll have to talk later. But now that you’re here”—she holds up the paper in her hand, a photograph torn from a magazine—“do you happen to know anything about this?”

  I shake my head and say, “No.” Because I don’t.

  Better to Fail in Originality than Succeed in Imitation

  In class, Miss Dovecott holds it up to show us all. She explains that someone left the photograph of the naked woman on her desk. Across the glossy breasts, someone has drawn a picture of a very large penis with a typed caption: “Miss Dovecott and Moby’s Dick.”

  Everyone knows it’s her favorite novel; she talks about it all the time, saying how we should read it on our own, which of course none of us will. Miss Dovecott makes sure we have a very good look at the artwork before she sets it facedown on her desk. No one has confessed thus far, she says. She wants to know if we know anything about it. It’s embarrassing—we are embarrassed for her—and we look away. Truth be told, the picture could have been torn out of any of the hundreds of porn magazines stuffed under mattresses or stashed behind toilets all over campus. I glance at Glenn; he is staring straight ahead at nothing. He looks the way he looked when we gathered in the hall of our dorm last year and listened to Spalding Frazier break up with his girlfriend over the phone. I remembered thinking that Glenn, who also had a girlfriend at the time, would have handled a breakup differently: using the pay phone in the gym or writing the girl a letter. He would never have done it in public.

  All during English class, Miss Dovecott keeps her arms folded across the front of her white turtleneck sweater. I remember the first day she wore this sweater: September 22. (Is that the first official day of autumn? I can never get those equinoxes straight.) I wrote it in my notes for that day—“sweater”—which was a reminder for me down the road that I didn’t pay one bit of attention in class to what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The sweater makes her breasts look big. Today she looks the way I feel—which is to say that sometimes, I don’t know what to do or how to feel.

  I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 9:19 A.M.

  The Samuel E. Walter IV Memorial Library is my rock. My Rock of Gibraltar. If I go back to dorm with this book in my hands, there is nowhere I can hide it, nowhere where it won’t be found. I will be cut, cut to shreds, if anyone, especially Glenn, finds this. This is the hard part to put on paper.

  Rock, Paper, Scissors

  Glenn tells Thomas to watch closely, to jump and not dive, to be sure that he knows exactly how far he needs to sling his body to clear the shallows.

  After he comes up sputtering for air, Glenn yells up to us, “Double jump! I dare you!” I turn to Thomas, he turns to me. I am about to say, Maybe we shouldn�
��t, and then Glenn shouts again from the water.

  So I go, “Rock, Paper, Scissors”—the last words I ever speak to Thomas—and one, two, three, he holds out rock, I hold out paper. Thomas dives through the sky. I do not wait for him to surface before I jump.

  The sick thing is that after I go under, I pretend like I’m drowning. I pop up, flailing my arms, opening my mouth wide, making gasping noises. I’m not even looking at Thomas—or for him. I’m flopping around in the water. Over my own fake drama, I hear Glenn scream Thomas’s name.

  Right before Thomas dove, he said things.

  25. Before I even realize it, I jump, too. We all go into the river. See Dick and Jane go under. Jump, Dick. Jump, Jane. (If only I were writing a children’s book. If I were writing a children’s book, I’d be done by now.) But Thomas does not jump, he dives. Thomas enters the water headfirst.

  26. Thomas’s head finds a rock that is harder than his head.

  27. His lungs fill with water.

  28. Drown, Thomas, drown.

  A Rough Draft

  October 15, 1982

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Broughton,

  I have been wanting to write for a couple of weeks now, but I did not know exactly what to say or how to say it, so I have put it off. Now I realize that I will never know exactly what to say or how to say it.

  I am profoundly sorry for the loss of your son. He was a good friend to me, and I mean that. I wish I could have been the person who saved Thomas’s life that day, rather than a person who was with him when he died. It all happened so fast. I guess you know that the rock is now off-limits, and that is good because it is dangerous and we never should have jumped from it.

  People like to say that boys will be boys. But I have never liked that expression, because it sounds like an excuse. I have no excuse to offer you, just my heartfelt apology and my sympathy.