But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 8:36 P.M.
Moby-Dick
How many years did it take Her-man to write this novel anyway? I still can’t get past the first chapter, its haunting sentences that won’t let me escape. No ocean in sight, no wind or wing to carry me into the sky, far, far away.
Double-Dick
This is what I tell Glenn he is when we are in the bathroom down the hall from Miss Dovecott’s classroom, after he has practically torn the sweatshirt off his body and handed it back to her on his way out the door. We stand at the urinals together, Glenn laughing at how I am so worked up over nothing. He knows, of course, that it is something, but there might be a person in the stall listening, so he plays it off like he’s pulled some juvenile prank that will be forgotten in two hours. But I am really mad at him—really mad. I am not pretending when I tell him that over the past five weeks, he has officially turned into an asshole of the highest order.
“Then look at what that makes you,” he says. “The Double-Dick’s best friend.”
The Barbarians
We do it under the cover of darkness. Our free periods don’t match up with hers on Fridays, so Glenn makes an appointment with Miss Dovecott in her classroom fifteen minutes before the start of study hall to go over a rough draft of an upcoming essay, which means I have fifteen minutes to get in and out of her apartment. At 7:15, I check into the infirmary with a stomachache at the exact time when Nurse Patty administers allergy shots to the guys who require them. She directs me to one of the patient rooms down the hall right by the stairwell and tells me she’ll be with me as soon as she can. I unzip my backpack and spread some books around on the cot. Then, with my flashlight tucked into my corduroys, I slip up the stairs to Miss Dovecott’s apartment, which, in keeping with the Birch School community of trust, is unlocked.
I am more nervous than I am before a race, which is pretty damn nervous. Her living room is small, like a nook in a library. I run the flashlight up and down the books on a tall case, where I find three notebooks of hers from college, but no diary. I even check behind the large books, the dictionaries and anthologies: nothing.
Into the inner sanctum, which smells like mothballs. I check my watch for the time and then see her watch sitting on her bedside table. It looks alien without her slender wrist attached to it. I pick it up, and I’m cradling it in my palm when I hear the heavy front door of the infirmary bang once, then bang again. The Allergy Cats are heading to study hall. I pull open the rickety drawer of the table—a hair ribbon, a wadded-up tissue, a tiny silver box, and something that looks like a dead mouse that I am not about to touch. No diary, no journal, no secret letters of confession, nothing. With my flashlight, I check under the bed, under the mattress. When I check under the pillows on her double bed, which I would like to lie down on, I find a photograph of Miss Dovecott in profile with her arms around a tall young man bending down to gaze into her eyes. Something in my stomach flips, and I put the photo back where I found it, but upside down, like my stomach. I find my way back to the door into the stairwell with her watch still curled in my hand.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2:10 P.M.
Green Fields
One Saturday last March, Glenn and I walked down to the rock together. Clay was already there, with a senior from the wrestling team; Clay had told Glenn the day before to come on down because they were going to catch a buzz and jump. A nice guy, the wrestler; the heavyweight that year. He was always eating doughnuts, in and out of season; today was no exception. He had brought, from the canteen, a tray of the little powdered ones, which must have tasted like shit with the vodka.
I took a couple of sips and spit when no one was looking. I was scared of it in combination with the rock (much more scared than I was a month ago when the vodka was well at home in my bloodstream). I had been down to the river the day before to study the space between the rock and the water—thirty feet, maybe, like if you were standing on the roof of a three-story building. I had gotten very little sleep. I kept waking myself up from dreams of me falling, falling so deep into the water that I couldn’t get back to the air.
We talked about how what we were doing was experimenting, just experimenting with fear. The heavyweight and I tried to laugh about how stupid it would sound to guys back at our old schools, like a club with an initiation, which was very third-grade. Glenn and Clay had jumped from it, stone-cold sober, the week before.
The wrestler told us about his twelve-year-old sister back in Kentucky. During spring break when he was home, she had a slumber party where the game of Truth or Dare turned into one big orgy. One of the girls had already developed breasts, and she took off her shirt. Some of the girls weren’t even wearing bras yet, but they all took turns kissing the early bloomer. “How do you know all this?” I asked the guy. “Sharon told me,” he said, simple as that, and I was never sure whether Sharon was his sister or the girl with the breasts.
I had heard before that girls practice kissing with one another so that they know what they’re doing when a boy kisses them for real. But I kept my mouth shut about it because that day, on the way down to the rock, Glenn had tried to kiss me. He had tripped and fallen, and when I’d pulled him back up, he’d pushed his lips onto mine. Then he’d tried to play it off like he had just stumbled into my face.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 9:32 P.M.
DNA
Mr. Parkes preaches tonight because Reverend Black has laryngitis, and it is the best sermon I have ever heard. “There is God in all of us,” he says. “God is programmed into our DNA, so He’s there under our skin, biologically there, to connect us to a force larger than ourselves. It’s what makes me feel not so alone in this world, as if inside of me is a seed, and if I nurture that seed, I can become my best far-reaching self.” This is the first time that God has made sense to me, and I am writing it down so I won’t forget it.
There is so much that I will forget. You think you’ll remember every single thing about your life, but you won’t. The morning after I entered the inner sanctum, a watchless Miss Dovecott had us make a list of images that were still in our heads from elementary school. It surprised me, how I couldn’t recall the name of my second-grade teacher or what the cafeteria smelled like.
What I wrote down was a walk I took with my father one Christmas. It was snowing, a veil of white in front of us. My dad saw it first, grabbed my arm, and pointed at the buck, majestic, ten points at least. The buck was so still that everything around him seemed to be moving, even the trunks of the trees. I felt I’d been turned inside out, I felt the peak of happiness and the chasm of sadness. For the first time in my life, I sensed that I was growing older.
The other guys do not see what Miss Dovecott is doing for us. They do not see how she is working by degrees to get us back to a time when our minds were freer, more connected to the world around us. More connected to what was programmed inside our DNA, just like Mr. Parkes said. I wonder if homosexuality is programmed there, too. Reverend Black says no, it’s a choice. But if given the option, why would anyone choose that? I bet Mr. Parkes thinks what I think, that some guys are born that way, just like some guys are born with the gene for green eyes or stubby thumbs.
Before we are dismissed from chapel, Dean Mansfield takes the pulpit from Mr. Parkes for a special announcement. Miss Dovecott can’t find her watch, which is of great sentimental value, so if anyone has seen it, please stay after for just a moment. Glenn, whose advisory group sits three rows in front of me, tilts his head ever so slightly in my direction.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 10:05 P.M.
Study Hall
No letter in my mailbox from Thomas’s parents, but I do get a study hall summons. I failed a math test, which means that I’m assigned to proctored study hall until I pass the next one. Mandatory study for two and a half hours five nights a week in a room with forty other f
ailures. Once a week, Miss Dovecott proctors. This week, it’s Monday. Normally I’d be chomping at the bit for the chance to gaze at her for hours, but I am uneasy for reasons too obvious to state. I try to focus, biting my pencil as I work trigonometry problems. When I look up for a sneak peak, she is watching Neddy Sanderling, a new-boy goofball who has stuck two pencils up his nose, one for each nostril. Instead of telling him out loud to stop, she rises from her desk at the front of the room, and the senior sitting to Neddy’s right notices, leans over, and punches him on the shoulder.
Then a guy sitting next to me—a football player named Aaron Botley—asks me in a whisper if he can borrow my math book, which I am using. I shake my head, and he asks me again. I shake my head more violently this time and turn away, at which point he grabs my notebook, without permission, without eye contact, and rips a blank sheet of paper out of it. I blink, but my shoulders do not move, and it is these seconds, this fleeting glimpse that Miss Dovecott could have so easily missed, that encapsulate who I am.
If I were a character in a novel, I would be half of a metaphor: in this world, some people are takers and some people allow themselves to be taken. The world, in the form of Aaron Botley, is stealing my innocence, piece by piece. What Miss Dovecott sees is the fact that I am a person who can be pushed beyond the normal limits of pushing.
But I could have stopped Aaron. She could have stopped Aaron. All she says to me after the bell rings to dismiss us is this: “I know you have a lot on your mind, Alex. That’s what your poems are for, spaces to say those things.”
I should have told her right then; I should have handed her my whole heart because she was the one who helped me to unfold it, to respect its knowledge and power—the part of the body that keeps every other part alive. I should have put my head in my hands and bawled like a baby, dropped to my knees and confessed that I’d signed on as a double agent, confessed that I’d stolen the watch, confessed, confessed, confessed. As I have done thousands of times, I swallow my gut reaction. I swallow who I am.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 7:27 P.M.
The Barbarians
Still no letter. When Glenn stops by my room before seated dinner tonight, he asks me for the fiftieth time where I’ve hidden the watch. I tell him yet again that I don’t have it, just as I told him that I didn’t find a diary in Miss Dovecott’s apartment. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t care. If I were a teacher here and kept a diary, I would say, Screw the Birch School Community of Trust; I would keep it in the locked glove compartment of my car, not lying around for Barbarians to find.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 7:20 P.M.
The Artists
In class, my pen is flying. I have to make it stop, slow down. I sense that she has assigned this in-class essay just for the artist in me. Miss Dovecott turns up the volume on the tape player, and I close my eyes, catching Mozart’s bass line and following it as it pulses under the melody. She has told us that composers, like novelists, hide whole stories beneath the dazzle. When I open my eyes, I look around at my classmates’ faces to see if I can pretend I’ve never seen them before, and I almost can. They are good-looking, all of them. A pimple here, a blackhead there, but no scar to be found, as if they’ve outgrown everything bad they’ve ever done.
Glenn hasn’t written a word; he is staring at a blank sheet of paper. But, as Miss Dovecott has shown me, I work best when I jump right in and swim my way to an understanding. The curve of our necks as we bend forward to write strikes me as primordial, primeval. This is the forest primeval: what poem is that from? I have heard it before. Primeval. Prime evil.
I keep writing. I am the last one in the room. I can hear the next class waiting in the hall.
“Finished,” I announce, smiling at Miss Dovecott, and in one single sweep, I scoop up my backpack and coat. As I reach my hand out across the desk to give her the essay, her fingers brush mine. She feels it, too, the shock, and our eyes brighten at the electricity. Skin holds a knowledge all its own. I am not exactly sure what grace is, but I think this moment might be something very close to it.
But moments of grace are fleeting. Glenn stops by my room on his way to football practice to tell me that Miss Dovecott assigned us the in-class essay to try to ferret out the guy who stole her watch. “She’s sneaky,” he says. “She’ll read into those things like there’s no tomorrow. And you know what, Stromm? For her there might not be. Don’t forget The Plan.”
“Get the fck out of my room,” I say, and he does.
(I am leaving space here to copy my response to the prompt Miss Dovecott gave us, once I get it back from her.)
My Response
I’m not going to write about the Honor Code at this school. We all know what that is; it has been drummed into our heads since before we even arrived here. I’m going to write about what I think honor really is, which is something this school never discusses.
Honor is truth. Truth has many meanings, but it first means that you have to be true to yourself. It is hard to be true to yourself because it is hard to be yourself. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those things that I struggle with all my life, like religion. I bet some people go through their whole lives living someone else’s life. It’s hard to put into words what I’m trying to say, but if it takes a lifetime to form your identity and arrive at the truth of who you are, then haven’t you, in some sense, been living a lie?
How do you ever know who you really are, when your society and world teach you to hide? You hide things every day, most of all your feelings, but you are conditioned to, especially if you are a boy. I remember the day when you asked us to write about the concealing paint that we wore at pep rallies that liberated us into our savagery. Well, this reminds me of that because we are taught to wear masks that hide our true selves, which have the capacity for evil.
It’s the question philosophers have debated for centuries: is man basically good or basically evil? If we really want to be honest with ourselves—that is to say, if we really want to be honorable—then the truth here is that we all have a little God inside of us—God did make us in His image, like the Bible says—but we also have evil, a little Satan inside of us, too. And that is a scary thought. I’ve done some bad things in my life, some very bad things, and the worst one is the one I think you know, which I have never admitted to anyone, and hardly even to myself: my friend was unconscious in the river while I was goofing around. Valuable seconds were wasted—I wasted valuable seconds, first in the water and then when I was running. But I got scared, I panicked. I crouched at the base of a tree for a moment or two to get a grip on myself. Maybe my friend was still alive then, maybe he was. If he was, then it was no one’s fault but mine that he died.
What’s hard for me is that a few people in this world, including you and my dad, think I’m this decent guy. But I have dark places inside of me. I have seen things that I can never describe, things so black that the person I was before has disappeared. If I’m to live an honest life, then I’m going to have to acknowledge that the darkest holes in my heart and my soul have truth to them, too. (I’m running out of time here, and I know this is very disorganized, so it’s okay if I don’t get a good grade because it’s not a good piece of writing. But at least it’s honest, and it’s what I really do think.)
Here is an artist. He desires to paint the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley. Yes, this is how I see it play out: like a knight, in defense of Miss Dovecott, I will beat up Glenn for the things he is doing to her; I will finally have it out with him, and the school will have to dismiss me for “conduct unbecoming of a Birch student,” but everyone will know that it was actually honorable behavior, the age-old code of chivalry. Then, Miss Dovecott will be so grateful and so much in love with me that she will welcome me into her life with open arms, filling me with her inspiration so that I don’t waste away in public high school. My dad will find a good woman, too—we’ll double-date in Asheville, going to concerts and fore
ign films and poetry readings—and he will eventually get over the disgrace of my dismissal.
Bad Monkey
And she will understand why I snuck into the inner sanctum, looking for proof. And she will understand why I took her watch, which I slide onto my wrist every night before I go to bed. I lie on my back, let everything go quiet, and breathe in rhythm with the ticking. With her watch on my skin, it’s like she’s touching me, not me touching myself. In the mornings before I take a shower, I tuck the watch into the stuffing of my pillow, where I’ve cut a slit in the lining just wide enough for my fingers.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 7:15 P.M.
Field Trip
When Miss Dovecott walks into her classroom, I can hardly look at her without a sweet pain tightening my stomach, without a surge of adrenaline through my blood. Has she read our essays yet? She doesn’t hand them back first thing as she usually does; instead, she reads us the announcements. Today is Bailey Richards’s birthday, and he runs with it.
“Please, Miss Dovecott, don’t give us a quiz,” he says. “This is definitely not a quiz day.”
“Yeah,” says Joe Bonnin. “That stuff we had to read last night was impossible.”
“Well, tell me what you understood, and if you can do that, we’ll forgo the quiz.”
“Forgo?” asks Bailey. “Does that mean that we’re having one at the end of the period?”
“Alex,” says Joe, “you tell her.”
“Joe,” says Miss Dovecott, “I asked you.”
After Joe flips his notebook open, he says, “I think I might have left the handout in my room.”
“Okay, then. Just tell me what you remember.”
Bailey and a couple of other guys start laughing because we all know that even if he did do the work, he won’t remember. Like a bunch of other Birch students, Joe’s a legacy, which means he can be as dumb as he wants.
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