Behind Moby-Dick, Is Male will hide his no-longer-blank pages until the time is right. Who cares about white whales in this day and age? No one will find Is Male here with his title-less book. The title is the writer’s stamp of approval, and Is Male does not approve. Truth fights for air, and when it finds air, Is Male the Liar is going down.
Masterpiece, Timepiece
After I stop shaking, after I go to the library and write and put my journal back in its hiding place, I find Glenn in his room. I have Clay’s Bible with me, the one he left behind, and when I ask Glenn to place his right hand on it, he does not argue.
“I swear to God that I put my hand on Thomas’s face to see if I could feel breath on my palm,” Glenn says calmly. “I felt nothing because Thomas was dead.” He hands the Bible back to me, and his eyes are so pale that I can see right through them. “What Miss Dovecott saw, she misread. It happens.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”
“You still have her watch?”
“Yeah,” I say, “I still have it.”
“Keep it,” says Glenn. “We’re not going to need it.”
The Way Boys Read
by Alexander No Middle Name Stromm
There’s nothing pretty about it:
they’ll claim a book,
brand nicknames to all three sides
as if the book might lose itself in tall grass
or wander, dumb as a cow.
The bookmark? A slice
to the top of the page, unthinking
as a kick to a rock on a dirt road.
And some so quick to break the spine,
the way they’ve broken girls
with too few words, or with false ones.
If the book is large,
it can be laid flat on a desk
so a boy wouldn’t even have to touch it,
just lift a finger to flip a page, halfheartedly,
like signaling a truck to dump its load.
I ask Miss Dovecott to take a walk with me during lunch, via an invitation scribbled on the back of the poem that I slide under her apartment door. It is time to make my move. This poem is my masterpiece. This one has a title because I approve of its coldhearted truth.
The Way Boys Read
We meet at the head of the running trail. “I liked the poem, Alex,” she says. “It may be your best yet.”
“It’s dark, like me.”
“The speaker of the poem and the poet don’t have to be one and the same.”
And over the hill we go, into the woods.
“I know,” I say. “You’ve taught me that. You’ve taught me a lot.”
There is no one running this time of day. We have the trail to ourselves. Everyone else on campus is feeding themselves. I have to keep the conversation going until we get there, until we get to the place where this is going to happen. But, really, I don’t want to talk. I want to throw her down on a bed of leaves and make my mark.
“That’s good, Alex. I’m glad. Knowledge is always a silver lining.”
I read between the lines of her words, finding justification for what I am about to do. “Speaking of that,” I tell her, “we never talked about In Our Time.” I read the CliffsNotes, not the book, renting them out for a dollar an hour from a future entrepreneur who runs a business out of his dorm room.
“But I thought you couldn’t find it in the library,” she says.
“Someone had it checked out,” I say, “but he returned it.”
“So tell me about Nick Adams,” she says.
“It’s kind of a complicated book, but I guess maybe Hemingway was saying that even after war, there is morality that gives life meaning. After all of that destruction, the purity of the heart still remains. Do you think that was what he was trying to say?”
“I think that’s exactly what he was trying to say. I’m impressed.”
“The story ‘Indian Camp,’ that takes place before Nick goes to war, the end of it. It’s one of the most perfect things I’ve ever read.”
“Remind me. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten.”
“There’s that description of Nick and his father in the boat, the father rowing, the son at the stern, and the sun rising over the hills. Nick lets his hand skim across the water. The morning is cool, but the water is warm.”
“Ah, yes.” She smiles.
“I memorized the last sentence. ‘In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.’ ”
“Yes.” She nods. “Yes.”
“It’s what we all think: that we will never die.”
She touches my arm with a gentle hand. “But of course we do. It’s the one universal experience, other than birth, that we all share.”
It is the moment I knew would arrive, when we look at each other and understand ourselves as equals on the same playing field. Her eyes are wider than I have ever seen them. “Oh, Alex,” she whispers, shaking her head, and already, the tears are in her throat. “You will recover from this. You will. Someday.”
She takes a step back, leaves rustling for a second, and then, silence in the woods, the loud sound of silence. She is floating away from me, like fog. Because of the tears, she can’t see where she’s going; there is a large branch fallen across the path, and just as she is about to stumble over it, I dash over, grab her arms, and pull her back toward me. It is all so unreal, fast and slow at the same time, and so strange that I am able, in a moment, to balance and unbalance her.
In a way it feels like the most natural thing in the world when it happens, even though it is planned, even though Glenn is crouched nearby, watching. With my hands on her arms, I draw her into me and keep her there until I have memorized the smell of her hair (pine bark), the scratchiness of her coat (tweed), the heat of her hand on my spine (like a fever). Her own spine is bony, as delicate as a bird’s, and when I feel it straighten, I bow to her face and kiss her.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 7:19 P.M.
Green Fields Gone
Her lips were cold. That surprised me. If I said that she kissed me back, you’d be within your rights to doubt me, but she did. A full kiss, a long one, until she pushed me away with her thin arms, pushed me away, once and for all, which was exactly what I deserved. I flicked a glance at Glenn, whose bottom lip had dropped open in either shock or victory, it was impossible to read. Fear rammed its way into my heart, and this time, I did run as fast as I could. I sprinted up to campus, to the infirmary, and checked myself in for a real-life upset stomach.
Lying there on the bed with the smell of her, the feel of her, all of her words in my head, I felt like the teacher, the one who knew everything. I thought about calling my father to ask him to come get me, to take me skiing, to take me anywhere, but I didn’t want to have to explain. Instead I spent a very long, very lonely Saturday night wondering if the minute had already passed in which Miss Dovecott had started to hate me.
On Sunday, Miss Dovecott was gone. It was all done quietly, her resignation, after Glenn went to Dean Mansfield and told him that he just happened to be running the trail when he saw Miss Dovecott kissing me, a fact that I had to confirm in Mr. Armstrong’s office, first with the Headmaster and Mr. Parkes, my advisor, and then over the phone with my father.
So many stories come full circle, and this one does, too: I spent an hour waiting on that bench in the outer hall, waiting once again to have my fate handed down to me. I had lied, yes, but only Miss Dovecott knew that for sure, and what I had stolen was metaphorical, not concrete like a can of Coke. And there was nothing in the rule book about students kissing faculty or faculty kissing students. What could they do to me when she was the one who’d initiated it?
Miss Dovecott didn’t rat me out for drinking at the scene of the accident. Nor did she rat me out for cheating at hide-and-seek. I had chickened out and hid too close to base, so close that she could never have tagged me. No, she didn’t rat me out for anything. Gl
enn said with a shit-eating smirk that it was because people who live in glass houses know better than to throw stones at their own windows, but I’m not so sure. I would like to believe, in my heart of hearts, that it was selflessness. Miss Dovecott knew for a fact that she’d be fine out there in the real world but that I wouldn’t be. She had tried her best to prepare me, but I had offered her irrefutable proof that I wasn’t ready for it yet. And so, unselfishly, she let me stay. And selflessness is a kind of love.
But she probably hated me, too. An announcement was made at a special assembly that afternoon that Miss Dovecott had to leave before the year was out because of an illness in her family and that, starting Monday, Mr. McGreavey’s wife would take over as our teacher.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 7:05 A.M.
Rock
Yesterday was the worst day. The letter I’d been dreading for a month was in my mailbox, which I discovered on my way to track practice. I hurried back to my room to open it in private. You would not believe how violently I was shaking. A folded sheet of monogrammed paper had been signed not only by Thomas’s parents, but also by his little brother, Trenton, who had, it appeared, just learned how to write in cursive. That upset me more than anything else, that little wobbly signature.
It was a heartfelt reply, sympathizing with me for having lost a friend and thanking me for being one. They actually apologized for not being able to write sooner. The postscript did its best to abdicate me of any responsibility: The last thing in the world we want is for you to feel that you could have somehow saved our son. Which was, of course, exactly how I did feel, how I should feel. I laid my head on my desk for hours on end, through track practice, which I skipped and got major demerits for, through the dinner bell and Lights-Out, through what I can without a doubt call, with Robert Frost accuracy, the “darkest evening of the year.”
I thought back to the essay that first put me on Miss Dovecott’s radar. The last paragraph, like the last sentence of Hemingway’s story, I remembered by heart: What I carry in my backpack down to the river, I carry not knowing that in less than an hour Thomas Broughton will be dead. That is not a knowledge I carry yet, but I will carry it soon—the knowledge of my darkest self—and I will carry it forever.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 9:52 P.M.
Paper Covers Rock
Back from Thanksgiving break, and it’s still here, as I knew it would be: my trusty journal, safe behind a whale of a tale that was last checked out in 1964 by Mr. Henley, who has been the head of the English department for a quarter of a century. I have just finished my English essay for tomorrow (yes, the English department gives us homework over Thanksgiving break—thanks, Mr. Henley), so this is it, my last entry, one more attempt to commit the truth to paper. It has not been easy. I have a newfound respect for Mr. Melville, and one day, maybe, I will actually read Moby-Dick in its entirety. One day, maybe, I will give this journal back to my dad. But for now, this is where my story belongs until it is time for me to leave this place.
What I record here on the final blank pages of my journal, my confession, my collection of poetry, my collection of guilt, my Not-So-Great American Novel, is this: I am surprised that Miss Dovecott—whose name I have changed (like all names in this whatever-you-want-to-call-it) to protect the innocent—did not mark through the word “forever.” She left it hanging there, untainted by red ink. “Forever,” a fairy-tale adverb that in some stories spins its magic. And in other stories, like mine, the word stretches itself as thin as a life line. A word burdened with both history and future.
In the end—that is, earlier today—I did talk to Mr. Parkes, mostly because he made me. He wanted to assure me that he and Glenn’s advisor were the only faculty members other than Dean Mansfield and Mr. Armstrong who knew what had happened between me and Miss Dovecott. Even though they had debated kicking me out for conduct unbecoming of a Birch student, Mr. Parkes had stood up for me, telling them he thought I had gotten myself caught between a rock and a hard place.
He told me now that he wasn’t disappointed in me, and though he never said that he was disappointed in Miss Dovecott, his colleague, I knew he was. In an attempt to make me feel better, he shared bits and pieces from the conversations he had had with her about me, but they only made me feel worse.
Miss Dovecott had admired me for my strength, he said, for the ways that I was learning to know, accept, and heal myself. More than any other student, I had given her hope in what she was doing; because of me, she wasn’t teaching to the walls or the air; someone was listening and trying. Someone was aware that through careful arrangements of words, order could be made from chaos. Mr. Parkes even told me that it had given her chills when I’d told her that a poem had come to me while riding the bus back to Birch from a crosscountry meet and I hadn’t had any paper so I’d written it on the back of a McDonald’s napkin in the dark. “You have to stop and freeze the moment,” he told me I had told her. “You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.”
When I asked Mr. Parkes why Miss Dovecott had told him all of this, he said there seemed to have been some sort of unspoken vow of solidarity between the two of them to keep tabs on me after Thomas had died. But I wonder if she’d needed Mr. Parkes to keep her in check. In the course of my conversation with Mr. Parkes, her offer to take me to Italy never came up, though maybe it wasn’t really an offer. Maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part. Maybe Miss Dovecott in general was wishful thinking on my part. I mean, it’s all here—in writing—but as we know by now, stories collide.
In Miss Dovecott’s eyes, I was a man among boys: I was a patient student, a patient athlete (I guess she’d gotten that from Mr. Wellfleet), and she’d watched the way I waited tables in the dining hall, never hurried or half-assed. She had observed me eating: I had “elegant” table manners, apparently, and a curious way of bringing my lips to the glass, as if I were a baby bird feeding from its mother. Mr. Parkes said that I was, like Miss Dovecott, an only child, and I will always wonder if there wasn’t a dose of narcissism in why she chose me. But I made my English teacher a promise, and even though my faithful reader was no longer here, it was a promise I would keep. It was how I would survive the wreck, after the drama was done.
Mr. Parkes requested that I report to his apartment once a week for hot chocolate and conversation, and once he dismissed me, and with Miss Dovecott’s watch in my pocket, I walked to the rock to wait for Glenn. In an hour, we would pay our tribute to Thomas two months after his death. On the bank where he died, we would dig a hole just big enough for the watch and bury it so deep that it would take at least a lifetime for the water to wash it clear. All the rest of my lifetime, without Thomas or Miss Dovecott in it. I knew, standing there, that if Glenn were to ask me to room with him next year, I would say no. But I was pretty sure he wouldn’t ask. The burial would mark the end of a lot of things.
When I reached the rock, I climbed up on it. So what if I was breaking a rule? I had broken so many that rules ceased to hold meaning. It was cold, but the sky was blue and clear, the sun so bright that I had to put my hand up as a visor. And then I did something that human beings aren’t supposed to do: I stared at the sun without blinking and didn’t close my eyes until they burned so hard I couldn’t stand it. I opened them to a strange blindness, as if seeing had now become hearing. The water tripped by, but I could still think, I could still understand. Flattening my back onto the cold stone, I took deep breaths and let the sun trace, like chalk at a crime scene, the outline of my body.
Acknowledgments
It does indeed take a village. I would like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to
Kathi Appelt, my guardian angel, for her impressive wingspan.
Jonathan Lyons, my invaluable agent, for giving my voice a voice.
Michelle Poploff, my editor, for settling on me and then not settling.
Rebecca Short, editorial assistant, for her sharp, young eyes.
Ben Hale and Ted Blain, for investing their wisdom in my words.
Sally Hawn, my sister and first reader always.
My sister Leigh Hubbard and my brother-in-law Andy Evans, best possible audience for my boarding-school stories.
Jayne and Joel Hubbard, for reading to me before I knew how.
Steve Cobb, for so much in my life that is good and true.
About the Author
Jenny Hubbard taught high school and college English for seventeen years. She now writes full-time in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, a high school math teacher. Learn more at papercoversrock.co and on Facebook.
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