by Adam Rapp
After a pause, Corinthia says, “You don’t want to talk about the tornadoes.”
“You’ve made it abundantly clear that there are three of them,” Mr. Smock says. “A triumvirate.”
“They’re gonna pull the roof off the field house.”
“Corinthia . . .”
Lugo Memorial’s guidance counselor is clearly tiring of this absurd subject, not to mention Corinthia Bledsoe’s newfound maverick attitude.
“It’s going to wind up in Brainard,” she says, “in a half-harvested cornfield.”
“Do you realize how silly you sound?”
“And in the field house, there will be a cow at half-court,” Corinthia continues willfully. “Not a thing wrong with it. Like it’s been there its whole life.”
Everyone on the faculty is well aware of Corinthia Bledsoe’s various medical issues. The hypothyroid condition and blood sugar problems. The terrible shoulder acne and sore gums and the perpetually sweaty palms. The excruciating joint pain suffered as a freshman when she couldn’t get out of bed for two days and was prescribed an anti-inflammatory powerful enough to soothe an ailing racehorse. The various medications and their side effects: shortness of breath; wobbly balance (“Don’t Operate Machinery . . .”); nausea; the seemingly irreversible dehydration.
Despite these challenges, Corinthia has always been known to be polite, courteous to her peers, and especially so to the faculty and staff of Lugo Memorial.
Mr. Smock passes her a paper cone of water, the second one he’s given her, dispensed from his upside-down jug, which glugs like a creature with uneasy bowels. Corinthia downs the water and inadvertently crushes the paper cone into a piece of damp popcorn.
Entire faculty meetings have been called to discuss Lugo Memorial’s physically unique student’s special needs. At one such meeting, urged by the kindhearted choir director, Dolores Slenderschundt, it was decided that a special private bathroom should be built for Corinthia, approximately ten feet west of the normal girls’ second-floor bathroom, the thinking being that placing Corinthia’s bathroom there would split the difference of the three-story building, and in order to make use of it, she’d never have to negotiate more than a flight of stairs on those big ailing knees.
In terms of contractor specifications, her size would require more porcelain. The reason for a personal bathroom was that she’d already broken two toilets; the first episode occurred when Rinna Buss, the student council president and co-captain of the varsity cheerleading squad, was urinating discreetly, if not beautifully, when a tremendous crash occurred in the stall beside her. Rinna was the one who brought the delicate matter to Principal Margo Ticonderoga and her devoted vice principal, the soft-spoken, bowling pin – shaped Doogan Mejerus.
The broken toilet caused a flood in the girls’ bathroom from which Corinthia emerged as though she’d survived an epic shipwreck, soaked from head to toe, her cinnamon hair pasted to her broad, stunned face.
After breaking her second toilet, which happened on the final Thursday of her sophomore year, Corinthia carried the porcelain remains down the hall to the principal’s office as if it were an offering. To the few students loitering by their lockers, it looked like she was carrying an otherworldly candy dish.
At the final faculty meeting of the school year, thanks to Dolores Slenderschundt’s impassioned appeal to civic kindness, the faculty unanimously approved the private bathroom after a quick vote, and a local contractor from nearby Benton arrived three weeks into the summer break to complete its installation. It took nearly five days to get the project going because the custom toilet had to be made from a special ceramic-and-graphite arrangement, with a thicker porcelain and reinforced stainless-steel buttresses to support Corinthia Bledsoe’s considerable weight.
At one point, the facilities manager, Shoreland Splitz, had to interrupt Corinthia’s summer break and ask her to come back to school and sit in a large vat of chalk dust and then sit again on a retired, repurposed chalkboard so they could have a proper measurement for the toilet seat.
“Sit in that,” he said, clearly uncomfortable with the unusual request. “And then sit on that.”
Shoreland “The Lamp” Splitz, a tall, bony man with hands like hawk talons, had to help Corinthia out of the vat of chalk dust, and the action aggravated a hernia he’d suffered some years back. For the rest of the summer and into the first few weeks of the new school year, he had to wear his old, ill-fitting double-spring truss with scrotal pads.
With regard to Corinthia’s special toilet, the faculty took into account the sensitivity issue, God bless those benevolent adults, and decided to splurge for a soundless flushing mechanism, so that students passing by in the hallway wouldn’t be able to easily identify when their prodigious peer was partaking of the customized services.
Despite fire code regulations, Corinthia was given a key and the bathroom was outfitted with a simple, easy-to-turn bolt-action lock. Again, the faculty was willing to bend on certain student handbook matters.
Corinthia’s bathroom was never discussed with the Lugo Memorial student body, but when it (the bathroom) materialized, it was Facebooked, Instagrammed, Tweeted, Foursquared, WordPressed, Tumblred, Snapchatted, and so thoroughly digitally disseminated that it was as if pictures of Rinna Buss’s breasts had been leaked. And they (the student body, not Rinna Buss’s breasts) knew why and for whom the oversize latrine had been created, boy, oh boy, did they ever. How could they not? It came to be known as “The Rinth’s Rectal Recliner,” which Corinthia found to be discursively lazy, as neither her private toilet nor her personal rectum — a comparatively straight, terminal section of the intestine (as taught to her by Belinda Hnath, Lugo Memorial’s willowy, allergy-prone anatomy teacher) — cantilevers in any direction.
One sophomore boy, Jordan Sheehey, even posted a smartphone movie of himself washing his dog, Demetrius, a 117-pound black Lab, in Corinthia’s toilet. He’d planned with great care (miniature smartphone tripod and all), as he knew it would be all but impossible to sneak a dog of that size and unabashed enthusiasm into Lugo Memorial during normal hours. (As evidenced by the sudsy footage, Demetrius obviously loves getting baths.) How Jordan Sheehey got into the bathroom in the first place is anyone’s guess. The only other key in existence lives in a metal strongbox down in Shoreland Splitz’s office.
In any event, the first two years of high school haven’t, to put it mildly, been easy for Corinthia. She never seems to fit anywhere, meaning literally, a cruel facilities fact she has accepted with self-effacing grace and at times a mock-woeful sense of humor. And this difficulty has extended beyond the entryways and corridors of Lugo Memorial. Once, after receiving the standard-issue P.E. clothes from the girls’ phys. ed. instructor, Carla “The Human Birdbath” Snells, Corinthia — all seven feet four and a quarter inches of her — came bounding into the girls’ locker room theatrically head-banging and rocking an air guitar. Her extra-large shorts, which looked absurdly miniature on her frame, were riding so high they were practically thonglike. In order to span the width of her shoulders, her T-shirt was so stretched that the letters LUGO PHYS. ED were distorted into a blown-out Milky Way of unrecognizability. It was as if someone had forced an infant’s onesie onto some prehistoric infant pterodactyl.
Yes, these moments have endeared Corinthia to her peers, but the continuous ducking under doorways, the edging sideways through entrances, the twisting her neck to avoid lamps, projection screens, hanging 3-D mobiles of RNA/DNA helices, and the wooden dowels of anatomy charts, not to mention the five- to seven-part move of negotiating her legs under the cafeteria tables, has caused a scourge of knots to settle up and down her spine. She has walked into the third-floor clock three times. Once, its hard plastic facing came crashing to the marble floor and went spinning down the locker-lined corridor like a runaway hubcap.
Mr. Smock utters something inane about the unbearable humidity and the tenacity of this year’s mosquitoes and the upcoming standardized tests (Corint
hia will again be taking the SATs). He, of all people, knows about Corinthia’s medication, about the thyroid and blood sugar problems, about the crippling Osgood-Schlatters (oh, those awkward NFL knee braces she had to wear outside her pants during her entire freshman year!), inflamed arches, the awful bunion on the joint of her left toe, and the sudden waves of fatigue; how the faculty has had to be very forgiving of her occasional midclass nap. Despite his somewhat impenetrable demeanor, Lugo Memorial’s guidance counselor has mostly been a steady voice of understanding.
One faculty member, girls’ varsity basketball coach Wilbon Von Treese, has been less sensitive. When Corinthia wasn’t interested in trying out for the basketball team, he called her parents immediately.
“There could be a HUGE future in this for her.”
Corinthia could hear Coach Von Treese’s voice wheedling through the phone’s handset. Her father, Brill, listened politely, if not generously, rolling his eyes and smiling patiently at his daughter, who was lying on the kitchen floor with her knees tented and a phone book under her head (the “constructive rest” position intended to relieve lower back pain).
“Just HUGE,” Coach Von Treese squawked repeatedly, insensitive to the angst this particular four-letter word might cause the Bledsoe family. “HUGE, HUGE, HUGE!”
Mr. Smock polices a few sesame cookie crumbs from the surface of his desk, brushes them into a cupped hand, and disposes of them into the trash can below. He rubs his palms together in a slow, priestlike manner and asks if everything is okay at home.
Corinthia replies, “Everything at home is dandy, Mr. Smock.”
“Denton,” he corrects her, reminding her of their first-name-basis “friendship,” intended to transcend faculty-student formalities.
But the truth is that Lugo Memorial’s only guidance counselor doesn’t seem to exist beyond the four walls of his austere, eucalyptus-scented room. It’s as if the office itself willed him into existence. He’s rarely seen walking the halls. Oh, sure, he’ll occasionally show up at a boys’ basketball game or be clapping it up at the finish line of a cross-country meet, but these sightings are few and far between. Although he encourages the students to trust him — “You can tell me anything. You really can!” — few actually do.
One thing that can be said for Mr. Smock is that he exhibits admirable hygiene and style. He is so clean-shaven, his face appears to have been painted on with acrylics. He sports slightly-cooler-than-Clark-Kent-style-glasses, in that they’re the tiniest bit cat-eyed, as well as skinny rockabilly pants. And basically the most stylish black leather shoes in southern Illinois. They have two-inch soles and big brass buckles.
His iPhone case boasts a zebra-print pattern.
He’s as asexual as the stunted ceramic donkey featured in the annual Lugo Memorial holiday Nativity scene.
“Things at home are only ‘dandy’?”
Corinthia brings the pads of her index fingers to her temples, which are suddenly throbbing again.
“Dandy can also mean lonely. Or sad. Or difficult,” Mr. Smock adds, shoveling forth the clichés like clumps of steaming asphalt from the back of a truck.
He goes on to say something about how understanding everyone has been about Corinthia’s various medical and physiological issues during these past two school years and reassures her that he knows — or at least he thinks he knows (as surely he can only imagine it) — how difficult it must be for her to face them on a daily basis. Again, the voice contains about as much music as a newly installed refrigerator. Corinthia gets the sense that he’s ticking off some prescribed line of questioning he learned from a training manual.
“And now you’re a junior,” he adds. “One’s junior year can be a time to turn the corner. . . .”
What specific figurative corner is he referring to? Corinthia wonders. The social corner? The student-as-citizen corner? The corner of mentally sound behavior? The corner of college candidacy?
For some reason, Corinthia sees herself manning the popcorn wagon in Lugo Memorial’s Connie and Dillard Deet Field House, dressed like a toy soldier, a red wool parade uniform complete with yellow piping and bright brass buttons, a black egg-shaped bearskin hat atop her head, little balloons of rouge enlivening her cheeks. The legendary field house packed to capacity for a boys’ varsity basketball game, cheerleaders cartwheeling through the air like hairless cats flung by larger creatures.
The upside-down water jug gurgles.
The aquarium whispers and pulses with brain light.
Mr. Smock’s eyes twitch behind the lenses of his designer glasses. He opens his mouth as if to impart more wisdom, then closes it, then opens it and leaves it open. He has nothing left to say, she thinks. He’s finally run out of clichés. Corinthia notices a dull, chalky stripe down the center of his tongue and wonders if he sometimes keeps the clown fish in there as some perverse exercise in oral pleasure.
The air-conditioning system at Lugo Memorial — all those convoluted tin ducts and chutes — seems to be a thing that only makes noise, as there isn’t anything remotely cool issuing from it. In her American literature class, Corinthia sits under the terminal vent of one such duct. Sometimes she imagines she is basking in the breath of a great African lion — just her and a hundred-year-old jungle king with a colossal, radiant mane, lying together in the long grass, breathing each other in.
And then, just like that, the sweltering heat seems to be a thing that is coming from within Corinthia, a cauldron that bakes not only her body but also the landmark limestone school building, the pond of recently refinished asphalt ringing the flagpole, the stunted neighborhood cottonwoods, and the sad tar paper – shingled roofs crowning the mostly one-story homes that make up the town of Lugo; roofs that, once the tornadoes hit, will fly off toward Arkansas and Missouri and Kentucky like the wings of weakened blackbirds.
The sky will turn brown, green, yellow.
Confused crows will skitter across the ground like lost rickety men.
Dogs will scamper in circles, their faces crazed.
Cats will slink backward down the trunks of ancient sycamores.
Trees will lean away from the sky.
The air will grow as thick as maple.
After Corinthia had urged her fellow life sciences juniors to get to a safe place, in an effort to alert the rest of the school, she exited as fast as she possibly could, bursting through Mr. Sluba’s classroom door, literally rocking it off its hinges, and then went bounding from classroom to classroom like some wild-eyed WWE wrestler, pleading with teachers and students alike — “We MUST, we absolutely MUST get to a safe place!” — the words hissing through her teeth.
These deranged visitations included Linda Lister’s English class and Harden Mlsna’s calc II class and Pru Tenderloin’s European history class and Nola Heck-Burden’s sophomore speech, drama, and journalism class at the precise moment when senior ingenue Skyler “Don’t You Dare Call Me Sky!” Montreal was bringing the back of her perfect Virgin Mary hand to her finely concaved alabaster forehead while performing Desdemona’s final speech in Othello.
Corinthia didn’t have time to explain anything in detail; her objective was to use her enormous, masculine, often congested French horn of a voice to sound an alarm, to trigger nervous systems and make people MOVE.
She basically looked like a very large, crazy monster person.
It was a strangely uncomfortable scene when she had to be physically coerced by Coach Task, Mr. Hauser, and Doris Dabaduda, the head librarian with the thick varicose ankles and koala-bear eyes, who just so happened to be in the hallway. As they got Corinthia prostrate to the floor, Doris Dabaduda cried out like a creature caught in the jaws of a trap, having severely pulled her left hamstring.
The most disturbing moment, though, was when Coach Task had to deploy a full nelson and wound up riding Corinthia to the ground with his knee planted between her shoulder blades. He literally rode her like a bucking bronco or, say, a felled, mechanically failing alpaca fighting for i
ts final breaths in the Andes.
Coach Task couldn’t help imagining what an effective offensive lineman — or lineperson — Corinthia Bledsoe would make. Her great strength seemed most powerful when her hips were engaged. How incredible would it be if a girl started at left guard on the varsity football team! A girl! She would protect quarterback Drake Sirocco in a kind of mercenary maternal fashion, and Drake would have that much more time to survey his receivers and unleash a laser beam to Corinthia’s older brother, speedster wide receiver Channing “The Lugo Heat” Bledsoe, who would be jetting down the right sideline, sprinting the way only God can make sprinters sprint, and the ball would be caught just shy of the thickly padded goalpost stanchions like a loaf of freshly baked bread — it would seem that miraculously soft — and the band would strike up the chorus of some eighties pop song, likely the title track to a classic Sylvester Stallone movie, the brass and strings and woodwinds dulcet and beautiful, the timpani drum rolling out end-zone thunder, causing the reinforced aluminum bleachers to shudder and spasm, the cream-and-crimson pom-poms airborne and plump with halos of halogen stadium lights, this particular Friday night in Lugo delivered like a southern Illinois sacrament to all 4,208 of its citizens.
Even those who weren’t able to make it to the game — those less fortunate housebound few — would feel the tradition and beauty practically pollinating the air, and all would be gilded in the annals of Lugo Memorial gridiron legend.
Yearbook dedications would never be the same.
It wasn’t easy getting Corinthia facedown on the marble floor, especially while students were spilling into the hallway and trying to digitally capture the incident.
“Smartphones down!” Becky Lujack cried, doing her absolute darnedest to corral her freshman boys and girls back into her American Government and the Founding Fathers classroom.
Coach Task, in the later stages of middle age, is still strong as a blue-blooded ox and, post – full nelson, was forced to deploy some incapacitating judo involving Corinthia’s neck/shoulder relationship. Once he got her prostrate, he spoke to her in a direct but calming fashion, the same way a dog owner might admonish a misbehaving beloved German shepherd.
