Educating Simon (15 page)

He gave me a wry grin. “Homework, and on the first day.” He stepped over and gave me a quick hug. “Get up there, then.” I looked at the bowl in the sink, the one I was told I'd have to wash. “Will you
go?”
And he pushed my shoulder.

As I sat at my PC to do a little online research for the biology assignment, I realised I'd been so preoccupied with Toby's situation that I'd almost forgotten about Tink's photos, and I hadn't gotten a thank-you off to Margaret. She was certainly asleep, now, so I wrote that I'd had an insane first day of school, and that the pics of Tink had made the whole day so much brighter. I told her she can't possibly send too many.

The research for biology was to see what might inspire me to do a paper, because I need to turn in a general outline for a project tomorrow. But thinking of cats brought La La to mind—La La with her genetic cartilage weakness that puzzled geneticists for so long. I decided that would be a great project. We don't have to come up with any new findings, just something unusual to research and report on. My title will be, “The Genetic Mutations of Scottish Fold Felines.” It's almost a tribute to Tink, who is a British shorthair, after all, like the original fold. And even I think it's a little cool that the solution arose so close to Boston.

Getting ready for bed, my mind turned again towards Toby's predicament. For it must be a real predicament to be a girl trapped in a boy's body. I hate to admit it, but Ned had been right to call me on the carpet.

To see if I could get a sense of what Toby feels like, I tried to picture myself in a girl's body, but I couldn't get there; my thoughts slipped away as though I'd tried to catch a fish with my hands in oily water, and my body shivered—almost convulsed—involuntarily.

So I'll just accept what Toby has told me and not try to puzzle it out. And, really, this is not my problem. I can't allow this distraction too far into my mind or it could jeopardise my own priorities. To push this profoundly uncomfortable feeling away, I'll make sure that before I go to sleep, Graeme reminds me quite thoroughly who I am.

This idea of writing something every day is just not going to work. I have to spend way too much time on schoolwork if I'm going to apply to Oxford (which I've decided I will do, though I'll also apply to a few other places). But I don't want to lose this thread, so I'll recap a little.

Saturday I told Mum and Brian over breakfast about my coaching assignment. I played it down as much as possible and made it sound like the task would be beyond simple for me so they wouldn't be tempted to interrogate me about it later. Mum was interested in the family, but of course I didn't have much information to give her. Instead, I described the home and, getting a certain unholy pleasure from it, the cat.

Classes are pretty much what I'd expected. My biology project was approved, so that will be kind of fun, and it will let me dive into cats—always a good thing.

My weekly consultation with Dr. Metcalf is Fridays at two, and last Friday he pretty much won me over, in terms of how our relationship will work. He said nothing that reminded me of how I'd run from his office the last time I was there; he simply asked how it had gone with Toby, and he approved of my approach.

I didn't tell him Toby is a she. It didn't seem like something he needed to know—at least, not at this point. Though when I left his office, I did feel as though I could talk to him about it in the future if things got . . . I don't know, awkward, or difficult, something like that.

I almost forgot to look up the significance of the cartoon man on the CharlieCard, which would have been bad because Dr. Osgood did
not
forget, and I acquitted myself well enough, explaining to the class on Tuesday that it refers to a satirical song about a political issue in the mid-twentieth century. The song says the fares were raised whilst this fellow was riding the subway, and he didn't have the money to pay the extra when he tried to get off. Now “he rides forever 'neath the streets of Boston.” He'll never be able to return home.

As I took my seat again, some nasty voice in my brain told me I would be the man who never returned to England. I didn't have time to dwell on that, because first Dr. Osgood used that story as a demonstration about what drives the development of a city, and then she herded us all out for our Freedom Trail tour.

I managed to avoid getting stuck walking with any one person for too long. I took photos with my iPhone of places that might be relevant to future assignments. Maddy kept trying to insert herself into my shots. “The redhead shooting the redhead!” as she put it. Irritating girl.

I liked the walking tour of Beacon Hill. Louisburg Square seemed very genteel and civilised, almost Parisian, and I decided that if I had to live in Boston, that's where it would be. But that isn't about to happen.

 

Thursday, back at Toby's, I had done some preparation. I knew, for example, that only one Massachusetts speller had ever won the competition, and that was way back in 1939. And I had scads of words, though I hadn't had time to make note of the etymology of them, knowing his dictionary would provide that.

“Chionablepsia,” I threw at him. He got it. “Capharnaum.” He got that. “Projicient.” Another one down. But he put two
l
s into
phalarope
and put an
a
instead of an
o
in the middle of
sciophyte,
which really was not a mistake he should have made, so it was a very good one for me to have chosen. We went over it thoroughly until he understood the reasons for the spelling, inside and out.

“Excellent!” he said. “This is fabulous! You found some great words.” I had thought I'd found rather a lot of great words, but he knew so many of them that I realised I'd have to put even more effort into it.

During our break (iced tea this time), he chatted on about things that had happened at school until Colleen disappeared. Then Toby leaned towards me and whispered, “Kay.” He sat back and grinned at me.

At first I thought he was shortening “okay,” but I couldn't imagine what he was referring to. Then it came to me. “That's your name, is it?”

He nodded. “In Welsh, it means ‘rejoiced in.' Actually, it might be given to a girl
or
a boy. My last name is Welsh, you know.”

“Yes.” My tone indicated ambiguity at worst, I hoped.

He squealed with delight. “Oh, you sound so British, the way you say that!”

“English,” I corrected. “I sounded English.” Which prompted him to ask me lots of questions about what Great Britain comprises, how it differs from the United Kingdom, the British Isles, the British Islands, and Ireland, all of which cost me a good deal of effort to avoid sounding disparaging of the non-English parts, especially Wales and all things Welsh.

Finally I suggested we resume our work. As we left the table I asked, “How many dictionary pages have you been reading per day?”

“Ooh, good question to ask me. Keep the standard high. Sixty-five!”

“And do you think you'll be ready for the regional competition in March?”

“I have to be. And then I have to get at least to the semifinals.”

“The semifinals? Not the
finals?
Don't you want to
win?”

He closed his bedroom door quietly, and as I took my chair he said, “I do want to win. Of course. But the semifinal event is the first time there are cameras on us, on stage. What I really, truly want is to be able to be me, the real me, for all the world. I'll show you.”

He disappeared behind me, poked in the clothes cupboard where I couldn't see him, and when he came into view again he was transformed. His dark hair was brushed up into a fluffier shape, and he was wearing a white blouse with soft ruffles for a collar and a pale rose-coloured skirt. His face beamed. And I was in the presence of Miss Kay Lloyd.

“You have been dying to show this to someone, haven't you, Kay?”

He practically threw himself at me, and as I stood to make the embrace less awkward I felt his body shaking. He was crying, though I couldn't tell whether it was from joy or pain.

He backed away, wiping at his eyes. “Thank you,” he managed through little gasps, “for calling me that.” He held his head up. “This is who I am. Only
you
know the truth.”

“This might seem obvious, but—do you want to be referred to as he or she?”

We locked eyes whilst he considered this carefully. Then he said, “It would mean you'd be talking to someone
about
me, wouldn't it? You wouldn't use those pronouns talking
to
me.”

I nodded, not quite sure I wanted to tell him I was committing all this to a written journal, and that that was the main reason for my question. “I guess that's right.”

“Then I guess it has to be ‘he.' ” He sat hard onto the desk chair. “But I
am
a she. And now that I've told someone, I don't know how I'll be able to go back to being a boy again!”

“Why don't you just be a boy except when we're alone, like you've been doing?”

“Because I want to
be
who I
am!
” He looked like he was about to cry again, for a very different reason this time. “But I guess I don't have a choice.”

From the other room came the sound of a man's voice, and I saw Kay shrink noticeably. Head down, Toby looked at me from under his eyebrows. “That's Father.”

“You call him Father?” He nodded. I had to ask: “Are you afraid of him?”

“He . . . he can't see me like this.” He jumped up to transform himself back into an apparent boy, or as close to it as Toby ever got. Then we went back to our work, but it was obvious his attention wasn't on the words.

“It's a quarter to four,” I said. “Shall we call it a day?” He didn't say anything, just looked at the floor, so I started putting my things together. I almost didn't recognise Toby; his behaviour was so subdued. “Till next Thursday, then.”

“Can you leave without me going out of the room with you?”

This seemed odd, rather like skulking out, but I could tell there was something going on I didn't understand. “Sure.” I stood and moved towards the door, where I turned back. He was looking frantically around the room, possibly for any clues that would reveal his true nature. “Are you all right?”

“Yes . . . yes. But . . . You know, I do have to go out with you. I have to introduce you.”

He walked around me, his body tight with tension, shrunken into itself. I followed close behind him, feeling almost protective, watching like a sniper for danger. What I saw was the man who must be Mr. Lloyd, standing in the kitchen. He moved suddenly as though surprised. And his motion was away from Colleen.

His voice was a little too loud, his tone a little too cheerful. “Toby. Is this your spelling tutor?”

Toby mumbled my name as I held my right hand out. Mr. Lloyd took it and said, “Speak up, Toby. Don't mumble.”

Behind him, Colleen busied herself with something, and Toby said, “Simon Fitzroy-Hunt,” more loudly.

To me, Mr. Lloyd said, “You're an expert, I gather?”

“In my own way, yes.”

He seemed not to know what to make of that. “Are you a past champion or something?”

“No. Never competed.” I wanted to leave it there, make him puzzle over me. But he might protest to St. Bony. If I were to fail at this project, I didn't want it to be the doing of this man. So I added, “I have an aptitude for spelling and a knack for productive study. St. Boniface felt I would be able to help Toby, and I think I will.”

“What's your strategy?”

A voice inside my head said,
Whom does he think he's dealing with?
Another one sent a silent thank-you to Dr. Metcalf, who had already made me articulate my approach.

Aloud, I told him, “Toby is very good at studying the words and their origins; he doesn't need any help there. But no amount of dictionary study or etymology will help him spell
schwärmerei
correctly if he doesn't know that it's pronounced as though the
a
-umlaut were an
e
. So my strategy”—I had to force myself not to lean sarcastically on the word—“is to seek out words that don't sound like they're spelled and give Toby only the spoken word to work from. He must be as comfortable as possible with being put on the spot with a word he hasn't studied.”

Mr. Lloyd laughed. “They weren't kidding about you,” he said.

“Really?” I tried not to sound especially interested. “What did ‘they' say?”

“That you were smart and skilled and—they didn't put it quite like this, but I'll say, a little full of yourself.”

I raised my chin just slightly and allowed one side of my mouth to curl upwards. My tone cryptic, giving away neither agreement nor quarrel, I said, “Indeed.” I turned to Toby. “See you next Thursday. Say good-bye to La La for me.” And to Mr. Lloyd, I lied: “A pleasure to meet you, sir.”

Oxford's deadline for application is the fifteenth of October, and I really don't want to be seen as waiting until the eleventh hour. So this weekend I've made short work of my homework so I could dedicate myself to completing the application. I had already started it, of course, some time ago, but I got sidetracked with the move to Boston and with my lack of confidence rising to the surface the way it did. But I'm back on track, now. And although on the forms I did mention my grandfather's being at Magdalen, I'm submitting an open application rather than focusing on one college. I'm almost afraid of New College, after all my fantasies of being there with GG, but if that's the only one that offers me a position, I'll take it.

After putting the finishing touches on the application package, I did take a little break this afternoon to realign my brain cells before digging into the schoolwork that waited for me. Mozart does that better than anything else, so whilst Brian (yes, I've decided to have mercy on him and use his actual name) and Mum were out walking Persie—a prescribed route that doesn't vary, evidently a large circle around several neighbourhood blocks—I dug out my book of Mozart's piano sonatas and played through a few of my favourites. Time got away from me, and I was in the middle of the first movement of No. 17, K. 576, which is fairly boisterous (at least for Mozart), when everyone came home. I didn't hear them, so when Persie appeared silently at my side I jumped about a foot off the bench. It took me several seconds to realise she had her laptop with her.

“More Clyfford Still art?” I asked her, my heart still pounding a little. From the corner of my eye, I could see Mum and Brian standing in the entrance to the music room, watching.

Persie stood on my right and looked down at the piano bench, and I took this to mean she wanted to sit there, so I scooted over to the left, wondering how soon I could get back upstairs.

She opened the laptop, which was displaying something on YouTube, and she clicked Play. It was that scene from the film
Deliverance
with the “Dueling Banjos” number, even though it's a banjo and a guitar. I'd heard the piece before—who hasn't?—but I hadn't seen the film, and I didn't know the banjo player was supposed to have a condition that appears to be something between deformity and autism. He won't speak to the guitar player, who's visiting the area with some other men, but his face lights up as he plays.

As I wondered how Persie had stumbled upon this clip, knowing she doesn't like films, wondering if she thinks the scene on YouTube is real, she let the video play all the way through. Then she shut the laptop and set it on a table. Right hand on the keyboard, she picked out the opening theme and waited. She was waiting for me, I realised, so I echoed the notes an octave down. She repeated the theme, and so did I, and then she launched into the tune. I don't know it as well as she evidently does, but I could follow the harmonic progression, which is pretty simple. So I improvised chords in the lower register to follow her melody, in a lively rhythm that kept everything moving. Her fingers flew over the keyboard almost as fast as the banjo player had fingered his notes. Finally she began a kind of musical coda that told me she was closing in on the end, and we raced together to the final cadence.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Mum start to applaud, but Brian caught her hands before she could make a sound. Persie turned her face towards me, grinning from ear to ear. I couldn't help smiling back. She stood, still smiling, picked up her laptop, and walked past Mum and Brian without acknowledging their presence.

Mum turned to watch as Persie headed towards the stairs, and then she turned back to me. “Oh, Simon! That was marvellous!” As I stood, she came over and hugged me briefly. I felt almost like Persie; didn't really want to say anything. And then I noticed Brian, who stood where he'd been. He was rubbing the heel of his hand on his eyes, wiping away tears.

To Mum I said, “Thanks. Um, guess I'll go back to my homework.”

Brian caught my arm gently as I came near him. “Thank you,” he said.

“My pleasure.” It was the polite thing to say, but as I said it, I realised it was true.

Back upstairs, it wasn't easy to focus on homework. When I'd headed downstairs to play Mozart I had been avoiding coming up with a topic for my Theory of Knowledge project (TOK), a requirement for the IB curriculum. TOK is about the nature and limitations of knowledge, determining the meaning and validity of critical thinking, or so the course description says. With “Dueling Banjos” still playing in my head, it occurred to me that I should be able to work out a topic inspired by Persie. Applying the course concepts to the way she acquires and exhibits knowledge, and the limitations she faces, could be just the thing to make my project unique. I made a note to ask her about how she perceives that video. How she even found it.

By the time I went down to dinner I had a pretty good basic outline of what I want my project to look like. I was ready for the Monday afternoon class. Thanks to Persie. Though that duelling tune refused to leave my head for the whole next day.