Paper Covers Rock (14 page)

“Bang,” I say. “Just go ahead and shoot me.”

The Dewey Decimal System

After Glenn leaves, I stand at the window, posted like a silent sentinel of Wimberley Hall, a mortal man fixed on woodland nightmares. I don’t want to talk to Miss Dovecott about the accident, I want to talk with her about poems, but the truth of the matter is, Glenn is right about one thing: I want to know what else might be in that diary. I’m pretty sure Glenn is full of shit, but what if he isn’t? Glenn’s father the hero was in the same class at Birch as Dean Mansfield’s younger brother. Dean Mansfield would certainly take that into consideration. Birch grads are loyal as hell to one another, lifelong friends.

I grab my jacket and dash over to the library before the Lights-Out bell. This book I’m writing needs an editor. A pair of scissors. An honest voice. A decent plot. A climax. A moral. You name it, this book needs it. It is time to go back to the beginning, and for the beginning, I could choose an epigraph by Henry David Thoreau, which I would italicize if this were a real book:

But where do I live, and what is it I’m living for? My physical self is sitting among Mr. Dewey’s system, but this is not what Henry David meant. Knotholes in the brain: that is what he meant. The brain is like a tree, and the tree has roots so deep that you have no idea what it is that grounds you. I have my own selfish motives for going along with Glenn, and if I find out in the process that my English teacher is in love with me, then I’ll come in my pants. But if I find out that she saw us drinking—all of us—then I’ll have to follow through with The Plan. Which is to say: Get Her Gone.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 8:17 P.M
.

The Part of The Plan That Golden Boy Keeps from Good, Solid Kid

I am already seated when Glenn struts into English class this morning wearing Miss Dovecott’s sweatshirt. In less than a second, she knows that I’m a barbarian after all. She is looking straight at me, her eyes wild. Then she recovers, raises a fist in the air, Black Power–style, and says, “Go, Tigers,” Princeton’s mascot, and moves on to the lesson. She makes Glenn sit there for the rest of the class wearing it, something that is way too small for him. And she doesn’t look at me again.

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 failures. 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.