Paper Covers Rock (16 page)

Mailbox

Still nothing from the Broughtons. A postcard from my dad in Acadia National Park, where it is snowing. As I am standing there reading it, I hear Reverend Black’s twangy voice down the hall, coming closer, and I duck outside. I want to cry the guilt out of my body, it is drowning me. Oh, Dad, how will I look you in the eye without your knowing that all I am doing these days is fighting for air?

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 4:00 P.M
.

I borrow words from
Her
-man.
Her
-man borrows words from God. Someday someone might borrow words from me. I want to be a writer when I grow up, maybe a poet. Poetry is a language unto itself, where words carry more than their weight, where white space on the page is profound silence. Poetry is a way of seeing the world with your feelings. Life is not meant to be taken so literally, and in my case, that is a huge relief.

Final Pep Rally

How do I begin to describe how the Birch School alums, especially the ones who are freshmen in college, act when they return for homecoming with something to prove? Some of them travel hundreds of miles for Friday night’s event, but when they get here, they walk around in their L.L.Bean moccasins and rag wool sweaters, gripping tightly to plastic cups
emblazoned with the name of a socially acceptable university. (The guys who go to loser schools never advertise it.) The alums get drunker and drunker, and inevitably one of them will take a piss in the middle of the quad or streak through his old dorm just because he can. At least one of them will end up in a dorm bathroom, where he’ll waste the night praying to the porcelain god. This is the one time a year when the school actually hires a security guard.

Before the lighting of the bonfire, the alumni gather behind us, and if they’re sober or gentlemanly enough, they’ll speak to us. Some of the theater majors or the Campus Crusaders for Christ hang out with the faculty. But wherever they are, and whoever they’re with, they cheer as the lit torches come hurtling through the air onto the two-story tower of branches. Everyone cheers in the heat of the moment.

This year, the cheers melt into shouts of Miss Dovecott’s name, her first name. “Hey-LEE!” Clap, clap. “Hey-LEE!” Clap, clap. Before she can run from where she stands with Mr. Parkes and the younger members of the faculty, Ted Ferenhardt touches her shoulder and escorts her to the platform.

The cheer masters always tap a teacher to lead the charge, but this is the first time they’ve tapped a female teacher. No one knows how this is going to go, but the whole teeming mass is whooping a war cry, “Whoo-hoo! Whoo-hoo!” while Miss Dovecott looks like Wendy about to walk the plank of the
Jolly Roger
. Everybody, even the alums, is cheering for her.

A cheer master in a mask helps her onto the platform. “Red hot!” he shouts into her face and jumps up and down. He grabs her hands so that she has to jump with him. “Higher!”
he shouts at her. “Faster!” She jumps up and down like a maniac, hair flying out of her ponytail. Then he shouts to the crowd. “Red hot! Let’s hear it for Miss Dovecott! Red hot, red hot! Let’s hear it for Miss Dovecott!”

Miss Dovecott’s face burns as she becomes a rhyme. Her only way out is to join in, become one of us. So she does. In a zombie voice she leads the charge: “Our team is red hot, our team is red hot! Our team is r-e-d—red—h-o-t—hot! Once we start, we can’t be stopped. Red! Red hot!” She stumbles over the monosyllables, but it doesn’t matter what the words are, only the loudness of them.

Miss Dovecott may have expected the cheers to turn to mocking laughter, but they do not. The stage and its rituals are sacred. As her name fades, Ted Ferenhardt takes front and center and shouts, “Let’s hear it for Miss Dovecott, who is, whoo-hoo, red hot!” He will rack up a few demerits for that, but he will also get pats on the back for at least a week, and in a way, it’s payback for the gingerbread incident, so it’s worth it. Ted grins like a crazy man while Miss Dovecott looks at her feet. A football player in a black hood escorts her down, and I wonder if she recognizes Glenn Everson’s pale, unreadable eyes as they flatline into her own.

It’s the same stare he gives me later that night in my room as I tell him the truth. “I don’t want to hurt Miss Dovecott. And she doesn’t deserve to get kicked out of here because of a lie. No one does.”

“It won’t be a lie, not if you make it happen the right way.”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“Stromm, you stole her watch. You know it, and I know it, and if you don’t go through with this, then I’ll tell Miss Dovecott you did it.”

“You wouldn’t,” I say, meaning it.

“Watch me. Pun intended.”

“That’s blackmail. Pun intended. ‘Black,’ as in ‘dark.’ ‘Male,’ as in ‘you and me.’ And I can rat you out, too.”

“For what?”

“For drinking vodka at the river.”

“If I go down for that, so will you,” Glenn says. “Besides, who are they going to believe—a thief or a Golden Boy?”

“You’re not so golden,” I say. “There are other things I could blackmail you for, but I’m not that kind of guy.”

“Like what?”

I give him my own stare, a dark one. “What Thomas told me right before he died.”

Hide-and-Seek

I do not go to the final football game of the season on Saturday afternoon. I could not care less whether we win or lose or even how we play the game. Football is a dirty sport, unlike cross-country, which is pure. In running, you have a clear winner and loser, no referees with their subjectivity, no masks or pads to hide behind. You are in competition with other runners from other teams, of course, but mainly, you are in competition with yourself, and that makes you try all the harder because if you can beat yourself, you can beat anything.

So I go for a run with Miss Dovecott’s watch tucked inside my shorts, using it to take note of my progress. I am out
to conquer my best time, which is an 18:20. But because of the extra weight in my brain, I end up running the 3.1-mile course in a flat 19. Not a time that would earn a place in a meet or a pat on the back from Mr. Wellfleet.

Back in my library carrel, I open my journal to a blank page. It scares me, all of that white, so I take my pen in my right hand, flatten my left hand to the paper, and draw an outline around it, the way you did when you were a kid. Sometimes you made a turkey out of it for Thanksgiving, coloring the fingers in with reds and yellows, adding an eye and a wattle to the thumb. I do not make a turkey, even though Thanksgiving break is a week away. I draw lines across the palm, life lines, they’re called. Have you ever noticed how much they look like rivers and streams, creeks and tributaries? Water hiding out in our own hands. Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink. I rip the drawing out of my journal and tear it into tiny pieces, which I let fall, a pathetic imitation of rain, into a library trash can.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 7:22 A.M
.

The Artists

After dinner and chapel, I knock on the door of Miss Dovecott’s classroom. She is there on a Sunday night, grading papers, head bowed. She looks like she’s praying. With her, it’s serious business; with some other teachers, not so much. You see them hurrying through tests at the breakfast table or even at basketball games. Their red pens move across the page while their eyes move across the court. Sometimes in class, when you’re going over a quiz or test, you’ll catch a teacher’s mistake, and usually the teacher is pretty nice about giving
you the points back. Some of them even tell you that if they make a mistake in your favor not to call their attention to it.

She waves me in. “I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “I read your honor essay.”

“Oh,” I say. “That.”

“Listen, Alex. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about that day?” She gestures for me to sit in one of the nearby desks, and I do, avoiding Thomas’s old desk.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you appear to have run out of time in your essay. I thought perhaps there was more you would have liked to put down on paper.”

I think about my journal-novel and almost smile; the whole thing, those strings and strings of words, seems so absurd. “You were there, too,” I say. “It was confusing.”

“What was?”

I point to my brain. “What was going on up here as compared to what was happening on the ground. You know me, Miss Dovecott. I don’t always lead with my head.”

“That’s what makes you such a good poet.”

“Speaking of that,” I say, “I was … Well, I was wondering. Do you think we could get together every now and then and read over my poems? Because I know they could be better. You could help me make them better. Mr. Henley has encouraged me to submit some to
Bark
, and I want to send in my best.”

She says it would be a
pleasure
. She suggests that we set up a weekly appointment; one thing every good writer needs to succeed, she tells me, is discipline, and a weekly meeting would keep me productive and focused.

“That would be great,” I say, and thank her.

“Did you just change the subject on purpose?”

I play dumb, something I’m pretty good at. “How did I change the subject?”

She looks at me, hard. “Well, you know where my signup sheet is.” She points to the wall. “And if there’s more you want to tell me, you know where to find me.”

I walk over to the sign-up sheet. “These conferences are during your free periods, right?” I take a breath. “It’d be more convenient for me—that is, if it’s okay with you—to meet after dinner, when I have more time. You’re in your classroom sometimes after dinner anyway. I know that’s a lot to ask.…”

“Not for you, Alex,” she says. “Not for you.”

“How about if we meet this Thursday, then?”

“Okay.”

“In your apartment?”

“No, Alex. We’ll meet here.”

(You can’t blame a guy for trying.)

I go, out of her classroom, out the front door of Sellers Hall. When I reach my room, I lock my door, which, in the Birch School spirit of trust, we aren’t supposed to do except when we leave for vacation, and I grab my purple pen. What pours out of it that night is purest poetry, as you can see.

Goldilocks

by Alex Stromm (1966–)

If you are a girl, Birch’s five hundred acres are a paradise. Most faculty daughters are sent away to boarding school once they hit puberty. I swear I never have—because if my dad ever found out, he would kill me—but most of my classmates talk about which faculty daughter they’d most like to f
ck. I’ve seen the way the older girls, the ones who aren’t sent away and go to the public school, look at Glenn. He doesn’t look back. Though he could say to all of them, “Meet me in the boxwoods behind the library at midnight,” and every single one of them would, I guarantee it.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 7:14 A.M.

Double O Seven

Even before I knock on the door of Miss Dovecott’s classroom Monday night after dinner, I feel like a criminal, like an honest-to-God double agent. I am here on too many missions.

“Alex,” she says, “I didn’t expect you until Thursday.”

“I have poems,” I say.

“I have work,” she says, pointing to her stack of essays.

“I’m kind of eager for you to read this one,” I say. “Just one. I won’t keep you long.”

“Well, let’s have a look, then.” She smiles, waving me into the room.

I pull the folder of poems out of my backpack, and she comes out from behind her desk.

“You sit there,” she says, pointing, “and I’ll sit across from you. The way this will work best, I think, is if you read the poem out loud, without my looking at it, and then I’ll read it out loud to you so you can hear your words in someone else’s voice. And then we’ll talk through it.”

Although I want her next to me, not across from me, I begin. “This first poem is called ‘Goldilocks.’ ” And I read. When I finish, I can hear the overhead fluorescent lights buzzing.

“It’s a sonnet,” she says.

“Well, a loose one.”

“It’s about me,” she says.