Authors: Jenny Hubbard
If I were good the way my dad is good, then I wouldn’t be filling up these pages. They would be blank, the way they were when I came to Birch. Tabula rasa. They would be clean, the way I used to be.
I belong in a janitor’s closet, which is where I hide after I change out of my wet clothes and call my dad. As you might expect, the janitor’s closet is full of cleaning supplies. I unwrap a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of I-don’t-know-what, spray the I-don’t-know-what onto the paper towels, strip down to my boxers, and clean myself, over and over, sixteen times, one time for every year I have lived. I use up two rolls and the whole bottle of spray, and although my skin is burning, I am still not clean. Out, out, damned spot. I am running scared; I am curled into a ball in the dark; I am as far away from the sky as I could possibly be.
Until it has scared you with its endlessness, sky is just sky.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1982, 9:05 P.M
.
Hide-and-Seek (a Leitmotif)
Someone is going to pop around a corner and scream, “You’re it!” That is why this particular landsman is clinched to a desk in the Samuel E. Walter IV Memorial Library, his face hiding behind a large novel about a dead whale. He is the proverbial “it.” The sentence at the top of the page is from the first chapter of said novel, which seems to fit the moment, which is why Is Male records it faithfully, strange punctuation and all. He has never kept a journal before, but his father has kept them for years, noting the time, date, and location.
Is Male does not need to note the location: the location is the library because the dorm is not safe. Is Male cannot do anything, doesn’t want to do anything, except watch the black ink of his pen roll over the white page. So he might as well do his homework for English—see the rough draft for yourself. By the way, Is Male has a big crush on his teacher.
Alex Stromm
English 500
Ms. Dovecott
10/03/82
What I Carry
I carry a backpack full of things I’m not supposed to have, a pack of cigarettes and a tattered
Playboy
magazine—adult things that speak of the burden of adolescence and of the line we have to walk between childhood and adulthood. Parents and teachers expect us to be both. Besides my backpack, I carry a fishing pole. So do my friends Thomas and Glenn because that’s why we’re headed to the river, to swim and maybe catch some bass. I don’t know why, though, because we always throw them back.
What I carry are simple things that you could find on any Birch School boy at any given time. I think about the things that I could have carried to the river instead, my Latin reader, for example, but I come here to escape school. Or I could have brought a sweatshirt, but cold water on skin, like the cigarettes, makes me feel real again. The students here think that they are missing out on the exciting lives that their friends back home are living. People in our hometowns think we were sent off to boarding school because we are discipline problems or drug addicts or just bad kids with bad genes. “What else could their parents do with them?” they probably say to each other.
That is not how my parents felt about sending me here. They wanted to give me brothers; they wanted to give me the opportunity to try things I wouldn’t
have tried at home. What I carry, too, is the burden of proof that they were, in fact, right. That I am coming to know who I am. I now run cross-country, I have more endurance and drive than I knew that I had, and I also have friends, good friends. But one of these good friends is dead, and so I carry his life, and his death, inside me, too. I was close to him when he lived, and I was close to him when he died. I don’t think my mom or dad ever expected this kind of closeness.
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.
Landsmen, Soldiers
After Thomas dies, everything seems outlined with electricity as if the school is at attention, poised for war. The boxwoods along the brick sidewalks appear taller, topped with a hundred little eyes. Even the lampposts look as if they are conspiring. Guys who have barely shown their faces for two whole years are wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, flushed as if with fever. They huddle on the grass outside the classroom buildings and whisper, jerking their heads around to make sure the enemy doesn’t creep up on them. And who is the enemy, other than the element of surprise? I can’t believe it myself, and I was there: Thomas Broughton, dead nine days after his seventeenth birthday.
But even death does not stop the Birch School schedule. Sunday, the first of October—for most guys, a day of rest; for me and Glenn, a day in hell, filled with interrogation (to be
detailed later, once I can stomach the reliving of it) and the beginning of sorrow. No matter how sad or sick or angry or wounded any of us here are, everything (as in:
life
) marches forward as planned. That is the Birch way. So on Monday morning, we all go to class.
What I Think About on the Way to English
I am the only one here who knows that Thomas lost his virginity to Kelly Somebody-or-Other, a girl he met at the beach on the Fourth of July. I know so much about it that it feels like my own loss, but in any boy’s case, it’s not loss, is it? It is gain, big gain, one of the biggest gains, if not
the
biggest gain, in the journey to manhood. So here is how Thomas does it, and I admire him mightily for it. He says to Kelly, who has just handed him a beer, “If I drink this, will you take advantage of me?”
According to Thomas, Kelly looks like Farrah Fawcett with dark hair, which she tosses around as she answers with a question: “In what way?”
“In the way I want you to,” says Thomas, and she smiles at him with all of her teeth to let him know that he is right.
Does Kelly know now that the boy who touched her is dead?
What I Think About in the Hall Outside English
Thomas had an irrational fear of squirrels (which I made merciless fun of him for).… One winter night during our sophomore year, Thomas and I took a taxi all the way into town just to eat Chinese food. We gorged ourselves, and he paid for it, both the cab fare and the meal, and afterward, back in his room, we listened to Steely Dan albums. Thomas
owned every single one. Thomas will never hear “Reelin’ in the Years” again.… Thomas will never again steer himself across these sidewalks, never again move like the rest of us, hard-faced as the bricks beneath our feet, without peripheral vision, back to our dorms, to the post office, to class, going through the motions.… The two of us when we hardly knew each other, sitting in Mr. Parkes’s freshman English class our very first week at Birch. Our homework had been to read “The Lottery,” a short story about this town that stoned to death one citizen a year simply because it had always been done. The discussion afterward wasn’t about plot or structure or boring stuff like that; it was about traditions—what role they played in civil societies and all that—and Thomas and I talked afterward about how cool Mr. Parkes was not to force his opinions on us like teachers at our old schools back home.… I can still read, but Thomas’s eyes are closed.
In English Class, Part One
In I walk, my head bowed, my books packed neatly in my L.L.Bean backpack. We all have L.L.Bean backpacks, just as we all have L.L.Bean sweaters and L.L.Bean moccasins. We are interchangeable, and because I am of average height (5′ 10″), though a bit on the thin side for a sixteen-year-old, I’ve gotten used to guys on my hall borrowing my clothes. It will get sorted out in June, when we have to pack up again.
If I am still here in June. If I don’t get found out. I am playing it cool. Playing it cool when I feel as uncool as I have ever felt in my entire life.
It is everyone’s first class of the day. Mine just happens to be English. Miss Dovecott tells us we can lay our heads on
our desks or stand at the windows and stare at the trees. We all feel how Thomas is not here with us. His desk is full of empty.
“Do you want to talk about it,” she says, “or ask questions?” Some of the guys look over at me or Glenn expectantly, but most of them drop their heads into their hands.
“I guess we could all use some quiet time,” she says. She returns to her desk and lays her head down on it, hoping we will take her lead. We don’t. Her shoulders move up and down slightly with her breathing. She has great shoulders.
Rock, Paper, Scissors
5. At 1:00, Glenn and Clay arrive, and my dear ol’ roomie pulls the fifth of vodka, which he has been hiding in his closet for weeks, out of his backpack. We all pass it around until it is half empty. The leaves, with the last of their green, filter the sun. That thin thread of sun is the only thing that finds us. We are deep in the woods on the last day of September.
6. This next move is Clay’s idea. His father had a club when he was a student here in the 1950s, and, according to Mr. Claybrook, the initiation for the club required its members to jump into the French Broad River from the high rock. Which three of us have done before and one of us hasn’t.
7. Glenn tells Thomas, “You have to jump out far. Jump, not dive. Got it?”
8. Thomas says, “Got it,” and drinks vodka with the rest of us.
9. The four of us walk to the rock.
10. The rock is exposed, like we all are about to be.
11. Glenn says he’ll go first, to show Thomas how it’s done.
12. Thomas says, “Okay, but I’m not scared.”
13. Thomas takes another chug of vodka.
13. Thomas takes another chug of vodka.
13. Thomas takes another chug of vodka.
In English Class, Part Two
I’m still staring at her shoulders when, at 8:16 a.m., Miss Dovecott rises, walks to the chalkboard, and erases it from top to bottom, from side to side, wiping out every remnant of word, every stray comma. By the time she turns back to us, Joe Bonnin has fallen asleep. Some guys laugh, but none of us do anything to stir him, so Miss Dovecott walks over and shakes Joe’s shoulder. He doesn’t wake up, so she has to shake him again. That’s when Glenn and I catch eyes, understanding. Miss Dovecott is afraid, afraid to touch him. By the time she returns to the front of the room, her armpits are wet, and it is the thing that draws me out of myself, the thing that calms me down: the realization that a teacher could be more scared than the students—and scared
of
the students.
“Under the circumstances,” Miss Dovecott says, “I think it only fair that I give you an extra day on the essay that was due today, and I’ll talk now about the story you’ll be reading tonight.” Some of us reach into our backpacks and pull out our books. On any other day she would require us to hold the text, as she calls it, in front of us and take notes in the margins, but today, she says nothing. Time hulks over us. Miss Dovecott plays with her watch, takes it off her wrist, and swings it gently from side to side. I study it; it looks old-timey. I try to hypnotize myself.
Out the window a robin keeps returning to an unsteady
branch. What is the robin looking for, its head ticking around, its black eyes blinking? Why doesn’t it chirp?
I want to hear something other than the inside of my head, something other than Miss Dovecott rambling on about the story. “Let us say, then, that Miss Emily represents the South, the pre–Civil War South, so if she is on this end of the spectrum”—and at this point Miss Dovecott draws a straight line across the smooth board, labeling one end “Emily”—“then who is on the other end?”
She doesn’t slow down for an answer because we haven’t read the story yet. A couple of guys turn their notebooks sideways and draw the line across the page. “Homer,” she says. “Homer Barron, the healthy, hearty Yankee whom Miss Emily—daughter of the Confederate South—poisons.”
“She
poisons
him?” Joe Bonnin, now awake, asks.
“Why?” says Auggie van Dorn, who looks like a Cabbage Patch doll. “Was he mean to her or something?”
“No,” says Miss Dovecott. “You’ll have to read the story tonight and find out for yourself.”
“What kind of poison does she use?” asks Jovan Davis, a black kid from Atlanta.
“Rat poison,” Miss Dovecott answers.
I look at Glenn; he looks at me.
“Does she sprinkle it on his dinner or something?” Joe is clearly intrigued by this whole poison thing.
“Glenn,” says Miss Dovecott, “do you happen to know how poison might be best administered?”
“No, ma’am.” He is staring at his hands, which are flat on the desk, palms down.
Joe clears his throat. “Glenn was with Thomas,” he says.
“I know that,” she says to Joe, but she is looking at Glenn, and when he looks up, some inexplicable electric knowledge passes between them.
Glenn Albright Everson, III, Class of 1984
Glenn is the sort of guy other guys respect. For one reason, he doesn’t make excuses for himself, but most of the time he doesn’t need to: he earned a perfect score in math on the PSAT. Glenn is a top scholar and all-conference athlete. Glenn does not argue with adults as some students do; I think it’s because he doesn’t want to be that involved with them. He is the most self-reliant guy I know; he does things his way, and that works out for him 99 percent of the time. He doesn’t seek the spotlight, yet it finds him. Thomas wanted to be Glenn’s best friend, but Glenn doesn’t play those kinds of girl games.
Alexander Stromm, No Middle Name, No Roman Numerals, Class of 1984
Alex is rarely in the spotlight, and that’s the way he likes it, though he wishes he were funnier because at Birch, funny is revered, funny is cool. Alex is a good audience for other guys’ jokes, and other guys seek him out to tell him jokes because he is appreciative and he has a great laugh that makes a weird little dimple in his lower right cheek. Alex stays out of the spotlight by being Above Average, except in math. Numbers don’t make sense to him even when you turn them into letters like “x” and “y.” He has learned that if you don’t talk much in class, the other guys think you are either really smart or really dumb, and so when he knows he can answer a question
correctly, he raises his hand, but no more than once per class period, because then he would be in the spotlight.