Authors: Jenny Hubbard
Paper Covers Rock (15 page)
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 7:27 P.M
.
The Barbarians
Still no letter. When Glenn stops by my room before seated dinner tonight, he asks me for the fiftieth time where I’ve hidden the watch. I tell him yet again that I don’t have it, just as I told him that I didn’t find a diary in Miss Dovecott’s apartment. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t care. If I were a teacher here and kept a diary, I would say, Screw the Birch School Community of Trust; I would keep it in the locked glove compartment of my car, not lying around for Barbarians to find.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 7:20 P.M
.
The Artists
In class, my pen is flying. I have to make it stop, slow down. I sense that she has assigned this in-class essay just for the artist in me. Miss Dovecott turns up the volume on the tape player, and I close my eyes, catching Mozart’s bass line and following it as it pulses under the melody. She has told us that composers, like novelists, hide whole stories beneath the dazzle. When I open my eyes, I look around at my classmates’ faces to see if I can pretend I’ve never seen them before, and I almost can. They are good-looking, all of them. A pimple here, a blackhead there, but no scar to be found, as if they’ve outgrown everything bad they’ve ever done.
Glenn hasn’t written a word; he is staring at a blank sheet of paper. But, as Miss Dovecott has shown me, I work best when I jump right in and swim my way to an understanding. The curve of our necks as we bend forward to write strikes me
as primordial, primeval.
This is the forest primeval:
what poem is that from? I have heard it before. Primeval. Prime evil.
I keep writing. I am the last one in the room. I can hear the next class waiting in the hall.
“Finished,” I announce, smiling at Miss Dovecott, and in one single sweep, I scoop up my backpack and coat. As I reach my hand out across the desk to give her the essay, her fingers brush mine. She feels it, too, the shock, and our eyes brighten at the electricity. Skin holds a knowledge all its own. I am not exactly sure what grace is, but I think this moment might be something very close to it.
But moments of grace are fleeting. Glenn stops by my room on his way to football practice to tell me that Miss Dovecott assigned us the in-class essay to try to ferret out the guy who stole her watch. “She’s sneaky,” he says. “She’ll read into those things like there’s no tomorrow. And you know what, Stromm? For her there might not be. Don’t forget The Plan.”
“Get the f
ck out of my room,” I say, and he does.
(I am leaving space here to copy my response to the prompt Miss Dovecott gave us, once I get it back from her.)
My Response
I’m not going to write about the Honor Code at this school. We all know what that is; it has been drummed into our heads since before we even arrived here. I’m going to write about what I think honor really is, which is something this school never discusses.
Honor is truth. Truth has many meanings, but it first means that you have to be true to yourself. It is
hard to be true to yourself because it is hard to be yourself. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those things that I struggle with all my life, like religion. I bet some people go through their whole lives living someone else’s life. It’s hard to put into words what I’m trying to say, but if it takes a lifetime to form your identity and arrive at the truth of who you are, then haven’t you, in some sense, been living a lie?
How do you ever know who you really are, when your society and world teach you to hide? You hide things every day, most of all your feelings, but you are conditioned to, especially if you are a boy. I remember the day when you asked us to write about the concealing paint that we wore at pep rallies that liberated us into our savagery. Well, this reminds me of that because we are taught to wear masks that hide our true selves, which have the capacity for evil.
It’s the question philosophers have debated for centuries: is man basically good or basically evil? If we really want to be honest with ourselves—that is to say, if we really want to be honorable—then the truth here is that we all have a little God inside of us—God did make us in His image, like the Bible says—but we also have evil, a little Satan inside of us, too. And that is a scary thought. I’ve done some bad things in my life, some very bad things, and the worst one is the one I think you know, which I have never admitted to anyone, and hardly even to myself: my friend was unconscious in the river while I was goofing around. Valuable seconds were wasted—I wasted valuable seconds, first in the water and then when I was running. But I got scared, I panicked. I crouched at the base of
a tree for a moment or two to get a grip on myself. Maybe my friend was still alive then, maybe he was. If he was, then it was no one’s fault but mine that he died.
What’s hard for me is that a few people in this world, including you and my dad, think I’m this decent guy. But I have dark places inside of me. I have seen things that I can never describe, things so black that the person I was before has disappeared. If I’m to live an honest life, then I’m going to have to acknowledge that the darkest holes in my heart and my soul have truth to them, too. (I’m running out of time here, and I know this is very disorganized, so it’s okay if I don’t get a good grade because it’s not a good piece of writing. But at least it’s honest, and it’s what I really do think.)
Here is an artist. He desires to paint the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley. Yes, this is how I see it play out: like a knight, in defense of Miss Dovecott, I will beat up Glenn for the things he is doing to her; I will finally have it out with him, and the school will have to dismiss me for “conduct unbecoming of a Birch student,” but everyone will know that it was actually honorable behavior, the age-old code of chivalry. Then, Miss Dovecott will be so grateful and so much in love with me that she will welcome me into her life with open arms, filling me with her inspiration so that I don’t waste away in public high school. My dad will find a good woman, too—we’ll double-date in Asheville, going to concerts and foreign films and poetry readings—and he will eventually get over the disgrace of my dismissal.
Bad Monkey
And she will understand why I snuck into the inner sanctum, looking for proof. And she will understand why I took her watch, which I slide onto my wrist every night before I go to bed. I lie on my back, let everything go quiet, and breathe in rhythm with the ticking. With her watch on my skin, it’s like she’s touching me, not me touching myself. In the mornings before I take a shower, I tuck the watch into the stuffing of my pillow, where I’ve cut a slit in the lining just wide enough for my fingers.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 7:15 P.M
.
Field Trip
When Miss Dovecott walks into her classroom, I can hardly look at her without a sweet pain tightening my stomach, without a surge of adrenaline through my blood. Has she read our essays yet? She doesn’t hand them back first thing as she usually does; instead, she reads us the announcements. Today is Bailey Richards’s birthday, and he runs with it.
“Please, Miss Dovecott, don’t give us a quiz,” he says. “This is definitely not a quiz day.”
“Yeah,” says Joe Bonnin. “That stuff we had to read last night was impossible.”
“Well, tell me what you understood, and if you can do that, we’ll forgo the quiz.”
“Forgo?” asks Bailey. “Does that mean that we’re having one at the end of the period?”
“Alex,” says Joe, “you tell her.”
“Joe,” says Miss Dovecott, “I asked you.”
After Joe flips his notebook open, he says, “I think I might have left the handout in my room.”
“Okay, then. Just tell me what you remember.”
Bailey and a couple of other guys start laughing because we all know that even if he did do the work, he won’t remember. Like a bunch of other Birch students, Joe’s a legacy, which means he can be as dumb as he wants.
“Well,” he says, “that David Henry Through guy—”
“Henry David Thoreau.”
“Whoever. He liked the woods. He went there to live inside his bones, or something like that. Something about bones. That’s part of what I didn’t understand.”
“Marrow,” says Jovan Davis. “Not bones.”
Miss Dovecott nods. “Go ahead, Joe.”
As Joe flounders to make sense of the excerpt from
Walden
, I look around the room. The light in our eyes there at the start of class is dimming.
“Henry said to eat only one meal a day,” Joe says. “To keep things simple. I don’t get it, though, because it seems like that would be more complicated because you’d be hungry all the time.”
Miss Dovecott walks over to the light switch and flips it off. The guys who had planned to tuck it in for the period lift their heads. “Without saying a word, I want you to stand up, put on your coats, and follow me. Then we’re going to come back and talk through the passage, sentence by sentence.”
In silence we follow her through the front door, across the quad, and up the hill to the edge of the woods. Fog lies low,
turns the trees edging the campus into undefined smudges like smeared pencil marks.
“Field trip!” Joe shouts, but Miss Dovecott shushes him by putting a finger to her lips.
We are standing on the ridge when the geese fly over, dozens, so many that we can hear the flapping of their wings. Because of the fog, we can’t see them. We listen for long minutes, letting our ears become our eyes. I close my eyes, feeling the moist air on my skin, pretending it’s Haley’s breath panting up and down my body. I open my eyes only when it’s time to follow the teacher down the hill.
Back at our desks, Miss Dovecott reads us the last paragraph of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” I glance at Glenn for the first time all day, and under these lights, his face looks gray. Thoreau’s sentences buzz around me, through me, as I hear the wings once more over my head. And then Miss Dovecott tells us that Thoreau, who vowed to rough it on the edge of a pond for a year, left Walden every now and then to take his dirty clothes home for his mom to wash. Fck Thoreau. Thoreau is a pussy of the highest order. At the very least, he is a poser just like the rest of us.
Grilled Cheese
Glenn and I and a bunch of other guys sit in the dining hall savoring our hour of freedom before another afternoon of classes. Some guys eat fast so they can cram for a test or squeeze in a nap or play Pac-Man on the one machine downstairs. There is a time limit on the machine because otherwise, some nerds would never stop playing. Anyway, the
other guys get up to go all at once, which leaves me and Glenn there alone at the table. We realize it at the exact same time that we’re eating what was Thomas’s favorite lunch. Glenn’s eyes shimmer for a minute, then glaze over, but not before he smiles the saddest smile I’ve ever seen, which I take as some kind of an acknowledgment. Of what, I’m not sure.
He looks around to make sure no one is listening. No one is. He tells me that when Miss Dovecott called him in for a conference on his honor essay, she told him his essay needed work, that it was vague, lacking in depth and development, and she asked him to rewrite it. He tells me he thought he saw Mr. Henley out in the hall, watching them through the window.
And just then, out of nowhere, Mr. Henley appears at our lunch table and pats Glenn on the back. “How’s that rewrite coming along?” he asks with a smile. Glenn and I smile along.
“Mr. Stromm, I understand that you have decided to enter a national essay contest. Good for you. And, Mr. Stromm, once you find fame and fortune, don’t forget us little people. Submit some of your poems to
Bark
(
Bark
being the school’s art and literary magazine). I hear you’re quite a talent.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “I mean, that’s nice of you to say. I’ll do my best.” When I turn back to Glenn to tell him he’s an asshole, to tell him once and for all that, due to lack of evidence, I refuse to execute the last play of The Plan, he has disappeared.
