Paper Covers Rock (7 page)

“Kiss the Buddha!” the crowd is shouting. “Kiss the Buddha!” The Little Dipper bows his head and puts his hands over his mouth, and Ted jumps behind him, arms spread and flapping like wings. He screams into the back of Lane Carter’s head, “Kiss the Buddha!” When Lane looks up, there are tears on his cheeks, and the Buddha grabs Lane’s head and
pushes it into his stomach. The cheer masters hop up and down, and the crowd roars.

Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror. One of the little kids standing next to Miss Dovecott runs back to his father, a chemistry teacher, and lifts his arms to the sky, begging to be picked up. Miss Dovecott crosses her arms and hugs herself.

Green Fields

My new-boy year, to avoid the second pep rally because the first one was so scary, I snuck out of study hall one Friday night ten minutes before the bell rang and hid in the chapel until I knew it was over. I sat in the back of the room in study hall. Mr. Lyme, the proctor, could hardly see his own wrist-watch, not to mention what was happening where I was. I slid to the floor and crawled out. No one ratted on me. Other guys in study hall saw me do it and laughed, but they never turned me in, and Mr. Lyme, who was ancient, didn’t hear them, just as he didn’t hear me zip up my backpack and drop to the floor like I was escaping from an ambush. Which, of course, I was.

Our World, the Sequel

Last year, I played Would You Rather all the time on dorm. Now that Miss Dovecott has become a piece on the game board, it is much less funny.

Basically, the game goes like this: you sit around in someone’s room with the door closed and offer up a scenario involving Birch School characters and/or movie stars. Sex is almost always involved.

For example, Would you rather watch Mrs. Davido give a blow job to the Buddha or Mr. Lyme? The best answer in this case is “Neither,” but in the world of Would You Rather, that is not an option.

I am with Joe Bonnin and Andy Hedron after the pep rally, before Lights-Out, when I have to be back in my room. Their room is so different from most guys’ rooms. That is to say, it is not wallpapered with posters of
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit models. Joe owns one poster of Brooke Shields in her Calvins and two of the UNC basketball team, and Andy has got to be the only guy on campus with a poster of Audrey Hepburn à la
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
—very understated foxy.

“Would You Rather?” Joe says.

“Here we go,” says Andy.

“Would you rather watch Miss Dovecott give a blow job to Gaybrook or Everson?”

“Who cares about Gaybrook?” I say. “He’s gone.”

“Gaybrook,” says Andy. “No way she could get him off. Hey, but I bet Everson could.”

“Gaybrook,” I say, and nod.

“I’m going with Everson,” says Joe. “He’d splooge in about two seconds.”

“So would you,” Andy says.

“Yeah, I know, but it’d be interesting because Everson can’t stand her.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, but I know exactly what he means.

“He’s the only one in this whole school who doesn’t want to do her.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like English,” I say.

“She’s cool,” said Andy. “I’d definitely do her.”

“Me too,” I say, but it’s not exactly what I mean. What I mean is, I would like to lie on a bed with her, her face an inch from mine.

“Hey,” says Andy, “would you rather watch Mr. Olson or Reverend Black roasted alive over a slow-burning fire?”

“Black,” Joe and I say in unison.

“Juicier,” adds Joe.

“Ballpark franks,” says Andy. “Plump when you cook ’em.”

Hide-and-Seek

Miss Dovecott finds me this morning at breakfast. I am sitting by myself at the head of a long table, cramming for my Latin test.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she says.

I smile a closed-mouth smile to keep scrambled eggs from falling out.

“Do you have a minute?”

I nod.

“Finish your breakfast,” she says. “I’ll be in my classroom.”

But when I get to her classroom, Mr. Henley, the head of the English department, is there. They are looking at a sheet of paper that Miss Dovecott is holding in her hand. When I knock, they look up like they’re accusing me of something. Miss Dovecott comes to the door.

“Alex,” she says, “we’ll have to talk later. But now that you’re here”—she holds up the paper in her hand, a photograph torn from a magazine—“do you happen to know anything about this?”

I shake my head and say, “No.” Because I don’t.

Better to Fail in Originality than Succeed in Imitation

In class, Miss Dovecott holds it up to show us all. She explains that someone left the photograph of the naked woman on her desk. Across the glossy breasts, someone has drawn a picture of a very large penis with a typed caption: “Miss Dovecott and Moby’s Dick.”

Everyone knows it’s her favorite novel; she talks about it all the time, saying how we should read it on our own, which of course none of us will. Miss Dovecott makes sure we have a very good look at the artwork before she sets it facedown on her desk. No one has confessed thus far, she says. She wants to know if we know anything about it. It’s embarrassing—we are embarrassed for her—and we look away. Truth be told, the picture could have been torn out of any of the hundreds of porn magazines stuffed under mattresses or stashed behind toilets all over campus. I glance at Glenn; he is staring straight ahead at nothing. He looks the way he looked when we gathered in the hall of our dorm last year and listened to Spalding Frazier break up with his girlfriend over the phone. I remembered thinking that Glenn, who also had a girlfriend at the time, would have handled a breakup differently: using the pay phone in the gym or writing the girl a letter. He would never have done it in public.

All during English class, Miss Dovecott keeps her arms folded across the front of her white turtleneck sweater. I remember the first day she wore this sweater: September 22. (Is that the first official day of autumn? I can never get those equinoxes straight.) I wrote it in my notes for that day—“sweater”—which was a reminder for me down the road
that I didn’t pay one bit of attention in class to what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The sweater makes her breasts look big. Today she looks the way I feel—which is to say that sometimes, I don’t know what to do or how to feel.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 9:19 A.M
.

The Samuel E. Walter IV Memorial Library is my rock. My Rock of Gibraltar. If I go back to dorm with this book in my hands, there is nowhere I can hide it, nowhere where it won’t be found. I will be cut, cut to shreds, if anyone, especially Glenn, finds this. This is the hard part to put on paper.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Glenn tells Thomas to watch closely, to jump and not dive, to be sure that he knows exactly how far he needs to sling his body to clear the shallows.

After he comes up sputtering for air, Glenn yells up to us, “Double jump! I dare you!” I turn to Thomas, he turns to me. I am about to say, Maybe we shouldn’t, and then Glenn shouts again from the water.

So I go, “Rock, Paper, Scissors”—the last words I ever speak to Thomas—and one, two, three, he holds out rock, I
hold out paper. Thomas dives through the sky. I do not wait for him to surface before I jump.

The sick thing is that after I go under, I pretend like I’m drowning. I pop up, flailing my arms, opening my mouth wide, making gasping noises. I’m not even looking at Thomas—or for him. I’m flopping around in the water. Over my own fake drama, I hear Glenn scream Thomas’s name.

Right before Thomas dove, he said things.

25. Before I even realize it, I jump, too. We all go into the river. See Dick and Jane go under. Jump, Dick. Jump, Jane. (If only I were writing a children’s book. If I were writing a children’s book, I’d be done by now.) But Thomas does not jump, he dives. Thomas enters the water headfirst.

26. Thomas’s head finds a rock that is harder than his head.

27. His lungs fill with water.

28. Drown, Thomas, drown.

A Rough Draft

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 8:48 P.M
.

Green Fields

And Thomas was a good friend. The fact that he was an uncomplicated guy made him that way. You could argue with Thomas over the littlest stuff, and even if it snowballed into a fight, he wouldn’t hold it against you. Like a lot of people, he liked arguing for the sake of arguing. His father was a hotshot litigator, so he came by it honestly.

Like I wrote in the essay, Thomas and I really did go down to the river to fish sometimes, and although we talked about doing it, we never brought along anything illegal (i.e., pot) when it was just the two of us. We played by the rules, and that was nice because we didn’t have to worry about Dean Mansfield jumping out of the bushes during one of his “nature walks,” as he calls them, although we call them “patrol strolls.” Thomas would pack us a lunch (peanut butter crackers, Snickers bars, a couple of apples), and I would take care of the bait. We didn’t fly-fish—too many trees—so I dug
up worms and grubs in the early morning after a rain. Although I never told Thomas this, I felt like we were Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer before Injun Joe entered the picture.

As far as Great American Novels go, put me down for
Huckleberry Finn
. It’s a hell of a lot better than
Moby-Dick
; I am having a hard time getting past the first chapter of that one. I read the library’s copy sometimes when I get writer’s block. Miss Dovecott says that schools don’t teach it anymore because there isn’t time enough during the academic year to cover all of the Greats. It makes her sad that such a fine novel collects dust on a shelf. It’s good for me, though, because a big book gives me something to hide behind.

Green Fields Gone

This afternoon in my room that I used to share with Clay, I copy the letter onto stationery with my name across the top, but what if it makes Mrs. Broughton cry? What if she and Mr. Broughton already hate me forever? I had not had the guts to offer them my condolences in person, and as soon as I drop the letter through the mail slot, I regret it.

The Artists

As I’m walking back from the post office, Miss Dovecott catches up with me. “Maybe you have a minute or two,” she says, pointing to a bench in the quadrangle. Another cold, hard bench. I feel sick to my stomach.

“I’ll get straight to the point,” she says. The point is that she finds my writing exciting. My most recent essay revealed to her that of all the students she teaches, I am the most observant. I have the sensitivity of a person twice my age. She
believes that I feel things with my heart that I’m unable to put into words. She calls me a natural-born poet. As she says all of these things that no one has ever said to me before, she follows my eyes with hers, which are dark and deep like pockets.

“You are on my side,” she says.

“What side is that?” I ask.

“The winning side,” she says, and smiles. “The team of artists.”

“Who are we playing?”

“The barbarians,” she says. “We are always playing them.”

The Barbarians

Glenn is waiting for me—in my room—when I return from the quadrangle. He is sitting at my desk, and the middle drawer is open.

“You are brilliant,” he whispers.

“What do you mean?”

“The giant penis on Dovecott’s desk.”

“I didn’t put it there.”

“Like hell you didn’t,” Glenn says.

“I think
you
did. And I bet Miss Dovecott thinks so, too.”

“Why the hell would she think that?”

“Because you did,” I say.

“So maybe I did. It’s part of The Plan.”

“What plan?”

“The one to figure out how much she knows.”

“Glenn, we have to be careful. There doesn’t have to be a
plan
. It’s way too dangerous and completely unnecessary.”

“She knows, Stromm. She knows something, and she’s not telling us or Dean Mansfield or Mr. Armstrong. She’s
keeping it all to herself, and you are the perfect one to find out what it is.”

“Why were you looking through my desk?” I ask.

“Pencil,” he says, raising one up in the air, and he writes out The Plan, with a line for signatures beneath it. Is Male signs it. Because he loves to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

The Plan

1. Mess with Miss Dovecott psychologically (as in the photo/drawing left on her desk).

2. Act innocent. Do all the homework; answer promptly and intelligently during class.

3. Make sure she is at the final pep rally.

4. Glenn: Tell Dean Mansfield she makes you uncomfortable when you go in for one-on-one help. Glenn: Go in for one-on-one help.

5. Alex: Use your writing to lure her. (This step is my contribution, though I do not tell Glenn what Miss Dovecott said to me in the quad.)

6. If she knows more than she’s telling, move in for the kill.