Paper Covers Rock (10 page)
Authors: Jenny Hubbard
Pause. The lights are buzzing over our heads. She says, “I hate fluorescent lights, don’t you?” As if she knows that I have given these lights some thought, as if we are on the same page.
“Oh, yeah.” I nod. “They’re so … they’re so …”
“Heartless.” She finishes my sentence for me.
Same word, same page, same feeling, same everything. Haley and me, me and Haley.
Fifth-and Sixth-Form Parents’ Weekend
Letter in the mailbox from Dad. He writes me every week. I’m a less regular correspondent, though I do make the obligatory call every couple of days, a two-minute conversation just so he can hear my voice. Dad will not be coming this weekend. I’ve known this for a long time, and it’s fine. Except for this semester, I see him regularly because he lives close by. But he has to make a living to support me, and in his field, making a living means taking a sabbatical when it’s offered so that you have time to write a book and be published and bring honor and glory to the university where you teach. That is why my dad isn’t coming.
I don’t know about my mom. I talked to her the day after the accident, but I haven’t heard from her since. I hope she doesn’t come. She is very beautiful but strange. Before she married my dad, she lived in London and went on some dates with Mick Jagger, a fact I let slip during my first month at Birch because I knew it would buy me clout. If she comes to Parents’ Weekend, she will wear something crazy, like a dashiki or red high-heeled shoes. She will be labeled by my friends as a Fum (boarding-school speak for “f
ckable mom”).
No letter in the mailbox from Thomas’s parents, of course, because they will have just gotten mine.
On Parents’ Weekend, a fountain will be unveiled in the center of the quad. It will be dedicated to the memory of Thomas Broughton, class of 1984, given by the parents of the class of 1984. Is this some kind of symbol or cautionary reminder? Did anyone think this through? A fountain???!!! I
bet you money that Thomas wants nothing to do with water, not to mention with the class of 1984.
New and Improved Homework (the Rough Draft)
Ginger Rogers
He was such a bad monkey that I had to stuff him into my suitcase and take him to the train station and leave him there for some other little girl to find. He had only been with me for two days, and already, he needed a reform school or a new family with much wider boundaries.
At the yard sale, he had looked so festive with his red mouth and red ball on top of his cap. A little cherry of a ball. His mouth did not open, and he had big ears, which made him the perfect companion for me because I am such a talker. But my mother did not know when she bought him for a quarter that he talked, too. He talked to me in his dreams.
Sometimes I was a part of his dream. Sometimes, in the dream, he was big and I was small. Sometimes he carried me by his right hand, swinging me down the sidewalks of Dreamland. He never dropped me, but once, he threw me up into a tree, where I had to hang by my toes for seven hours, which was much worse than being dropped. Once, he made a boat for me out of sticks and leaves and pushed me over a waterfall. I survived, but barely.
I could hear the monkey knocking against the suitcase. He was tap dancing. He thought he was a fabulous tap dancer, but I had news for him: he was no Fred Astaire. “Stop being so bad!” I yelled through the keyhole.
“I’ll stop being bad when you give me a name,” he yelled back.
“Don’t you sass me, Bad Monkey,” I said.
“I am magic,” he whispered. “Don’t you get it? If you name me, all your troubles will be over. Please give me a name, and don’t leave me here in this dirty train station all alone.”
So I sat down on a bench and unlocked the suitcase. “Fred,” I said, pulling him to me and hugging him tight. “You are such a Fred.”
The Artist vs. the Barbarian
When Miss Dovecott reads my charmingly quirky, symbolic-sounding but utterly pointless story, maybe she will fall in love with me all over again. And maybe she will forgive me for all that I am about to do, for all I have already done. Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.
.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 12:35 P.M
.
Running, Yesterday
It is the time of day when the sun turns treetops into keepers of light. After redoing my homework and leaving it on Miss Dovecott’s desk, I run through that light, up one side of the hill and down the other, imagining possibilities.… Miss Dovecott is only five years older than I am, and in five years, when I’m out of college and the age difference won’t matter, we can fall in love properly and go to restaurants and drink wine and whisper into each other’s eyes and get married and live in an apartment with fresh flowers on every table and bookshelf, flowers that I select myself and bring home from the corner market.
The wildflowers that grow on the banks of the French Broad River have all gone under the earth. Like Thomas. It is a Friday with no rain. The sun leaves nothing of itself on the water; cold air raises goose bumps on my legs. Birds skim
across the path, leaves murmur beneath my shoes, sounds that become one with the river.
I stand on a bank far away from the headwaters, far away from the rock. The water is gray but inviting because it is moving, going somewhere. I step down into it, and it covers my shoes and socks. Cold, cold. I take another step, then another. I am up to my knees in water. I test myself to see how far I can go: top of my shorts, my balls start shriveling; up to my belly button; my gray shirt sucks up the gray water, turning my shirt darker. I make it up to my neck, and then it’s too much. I flounder back up the bank, where I fold into myself to stay warm, rocking back and forth to the pulse of the river until my heartbeat falls in unison with it.
“Oh, Alex, it’s you,” a voice says, and I jump.
When I turn my head around, Miss Dovecott steps toward me, her eyes flickering with curiosity. She must wonder what I am doing here when most guys are having dinner with their parents.
“You’re all wet,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why would you want to go swimming on a day like today?”
“Uh …” I don’t have an answer.
“You’re cold.”
“I just finished running.”
“You should dry off.”
I take off my shirt.
“You’re shaking,” she says. When she pulls her sweatshirt over her head, I see her nipples poking through her bra and into her shirt. “Here. You need this more than I do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. I’m fine. I have on a turtleneck.”
“I don’t need your sweatshirt, Miss Dovecott.”
“Alex, the tips of your fingers are blue.”
I lift my hands to look at them. She holds the sweatshirt out to me, and I take it, putting my arms through the sleeves, then pulling it over my head in one quick motion. On Miss Dovecott the sweatshirt is miniskirt length, but it fits me.
“I’m on my way back up to campus,” she says. “Want to join me?”
I nod and follow.
“I heard the cross-country team won the other day,” she says. “And a personal best for you. Congratulations.”
(I didn’t have time to write about it here in this book.)
“Thanks.” I smile, curious. “Who told you?”
“Mr. Wellfleet. He was proud.”
“Yeah, he was jumping around all over the place. You’d have thought we’d won the Olympics or something.”
Because the path is narrow, I let her walk in front. To talk face to face is impossible, and sending small talk into the back of her head feels pointless. I try not to stare at her bottom in case she suddenly turns around.
I suppress the urge to grab her by the waist and instead tap her on the shoulder. “I know a shortcut,” I say, stepping in front of her, wondering if she might be studying the muscles in my calves or the mud spattered on the back of them. As we angle away from the rush of the river, I pick up the pace. When the path disappears, I lead her over cushions of leaves, weaving in and out of trees. We are almost running, but she has no trouble keeping up, and I don’t slow down
until I reach the sycamore with the low, oblong knothole. “The coolest tree on campus,” I say. I press my hand on the trunk next to the hole. “Once I found a bird’s nest here.”
I do not say that when I went running for help on the day Thomas died, I stopped here on the way up the hill to the infirmary, out of my mind with panic, and sobbed for at least two minutes.
A single bird whisks by over our heads, and we look up. The light is gone from the treetops, leaving only feathers of cloud in the sky. I take the opportunity to earn a few brownie points. “I’ve been meaning to ask if you could recommend a book for me to read. Anything you think I might like that isn’t too ‘Englishy.’ You know what I mean. I like English. It’s my favorite class. It really is; I’m not just saying that.”
She smiles. “Well, have you read
Crime and Punishment
?”
“I’ve seen it on my dad’s bookshelf at home.” I pause. “But to be honest, it looks kind of long, and I don’t have a lot of extra reading time.” I do not tell her that I’m in the process of slogging through
Moby-Dick
because at the rate I’m going, I may not make it all the way. “Can you think of something a little shorter?”
“Why don’t you try
In Our Time
, by Hemingway? It’s a collection of stories about a young man named Nick Adams, a soldier in World War I. I’m sure the library has a copy. If not, you’re welcome to borrow mine.”
By now we have reached the top of the hill, where below us the school buildings cast their long shadows. A game of touch football has started in the quad, but it is too far away for me to make out the players. I feel empty, a whole Friday night without study hall stretching before me, and I almost
ask Miss Dovecott if she wants to drive into town for dinner. I consider offering an observation about dark closing in on us, but that sounds stupid, too. I am almost expecting her to say something about Thomas, to pounce and try to draw the truth out of me, like a mouth on a rattlesnake bite, but she doesn’t. What she says is “I’m taking you to the infirmary.”
For a split second, I think she means her apartment, but then I realize she is worried that I might have hypothermia. When I check in with Nurse Patty, I am still wearing Miss Dovecott’s sweatshirt.
Ice Cream
In the waiting room with its clanking radiator, Nurse Patty gives me some towels and checks my temperature. Normal. She makes me drink tea from a china cup with pink roses on it, then sends me back to my dorm to shower in time for dinner. I stuff the damp sweatshirt under my bed for the time being, throw on khakis and a collared shirt, and run to the dining hall for make-’em-yourself sundaes, cold comfort for the parentless. I eat three of them, and they actually do make me feel better for a little while. I sit at the corner table usually occupied by faculty, where the tall windows come together, and I look through my own reflection out into the night, where things I know nothing about are happening. Afterward, in the darkness of my room, I lie on my bed naked with the sweatshirt in my arms, aching all over.
Old Man
The next morning (this morning) at the library, I find
In Our Time
, right where it should be, and I sit in my carrel for
forty-five minutes, reading. I have a Latin quiz first period (yes, they still make us go to Saturday class even on Parents’ Weekend) that I should be studying for, but I’m not interested in Latin right now. I am Nick Adams, the soldier who has to keep his mind shut down in order to get through a day.
By the time the bell rings, the scent of the book has worked its way into the creases of my palms. It is a nice smell, really, a grandfather’s-closet smell, and I am smiling as I walk to the circulation desk even though I am about to fail a quiz. I pull the card out of the back of the Hemingway book and sign my name. That’s when I see another name. Thomas Broughton checked out this book in March of 1956. Quick as a wink, I erase my name from the card, but the eraser smudges rather than clears, and I can still see my handwriting. I reach across the circulation desk to grab a black felt-tip pen, and I color in the whole block so that no trace of my name remains. I return the book to the shelf where it belongs and check out
The Old Man and the Sea
instead.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 9:15 A.M
.
Saturday Night at Boarding School on Parents’ Weekend
You don’t have a lot of options. You don’t want to be the only guy on dorm other than the shy Korean kid whose family lives halfway around the world. You don’t want to feel sorry for yourself as you sit and watch girl shows like
The Love Boat
and
Fantasy Island
. You think you might sail about a little and see the watery part of the world; you think you might sign up for the mixer designed to keep the under-formers occupied and the upper-form losers like you and the Korean kid from
killing yourselves. Sure enough, the evening doesn’t seem nearly as bleak when you see who the chaperone is. You tuck a paperback into your jacket pocket just in case you and she want to get literary.