Paper Covers Rock (17 page)

“It’s a tribute.”

“No one has ever written a poem about me before,” she says, her face turning red.

“Well, it’s about time,” I say as I watch the blush creep all the way to her hairline. “Now, it’s your turn.” I hand her the sheet of paper.

After hearing the poem in her voice, I want to make the whole thing rhyme. Miss Dovecott agrees: it will give the poem more tension, she says, the rhymes versus the subject not being able to fit.

“But the rhymes, in a way, allow her to fit,” I say, looking at her.

“Maybe you’re right, Alex.” She closes her mouth, opens it to speak, closes it again. She reaches for her watch, forgetting it’s not there, and grabs on to her wrist.

And in that moment I realize that if Thomas hadn’t died, she would never have taken an interest in me. I would have been just another polite student with nothing important to say, a kid yet to come into his own. I would have never written a poem other than the ones I was required to write.

“Alex,” she says. “How do I say this?”

“Say what?” I hold my breath, thinking, This is it, here it comes, she is going to tell me she loves me. But that is not what she says.

She says, “I’m afraid that after you leave this class, you’ll stop writing. Life will get in the way, it will move too fast, and you won’t make time for these.” She lifts the poem up, holding it out to me. “Promise me that, whatever happens, you’ll keep writing.”

“I promise,” I say.

“And I promise that you will always have at least one faithful reader. But now I’ve got miles to go before I sleep, so I’ll see you Thursday with a new poem.” She walks to the door while I gather my things, and she holds it open for me.

I run straight out into the night, running fast, as if pulled by the moon hanging over the campus like an examiner’s bulb. The stars fuzz in my eyes, now blurry with cold, and in the distance a dog barks. I wonder if dogs ever feel as lonely as people. After my mom left, Freud, our golden retriever, kept climbing at night onto her side of the bed even though he had never slept there before, and when my dad finally got around to buying Freud his own special cushion, which Freud refused, I dragged him into my bed and fell asleep listening to his heart beat.

Bed, bed: where I need to be, the place I know best, my home away from home. But almost as soon as I close the door to my room and curl into the fetal position, Glenn walks in.

“I’m sick,” I tell him.

“Alex,” he says. He hardly ever calls me Alex. I sit up. “Alex,” he says again, “do you think that Thomas is looking down at us right now?”

And with that, Glenn sounds like the old Glenn, the one I used to like, the one I became friends with. He looks like the old Glenn, too, his pale eyes clear with light, not murky with confusion. “Sometimes I think that,” I say.

“Poet-boys think that all the time, I bet.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much.”

“I think it all the time, too. And I’m a math guy.”

“Math is all right.”

“You hate math.”

“Yeah, I know, but just because I hate it doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile.”

“Hey,” says Glenn, “maybe we should do something for Thomas, like a tribute or something.”

“You mean like the fountain?”

“No, not anything stupid, completely insensitive, totally morbid, not to mention tasteless. Something real. Something we know Thomas would appreciate.”

I think for a minute. “Well, how about a plaque? Like those ones in the chapel of the guys who died in the wars.”

“I don’t think it should hang in the chapel. I’d feel like a hypocrite.”

“How about in Miss Dovecott’s classroom, then, or someone else’s? We could put it on the wall near his desk. Or
on
his desk.”

“Thomas didn’t really like school,” says Glenn. “He liked girls and fishing and girls and grilled cheese sandwiches and girls. So where does that leave us?”

“Girls.”

“Speaking of girls”—he pauses dramatically—“how’s Haley?”

“Fine.”

“How did she like your honor essay?”

“She gave me a B-plus. There were some grammatical errors.”

I do not tell him I confessed; I do not tell him that I stopped running for a few precious minutes and hid by the tree with the knothole.

“If you can find out how much she knows, then we can lay everything to rest,” Glenn says. “I mean it. Everything. We can get back to the way we were before all of this happened.”

“That’s impossible.”

“So forget The Plan—fine. With a little luck, she’ll get her own self booted. Giving boys her clothes, touching them where she shouldn’t—it’ll happen in its own good time. I’m talking about putting the whole Thomas thing behind us so that we can move forward with our lives. You want that, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“And Thomas would want that for us. Seriously, Stromm, think about the tribute. We owe him. And think about doing your duty as a man of your word. You owe that to yourself.” He walks to the door and turns back. “She’s using you. You realize that, don’t you?”

The idea falls on my heart like an anchor.

“She’s turning you into a poet to make herself look good. She’s the sculptor; you’re clay. If she succeeds with you, then it’s a mark in her favor. The administration’s suspicious.”

“Thanks to you.”

“She needs to prove she’s valuable here. You’re her ticket.”

“She doesn’t need me. She’s helped lots of guys.”

“But you’re her pet.”

“I’m not a dog, Glenn. And she’s not my master.”

“No,” he says with a big smile. “I am. I am the captain of this ship, and you are my first mate, my right-hand man.” Then he closes the door so quietly behind him that I have to look to make sure he is really gone.

I slump back to my pillow with thoughts orbiting my
brain like planets, worlds unto themselves. What if Miss Dovecott
is
using me and my poems to slip inside the Old Boy Network that creeps across the ground here like ivy, using me and my poems to get to the heart of her suspicions? What made her suspicious in the first place? My essay? The scattered ideas of an unreliable narrator? I pull the essay out of my English folder, read it over again. I don’t see anything there that an innocent boy wouldn’t write, too, under the circumstances. I feel old; I feel doomed. I think about how Thomas will soon be one of the dead boys trapped in the school’s musty yearbooks. And I only am escaped alone to tell the tale—I only. I conjure Miss Dovecott’s voice reciting my poems, the clip-clop of the lines carried in her voice, her rocking voice, which is the rocking of the water, which is the rocking of my body as I lay me down to sleep.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 7:03 A.M
.

Captain Ahab has an obsession that clouds his judgment. To believe that he has the power to bring down a whale, to believe that he can battle what God made, and win: this is his hubris, his tragic flaw. Melville was right to title his masterpiece with the obsession itself because it looms, ghostlike, over every nautical mile.

On Wednesday I find the flyer in my English notebook tucked behind my explication of Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain.” The deadline for the contest I told Miss Dovecott I’d enter was Tuesday. I throw the flyer away in a library trash can. There are a million guys like me out there, being encouraged by their teachers; there is no way I would have won a thing. The judges would have laughed all over my paper, saying, “Who does he think he is?”

My thoughts precisely: who does he think he is? Take your pick: reader, writer, son, lifeguard, lover of water, lover
of Haley (in his dreams), dreamer, nephew, cousin, friend, student, teammate, Bulldog, hater of vodka and hypocrites, hypocrite, janitor, Tarheel fan, caretaker (of Freud). He is Is Male, boy among boys at a school in 1982, and he’ll leave it as others have left it, as others will leave it, boys stepping into who they are without ever having known who they were. Even with words of identification beside his photograph in the yearbook, he will go down, down in history, a drop in the bottomless bucket of time.

Alexander No Middle Name Stromm

At our designated poetry-meeting time on Thursday night, I knock on Miss Dovecott’s classroom door. I have my poems,
I have my heart beating faster than it does after I’ve finished a race. I have never been so aware of this organ of mine that looks like a fist, clenched and bloody. Whoever it was who first equated hearts with valentines was way off. The heart is a weapon.

She is ready for me. She gestures toward the empty desk, the one that no one sits in anymore. “Have a seat.”

When she turns to get the chair from behind her desk, I sit in the desk nearest the empty one. She either doesn’t notice or chooses not to comment as she pulls her chair up so that she faces me. “I take it you sent your essay in to the contest,” she says, smiling. “I sent in my part last week.”

“Actually, Miss Dovecott, I didn’t. I’m sorry you spent time recommending me when I didn’t even send anything in.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a lot on my mind these days,” I tell her, “and sometimes I can’t make it do what I want it to do.” I pause. “Can I ask you a question first that has nothing to do with writing?”

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer it, but you may ask it.”

I stare at the clock on the wall. “When Thomas died. You were there. But maybe you were there before that. I mean, a few minutes earlier? Were you?”

“I didn’t see you run and then stop running, like you said in your honor essay, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t see that, but, no, that’s not what I mean.”

She looks at me with her deep eyes. “You want to know everything I saw.”

“Yes.”

She hesitates. And that’s when I know that Glenn is right—there
is
more to the story. I nod, wiping my palms on my corduroys, and stare at her pearls, how the right side of her necklace holds the light. Half of everything blooms white.

“I’ll tell you,” she says, “if you tell me first what it is you are afraid I saw.”

“Miss Dovecott, that’s not fair.”

“Sure it is. I already know there’s more to the story, Alex. I’ve read between the lines, and I’m usually pretty good at that.”

“If I tell you, can we keep it just between us?”

“That depends,” she says.

“On what?”

“On how much of it actually
is
just between us.”

“You know that it’s not,” I say.

“Well, then, it’s your choice, Alex. Don’t tell me if you feel the need to protect someone other than yourself. But if you do choose to tell me, I ask that it be the truth.”

I take a deep breath, thinking, If I go down with the ship, I go down with the ship. “I was drinking vodka, too. Clay told Mr. Armstrong I wasn’t, but I was. Maybe if I hadn’t been, I would have been able to stop Thomas. He was so drunk, there was no way we’d ever get him back up the hill; someone would see him, someone would know, and we’d all be sent home. When he dove from the rock, he could hardly stand up straight. We thought swimming would sober him up. We—I—should never have let him do it.”

She touches her wrist where her watch used to be, her fingers lost without time to hold on to.

“So,” I ask, “are you going to tell on me?”

“As hard as it might be for you to believe, it wasn’t that long ago that I was seventeen. To be honest with you, a part of me doesn’t care about the vodka.”

“Then what do you care about?”

“You.”

I hold my breath.

“Trust me—it’s not going to do anyone any good for me to blow the whistle now on the drinking. At the time, Dean Mansfield asked me if I saw any evidence of alcohol or drugs, or smelled any, and I didn’t. That’s the truth.”

I exhale, remembering Glenn’s licorice gum.

“You have a gift, Alex. You have no idea how gifted you are. And I shouldn’t tell you that because I’m afraid it will go to your head, and then you’ll grow complacent and lazy. If you go back to public school, I’m afraid you’ll become your lesser self.”

I pull my folder of poems to my stomach. “Don’t you think I deserve to be kicked out?”

“By the letter of the law, yes.”

“But you don’t want me to go.”

“No, I don’t want you to go.” She takes a deep breath. “You remind me of someone, a boy in my third-grade class who told me that he had a secret set of wings growing on the inside of his shoulder blades and that one day the wings would push through the skin and lift him into the sky. This is hard to explain, but there is something about you, Alex, that makes me want to run to the library and learn everything there is to learn about birds.”

I gaze at my feet, which look as if they want to walk away from my body.

“You don’t need me to write, Alex. You have what you need right here.” She taps my head, and I look up.

“I thought it was here,” I say, touching my heart. “I thought the poems were here.”

“Maybe they are. What do I know?”

“But you’re the teacher.”

“Sometimes, Alex, I’m the student.” She rises, and I rise with her.

“In a way, I wish you
would
tell on me,” I say. “It might make me feel better, to have it all out in the open. But I don’t want Glenn to get in trouble because of me.”