Paper Covers Rock (19 page)

It was a heartfelt reply, sympathizing with me for having lost a friend and thanking me for being one. They actually apologized for not being able to write sooner. The postscript
did its best to abdicate me of any responsibility:
The last thing in the world we want is for you to feel that you could have somehow saved our son
. Which was, of course, exactly how I did feel, how I
should
feel. I laid my head on my desk for hours on end, through track practice, which I skipped and got major demerits for, through the dinner bell and Lights-Out, through what I can without a doubt call, with Robert Frost accuracy, the “darkest evening of the year.”

I thought back to the essay that first put me on Miss Dovecott’s radar. The last paragraph, like the last sentence of Hemingway’s story, I remembered by heart:
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
.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 9:52 P.M
.

Paper Covers Rock

Back from Thanksgiving break, and it’s still here, as I knew it would be: my trusty journal, safe behind a whale of a tale that was last checked out in 1964 by Mr. Henley, who has been the head of the English department for a quarter of a century. I have just finished my English essay for tomorrow (yes, the English department gives us homework over Thanksgiving break—thanks, Mr. Henley), so this is it, my last entry, one more attempt to commit the truth to paper. It has not been easy. I have a newfound respect for Mr. Melville, and one day, maybe, I will actually read
Moby-Dick
in its entirety. One day, maybe, I will give this journal back to my dad. But for
now, this is where my story belongs until it is time for me to leave this place.

What I record here on the final blank pages of my journal, my confession, my collection of poetry, my collection of guilt, my Not-So-Great American Novel, is this: I am surprised that Miss Dovecott—whose name I have changed (like all names in this whatever-you-want-to-call-it) to protect the innocent—did not mark through the word “forever.” She left it hanging there, untainted by red ink. “Forever,” a fairy-tale adverb that in some stories spins its magic. And in other stories, like mine, the word stretches itself as thin as a life line. A word burdened with both history and future.

In the end—that is, earlier today—I did talk to Mr. Parkes, mostly because he made me. He wanted to assure me that he and Glenn’s advisor were the only faculty members other than Dean Mansfield and Mr. Armstrong who knew what had happened between me and Miss Dovecott. Even though they had debated kicking me out for conduct unbecoming of a Birch student, Mr. Parkes had stood up for me, telling them he thought I had gotten myself caught between a rock and a hard place.

He told me now that he wasn’t disappointed in me, and though he never said that he was disappointed in Miss Dovecott, his colleague, I knew he was. In an attempt to make me feel better, he shared bits and pieces from the conversations he had had with her about me, but they only made me feel worse.

Miss Dovecott had admired me for my strength, he said, for the ways that I was learning to know, accept, and heal myself. More than any other student, I had given her hope in
what she was doing; because of me, she wasn’t teaching to the walls or the air; someone was listening and trying. Someone was aware that through careful arrangements of words, order could be made from chaos. Mr. Parkes even told me that it had given her chills when I’d told her that a poem had come to me while riding the bus back to Birch from a crosscountry meet and I hadn’t had any paper so I’d written it on the back of a McDonald’s napkin in the dark. “You have to stop and freeze the moment,” he told me I had told her. “You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.”

When I asked Mr. Parkes why Miss Dovecott had told him all of this, he said there seemed to have been some sort of unspoken vow of solidarity between the two of them to keep tabs on me after Thomas had died. But I wonder if she’d needed Mr. Parkes to keep her in check. In the course of my conversation with Mr. Parkes, her offer to take me to Italy never came up, though maybe it wasn’t really an offer. Maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part. Maybe Miss Dovecott in general was wishful thinking on my part. I mean, it’s all here—in writing—but as we know by now, stories collide.

In Miss Dovecott’s eyes, I was a man among boys: I was a patient student, a patient athlete (I guess she’d gotten that from Mr. Wellfleet), and she’d watched the way I waited tables in the dining hall, never hurried or half-assed. She had observed me eating: I had “elegant” table manners, apparently, and a curious way of bringing my lips to the glass, as if I were a baby bird feeding from its mother. Mr. Parkes said that I was, like Miss Dovecott, an only child, and I will always wonder if there wasn’t a dose of narcissism in why she
chose me. But I made my English teacher a promise, and even though my faithful reader was no longer here, it was a promise I would keep. It was how I would survive the wreck, after the drama was done.

Mr. Parkes requested that I report to his apartment once a week for hot chocolate and conversation, and once he dismissed me, and with Miss Dovecott’s watch in my pocket, I walked to the rock to wait for Glenn. In an hour, we would pay our tribute to Thomas two months after his death. On the bank where he died, we would dig a hole just big enough for the watch and bury it so deep that it would take at least a lifetime for the water to wash it clear. All the rest of my lifetime, without Thomas or Miss Dovecott in it. I knew, standing there, that if Glenn were to ask me to room with him next year, I would say no. But I was pretty sure he wouldn’t ask. The burial would mark the end of a lot of things.

When I reached the rock, I climbed up on it. So what if I was breaking a rule? I had broken so many that rules ceased to hold meaning. It was cold, but the sky was blue and clear, the sun so bright that I had to put my hand up as a visor. And then I did something that human beings aren’t supposed to do: I stared at the sun without blinking and didn’t close my eyes until they burned so hard I couldn’t stand it. I opened them to a strange blindness, as if seeing had now become hearing. The water tripped by, but I could still think, I could still understand. Flattening my back onto the cold stone, I took deep breaths and let the sun trace, like chalk at a crime scene, the outline of my body.

It does indeed take a village. I would like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to

Kathi Appelt, my guardian angel, for her impressive wingspan.

Jonathan Lyons, my invaluable agent, for giving my voice a voice.

Michelle Poploff, my editor, for settling on me and then not settling.

Rebecca Short, editorial assistant, for her sharp, young eyes.

Ben Hale and Ted Blain, for investing their wisdom in my words.

Sally Hawn, my sister and first reader always.

My sister Leigh Hubbard and my brother-in-law Andy Evans, best possible audience for my boarding-school stories.

Jayne and Joel Hubbard, for reading to me before I knew how.

Steve Cobb, for so much in my life that is good and true.

Jenny Hubbard taught high school and college English for seventeen years. She now writes full-time in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, a high school math teacher. Learn more at
papercoversrock.co
and on Facebook.