Paper Covers Rock (3 page)

In English Class, Part Three

“Alex was with Thomas, too,” Auggie says, unnecessarily, because the students, the teachers, everyone, knows who was where on Saturday at approximately two o’clock in the afternoon. I want to shoot Auggie a dirty look, but I’m lying low. Besides, how do you shoot a dirty look? Do you take out your eyeballs and pocket them into a slingshot, and pull back the rubber band, and …

Miss Dovecott is gazing at me, and I forget all about my eyeballs. To her credit, she does not tell the class that she was there at the river that day, too. Our screams led her there.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. “For
our
loss,” she corrects herself, glancing over at the oxymoronic desk, the one full of emptiness.

Postscript

Even though other boys in other classes sit in that desk, I expect Miss Dovecott to remove it, to store it in the attic or something, but the next morning, Thomas’s desk is still there. In other classrooms, too—history, chemistry, pre-calc, Spanish—there are still desks.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 8:05 P.M
.

Yes, Mr. Melville, they are gone,
long
gone, which is why I must sit here in this library and write about them, just as you did before me. Your novel is art. My novel is the sloppy work of a guy trying to fill up a journal with inadequate words.

Green Fields

Now
and
then
are two opposite places, two different time zones.
Then
was a lifetime ago. Then, I ate that lunch. Then, I rhymed my poems. Our first homework assignment in fifth-form English (pretentious boarding-school speak for eleventh grade) was to write a poem that evoked the mood of autumn. Here is mine, copied here for posterity, now that the green fields are gone.

By Alex Stromm

9/4/82

An eerily foreshadowy effort that Miss Dovecott chose to read out loud to the class the day I turned it in. After she did, I was out in the open, I was someone with a name, and I knew I would be called a few other names once I returned to the dorm that afternoon. For a second, I was mad at her. And then she wrote some of my poem on the board, underlining words, and I think that’s when I fell in love, though it didn’t feel like falling. She asked us questions about diction and placement, the same as she had done the day before with poems by actual writers. It’s difficult to put into words on a
page, but before this moment, I was not actual, or not full, or full of shit. Miss Dovecott made me real.

“The poet chose to leave this untitled,” she said, making it seem as if I’d done the exact right thing. “But if it were your poem, if you had weighed your choices and ended here, what would you call it?”

She made us write our titles on scrap paper—“To keep you honest,” she said—and then she circled the room with her lilting voice, pecking the board with chalk as we, one by one, offered up our ideas. The title she liked best was “Sand,” which connotes a desert, the opposite of a garden, cradle of paradise. But contrary to the sentiment contained within my waltzing stanzas, I felt—for the first time at Birch—a future rising up inside me.

And then she turned to the board and erased, and wrote another boy’s words across the dust left behind by my poem.

But that was
then
, before the accident. Miss Dovecott—without whose existence the filling of these pages would not be possible; without whose existence this story would remain untold. I am in love with Miss Dovecott. And she might, just might, be in love with me. She writes about me in her journal the same way I write about her in mine. At least I dream she does.

If you think about it, it’s kind of weird that Miss Dovecott would sign on for a job here. A young Yankee female in an age-old Southern male institution. Even English-teacher bookworms need friends and bars. The campus is more beautiful to adults than it is to us: we see it as a fishbowl, and they see it as a nest, with the stone buildings tucked inside the
rolling hills at the feet of the Blue Ridge Mountains, supposedly the oldest chain of mountains in the United States. To adults, old is cozy. To us, old is something we can’t imagine we will ever be.

Miss Dovecott isn’t old; she’s right out of college, probably twenty-two, maybe only twenty-one. My father says he admires the Birch faculty because they give so much of themselves to the place—seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Of course he’s aware of the free housing and food they receive in addition to a teacher’s salary, but that doesn’t compensate for a lack of privacy and time to themselves. He could never work here, he says, and I certainly haven’t encouraged him to apply.

I have seen Miss Dovecott talking with Mr. Parkes, my advisor. Sometimes they sit together at lunch, but it doesn’t look like love, except for the fact that when they talk, she plays with her watch and smiles. Maybe they drink wine together at his apartment. Maybe they read poems and stories out loud to each other.

Scissors Cut Paper

Poems and stories: NOT the newspaper version of things. There is a boarding school version of things, too, and it’s like the newspaper version, only more deliberate. The boarding school version, sent out ASAP in a letter written by the Headmaster’s secretary and signed by the Headmaster, is there to soothe the parents, who pay shitloads of money to send their sons away. The letter is sent so that, even in the wake of disaster, parents will keep sending their sons to, and
I quote, “a community who makes it not a business but a moral duty, an obligation, to prepare boys for life.” My dad bought into this, literally and figuratively.

My dad calls me several times on the day of the accident, the last day of September, after he receives a call from Mr. Armstrong. (Later in the week, he receives his own personal copy of the soothing letter.) There are three messages tacked to my door, scribbled in sloppy handwriting, when I return to the dorm Saturday night after holing up in the janitor’s closet. The last note says to call my dad no matter how late, but by that time, the school switchboard is closed, so I get permission from my prefect, a senior I’ll call Bob Dylan (just because I can), to use the pay phone in the gym. Glenn wants to go with me, but Bob Dylan won’t let him because it’s after check-in.

The basement of the gym, night or day, is like a dungeon and smells worse than one. Dad answers on the first ring.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” I say, lying. “I’m not fine right this minute, but I will be.”

“I’m coming to get you.”

“No, Dad, please. Everything is under control. You know this place. It’s like the army. They don’t let anything slide, least of all a potentially troubled young man such as myself.”

My dad tells me he’s talked with Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Parkes, but he still isn’t sure that in loco parentis is the proper modus operandi. “The first flight I can get out of here is Monday morning.”

“Don’t waste your money, Dad.”

“Then will you call me tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that? If I’m not in, keep trying. Better yet,
call me as soon as you wake up. That way, I know I’ll be here.”

I tell him I will, but I do not tell him that I won’t be sleeping tonight, tomorrow night, or probably ever. Before I leave the gym, I grope my way to the corner bench in front of my locker, put my head in my hands, and cry myself a river. When I get back to the dorm, I check in with Bob Dylan, who offers me a fatherly pat on the back.

Clay Claybrook: not fatherly. Not brotherly. Hardly human. I got stuck with him. Thomas and I had planned to room together, but then Glenn’s chosen roommate got kicked out at the very end of our sophomore year for stealing another guy’s Coke out of the dormitory refrigerator. Birch has a strict code of honor—no lying, no cheating, no stealing, and no second chances—so Claybrook, otherwise known as Gaybrook, got assigned to him. When Glenn found out, he asked Thomas if he wanted to switch, and Thomas said yes, basically screwing me over. Thomas explained that he had asked Glenn first, in the spring of our sophomore year before the Coke incident, but that I had been his next choice.

Good, Solid Kids don’t mind playing second fiddle to Golden Boys. Golden Boys have it hard, too. One false move gone public and not only do you lose your chance at prefect, but you are out of here. When it comes to honor, Birch doesn’t believe in second chances. Which is why it is a good thing that Clay left the river before the jumping began and took his bottle of vodka with him, which is why Miss Dovecott didn’t see it when she came on the scene. Clay left because of something Thomas said. Clay is a very touchy guy.

When I come back to the dorm after talking to my dad, Glenn is sitting on Clay’s bed. Clay is in the bathroom.

“You’ve been crying,” Glenn says.

“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” I say.

“Thomas’s parents came by after chapel and took some of his stuff home with them.”

“What about the rest of his stuff?”

“Dean Mansfield told them he’d box it up and save it for some scholarship kid,” Glenn says. “His mom stayed at the hospital with the body. They’re doing an autopsy.”

“Why?”

“It’s what they do when they need to rule out foul play! They’re going to find the alcohol! We are dead, Alex! Dead!”

“No, Glenn, we’re not. We’re alive. Thomas is dead.”

He stops and looks at me. “Do you not realize what is about to happen here?”

“Yeah. But maybe we deserve it.”

“We do not deserve it, Stromm. Thomas was shit-faced. If he’d listened to us and jumped out like we told him, he’d still be alive.”

“Are you saying it’s his own fault he’s dead?”

“No, of course not. I’m saying it was his choice to chug half a pint of vodka.”

“We could have stopped him,” I say.

“He would have done it anyway,” says Glenn.

“How do you know?”

“Because I know Thomas.”

“Well, I knew him better than you,” I say, “and I have my doubts.”

Glenn rises from the bed with a funny look on his face.

“What?” I say.

“I just figured out a way for us to stay, me and you. Even if they do find alcohol in his bloodstream—”

“Which they will—”

“I figured it out, Stromm. We’re safe.” Just then, Clay opens the door and kind of shoves me out of his way.

“I was just leaving,” Glenn says. “Let’s all try to get some sleep, okay?”

Green Fields Gone

There is always more to the story. Look around at the books on these shelves: stories, stories, stories, get your stories here! Stories within stories that lead to other stories that lead to other stories. A whole Pandora’s box of stories. And then, of course, there is the story of how stories collide—the fiction and the fact—and the very fine line between them.

Rock Beats Scissors

Outside the infirmary, the two boys sit side by side on a bench, a hard wooden one with slats, and in the stone-cold clarity of the moment, with the haze of the vodka shocked out of his system, one of the boys thinks about the rectangle of wood underneath him, one that was made by a man he did not know, from some tree that used to live in a forest, and how that craftsman could never, in his wildest dreams, have imagined that the most important moment in these two boys’ lives would take place on wood that he had hewn and sanded. The sun begins to lower itself behind the mountains, and the shadows on the lawn outside the school infirmary
become fingers, broad, giant fingers, creeping up the backs of the Dean of Students and the Headmaster, who inform the boys that the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department, now that it has drawn up an official accident report, has decided to leave any further investigating to the school.

The two boys are escorted by the Dean of Students, first back to the dorm to change clothes, and then to the main building, where the school’s offices are, so that the boys can call home to the people known as parents, who gave them life. One of the boys will sit in an office and stare at a poster that mocks all that his father has tried to teach him; one of the boys will hide out in a janitor’s closet and try to pretend that what just happened didn’t really happen.

Green Fields Long Gone

Like I said, more to the story: there is another bench outside the Headmaster’s office, to which Glenn and I are summoned Sunday morning October 1, less than twenty-four hours after the accident. Dean Mansfield finds me in the library, writing in this journal, and I stuff it into my backpack, and he leads me to where Glenn is waiting outside. We are directed across the misty quadrangle. The morning fog has not yet lifted. How symbolic, I think.

Dean Mansfield walks behind us so that we can’t talk to each other, and I get the feeling that our days of talking are numbered. Mr. Armstrong’s office door is closed. Dean Mansfield knocks and tells me and Glenn to wait in the hall, and on the bench between us he places a tape recorder and presses the On button.

I look at Glenn. Without a word, he grabs me by the shoulders just as he did the night he found me in the janitor’s closet. I was very, very clean when he found me, but I was shaking, and Glenn had to grab me. “Stromm,” he said, “get ahold of yourself.”

I almost laughed, it was so cliché, but it was then that Glenn convinced me that the proverbial
they
would come after us. And of course, Glenn was right. Guys like Glenn know all the places another guy might hide. Guys like Glenn don’t make mistakes.