Paper Covers Rock (6 page)

—Alex Stromm (1966–)

Gingerbread Night

Suddenly, like daffodils in spring, Miss Dovecott is everywhere in my life. Including at seated dinner, a boarding school staple: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday. We make polite conversation regarding stuff no one cares anything about. Birch students take turns being waiters, and whether you are waiting or eating (waiters eat last, after everyone else), you rotate to a new table each week. Sometimes you get a good table, but sometimes you get stuck. There’s a faculty member at each table, and the object is to sit as far away from them as possible. The faculty member serves the meat, and then you pass around the side dishes. I never eat the cooked carrots or the steamed broccoli, which have all of the color sucked right out of them. There is always dessert.

This week, I am assigned to Mr. McGreavey’s table, but Mr. McGreavey has just been nabbed to drive an injured soccer player to the hospital in Asheville, so Miss Dovecott is filling in for him because new teachers share tables with the veterans. (She usually sits with Mr. Henley, the head of her department.) For once, guys are scrambling to sit next to the teacher, but the only seat left when I arrive is three seats down from her on the same side of the table. Miss Dovecott is doing her duty to initiate interesting dinnertime conversation, but her voice is low, and I can’t hear what she’s saying.

All conversation stops when the waiter serves the dessert, and Ted Ferenhardt, a senior, starts up with the noises. He pours thick white sauce over the square of gingerbread; we watch the liquid slink from its silver pitcher. Miss Dovecott’s face goes to stone as Ted moans softly, once. Nathan Brummels, a buddy of Ted’s, picks up where Ted leaves off and moans again. Then back to Ted, who adds facial expressions. Moan, moan. Then Nathan. They are quiet about it, but make no mistake, they are enjoying themselves.

Miss Dovecott rises from her chair. “Stop. Right now.” Everyone does. I am looking down at my plate, fumbling with my dessert fork. “That is what’s known in the real world as sexual harassment. You could get fired from a job for it. Some of you men—and I use that term ironically—are in for a rude awakening when you leave these hallowed halls.” She does not look at anyone when she lowers herself back into her chair and says, with no inflection, “Please pass the sauce.”

I want to smile, I want to cheer, not the kind of stupid cheer Ted leads us in at the pep rallies. I want to give her a big pat on the back, but just then a wadded-up napkin hits me in
the head. I turn and see Glenn at the next table. He raises his eyebrows, amused; he has seen the whole thing. He is still watching when Miss Dovecott folds her napkin neatly by her plate and excuses herself before the bell has rung to dismiss us. She hurries down the long aisle of the dining hall as six hundred eyes crawl over her like black bugs.

Vermin

Right after dinner, Glenn tracks me down. He finds me standing at the library water fountain. He whispers in my ear to meet him in the bathroom in the basement, so I do. There is one toilet, one sink, and a bolt lock on the door, which he slides shut.

“What’s going on, Stromm? What did she say during your little talk?”

“Nothing,” I tell him. “We haven’t talked yet.”

“Bullshit.”

“Don’t worry. There’s nothing she could possibly know because she didn’t get there in time to see anything.”

“Not unless you told her,” says Glenn.

“Now, why would I do that?”

“Because your brains are in your crotch.”

“I’m not going to do anything stupid. My dad would kill me for getting kicked out of here.”

“Mine, too,” he says. “But what if Miss Dovecott got there sooner than we think she did? What if she was spying on us the whole time?”

“Then she would have said. We’d have been kicked out by now if she’d gotten there earlier. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but there’s something about her I don’t trust. Mark
my words: she’ll turn Ferenhardt and Brummels in for what they did at dinner.”

“I bet you five dollars she won’t,” I say. “She won that round.”

Glenn holds out his hand. “I’ll take that bet. You’re going to owe me some money when the demerit sheet gets posted tomorrow.”

We shake on it. “I’ve got homework to do,” I say, unlocking the door. But inside, my brain is screaming at me, Whatever you tell her, don’t mention the vodka, don’t bring up Glenn’s name. Because whatever happens, Glenn won’t rat me out, just as I won’t rat him out. It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t live here day in and day out, but the situation with Clay was different. Glenn and I are friends, and you don’t tell on friends. It is the real Birch code of honor, the one the students truly embrace, and we will follow it to the end.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1:20 P.M
.

Me too,
Her
-man. Horror is everywhere. It’s not like I can run away, unless I want to hitchhike or climb a few mountains like the Trapp Family Singers. After Thomas dies, the only way I can escape is by doing my homework, every last bit of it. Who knew I could be such an excellent student? Now I dot every “i,” cross every “t.” My teachers applaud my attention to detail. And voila, I am in the spotlight.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

19. Thomas is drunk, way more drunk than Glenn and I.

20. We take off our shoes (but leave our shorts and boxers on).

21. We climb onto the rock. Glenn and Thomas have grown up pulling stunts like this. Being a cautious only child, I just pretend that I have. There are no guys from my hometown around to call my bluff.

22. Glenn jumps.

23. Thomas and I do Rock, Paper, Scissors.

24. Thomas dives.

25. Before I even realize it, I jump, too.

As If the Top of My Head Were Taken Off

Miss Dovecott tells us that Emily Dickinson posed for the daguerreotype when she was seventeen. She passes it around the classroom Friday morning and asks us to stare into Emily Dickinson’s eyes. When it gets to Auggie van Dorn, he starts giggling. Emily is homely. She has fat lips, a bunch of moles, and hair that looks oiled to her head. She is seriously unattractive.

Except for the eyes. They are black, they are deep, they know all.

After the Walt Whitman failure, Miss Dovecott knows we will protest Emily Dickinson and her poems. We will say she is a crazy woman who never leaves her attic; we will say she aches for the Grim Reaper to sneak into her bed at night and ravish her. Miss Dovecott knows she is going to have to wow us to get us to like anything at all about Emily.

“So much of Dickinson,” she tells us, “is about what is left unsaid and what is left unclear. What we aren’t able to articulate, what we aren’t able to find the words for—that’s what underscores these poems and what, as Dickinson so aptly perceived, lies beneath all of our experiences.”

Uh-huh. We nod.

“Because Dickinson’s poems were written in the form of hymns,” Miss Dovecott explains, mapping out iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter on the blackboard, “we can sing
them, and as we sing them, we can hear where the rhythm slips, where Dickinson disregards, maybe even snubs, that sacred form.” So many eyes glazed over; Glenn Everson, dutifully taking notes or plotting a murder—it’s hard to tell. “What else might she be snubbing?”

No one answers, no one is going to answer. She repeats the question. No hands go up. So Miss Dovecott starts singing poem #389—“There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House”—to the tune of the
Gilligan’s Island
theme song.

By the time she reaches the fourth stanza, we are laughing.

We are laughing at the minister’s stiff entry; we are laughing at Miss Dovecott because she can’t sing. Suddenly our teacher seems like the weird girl in junior high who wore granny dresses.

At the board, she points to what is written there. “So iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter is a common form in all types of songs.” She puts her hands on the back of her chair. “Now. Even though the death happened in the ‘opposite house,’ it still affects the speaker. How?”

Andy Hedron raises his hand. “She sees the aftermath of it.”

“Right, Andy, but why do you think the speaker is female?”

Auggie jumps in. “Because Emily is a woman. Although she kinda looks like a man.”

We laugh, but Miss Dovecott ignores us. “Can you find any evidence in the poem itself that the speaker is female?” The room is so silent that I can hear the fluorescent lights overhead. A couple of guys are gazing out the window. “Okay. Everybody. Look at the poem. It’s there. See if you can find it.”

“What are we looking for again?” asks Jovan Davis.

“Is it in the third paragraph?” asks Malcolm Marshall.

“Third
stanza
, Malcolm.”

I look at the third stanza, singing it to the
Gilligan’s Island
theme in my head:

I don’t get it, so I study my corduroy knees.

“What is that last line saying there? Can you put it in your own words?”

Colin Bates (nickname: Master) raises his hand. “ ‘I used to when
I was
a boy’?”

“Good. Used to what?”

“Used to imagine that the mattresses thrown out of windows were deathbeds,” Glenn says. I jerk my head to look at him. He is giving her his cool eyes.

“Well done, Glenn,” she says.

“I don’t think the speaker is a boy,” says Malcolm. “I think he’s a man. Because of ‘used to,’ like he no longer is a boy.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“I was wondering about this,” Auggie says. “I think the Minister is God. The way she capitalizes
His.
”

“The house is the church,” says Master.

“The house can’t be a church,” says Jovan. “The house is a house, man.”

Suddenly I get it, I get it. I raise my hand. She calls on me. “In the boy’s eyes, the minister is like God. When he was a boy, not a man. So it’s like when the minister enters the house, the house becomes a church, you know, God’s house.”

“Good, Alex,” Miss Dovecott says, clapping. “Very good. Keep going. So what, according to this poem, does this minister-God own?”

“All the mourners,” I say. “And little boys. Dickinson is saying he owns all of us.”

She claps again—we are in the swing of it now—and then Glenn says slowly, with eyes as pale as water, “God does not own you, Stromm. God does not own any of us.”

Miss Dovecott stares back at him, but his gaze does not waver. “Let’s back up now,” she says, “and talk about that window.” But she can’t get us to do it, to explain why it opened like a pod, abruptly, mechanically. The mighty Achilles has silenced us, and Miss Dovecott has to stand there and watch her students fold into themselves, hunching away from the window in the poem, from the windows in the classroom, from everything. One of these students, the one who lost five dollars for believing in the woman he loves, wants desperately to come back to her world—her heavenly wide-open world—but it is roped off now, like an unsafe balcony.

Our World

Ten p.m. Friday night (last night). Outside the freshman dorm, upperclassmen in masks and no shirts stomp in unison. “New boys! New boys!” they chant, shaking their lit torches. Two years ago, at my first pep rally, I was afraid to come out of my dorm.

“Here they come!” someone shouts, and torches flare as the third-formers creep out the front door. Their hands fly to their foreheads, shielding their eyes, as they get absorbed by the mob. The crowd lurches across the quad, down the hill, and into the end zone of the football field. The cheer masters leap onto the wooden platform built especially for these occasions. When they raise their torches, the muscles in their biceps and shoulders harden.

“Are you ready?” the head cheer master, Ted Ferenhardt, shouts. Tonight he is a giant in an Afro wig, cutoff jean shorts, and combat boots. His chest is slick with Vaseline. The crowd roars back. “Are you ready?”

On the sidelines, a flock of frightened faculty children take a few steps back into the shadows where their parents are huddled.

“Chase Harper!” the cheer masters yell and clap in rhythm. “Chase Harper!” The quarterback of the football team hops onto the platform. One of the cheer masters hands him a torch.

“New boys!” shouts Chase. “You see this torch? This is what you are going to have to be for us tomorrow. Every single one of you better be in those stands cheering your guts
out. If you don’t, you run the gauntlet, and you all know what that means. Now, let’s hear it! Go, Bulldogs! Go, Bulldogs!”

All of the new boys are yelling it now. “Go, Bulldogs!” The defensive line of the football team mobs the stage: more guys with painted chests, more guys with wigs and masks. Out of the mass rises a new chant, a slower one that folds on itself one screeching letter at a time: “B! U! L! L! D! O! G! S! Gooooooo, Dawgs! Dawgs! Dawgs! Dawgs!” The guys on the stage erupt into chaotic barking, and Ted silences them by raising his torch.

“Who’s ready to kiss the Buddha?” he shouts. Chip Donnelly, with his jiggling stomach, struggles onto the platform, and Ted puts his hand on the other boy’s shoulder. The two of them scan the crowd with demonic eyes. “Where is he?” Ted shouts. “Where’s the Little Dipper?”

The Little Dipper is the younger brother of the Big Dipper, who got caught dipping tobacco during the first week of his new-boy year and racked up sixty demerits, which took five months to work off. Eyes wide, Lane Carter raises his hand, shaking, and he climbs onto the stage. His big brother, Silas, a cheer master, stands at the back of the stage, laughing his head off while the Little Dipper drops to his knees in front of Chip’s sumo wrestler stomach.