Idlewild, p.33
Idlewild, page 33
She continued down the stairs. I chased her down the last three flights and caught up with her as she was crossing the lobby. She pushed open the front door, but the rain was lashing down so hard she closed it again. The two of us stood side by side in the vestibule, watching the rain pound against the glass pane.
Finally she spoke, in a small voice. “Can’t we just pretend it’s real?”
I turned to her in disbelief. Her eyes flickered hopefully toward me.
When I replay this in my mind, I come up with a million different answers. In my head I tell her she has no idea what it’s like to be me. That she’s been using me like a prop, like a little lesbian doll she carries around to play gay make-believe, and I’m sick of it. Sometimes, reliving it in my head, I get angry enough to fantasize about hitting her. In my imagination I slap her the same way she slapped me, proving to her—proving to myself, really—that I exist outside her mind. I’m a person. What do I have to do to make her see me as a person?
But in the moment, I couldn’t summon up that anger. Not yet. All I felt was drained, literally, like she was draining the life out of me and there was no amount of myself I could give her that would make her stop. I was so tired.
Ignoring her question, I pressed my forehead against the window. Through the smeared blur of the rainy glass, I spotted a taxi with the roof light on.
I pushed open the front door and ran out into the rain, arm extended, to flag it down. The rain pelted down on me again, but it barely mattered; my clothes were already soaked through. The cab rolled to a stop. I thought about opening the passenger door and climbing inside. I thought about how warm and dry it would be in there. I thought about driving off without even a look back at the vestibule, where Fay was still waiting for my answer.
Seeing me hesitate, the driver rolled down the window. “Where you going?”
“Twenty-third between Ninth and Tenth,” I said. “It’s for my friend.”
It was a stupid martyr move, letting Fay have the cab. I couldn’t find another one and ended up walking home in the rain. But of all the stupid ways I martyred myself for Fay, I don’t regret that one so much. It was the last thing I ever did for her.
FAY
On nights when sleep eludes me, I often pretend to be in the company of Nell. I close my eyes and attempt to recreate from memory her voice, her laugh, her verbal mannerisms, the shape and scent and warmth of her body. I draw from every memory of her that I’ve retained over the years, right up to this one, the final one: Nell running into the rain, arm extended toward the taxi.
But tonight that image is superimposed by Nell as I saw her today on the street outside the Meetinghouse. I see Nell wearing a long-sleeved shirt beneath smartly tailored scrubs. I see Nell with her sandy hair professionally tapered and faded. I see Nell as a nurse, capable and competent and butch. I see her from behind as she moves away from me.
In the taxi that Nell had hailed for me, I thought again about Daylily and Juniper. How fearlessly they’d touched each other. How easily Daylily had said love. All along, then, there had been others like Nell at Idlewild, sitting in the Meetinghouse and going to class and performing onstage alongside her. She had never needed me at all.
Of all the ways I let her down, this one haunts me especially: I could still have told her. But I couldn’t bear for her to know.
What I felt in that taxi was not precisely self-loathing, but grim self-knowledge. I knew myself to be an impostor in Nell’s world. I knew that I had tried and failed to attach myself to her queerness—which existed independently of me, even as mine was contingent on hers—and that I’d hurt her in the attempt. And I knew, even then, that I would spend the rest of my life trying to outrun the shame of it. An escape route was already forming in my mind.
The cab carried me crosstown, sluicing through streetlight-shimmering puddles, its windows so wet I could see little past my own faint reflection. The whole way home, I planned.
NELL
The fake blog got taken down over the weekend. By then, though, I figured everyone at Idlewild must have seen it.
On Monday morning, when my mom came in to check on me, I said, “I don’t feel good. Maybe I should stay home.”
She felt my forehead skeptically. “Is this about Fay? What’s going on with you two?”
I considered telling her. I really did want to talk about it. I imagined explaining to my mom that everyone in school would be graphically picturing me performing oral sex on Fay.
“Never mind,” I said and dragged myself out of bed.
When I got to school I noticed that the Peace Garden wall mural had been repainted over the weekend. The dicks were gone. So was the On the Town set. And Fay was conspicuously absent too.
She didn’t show up all day. I was hugely relieved, if not surprised. I drifted solo through Meeting and Chorus and English and history, wondering miserably how I would be able to avoid her when she wasn’t cutting school. What was I going to do, give her the silent treatment in front of everyone? Every day, for the next two and a half months? Could I somehow fake it with her until graduation without making the rumors worse? I didn’t know which would be more horrible.
As the day went on, I came to a bitterly funny realization. I’d been right about one thing: I was different from Daylily and Juniper with their fake-lesbian act. Nobody made a show of being cartoonishly horny over me and Fay playing in a room by ourselves. Nobody even mentioned it to my face. If I hadn’t kept catching classmates staring at me and quickly looking away as soon as I met their eyes, I might have convinced myself nobody cared. I almost wished someone would accost me in the stairs, or whisper dyke behind my back, or ask me a rude question about how two girls did it—just as proof that I wasn’t imagining the attention. But as I already knew, Idlewild wasn’t the kind of school where kids got bullied for being openly gay. Idlewild was the kind of school where theoretically it was okay for kids to be openly gay, but no one was dumb enough to test this in practice except me, and now I would never be known or remembered as anything but Nell the Lesbian.
But that had always been true, hadn’t it? It just hadn’t mattered, not with Fay by my side. That was why I’d loved her: I was so excited to be gay, and she was the only one who really got that. What a stupid irony that she also ended up being the one to make me feel ashamed.
Fay was absent the next day, too, so there was an empty space next to me on the Meetinghouse bench in the morning. It was the only empty space remaining by the time Eddie Applebaum showed up. “Are you saving this seat?” he asked.
“Yes,” I lied, because I didn’t want to talk to him.
“For who? Fay?”
“Yeah.”
He raised his eyebrows. I tensed in anticipation of some comment about how she was my girlfriend. Maybe a double entendre about saving my seat for her. (I cursed myself for setting him up for that one.) Instead he said, “She’s coming to school?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m not her secretary.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw his face fall. Then I felt shitty. It was so easy to be mean to Eddie Applebaum, but I didn’t actually want to hurt his feelings. Or maybe I did a little, but it was less satisfying than I expected. I scooched over to let him squeeze into the bench beside me. “She’s probably cutting again,” I said. “She has senioritis.”
“Oh, you don’t need to pretend with me.” He settled into the bench. “I know she’s suspended.”
I turned to face him. He wasn’t wearing his Yankees cap, for once. After years of getting scolded by teachers, he’d finally learned to take it off in the House of God. His head looked bigger without it. His hair was dark and curly, a Jewfro.
“I overheard yesterday,” he said. “Mr. Prins sent me to Skip and Trudy’s office because I was late and I missed Meeting. It wasn’t my fault—there was a problem with the N train—but he was pissed.” He grimaced. “It was my third late in a row since my last detention, so I have to go before StuDisc again.”
The Meetinghouse had filled up. The big Meetinghouse clock was at nine o’clock exactly. Silence was going to fall any second.
He saw me looking at the clock. “Anyway,” he said quickly, “Fay was in the office when I got there, so I waited outside the door, and—I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything. I just heard.” He squinted at me, incredulous. “You don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” I had to say it quietly. All around the Meetinghouse, voices were trailing off.
Silence fell.
Eddie Applebaum committed sacrilege for me. He whispered in my ear.
FAY
Getting in trouble at Idlewild was a ten-step procedure laid out in the Idlewild student handbook, the 2002 edition of which I still have in my possession.
Step 0: Determine that the incident in question is worthy of initiating the disciplinary process.
Step 1: Gather the student members of the StuDisc committee, which must consist of two elected representatives from each Upper School grade.
During the 2002–2003 school year, the StuDisc representatives from the senior class were Oliver Dicks and Bottom.
Step 2: The student members of the StuDisc committee shall select two faculty members, preferably acquainted with the accused student, to serve in an advisory role.
The two faculty members selected for my case were Glenn Harding and Deenie Mellman.
Step 3: The accused student shall select one peer advocate and one teacher advocate from outside the StuDisc committee.
Everyone on the committee expected me to choose Nell and Ms. Spider. The collective surprise was palpable when I announced that I waived my right to any advocate at all. I wished to represent myself.
Step 4: The accused student shall go before StuDisc and make his or her own case.
The hearing was conducted on Wednesday afternoon, during Activity Period. It took place in the Meetinghouse, newly roomy in the absence of the On the Town set. If I had clung to any shred of hope that the aborted second performance might be rescheduled for a future date, that hope vanished along with the set. When my turn came to take the floor, I did so on gray carpet still marked with indentations from the recently removed stage risers. My statement was brief.
“On February thirteenth,” I said, “I called the Idlewild front desk from the pay phone on the corner of Sixteenth and Third. I imitated Marlon Brando in The Godfather so no one would recognize my voice, and I made a fake bomb threat. It was me. I did it.”
Step 5: After the student has told his/her side of the story, StuDisc may ask questions.
Bottom asked me if I had acted alone; I asserted that I had. Oliver Dicks asked me if I’d considered that the recent memory of 9/11 meant that a bomb threat would be received with a high degree of alarm; I replied that I had, and that my intention had been to sow panic. Glenn asked me why I chose to confess now; I said I wished to be punished. Deenie asked me what punishment I believed I deserved. I told her.
Step 6: After the hearing, StuDisc shall hold a confidential Meeting for Business to form a consensus on the appropriate consequences for the student.
Step 7: Concurrently, the student and the student’s parents will meet with Skip and Trudy.
Step 8: Having reached consensus, StuDisc shall make a recommendation to Trudy.
Step 9: Taking the StuDisc recommendation into account, Trudy shall make a recommendation to Skip.
Step 10: Skip and Trudy shall deliver the ultimate judgment.
Steps 8 through 10 often provoked complaints from Idlewilders that the whole StuDisc system was a mere formality, a Potemkin village of Quaker egalitarianism that served no real purpose beyond burnishing the extracurricular résumés of its student members. My parents, banking on the same idea, appealed to Skip and Trudy’s authority.
“I’d be happy to make a donation to the school,” my mother said. “On top of what I already gave at the fundraiser this year.”
“I thought Quakers were all about forgiveness and second chances,” my father said.
“She has just two months till graduation,” my mother said. “Think of her future.”
“Unfortunately,” said Trudy, “with her grades the way they are, it’s not clear if she can make it to graduation as it is.”
I mouthed bathroom, slipped out of the office, and fled to the Peace Garden.
Aware that I might never enter the garden again, I tried to memorize every inch of it. To this day, I sometimes try to reconstruct the Peace Garden in my mind. I’m reconstructing it right now. Quiet as a cloister. Redolent of cold stone. Ivy lushly overgrown, creeping up the four walls, obscuring the repainted mural, cloaking and choking the crumbling brickwork.
I felt no regret—not then, not yet. I was anxious, I suppose, but it was only the anxiety I felt backstage before my final scene. I was not burning, but glowing. I was radiant with resolve.
I believed then, and I want to believe now, that I was doing Nell a favor. By removing myself from Idlewild, disappearing from her life, I was setting her free. But mere altruism seems insufficient to account for the twisted triumph I took in the prospect of my own expulsion. Of claiming
Theo’s crime as my own, accepting the punishment that would have gone to him.
I can see now, from fifteen years’ distance, what I was really doing. In my own secret way, in the only way I knew how, I transformed myself into Theo Severyn.
The Meetinghouse door opened. The committee hearing was over. Consensus had been reached.
NELL
Gossip traveled fast at Idlewild. By Wednesday morning, the whole school knew. I overheard people talking about it in the hallway.
“… going before StuDisc today.”
“Is it true she turned herself in?”
They didn’t seem to notice me as I passed, and I realized the fake blog had essentially been bumped from the headlines. I wondered if that was part of Fay’s motivation. I kind of hoped not, so I could stay uncomplicatedly mad at her.
At one point I passed Theo and Christopher on the stairs. I ignored them. They ignored me. For the rest of my time at Idlewild, we would act like we didn’t know each other.
I dragged myself through the day. Sixth period Chorus ended and the underclassgirls cleared out, leaving me and Bottom and Ms. Spider alone in the Meetinghouse Loft. It was time, theoretically, for Senior Musical Theater Seminar.
For a minute or two, the three of us just sat there in miserable silence—Ms. Spider on the piano bench, me and Bottom on opposite ends of the semicircle of black plastic chairs. In Fay’s absence the rehearsal room felt huge, cavernous. At the same time, it looked newly dinky and shabby to me. It was hard to believe how happy it used to make me just to walk into it.
The bell rang. Seventh period had officially started.
“I don’t feel much like singing.” Ms. Spider was rocking slightly, like a sad haunted rocking horse, on the piano bench. Her body seemed tiny and fragile, and her face looked really old. “I don’t suppose you do either.”
Bottom and I shook our heads.
“We probably can’t continue this class,” she said. “But you two should still get credit for it. I’ll see to that. We’ll call it an independent study project.”
Bottom and I mumbled our thanks.
Ms. Spider sighed. “I just don’t understand,” she said. “She had so much potential.” She rose to her feet, or tried to. Her face tightened with pain. Her knees must have really been bothering her. For the first time ever, I thought of offering to help her up—but by the time I had the thought, it was too late. She shuffled slowly out of the rehearsal room.
Then it was just me and Bottom. To fill the silence, I asked, “When’s the movie audition?”
“Friday afternoon,” he said. “But I’m trying not to think about it.” His voice was mostly back to normal. For the millionth time, I marveled at what a gorgeous voice it was—so rich and resonant and deep.
“I’m sure you’ll do great,” I said.
He shook his head. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“When’s the StuDisc hearing?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“Activity Period,” he said. “So, in about forty-five minutes.”
I slid my butt across my chair and onto the one to my left, closer to him. “What’s it like being on StuDisc? Holding people’s fate in your hands.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” He slid, too, onto the chair to his right. Now there were only two chairs between us. “It’s boring,” he said. “Mostly we just deal with lates. Lates and absences. If there are no new cases, we spend the meetings rewriting the student handbook. We’ve been rewriting the student handbook sentence by sentence for about a year now.”
I was genuinely amazed at how boring that sounded. “I’m sorry we got you elected,” I said. “I didn’t know we’d be inflicting that on you.”
I expected him to wave this off and say, Oh, it’s no trouble. Instead he said, “Well, you did, and here we are.” He sat up straighter, correcting his posture, which had almost slumped for a second. “That’s all to say,” he said, “I’ve never dealt with a major disciplinary infraction before now.”
“So you’ve never had to expel someone,” I said.
“Well, StuDisc doesn’t do the expelling. We make a recommendation to Trudy, and …” He rolled his eyes like the sentence was too boring to finish. “But everyone’s expecting us to recommend expulsion, yes.”
I scooched once more, so there was only one chair between me and him. “Will you?”
Bottom looked me right in the eye. “Do you think I should?”
His eyes were so big and dark. They sparkled in the sunlight coming through the window. I had the funny thought that I loved his eyes, just like I loved his voice. I loved him. Not in the same way I loved Fay. But I wanted to know him better. I wanted to be his friend.
I wondered what my time at Idlewild would have been like if I hadn’t spent it all in Fay’s shadow. Maybe I’d have been close with Bottom. (I wouldn’t still think of him as Bottom, that’s for sure. He would be Peter to me.) Maybe, instead of the Invert Society, I could have done something legit with the Gay-Straight Alliance. I could have taken Christopher under my wing. We could have been two gay kids looking out for each other. The two of us—or more of us, even, who knows?—could have gone together to gay youth group meetings in the city. I might have found a girlfriend.
