My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Following Heidi into the woods. At least, Skyler believed he was following Heidi into the woods because otherwise, where was she?

  Often he’d sighted her, walking alone at the scrubby edge of the campus. For this girl to whom he’d never spoken he felt a stab of erotic yearning, or was it Schadenfreude: delicious German harm-joy.

  Thinking She is more famous than I am. More miserable.

  No harm-joy more exquisite/voluptuous/sensuous-brimming as the Germanic!

  And it may have been that Skyler resented Heidi Harkness. Not for her fame/infamy/misery but for the annoying fact that, when Skyler had tried to speak with her, in the thunderous corridor of Babbitt Hall where both tenth-graders had classes, the shyly evasive girl had managed to elude him: him! Skyler Rampike who rarely went out of his way to speak to anyone, still less to smile at anyone. Heidi Harkness had snubbed him.

  Inside each maladroit loser, like a hoagie falling out of its greasy wrapper, is a raving egotist. Especially at sixteen.

  “‘Heidi Harkness.’ I want to be your friend.”

  Or, more forcibly: “‘Heidi Harkness.’ My name is Skyler Rampike and maybe you’ve heard of me? I want to be your friend.”

  More forcibly yet, hoping to pitch his voice low and compelling as in a movie close-up: “‘Heidi Harkness.’ Don’t be afraid of me. I know what your life is. I want to be your friend. My name is—”

  But where was Heidi Harkness? Skyler was beginning to sweat inside his clothes. His shoes were nearly soaked through. Tiny insects the size of punctuation marks, he had a vague idea were called nats, droned in a cloud about his spiky hair and stuck in his eyelashes. If the reader has not previously accompanied Skyler into idyllic “nature settings” it is because Skyler seems to have passed most of his life in airless, claustrophobic, and shrinking settings. Somehow the wood-chip path he’d been following had vanished in marshy soil. Something scuttled through the damp grass: a snake? two snakes? Thirty feet away was a shallow creek trickling over scattered boulders like misshapen vertebrae. Skyler was not lost for how could Skyler be lost?—even a boy unaccustomed to the outdoors couldn’t have become lost so quickly. He had not walked more than a mile from the stone steps of Babbitt Hall. But Skyler was feeling the familiar choking sensation of panic* as if the reptile part of his brain wished perversely to believe that he was lost, and in danger.

  (Away at school Skyler had grown careless, “unsupervised” and “on his own” and so he’d forgotten to take his morning meds [Zilich + Soothix] and deliberately he’d skipped his lunchtime med [Effexor] which made his mouth dry as an old sock, and his vision blurred.)

  Promise me that you will take your medications as prescribed, Skyler, you know you will become sick again if you don’t. So Mother pleaded.

  Skyler had mumbled Sure! I will.

  Politely adding Sure I will, Mother.

  To her face he called her Mother now. No more Mummy! No more Mummy’s little man.

  Must’ve been the accumulative effect of so many drugs, so many years of so many drugs, Skyler had not frequently felt what are called sexual urges. Until recently.

  Since being delivered to the Academy at Basking Ridge to make his “fresh start.” Skyler liked it that he was “unsupervised” and “on his own.”

  Here in the woods, for instance. Why’d he come here? Wiping his face on his sleeve. God damn nats.

  So far as he could see, he was alone. Yet: Heidi Harkness had to be here somewhere. Had she seen him following her, was she hiding from him?

  From him? Skyler Rampike? Her only friend?

  Skyler heard a sound, turned in alarm and there was Heidi Harkness less than ten feet away, staring at him with wild damp eyes. Her face was asymmetrical as if someone had twisted it subtly out of shape and her sallow skin was flushed as if she’d been running. Her chunky white front teeth overlapped like crossed fingers. Skyler could not have said if she was ugly or beautiful or some strange mixture of both. She was crouched, panting. Something glittered in her trembling hand: a blade? A knife?

  Her frightened voice was low, abrasive like sandpaper rubbed against sandpaper: “Get away from me—stalker! Get away.”

  HOW COULD YOU THINK THAT I’D WANT TO HURT YOU! I LOVED YOU RIGHT away.

  I didn’t say you wanted to hurt me. I said you were stalking me.

  But only because I loved you…

  That’s what stalkers say*

  OF TWO HUNDRED FORTY-THREE STUDENTS AT BASKING RIDGE, “SLY” soon acquired a reputation for being “some kind of weird genius” in such difficult subjects as trigonometry, chemistry, and earth science. Quickly Sly hid his papers when they were handed back in class but you could see scrawled red A’s: “Weird dude knows all the fuckin’ answers.” Sly was aloof, disdainful, preoccupied; in class, he looked straight forward at the instructor, and at the blackboard; he was taciturn, reluctant to speak, but could be counted on by his instructor to give correct answers to questions; though his voice was hoarse and halting as if infrequently used. He wore school clothing—mud-colored blazer, white cotton long-sleeved shirt, clip-on school tie—that was likely to be rumpled as if slept in. He never seemed to be watching where he was headed, frowning at the ground, or squinting into the distance; you had to leap out of his way, or, if you were one of the boy-jocks, you shoved him out of your way with a curse: “Watch out, asshole!”

  Luckily, Sly was protected by his coveted P.M.E. deferment (“Perpetual Medical Excuse”) which allowed him the luxury of avoiding gym and athletics altogether, and so he was spared combative physical activities in which the righteous wrath of his fellow boy-students would have been unleashed upon him: “Fuckin’ lucky dude. Man!”

  Sly turned up in class alone, and Sly left class alone; except for English class, where usually he left in the company of his single friend; as, in the thunderous dining hall modeled after some fabled mausoleum at Oxford, if Sly turned up at all he sat with his friend* at a table of losers/loners in a farther corner. Gregarious Bix Rampike had urged his sulky son to room in a “suite” and so enjoy the companionship of “suitemates” but more pragmatic-minded Betsey knew that it was far wiser to defer to their excitable son’s vehement preference for a private room; for roommates/suitemates at previous institutions had not worked out well. And now, at sixteen, alarmingly tall and abrasive in his manner, and less inclined to take his daily meds as prescribed, certainly Skyler would be better off in a private room. So it happened, Skyler, that’s to say “Sly,” was allowed to live alone in a single room on the top, fourth floor of Old Craghorne, a creaking residence adjacent to (new) Craghorne Hall; where (new) Craghorne was made of buff-colored brick, Old Craghorne, a much smaller structure, was made of some darkly crumbling stone with a look of having been rained-upon for centuries. Where (new) Craghorne was the residence of the most popular boys, Old Craghorne was known to be the residence of losers/loners/freaks. Skyler’s room, of the approximate size of two toilet stalls, was at the top of a steep flight of stairs that creaked beneath his meager weight (111 pounds at five-feet-ten: scrawny, eh?); though drafty, with ill-fitting windows and tilting floorboards, Skyler’s room soon came to be, for him, a place of refuge. For hearty “jocks” from (new) Craghorne couldn’t be troubled to make their way so vertically to harass “Sly Rampole” as in other circumstances they would have been delighted to do; and the boys of Old Craghorne were not up to the spirit of harassment, let alone the actions. These boys seemed to Skyler to have bonded together in a previous incarnation, having attended Basking Ridge in the past, but they were not at all threatening, and all of them were shorter than Skyler. If he’d have liked, he could threaten them.

  Noting how like a barely materialized ghost he passed through their somber stares hearing in his wake That’s him: Rampick!

  Or: That’s him? The guy who killed his…

  How blithely Headmaster Shovell had assured the Rampikes that no one at the school would know their son’s identity! Yet it soon became clear to Skyler that e
veryone at Basking Ridge knew who he was, or that he was “somebody” to whom some measure of shame and scandal accrued. For how strangely they looked at him, how openly they stared at him behind his back, or smiled at him pityingly, and quickly looked away: even Rusty the cheeriest of the kitchen workers at Clapp Dining Hall, with his oily-dark skin and winking gold teeth; even Shovell’s staff of mostly elderly prim-staring females having to restrain themselves from crossing themselves Roman Catholic style, as Skyler passed by. (As everyone seemed to know within a few days of her arrival that the new girl “Heidi Harkness” was the daughter of infamous “Leander Harkness.”) Skyler learned to bear his affliction as one might bear a disfigured face or a misshapen body, with as much dignity as he could summon. “Hey how’s it goin’, ‘Sly’?” was a frequent taunt, or query; possibly it was a friendly taunt, or a purely innocent query; “Sly” was not so bad a name; there was the macho example of “Sylvester Stallone”; you might argue that “Sly” was a sort-of cool name; and so “Sly” managed to smile a pained-grimace smile and to say: “Goin’ okay, man: how ’bout you?”

  Of Skyler’s teachers he could not be absolutely certain who knew, and who did not. His chemistry teacher Mr. Badian regarded him with a perplexed gaze, at times; his French teacher Madame Du Mont seemed to take a special interest in him, amid so many bored and restless students; but there was unmistakably Skyler’s English teacher Mr. Dunwoody who stared at him as if memorizing him, and feigned friendliness to “the new transfer student in our midst.” Dunwoody smiled at his captive whom he’d seated in the first row (as he would seat Heidi Harkness who began classes twelve days after the term began); he smiled at Skyler with moist pink gums, and briskly rubbed his pudgy hands together as a praying mantis might rub its forelegs together in anticipation of a feast: “‘Sylvester Rampole.’ You are new to Basking Ridge, Sylvester? And what was your previous school?” In his front-row seat Skyler would have liked to shrink into a dense hard object impenetrable to scrutiny as a chunk of Kryptonite. His newly sprung coarse hair that could not be flat-combed but lifted up from his forehead gave him an unnatural look; though Skyler wore the school uniform (“heather”-colored blazer with brass buttons, white cotton shirt, [clip-on] striped school tie) he stood out alarmingly; except for his scrawny body, you would not have thought him sixteen years old but much older. Since the incident at Hodge Hill School when Skyler had been beaten by security guards, he’d had dental surgery to repair some of the damage to his mouth, and his nose had healed with a small bony bump that gave him, he thought, squinting sidelong at himself in any flattering mirrored surface, the macho-guy look of a seasoned boxer. And now shielding his mouth with his hand Skyler answered the English teacher’s taunting question in a mumble: “…Hodge Hell, Pennsylvania.”

  With the perky manner of a middle-aged twat accustomed to provoking mirth in cretinous adolescents, Dunwoody leaned forward cupping his hand to his ear: “Syl-vester? Excuse me? I’m afraid I cannot decipher rude mumbles.”

  A titter of laughter. Even the nicer girls, who ordinarily took pity on their picked-on classmates, couldn’t help giggling.

  Skyler had no choice but to speak a little more loudly, if sullenly, and unsmiling: “Hodge Hill, sir. School.”

  “Ah: Hodge Hill! Not quite of the academic/social caliber as the prestigious Academy at Basking Ridge, is it? One can see why you transferred here.” Dunwoody, fattish-jowled guy in his mid-forties, faux-Brit manner, dry thinning hair and goofy-“sexy” tinted glasses with aviator frames, smiled at Skyler as a dentist might smile at a trapped patient. “And where is your home, Sylvester? Your sinus-clogged accent seems to suggest New Jersey, I think?”

  His home! Where was Skyler’s home!

  Here was an unanswerable question. For Skyler could not say I am from Fair Hills. Could not say: My home is Fair Hills. For the fact was, Skyler no longer had a home in Fair Hills, at 93 Ravens Crest Drive. All that was finished, forever. Yet more shamefully, Skyler no longer had a home. Did Lionel Dunwoody know, and that was why he was asking? Skyler had not spent more than a few haphazard days with his mother in recent years, in one or another “temporary residence” of hers; he’d waited in vain to be invited to stay with Bix, in the fabled apartment on Central Park South, and to be taken to see a fabled Knicks game; the last “home” Skyler had stayed in had been Grandmother Rampike’s big old house in Pittsburgh, where he’d been sent for a few confused days at Christmas 2002…Elderly Grandmother Rampike was no longer on speaking terms with her “shameless” daughter-in-law; nor was Grandmother Rampike “very happy” with her son Bix’s behavior; but, like most adult relatives in Skyler’s family, she had not explained what she’d meant. Under Dunwoody’s scrutiny Skyler felt his face burn. His mottled face, his battered face, sick-guilty-kid face. He’d been picking at a hard little pimple on the underside of his left nostril and now his fingernails drew blood and a little trickle ran rapidly down to his chin*; and, seeing he’d drawn blood, Dunwoody made a show of concern for his stricken student: “Oh my! What have we here! ‘Sylvester,’ here—quickly!—is a tissue.”

  But furious Sylvester pushed away the teacher’s hand, stumbled to his feet and ran from the room—†

  CHILDREN OF CABLOID HELL: A PROSE POEM

  At the farther end of the walnut-wood-paneled dining room modeled after some fabled mausoleum at Oxford, indifferent to the buzz, clatter, and hilarity of their fellows, the trio of exiles sat together beneath a high mullioned window: Harkness, Grubbe, Rampole. Young people disfigured by the infamy of their parents as by physical deformity.

  Drawn to one another by temperament, and not, they would have passionately declared, by mere vulgar accidents of history, they were Children of Tabloid Hell.

  Reader, this was my original opening for “First Love, Farewell!” Reader, I loved it so! I am ashamed to confess.

  But some of you dislike such prose-poem artiness, on principle. Your sensitive eye, long habituated to the bland affabilities and predictable normalities of such fonts as Baskerville, Century, Bodoni et al. reacts negatively to such “distinctive”—“attention-grabbing”—fonts as the Lucinda Blackletter Bold of which the above is a sample: no doubt, you see it as “showy”—“overwrought”—“adolescent.” I know that you are right, and yet: each time I read this paragraph, I am thrilled with its possibilities which seem to me two-fold:

  Postmodernist: self-conscious/self-mocking/“weird”

  Traditional: forthright/declarative/“linear”

  Yet, the portentousness of the prose, the breathy solemnity with which “Children of Tabloid Hell” is intoned, would be very difficult to sustain for even the most virtuoso of stylists—which I am not.

  Yet it might be argued: Skyler Rampike is in fact an adolescent.

  For much of this document, Skyler has been a young child: a juvenile. Now, lately he has morphed to adolescence. Yet, in his snarled little heart he is still a juvenile. The reader is perhaps aware of the latest neurophysiological findings, that, in the adolescent brain, the frontal cortex isn’t fully developed; in particular, the frontal cortex of the adolescent male. (And how long does adolescence last, in our time? Well into a young man’s twenties? Maybe—his thirties? Beyond?) The reader’s habit of condescending to Skyler at age sixteen and the “overwrought” prose-poem that so aptly expresses his feelings is a mere consequence of the reader being older than Skyler, very likely decades older, so what is your prissy judgment worth?

  Hey sorry: I didn’t mean that.

  I mean, I didn’t mean to sound hostile.

  I may be hostile as hell, just a festering petti dish of simmering/festering hostilities, but, reader, I don’t mean to sound hostile; and if I have offended a few prissy middle-aged readers, sorry!

  Skyler take care! There is a demon inside you Skyler yearning for nothing more than release.

  II.

  “GET AWAY FROM ME—STALKER! GET AWAY.”

  Unexpectedly there was Heidi Harkness confronting him. Naivel
y Skyler had believed he would come up quietly behind her and instead, Heidi Harkness had come up quietly behind him.

  In her trembling hand—what? Skyler couldn’t determine if it was a strip of scrap aluminum foil she’d picked up from the ground, or a knife.

  Skyler protested, “I wasn’t s-stalking you. I—I wanted to h-help you. I saw—”

  “‘Help me’? How could you ‘help’ me? You can’t help me.”

  The statement was flat, blunt, challenging. No one can help me this distraught girl seemed to be boasting.

  Skyler wiped at his eyes. Nervous excitement made his eyes mist over. Was it a small knife Heidi Harkness held threateningly, or a harmless strip of aluminum foil? The girl’s nostrils were dilated, her eyes showed a rim of white above the iris. She was frightened, and she was combustible. Skyler could smell her agitation, and his own. Yet he dared to approach her, as if to calm her. Seeing that her eyes were a pale golden hazel like small spinning suns. Her eyes were finely threaded with blood, broken capillaries from sleepless nights, or weeping, Skyler understood. Yet her eyes were beautiful, Skyler could not bear to look at them. And at her left temple, a delicate blue vein pulsed. And at her hairline a scar-like area the size of a half-dollar where Heidi had been pulling out individual strands of her hair, as Skyler himself had once done. He would come to love Heidi Harkness’s untidy hair, thick springy light brown hair like a broom, the identical color Skyler’s hair had been before he’d gone bald at the age of ten.

  Furiously Heidi said: “You! You’ve been following me! You and your hateful friends! Leave me alone.”

  Quickly Skyler said, “Not me! Not my ‘friends’—I don’t have any friends.”

  Impulsively then Skyler reached for the gleaming object in Heidi Harkness’s hand. It might have been that, in that confused moment, Skyler had the idea he might calm her, protect and comfort her by disarming her. Instead, his fingers closed on something so steely-sharp he wasn’t sure, at first, that he’d actually felt it. The surprise of it sent a tremor up his arm. Through his stunned fingers something seemed to be passing rapidly like a very thin wire that was scalding-hot. He felt something wet, oily in his hand. What was this? Blood? His blood? Had he been cut? Like a vengeful female figure in an Asian action film, part-human and part-animation, Heidi leapt backward wrenching the knife from Skyler’s loosening fingers—it was a knife, with a sturdy four-inch blade—and tossing it in the direction of the creek.