Words We Don't Say

by K. J. Reilly

  Then Spindini paused and picked up the last asparagus on his plate and I looked up and Eli was wiping away tears and Spindini said, “This is delicious by the way.” And then he got that far-off look again and said, “IEDs are improvised explosive devices, which are bombs hidden in cars and rucksacks or on the side of the road or in a kid’s backpack.” And his hands were shaking and his face was sweating when he said, “And there are little kids, little five-year-olds, running around and they start looking like the enemy and you can’t tell who to save and who to kill because they all look the same because they’re just people, just like you and me, but you can’t tell who is an enemy anymore and, man alive, you want to tell your girlfriend this in a language that she can understand because you fucking know she can’t understand, so you say to her, imagine you are at Target and you’re pushing your cart and trying to decide if you need to buy a garden hose or new sheets or wondering if you are out of paper towels and then there is an explosion so loud you can’t hear anything but you feel it reverb in your chest and you can’t see a thing through all that dust and then there is a second blast….”

  Eli put her hand on Spindini’s back and I stood up knowing that I should get help but wondering from who and he kept going. “This time the blast is in the sheet department and then there’s another in the toy department and then the whole store is just gone and your buddies are gone and you are gone or maybe just some of you is gone or maybe it looks like you are all there but then the doctors say they don’t have the parts they need to make you whole again.”

  I stood there shaking and sweating and said, “Do you want me to get the colonel or Mrs. T or…”

  Spindini looked straight up at me and he said, “A quarter of the homeless in America are veterans of wars fought in foreign lands that destroyed their homes and families even though not a single shot was fired here. It’s like the nuclear fallout and radiation of war that we won’t talk about.”

  I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes and said, “Is that why you went back to Iraq so many times? Because home didn’t feel like home anymore?” but Spindini didn’t answer.

  He looked down at his plate and said, “Thank you for the food.”

  I backed up, knocking over two chairs by accident in the process, and said, “Thank you for your service.” Then I walked away because I knew what I just said wasn’t nearly enough.

  But the thing of it was, even though those words I just said were nothing but a shopping cart full of shit, they were all that I had, and I had to hope that made them worth something after all.

  Benj intercepted me on my way to the kitchen and said, “Joel, are you going to Chris Williams’s party?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “But—” and I said, “No,” and stepped back to get away from him and knocked a plate of food onto the floor by mistake. When I went to clean up the mess Eli was at my side helping.

  When we were done she followed me into the back and she was crying.

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 4:30 a.m.

  Have you ever had a poached egg on top of steamed asparagus?

  ’Cause if you did you’d plow up the parking lot, plant asparagus, and put chickens in the gym.

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 4:34 a.m.

  And if you came to the soup kitchen up on Hendricks Street and you sat down with some of the guys you’d figure out how to do something to help the veterans. And stop war. And grow more food.

  Benj said if we were going to go to Burning Man we should get tickets soon.

  I said, “Jesus, Benj, I told you I wasn’t going.”

  Benj said that the tickets cost $390 each plus $80 to bring a car or truck in and when you get there you go to Walmart and buy all sorts of snacks and weird shit like costumes and Vaseline and licorice and face paint and then you ride a bike in the desert with goggles on because there is so much sand that it gets in your eyes and you can sleep in a tent or an RV or a yurt. He said seventy thousand people attend and it’s like a giant campout with crazy people.

  Eli had her phone out and she said seventy thousand is more than the population of Yuba City, California; Youngstown, Ohio; Waterloo, Iowa; Temple, Texas; Taylor, Michigan; and Utica, New York.

  And I said, “What the hell is a yurt?”

  And Benj said it’s a really cool tent made for the desert and we’ll have our driver’s licenses by the summer, so we could probably go and that Black Rock City, Nevada, which is the name of the temporary city where Burning Man is held, is 2,691.1 miles from Rockland County if you measured it from his aunt’s driveway on Adams Street. Then he said, “We’ll miss the first two days of senior year but it will be worth it because it’s like living on Mars with people from the future.”

  I said, “I’m not doing that, missing the first two days of senior year.”

  Then I said, “Where the hell are we going to get almost two thousand dollars and a truck and a yurt?”

  Benj said, “The pennies and geometric progression.”

  I said, “Oh, that explains it.”

  Benj said he started with one penny six days ago and now he has sixty-four cents. In four days he’ll have $10.24. Two days after that, $40.96. The day after that, $81.92. Day eighteen, $1,310.72. Then he said that on day nineteen he would have $2,621.44, which was more than enough for the tickets and the yurt and the Walmart stuff and gas. Then he said, “So in twelve days we will be fully funded. We will have eight hundred and sixty dollars for tickets and a thousand dollars for snacks and goggles and shit at Walmart.” Then he said that the Burning Man website said to be prepared for fire, nakedness, and mutant vehicles. It said to bring fleece jackets, animal suits, and glow sticks. Also, animal ears, tails, wings, furry vests, sparkly clothes, and condoms.

  Benj then said that the only problem was that you have to be eighteen or over to buy a ticket and attend the festival. But that maybe they won’t check about the over-eighteen thing.

  I said, “I think week two of your geometric progression is going to be a bit of an obstacle, too,” but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  Then he said you didn’t have to wear pants if you didn’t want to because some people were naked in the pictures online and if you wanted to see naked girls wearing leather boots and hats made of ostrich feathers or if you liked fire and wanted to see a lot of stuff burn it was a good place to go. He said they burn a forty-foot-tall wood structure called “The Man,” on the second-to-last night and people say it is the most powerful thing they’ve ever seen. Then Benj said there was a temple at Burning Man too, and it’s not all about sex and nakedness and drugs, but he didn’t want to talk about that part now.

  I said, “Did you do the English homework?” And Benj said, “No. I’m going to fail English, so what would be the point?” And I said, “If you want to go to Burning Man you better not be in summer school.” And he said, “Summer school will be over by then. I checked.”

  And then he said, “When you get home, google Burning Man and see how much fun we are going to have,” and I said, “I told you, I’m not going.”

  for Mr. Morgan that Benj didn’t bother to do was to write a list of everything wrong with this country or with this class or with Mr. Morgan or with our parents or with ourselves.

  It could be any overall category like teachers or the government or an institution that we perceived to be flawed. Mr. Morgan instructed us to put the things on the list that we could fix and also put things on the list that we thought that we couldn’t fix and Eli had the best list out of everyone.

  For starters it was seventy-two pages long and when Mr. Morgan looked it over he called it “fastidiously comprehensive” and she smiled. Eli had shown me the document before class and it included subcategories for the nuclear arms programs of North Korea and Iran as well as a long list of countries with human rights violations. She had separate headers for European, Russian, and Chinese colonialism; police brutality with subheads for the police forces of Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland; and cities wi
th policies to stop and frisk. Then there were categories for persecution based on gender identity, cloning, food insecurity, arms sales, gender parity, and global trade. She covered environmental concerns like overfishing the oceans, GMOs, and corn subsidies. Then there were prescription drug prices, the opiate epidemic, Chinese cyberhacking, high-fructose corn syrup, sexual harassment, carcinogens in toothpaste, and slavery. She covered everything from equal pay for women to child labor laws to fair treatment of immigrants to free speech and the closing of Guantanamo Bay. Then there was waterboarding, proper food labeling, and securing adequate funding for research on the Zika virus. That was just a sampling from the first thirteen pages. She had absolutely nothing in the column for “things she could not fix” and I suggested that she could put my name there, as I was a massive, unsolvable large-scale problem sort of like malaria or global warming.

  Benj suggested that maybe I was just a giant, cosmic energy suck like a black hole.

  I said, “Thanks, Benj,” and gave him a look.

  But Eli took our comments seriously and said she’d think about it.

  For my list I only included minor annoyances, not because I didn’t understand the assignment or have BIG grievances, because I did. But I just didn’t want to share them with the class. I wanted to make a list of all the stuff Mr. Morgan taught us about free speech and banned books and all the stuff that Spindini had been telling us like the fact that almost one-quarter of the homeless in this country are veterans and that veterans can’t get the medical care they need and sometimes they come home missing body parts and sometimes they come home with all of their body parts but still something big is missing or damaged or needs to be fixed and that we should make it feel like home for them when they get here so they won’t want to go back to war because they feel more at home in a foreign war zone with their buddies than then they do here in America with their families. And I wanted to say that we don’t make them feel like this is home mostly because we are all thinking about THE WRONG THINGS like if we have a cool car or who won the football game or if it’s better to take the SATs in the spring or fall or whether the Yankees are better than the Mets, or if a pearled bodice is better than a long train on a wedding dress, instead of thinking about what it might be like to come home with parts of yourself missing. So my “things I want to solve” list for Mr. Morgan had stuff on it like there shouldn’t be late fines at the library and there should be free chocolate-chip cookies in the cafeteria and maybe Mr. Morgan should lighten up on the Auto F policy because it’s freaking everyone out and he never really uses it anyway and short guys should get to go out with tall girls if they want to. And then I made a list of all of the tall girl–short guy combos with subcategories:

  First there was the movie star–movie star combo:

  Daniel Radcliffe and Erin Darke

  Seth Green and Clare Grant

  Then there was the movie star–rocker combo:

  Justin Bieber and Yovanna

  And the iconic supermodel–short president of France combo:

  Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy

  And of course the supermodel girl–super-rich guy combo like:

  Alessandra Ambrosio and

  Jamie Mazur and, like, a gazillion others

  And then I got depressed because there was a common thread, which was that tall girls only dated short guys if they were rich or famous or in a rock band or were hotshot bankers with mega yachts or the president of France. There wasn’t a single short guy who worked at a gas station dating a tall perfect girl who made lists of everything wrong with the world and planned on fixing all of it. So I deleted the whole tall girl–short guy part and stuck with things like the fact that it was really annoying that they don’t have chocolate milk in the cafeteria anymore.

  Eli’s list could have been sent to the president of the Red Cross or to the UN or Doctors Without Borders, or the Congress of the United States and mine could have been sent to absolutely no one unless there was a government agency in charge of filling up a Dumpster with pathetic, petty personal gripes. So I just ripped my list up and figured I deserved an Auto F but luckily for Benj and me Mr. Morgan didn’t collect our homework this time. Mr. Morgan just said, “Read over the list you made because these lists may be the most important thing you will ever write, even though it may not seem that way right now. When you are sixteen years old you still feel the world is a place where you can fix everything, and everything seems possible to you, and that drive and ambition and blind optimism is the engine that drives important change.”

  When I looked over at Eli she was smiling like she had finally seen God for real and I thought, It’s a good thing that I ripped up my list, because I don’t want to read it years from now and look back and see that at my very best I was concerned about the broken yogurt machine in the cafeteria at Calf City High School in Rockland County and the absolutely abhorrent injustice of white milk.

  Right before the class ended Benj leaned in close to me and whispered, “Now I understand why Eli makes lists all the time.”

  And I said, “Me too. I’d be making lists a lot, too, if I thought that I had to fix that much stuff.”

  Then Mr. Morgan said, “One more thing. A few parents complained about the subject matter of the books we’ve been reading this year, so there’s a new policy that if we’re going to read a book or have a discussion about anything that anyone might be uncomfortable with, I have to let you know ahead of time and give you a chance to opt out.

  “This new policy is based on something called the violence of words. Meaning that some words and some stories can deal with content and language that can be so damaging that we have to protect you from experiencing it.

  “So from now on I will warn you if there are any ‘trigger words’ or ‘trigger topics’ that could traumatize or offend any one of you because of a previous experience—or strongly held belief. I’ve been instructed to inform you that there will be a ‘safe space’ right next to Mrs. Plummer’s office where you can go to shield yourself from that conversation if you feel that it will be too traumatic for you.”

  Then I raised my hand and got called on. I stood up and everyone looked at me because I never volunteered to talk and I said, “I thought the whole point was that we were supposed to be traumatized by violent words. That’s how you learn.”

  Mr. Morgan said, “Me too. But some people believe students are fragile intellectual eggs and need to be offered a safe space to hide if a topic of conversation might be upsetting to them.”

  Benj blurted out, “You mean like if there are gay people in books?” And Mr. Morgan said, “Yes.”

  Then Paulie Pullman raised his hand and Mr. Morgan called on him and Paulie said, “So, if I don’t want to read a book with a gay character in it I can go to Mrs. Plummer’s office?”

  “Yes, and you can color. I hear she has the large box of crayons.”

  Paulie got up and left the room and without raising my hand or getting permission I stood up again and called after him, “You’re making a mistake.” And then I turned to face Mr. Morgan and said, “Give me an Auto F.”

  And he said, “No.”

  And I said, “You have to. Speaking without being called on is on the Auto F list….”

  No one moved.

  Not even Mr. Morgan.

  And then he said, “Joel, sit down.”

  I kept standing there. I said, “But…”

  He said, “Joel.”

  Then I finally slipped back into my seat.

  There were still ten minutes left in class and everyone just stayed at their desks and thought about stuff, probably free speech and safe spaces and the violence of words. And some of us were thinking about other stuff like banned books and IEDs and Spindini and Eli.

  Then the bell rang and Benj got up to leave and he walked over to me and said, “We’re still going to Burning Man. Right?”

  And I said, “Basically, that’s still a no.”

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL
REDMAN 1:24 a.m.

  About that raise for Mr. Morgan. He should really get it. Like now. Maybe use some of the bus/car-swap money.

  If we got Zipcars instead of Corvettes and Camaros or Jeeps or Harleys we could still ditch the buses and use the rest of the money for Mr. Morgan’s raise and for farming.

  It should definitely be Zipcars. Or Harleys. Either way. I’m good with both.

  TEXT FROM JOEL TO ANDY 1:31 a.m.

  My whole family is sick. My mom says we’re fine and that I have to stop worrying. I’m still pretty sure she has tuberculosis.

  Jacey is a walking rash and Jackson’s a mess. I’m thinking sciatica, arthritis, high blood pressure, and colitis.

  I pretty much have a brain tumor to go with the toenail fungus, the collywobbles, and exploding head syndrome. I mean, a tumor explains the headaches better than exploding head syndrome. But I don’t want you to worry. I’m just keeping you up to date.

  and the Driver’s Ed car to pull around, which was going to take a while being that the seniors on the football team had carried it onto the tennis courts, there were some other kids nearby waiting for the track coach, and Benj was asking all of us one of his annoying what-if questions.