by Paul Cody
We sat on the patio steps, under a big oak tree that had dark scarlet leaves. We lit our cigs, and Sam coughed, and then we just sat and looked out. It must have been two or three in the morning, and it’s something I remember most of all. Because the cigarettes tasted so good, and we didn’t say anything. Just the two of us, like old soldiers, understanding something we couldn’t say.
Five
Sam
Classes at the Clock School started the Tuesday after Labor Day, and it was kind of funny because the last official school I’d gone to was Groton, which was as WASP-y as it gets, and tony as all get-out, with quads and old red brick, and oak trees that went back to the Civil War, or to Roosevelt’s time, and you never knew which Roosevelt—Franklin or Teddy—though I’m not sure if both of them went there. Now I was going to school in an old factory building, which was whitewashed, but you could still see the black lettering under the paint—Ithaca Calendar Clock. I kind of liked it, because I had hated Groton, just as I read somewhere that Roosevelt—I think FDR—had hated Groton. Good for him.
I’d been to the Clock School twice, in midsummer with my mom and dad, and then later to meet with Meg. The summer in Ithaca had gone well, not that I’d done much. Dad was around much more; none of those Fidelity days when a car picked him up at seven in the morning and often dropped him off at nine or ten at night. He’d also ditched the black Benz for an Accord, and Mom gave up her Lexus for an Austin Mini. A red Mini, but still. Dad worked more or less normal hours, and he taught me to drive, first in the high school parking lot, then in this beautiful park that had small roads that ran along the southern end of Cayuga Lake, which is one of those giant Finger Lakes that are thirty or forty miles long. Then in a cemetery that had a view of the lake, then along the roads in Cayuga Heights, which is the fancy neighborhood in Ithaca.
By Chestnut Hill standards, it was modest. No ten-thousand-square-foot houses. You could see the houses from the road, and our house, which was relatively big, but not crazy big, had been owned by a retired horticulture professor, and the yard was unbelievably beautiful. I mean, all kinds of trees and plants and small terraces, all on a small scale, but it was like you could die there happy.
I had two rooms to myself on the third floor, with slanted ceilings, a couch, two big chairs, my desk, bed, bookcases, and these great old leaded windows. I had my own bathroom. It felt good up there. It felt like home.
By July, I had my license, and Dad bought me an orange Honda Fit.
I didn’t know anyone, but the town was small enough, and I was on lithium and a small dose of lorazepam for anxiety, so I felt pretty comfortable driving around, parking near downtown, getting coffee at this place called Gimme!, then sitting in a park shaped like a triangle, which was next to a brook. The town felt mellow and right-sized. It felt like a place I could reason with.
By late August it started to get noticeably busier. You’d see a lot of rental trucks and vans, and stupid me, it took me two days to realize that the college students were coming back. Between Cornell and Ithaca College, twenty-five thousand college students were moving back. You could feel the energy, and the streets were way more clogged with cars.
So Tuesday: eight fifty a.m. I parked on this leafy Fall Creek street. No problem with parking. All these neat, funky-looking houses. Buddhist prayer flags over some front doors, No Fracking Way signs on some front lawns, kind of like Cambridge.
I went in the side door of the big white building, and there was a table, and a man and woman, teacher-like, were handing out folders in the lobby. Upper-school, lower-school. I went to the upper-school guy, who had a beard and was wearing a suit coat over a T-shirt. Hello, he said. You look new.
I nodded.
He put his hand out and we shook.
And you are?
Sam Vash.
Yes, I’ve heard of you.
It kind of made me start. I felt myself blushing.
Shit, I thought. Shit. Shit. Should’ve taken an extra lorazepam.
Nothing but praise, he said. Chuck Vallely. English. But I’m afraid Meg’s claimed you. I get to feed the robotics kids. Give them their sci-fi.
He nodded and smiled more.
Upstairs to the Big Room.
I took the folder, which had my name typed on a sticker in the upper right corner. Samantha Ariel Vash.
I went up the wide staircase, which was polished oak and had oak banisters. It was startling, the contrast between the inside and outside of the building. I was also startled by how little some of the kids were, how small and nervous they seemed. They must have been eleven, twelve years old. Was I them? I thought. Starting at the start?
They were thin and awkward, and they seemed to be trying hard to hug the walls, to stay low and unseen. But you could also see that they were trying hard to wear the right clothes, the canvas sneakers, the hair ties, the short skirt or the jeans with the huge rips in the knees.
At the top of the stairs was a long hallway they called Main Street, which was wide and carpeted. Everything else was windows, and refurbished brick, and old beams, and new oak supporting the beams.
We were directed to the Big Room, which was a small auditorium that sat maybe three hundred. It was beautifully done. They had somehow cut into the floor above, and it was tall and spacious, and the seats were inclined. Four people were sitting on the stage, and kids were clustering into groups. More or less by age and friendship. There were six or seven kids near the front, older kids, all wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, all but one with glasses, and I was betting ten to one that these were the robotics kids.
The kids looked more or less normal, though the kids at McLean and Austen Riggs had always seemed kind of normal, until you dug a little below the surface or spent time with them. They all had their stories, though. I guess everybody has their stories.
A big guy in a dark blue checked shirt got up first with a handheld microphone. He said, Okay, everybody, seats, please. Time for kickoff.
I was in the top row, on the side, on an aisle, and I could see everybody. While Gus, the principal, was saying, Welcome back, we’re gonna have a great year, I was kind of scanning the room. I saw Meg down near the front, in an aisle seat, and I guess, without realizing it, I was looking for Levon.
I had no idea who I was looking for. A short chunky guy with bad glasses, a medium skinny guy who twitched, someone with a ponytail or rat-tail, someone in tie-dye, but I guessed that was the science kids. There was a group you could tell were the art kids. They wore black, and had part of their hair shaved, and had tats and piercings. It was the same everywhere—at Groton, McLean, Austen Riggs.
Then a woman, a social worker, was saying that she was always available, she was here all the time, her door was always open, and then a kind of severe-looking woman with very short helmet hair and a suit, who was the nurse practitioner, said she was at the school Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, and she said her specialty was psychiatric meds, and her door was always open.
The last guy was big and shambly and kind of old, maybe in his sixties. He wore a baggy tweed jacket, a shirt with a button-down collar, and corduroy pants. He spoke softly. He was the school psychologist. His name was Ron and he just wanted to say one thing. He said, If you’re trying to move a box, and it’s not too big, then you can probably move it by yourself. No problem. But if you’re trying to move a couch, you can’t do it by yourself, no matter how big and strong you are. You need someone on the other end. So if the box is really heavy, and really uncomfortable, and is really painful to move, then it’s probably a couch. That’s when you need to get some help. That’s when you talk to one of us. Any of us. It made sense. I liked this guy Ron.
Then we broke up and went to different classes, though they weren’t like other classes I’d been to. One was called Quest for Justice, and there were five of us, plus Justine, the teacher. She was maybe fifty, had gray hair, and her glasses kept slipping down her nose. We talked about what we would read—Voltaire, Camus, Sene
ca, a little Plato and Nietzsche, some novels later in the year. There was the Biology of Ecology and there were three of us in there, and then art class, which had about ten of us in this big room, and the teacher was Francine, and I liked her. She wore a smock and black tights, and she said we could do what we wanted, but that she wanted us to try a little of everything. Clay, silk-screening, oils, watercolor, digital, which might be fun.
A guy named Andre, who was tall and had black hair and multiple piercings in both ears, was very friendly and kept showing me different things in the studio, then Francine called him over, and this girl who was short and really pretty and had warm eyes came over. She said, Hey, Sam, welcome. Just want to warn you—Andre thinks he’s the biggest player in all of Ithaca, but he understands the word no.
We laughed, and she said, Wanna go outside for a break?
I said, Sure. I need air.
She said, Me too. I’m Anna.
We went down some stairs, through a heavy steel door, and there was an old parking lot, and a beat-up picnic table with an old coffee can for butts. She took out ChapStick, did her lips, offered it to me. I passed.
You doing okay? she asked. First day?
Yeah, it’s pretty loose, I said.
Yeah, it’s chill. People do some pretty cool stuff. Interesting stuff.
We sat a little and picked at the worn wood of the table.
Who’s your main teacher? she asked.
Meg.
The Megster, Anna said, and nodded.
She good?
Very good. And I heard she’ll team you up with Levon.
Is that good?
She blinked and looked thoughtful. Finally she said, An extremely interesting boy. Could be a disaster, could be brilliant.
How do you mean?
She smiled, kind of mysteriously. I spent half of last year trying to sleep with Levon, she said. No luck. I know at least three other girls, all lookers, who’ve done the same thing. Same result. I’ll say no more. You’ll see.
We exchanged cell numbers and email addresses, and Anna became my first Ithaca friend.
I went back inside and things felt more relaxed, or I felt more relaxed. I hadn’t realized that all day I’d had this first-day-of-school anxiety. I hadn’t been in a normal school in over a year, and the last one had ended in disaster. I had this awful, deep fear that one wrong move, and I’d be back at McLean or Austen Riggs. This all felt, part of it, at least, like one huge trial. And I noticed that the younger kids, too, weren’t hugging the walls so much, that they seemed chattier with each other, and I thought, Good for them.
It occurred to me that I was around more people than I’d been in a while, which I guess was since May, at Austen Riggs.
I thought about Andre, who was kind of a skank, and I kept wondering about the mysterious Levon Grady. Andre was slick as puppy shit, as this girl Suzy, at McLean, used to say. Whatever he was, Levon Grady was not puppy shit.
So Wednesday, ten in the a.m., my first class, if you could call it a class, I was sitting in Meg’s office, in one of the big overstuffed chairs. Meg asked me if I’d written anything more, and I said, A little, and she said, Wanna show us?
Must I?
She laughed. I think that’s part of the deal, she said. But if you want to wait a week or two to let it cool down, that’s good with me.
If I wait a week or two I might delete it.
So maybe don’t think and just hit send.
I’ll try to try, I said.
She leaned back in her rolling desk chair and said, You know how when you’re a kid and you’re dipping a toe in the water and they tell you to just jump in, or how they say just pull the Band-Aid off fast?
I nodded.
It works, she said.
It was five past, and still no Levon, and Meg said, Yesterday go okay?
Yeah, I think this might be okay, I said.
Then we didn’t say anything for a minute or two, and then there was a soft tapping on the door.
Mr. Grady, enter, Meg said.
She stood up and quickly hugged him, and I stood up, and he was nothing like the way I’d thought.
For one thing, I’m pretty tall, almost five eight, and he was way taller than me, six two or three. He had wide, square shoulders, but was otherwise lean, and he had dark hair that wasn’t long, but was loose and kind of curly and unruly and had hints of red in it. He wore glasses with brown frames that had wire on the bottom of the glass to hold the lenses in, kind of like ’60s businessman glasses.
He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with the top button buttoned, and black khaki pants and really beat-up black Docs. I only looked briefly at his face, but his eyes were brown, and he was handsome. Jesus, he was handsome. Not pretty, not model handsome, but this slightly wide nose, and gorgeous lips, and his eyes looked at me a second and then away.
So, Sam, he said. So. Here we are.
He slouched onto the couch, and I sat too straight in the chair, and I said, Nice to meet you, Levon, and then I wanted to kick myself because that’s what people at Groton said.
I might have been blushing, but I looked quickly over at him, and he was looking down at his shoes and smiling. Not smirking.
He said, I loved, Say here her / feet rose.
He kept looking at his shoes. Say here her, he repeated. Just lovely.
Six
Elliot
I didn’t know him well, and this whole thing took about a minute, maybe two minutes in all, but it was one of the most amazing, awesome things I ever saw. Even though it took place six years ago, in late September, our first month in middle school, in sixth grade, I can see it all now like it was a day or a week or a month ago. I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever forget.
As sixth graders, we were the new kids, just out of grade school, which was kindergarten to fifth, then middle school, which was sixth to eighth, then high school, which was ninth to twelfth.
So there were four different lunch blocks, E, F, G, and H, and the grades were all jumbled together at lunch, depending on your schedule. I think E started at eleven twenty, you had about thirty minutes, and so on.
I should also say that I’d gone to school at Fall Creek Elementary all the way with Levon Grady, and though I wasn’t real friendly with him—nobody was real friendly with him—I liked him, and thought he was a nice kid. He kept to himself, he was real smart, and he never bothered anybody.
He was also really tall, and wore glasses, and had curly hair, and even though he was skinny, he had broad shoulders, and he looked kind of skinny-strong, the way a swimmer looks, and he moved kind of fluidly, like an athlete, though he didn’t play sports.
I didn’t either. In fact, nobody in my family was interested in sports in any way, except for one thing. My parents loved Muhammad Ali, and we had a copy of When We Were Kings, the documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle, the famous fight in Zaire between George Foreman and Ali. My parents loved Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, and his courage and wit and how smart he was. I guess, too, they thought he was an amazing boxer, even though they didn’t like or approve of boxing.
Anyway, by the time I was in sixth grade, I’d seen When We Were Kings about five times. How the massive Foreman was supposed to destroy Ali with these punches that hit like cinder blocks. That Ali was too old, outclassed, and just couldn’t stand up to Foreman’s thunderbolts. But Ali leaned way back on the ropes, the Rope-a-Dope, and let Foreman land body blow after body blow, and leaned his head back, and Foreman almost never hit Ali in the head. Finally, Foreman was punched out, and Ali started counterpunching with these incredibly hard, fast, and accurate shots to Foreman’s head.
Well, during E-block lunch, there was a kid, an eighth grader, named Jason Slough. He was a big beefy kid who might have played football or something, and he always sat with his buddies near where some of us sixth graders sat. I don’t know why, but he seemed to hate Levon, and almost from the first week of school, he’d been giving him a hard
time. Bumping into him in the halls on purpose (har-har), and sitting during lunch and saying, Hey, LePussy, LeFaggot, what’s for lunch today? It happened every E-block lunch.
Hey, LeShit, you cornhole your friends this weekend? Or you don’t have no friends?
Aren’t you some kind of freak, LeRetard? Go to special classes?
Jason Slough had a lot of acne, and a round red face, and he always wore a baseball cap on backward, and Timberlands that weren’t laced all the way up. He was probably the same height as Levon, but he must have weighed close to twice as much.
I don’t think many people liked him, and I think people liked Levon if they thought of him at all.
Isn’t Levon a hillbilly name? Don’t all hillbillies fuck their sisters and mothers? Slough taunted him on one day in particular.
There was silence for a moment or two. This was a Tuesday, I think.
Then Levon put his sandwich down, and stood up, and said, Okay, shitbird.
Jason Slough stood up, and there was a space between the tables, and a whole lot of people stood up and there was a thick circle of people around them. They put their hands up, and Jason kind of leaned back, then forward, and took this huge George Foreman swing at Levon’s head. Levon stepped back, leaned his head back like Ali, and the punch missed by at least six inches.
Then Levon moved his feet, stepped forward, and while Slough was off balance, Levon Grady threw this hard punch that landed square on the side of Jason’s face. It shocked him, you could tell. But before he could get his balance, Levon moved his feet again, stepped forward again, and threw a right that seemed to have every ounce of his weight, from his toes to his fist, behind it. The punch landed in the middle of Jason’s face, and there was a cracking sound, and you could see Jason’s legs wobble like he was drunk, and he just crumpled to the linoleum floor.
People were screaming, and teachers were rushing in.
Levon picked his backpack up, and I heard he went to the principal’s office, and that was the end of Levon Grady and regular public schools.