Tradition

by Brendan Kiely

  Freddie wrote the scores next to the photos as the guys shouted them out to him. “No way,” he argued. “Not even a 3.” He laughed. “Fair is fair and all, but reality is also reality. I’m putting down a 2.”

  I let out a breath, not one of fire, as much as I wished I could. I knew I had to get up and say something, because no one else would. As soon as the guys saw me coming, they knew what I was going to say. That was the part that pissed me off the most—they already knew. Somewhere in their minds they heard my voice before I spoke. Maybe it was their mothers’ voice, maybe their sisters’. Maybe it was a teacher’s. Or maybe it was even their own voice, too soft to be heard in the rumble and roar of the mob. But none of them looked nervous as they watched me approach. Only the Buckeye cracked a crooked, embarrassed smile.

  “Guys,” I said in my best guyish tone. “Isn’t this a little childish?”

  “Ha!” Freddie laughed. “You want in? You can rate the boys.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Come on,” he went on. “You’re the one always talking about equity this and equity that. Here’s your chance. Start a new tradition. Rate the boys.”

  Some of the guys laughed, and I realized there were a few other student handbooks from years past on the table in front of him. He pushed aside two of the student handbooks and held the third one up. “Jules,” he said, “let’s see what they gave you!” He handed it to the Buckeye and told him to find my picture.

  I’d been ready to give them a lecture, but I felt muted, not by Freddie exactly, but by the fact that some other group of guys had been sitting here doing the same thing when I was a first year. By the fact that before they really knew my name, they knew my number.

  “Find it?” Freddie asked the Buckeye.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  “An 8,” the Buckeye said. He looked at me hopefully, as if he thought the higher number would make me feel better about it all. I smoldered deep inside.

  Freddie grabbed the book and held it high for all to see. There I was. Hair curled in a way I never would otherwise. But mostly, it was freaky to look back into the eyes of the younger me. Run, I wanted to tell her. Run for your life.

  “Hey,” Freddie said. “An 8. Not bad!” Some of the guys cheered along. Freddie grinned at me. “Yeah,” he continued. “But what happened?”

  “Aww, man,” Lou Anastasos said. He was a skinny guy who shaved his head at the beginning of every soccer, hockey, and baseball season. His head gleamed as he swung it around while looking for more support from the other guys. “That’s not right.” He turned to me with what I think he thought was pity. “You’re still an 8, Jules. All the way!”

  It was like they weren’t even really talking to me, but rather, right at my body, wrenching the two apart. That seemed so dangerous, to think of me and my body as two separate things—as if one could be sacrificed to protect the other.

  I found it hard to speak, and what finally came out didn’t have the force I wanted it to. “I want to be there the day you get cancer, or the day you lose a child. The day your wife tells you she’s getting a divorce and she’s taking the house with her. I want to see that look on your face when something turns your world upside down.”

  Freddie brushed it off. “Oh, man, so dramatic.” He held up the pen. “You know what your problem is, Jules? You just don’t want people to be people. You want to suck all the fun out of life until we’re all dead and boring and politically correct. Lighten up. You used to be fun. What happened to you?”

  My sundae sat mostly melted in my cup, and I plopped the cup down and slid it across the table at him. He bounced backward, but the behemoth Buckeye stood too close, Freddie had nowhere to go, and the ice cream soup dropped right into his lap. He shouted at me, but I was already walking away. Already trying to ignore them, or really, trying not to show them how choked up I was, or how close to screaming.

  Because right then, I almost wished I could go back to living the lie that everyone else embraced so wholeheartedly. Reality was reality, Freddie-goddamn-Watts. But for some of us, reality was too painful.

  Once, in middle school, back when I played soccer, I was stretching with three other girls, and a boy walked by with his friend. “Best legs,” he said, pointing at one girl. “Best boobs.” He pointed to another. “Best butt,” he said to me. We were all shocked into silence, like he’d struck us with invisible bolts of lightning. “What if you could smash them all together?” his friend said as they walked away. “Ooooh,” the first boy said. I felt so grossed out, like I’d been cut apart, and I looked at the girl who he’d said nothing about and wondered how she felt. She stared at the ground and ignored us.

  Too many days felt like that day on the soccer field. This was my reality: having to deal with the Franken-dream fantasies of people like Freddie Watts. All the damn time. I guess I had known all this last year, and the year before, even earlier, but I’d just accepted it before. Not anymore. It was like I’d put on a pair of glasses and could see it all so much clearer, and now that I had, I couldn’t ignore it.

  Still, what the heck could I do about it?

  At many colleges there are large groups of students who volunteer at the campus health center. I knew because I’d looked it up at all the schools on my list. But at Fullbrook, there was only one: me. And truthfully, I didn’t get to do all that much. It was just somewhere I could go when I didn’t know how to settle all the rage swirling and smoking within me.

  I walked over to Ms. Taggart’s office and tried to manage what was going on inside me by doing something useful for someone else. She sat in a chair in the receiving room, using her tea mug to warm her hands. She’d tucked her legs up onto the seat like a little kid, and she peered at me over her knees as she directed me.

  I’d ordered a poster for the office, and she’d waited for me to hang it up. I pressed one thumbtack to hold it in place, and Ms. Taggart got up to help me fix the rest of it. It was a magnificent, life-size illustration of the female body, with the skin missing so you could see the muscles and tendons and organs and all that. Something to occupy your mind while you waited in the receiving room.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, patting my back like a proud mom. Ms. Taggart looked so young, it was sometimes hard to remember she had a child of her own—a little boy I’d seen running around campus like a Jack Russell terrier. She collected her mug from the end table.

  “I love it,” I told her. I ran my finger down the long, winding sartorius muscle, which looped around the thigh.

  “Have you figured out your list?”

  I sighed and spoke to her over my shoulder. “It’s such bullshit.” Sometimes I thought of her as the older sister I never had but always wanted. Sometimes I remembered she was an adult and I had to think of boundaries. I turned back to her. “What I mean is, why can’t I study science and humanities? Like, I know I’m really good in English and history, but I love bio. I love environmental science. Why isn’t there a major called science in literature?”

  “That would be cool.” She sipped her tea. “Also, you don’t have to choose and limit yourself.”

  “Ugh. Yes, I know I can double major and all that, but I want it all together, all mushed together.”

  Ms. Taggart glanced at her watch and then at the door to her office. She was letting a first year take a nap on the couch inside. I knew girls who’d taken advantage of Ms. Taggart’s couch—Gillian, for instance, for so much of sophomore year, after the video—because even though we could always go back to our rooms, napping in Ms. Taggart’s office just felt somehow more protected. It wasn’t something I’d ever done, but I understood that. I didn’t nap here, but I volunteered, and somehow it was the same thing.

  “Time’s almost up.” She’d have to go back in, and when she did, she’d probably talk to the first year for a bit. Find out what was stressing her out.

  “Yup.” I pulled a paper cup from the water cooler and filled it.

  “And th
ink about this, Jules. William Carlos Williams was a doctor and a poet. Carl Sagan wrote about the universe, beautifully.”

  “How about women?”

  My mother was the first woman to join the board of directors at her firm. There’d been a first woman to teach at Fullbrook at some point. The first woman to get elected senator was Hattie Caraway. One of the first recorded women in the US Army was Deborah Sampson Gannett, who enlisted under a man’s name in 1782, and who cut out a musket ball from her own leg so a doctor wouldn’t reveal her big secret. Stories of first women stuck with me. Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova the first woman ever in space. No woman had walked on the moon. And when she did, because surely that would happen one day—wouldn’t it?—there would be all the jokes, because that was also inevitable. For every achievement, there was always the joke intended to take it away.

  She smiled. “I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but maybe a few years from now, when another student comes to me with this question, I’ll say, ‘Julianna Devereux, of course.’ ” She held up her wrist. “Heading back in. See you soon.”

  She’d done it, even if only a little, quelled my rage by giving me a little hope. I heard my name in Ms. Taggart’s voice. I loved how that sounded: Julianna Devereux, a young woman who did a thing.

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  I don’t know why they put a dumb kid like me in British lit. It wasn’t AP, it was just an elective, but I was in a class with AP students like Gillian, Jules, and Aileen. Why couldn’t I take a crime fiction course? Or better yet, sports writing? Nope. Mr. Hale paced the room, talking to us about the opening moments of Paradise Lost.

  “When Lucifer wakes up in hell, it’s not sorrow he feels, is it?”

  He looked around the room, and had to wait all of two milliseconds for hands to shoot up. Not mine. I never raised my hand. Mr. Hale knew that. He stared at me, not hoping I’d raise my hand, more like he was taunting me. No idea, Baxter? No. I didn’t even know what all the words in the damn stanza meant.

  Mr. Hale’s classroom was smaller than some, and he leaned back against one of the dark wooden panels on the wall. It was mostly girls who had their hands up, but this hockey guy, Ryan Tucker, had his up too, in his own way, his elbow on the desk in front of him, one finger pointing toward the ceiling.

  “Go ahead.” Mr. Hale nodded to Tucker. “Why don’t you take a stab at it? Get us started.”

  I don’t know what Tucker began talking about, but he went on forever. I leaned back in my chair and glanced out the door of the classroom. We were only a few weeks into the school year and I was already struggling significantly. It wasn’t just the papers I couldn’t write—I’d been assigned two, one in each English class—it was the hour I could spend on one pre-calc equation, the reading for history class that would take me all night to finish, if I tried to finish it. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how all these people at Fullbrook did it—and without breaking out in hives.

  “James?” Mr. Hale said.

  “Huh?”

  “Care to elaborate on Ryan’s comments?”

  “Huh?”

  “You looked deep in thought. Maybe you have something to add. About the setup for Adam and Eve?”

  Jules blew out a long sigh. I’m sure she knew as well as I did that I hadn’t caught a single word of what Tucker had said, but all eyes were on me, and one thing I’d learned at Fullbrook in the short amount of time I’d been there was that it was better to fake it than to keep showing your ignorance. “Of course,” I said. Someone laughed under her breath. “It’s all about rules and order and it doesn’t make sense to Lucifer, just like it won’t make sense to Adam and Eve.”

  The room was quiet. Mr. Hale nodded. “Not bad,” he said. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. We’ll talk about that.”

  I was as shocked as anyone else in the class that I had some sense of what was going on. I didn’t. I’d just said the first thing that popped into my head. And weirdly, I felt more embarrassed that I’d said something meaningful than if I’d just mumbled my usual line: “I don’t know.”

  There were still a few hands up, including Jules’s and Aileen’s, but Mr. Hale went on about the battle in Milton’s mind between individualism and the moral order of a Christian universe. Jules shook her head. She reached down into her backpack, rustled for a minute, then pulled out a tampon and placed it next to the pen and highlighter beside her book.

  Mr. Hale didn’t see it at first, but as he looked around the table, he could see all the uncomfortable faces glancing back and forth from Jules to him. He finally noticed. “Excuse me,” he said.

  No one said anything, including Jules, who he was looking at. Slowly, she raised her hand. Because he was still looking at her, she assumed she’d been called on. “I wanted to get back to this question of reigning in hell being better than serving in heaven.”

  “No.” Mr. Hale cut her off. “Julianna, please try to have a little decency in class.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He pointed to the tampon. “Enough with the stunts.”

  She picked it up and waved it as she talked. “If you are referring to this, it’s no big deal. I was going to go to the bathroom, but then I realized I didn’t want to miss class at the moment, and really, I’m so sick of secretly slipping it up my sleeve and hiding it every time I walk to the bathroom.”

  “Honestly,” Mr. Hale said.

  “What? That’s what I do. That’s what most of us do,” she said, looking around the room. “I’m sick of pretending it doesn’t exist, just to make other people feel more comfortable. How about they just get comfortable with my reality?”

  “Oh, man,” Tucker whined. “Here it comes.”

  Just seeing the tampon kind of put me out of place too. It didn’t bother me as much as make me think of the last time I’d seen one, back when Heather and I were still a couple and she pulled one out of her backpack in her living room after school. She’d pulled it out with a bottle of extra-strength Advil, complaining about her cramps. “You have no idea,” she’d told me.

  “Can’t we just act like ladies and gentlemen?” Mr. Hale asked. He wasn’t really talking to anyone else, though.

  “A lady?” Jules said.

  Gillian leaned forward, around Tucker, and added, “Exactly, Jules. Come on. Put it away. I don’t want to see that out on the table either.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Jules said. “Why are we all pretending like this isn’t a part of our everyday lives?”

  “It probably is every day for you,” one of the other guys said.

  “Okay,” Mr. Hale said. “Let’s try to have a little decency.” He waved out over all of us. “Jules, put that away. Everybody else, let’s get back to work. We have more important things to concentrate on.”

  “Actually,” Jules continued, “this is relevant. I mean, we’re talking about a poem that’s based on the whole Adam and Eve story, and how it basically blames women for all the problems in the world—like if only we’d just done what we were told.” She wagged her finger in emphasis at people across the table from her, including me.

  “Oh, classic,” Tucker said, leaning back so his chair tilted away from the table. “Classic Jules.”

  “God,” Gillian said.

  Mr. Hale had clearly lost patience; his face was flushed to the base of his neck. “Well, if you’d just do what you’re told right now,” he said, “we could get back to talking about what we need to. All of you,” he added, even though he was still looking right at Jules.

  “But we are,” Jules went on. “I mean, you haven’t called on me or Aileen, or even you, Gillian,” she said, leaning down and staring at her. “You pass by us all the time. And by the way, we’ve all done the reading, and we aren’t BS-ing like Ryan always is.”

  As soon as she called him out, Tucker dropped the front legs of the chair to the floor, and shot
back. “You need to get a boyfriend or something and chill out.”

  He glanced to me, nodding, looking for approval, and something sank in my gut. Because truthfully, no matter how good it felt to be back on the ice, I was starting to feel hollowed out sometimes when I was around the guys. The way he said that, get a boyfriend, reminded me of Heather saying it wasn’t fair, why did she have to put on a happy face and pretend like she wasn’t in pain. All guys wanted to do was get in her pants, she’d said, but they didn’t actually want to know anything about what was in her pants.

  “See what I mean?” Jules said. “If I talk about tampons or menstrual cups or pads, suddenly it’s my fault the guys don’t do their homework?”

  Mr. Hale was about to speak, but Jules was looking at me when she said that, and something in me clicked.

  I found myself leaping out of my seat, leaning over the table, and grabbing the tampon. “All right,” I said, louder than I meant to. I slammed the tampon down in front of me. “Now I have one too.”

  Jules didn’t miss a beat. She pulled another one out of her bag and slipped it where the other one had been, beside her book. Tucker laughed. “I’m not kidding,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. It’s a tampon. Let’s move on.” He stopped laughing and stared at me, completely confused.

  The whole class was. Even Mr. Hale. I hoped to hell I didn’t look as insanely nervous as I felt, but nobody said anything, until Jules broke the silence. “Welp,” she said, “if we’re taking a break, now’s probably a good time to go to the bathroom.” She kind of smiled at me, although not like a laugh, more like she was looking at me like I was kind of nuts, and maybe I was, but I was pretty sick of everyone around the room giving her a hard time. She seemed comfortable being on her own, but I didn’t like that everyone was just as comfortable ganging up on her.

  Jules stepped away, class fell into its dull rhythm again, and when she returned, she slipped another tampon onto the desk in front of her and nobody said anything.