Tradition

by Brendan Kiely

  • • •

  By the time I got back upstairs, the stands had emptied and the lights had been dimmed to night mode, a pale green glow over the ice, a few yellowed globes along the walls. I stood by the boards in the little driveway the Zamboni took to get out onto the ice, and found myself getting lost in the cuts and grooves the skates had left everywhere. I felt a little too old to feel this emotional, so broken up, I had no words to describe the fissure I felt widening inside me—but I also felt like, why? Or rather, why the hell not? What was so damn wrong with wanting to cry sometimes? Hadn’t it felt good to cry with Jules that night at the pep rally? Hadn’t it felt good to wash out whatever nameless storm swept through me? In the arena, all alone, I heard the echo of one loud sob double back to me, and it was weirdly comforting, as if there was one other person crying along with me.

  The door to the main lobby opened and banged close. Instinct kicked in, and I wiped away my tears as fast as I could. I hawked a loogie in the driveway and tried to fix my face, brace myself, get back on guard. I thought it might be Coach, and he was the last person I needed to see me like this. It was shattering how much I wanted someone there with me, but almost no one at all from Fullbrook.

  Almost. Javi came around the corner of the stands and leaned on one of the scaffolding pipes holding them up. “Oh, man,” he said. “You don’t look good.”

  I let out a laugh I’d never heard come out of me. It was like a bird calling in the forest—the kind of laugh that picked up and soared after a good cry. “You’re the last person I thought I’d see here.”

  “Nope. That’d be Jules. She’d never be caught dead in here. I like coming to the games, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “No. I’m just playing. I thought Max was coming to the game.” He shrugged. “Guess I thought if he saw me, maybe we could talk.”

  “He didn’t come.”

  “Nope. But then I thought I’d stick around for you. Seriously, once I started watching the game? Man. Now I know what the hype is all about. You’re a monster out there.”

  “Thanks.” I knew he was kidding but it stung a little anyway. He was right.

  “I think you have to be to play this game.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, I waited for you because I thought you’d want to hear from someone who knows nothing about the game, other than it kind of looks like the most violent ballet on ice, that you were great.”

  “Aw, thanks,” I teased. “It means so much to hear that from someone who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Javi said, coming toward me now. “Anytime. You want to hear some really meaningless pats on the back, just come to me.”

  I shrugged. He was close enough now that I was sure he could see I’d been crying. I wondered if he’d heard me too.

  He stepped closer, put a hand on each of my shoulders. “You really do look like shit.”

  “Exactly how I feel.”

  He pulled me into a hug. “I think we both need one of these.”

  And he was right. The weirdest thing was that I couldn’t remember ever hugging a man that long. Not my father, for sure. He could barely get through a mutual pat on the back. Not any friend or teammate. It’d always been girls. Why? How ridiculous.

  I squeezed him as tight as I could, and when I finally let him go, we both started walking toward the lobby. Then I paused. “Hey,” I said as an idea came to me. “Follow me.”

  I led him back around to the locker room entrance and then down the stairs with the same sense of spirit I’d had knowing I had to get Aileen back home from Horn Rock. The overnight lights cast a jaundiced glow over the room, and the whole place still smelled like sweaty socks and bile. I led Javi around to my aisle.

  “How do you stand any time at all in this hell pit?”

  “It’s just normal for me,” I said.

  “Your normal is disgusting.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Why did you bring me down here?”

  “For this,” I said, pointing to the graffiti about Aileen.

  “Sorry, man. I know you two have been scoring, but this stuff is all over the place. It’s not just in locker rooms.”

  “Yeah, I know. But this is the only place I have to come to every single day. Besides, it’s not just her. You know how many girls’ names are down here?” I went over to my locker, opened it, and dug out my skates. I handed one to Javi.

  “Oh, hell, no,” he said, handing it back. “I’m not touching that. I’ll get like twelve diseases if I hold it for too long.”

  “It’s the best tool I have,” I said. “Are you with me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I handed him the skate again and walked over to the locker with the scratch graffiti about Aileen. I held the skate edge and scraped it against the locker, over the words, and in a few seconds it was a barren waste of squiggles.

  “Let’s wipe them all clean.”

  “What? There must be dozens, tens of dozens of lines like that all over the place.”

  “Well, they don’t need to be here.”

  “I know you don’t like seeing your girlfriend or whatever disparaged like that, but these guys have been doing this for years. That graffiti was probably from last year or before.”

  “It doesn’t matter. This is my locker room too. This shit,” I said, pointing to another line of graffiti about a girl I didn’t know, a number to text her something dirty, “this shit doesn’t stand. Not in my locker room.”

  Javi smiled. “You’re insane. I am so in.”

  We bisected the locker room, each to a side, and went at it. It took us more than an hour, but we got it all, or at least everything we could find. At the end, he carried my skate back over to my locker and pointed to my nickname. “We ripping that off too?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll deal with that later.”

  He nodded. “You know they’re going to know it was you,” he said.

  “I know. I won’t tell them you helped.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He handed me my skate and I wiped the paint chips from the blade. “But thanks,” I said. “I mean it. It helps to know someone has your back.”

  Javi nodded. “You know who needs someone to have her back right now? Jules.”

  “She won’t talk to me.”

  “Try again. She needs to know you care.” He paused. “If you care.”

  “You know I do.”

  “Well, let her know.”

  “I will,” I said, because I knew he was right, and I had to, but I just had to figure out exactly how.

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  I was back in Mrs. Attison’s class, trying to pay attention but thinking instead about how exactly I was going to skip the Winter Ball. I didn’t want to just opt out, or play sick, or cross my name off the organizers’ matchmaking list. I wanted to send a message. It was demented and archaic. Seniors took first years to the dance—that was the annual tradition? There was nothing cute about it. It was a setup for disaster.

  Everybody in the administration was sick of me. They were sick of my pleas for more dietary flexibility. They were sick of my demands for racial affinity support groups and more body image counseling for girls. What had Mrs. Attison once said to me? When will you run out of things to complain about?

  Now Mr. Patterson had me bogged down in some kind of investigation, and I wasn’t supposed to talk about anything until he had outlined the clearest course of action. What he didn’t say but what was now perfectly clear to me and Ms. Taggart was that that meant nonaction.

  “Ms. Devereux?”

  “Huh?”

  The whole class was looking at me, and I suddenly feared I’d been talking to myself aloud, that I’d really lost it and Mrs. Attison was telling me to leave class and go to the health center.

  “Ms. Devereux, I’m asking you to redeem yourself and solve this p
roblem for us on the board.”

  She never called me that: Ms. Devereux. Some of the guys got referred to as Mr. So-and-So, but never the girls. Never me. There was something so grounding in it. Something inspiring. I was about to say I hadn’t done the homework again, when she said it a second time.

  “Ms. Devereux, let’s see what you have.”

  I stood, not by command, but through sheer willpower. I walked to the front of the room, knowing everyone was staring at me, but fixating on the problem ahead of me. I hadn’t even looked at it. I wasn’t sure where we’d gone since the lessons in parabolic ratios the week before. Still, I could begin. I knew enough to begin. And I did.

  At the board, I moved as quickly as I could, making my calculations in the white space around the problem and tackling it up to a point. I only paused when I had to, when I didn’t know what to do next, the part of solving the problem we’d been doing for the last week when I’d been locked in my mind.

  I heard Freddie snicker behind me. I couldn’t continue. I was at a loss. Mrs. Attison sighed, and Freddie laughed to someone beside him. I spun around and flung the SMART Board marker at him. I didn’t wind up, I just turned, flicked my wrist, and let it fly, the marker tumbling top over bottom like a knife let loose by a knife thrower, and it hit Freddie smack on the forehead.

  “What the hell?” he shouted.

  The class erupted into chaos. Some people laughed, others were horrified, and nobody knew what to do. Mrs. Attison rushed beside me.

  “You sit down right now,” she said in my ear.

  But I couldn’t stop staring at Freddie. “He doesn’t get to laugh,” I said. “Not at me, not at Gillian, not at any of us.”

  That stopped Mrs. Attison. She pulled back and stood at the front of the class. “That’s true,” she said.

  “What?” Freddie yelled, as I sat down as far away from him as possible. “Of course you’d take her side.”

  “No one’s taking any sides.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “If you’d let me finish, Mr. Watts.”

  “She just whipped a marker at me.”

  “If you’d let me finish.”

  “What kind of insane overreaction—”

  “Mr. Watts!” She’d never raised her voice like that before, and she sent a static shock through the room. We were all silent. “I don’t know what is behind all this, but I’ve had enough. We’re here to do calculus. We’re here to work and not act like toddlers let loose at the zoo.”

  She walked to her desk and sat on the edge. “In fact”—she nodded—“we’re going to move the test up a day. That means it’s tomorrow.” She waited and let that sink in. “The material we were going to cover tomorrow? The review? That’s all on your own. Figure it out. I promise there will be at least one problem with the new material in it. I’m not sure which one. Could be problem one, or two, or five, who knows? You want my advice? You work together in study groups today and try to teach each other. See if you think class is a waste of time anymore.”

  There were a couple of muffled groans.

  “But, Mrs. Attison—” Gillian began.

  “Enough.” She waved her hand out over the class. “Everyone out. Class is over, early.”

  “But—”

  “I said enough! Go.” She pointed to the door.

  I went back to the seat I’d been sitting in at the beginning of class and stuffed my bag. Gillian and a few other people whispered over my shoulder.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Nutjob.”

  “Happy now?”

  I let most of the class walk out ahead of me, and as I turned to leave, Mrs. Attison called me over to her. She waited for the last stragglers to pick up and go, and when we were all alone, she looked at me, not saying a word. Eventually, she lost her patience.

  “Don’t you have anything to say to me?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She sighed.

  “I don’t know what happened. I just lost it.”

  “Is something going on between you and him?”

  “Freddie? No.”

  “That all seemed awfully personal.”

  “I’m just so tired of him. When he walks into a room, I feel some of the air gets pushed out.”

  Mrs. Attison nodded. “I hear you, but that is never going to be the way to deal with it. Do you understand me?” She stood up and put her hand on my arm. “Honey, there’s another way, and I’m not just saying this because I’m your math teacher. You are giving up on this class, Julianna.”

  “I don’t mean to. I’m just . . . I don’t know.”

  “You do not give up.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “No. You don’t understand me. You are not a person who gives up. I have always admired that about you. No matter what, you have never given up.”

  I nodded. She squeezed my arm.

  “You ace that test tomorrow, Jules. You ace that one and the next one. You are a dean’s list student, Jules. You stay that way, and you are going to any college you wish. And that’s how you deal with the Freddie Wattses of the world.”

  She hugged me, and I hugged her back, and I had this crazy feeling I was going to say something else to her, something I probably shouldn’t but really needed to, because it felt like it had absolutely nothing to do with her class, or calc, or Freddie Watts, but at the same time, it felt like it had to do with everything.

  “Now please come back tomorrow prepared.”

  And with that she stepped away, and began gathering her own stuff and throwing it all in her handbag. I couldn’t do much else than thank her and slink away, and that was all I did. But her pep talk shook something loose in me, because I heard my mother’s voice in Mrs. Attison’s. You don’t give up. She’d said it to me so many times, but maybe because she’d had to say it to herself and she wanted me to hear it. To know it. To own it. Maybe it had been one of her rules—especially as one of the first women ever to attend Fullbrook. What had she had to do to make it here? First women. They were up against the world.

  It was the end of the day, so I knew people were going to start gathering in the library and student center and in the common room back at Mary Lyon, and I didn’t want to be any of those places with any of them. I made a beeline for the arts center, ducked inside, and ran upstairs to the photo studio. I was late on that project too, so I figured I’d just take care of it, and then do exactly as Mrs. Attison had directed. Study, so I could nail that test.

  The project I was supposed to be working on with Aileen was both digital and film photography, layering old school and new, creating this web collage of busted tools and crumbling bits of architecture, trying to bring back to life the broken. When I got to the darkroom and saw the red light on outside, I almost turned away, but then stopped. Who else would be in there?

  I knocked, and after a moment, Aileen poked her head out the door, the black curtain curled around her face like a nun’s habit. “Jules?”

  “Can I help?”

  She narrowed her eyes, giving me one of her nonplussed stares. Then she cracked a grin. “You better.”

  At first we didn’t talk much, just simple stuff about class, and I apologized for not being around, for being an absent partner. I was stunned by how much she’d accomplished without me. “How did you get all this done?” I said, looking around at the photos hanging on a string at the far side of the room. She’d already cut some of the photos, leaving room for the digital images to slip in.

  “What else do I have to do?” she said.

  “Uh, I don’t know. Hang out with Bax.”

  I’d seen them hanging out a number of times, but when he wasn’t with Aileen, he was always with the hockey team, and I was beginning to worry he was just another meathead after all.

  Aileen smiled. “Yeah, him.”

  “You have been together a lot.”

  “Not a lot.” She turned away and pushed a photo around in one of the chemical trays. “But some,
yeah.”

  She turned around and carried the dripping photo to the string, and I realized that Aileen was the closest girlfriend I had. That wasn’t saying much, but it said something. Maybe I was for her, too.

  “Aileen?” I said, and I was sure she knew something was wrong, because she wiped her hands on her apron and walked straight over.

  “You okay?”

  “I just need to talk.”

  She nodded, and I unloaded. I told her about throwing the pen at Freddie, and we both laughed, but also about him laughing, and all the wild bullshit of the year that was piling up and making me crazy, and suddenly I felt like the animal I had hiding deep inside me, the truth that wanted to break free, was crawling up and out, and I needed to let it loose.

  “Also . . . ,” I began, and Aileen nodded. She could see the thing coming out of me. Her eyes softened. She reached out and held my hand, because whatever was on my face, it wasn’t good, and I told her how fucking awful it all felt with Ethan that night in the woods, and how nobody believed me, that I hadn’t wanted anything to do with it.

  “Listen,” she began. “I believe you.” She hugged me for a moment, then pulled back. “Do you know why those boys call me the Viking?”

  “I hate that, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “But whatever,” I went on. “It’s so fucked up. People call us sluts, but what about them? What about the boys who sleep around and fuck around with every single girl they can get their stupid hands on? What about all those pucks in Freddie’s window, in all those windows?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But that’s not what the name means to me,” she said. “They might think it’s an insult, but it isn’t.” She clenched a fist. “I am a Viking. I’m fighting just to get by.”

  She went on to tell me about what happened to her by the boathouse after the Winter Ball our first year here. The cold, stiff ground. Her legs blue and not working like they should in the night air. She told me how she’d swallowed it all, even the memory of it, like the tiniest bitter pill, and about all the boys she consumed after it just to keep it buried down there.