Tradition

by Brendan Kiely

  Well, not everyone. Bax and Javi, and Aileen, who knew truth like sunlight in her eyes—they all held me together. They were mirrors, but not for my face, not for what was on the outside, more like they reflected something back to me that was deep and invisible but real and on the inside. Maybe that was what some people called the soul. Whatever it was, I could feel it looking back at me through them, telling me I wasn’t alone.

  Javi and Aileen stopped and turned to us. They were further up the hill, and they waved us on. “Smells funny,” Javi shouted down to us. “Hurry.”

  Bax and I trudged up the hill and joined them. Aileen was out in front, and she led us into the first clearing around Horn Rock. She glanced back at me and nodded, knowing without asking. She pushed us ahead, toward the second clearing, toward my tree.

  I’d asked them all to come with me, and all three of them had agreed in an instant. I didn’t say, Hey, want to head to the bluffs? or Let’s get out of here for a while. “I need to go to my tree” was all I’d said, and we were on our way.

  When we made it to the second clearing, Javi stepped closer to the bluff edge and pointed. Smoke rose into the air in the distance, far downriver. It wasn’t insignificant, it was more like a line rippled around the edge of the field, slowly creeping toward the center. There was almost no wind, even up on the bluff, and the smoke curled and wafted upward like a curtain quivering as it shuttled across a stage.

  “Should we call someone?” Aileen asked.

  “I don’t think it’s a big deal,” Bax said. “It looks like a controlled burn.” He gave half a smile when none of us knew what he was talking about. “My uncle Earl,” he continued, “he had me help him sometimes. Burn out the weeds and dead stuff after the harvest. We’d do it at the end of the season and we’d do it again in the spring sometimes, depending on which crops were in rotation.” He made a visor with his hands and squinted. “Those are the fields behind the farm stand,” he added.

  Aileen crossed her arms. “Looks a little nuts to me.”

  “It’s pretty tame,” Bax said. “It’s controlled. We’d use drip torches like Cray-Cray uses at the bonfire. Just burn out the old, and get ready for the new.”

  “Crazy farm boy,” Aileen teased. Bax blushed, and Aileen could barely hold back her smile. She pushed him, but he barely moved, and instead, as she tried to push him again, he pivoted and pulled her into a one-armed hug.

  “You know what would be awesome,” Javi said. “If we all just skipped everything else this evening and we just watched the fields burn. It’s so weird. It’s hypnotic watching a fire.”

  “Even from this distance,” Aileen added.

  I remained quiet. I wasn’t mad, and I didn’t really want to make a big deal out of coming up to the bluffs, to my tree, I just wanted them there with me. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do—I just knew I had to come back. Face it down. I needed to make it all my own again.

  Bax let go of Aileen and walked over to me. “I would,” he said to me. I shook my head, but he continued. “No, for real. I want to. It’s just, if I do one more thing wrong, if I do anything, they boot me.” He rubbed his hands through his hair. He had so much more of it now, curly and wild, nothing like the buzz cut from the beginning of the year. “But I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s worth it. This place. Fullbrook.”

  “You know what I wish,” Aileen said. “I wish we could do something about this stupid Winter Ball. It’s so demented we still do that here.”

  “Burn out the old,” Bax said again. “I can’t believe I said that.” He looked a little pale. He pointed down to the river. “That’s what Hackett and Freddie made me do at the beginning of the year.” He glared as if they were actually standing down there. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Javi nodded. “Like this dance. It’s like everyone knows but they don’t want to know. It’s not the knowing that’s bad—it’s knowing and not doing anything to stop it. To know and do nothing. Senior Send-Off—seriously?”

  “We’re outcasts,” Aileen said. She looked around at all of us. “Nobody else seems to care what can happen.”

  Senior prank. Senior carpet. Senior couches in the library. The Senior Send-Off. All of it disgusted me. All of it was really about the boys—as if they’d imported us girls here just for them.

  I peeled away from the other three and stood where I’d stood the night of the party. Without thinking too much about it, I scratched the word “no” on the side of the tree. I dug and dug, chipping away at the gray bark until the soft brown inside of the tree glowed with the word, like the tree itself was saying it. No. Like it was speaking down into me and reminding me that I’d said it, and it meant something and I could say it again and I would probably have to. And not only me. So many others.

  No, the tree said to me as I stared at it. As if the tree knew. As if it held all the knowledge, the truth. It was so much better to see that—the tree reminding me what I knew. I knew the truth too. I had lived it.

  It wasn’t that I just knew the facts. It was so much deeper. To know right from wrong, and to know it so profoundly, was a gift. No matter how much they wanted me to behave, to play by the rules of their little, fake Fullbrook paradise, I didn’t have to. I knew too much to play pretend. I knew the real world—and it was mine to live in. They could take so much from me, but not everything. What was left was strong, and they couldn’t stop the me I would and could become—how I’d poke up from what they’d torn down, rise from it all, and bloom again, wild and free.

  I turned back to the three of them. “Hey,” I said. “We can make them care.”

  “What?” Aileen said. “How?”

  “They can only not care if they continue to pretend they don’t know.” I stepped closer to them. “So we can make them know. All of them. Make it impossible to pretend.”

  “What are you saying?” Javi asked.

  “I’m asking if you’re with me. If you won’t let me do this all alone.”

  “We’re with you,” Bax said.

  I looked at him. “Did you say you know how to use one of those things? The drip torch?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Good.” I walked out to the bluff edge again. I looked back out to the fire snaking through the dead brush. From this distance it was nothing more than a squiggle of graffiti in the earth. But it was enough. “We’ll speak to them in a language they can’t ignore.”

  Burn out the old. Bring in the new.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  THE WINTER BALL

  CHAPTER 35

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  My probation didn’t bar me from playing hockey, of course. Coach would have lost it if I’d been pulled from the game against Hodges. It was in the afternoon, a few hours before the Winter Ball, and the stands shook with what felt like all of Fullbrook cheering as we glided onto the ice. It’s impossible not to feel a rush as the noise fills your ears, throbs and swells, pulls you into motion, so you’re not flexing your own muscles as much as riding the roar. My body hummed through the warm-ups. Pucks flew at me, one after another, and I stopped them all, or nabbed them out of the air, dipping and moving like I knew where each puck would hit before it was slapped at me.

  Hodges hit hard and fast. They’d shown up with their own fleet of fan vans, but no matter how loud they yelled, they were drowned out by our chants. I breathed deep, slowed the game down in my mind to the speed I needed. No matter how fast they moved, how fast they cut and swiveled, how fast the sticks popped back and forth, I slowed everything down and remained focused. It felt good to be back. Not for Fullbrook. Not for Coach O. Not for Freddie and my own team. Not even for the game, as Coach Drucker had once told me. For me. I needed to know. I could do it. Not for the fifty thousand dollars, just for me, for my mind. For clarity.

  The first shot was a slap from ten feet out. Just testing me. Easy. Caught it and dropped it for Tucker to take wide left. The next couple were tougher, as th
ey always are when they’re closer. Sticks dancing, swerving, keeping the puck in endless razzle-dazzle motion. I stopped one with my shoulder, a little ugly, but anything and everything works, as long as it’s a stop. Took another to the leg pads. I almost fell for a fake-out. Hodges’s top scorer, Number Seven, broke free. In one-on-ones, advantage is to the shooter, especially if he’s as good as this guy. He dipped right, and tried to flick the puck to the corner above my opposite shoulder, but I snapped my head and blocked it off my face mask. By third period, I’d blocked twelve shots. Freddie had scored twice. Our crowd roared, and Hodges’s kept trying and trying, but nothing was going their way. Tucker took out Number Seven with a solid hit, but Number Seven took revenge mid-period and flattened Tucker. With him out, my best defender was gone. I was more on my own. In the tenth minute, they hit me with a combo. One, two, three shots on net in a row. I blocked the first two—chopped the first one back down to the ice with my stick, but they got the puck and shot again in an instant, and I blocked it with my shin pads. One of their forwards stole the puck back before I could even get set, and shot, and I nabbed the puck midair, robbing him of the easy goal. In the last minute, with a two-on-one, Hodges shuffled the puck between their forwards, and it was impossible to guess who was going to shoot, but I did a split to stop the last one from sliding beneath me. The buzzer boomed like thunder in my head, and Freddie, despite everything, charged me and knocked me back into the net. He wasn’t pissed; he was delirious.

  “Buckeye, you bastard!” he yelled. “Number one! Number one!” He got the crowd chanting behind him.

  I scrambled out of the net and began a victory lap around the rink, tearing off my glove and holding one finger in the air. I had no idea what was going to happen to me that night, after the showers, after I put on a suit and walked out into the darkness with Jules’s plan memorized down to the minute. But before all that, I was here, on the ice, doing what I did best. Nothing and nobody could take that away from me. For one hour and a half, I was the glittering morning star I knew I could be.

  Tradition has it that if we win the home game the day of the Winter Ball, everyone pours out onto the ice to congratulate us. That day was no different, and while Hodges’s team filed off to the locker room, and their fans slowly exited the arena, the Fullbrook crowd unlocked the doors in the boards and, in a flurry of wool hats and scarves, all Fullbrook maroon, spilled out into the rink, slipping and sliding and tumbling around, a nonsensical pandemonium of discombobulated bodies undulating on the ice.

  People roared and cheered around me, teammates slammed and hugged me, even Coach O, who’d donned his own skates for the moment, carved an arc around me, pumping his fist in the air.

  But this wasn’t the place for me. I could do this. But not here. Everyone had told me Fullbrook was it—the perfect place—but it wasn’t. All I had to do was look up into the stands and see Aileen there, on her feet, completely alone except for Jules sitting beside her. Aileen dropped her large coat from her shoulders and stared out over the ice, for all of Fullbrook to see.

  I’d thought she was going to wait until that night, at the ball, but that she’d come to the arena instead made so much more sense. I broke free from the crowd and skated over to the Fullbrook team box, stomped in, unlocked the door behind the bench, and still in my skates, stumbled up the stairs until I was next to her.

  Together, with Jules on one side and me on the other and Aileen standing tall in the center, we stared down at the rest of Fullbrook. Defiant. Proud. Indefatigable.

  CHAPTER 36

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  Even I came out for the game. Watching Bax flop and dive for pucks was like watching grizzly bears catch salmon leaping upstream. It doesn’t seem possible until you see it, and you’re amazed despite the horror. It was contained within the rink, where it belonged. But what if Freddie checked people off the sidewalks with the force he used to smash the Hodges players into the boards? What if the Hodges guys came swinging into a classroom, whacking people with their sticks the way they did on the ice, and no one in the class was wearing gear?

  It was a brutal ballet on ice, exhilarating, breathtaking, but elsewhere, in the real world, it was raw, devastating violence. The bear sinks its teeth into the fish’s flesh because it must; it never terrorizes a deer for a night of fun, just because it can.

  This was what I was thinking as I sat in the stands next to Aileen. People left space around us. I hadn’t realized she was going to wear it to the game, but it was all the more powerful here, out in the open, not only on the dance floor at the Winter Ball. She sat in the middle tier of benches, a long beige shearling coat wrapped around her. The Fullbrook crowd leapt to its feet every time Bax saved a goal, or every time Freddie scored, or every time it was close. But in the quieter moments, the moments after a whistle stopped the clock, or in between periods, Aileen rose from her seat, shook the coat from her shoulders, and stood for all the rink to see. It barely fit, but that didn’t matter. It fit because of where and how it was ripped—the dress she’d worn to the Winter Ball her first year.

  I thought people were going to yell at her, make fun of her, call her all the names I’d had rattling around in my mind since the day after the party at Horn Rock—but they didn’t. Instead, they tried to avoid it. They looked away. Only some people might have understood at first, but the whispers would travel. Nobody at Fullbrook might have wanted to talk about it, but they couldn’t deny seeing it, especially when she got up and walked to the concession stand between second and third period, and again, after the game, when the stands emptied onto the ice and she rose, glowing above us all, her blue sequins sparkling like stars under the halogen light.

  They called her the Viking. They had no idea how tough she was.

  Bax pounded up the stairs to join us, but none of us could stay long. We all had to get ready. I’d laid out the plan for the night, but I still had to put some of the pieces together. Get the tools in place.

  When I stepped back outside, it was snowing. Large, light, cotton ball flakes gently sifted through the air, blanketing the campus in a kind of idyllic innocence. Or so it looked. When Aileen and I walked by the dining hall and saw Gillian and her team stringing lights up under the portico, Aileen dropped the coat off her shoulders again and stared ahead. For a moment, Gillian paused and looked back. Not even the snowfall could hide the violence ripped through the missing fabric across Aileen’s body.

  CHAPTER 37

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  The night of the ball, instead of getting ready in my room like all the other boys, I went upstairs to Javi’s room. Firstly, I had no idea how to tie a bow tie. Javi had insisted I get a real one and not a knockoff, prefab bow tie like the ones I’d worn to every prom and semiformal back home—the ones that made the most sense to me, since we all yanked them off and unbuttoned our shirts as soon as we started dancing anyway. But not Javi.

  “I’m not going to be seen in a photo with a guy wearing one of those,” he said.

  “Who cares? This whole thing is a mess anyway.”

  “Mess or no mess, I’m thinking about that day I look back twenty years from now, and I’m not about to have some rent-a-tux on my arm.”

  We were standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of his room’s door. He was already spotlessly spiffed up and ready to go. He stood on tiptoes behind me and craned to see over my shoulder as he slipped the black tie around my neck and tied it for me. He was immaculate, everything fit him perfectly, he had the cleanest shave at Fullbrook; he looked as strong and fresh as a tree—he even smelled something like cedar. I sniffed. “What is that?”

  “My mother’s favorite cologne. I can just hear her reminding me. It’s habit.”

  He handed me my coat and I awkwardly fought to get into it without ripping the seams around the shoulders. When I was sufficiently encased, Javi pinned the boutonniere to my lapel, straightened my collar, and then stood back.

>   “Let’s take a look at you.”

  “Well, I don’t look half as good as you,” I said.

  “My God, Bax, are you telling me I look good?”

  I blushed a hundred shades of maroon.

  “Are you?” he teased.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He stepped close, took my hand, then leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. “You too, Bax. You clean up better than I expected.”

  “Thanks,” I said, even though I felt more bagged, tied, and trapped than I did in my everyday Fullbrook uniform.

  “Not my type, usually,” he said, grinning. “But I’m grateful for the date.” He kissed me again.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Now, let’s do this.”

  I swung my arm out like a car door and he looped his hand through. We stepped out into the hall and Javi looked at me. “Ready, boys?” he yelled. “Here we come!” We walked down the hall, and then down the stairs and into the common room, locked arm in arm.

  As we entered the room, many of the guys averted their eyes, like it was impolite to look or something. I was used to people doing double takes when they saw me, because of my size, but it was weird to be on the other end for once—to be the one they did double takes away from, like they were nervous to make eye contact. I leaned in and squeezed Javi close.

  “Don’t cut off the circulation in my arm,” he teased.

  Tapper’s freshman boys were lined up in the common room, excited, terrified, maybe looking a little too much like they were going to a funeral instead of getting ready to go pick up their dates. It was crazy. Even though the senior girls were the ones who were calm and practiced and had been to the ball three times before, it was tradition for the boys to walk across the quad, each to his date’s assigned dorm, and each to offer his arm to the girl whose corsage matched his boutonniere. Some of the guys twitched and fidgeted like boys half their age trying to hold it and not let it all loose down the pant leg. Poor kids. I actually felt bad for them. They had no clue what was ahead of them.