Tradition

by Brendan Kiely

  We walked up and down through the trough I’d made. I handed him the little balls from the pouch, and when he placed them on the ground, I doused them with lighter fluid. Beside the last line, we made two sweeping arcs, carving a circle into the ground, and filled it with the kindling as well. I had no idea if it would work. I had no idea if it could be seen clearly and legibly from the windows of the dining hall—but that was all I wanted. The whole party drifting to the windows to see the fire of what I had to say.

  When I felt I had done all I could to prepare, I crouched and felt the chill sweep down through me from my teeth to my toes and waited. I didn’t have a phone or a watch or anything. I just waited. “Come on, Aileen,” I whispered.

  And like that, she answered.

  The lights cut out. The music stopped, and for a moment there was a peace and calm and quiet that stalled me, that made me wonder if I shouldn’t go through with it, but under the moonlight, I could see the shadowy fingers of leafless trees poking up out of one darkness and into another, and if he didn’t listen to me that night against the tree at Horn Rock, he would at least have to see it now.

  Bax demonstrated first. He lit a few of the balls on fire and showed me how to do it slowly. He began to trace a line of fire along the arc. It was now or never. I ran over to the other letter, dipped the nozzle, flipped the switch, felt the heat steam up through the handle and off the sides of the can, and ignited the first ball. I walked backward, like Bax was doing, like Cray-Cray had done, drawing my line of fire. Flames zipped through the troughs I’d dug. I’d written it the right way, so that when they looked out the windows from the darkened hall, they’d see it ignited in the snow. My flaming script: the word “NO.”

  I stood for a moment, smoke curling around my legs and around the hem of my dress, watching the word burn down into the grass—a fiery tattoo of the word they’d ignored for too long at Fullbrook. NO. The word flickered and danced as steam rose up like shadowy breaths released from the ground through the snow.

  Pandemonium had probably taken over the dining hall, and I could only imagine the currents of fear ripping through the teachers, let alone the students. Bax and I ditched the cans and satchel in the bushes and ran the long way back, in the shadows and darkness in front of the science center, across the footpath near the path to the boathouse, and through the snow up around to the side door to the dining hall. We thought we’d probably get caught, but if we made it back before the lights went on, there was still a chance we might not. Maybe, if we were in the crowd when the lights shot back on, we’d send our message and still be able to stick it out for the year. Maybe.

  I was exhausted and leaping with my own kind of fire on the inside, but the rest of me was blue with cold. My feet were soaked. When Bax and I got to the stairwell door, the one I’d exited, I knocked once, and then again, and like air coming into my lungs after I’d held my breath for too long, Aileen opened the door and swept us in.

  The lights were still on in the basement, and Aileen stood holding a trash bag and another pair of shoes. For a moment, as I heard the ebb and flow of commotion echoing down the stairs, I held my breath again. I thought about what it would mean if I was able to get away with this—just like Ethan and all the other guys had been able to get away with what they’d done—if we could make our mark of permanence on their minds in the same way I was sure they had left theirs on ours.

  NO: an afterimage burned on their retinas, the glow seared forever in their memory. Knowledge of a truth they could no longer avoid.

  Ready to take on the world . . .

  JAMES BAXTER

  There’s a quote a teacher of mine back home used to have up on his wall. I’d looked at it so many times and never really thought about the meaning. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

  There’s controversy about who said it first, so in our classroom it was attributed to “anonymous.” That seemed fitting. I suppose anybody could have said it. Anybody who’d tried to grow up and sort out what to do and who to become in a world that is too confusing for me to ever understand. You have to use what you have and do the best you can.

  It hadn’t taken us long to get caught. In fact, it was only a few days, and frankly, I think they knew more about every little detail that happened than we did. That’s power—you have all the advantages. The rest of us just live here. The admin team, the faculty, they had all the power. As did the board of trustees.

  I was thinking about all this as I sat on the overstuffed couch in the lobby of the admin building, right where I’d sat the day the folks in admissions tried to decide if I was worthy and exceptional enough to join them. Why would I ever want to stay here? The place was full of lies, and maybe the worst lie of all was the one they told themselves. That Fullbrook was some kind of paradise nestled in the hills of New England.

  What a relief to walk out into the world and be free of it.

  The night of the Winter Ball, it was easy for me and Aileen and Jules to sprint back upstairs to where the power had been cut and, in the darkness, slip back into the crowd as if we’d always been there. Everyone in the room had migrated over to the windows along the wall, and gazed out toward the great lawn in the academic quad. The fire still burned, terrifying and hypnotic.

  NO.

  Then I heard Javi.

  “No.” He said it loud and slow, so everyone could hear. “No, no, no, no.” He was all alone, no one joined him, and it was like some distant echo from the pep rally. One man chanting by the light of the fire. But then Max joined him. Then someone else. Soon there was a small chorus, only a few voices—but it was enough.

  It was hard to see who was who, so I couldn’t tell if Hackett was there, or Freddie, looking out the window with everyone else. But when the lights came back on, I spotted them turning away from the windows. Pale and shaken. Freddie didn’t look at me, but Hackett did. He saw the word on fire and knew immediately what was going on. He knew I had something to do with it and Jules had something to do with it too. He went to the admin building the next day and told them his suspicions. That was the beginning of the end.

  The next day I watched, along with many others, as his father’s helicopter circled the air above Fullbrook again, hovering with its deafening noise and menace, and descended slowly to the football field. Cray-Cray drove him and his lawyer up to the admin building. That’s when I knew I was finished. Jules, too.

  He was the target of terrible bullying, he explained, and he wanted it ended. He was a victim, he told everyone. The victim. As Javi told me, “He just got in front of the narrative, man. That’s how it works.” And he did. Two days later I was sitting in the admin building lobby with the threat of being expelled under charges of assault and battery and arson. I wore the same stupid suit I wore to my admissions meeting. Heard the subtle undertones of what everybody was saying back then, even though nobody else was in the lobby with me this time. You do not belong here.

  I leaned forward on the couch and ripped the seam along the back of the jacket. As soon as I heard it, I felt looser, freer. I laughed. I took the coat off and slung it over my knee, rolled my shirt cuffs up my arm, loosened my tie, and freed my neck from the top button. I felt more ready for what I had to do than I had in over a year. I remembered my old man once telling me that every morning, he swung his feet out of bed, planted them on the floor, and reminded himself to smile, because he was about to get up and do everything he had to do, everything he wanted to do, and everything he didn’t. He started each day reminding himself he could be proud to be the man he was, and that pride could get him through the day no matter what. It wasn’t bravado. He wasn’t tough. All he had was integrity, and that was enough.

  The door to Headmaster Patterson’s office swung open and Jules stepped out. She had on what I knew she called her brave face, the one where she squints ever so slightly and sets her jaw on lockdown.

  As she walked away from him and toward me, Headmaster Patterson called to me over her s
houlder. “Mr. Baxter,” he growled.

  Jules curled a smile into one corner of her mouth, and she flung a mischievous side-eye glance at me as she passed. Headmaster Patterson cleared his throat and called me again, but I turned first to watch Jules walk away.

  “Bax,” she said as she turned toward the front door. She flashed a peace sign over her shoulder as she stepped out of sight.

  I felt my feet planted firmly on the floor, and I cracked my own smile as I stood and stepped toward Headmaster Patterson, and I didn’t slouch or hang my head, or even look away. I stared him right in the eye to let him know what Baxter pride looked like when it rose to meet the day.

  JULES DEVEREUX

  It didn’t take a forensics team to put two and two together and discover I was part of the duo who tattooed the great lawn with fire. But truthfully, I’d really always known I was going to get caught anyway. I didn’t mind. I’d had it with Fullbrook.

  Aileen and Javi hadn’t done much of anything. There was no reason for them to get in trouble too, and I might have been able to take all the blame if Bax hadn’t already been on probation, and hadn’t spooked Ethan all over again right before running out to help me, although I loved seeing how terrified Ethan looked after that, scared in the way some girls are when they don’t know whose steps they hear behind them on the walkway between buildings at night. I didn’t want any of them to get expelled with me—I just needed their help to make sure I could finish what I had set out to do.

  When Aileen had thrown out my wet sneakers and the gloves, we all rushed upstairs into the main hall and watched as the rest of the room stared outside. Some people had already drifted away, but most were still watching the flames flicker out on the great lawn, and everyone had to listen to Javi. He was still chanting when I got into the room. It was too dark, he didn’t know if I was there or not, and I could hear the strain in his voice, as if he’d been shouting it out for a while. I was surprised no one had stopped him yet.

  Obviously, there were teachers running around trying to figure out what was going on. Mr. Hale even bumped into me by the door as he staggered out of the main hall. He didn’t apologize, he just stood still for a moment, fear ballooned on his face, openmouthed and unable to find that condescending glare down the slope of his nose he usually found for me.

  I couldn’t see who was who. I didn’t know if Lianne and Ethan and Freddie and the whole damn hockey team were all at the windows watching the word burn into ash and coals in the ground. But I knew they’d know. Everyone would know. They’d have to address it in a new way.

  Javi took that on. He knew exactly how to follow up. He wrote an article for the Red Hawk Chronicle. He drew up a petition, had it signed by a hundred students, and demanded an all-school training workshop on consent. He didn’t disappoint. He could say with a clear conscience that he didn’t have anything to do with the fire, because he didn’t, and that became abundantly clear when Cray-Cray and a local police detective searched my room the very next day and found my smoky dress, and when they found Cray-Cray’s drip torches in the bushes, and they found the footprints and witnesses who said they’d seen me, and they had my track record of being a pain in the ass.

  But it was worth it. Aileen shared her story in another article in the Red Hawk Chronicle, and a handful of other girls came forward to share their stories too. And that was only the beginning.

  Three days after the fire, Headmaster Patterson had me in his office and he used one form or another of the word “expel” eleven times. I didn’t say much at all, especially because I stared at him blankly as he spoke, really thinking about how he wasn’t expelling me as much as I’d chosen to do what I did, that leaving Fullbrook was really my choice, he wasn’t casting me out, driving me out, as much as I was pushing on and leaving it behind me. I was staring back at him telling him that I was walking out. I was ready to take on the world. I was living.

  He might have felt it radiating off me. “Are you listening, Julianna?” he asked me.

  “Are you?” I replied.

  I liked watching a man finally dumbstruck into stillness and silence before me.

  When he recovered, he told me he’d see me when my mother arrived and he would explain everything to her again, in person, although he’d already explained it to her over the phone, and she didn’t believe him and she explained that she’d been giving money to the school in one way or another for forty years, but what Patterson didn’t say and what I didn’t have the heart to say either is that that didn’t matter, what she had done, it was nothing compared with the crusty old bald man shuttling into Fullbrook in his helicopter and demanding that Ethan, a man with a future, be protected.

  I had to hand it to Bax. I’d never dreamed of getting Ethan booted from Fullbrook, but making him know just how much had to go into protecting him was a nice kind of dig too.

  I was just sorry Bax had to go too.

  I saw him on my way out of Patterson’s office, massive and oafish as always, but unbuttoned, loose, someone I admired because when I asked him to be there he had been. There is an old Italian proverb that goes something like “To find a friend is to find a treasure,” and I think that’s true. They’re as rare and precious as any buried gold.

  I gave Bax my little wave of love as I passed him, tried to buoy him on his way in to hear the news he already knew was coming too, and I pushed open the front door to the admin building. In the sunlight, I stared at the old elm tree ahead of me and smiled, because to some degree, Fullbrook had done its job. I did feel ready to take on the world. I already had.

  Then a final thought came to me. I leaned against the wall of the admin building and waited for Bax. His meeting wasn’t all that long either. He came lumbering out the front door, a crooked smile cracked across his face, and he seemed a little surprised to see me waiting for him.

  “Can you do one last thing with me?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Only if you promise me it actually isn’t the last.”

  “I promise.”

  The administration, the board, the whole community at Fullbrook was already beginning to wipe away the evidence of the flaming script, and within days they would have the lawn dug up, and within months, there’d be new grass spread out and perfectly manicured in a stitched work of green. I wanted to make some mark that would last a little longer, something next year’s first years could look up at and think about, and the first years the year after that, too. So that when they were asked to look up at the school motto and reflect on the power of the words, they could see too how their own words should carry the same respect. I wanted them to know that when they spoke they should be heard.

  I led Bax over to the old elm. “Hoist me up as high as you can,” I said.

  I dug out my keys, and with his back braced against the tree he lifted me up along the broad smooth trunk. I held my key like a knife and I scratched. I dug and dug until the soft brown pulp beneath the bark began to glow in the sunlight. Ten feet high in the air, my words were writ large and bold: I SAID NO.

  Just as I finished, we heard Mr. Patterson out on the steps. “Hey,” he yelled. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  Bax dropped and caught me like we were doing a pep squad routine. As soon as my feet were on the ground, I grabbed him and began to run. We had no idea where we were going. We were simply sparked, ignited—free to wander hand in hand, all the world before us, not what it was but what it could be, the world to come, the one we made ourselves.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *

  I deeply care about the issues at the heart of Tradition, but I wouldn’t have had the courage to begin writing this story without the care, counsel, and expert stewardship of my editor, Ruta Rimas, and my agent, Rob Weisbach. They inspired me, spurred me on, and devoted so much of their intelligence, thoughtfulness, and time to the creation of this book. I’m forever grateful to them for this and for everything they do—thank you! Thank you also to Justin Chanda and the entire team at Simon & Schuste
r for their tireless efforts and nurturing of this book at every level and in every department—thank you to my whole publishing family.

  As I began the book, I knew enough to know I knew nothing—Sarah Tarrant Madden and Savannah Whiting helped to give the story shape and heart. Thank you both for your patience, wisdom, and willingness to breathe life into what was at first only an idea. And a special thank-you to Ruby Kinstle for the wisdom, courage, and inspiration you gifted this novel. Jules and I both owe you a debt of gratitude.

  Thank you also to everyone at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York Public Library’s Allen Study Room for the time, space, and resources to pursue, write, and edit this novel. I can’t thank enough the people at these two institutions— the work they do to bolster the arts is vital. Thank you for all that you do to help the work that artists make see the light of day.

  I am incredibly grateful to David Groff, Christa Desir, Randy Ribay, Shaun David Hutchinson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds for taking the time to read and offer their profound advice for this story—thank you for your enormous hearts; so much love to you all.

  Nicola Yoon, Amber Smith, Jeff Zenter, Amy Reed, and Kathleen Glasgow’s generous and galvanizing early support for this novel means the world to me. I admire you all, and I’m humbled by your words—thank you all!

  Thank you to my large and growing family, Heide Lange, John Chaffee, Joshua Chaffee, Garima Prasai, Maryanne Kiely, Tom Kiely, Trish Kiely, Niall Kiely, and Bridget and Leo—I love you all. I am deeply grateful for your love, expert advice, patience, and indefatigable support, and for the many hours you spend hearing me talk about the stories I’m inventing in my mind. Thank you for listening, and for teaching me how to be a better listener, which to me feels like the most important skill to cultivate when trying to live lovingly.

  And thank you Jessie Chaffee for inspiring me to try to live as lovingly as possible. Thank you for the integrity of your earnestness, for the wisdom of your thoughtfulness, and for the strength of your love. Thank you for sharing your life with me. I love you all ways and always.