by Ali Benjamin
Every one of these stories is different. And every one of them is true.
Long story short: My great-great-granddad was Julius Hewitt Mayberry Oxthorpe, who had a thing for velvet suits and who built a textile factory on a river in northern Vermont. Julius built an estate on the edge of town, where he surrounded himself with books and statues. He was followed by a few more generations of Oxthorpes: Paul Jarvis Oxthorpe, who made that mill a little bigger and decided to keep some pet ostriches on the grounds of the estate. Then Forrest James Oxthorpe, who cared more about his collection of decorative tapestries than either the factory or the town. After a couple of decades of declining revenues, Forrest sold the whole business off to some multinational corporation for a buttload of cash, then moved to Boca Raton and spent the rest of his days visiting auction houses. It didn’t take long for that corporation to transfer the whole business overseas.
Forrest’s daughter was Beatrice, who ran off to art school in California to become a sculptor. She married a gallery owner there named Gilbert Fink, then divorced him nineteen months later. But not before they had a kid.
That’s me. Paulie Fink.
Today, Mom is Beatrice Oxthorpe Masterson, wife of Mark Masterson, who used to work at a bank in Boston but now manages other people’s money from a brick-walled office above the Foxhollow Café in downtown Devlinshire Hills, Vermont.
One of his clients is a retired rock star.
All of which is to say that (a) I come from a long line of eccentrics, and (b) I might be a Fink, but I’m also an Oxthorpe.
I told that to the other kids once. They were looking at Julius’s portrait, and I said: That’s my great-great-granddad, you know. They were all, Yeah right. I guess Julius seemed about as real to them as Glebus smuggling vanilla-scented candles, or the Republic of Endrisistan.
It just so happened that on this occasion I was telling the truth.
If you’ve read this far—and hey, nice job if you have—you’re probably asking, What the heck is this about?
That’s exactly what I asked a few weeks ago—after the ceremony that everyone kept calling a season finale—when a random email from Henry popped up in my in-box. Attached was a class project: PLATO’S CAVE, KLEOS, PHARMAKOS, AND KATHARSIS: GREEK CONCEPTS IN MODERN-DAY VERMONT. It included Caitlyn’s “Official Record of the Search for the Next Great Paulie Fink,” with excerpts from interview transcripts and a bunch of her own stories, too. I read every word.
I’ve got to hand it to Caitlyn: She did a great job pulling it all together. But there’s one story she didn’t have: mine.
Don’t worry, I’m not about to insist you sit here for another three hundred pages. Let’s face it: Silence is golden (and duct tape is silver). I just want to complete the story of the competition by telling you what happened that night, after I got back to Devlinshire and opened up the gifts that Fiona and Diego had given to me.
In Diego’s box was a scrap of fabric, neon green, and chewed at the edges, with part of a word visible: WINNER. There was a note:
Stay legendary, Paulie.
Your buddy, D.
In Fiona’s bag was a different scrap of fabric. It was the same color as Diego’s, and just as chewed. Her scrap also had a word on it: PICK.
I hope you always pick the element of surprise.
And remember, it’s not trouble until they say your name three times.
Your friend, forever and ever and ever,
Fiona
When I realized they’d both given me pieces of my old shirt, I laughed out loud. But I guess I liked the way Fiona signed her note best of all.
Here’s what I keep wondering: What if I actually was the person that they described? The powerful trickster who influences everything. The one people were leaving notes for at the tree, asking for help.
What would that version of Paulie do right now?
I’ll tell you what I think he’d do: He’d turn this whole stinking situation, the school closing, on its head. He’d figure out some way to make pharmakos real.
So. Mom and Mark, Uncle Teddy and Aunt Cynthia, Auntie Alex and Uncle Geoffrey, Aunties Laura and Genevieve, Uncle Russ, Cousins Jennifer and Toby and Hannah, Great-Uncle Cecil, and Great-Aunt Susan, and everyone else who gets this email, which is to say literally every single Oxthorpe I could find an address for (including, I suspect, even a few that I’m not related to):
What if we were to pull the ultimate trick?
What if we were to save the school?
What if we became the people Gabby wants to believe are real—the ones who see a need, and step up?
I mean, talk about the element of surprise.
It’s a long shot, I know. But you know what? We Oxthorpes kind of hit the jackpot. In the scheme of, like, all of history, we’re pretty lucky. So what should we do with this good luck?
I guess we could keep it to ourselves. We could also pretend we don’t have it in the first place—not talk about it, maybe even go out of our way to hide it.
But there’s something else we could do: We could use it. Not to buy velvet suits, or decorative tapestries, or pet ostriches.
Instead, we could use it to save a school.
Anyway, I’ll turn this back to Caitlyn one last time. It seems only fair to let her have the last word. When we left off, we were all at the Mitchell School. They had just loaded a goat with my name on it onto the back of a truck and watched it drive away. Remember that? Great, let’s get back to it.
From the heart of my bottom,
Ciao for niao,
Flatulently yours,
Your nephew/grandnephew/cousin/random stranger/whatever,
Paul Julius Oxthorpe Fink
It Won’t Last, but We Play Anyway
The sun is sitting low on the horizon as Mr. Farabi disappears into the school.
It’s strange, seeing the school at this hour. The shadows are longer than I’m used to, and everything is glowing with this ridiculously golden light. My mom would like how everything looks right now: the mountains, the last leaves fluttering to the ground, the way everything feels kind of glowy and dreamlike.
Mr. Farabi comes jogging out of the building carrying a kickball. “Who’s up for a game?” he says.
As we walk toward the field, I glance around. In this light, you can’t quite see how falling-apart everything is. You can’t quite see the missing patches of paint on the building, or the cracked windows, or the encroaching brambles and weeds that are everywhere the goats aren’t.
I mean, I guess you can see those things if you look. I could choose to look, and some part of me even wants to.
But I don’t. Not right now. Right now, I’m looking at the way Sam and Willow and Lydia are linked arm in arm, three across. I remember how I assumed on the first day that there’d never be room for a fourth. But Fiona runs up and wiggles right in between Lydia and Willow, as if it’s no big deal. Four across. Then Diego joins them. Five across. Yumi joins in, too. Six. Then others. Seven across. Ten.
In our tunics, you could almost imagine that we’ve been transported to some other moment in time. Like this is a part of history, rather than the present day. That’s when it hits me: We are history. This, right here, is all history ever has been: regular people living their lives, making things up as they go, hoping they get it right.
Now the line in front of me is eleven across: every kid in my class, plus the original and totally legendary Paulie Fink.
“Wait,” says Gabby. She’s got one arm draped over Henry and the other over Yumi. “Where’s Caitlyn?” She turns around, takes her hand off Henry, and waves me over.
I step into place between Gabby and Henry. And then I’m part of the line, too.
It won’t last long, this light. Soon, the sun will dip below the mountains. When it does, dark will fall quickly, and we’ll all scatter to our different homes and our different lives, and eventually everything that’s happened—the ceremony, the competition, probably even this school—will fade away fo
rever.
But not yet. Not just yet.
Because right now, I can feel Gabby’s and Henry’s arms against my shoulders, and Mr. Farabi is just a tiny bit ahead of us, and he’s bouncing that red kickball up and down.
Right now, we’ve got a game to play.
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Author’s Note
At the heart of The Next Great Paulie Fink is Plato’s allegory of the cave, a 2,400-year-old thought experiment. While I’ve simplified Plato’s argument a bit for younger readers, the essence comes down to this: We might be wrong, even about the things we “know” for sure. Millennia later, this is still a pretty radical idea.
If you’re interested in Plato’s allegory of the cave, check out Alex Gendler’s TED-Ed video and related discussions. Interested in philosophy? A good beginner-friendly starting place is Stephen West’s podcast, Philosophize This! At the conclusion of each episode, West thanks listeners for wanting to know more today than they did yesterday—a pretty good goal, I’d say.
Leaving our cave requires examining the stories we’ve been told, and the way these stories shape our understanding of and our experiences in the world. It’s my hope that this book can serve as one small example of the power of opening ourselves up to new stories. The book itself even parallels the history of storytelling: There’s a moment, for example, where the characters move from oral storytelling into written form. The book also explores several storytelling genres and elements (tall tales, parable, allegory, primary sources, newspaper accounts, and rhetorical speech), ultimately veering into an examination of narrative itself.
I’ve taken the epigraph at the start of this book from Emily Wilson’s gorgeous, groundbreaking translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), the first into English by a woman. Wilson’s translation, along with works like Madeline Miller’s incredible Circe (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018), demonstrates the power and potential of exploring ancient tales with new eyes and with new voices. Other contemporary scholars, writers, and thought leaders whose work has helped me think more critically about the version of the story of ancient Greece I was taught include Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mary Beard, Joel Perry Christensen, Curtis Dozier, Yung In Chae, Daniel Mendelsohn, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Erik Robinson, and Donna Zuckerberg. You’ll find several of these writers at the website Eidolon and the blog Sententiae Antiquae. I’m especially grateful to Christopher Lovell, PhD, my go-to person for all things related to ancient Greece, for his expertise and guidance.
Fiona uses the phrase Well-behaved women seldom make history. The expression was first used by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who was writing not about the value of misbehaving per se, but rather about who gets left out of our historic narrative—and who, ultimately, gets kleos.
Mr. Farabi’s name was inspired by Abū Nar al-Fārābī, circa 872–950, a Muslim philosopher who both helped preserve ancient Greek texts and expanded on them. Among other accomplishments, al-Fārābī was a Neoplatonist who wrote about the power of philosophy to inspire souls, promote justice, and create more virtuous societies. This name is a small nod to the fact that ancient Greeks are part of a wider human exchange of ideas and cultures—one that transcends borders, religion, and ethnicity.
Acknowledgments
A few thank-yous are in order: First, to the entire team at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, for your patience and hard work, and for having more faith in me than I had in myself. Special thanks to copyeditors Chandra Wohleber and Jen Graham, and to my epically heroic editor, Andrea Spooner. You are wise, steady, and mighty, and totally legendary.
Thanks, too, to my agent and friend, Mollie Glick (what a blessing you are); my beautiful Mojos Molly Burnham, Leslie Connor, Jacqueline Davies, Lita Judge, and Grace Lin; readers Amie Bui, Lisa Cushman, Marisa Daley, Darlie Kerns, Molly Kerns, Emma Mathews, Piper Mathews, Rebecca Tucker-Smith, and Tom Wade; the students and faculty at Pine Cobble; and Joe Bergeron, guru of all things related to school policy.
A huge thank-you to the individuals who inspired a few of the antics in these pages: Eric Printz, the original BoxMan, who was once trampled by a goat; Aidan White, who successfully escaped his own goat trampling; Daniel Currie, no stranger to fruit-fly infestations; the Crugers gang for all those epic games of team tag; Beau Leahy, who found his inner bird during a game of capture the flag; and Patrick McGarrity, who livened up a mundane workday by hiding beneath my desk.
And, of course, to my family, especially Blair, Merrie, and Charlotte.
Here’s to wanting to know more than we did yesterday. Here’s to each of us venturing out of our cave.
About the Author
Paul Hopkins
Depending on whom you ask, ALI BENJAMIN is a New York Times bestselling author, a harried mom, a dog lover, a rural dweller, or an armchair philosopher. Ali wrote The Thing About Jellyfish, a finalist for the National Book Award that garnered multiple best-of-year accolades. She has written in partnership with astronomers, professional athletes, beauty queens, and cosmologists, and her work has appeared online, on television, and in print. She lives in western Massachusetts, and while she has not lived with goats, for many years her next-door neighbor was a miniature donkey named Jack.