by Alex Flinn
I woke at three, and at four, and then again at five. Each time, I thought I heard noises downstairs. Each time, I tried to go back to sleep. Finally, at six, I gave up and took out Shakespeare’s sonnets. I flipped to my favorite, “Sonnet 54.” I chose it in honor of the roses, and of the day.
O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.
I know some people would call it a cliché, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. A lot of my Tuttle classmates complained about reading all that old stuff, but I loved feeling the connection to Shakespeare, to someone who lived hundreds of years ago but who was still a real man, a man who sniffed roses and thought about beauty. Sometimes, it’s like I know Shakespeare better than I know anyone.
At seven, Magda brought me breakfast, and at eight, I fixed my hair and got dressed, and at nine, exactly, I went downstairs to the greenhouse.
Adrian had obviously prepared for me. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was playing on the speakers, and he’d pulled a table and three chairs out to the greenhouse. There was even a vase of roses on the table. He seemed nervous. At least, he was talking kind of fast, but he showed me each variety of rose in the greenhouse, de
scribing the different types, floribunda, hybrid tea roses, even one he said was called the “Little Linda.”
“Do all your roses have names?” I asked him. Meaning, had he named a rose after me? That was . . . weird.
But it turned out to be okay. He explained that when the horticulturalists develop a new rose variety, they name it, and actually, that sounded right. I think I read that somewhere before. The rose called “Little Linda” was tiny—Adrian called it a miniature—and yellow, my favorite color.
Standing there, inhaling the glorious scent of all those roses, my mind went immediately to Kyle and that night at the dance. Poor, stupid, probably drug-addicted Kyle. If I just closed my eyes, I could pretend he was there. Once, when I accidentally brushed up against Adrian’s arm, I was imagining he was Kyle, and I felt a shock of electricity all through my body. If only he was Kyle.
But no. Kyle isn’t what I want, isn’t what I should want. If I’m honest with myself—and I try to be—the main thing Kyle had going for him was looks. Maybe Adrian will have everything else. Maybe we can be friends.
I could use a friend, actually, and by the looks of it, so could he.
So I admired each rose, which wasn’t hard. They were as beautiful as their owner was strange. And it was flattering to have someone try so hard to impress me. No one had ever cared before.
Adrian offered to cut some of the roses for me, but I said, “Maybe I’ll come back to see them,” and then, I made myself take a long look at his face and was struck, once again, by his beautiful, catlike eyes. Hadn’t Kyle’s been the same blue? Maybe. But that was where the resemblance ended.
Then, Will showed up. Adrian told him I was there, and he acted all happy and announced we’d be reading Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 54.”
!!!!!
“No way! I was just reading that this morning,” I said.
Will asked Adrian to read it aloud, and it was beautiful. He read beautifully, and when we discussed the sonnet, Adrian seemed to understand it better than most of the kids in my class. Okay, his understanding was a little surface-y, like someone who’d looked the poem up on Wikipedia or something. But that was way more than I was used to. I mean, he actually cared.
I said, “I love these old sonnets.”
“Why?” he asked. “I mean, not that I don’t. I was just wondering why you love them?”
I laughed. “It’s okay if you don’t love them. At my school, people kind of thought I was a mutant because I loved every moldy old poem we read.”
God, why did I keep saying stuff like “mutant”? But I kept going. “I love Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks like The Iliad and The Odyssey, Chaucer, even Thomas Malory. But the people in my class, they wanted to analyze song lyrics or something.”
He didn’t reply, but I talk when I get nervous, so I kept going. On and on and on and on, saying pretentious stuff like, “I think that it’s not really possible to understand the new things without seeing their origins. I mean, there would have been no Once and Future King if Malory hadn’t written Le Morte d’Arthur, and there would be no song lyrics if we hadn’t first read Shakespeare’s sonnets. You know?”
Clearly, he didn’t know. He was staring at me, that weird, fixed stare I often got from classmates, like I might possibly have gone off the deep end, babbling about my favorite subject. Literally, no one got me unless they were a 70-year-old English teacher.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know I get carried away.” I vowed not to tell him about how Shakespeare was like a personal friend of mine.
He shook his head. “No. No, not at all. Man, that is just so . . . I never thought of it that way. Wow. I mean, wow! Hearing you talk about it like that, it makes me want to read all that stuff. What was that last one you said, Le Morte d’Arthur? Is that like King Arthur? I’m really into heroes.”
“Me too!” I found I could look at him now, without even thinking about it. “I have Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in my room. They’re poems about Arthur. Epic poems.” I tried not to sigh a little when I said “epic.” I glanced at Will. “Maybe we could read them sometime, Will?”
Will said, “Don’t look at me. I’m just furniture.”
Adrian laughed and said, “Please, Will. It would be . . . epic.”
And he wasn’t joking.
We moved on to math then, in which Adrian was really smart, and then history. He had some decent thoughts on the French and Indian War, a war teachers usually brush over. Apparently, he and Will had actually discussed it in depth.
By the time we went upstairs to have lunch, I was thinking this might not actually suck as bad as I thought it would.
July 26
Yesterday’s entry was interrupted by Adrian, who knocked on my door, first off, to ask me if I was having dinner with them (I was) and secondly to make, he said, a confession.
“A confession?” I asked, thinking, Okay, this is the part where he tells me he actually does intend to sell me on the black market after all.
But he said, “I don’t know squat about poetry.”
I laughed and said, “Sure you do. You had a lot to say about sonnet fifty-four.”
He said, “I cheated. I looked it up. Will told me ahead of time what we were going to do, and I studied. I didn’t want to look stupid in front of you.”
Wikipedia. Just as I thought. Playing with a girl’s feelings about poetry.
He said, “Stupid and ugly is a deadly combination.”
Aaaaannnnd . . . I forgave him. I said, “You’re not stupid. You’re great at math—can’t fake that. And you had a lot to say about the French and Indian War.” I cringed, realizing I hadn’t contradicted his assertion that he was ugly. I couldn’t. He would know I was lying.
He said, “Ah, well . . . Will and I read The Last of the Mohicans.”
I smiled. “See, I haven’t read that.”
“The important thing is,” he said, “I lied about Shakespeare. Yes, I lied because you have to try harder when you look like a supervillain, but I don’t want to lie to you. I want to be friends, which requires total and complete hon
esty. Usually, I’m one of those people you talked about, the people who don’t understand why we read the moldy old stuff.”
So did he come to insult my taste? But then he added, “Until now. Hearing you talking about Shakespeare and all those other writers really made me want to read them.”
I still didn’t know if he was making fun of me or what, but then he said, “Will you teach me about poetry?”
That was all I needed, all I needed to start babbling on about every poem I’d ever read in my entire life. If you think I didn’t recite parts of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” you don’t know me very well. And then, I started on “Dover Beach,” and he listened like he was actually, you know, listening.
I got to the last stanza, the part that goes,
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
He got really excited. “Hey, I know that poem,” he said. “Wasn’t that in Fahrenheit 451?”
I remembered that yes, it had been. The part where the fireman, Guy Montag, reads poetry to his wife and her friends, to show them why books shouldn’t be burned.
“That book was awesome,” he said. “It was the first book I ever really loved, and it started me reading all this other science fiction, like Asimov and Toffler.”
Now, science fiction is the one genre that totally makes my eyes glaze over, but it was cool that he read, and I actually liked Fahrenheit 451. I told him so.
Which led to another fifteen minutes of talking about that.
And, at the end of it, I realized I’d been standing there with him for almost an hour and I hadn’t once thought about how weird looking he was, hadn’t once thought about how I was a prisoner here. Hadn’t thought about my father or school.
And then, Magda called us for dinner and Adrian said he would read Shakespeare and he would read Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and anything else I wanted him to read, if I would just forgive him for his lie, and loan him the books, which he was pretty sure I had.
I gave him Idylls of the King, and by this morning, he’d already read “The Coming of Arthur,” “Gareth and Lynette,” and all the way to “Merlin and Vivien.” He confessed he’d stayed up most of the night to read them. Before Will came, we sat and read “Lancelot and Elaine” together, and I swear I thought I saw him wipe a tear from his eye when Elaine’s body was borne down the Thames past Camelot, but I pretended not to notice.
But Will, who showed up just then, did notice. He was all, “Was that sniffling I just heard? Are you crying, Adrian?”
Adrian laughed at that and said Will’s supersonic blind-person hearing was obviously failing him and that he was not crying. I assured Will that it had been me and told him what we’d been reading.
So then, Will calls Adrian a heartless beast for not crying over one of the most touching passages in English lit.
I sort of froze at the word beast, but Adrian laughed and said, “Poetry’s for sissies!”
Adrian was an unusual guy in more ways than just his appearance.
I want to ask him more about himself, about what it’s like to be like he is, but I guess it would be too embarrassing. There are plenty of things I don’t want him to ask me about either. So it was fine just to talk about poetry.
September 1
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written, mostly because I’ve been so busy reading to keep up with Adrian. Also, watching baseball, because it turns out he’s a major Yankees fan and so am I.
Between watching the games and discussing the Yanks’ chances at the pennant, we have sort of a running game of Can You Top This? where our childhoods are concerned.
It went like this:
Me: Did you ever play baseball?
Him: Nah, my dad wasn’t much for throwing a ball. He offered to have the maid practice with me, but it didn’t seem like real baseball that way.
Me: Understood.
Him: We did watch a game on TV . . . once. But we never went to a game because, you know, the shrieking mobs with pitchforks would have made things uncomfortable.
Me: (nervous laugh, but tucking away the information that he’d always looked like this) Aren’t you going to ask me if my dad took me to any ball games?
Him: Sorry. I thought it might be a sensitive subject. He didn’t exactly seem like the type of guy who’d put buying peanuts and Cracker Jacks high on his priority list.
Me: It’s true. Most of our Cracker Jack budget has been going for actual crack lately. But when I was little, we used to go.
And then, I stopped joking and told him about how it was, back when my mom was alive. We were a normal family, my two sisters and I. Mom was a paralegal. Dad was an English teacher at Tuttle, which is how I got so interested in poetry and stuff like that. But then, when my mom died, he sort of freaked out, started doing drugs. Prescription stuff first, to help him sleep, but then, it was easier to get the other stuff. He got fired from Tuttle. My sister Sarah, who’d been going there, had to drop out and go to public school. She never forgave him. But when I got old enough to go to middle school myself, she told me we should call them, give them a guilt trip about firing my dad (even though, really, we knew they’d had no choice), get them to give me a scholarship. After all, I had the grades for it. That’s how I started going to Tuttle.
“Did you like it?” Adrian asked, and that set off a whole other train of thought because, no, I hadn’t liked it. I’d hated it. I mean, yes, I’d been physically safe at Tuttle, unlike at my old school or even at home, but I hated going someplace where everyone was rich and beautiful and treated me like I was vaguely—if I’m honest here, not even vaguely—dirty compared to them just because I was poor. The fact is, here, in this apartment, where I’m being held prisoner, I’m actually happier than I’ve been in a long time, and these people—this freakish boy, blind man, and their maid—are the closest I’ve had to a real family since my mother died. We have dinner together. And yesterday, Magda taught Adrian and me to make flan for dessert. Will and I do yoga every morning, and we have a baseball pool going. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m part of something. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but if so, I’m moving to Stockholm.
Finally, I said, “No, I didn’t really like it. I mean, it was a good education, but the people there were snobs.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What are you sorry about? They’d have been just as snobby to you.”
More snobby, I was thinking. He looked thoughtful, and for a second, I was worried I’d hurt his feelings.
But then he said, “Well, that’s obvious. Good thing neither of us have to go there, right?”
And I agreed that it was a good thing, then changed the subject back to baseball. Fortunately, we had a lot to talk about.
October 23
Last year, when Kyle Kingsbury gave me that rose at the dance, I thought that whenever I smelled roses, I would think of him.
I was wrong.
It’s fall now. It has been three months since I came to live with Adrian, three months, studying every day in his rose garden. Now, the scent of roses has become hopelessly, irrevocably associated with Adrian. Sometimes I think I’ve become used to it, and I ask him if we can study someplace else for a day, so the next day, I can experience it anew.
It’s hard for me to believe I missed the beginning of school. I wonder if people have even noticed I’m gone. If they have, they probably just think I went back to my old school. I don’t miss Tuttle, where I was so invisible.
Other Things I Don’t Miss
—Guys lurking on our doorstep
> —Weird noises outside at night
—My dad not coming home for days or nights on end
—Being alone and frightened
Sometimes I do worry about my father. I don’t know if he actually went to rehab. Chances are, he didn’t. But I push that fear back. After all, he ditched me here. I’ve at least earned the right not to obsess over him.
Now, my life has routine. Here’s my schedule.
6:30 a.m. Wake up
6:45 a.m. Yoga with Will
7:45 a.m. Shower and dress
8:30 a.m. Breakfast
9-2:00 School with Adrian and Will
2-5:00 Reading/quiet time (usually with Adrian)
5:00 p.m. Adrian and I help Magda with dinner
6:00 p.m. Dinner
7:00 p.m. More time with Adrian
Through the windows, I can see the leaves hanging red and orange on the trees, then falling. (This neighborhood, what I can see of it, is beautiful, with tree-lined streets, unlike what I was used to.) I wished we could go out and play in them.
I mentioned this to Adrian.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I wrecked your life.”
This wasn’t what I meant. I said, “No, no you didn’t. Not really. I understand.”
“Understand what?”
“What it’s like to be lonely, to be alone. I’ve been alone all my life, even if there were other people around.”
“You ever see an animal in a cage?” he asked. “Once, I saw a tiger at the zoo. He had this tiny area, and all day long, he’d walk from left to right, sit down, stand up, walk back, then front, and repeat. It was really sad, because he was supposed to be a TIGER, and he didn’t even have the freedom of a housecat.”