by Louise Hawes
“What’s that you’re so caught up in, Sarah? Is everything all right?”
I guess I’d always known I would tell Rufus about Fry’s poetry. Because who else but another poet could understand how those texted lines made me feel? How they’d changed everything? How even when I was angry at my prince, or feeling galaxies apart from him, one look at his poems would bring us back together? I didn’t need that feeble, cloud-fighting sun, or even my cell’s backlight, to read Rufus the short poem Fry had texted me before the play, the one about my shadow being his sunlight. I knew it by heart.
When I’d finished reciting, I let the words hang in the air between us, like a whispered gift. At first, I thought Rufus felt the same way I did about what I’d shared, because he sat a long while without speaking. But then he said, “That boy must love you a lot, Sarah, to steal a poem for you.”
I didn’t, couldn’t, say anything. But Rufus saw the question on my face, leaned toward me across the couch. “That’s from a semifamous poem, you know. It’s by someone who might not have minded your sweetheart borrowing it. Someone named Amy Lowell.”
Sweetheart. What an old-fashioned word Rufus had used. I was suddenly cold and sad and somehow not too surprised. I had made Fry up, after all. Behind the muscles and guy talk, I’d pretended a valentine, a greeting-card soul mate. Sure, I’d Googled those first poems, but I’d never asked Fry why he forgot his verses as soon as he sent them to me. Why he hated to talk about poems if he loved to write them.
That was when I showed Rufus the rest of the poetry I’d been hoarding, savoring. I opened the Fry folder and read everything there, one poem after another. And though none of them was a direct copy, my poet recognized parts of each one. They were all bits and pieces of stolen property, words cobbled together; snippets from different poems bumping up against one another, getting cozy in a way they’d never been before. Each was just short enough, just changed enough, to fool a search engine. But not Rufus.
One by one, he named the poets whose poems Fry had plundered to make those counterfeit love texts: “That’s from Dylan Thomas,” he’d say. Or, “If you change the color, that phrase is from ‘The Waste Land.’ ” “Make that door a window, and those four words are Sara Teasdale’s.” “Marianne Moore wrote that in a different tense.” “A widely read young man, that friend of yours,” was all he said when I’d finished. Though I knew from class that plagiarism was something he couldn’t abide. “Theft is theft,” he’d told us several times. I remembered thinking that he seemed to take less kindly to word thievery than he did to arson.
With the sun fighting the rain and my poet’s hand covering mine, the hurt came—without anyone shaking their finger at me, without “I told you so” playing in the background. I was used to being disappointed by my mother. She was so busy planning my life, she never even stopped to take a good look at me. But Fry? Fry was different, because I had believed in him. In us. In Love with a capital L. And all along, all the time, I was believing in a cheat. Was there any other word for someone who pretended to be what he wasn’t? Rufus had called him my sweetheart, but what he’d done was anything but sweet.
I pushed against the pain now; I took its measure and sat, wordless, while the fairy tale melted away. The tears started, and I let them come, in a way I would never have been able to do at home. Or even with Wanda. Finally, just as the storm that had been trying to happen all morning started up and we heard rain against the roof, Rufus gathered me up and held me against that poetry tee of his. I wept so hard I thought I’d never stop. When I was finished, I piled our plates and dishes, then carried everything back to the kitchen. While Carmen stalked my every move, I set the dishes in the sink and ran water over them.
Rufus insisted on “walking” me to the door. Which meant he was listing to the side, leaning heavily on one crutch, when my tears started up again. Not noisy like last time, they were stealth tears, and they sneaked down my face before I even knew it. Rufus spotted them, though, and cradled his right crutch under his arm. He reached out and brushed one away. “Long ago, before you and even before me,” he said, “my grandmother would have made lemon balm tea to cure heartache. But I’m afraid I don’t have the recipe. I hope this will do instead.” Then he leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. No one had ever done that before, and it felt much better than those daddy kisses I’d watched in movies and on TV. I nursed that good feeling all the way home, even in between calls and texts to Fry, who didn’t answer any of them. Every word my boyfriend had stolen, every broken piece of someone else’s feelings, kept running through my mind. But what stayed with me the longest? What felt like a blessing was Rufus’s kiss, right where I parted my hair.
* * * *
Against all reason, through the middle of my hurt, I guess I still hoped Fry could make it right, could put us back together again. Which is why I kept texting him. Walking in the rain, which had gotten worse, not better, I held my cell under my tee and sent him message after message, asking him to call. Finally, right outside my own front door, his ringtone made the phone leap in my hand. I stood just inside our hall, gulping air like a beached fish, then said hello. Fry, who had no idea what had happened, sounded giddy, charged up.
“The surf is amazing!”
“You’re at the beach?” The rain hadn’t slowed. It was still hammering on the skylight above my head. “In this?!”
“There’s no lightning, just glassed-up waves.” Fry had that kid sound, that look-at-me voice. “You should see it, Sarah! I just caught a monster, rode it forever!”
“Fry,” I told him, “I need to—”
“You’ve got to come out here, Sarah. You have to see this!”
I could see it: Fry’s tanned face, spray covered, happy. I knew that happy, I’d seen it every time he rode a wave. “I’ve got class in a few hours,” I told him. “I have work to do.”
“Last night wasn’t enough high culture for you?” Fry sounded exasperated. “You need a double dose of stuffed shirts?”
“Fry, listen.” And suddenly, it was harder than I’d thought it would be. There was this little boy playing on the beach, and I had to force him to grow up. “You didn’t write those poems.” What was the point of small talk? Nothing else mattered. I sank to the floor in the hall, watching the rain slam against the glass overhead.
“What?”
I told him how I’d read his poems to Rufus. How the last one he’d sent was by Amy Lowell.
“Amy who?”
“Fry.” I almost cried his name. “It was all a lie. You didn’t write any of the beautiful words you sent.”
Silence. That’s all I heard for a long time, so long that I thought he might have hung up. Then, when he finally spoke, his Fry cool was back. “I told you, Sarah. They were only words. What’s the big deal?”
“Where did you get them?”
“I found this app called Sonnet Snitch. You input the kind of poem you want—hair color, eyes, you know. Then it puts together stuff from other poems. Not whole sentences or anything, but patterns, words. Pretty good, huh?”
Now it was my turn to be quiet. I said nothing. I listened to my own even breathing and, overhead, the rain.
“It changes just enough, you know? Brown to green. Chin to face. That kind of thing.” The boy actually sounded proud!
“Come on, Sarah. You’re not going to throw what we’ve got away over a stupid app, are you?”
“What have we got?”
“Jeez, Sarah!”
The rain was constant, steady, on and on.
“Oh, for crying out loud. It’s that old guy, isn’t it? He’s spoiling this because he’s all dried up, right?”
The rain, again and again. Washing everything away.
“Listen, Sarah. This is no good. We have to talk in person. I have to see you.”
Arms, heat, holding. Stay.
“Just promise me that, Sar. You won’t go ruining everything without giving me a chance. Okay? Just one hour? One lousy hour? I
s that so much to ask?”
I said nothing. What was there to say?
“Look, Sarah, I can explain.”
“Explain what?”
“Everything. Why I’m not a world-class poet.” He stopped. “Okay, why I’m not a poet at all. Just give me a chance, will you?”
I hadn’t thought there were any tears left, but one found its way down to my nose. I brushed it away.
“Tomorrow, okay? I’ll call you. And Sarah?”
No words left. Only the rain. And one last tear.
“Just because I’m not a poet doesn’t mean I can’t love someone.”
He hung up before I realized that was the first time he’d ever said the word “love” to me. At least the first time he’d ever said it without plagiarizing.
* * * *
The sky stopped looking bruised and swollen, and the sun came out just before class. When he saw the chairs we’d unfolded, Rufus announced that we might want to fold them back up and put them away; we were going to hold our next-to-last class (“penultimate,” he called it, which sounded elegant but still kind of sad) outside. H, obliging as ever, started snapping chairs closed with a flourish. If anything, he was more cheerful than usual. And, watching Margaret, working beside him, I had a suspicion I knew why.
“So,” I asked him, “what’s this about the vet’s?”
The two of them, grinning like happy fools and finishing each other’s sentences, explained that Margaret’s dog, Falafel, had swallowed her owner’s earrings. “I named her Falafel because she’ll eat anything,” Margaret said. “But I didn’t think that included jewelry!”
“Those hoops were this big,” H told me, joining his thumbs and forefingers to make circles, then reconsidering, opening his fingers wide, wide, wider.
“She started whining just before Hector picked me up this morning.” Margaret touched H’s arm the same way Miss Kinney had. “He was so great. He said poetry was important, but not as important as making sure Falafel was okay.”
They had spent two and a half hours in the waiting room. By that time, Falafel was out of the woods, the earrings were retrieved, and Margaret and H? Well, it was clear they were a couple now. “We wrote morning pages while we waited,” H told me. “You should see the ideas this woman”—he smiled at Margaret—“comes up with.” Another smile, this time right into a matching one from Margaret. “She could write a poem about her refrigerator and make it sound great.” He paused. “Come to think of it, she did!”
“Listen to this guy.” Margaret’s laugh was a lot softer than I remembered it. “I’ve still got chills from what he wrote about the sea at night.”
“Wait!” It felt as though I’d come in just as the credits were rolling. I looked at H. “No more odes to Miss K.?”
Latino toughs aren’t big on blushing. But newborn poets apparently are. H rode through his embarrassment in the sweetest way, though. He didn’t look at his hands or his feet or the last of the chairs that needed putting away. Instead, he just grinned at Margaret. “Guess a crush can last just so long,” he said. “Eventually, you have to find someone who feels like home.”
I’d like to say that I was instantly and completely happy for those brand-new lovebirds. But I have to be honest: Watching those two, I was jealous. With only a few words, H had just said more to Margaret about the way he felt than Fry had said to me all year. Not counting his poems. Well, not his, actually. You know what I mean.
Of course, I was thrilled that H had found someone at last—someone he liked who liked him back. But that happiness bumped up against the empty feeling I’d been carrying, and suddenly, I wasn’t so sure I’d used up all my tears. Each time H bent to whisper something to Margaret, and each time she leaned into him, easy and natural, the spillover feeling built behind my eyes. Why hadn’t Fry ever acted like that? How had everything between us ended up like my poet’s cottage, empty and ruined?
So I was glad when Shepherd, who’d been helping Rufus put Carmen in exile (i.e., locking her up in the bedroom with food, water, and a large cat toy shaped like a dog), joined us. “That blindfold stuff work?” he asked.
It still shocked me how interested my father was in our class. How he kept up with what we were doing. H, naturally, couldn’t wait to fill Shepherd in on the latest chapter in the artistic life and times of his favorite poet, Hector Losada. “I don’t believe it,” he told us. “I may have to wear gloves from now on.” He waved the fingers of both hands, as if he were playing an air piano. “My hands keep sending me messages, even when I don’t want them to. It’s like I’ve got eyes in my fingers!”
I was excited in spite of myself. “I know,” I told him. “My doorknob took me one place, but my sneakers sent me another. I mean, I’d already written a poem about a poster in my bedroom. I was all set to bring that to class, and then I—”
“Then you got inspired all over again.” H snapped the last chair shut, looked at me over the edge of his sunglasses. “I know. I guess that’s what happens to sensitive types. We find poems everywhere.”
If anyone had told me a month before that I’d ever be discussing the sense of touch with H and my father, I would have thought they were living in a different dimension. One where the rules of logic, common sense, and probability didn’t apply. But, of course, that was BR. Before Rufus.
“And typing blind?” H pushed his shades back and grinned. “My mom walked in on me, and even though I tried to explain, I think she’s still worried about my mental health.”
I remembered the way it felt to be alone in the dark with the pictures in my head. I was glad I’d done the homework before this morning. Before the End. BE. If I closed my eyes now, I’d go right back to misery, to wondering how Fry could have lied to me, and how I could have believed him. But BE, I could fall into the concrete world around me, take it back to my desk, keep it fresh while the blindfold kept everything else out. I could type a few lines and remove the blindfold, and guess what? I could actually read what I’d written. “I kind of gave up on capital letters, though,” I told H and Margaret. “But who needs them, really?”
We were still talking shop when Shepherd had to leave. “Anselmo is hemorrhaging,” he explained. “He says he needs me to go over the accounts.” I’d met Mamselle’s owner only once, but I’d never forgotten the way that rotund little man depended on my father for everything. The way he didn’t take a step, hardly even spoke, until he’d turned to Shepherd and asked, “So what do you think?”
“I’m sorry you’ll miss class,” I told my father. And I meant it.
“The good news is, Rufus is about to graduate Gimp School. There’s almost nothing he can’t handle.” Shepherd wore an odd, proud-daddy smile, as if he’d taught my poet to walk and talk. “Besides,” he added, giving H a shoulder punch, “Hector’s here.”
A few weeks back, I might have wondered how one skinny eighteen-year-old could be of much help when it came to supporting or moving a senior citizen who outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. But now? Well, I’d seen H in action, and I knew that, between us, we would manage just fine. Besides, a few minutes later, we had backup: The whole class arrived.
Tonight, I lived on a magic island,
watched as it filled with monsters,
wizards, soaring sprites. I cried and
laughed as they suffered and danced.
Tense in my seat, I wanted what
they did, I dreamt their dream.
Later I hold the playbill, close my
eyes to bring it all back. But my
fingers meet only the glossy cold
of dry facts, and the stapled pages
shuffle like dead leaves, faerie
revels flown, magic undone.
The Fifth Class
“We are not at the mercy of electronics today,” Rufus told us. “Let’s get some fresh air.” He pointed to a bulky canvas bag on the couch, even bigger than the baggy briefcase he usually brought to class. “Charles,” he asked our prof, who was
sporting rolled-up sleeves again, and looking much more at ease than he had last week, “would you do the honors?”
Fenshaw, proud of his role, strode to the couch, hoisted up the bag. Then, after everyone had left their assignments on the coffee table, my poet led us out into the backyard. Although “led” might not be the right word, since he had to entrust his crutches to H while he swung his way down the steps and out onto the patio. By the time he achieved that feat, most of the class had beaten him there and were lounging in deck chairs, waiting for instructions.
“Don’t worry about our state bird,” he told everyone. “I’ve brought weapons.” He asked Fenshaw to open the bag and hand out four small bottles of mosquito repellent.
“So how did it go?” Rufus stood and watched as we passed the bottles around, rubbing the spray on our arms and legs. “Was blind typing as hard as y’all figured?”
Like me, most people agreed they’d been surprised at how well they’d managed. “It was like being in a cave,” Margaret said. “Only the cave was your own head.”
“Exactly,” H agreed. “Skull Mansion!”
The two of them high-fived, H grinning as if they’d simultaneously stumbled on the theory of everything.
That was when I felt my phone vibrate, and right away I was out of class and into my head. It was Fry: We have to talk. I didn’t answer. Not that text. Or the next. Or the next. I didn’t need to. All my answers would have been the same: There’s nothing to say.
So while the others described their maiden voyages with blind typing, I was in a skull cave of my own. Over and over, I checked myself for damage. Over and over, I felt the missing dream. The hurt. The why, why, why?
“I can’t wait to read your homework,” Rufus was saying. “And to show y’all how grateful I am for the way you’re feeding our book, I’m going to ask you to write more.”