Wise Young Fool

by Sean Beaudoin

  Ravenna laughs. She takes my hand.

  “Howdy, stranger.”

  “Hi.”

  “What’s new?”

  “Oh not much. Unless you count how I hear you’re getting it on with a college professor.”

  “Oh my god. Let me guess. Everyone’s favorite hostess told you that?”

  I shrug. “Maybe.”

  Ravenna finishes her martini and sets it on the piano, a Bösendorfer that has to cost at least sixty grand. “It’s possible there are people here who don’t have my best interests at heart.”

  I grab the glass and wipe the water ring with my sleeve. “It’s possible there are people here who have no hearts at all.”

  “Does that include you?”

  I think about it. “Maybe, but at least I’m filled to the rim with soul.”

  “Well, you’ve got to have something to offer the devil down at the crossroads.”

  It occurs to me for the very first time that the real reason I’ve liked Ravenna for so long, despite her looks, is because of how whip-smart she is. She’s funny like me. She gets what I get. The orange juice concentrate of my cynicism mixes with the ice-cold water of her sarcasm, making a frothy and refreshing beverage. It further occurs to me that I am an unredeemable tool for not realizing it sooner. And that the best possible way to make it up to her would be to just leave her alone.

  “Speaking of which, I better get back to Sackville. We’re supposed to practice.”

  “Elliot Hella still pulling your leash?”

  “Woof,” I say. “Grrr.”

  She plays with an earring, leans against me. “What is it you’re really getting back to, Ritchie? Have you ever asked yourself that?”

  I laugh. “No, but at least now I know what passes for profundity up here at Killington-Holloway.”

  She stares, hard, the corners of her mouth curling downward in their painterly way, snatches of conversation swirling around us.

  “… I’ll try being nicer, if you try being smarter…”

  “… use much at the end of a sentence much?…”

  “… you’re like binge and purge but without the binge…”

  “… it sounds like English, but I can’t understand a word you’re saying…”

  “… if I wanted to take a girl with a mustache to the prom, I would have asked a girl with a mustache to the prom…”

  “… your dad’s the ambassador to Bahrain. Buy your own cigarettes…”

  “… I can’t believe Mama Hurricane’s not holding…”

  It goes from funny to sad to depressing and stays there. It’s like a scoop of sherbet. A palate cleanser. I know I should leave, but I want to say one last thing. I just don’t know what that thing is.

  “So, are you coming on Saturday?” I finally ask.

  “Coming where?”

  “Rock Scene 2013. The biggest night of my life.”

  “Tonight is the biggest night of your life.”

  There’s no need for her coy smirk, but it rears its head anyway, in full lipsticked glory.

  “It is?”

  “Do you want it to be?”

  While I’m trying to think of a smooth answer, she leans over and sticks her tongue in my mouth.

  What else am I going to do but bite it?

  I mean, hell, it’s so totally in the script.

  It’s sometime around two. Everyone has left, including Sigourney, who went to get pancakes with a bunch of guys who claimed to be Whiffenpoofs, and never came back. Ravenna and I are in some room whose shelves are lined with practically every good book ever written, in archival vellum wraps and mint dust jackets. There’re first editions of Naked Lunch and Notes of a Dirty Old Man and The Dharma Bums. There’s an original copy of William Blake etchings that has to be worth a million dollars. We’re sitting on an ancient leather couch. It smells of cigars and cognac and sweaty jodhpurs, like it was shipped from some officer’s club in colonial Burma in 1892.

  Ravenna’s mouth is locked on mine. Her tongue swirls clockwise. My tongue, a natural contrarian, swirls counterclockwise.

  We meet at a quarter to six.

  Communion.

  It’s really kissing.

  Movie kissing.

  Deep kissing.

  Which I’ve never actually done before.

  Touched someone and genuinely cared that she touched me back.

  I’m not entirely sure how to handle it.

  Ravenna can sense my confusion, because she puts her hand gently behind my neck, palm cool and soft, and holds it there.

  It’s the kind of thing that could only happen to a better, smarter, sexier me.

  Except it’s happening to this me.

  Which, you know, is an amazing feeling.

  Suddenly being that guy who winters in Biarritz.

  Who chairs the charity ball.

  Who always tips the valet.

  And every full moon, hires a peasant girl to wax his chest.

  That guy strokes Ravenna’s hair.

  That guy strokes her thigh.

  That guy leans back and just keeps leaning.

  I wake up near dawn.

  In a bed the size of an aircraft carrier.

  I get up and find my clothes, late for school. Ravenna is awake but pretending to sleep. She knows it and I know she knows I know it.

  Last night was last night.

  Today is today.

  It is what it is.

  Except it isn’t.

  “Come here,” she says.

  I roll back under the covers and pull her close to me.

  We poke and squeeze and giggle and whisper insanely smart things in each other’s ears. I am somehow aware that this behavior is way older than either of us. We’re playing tennis instructors in Paris, comparative lit professors in Rome. She bites my lower lip and tells me to have a good day. Maybe this is love, I think. Maybe all it takes is the welling feeling that I am luckier than any other fucker on earth. That there is someone beneath me wrapped in sheets that smell like cinnamon and salt and pitted fruit, breasts and sex unfolded, hair wound across the pillow like a conquering flag, who wants me to stay enough to admit out loud that she wants me to stay.

  And then the alarm goes off for the third time.

  Ravenna slaps my ass, rolling over and closing her eyes.

  In the kitchen there’re fresh croissants. And grapes and mangoes and pomegranate juice and coffee so strong it could dissolve a barrel full of mob informants. I drink it while running my hand along each one of Jensen Partman’s sets.

  Downstairs, the doorman looks surprised but does a credible job of hiding it. He instantly knows what happened and neither of us can quite believe it, but the look on his face says he’s bored with the sons of the rich—if only because he, too, should have had the chance, at least once, to stroll out of a brownstone with the smell of teen daughter and furtive cocktails wafting around his neck like an Hermès scarf.

  I hand him five bucks.

  “What’s this for?”

  “It’s a tip.”

  He shoves the money back in my pocket. “Don’t be a wiseass.”

  There’s a honk and a beep and a screech, some homeless dude railing away about the end of the end.

  “I wasn’t,” I say, but the doorman’s already gone, helping a woman out of a taxi who’s holding a dog that is literally smaller than the word yap, the thing tucked under her arm like a dinner roll, barking for every last thing it’s worth.

  In the bathroom I look in the mirror.

  It’s bolted to the wall, made of soft metal that barely reflects an image through the thousand tags and curse words and Nazi symbols etched into it. I open my mouth, try to speak, give my wavery face some advice, can’t.

  Lunch is theoretical, because my stomach is locked.

  I go to the library, but it’s closed. No one will look at me, meet my eyes. Groups of kids stand there, Josés and Ralphs and Garys and Laphonsos. They kick their sneakers together, talk in low voices.
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  B’los isn’t around.

  There’re no counselors around.

  A bunch of kids are gathered at the end of the hall, in front of Dr. Benway’s office, hands in pockets. No one says anything, but it’s obvious they’re not going to let me pass.

  There’s nowhere else to go but outside.

  The basketball courts or the dayroom.

  Why put it off?

  I decide on the dayroom.

  A group of kids follow me in. Five of them.

  A bunch of mopes who do favors for Peanut and Conner.

  Waiting for me to try to run.

  I’m not going to run.

  There’s a series of shrill whistles, a signal.

  They’re saying shit, laughing, calling me names.

  They can smell blood. Taste blood.

  I can’t turn around, won’t turn around, don’t turn around.

  I press my face into a corkboard with notices for GED classes and yoga classes and crude anatomical drawings, vaginas as imagined by three-year-olds, cartoon dicks that A-Rod could bat cleanup with.

  It highlights, in its subtle way, the elemental stupidity of everyone and everything.

  Behind me, the stage is ready.

  The dayroom is packed.

  The doors are open.

  The audience is primed.

  The talent has arrived.

  And not a minute too late.

  I’m late and have to go to the office for a detention form.

  “You’re already missing the assembly,” the secretary says.

  “What assembly?”

  She gives me a look like I just crapped her mattress.

  I walk down to the auditorium. The door creaks and everyone turns, glaring.

  Dice is up onstage. There’s a poster next to him, just like the one they had for Beth. The main difference being that it’s a picture of Kyle Litotes, and he’s not dead. Dice gives a real heartfelt speech. About how great a student Kyle was and how much he, Dice, loved Kyle and gazed deeply into the pool of his unlimited potential. How Kyle was too special for words, too talented for fate, too determined for luck, too sexy for his shirt. Essentially word for word what he said about Beth.

  Except Dice didn’t kiss Kyle.

  Didn’t force himself on Kyle at a party.

  Didn’t make out with Kyle, grabbing his shoulders while he tried to pull away.

  I hear a song in my head, one that I often do. Mostly because I made it up. I’ve never shown it to Elliot, because it’s not a song for Elliot.

  It’s a song for Dick Isley.

  I usually picture it being sung by someone named Tiffani or Brittney, a midtwenties plastic blonde trying to corner the teeny market. I see her wearing a plaid schoolgirl skirt and sports bra, dancing on the desk in front of a classroom.

  In front of a goggle-eyed Dice.

  Who’s pretending to be professional, disinterested, shocked.

  But is so, so into it.

  Brittney or Tiffani or Tammi or Misti pops a lollipop in her mouth and then leans over and sings, to a sultry backbeat, with male dancers behind her:

  I think we’re alone

  Like we were meant to be

  Just us in the classroom

  In applied credit biology.

  Oh, I think we’re alone now,

  Teacher man,

  Take off that tweed jacket and

  Show me your hand.

  Lay me across your

  Desk, desk

  Pop quiz me

  Yes, yes

  I’ll give you my apple and

  You give me your

  Best, best.

  Oh, I think we’re alone

  Now and forever more

  Bell rings the end of days

  Laughing in the corridor.

  It’s just me and you

  And the things that we do

  It’s just you and me

  And everything you’ve yet to see

  So much to teach.

  So much to learn.

  So far to reach.

  So easy to burn.

  We’re going up in an academic

  Con-fla-gration.

  We’re going up in an honor code

  Vi-o-lation.

  We’re going—

  Dice takes a breath, interrupting my reverie. He wipes a tear, then talks about how cosmically unfair it is that Kyle won’t be going to college.

  “There will be no college for this fine young man.”

  How tragically unjust that Kyle will not be cashing in his scholarship—which has already been revoked—or pursuing further athletic glory.

  “Sadly, athletic achievement is now a thing of the past.”

  He concludes that Kyle made, in the blink of an eye, a mistake in judgment that he will pay deeply for the rest of his life.

  “These tiny, random decisions are often vast and irrevocable.”

  Students are then advised to be unusually understanding this morning, because Kyle isn’t always in control of his language and his attention can wander.

  “He may not appear exactly as you remember him.”

  Also, no flash photography; the lights hurt Kyle’s eyes and may disorient him.

  “So stow your cameras and cell phones, people.”

  Dice begins to clap. “Students of Sackville High, please give a very warm hand for one of our own, Kyle Litotes, and his mom, Myra!”

  Kyle and his mom get a standing O.

  She leads him out to the podium. It gets still and quiet. Even the most sarcastic pricks are listening, no one cracking wise. People are scared. They’re freaked. Because, essentially, here’s this kid they all know backward and forward, this kid they’ve gone through year after year of math classes and gym classes and study halls with, but it’s not really him anymore. It’s Kyle, but from the fifth dimension, like one of those movies where a space slug bores its way into the president’s ear and takes over. Now the president’s skin doesn’t really fit right, and he starts eating lightbulbs and passing all these crazy laws, but the Secret Service guys let it go because what are you gonna do, the space slug won the electoral college outright.

  The mic feeds back. Kyle bonks it with his forehead and giggles. When he finally talks, it’s way too slow. It’s like he’s underwater. And not only because his mom has to keep leaning over and wiping his lips with a hankie.

  Kyle gets his sea legs and starts talking about drinking and driving and how bad it is. How sorry he is. How glad he is to be alive. People are nodding. Girls are crying. Tough kids are wondering if maybe it really is time to take a long look at themselves and their six-pack Friday nights. But others are shaking their heads, thinking, Yeah, dude, we get it; everyone knows what the smart move is as far as getting behind the wheel hammered. But, on the other hand, we live in this shit-ass town, don’t we? I mean, we live in the middle of nowhere and the roads are paved cow paths and there’s no bus system or anything, so if you want to go somewhere, you got to drive. And if you drive somewhere at night, there’s a good chance someone’s got a few beers to knock back. And so there’s a good chance you’re going to be drinking and driving, unless you go to the movies or mini golf or some other square shit with the Saving It for Marriage team or the Anti-Masturbator’s League. It’s just, like, unavoidable.

  I know Beth thought it was unavoidable.

  I know she took her chances, plenty of them.

  And then I’m thinking, Hey, there’s another speech Kyle could be giving. It’s a speech about being a hotshot. About having to show off in your car, or on the team, just to prove what a hilarious dude you are all the time. About how the Litoteses of the world only find the moral of the story after the story brings them to their knees, but the moral was nowhere to be found when it actually mattered, because they buried it under all the ways they were busy taking advantage of their advantages.

  Clitotes wasn’t sorry during Beth’s assembly.

  He was texting his friends.

  Kyle lo
ses his place. His mom prompts him, but he gets confused, and then says, Shit fucking shit! at the top of his lungs. About eight times. People start to laugh despite themselves. Someone says, Right on! Kyle waves, says, Motherfucker dogballs bitch about nine times, and then Dice sweeps over and wraps it up. Everyone stands and gives Kyle another ovation. All these girls in expensive sweaters are crying and guys are looking at their feet and I’m standing, too, just clapping away, giving it up like I mean it for Kyle Litotes.

  And the thing is, I really do.

  Because no matter who he was before, he’s this Kyle now.

  And no matter who I was before Beth, I’m this me now.

  And this me wants to take Kyle out for a hot dog and some onion rings and tell him I understand.

  That no matter how much of a douche he was, he was probably just scared of getting left outside the ring of cool. And it mattered so much that he wasn’t able to muster the strength to be a better person. Not everyone has the strength to be a better person. We’re all trying to pretend that not being our worst selves every minute of every day is easy.

  It’s so not easy.

  And also that the only person in the whole school, maybe the whole world, who has no excuse for ever being his worst self ever again is Dice Isley.

  We practice for four hours straight, running through our set eight times. Elliot is talking again, but he’s so intense, there’s almost nothing to say. His eyes bulge out of his head like they’re ready to pop. He snaps at every little noise. He even yells at Lawrence. All of us are so freaked out that we play like we’re in a studio recording with Charlie Parker. No one flubs, but there’s no groove, no swing, no joy. It’s pure math, beat calisthenics, rote discipline. Chaos finally begs off, saying his fingers can’t take it anymore, and splits in the Beemer. I pack up my stuff while Elliot sits on a milk crate in the corner.

  Lacy sits on his lap, talking to him quietly.

  Rubbing his neck.

  Just like Ravenna rubbed mine.

  Except totally and completely different.

  On Friday morning we blow off school, practice for six hours, and then all pile into the Black Widow’s Renault.

  “Is this for real?” El Hella asks. “I’m not driving all the way out there if someone’s pussing out at the last second.”