by Neil Plakcy
“Does that include you and me?” Lili asked, gathering the rest of the dishes and following me. “I think we’re in sync most of the time.”
“I think the differences between us are more low-lying,” I said. “You have a sense of adventure and wanderlust, and I’m more a homebody. You look at the world as an artist and consider what you can make of it.”
I began rinsing the dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher while Lili put away the butter, orange juice and so on. “I like to confront the world head-on and then find ways to sneak around and bend situations to my advantage.”
“Have you been in therapy?” she asked. “You sure talk like you have.”
“In prison. Mandatory counseling sessions. I talked a lot about Mary and why our marriage had failed, and how that was tied into my self-image.”
“You said that your marriage was over after her second miscarriage,” Lili said, stepping over Rochester in order to get back out to the breakfast nook.
“It was. The prison term was just icing on the cake. But the miscarriages weren’t the underlying reason we broke up.”
I closed the dishwasher and followed Lili out to the breakfast nook. “Mary thought my personality was something she could drill out of me by pushing me to dress better, to get a better job, and all that. Eventually we both realized that wasn’t going to happen. If we’d had kids, we probably would have stuck it out for a while longer, but the end result would be the same.
“Well, I think your personality is just fine the way it is,” she said, leaning over to kiss my cheek.
“And I’m very glad you do,” I said.
Lili was barefoot, wearing a pair of my running shorts and another of my T-shirts. This one had a picture of a dog sitting up in a canoe, holding an oar in his paws. The legend underneath read “Dog Paddle.”
“Let me put my shoes on and we can go out to the towpath,” she said. “Remember, we have that College Connection welcome reception this afternoon.”
I played ball toss with Rochester while Lili went upstairs. When she returned she was wearing those yellow shoes she’d bought from Paula Madden again. “Why do you think Rick’s marriage broke up?” she asked, picking up her camera from the table.
“When he was serious and sober he said that Vanessa was an adrenaline junkie, that she loved driving fast and bungee jumping and stuff like that. That she got off on him being a cop because there was always a chance that he’d get killed on the job. Once he got promoted to detective she decided the thrill was gone, and she took up with a fire jumper and moved to Colorado.”
“She does sound pretty awful,” Lili said. “Did you ever meet her?”
I shook my head. “He and I weren’t friends in high school—just knew each other because we had a couple of classes together. He got married while I was in New York, I think, and then divorced while I was in California. By the time I moved back here and met up with him again, and we got to be friends, Vanessa was long gone.”
I hooked Rochester’s leash and we walked outside. “Rick was pretty angry after Vanessa left,” I said. “He used to bitch about her non-stop for the first couple of months I knew him. He used to say things like ‘my ex-wife moved to Whoragon’ and ‘if a tree falls in a forest and kills your ex-wife, what do you do with the lumber.’”
Lili laughed, but said that she shouldn’t. “Do you think he’s over her?”
“I sure hope so. It’s been nearly two years.”
Rochester scrambled after a squirrel and I pulled him back. “My therapist back in prison would say that Rick is dating difficult women to avoid making a commitment to someone reasonable,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I think you got more out of being in prison than you’re willing to admit,” she said. “It sounds like you came out of there knowing yourself a lot better than when you went in.”
“I wouldn’t argue with that,” I said. “But all in all I’d rather have gone to some fancy rehab center like all the Hollywood stars.”
We crossed the bridge over the canal and turned onto the towpath. “Keep an eye out for plant thieves,” I said.
“It’s Sunday morning,” Lili said. “If Mark and this guy are having a relationship, they’re in bed together right now. Not out scavenging for plants.”
“We’re out here.”
“Yeah, but we’ve been together for months already. That initial surge of lust and desire has passed.”
I opened my mouth in mock anger, then pulled her close for a long, deep kiss.
She finally pushed me away. “I want to take some pictures.”
Rochester was a natural ham, looking up when I clicked my fingers so that his ears stood up. She followed him, snapping casual shots, even getting a good one of him paws-up on a weeping willow.
It was fun to watch her in her photographer mode, and I wondered if this was the way she’d been when she was a working photojournalist, traveling the world taking pictures to accompany news and feature stories. She looked happy and fully engaged, and I hoped she always maintained that sense of pride and pleasure in what she was doing.
Just before noon, she said, “We’d better get back to your house. I’ll need to make a pit stop at my place before we go to the reception.”
“Sure we can’t just skip out?” I asked, as we turned and began walking home. “No one will miss us.”
“Of course they will,” she said. “And I want to get a look at these kids. Don’t you?”
I held my hands out, palms up, as if I was weighing alternatives. “Spend the afternoon with you, or with a bunch of inner-city teens,” I said. My hands went up and down. “I pick you.”
“That’s sweet, but we’re still going.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek.
20 – Ice-Breaker
On our way back to the townhouse, we passed Owen Keely watering his parents’ yard. “So much for Sunday morning in bed,” I whispered to Lili. We waved and said hello.
“Good morning, sir,” he said, nodding. “Ma’am.”
Lili and I smiled, but as soon as we were out of range she said, “I hate being called ma’am. It reminds me of old women in long skirts. And he’s not that much younger than we are.”
“I think it’s a military thing,” I said. “But you’ve got to admit it’s nice to meet someone who’s so polite.”
Back at the house, we both read for a while, working our way through Catching Fire, the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy, and then I took a shower and changed into college-appropriate khakis and a polo shirt while Lili played with Rochester. When I walked halfway down the stairs, I stopped at the landing and looked below.
Lili was sitting Indian-style on the floor next to his crate. She had already tossed in a couple of chew toys and filled the water dish that clamped onto the side. Rochester was lying flat on the floor a few feet away from her, his head resting on one paw, looking at her. She had a bag of tiny training treats in her hand, and she was trying to coax him to crawl closer to her to retrieve each treat.
“That’s a good boy,” she said, dropping a treat on the tile just far enough from him that he had to scoot forward a few inches to retrieve it. I knew that her goal was to trick him into crawling into the crate on his own. He didn’t like being stuck in there, even though all the dog-training manuals said he ought to feel safe and sheltered inside.
“It’s not going to work,” I said from the landing. “He’s too smart.”
“I agree that he’s smart,” she said, placing another treat on the floor. “He knows he’s going in the crate eventually. I think he’ll figure out he can go in willingly, with treats, or with you dragging him and no treats.”
Rochester was a smart dog; I’d seen lots of evidence of that in the year and a half that I’d had him. But he didn’t always have common sense; he continued to chase squirrels, for example, even though it was clear, at least to me, that he was never going to catch one—and wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did.
Lili fed him a
nother treat, and he inched closer. I stayed quietly where I was on the landing as she took the last treat and put it just inside the entrance to the crate. Rochester eyed it, then looked up at her. Then he hopped up and ran into the living room, where he curled up on the sofa.
I resisted the urge to laugh. I just went to the refrigerator and pulled out a package of Swiss cheese. At the sound of the door opening, he hopped back off the sofa and came into the kitchen, looking up at me with those big brown eyes.
I pulled off a piece of cheese and waved it in front of his nose. Then I tossed it into the crate, and as he scrambled in after it I shut the door behind him. He was still eating as Lili and I hurried out the front door.
On the way up to Leighville, we talked about how we were going to approach our seminar duties with the College Connection kids. Lili planned to take them out into the woods at the back of the campus, give them cameras, and ask them to take pictures of things that they might have seen in the book—trees, plants, water, animal tracks. Then she’d take them to the photography lab and help them put together their own collages.
“I’m thinking about communication,” I said. “The way information is so restricted in Panem. I want to create some kind of a game for them to play, one that involves writing, sending messages and so on. Give them some exposure to college level writing, but make it fun.”
“That would be cool,” she said. “Since all three of the books center around the games.”
“I’ve been reading this book about how game structure can be applied to academics,” I said. “You need to provide a clearly defined goal, and steps that the kids can take to achieve it. Then you have to give them feedback so that they feel like they’ve accomplished something.”
“It’s an interesting idea,” she said. “But you’d better get your act together fast. You do know you’re teaching Tuesday and Thursday morning?”
“Is there a schedule already put together?”
She shook her head. “You really need to read your email. The kids are all staying in Birthday House, and they eat breakfast together every morning at Burgers Commons.”
Like almost every college and university, Eastern named buildings after their donors. Howard M. Burgers, an alum who’d made a fortune in fast food, had funded the renovation of the main dining hall a few years before, and it had been named for him. The story behind Birthday House, the high-rise dorm where I had lived when I was at Eastern, was that the money for it had been donated by an alumnus named Hoare. There was no way Eastern was going to name a dorm Hoare House, though, so the donation was made on the man’s birthday, giving rise to the name.
We stopped at Lili’s so she could shower and change, and while she did I used her computer to access my college email account. Sure enough, there was an attachment I hadn’t noticed which spelled out the week-long schedule for the CC kids. I’d been assigned a slot on Tuesday morning.
Lili and I arrived at the auditorium in Granger Hall to find a group of about fifty teenagers milling around in the lobby, looking at the student artwork that had been hung on the walls. “They don’t seem too terrifying,” I whispered to her.
Probably two-thirds of them were female; about fifty percent were African-American, another thirty percent Hispanic. A group of white girls clustered together, with a single white boy floating at the edge of their group. The rest were a mix of Asian, South Asian, and kids who probably had to check the “other” box on any official forms. They all wore lanyards around their neck with a plastic badge at the end giving their first name and the city they were from.
An awful lot of them had tattoos of one kind or another, and I couldn’t help wondering if some of them might be gang-related. Almost every girl had something in the way of ear jewelry, from rows of studs to dangling rings to those big plugs called gauges.
Everyone began to file into the auditorium, and we followed. The program was mercifully short; President Babson welcomed everyone, and Dot Sneiss, the college registrar, gave them a brief overview of what to expect over the next week. Then she began introducing each of the faculty members. I was lucky that there were four of us representing the English department, and we all stood together. Lili was the only one representing fine arts.
After the program was over, we all walked back outside, to where aluminum folding tables had been set up with picnic foods. A group of Eastern students had been hired to act as mentors, and they organized the kids into groups to eat and play ice-breaker games. I noticed Yudame, one of my tech writing students, among the mentors. He was a light-skinned Puerto Rican kid with a dandelion puff of blondish-brown hair. He pronounced his name You-Dummy, which always amused me.
The CC kids had been divided into four smaller groups, each of about a dozen, and each assigned to one mentor. It looked like someone had been careful to compose the groups, as they each looked to be balanced between race and ethnicity.
Lili and I loaded up paper plates with hamburgers and fries, and walked over to where Yudame had staked out his section. “Hey, Prof, let me introduce you to my team,” he said, standing up.
I scanned the group as he named them. Courtney was a skinny tough-looking white girl in a white wife-beater T-shirt that showed she had tattoos down both arms. Her blonde hair hung in dreads and she wore a ball cap backwards. Chinelle was twice her size, with a huge chest that nearly popped out of her low-cut blouse. She wore tight jeans and high heels, and her dark skin shone with some kind of makeup. The last to be introduced was Ka’Tar, and I remembered that was the name of DeAndre Dawson’s half-brother. Could there be two kids with that same Klingon-influenced name?
He was a skinny kid with skin so dark it was almost black. I remembered Shenetta Levy had sad something about DeAndre’s brother being handicapped in some way, but I couldn’t remember how.
Yudame raved about what a good teacher I was and I had to jump in and say, “I already put in your grade for last term, Yudame. You don’t have to suck up any more.”
That got a laugh from the kids. We started to eat and talk to them, and I learned that they were mostly from New York and Philadelphia, as well as a few other urban cities in the northeast. They ranged from fourteen to seventeen. Two had just graduated from high school, but the rest were still enrolled.
“That’s great that you’re all still in school,” Lili said.
“You gotta be in school to be in this program,” a heavyset black girl named Ashanty said. “They won’t let you in if you ain’t.” Her hair was pulled into cornrows so tight just looking at them gave me a headache.
“But you can be in any kind of school, right?” Yudame asked.
Ashanty nodded. “I’m in this program for teen mothers. I have a little boy and they have a day care right there at the school.”
The other kids chimed in, and I was surprised at the range of educational opportunities available, from programs like Ashanty’s to parochial schools, technical schools, work-study programs and pre-college academies.
When we finished eating, Yudame announced that the kids were going to play volleyball. As they stood up, I asked, “Ka’Tar, can I talk to you before you leave?”
He looked suspicious, like he had done something wrong but didn’t realize it yet. He shuffled over to where Lili and I stood under the shade of a maple tree. “D’you have a half-brother named DeAndre?” I asked, deliberately trying to keep my tense vague in case I was right—and in case the boy didn’t know that DeAndre was dead.
“True dat,” he said, lowering his head and scuffing at the dirt with the toe of one shoe. “He the reason why I came here. He tole me about it.” Then he looked up at me, suspicious. “How you know about DeAndre? He dead.”
Up close, I saw that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand were fused together. I didn’t think it was right to tell him that my dog had discovered his half-brother’s body. “I never met him. But I know Shenetta. She was here in Leighville yesterday. Maybe she and Jamarcus are going to move down here.”
“
Shenetta good people,” he said. “DeAndre always said so.”
“Yeah, she is,” I said. “Well, I don’t want to keep you from volleyball.”
“’S all right,” he said. “They always pick me last, cause of my hand.” He held it up. “DeAndre, he always saying he gonna get the money to get me fixed up.”
My heart felt like it was going to break. I barely knew the kid, but I could see the hurt and disappointment playing on his face. He turned away from us and shuffled toward the volleyball net.
Lili put her hand on my upper arm. “You can’t fix the world,” she said.
“He’s not the world. He’s just one kid.”
“I know. And I’m sure he’s had a tough life. But at least he’s here for the week, and maybe he can see something better in the future.”
She took my hand and squeezed, and we walked back to where we had parked. “I should work on my program for the kids,” she said, when we reached my car. “I can’t believe I signed up to teach every day.” She shook her head. “What was I thinking?”
“You were thinking that you wanted to do some good for these kids,” I said.
I drove back to her apartment. “You’d better go home and get your class planned,” she said, when I pulled up in front of the building. She leaned over and kissed me, and then hopped out of the car. “Now go take care of your dog,” she said.
21 – A Need to be Educated
Back at River Bend, Rochester was sitting up in his crate watching the courtyard when I walked up, and began his pyrotechnics as soon as he saw me. I fed him and took him for a walk, then tried to focus on a game to help the CC kids learn about college.
I hadn’t found any mention of higher education in the books so far, though I assumed that kids in the capital would have that opportunity. So I focused on the game itself in the first book. I thought I could assign them each a character, and then ask them to write a message to another character, providing some piece of important information.