by Sarah Bannan
The dates were never really established, though, that’s what we talked about later: nobody knew if she’d stolen anyone from anybody. And Andrew and Shane stayed quiet and nobody ever blamed them. It was just between us girls.
Andrew explained later that he was just trying to be there for her, he was trying to listen, to help her fit in. He felt sorry for Carolyn after the thing with the hospital and after all the crap with Shane. We stopped seeing Carolyn with Taylor and Tiffany and all those after cheerleading practice, didn’t see them linking arms in the courtyard. We saw Taylor brush by Carolyn in the halls: she either didn’t notice her or wasn’t speaking to her. We assumed it was the former. Over Christmas break, Taylor was seen with Gemma in Sonic on the weekends and, when we got back to school, Taylor was hanging out with her at the water fountain before the first bell rang. We guessed things were back to normal.
Andrew never dumped Gemma, never actually broke up with her, not as far as we knew: he just stopped calling her, stopped meeting her after school. Maybe he thought the thing on Facebook meant they were over, maybe they were never as serious as we thought. In any case, Christmas break was good for that kind of thing – you didn’t see people for a while and, if you wanted to, you could ignore someone, or at least phase them out. It sucked but it happened.
Gemma, like all the other girls in our class, was already thinking about college. Sororities, mostly. “If you’re a junior, and you have a senior boyfriend, you’re, like, automatically a Tri Delt or a Phi Mu.” She would tell people this at lunch, or in the halls, or in the parking lot after church. And we’d squint our eyes a little, unsure if this were really true, not exactly sure how this could matter. And then she’d continue: “I mean, as long as you’re together the next year. Then you can go to the frat parties on the weekends and you meet all the girls and you’re, like, an automatic in.” She’d smile, satisfied with herself that she’d satisfied us. And then she’d finish up, her eyes bright and excited: “Andrew’s undecided between Auburn and Alabama.” We thought she was kind of deranged.
She got carried away, people said later, was too caught up in the future to see what was right in front of her nose. That Andrew Wright had a major thing for Carolyn Lessing. Now Gemma Davies’s reputation was tarnished – she’d been dumped by a senior – and it didn’t look like she’d be going to any frat parties at Auburn in the fall. And, for that reason, and maybe because she actually liked Andrew at least a little, she was pissed.
In January, Carolyn was working on a major art project – a series of paintings and prints – and that was the official story for why she was in the art room every night until late. Andrew probably wasn’t meant to be there, but maybe because he was such a good student, people turned a blind eye. Or maybe Mr Ferris just had a soft spot for Carolyn. We didn’t know.
Mr Ferris taught Art along with Trig, and he told everybody how talented Carolyn was, that he thought there was some connection between her skills as an artist and her aptitude for Math. “She became extremely focused during the second semester,” he told people later. “And we put up the work in the halls as kind of a treat – a reward. I thought it would be nice for her to have an exhibition.” And then he would sigh. “I’m not sure if it was wise, in retrospect.”
The exhibition went up in the halls of the new English building – there were thirteen pieces and there was even a photograph of Carolyn with an “artist’s statement” at the entrance. Like a real museum or a gallery. At first, people were really impressed with the work – they were half paintings and half collages and really cool, up close and far away. They were made with maps and magazine and newspaper clippings and all sorts of things that had been painted over and enhanced and enlarged. Some of them had photographs in them – and if you looked closely enough, you could see her eyes in a couple of them. They were weird but cool. We didn’t know anything about art, not really, but they weren’t anything we thought we could ever make. People said it was a little conceited – some people even said she had forced Mr Ferris to put them up – but they were still good, no matter what you really thought of her.
The colors were pretty much the same in all of them: lots of red and blue and purple. And lots of white. Most of them were shapes, squares and circles and parallelograms and triangles, but all mixed up and layered on top of each other. Over the shapes she’d pasted the clippings, and they were painted over again and again, and in her little description she said she used nail polish and Wite-Out to make those stick. There were pictures of models’ bodies and Barbie dolls and captions like “10 Ways to Make Him . . .” and she’d cut off the end, we guessed ’cause it was too dirty for school. On some of the canvases, underneath the models and the lines from Cosmopolitan, she pasted pages from textbooks or dictionaries or something: long words with definitions. We weren’t sure we understood them – the clippings or the definitions or the paintings. But we knew they were good, even if we didn’t know why.
The work was up for a week – toward the end of January – before one of them was slashed, a big gaping hole in the center of the canvas. Somebody took a staple gun to the three that had the photographs of her eyes. And somebody wrote “WHORE” in red Sharpie over one of the plainer prints. And the photograph of Carolyn was completely mangled – we never saw that one for ourselves, but the paper said somebody had put “something phallic” right next to her face. Mr Ferris took the whole exhibition down within the day. Nobody ever got caught.
Chapter 20
Nicole Willis had a pool in her backyard and her dad had just installed some kind of heater which meant they could have pool parties twelve months a year. The Saturday after our first week back after break, Nicole’s parents went to Moulton for some work thing of her dad’s. So she had a party at her house and Carolyn was there.
Nicole told us to get there early. We pre-gamed before people arrived: some Jell-O shots and purple Kool-Aid made with water and Smirnoff. People arrived in twos and threes and fours and then in gangs of more than we could count. We stayed in the kitchen, mostly, sipping and laughing and watching and waiting for the cool people to arrive.
Gemma and Brooke came with Taylor Lyon and Tiffany Port. As they walked out of the kitchen and onto the porch, Jessica turned to us: “Look! The whole gang is back together again.” And we laughed. We followed them out there later, and they stood around, sharing one cigarette between the four of them, looking bored then happy then bored again. They talked really low and they looked over at Carolyn and we couldn’t hear what they said, but we guessed and Jessica acted out a dialogue and we laughed. Shane walked over to them every ten minutes or so, to put his arm around Brooke, kiss her on the cheek or the shoulder. She would whisper into his ear and she would laugh. Then he’d look around.
We’d seen them all at church earlier – a youth group meeting to prepare for our next youth service – and Gemma had picked out the psalm she was going to read – something about enemies not shouting in triumph over them – and Brooke begged Dave Dillon to let her read that Corinthians one about love and being patient and everything. Taylor and Tiffany had picked out a song they wanted to sing – Alan Jackson’s “A Woman’s Love” – but with Jesus in it instead.
Carolyn stood close to Andrew and, at first, nobody really noticed if she was drinking or not. She was wearing some old tank top and it was white and thin, like something your dad would wear. People would say later that her clothes were amazing and vintage – she was a hipster, boho, original. But at that time, people had started to say she was a freak: freaky clothes, freaky stare. Even band kids were making fun of her.
As it got later, Brooke kept calling Andrew over to them. He pretended like he couldn’t hear her. This encouraged her, we guessed, or annoyed her, because she kept calling his name, every three or four minutes. He put his arm around Carolyn and moved them away. Then Brooke and Gemma and Taylor and Tiffany, and sometimes Shane, they’d move over closer again. It would get on anybody’s nerves. Andrew looked freaked. Caro
lyn smiled.
Later, we wondered if it was because of Brooke and them that Carolyn started to drink so much as the night went on, that she started to pour everything back so fast. She drank shots and bottles of High Life and she went inside and she played flip cup and was terrible. She swayed a lot and she looked like she might cry. Later on, she told jokes, we heard, and was doing impressions of Miss Simpson and Mr Overton.
“She could do the accent perfect.”
“Yeah, she was good at that.”
When somebody asked her about the exhibition, she rolled her eyes and said she didn’t care. “I’m no stranger to controversy,” she laughed. And people should have thought this made her a good sport. Instead they called her pathetic.
People got in the pool when it was late – the girls in their bras and panties, the guys in their boxers. We stayed on the deck. Andrew Wright sat on the steps in the shallow end, Carolyn right below him, both of them stripped down. The pool lights lit up the water – you could see the moisturizer swirling off the girls’ legs, the hair gel gathering at the surface. People splashed and played Marco Polo and the boys did cannonballs – and we tried not to get our hair wet.
“Marco.”
“Polo.”
“Fish Out of Water?”
A splash. Swimming hard now. Laughter. Yelling. Brad Paisley playing. Lights flashing as a body swam past the pool’s lights.
“MARCO!!!”
“POLO!!!!”
“Fish Out of Water?”
“NO!”
They were playing and laughing and pushing. Blake Wyatt did a flip and nearly cracked his skull. Tiffany Port got pushed in, wearing a peach t-shirt and no bra. The girls screamed every time they were splashed, the guys tried to make waves with an inflatable alligator. They were having fun. And they were all so busy splashing and swimming that they almost didn’t notice Carolyn, her head between Andrew’s legs, his eyes closed, mouth open. We almost didn’t either.
We looked over to Shane. He was standing with Adam Simmons and Dylan Hall, head-butting each other or something. Brooke walked over to him and pointed to the pool. His face went blank and then he laughed. He went inside, like, two minutes later. We heard he left shortly after that. We only thought later about how he might have felt about the whole thing. We guessed it must have pissed him off. Shane was so good-looking, so popular, so certain, you never thought that he could get jealous or pissy. When we asked him about it in school on Monday, he told us: “She can do whatever the hell she wants.” And we believed him at first. But not in the end.
People talked about the thing in the pool for weeks, and it went round and round on Facebook; we texted each other updates about what had happened. A few photos went up on Instagram, all hazy and hipster, and people tagged Carolyn and then Andrew, but the pictures there were all PG. People had to make up the rest. At first it was just a blow job, then it was full-on sex, and then that she took it from behind later that night. This seemed unlikely, we all agreed, but Tiffany and Taylor and all of the other cheerleaders whispered it was true, and people believed them. “Andrew is so sweet,” people said. “Sweeter than Shane.” And then: “Poor Gemma.” But we had seen Gemma making out with Jason Nelson a couple of weeks earlier, outside the mall, after he had gotten off his shift at Abercrombie. We hadn’t told anybody – nobody wanted to hear bad things about her – and it might have changed things, we thought, if people knew. But we didn’t say anything, and neither did Andrew, even though we found out later he must have known. And the chatter got louder and louder and the texts came more and more often. She should really have quit while she was ahead. Carolyn, that is.
Honors English – Miss Simpson
Carolyn Lessing
29 January 2011
Catcher in the Rye: Interview about high-school life
Assignment: I know that it often seems as though adults forget that they were once teenagers, attended high school and had experiences similar to what you are going through today. Now is your opportunity to lead an adult (this can be a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, family friend) down Memory Lane and see what high school was like “back in the day.”
Your assignment is to interview one such person and write a narrative account about what you learned. Ideally, the interview should be conducted in person.
Once you have completed the interview process you will then write a narrative about that person, which will include the following:
1. why you chose to interview this particular person;
2. a physical description of the person you interviewed;
3. a description of the setting of the interview;
4. detailed examples of what life was like for your interviewee in high school;
5. an account of what the interviewee thought of Catcher in the Rye;
6. actual quotes from the person you interviewed (at least 3);
7. a final paragraph that includes a reflection of what you learned from doing the interview and how, if at all, this relates to Catcher in the Rye.
(Handwritten at top of assignment: While I had hoped to conduct this interview in person, my father’s trip to Adamsville was canceled at the last minute. As I had already prepared the questions, I thought it would be better to carry on with my original interviewee.)
For this assignment, I interviewed my father (Jerome Hadden), whom I spoke to over Skype. I interviewed my dad to find out what high school was like for him and whether or not Catcher in the Rye was a book that he read and whether it was important to him. Additionally, I sought to find out if high school was different for him than it is for me. I chose my father because he is the adult I find the easiest to relate to and the adult I have learned the most from, particularly in terms of politics and culture, over the past years.
My father’s apartment is in Brooklyn, and he lives in a diverse and vibrant neighborhood, in a studio apartment above an Indian restaurant. Even when I am Skyping my father, I feel that I can smell the scents of curry wafting from his apartment through my computer. The apartment is small and cozy, and is all one room, with a separate bathroom. When I’m in the apartment, I’m struck by how little space one really actually needs and how excessively large our home is in Alabama. My father keeps his life very simple, which is important to his writing, and he does not have a television. Before he and my mother divorced, we lived in a large house all together, but Dad prefers a smaller place now that he’s on his own.
I interviewed my father on a Thursday evening, at around 8 p.m. my time, 9 p.m. his time. Dad sat in a vintage leather armchair with his computer in front of him. He was wearing a blue t-shirt and his favorite corduroy blazer, which he has had since I was little. My dad is fifty years old and has thick, silver hair and dark, bushy eyebrows. He wears reading glasses most of the time, and is skinny and not very tall. As we chatted, I could see a large bookcase behind him, and the shelves were bent because his books are so heavy and there are so many of them. I interviewed Dad from my bedroom, at my desk, and I was wearing my purple fleece onesie. While I interviewed Dad, I drank a Diet Coke and Dad sipped a glass of red wine. Even though I could see him on the screen and talk to him, I felt really far away from his life in New York. Alabama is a million miles away from my old life.
My father was in high school from 1974 to 1978. He went to a public high school in Newburgh, New York. Dad was a strong athlete and was on the golf team, the swim team and the baseball team. Sports were a very important part of school life in Newburgh, as were academics. Even though he enjoyed school, he says that teachers were generally much stricter then than they are now, and that kids were not encouraged to be individuals. “We memorized huge amounts of material and were never expected, or encouraged, to be creative or write things like essays. Tests were very formulaic. If you grew your hair too long, or if you wore something too outlandish, you would be punished or even suspended.”
Dad said that he wore bell-bottoms and a blazer when he wanted to dres
s up, and that during his senior year, he tried to emulate the look of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Later, he emailed me some pictures of him and his date before his senior prom. He wore a burgundy velour blazer, burgundy bow tie and burgundy bell-bottoms, along with a pale blue shirt with a wide collar and a pair of white boots. His date wore a long blue check dress and a pair of blue platform boots. He said that dancing was important and that he and his friends would practice before prom so that they could show off their “moves.” He and his friends were allowed to drink when they were eighteen years old (as opposed to twenty-one for us) and he also said that smoking pot was fairly common. He said he didn’t know anybody who did any other drugs at that time, and that most of his friends were pretty “tame.”
Dad said that he feels my generation has more freedom than his did, and more self-confidence. Now, when we go to school, teachers are more concerned with students being happy and being well-rounded, whereas his teachers were more concerned with what colleges the kids would get into. When Dad told his teachers that he wanted to be a writer, they told him to get a teaching degree because being a novelist was not a real “profession.” He says that nowadays teachers seem to encourage students to pursue their dreams. I’m not sure that this is really the case, but I’m not sure if that’s the point of this assignment either.
Unsurprisingly, Dad’s favorite subject in school was English (the same as me) and his teacher, Mrs Healey, had very good taste in books and led interesting and exciting discussions about the things that they read. “We often read books that were unusual, or that you wouldn’t expect to read in school,” he said. “And Mrs Healey allowed us to write reports on anything that we were interested in, including mysteries and comic books.” Dad told me that this was the first time he had been encouraged to read for pleasure and that that stayed with him for life.