Under the Sea

by Mark Leidner

  It felt like Candace and I were really in love that year. Whenever I thought about her, my stomach kinked up in that terrible, exciting way that it does when there’s so much you want to say to someone, but can’t, or don’t know how to in a way that would do it justice, or are maybe afraid of ruining whatever it is by putting it into words and making it official.

  But I remember that feeling completely unknotting, unkinking, whenever we were playing Charlotte’s Web. During that fantasy, I felt profoundly alive and free, like I had everything anyone could ever want in life.

  1ST GRADE

  MRS. VINCENNES WAS MOUSY AND wore thick glasses. She was all business, one of those teachers who showed affection so sparingly that, when it happened, you knew it really meant something.

  She had more trouble with students because not everyone loved her. She would bust your balls, and she didn’t think anything anybody did was cute. It wasn’t about cuteness for her. It was about education. I respected the fuck out of Mrs. Vincennes.

  In this class, I was in love with Jenny Meachum. Jenny was pretty, blonde, quiet, and smart. We were the two smartest in the class. The problem was, she was in love with Scotty Dillard, who was my best friend. Scotty was not as smart as me, but he was cuter and he had a gold chain.

  When I told Scotty I liked Jenny, he shrugged and said, “Yeah, me too.” He was tying his shoe and didn’t even look up. I watched the cross on his chain swinging back and forth above his laces until he finished and stood.

  Soon they were together, Jenny and Scotty, and I was miserable, because I loved Jenny because she was so smart and pretty. I would see her and Scotty laughing, passing notes, and my stomach would tighten, and my heart would hurt, and I’d feel like a hideous loser, a failure, a fraud in my own skin. Scotty and Jenny were neither cruel nor unobservant, though, so it wasn’t that long before they proposed something.

  Cassidy Lastinger was Jenny’s best friend, and Cassidy Lastinger had decided she might like me. Maybe me and Cassidy Lastinger could go with each other?

  SOON ENOUGH, ALL FOUR OF us were hanging out at P.E., and to be honest, I didn’t think Cassidy Lastinger was all that great. She had curly hair and spaces between her teeth. Whereas Jenny’s smile was understated and aristocratic, Cassidy’s was unselfconsciously out of control, vaudevillian even. There was something unbridled about her laughter, too. I decided to give her a shot, though, despite my own suspicions that, deep down, I was only using her to get closer to Jenny.

  Cassidy, Jenny, Scotty, and I would walk the playground playing games I don’t remember the rules of anymore. Perhaps that was because these games always felt forced and dull, and perhaps they felt that way because we had to come up with activities that appealed to all four of us. I suppose I was learning the real value of intimacy, and that the sort I’d shared with Candace Fisher in kindergarten was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to recapture. I did feel my tolerance of Cassidy Lastinger, though, burgeoning into respect, if not affection. For instance, after every math and handwriting test, Jenny, Scotty, Cassidy, and I would compare the results to see who had the highest grade. Despite hers always being the lowest, she never shied away from the competition. After seeing she’d been beaten yet again, Cassidy would just shrug and say something wry and self-deprecating like, “Guess I should’ve studied, huh.” She seemed to be above the academic rat race with which we were obsessed, and I wondered more than once what, if anything, Cassidy Lastinger knew that we didn’t.

  Of everything on the playground, Cassidy loved the monkey bars the most, and she was better at them than me. The more I got to know Cassidy, the more I wanted to have a crush on her instead of Jenny, but it was futile. Jenny’s smile took me away to somewhere magical, while Cassidy’s seemed to be merely real. I was insanely jealous of Scotty, and I sometimes wished he’d get sick and miss school, or that his parents would get a divorce so one of them would move to Florida and he’d have to go with them so I could have Jenny for myself. Scotty was clueless as to these dark wishes. And he never went anywhere. Mrs. Vincennes observed all of these proceedings with such a well-practiced detachment that it gave me the feeling that she was actually always listening and watching—and with greater attention than anyone had the capacity to realize—kind of like God.

  Every day I found myself feeling more and more guilty about not being honest with Cassidy. Eventually I told her we had to break up. I really liked her, but I was in love with Jenny, and it was wrong to go with someone when you were in love with their best friend the whole time. Cassidy Lastinger took it badly. She told me the first-grade equivalent of “You’re a fucking idiot. You wouldn’t know love if it bit you on the ass. You’re gonna live to regret this. You’re gonna be alone for a long, long time.”

  2ND GRADE

  I WAS SINGLE THE WHOLE year, and my teacher, Miss Dumas, was the first unmarried teacher I’d ever had. Miss Dumas was kind of ditsy, kind of a bombshell. She wore purple lipstick and reapplied it after lunch every day. It grossed me out, but at the same time I found the ritual mesmerizing and I couldn’t peel my eyes away. She had an enormous bosom. This was also the first time one of my classrooms had a paraprofessional, the term our school district uses for a teacher-in-training in the classroom. So, Miss Dumas was always trailed by the extremely tall and stern Mrs. Blackshear. Whereas Miss Dumas wore billowing dresses of patterned pastels, or every once in a while, jeans that showcased her curves—Mrs. Blackshear only wore stonewashed jeans with a tucked-in silk blouse and a tight vest with a western frill. She was also the first person I’d ever seen with a tattoo—a small snake curled around a sword on her forearm. It was rare to see it, and so I was always looking for it. Mrs. Blackshear was Miss Dumas’ enforcer. There was a really gross, wild girl in the class named Tiffany Simmons who could whistle by putting her tongue up to her nose and blowing upward really hard. It was a really loud, extremely annoying, bizarre-looking way to whistle, and I was secretly always trying to mimic it.

  Tiffany got made fun of a lot for her body and clothes, like having boogers visible in her nose, or getting caught digging her underwear out of her crack, or having bugs in her hair. She was sort of like the second-grade equivalent of a hippie, but she was self-aware and fairly fearless. For instance, if someone made fun of her for picking her nose, she wouldn’t just run away (which is what I would’ve done), she’d try to wipe it on them. One time this kid Rawls pushed her, and instead of pushing him back, Tiffany tried to lick him.

  This didn’t always work to protect her from humiliation. She was often crying, snot-streaked, and alone in a corner of the playground, wondering aloud why everyone hated her.

  From a distance, I admired her as any spineless worm admires any iconoclast. I never stood up for her, and I never befriended her. Had it been Nazi Germany, Tiffany would’ve been one of the innocents ripped from their homes in the middle of the night and “relocated” without explanation, and I would’ve been one of the ones watching from some upstairs window, wringing their hands and feeling horrible, but not lifting a finger to stop it. I was a real piece of shit back then, and when I look back now and try to figure out why, I never reach a satisfactory resolution. One answer might have been that I was reeling from the Jenny and Cassidy debacle. To be sure, I missed both terribly, and Cassidy Lastinger’s parting words still echoed hauntingly in my mind. But I don’t wholly accept this rationale, as it seems to me like I’m trying to let myself off the hook for being a coward. There’s nothing more disgusting and cliché than a man who blames his defects of character on some past heartbreak, is there?

  Truthfully, I suspect that even if I and Jenny had been together in first grade, I still wouldn’t have reached out to Tiffany Simmons in second. But why not? How can I see that something is the right thing to do, but not do it? I remember thinking that repeatedly during that year.

  I don’t know why everyone picked on her so badly, either. She was actually kind of cute. Her clothes were dirty, sure, but, back in those days, who
se weren’t? After all, this was James T. Bumblefuck Elementary, not Harvard University. Were we so backward that Tiffany’s smidgen of imagination made us too painfully aware of ourselves as the rubes we were? God only knows what happened to her. I never saw her after second grade.

  One day out in the hall after lunch I was standing against the wall, waiting for the bathroom, and when no one was watching, I tried to touch the tip of my tongue to my nose and blow as hard as I could. I tried for a long time, and then, right as Mrs. Blackshear swept past in her swishy vest and stonewashed jeans, the whistle inexplicably worked.

  It was like a loud and beautiful birdcall. It pierced the corridors of the school, yet sounded faintly sad, like a whale song. Mrs. Blackshear whipped to me without batting an eyelash and spat acidly, “Tongue in your mouth, young’un.”

  Thinking about this later, I found it perplexing that Mrs. Blackshear’s reprimand had focused on my tongue being out of my mouth, and had not at all addressed the disruptive sound I’d made.

  More importantly, whenever I’ve tried to make that sound since, it’s never worked. That was the only time it ever happened. Tiffany Simmons, on the other hand, whistled like that every day. Now it’s been so long since I’ve heard it, I’m not even sure I remember it right. Maybe I’ll never hear it again.

  3RD GRADE

  MRS. RAY HAD BIG EYES and big hair and looked like a shell-shocked war veteran. Every morning when we filed into her classroom, she looked up at us like we were aliens, like she had no idea how she’d gotten here to be teaching these particular human beings. Third grade was also my introduction to the cool kids at my school, who’d thus far never been in any of my classes. I think this might’ve been the first year they tracked students by test scores and shoved high-scorers into certain rooms and low-scorers into others. Whereas before, randomized classroom rosters tended to promote social parity by forcing clean, rich kids to learn alongside dirty, poor ones, which kept all alliances more or less loose—now all the rich kids were clustered in a few rooms, and powerful cliques with non-porous borders began to form.

  Some of the cool kids were: Richie Myers, the third-grade equivalent of Hercules (backwards hat), Nessa (short for Vanessa) Evans, the stylish dresser with dyed blonde hair, and Cody Jones, who was skinny, sly, smart, and wealthy, and who was the first person in our school to wear sunglasses at recess. Also, in this class were Scotty and Jenny, all the way back from first grade. Scotty wore the same gold chain he always had, but he’d plumped up, and now it looked tiny around his thick neck. He was no longer anywhere near alpha-dog, and Jenny had suffered a case of early-onset acne, and had gotten wispy, and, I’m ashamed to say, poorer-looking, especially compared to Richie, Nessa, and Cody. Most likely, Jenny had always been poor, but in first grade I’d just been too naive or infatuated to notice. Now when I looked at her, instead of seeing her face and feeling butterflies, I saw only her poverty and felt only pity. I wondered why before I hadn’t seen it. What had even made me aware that such a category as “rich” or “poor” existed?

  And if you think I was happy in the slightest to see Jenny knocked off the pedestal she once so effortlessly occupied in my mind, you’ve got me all wrong. I was sad for her and Scotty and bore no ill will toward them whatsoever. In a weird way, I felt guilty, like I’d surpassed them, and not because of anything I’d done. It was only dumb luck. I’d won a lottery none of us were even aware that any of us were playing, simply by not yet having suffered the indignities of poverty, acne, or any of the other ravages of age. I was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as they say. Neither cool nor excluded from coolness, I lived resolutely in the middle.

  Anyway, Mrs. Ray, poor woman, was cognitively absent the entire year. I remember one day she got really angry at us for something, but no one could figure out what we’d done. Then later at recess Cody called her, casually, “Crazy Ray,” and everyone laughed. I laughed too, but then felt bad for laughing. Not because I didn’t think it was funny—it was because it was true—but because I hadn’t thought of it. I think that moment is when it began to dawn on me that my envy of Cody wasn’t just casual. It was primal. I didn’t understand why, but it bordered on actual hatred. And I would be lying if I said it didn’t frighten me.

  There were no girls in third grade that I was in love with that I remember. Nessa Evans, with her leopard-print backpack and high-tops with blinking lights, was practically incomprehensible to my simplistic perception of aesthetics. Plus, what would happen in fourth grade was so emotionally epic that I might’ve had hundreds of girlfriends in third grade and not remembered any of them, the way no one remembers who they talked to on the phone a week before Kennedy was assassinated, or what they had for dinner the night before 9/11, even though, for all they know, it might’ve been the most amazing phone call or meal of their lives.

  4TH GRADE

  IMAGINE A MORE SOFT-SPOKEN MARILYN Monroe. That was Miss Forrester, and I was in love with her. She was nice and smart and was always happy to talk to any of her students. Most importantly, by some insane stroke of luck, I was her teacher’s pet—a distinction I’d never enjoyed before. It wasn’t without its disadvantages, of course. People made fun of me for it, but similar to when I was playing Charlotte’s Web with Candace, it felt so gratifying to fill the role of pet that I was emotionally immune to any embarrassment from it.

  Then, halfway through the year, Miss Forrester’s boyfriend, a sheriff’s deputy named Officer Alton whose cruiser was sometimes parked beside the school, proposed. Miss Forrester’s stapler was labeled with white masking tape and FORRESTER was written on the tape in Magic Marker, and as a joke, the teacher next door, the mean and shrill Mrs. Templeton, who we could hear shouting at her kids through the cinderblock walls, stormed into our room and tore the old masking tape off the stapler and balled it up and threw it at Miss Forrester, who just looked confused and offended. Before Miss Forrester could do anything, Mrs. Templeton peeled a strip of fresh masking tape from the roller and smoothed it onto the stapler and wrote TAYLOR on it with new Magic Marker, and then Miss Forrester understood, and the two of them laughed uncomfortably. I don’t think they were friends. When Mrs. Templeton left, Miss Forrester explained to us the joke: Officer Alton’s last name was Taylor, and that soon she herself would be Mrs. Taylor, not Miss Forrester.

  There was nothing inherently frightening about the transformation of my favorite teacher’s name; after all, she was still the same person who doted on me and called on me and listened to me and whose angelic face and melodic voice made learning about long division and earth science and world capitals almost narcotic. But how quickly a Forrester could become a Taylor—that planted within me a seed of unease.

  I avoided discussing it with my girlfriend at the time, who was none other than the incredibly brilliant, vivacious, and irresistible Cassidy Lastinger. That’s right, the one from first grade whose heart I’d broken and who, within the first few weeks of fourth grade, had taken me back. Her teeth had filled in, her smile was now kinetic, and her laughter was somehow even louder and freer. In a way, she reminded me of the tongue-whistler, Tiffany Simmons, only more in control of her social image, and comfortable moving among every clique. Of course, I never told Cassidy about Tiffany, but in my mind it was as if Tiffany Simmons had been a kind of prototype—a novel innovation too unique to function—and Cassidy Lastinger was somehow its second-generation fulfillment: cuteness, confidence, imagination, and popularity all rolled into one. That we had a history together gave me an in, and so I worked it.

  Cassidy and I passed notes back and forth constantly. In them we covered topics as far ranging as the subjects we studied, the other people in our class, and how cute we thought each other were, which was very. My main male friend that year was a guy named Sam Washington, a really skinny dude who was equally athletic and charismatic. He was poor, but he was a cut-up, and he ruled the field when we threw the football at P.E. Mine and Sam’s alliance formed naturally and yet offered key strategic adva
ntages. His status as class clown took the edge off mine as teacher’s pet, and mine as teacher’s pet probably saved him a lot of grief from Miss Forrester/Mrs. Taylor.

  Rawls was also in our class (the same kid who bullied Tiffany back in the day) who everyone hated. I always felt like I was in charge of the class, and had a responsibility to be nice to everyone. Just to give you an idea of how sad Rawls’ situation was, he’d spray-paint his shoes white every few months instead of buying the new ones he needed. But I told him they looked cool and that I wished I had a pair. He seemed to appreciate it, even though I knew he didn’t believe me.

  If second and third grade were characterized by fear and cynicism, partially due to my dawning awareness of competition and tension between different socioeconomic classes, and partially due to the aftershocks of first grade’s heartache, fourth grade was, comparatively, a utopia. Even Nessa Evans, who was also in our class, smiled with admiration whenever I said something even mediocrely clever, which was the maximum level of cleverness of which I was then capable. I knew I was too good, or perhaps too boring, to actually interest her, but that didn’t make her attention feel any less satisfying. Under the paradigm of this low bar, I thrived, raking in attention from Nessa, Miss Forrester/Mrs. Taylor, and of course, Cassidy Lastinger. And I had Sam Washington as my best friend. And I even looked out for hard-luck kids like Rawls. Everything was perfect, and the fantasy that I had achieved a universally satisfactory resolution in the intertwined narratives of my private and social senses of self was so engrossing and bolstering to my self-esteem, that I had no reason to question whether it was real, or wonder whether I deserved it, or imagine that it could ever change.

  A week or two after Miss Forrester completed her metamorphosis into Mrs. Taylor, Cody Jones transferred in from Mrs. Templeton’s. He had apparently been in the wrong class the whole time, and now he was in ours. When he walked in the classroom, all the girls practically gasped. Then the boys saw his shoes, and they did too. He would’ve been an impressive enough specimen in any footwear, but he was wearing those new kinds of shoes that you could pump air into by pressing a button on the tongue. He was the first person in our school to have them. There was a poster on the wall behind Mrs. Taylor’s desk that featured a big cartoon heart with a smile on its face, reaching forward with a white-gloved hand and giving a huge thumbs up with the caption “You can do it!” This poster had always made me happy. I truly believed it. But when Cody Jones walked in, I turned back to look at it, and it seemed insipid.