A Place to Live

by Jean-Philippe Blondel

  Single Voice

  Jean-Philippe Blondel

  A Place

  to Live

  annick press

  toronto + new york + vancouver

  It’s all because of the new principal, Mr. Langley—tall and thin as a rake.

  Because of his speeches.

  Because of his way of stressing all the negative words when he talks: do not, forbidden, never, no one.

  Because of the way they all looked at him—like sheep. Moist eyes, glazed-over expressions. Obedient. Tamed. It ate me up.

  But I never talked about it to anyone.

  But then, I don’t talk about much to anyone—except for Evan, sometimes. Maybe that’s why people at school like me: I’m a guy without baggage. I haven’t failed or skipped a grade; I’m not good or bad; I’m not the best student or the worst. I’m just in the middle. I get invited to parties, and I go once in a while. I let people copy my homework and don’t ask for anything in return. I stay cool. I moved here from the other side of the country last year, near the end of the semester—my dad got a job transfer—so no one really knows me yet. But they like me. Girls have started to hang around me. They’re nice to me. They say I understand them. They’ve convinced themselves that I’m sensitive, even though they have no reason to think that. I never reveal anything. I know how to keep my mouth shut. And how to observe people. That’s what I like most of all—observing.

  I watch women in the street get angry when their husbands aren’t listening to them. I see the disappointed faces of mothers whose children don’t need them anymore. I notice how guys and girls try to get each other’s attention when spring is coming—shorter skirts, tighter pants, thin T-shirts showing off muscles. I can spend hours just watching the world.

  My mother always nagged me about it when I was younger. “Stop daydreaming,” she’d say. It was like her motto. My mother thinks you should always be doing something. Because my dad’s at work all the time, she complains that she has to work twice as hard—first at the office, then at home. Obviously, it’s not true—not for the last few years, anyway, because I help her out a lot. But she’ll never admit it. She really loves to complain. Complaining makes her feel alive.

  My mom’s a secretary. At the beginning of my first year in junior high, she told me the teachers would need to get information about our family, and I’d have to fill out some forms. “On the forms, there’ll be a spot where it asks about your parents’ profession,” she said, and then she told me it was very important to put down that she was an executive secretary.

  My mother has never been an executive secretary.

  She’s tried hard enough, though.

  Once, on a job interview, she even tried to pass herself off as trilingual—English, French, and German—even though she can’t say two words in a foreign language without laughing.

  But, as she never stops repeating, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  My mom is a cliché factory.

  She just slides them onto the end of every sentence, effortlessly. It’s like they wait in her mouth, hiding, and at the last moment they spring on her helpless victim: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. April showers bring May flowers.

  Except right now, it’s April and there aren’t any showers. And life is too complicated for clichés.

  For two weeks now, it’s been really warm. Abnormally warm for April—though who knows what normal is anymore. On the radio, they go on and on about seasonal norms, but what does that mean? Most of us just try to enjoy the weather while it lasts, without thinking too much about what it means. We live for the moment, even though we know the planet is being destroyed and, sooner or later, we’ll have to deal with it.

  I’m sixteen.

  I’m in my last year of school.

  In sixteen years times three, the scientists say, Earth will be a very different place. The planet we know today will be just a distant memory.

  I already miss it.

  Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I imagine myself in three or four decades. Shut up inside a stifling house, unable to go outside because of the brutal heat of the sun. I’m lying on a dirty mattress, waiting for darkness to bring relief. When night falls, the humans go outside. They breathe in the air. They kiss and make love and fight. Sometimes they kill each other. Human contact has become urgent. I spend all day lying in bed, flipping through the novels I’ve rescued from people who don’t want them—people who say books are frivolous, who say now that we have science, we don’t need fiction.

  I daydream.

  And my mother’s not there to reprimand me.

  My mother is lying under a tombstone that she had inscribed to read Executive Secretary.

  I got into books early.

  Or more like I was pushed into them.

  By my mother’s constant busyness and my father’s absence. By their need to be alone together whenever they had time.

  I figured it out quickly—what they wanted from me, most of all, was to “not get in the way” and to “play with friends my own age. ” I learned to keep a low profile. I also learned that reading helped. All of a sudden I could be someone else. Live another life. Or, even better, invent one.

  I thought about becoming a writer, but my grades in English weren’t too encouraging. A writer with red marks all over his papers, a writer who doesn’t know how to use the pluperfect or what a conjunction is or how to structure an essay—yeah, that would be impressive. Not to mention that my spelling isn’t great, either. At one of the parent-teacher interviews, the English teacher told me I should read more. Even my mom was surprised. She said,“But he never stops reading. ” And the teacher smiled and said, “No, I mean something besides comic books and manga. ”My mom nodded. So did I. What else was I supposed to do?

  I never read manga. I don’t read many comics.

  I tried—I just couldn’t get into them.

  So I quit books and went straight into movies.

  My mother didn’t notice much of a change, except in her wallet. Going to the movies is expensive. She asked me why I didn’t just rent movies. I shrugged. It’s not that hard to figure out—the sensation of walking into the theater, the whispers, the anticipation that in ten minutes, the world outside will disappear like magic—but she wouldn’t have understood. She thinks watching movies at home is so much more convenient, because you can press pause to go to the bathroom. And it’s so much more comfortable to be in your own home.

  Home, sweet home.

  The early bird gets the worm.

  Never say never.

  In the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.

  No, she doesn’t like that one.

  The principal wouldn’t like it either, no doubt.

  Spring is too hot; there are no April showers. And he can’t compete with spring. That puts him in a bad mood.

  He arrived in September. He’s an autumn kind of guy.

  I didn’t know the old principal. Apparently, he was a little old grandpa who quietly whiled away the hours until his retirement, trying to take it easy and showing his face as little as possible. The school functioned without him; the vice principals and teachers kept things running. Grandpa signed the report cards at the end of the term and fell asleep sometimes in staff meetings. Grandpa didn’t like conflict, either, so as soon as a parent would get mad about something, he’d give in. He’d say to his secretary that, in the end, there wasn’t much he could do. If a failing student was promoted to the next year even though he shouldn’t have been, it was really the parents’ problem, not the school’s. It wasn’t going to change the world. Then he’d close the door to his office and sit back down at his computer to play solitair
e. He loved his solitaire.

  I know all that because of Evan.

  Evan’s mom is one of the school’s vice principals. It’s not easy for him at school, but he deals with it. He says that it’s better than being the son of an undertaker or an arms dealer. Sometimes we make a list of jobs we don’t want to do when we’re older: slaughterhouse worker, fishmonger, telemarketer, guy who holds up the “applause” sign on TV shows. It’s way easier than thinking of jobs we actually want to do.

  Evan’s also one of our class reps—Evan and Marion. Everyone knew those two would be elected. Good students, responsible, not suck-ups. And they know how to speak in public without turning the color of a tomato, though they still blush just a little because they take it seriously. When a debate falls flat in English or history class, they’re always the ones to bring it back to life.

  For a while, everyone was betting they’d start dating. But nothing came of it. Marion’s seeing a guy who goes to another school, and Evan’s been single since he broke up with Lily.

  And ever since then, I’ve been seeing more of him. First, it was just because we had stuff to work on together. I was elected as the deputy representative. I’m supposed to replace him on student council meetings if he’s away sick—even though I know he’ll never be away sick.

  I was sitting in the desk behind him the day of the vote. At the start of class, he turned around, looked me in the eyes, and said, “You want to be a team?” I was so surprised—he had never really spoken to me before—that I said yes. My name and his. It was strange to see them together on the blackboard. And even stranger to see the votes piling up underneath them. Evan is really popular, and no one has a problem with me. We got elected in a landslide. When I walked out of class, I was still stunned. Everyone was patting me on the back, congratulating me, even though I knew I’d done nothing to deserve it. But, for the first time, I said to myself that maybe I really could enjoy it here. Maybe the school could be my anchor. Not just a place to go—a place to live.

  So Evan and I got together a few times, to talk about the candidates for the social committee and the plans to improve the school. We thought about starting a film club but realized right away that no one but us would be interested. That’s when we started having more serious conversations. Evan’s really into movies, too, but not the same ones as me. He likes American movies, and I’m into European and Asian ones. He likes action. I’m more contemplative.

  I like to daydream.

  I went to Evan’s place once, but I felt weird there. His house is right behind the school and it felt like I was at school on my day off. I couldn’t figure out how he could stand it.

  Evan and I may be friends, but I don’t know much about him.

  We’re not together all the time, and sometimes three or four days go by and we don’t talk except to say hi. I text message other people in my class way more often and I visit their blogs all the time. Evan’s more elusive. I know he has a blog, but he’s never given me the address. It’s not a big deal; that’s just the way he is. And anyway, I have no choice—it’s not like I have a lot of close friends.

  Evan never says anything about the new principal.

  Sometimes he criticizes the teachers or makes fun of the associate principal’s beer belly, but as for the principal—nothing. I mentioned it to him once. He raised his eyebrows. He said he had to watch what he said or else his mom could get in trouble. So he stuck with no comment—and that’s all he would say. It wasn’t the same thing with the teachers or the associate principal—they’re his mom’s colleagues. The principal is a boss. He’s the boss.

  I remember rolling my eyes when he told me that. I said, “What is this, the 1950s?”Evan said that nothing had really changed since then, had it? I thought about my father—always away from home, the nights he spent in motels with other sales reps, in some depressing town in the middle of nowhere. I thought about my mom and her obsession with being an executive secretary. I remember being jealous of Evan when we discussed economics and history in class because he always knew what he was talking about—he knew what he stood for. As for me, I wasn’t so sure. I knew I had a struggle—but I wasn’t sure if I had what it takes to win.

  At the time, I didn’t know I was so close to proving that I did. Or that all the actors were already there, under my nose. Under the April sun—the sun that was causing skirts to shorten and heads to turn. The sun that was driving the principal crazy—Charles Langley, fifty-six years old, the master of the house.

  The week before, he had given detention to two juniors for kissing “flagrantly” in the hall. On Tuesday, he sent a kid home just for wearing shorts, because pants should come down to the ankles… This is not a place where anything goes.

  And then yesterday—the last straw.

  Or maybe it was the first.

  The spark that lit the fire, anyway.

  The big speech.

  All the class reps and their deputies were there.

  I was sitting between Marion and Evan. Marion was frowning and fanning herself with her notebook. It was hot in the room. The sun burned through the windows. Evan was biting his lip. Once, he started to say something to me, then changed his mind. He said it wasn’t important. I could see something was bothering him and was about to say something when Langley walked in, accompanied by the entire administrative staff.

  They sat behind the tables set up at the front. Evan’s mother stared at the far wall. She clenched her jaw. The associate principal flipped through his papers. Langley’s eyes shot daggers at us.

  And then, it began.

  No preamble.

  It felt like a debriefing in a cop show. We’re looking for the killer; what evidence do we have? The mayor wants immediate results. We need to make an arrest, and quick.

  First he said that school was not supposed to be an amusement park. He let out a sharp little laugh. No one reacted. He cleared his throat.

  Then he said that we had to remind ourselves, and remind everyone else, that school was, above all, a place of work. He had a bunch of charts and graphs that he pointed to while he was talking—pies, bars, lines, and curves of red and blue and green. My head was spinning. He recited numbers and percentages. He said he had come to the definitive conclusion that the recent downward trend in exam results was due to the increasingly lax atmosphere in the school and to the fact that our common goals as students had been forgotten. You all need to learn the values of dignity, respect, and hard work. I couldn’t believe my ears. Even my grandmother wouldn’t have said something like that.

  So, in short, it was time to put some structure back into the school.

  Rigid smile.

  Dead silence.

  I heard an ambulance siren outside on the street. Someone was in pain somewhere. Someone would be calling someone else to say, quietly, “There’s been an accident. You have to come. ”

  Then came the avalanche of rules—agreed to by a majority of the parents, he said. Impeccable dress at all times, no sitting in the hall, no hanging around the school building, absolutely no “canoodling”—that’s the word he used—on the benches, on the lawn, anywhere on school property. It was time to return to the key principles of success: work, discipline, and consequences.

  The moral of his story was: school is a place to work.

  I’ve never really understood the difference between life and work.

  People talk about them like they’re opposites, and I don’t see why. The few friends my parents have are people they work with. A lot of couples meet at work. Love is something you can work on, and friendship, too. Work is life, and life is work, isn’t it?

  What killed me about it all was the way the others reacted.

  When we got back to our class, we had to repeat Principal Langley’s sermon to them. That’s why we’re there, the class reps and the deputies—to balance good and bad news.

  I thought there would have been a reaction, an outcry, calls to start a petition or to march in protest. But noth
ing. Just a few annoyed-looking pouts and some disbelieving expressions.

  I told myself that they needed time to absorb the shock. That they’d shake themselves into action the next day, or the day after. But the next day and the day after, there was still nothing. Joris and Sonia had stopped kissing on the second-floor landing. Lisa and Sam had stopped sitting outside together on the grass.

  It made me sick, really.

  For days, I couldn’t think about anything else. I handed in a blank exam in history class. The teacher raised his eyebrows; I had never done that before. He asked for an explanation, and I just shrugged. What could I say? That I didn’t want to exist in a place where we weren’t allowed to live?

  And then there was English class. We were discussing a story that talked about the power of images, and the teacher asked us, on the spot, to say what our favorite movie was, and why. I saw all the answers projected in my head—faces, directors’ names, scenes. I go to the movies twice a week; sometimes it’s like I’m living two lives, one on screen and the other where I get up every morning and go to school. When the teacher got around to me, though, I just mumbled something incoherent. I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say. She was surprised. She reminded me that at the beginning of the year, I’d said I wanted to become a film director. I turned red. I lowered my eyes.

  Then, all of a sudden, I opened them.

  All of a sudden, everything was clear. I knew what I had to do.

  I had a mission.

  I didn’t listen to anything that happened for the rest of the class. Or in the next class. Or for the rest of that day.

  Everything was falling into place—quietly, slowly.

  The next day, I came to school with my dad’s camcorder. He bought it because everyone else was buying them, but he doesn’t even know how to work it. When my parents weren’t around, I taught myself how to use it, and now I’m an expert.

  I would have to explain myself carefully.

  If I didn’t, everyone would think I was a pervert, a voyeur—they’d turn me in to the principal, or even to the cops.