“There’s only two kinds of people,” my father used to say. “The people who succeed and the people who don't want to.” He said this often, self-importantly across the dining room table, quietly, with one eye on the blue-haired cashier at Whole Foods, at the gas station, his lip turned up at the man curled on the street, his face dirty, the reflection of his pupils wide in the dark blue paint of my father’s Audi. He hadn’t said it years, not since I was very young and everyone thought I was going to be the kind of person that succeeded.
In the first place, I hadn’t gone to Harvard. This was an experience certainly not unique to me, but to my father it was an enormous disappointment. He’d gone for both law school and undergrad, as had his father and his grandfather, all who had made generous donations to the school after graduation. That was another frustration-he’d wasted an endowment of half the new legal library trying to ensure my admission.
I got into Dartmouth, which I shouldn’t have. My grades were low to begin with, astronomically low for the small private school I’d attended. I’d spent a fortune on tutoring, though, or my father had, six months of two-hour sessions twice a week, and managed a perfect ACT score, unrepresentative of my actual ability. The idea, my tutor, a thin, slightly ratty man, said, was to get the schools to think I was some sort of unorthodox genius, stifled in the classroom but intrinsically intelligent. I told him that a genius who felt stifled in the classroom would probably feel just as stifled in a student testing center, and he told me he’d been doing this for ten years and did I want to go to college or not.
The first day of May was college day at Collegiate, and all the seniors wore sweatshirts they’d ordered after they’d opened the letters from Yale and Stanford, still giddy, their chests stamped with Latin, like they’d been branded.
I had one too, folded neatly in my bottom drawer, still smelling like cardboard, but I didn’t wear it. It was meant to be some kind of statement, I guess, but one that felt progressively more stupid as the day went on.
“Not going to college, huh, Eden?” asked James Harris, in English, as the rest of those in our independent study group looked on, smirking. “Good for you. Gonna really stick it to the man, right?”
“Dartmouth,” I said, then immediately hated myself for it.
His lip curled. “Are you actually?”
I shrugged.
“Full scholarship, too, I bet,” he said, as the rest of the group laughed.
There was a lockdown drill during fourth period. Duke walked in late, as usual, a minute before the alarm rang. He was wearing his school colors too, a blue University of Virginia hoodie, and for a second I was disappointed.
“What, you’re not going to college?” he asked, even though he knew full well I was already enrolled. We were crowded together at the back of the Statistics room, the room darkening as our teacher pulled down the blackout shades.
“Yeah,” I said, giving up. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He grinned, revealing two rows of straight white teeth. “I sure hope not.” He tried to put his arm around me, and I shrugged it off, a little embarrassed, I think. Behind him, I saw the class valedictorian mime gagging. The student council president laughed.
The drill went on five minutes longer than usual, then ten, and then I started to wonder if maybe it wasn’t really a drill. Mr. Davis, a tall, slightly bald man in his forties, shifted slightly.
“You think someone had a seizure again?” I asked Duke, quietly.
“I think we’re getting nuked,” he said. “Finally.”
The alarm went off again about half an hour later, marking the all clear. I went back to my seat, but Mr. Davis didn’t move. He was seated, legs crossed, on the carpet, his face pale, illuminated by the harsh glow of his phone screen in the artificial dark.
It was only bits and pieces at first-indiscrete teachers, rumors-but by the time the last bell rang, we all knew what had happened. My English teacher had shot her husband, aimed for the heart and missed, grazing his ankle, then been carted off, sedated, hysterical.
Forty, thin, mousy, tired, incapable of inspiring any sort of sentiment, like or dislike both, she’d never existed to me beyond the boundaries of her classroom. Now, though, I was fascinated. How far had she been pushed, how long had it taken, before she reached the breaking point? She’d always seemed so flat, so completely void of any emotion. If she could snap, anyone could.
The English 12 classroom was in the old wing of the school; wood-paneled, airy-- romantic, though it hadn’t seemed so when it was Mrs. Morris at the blackboard. Only when the substitute was there did the floors take on the color of honey, did the windows let in the sunlight.
Mr. Clare was barely thirty, tall and thin with thinning hair that somehow suited him. He introduced himself. He was from California, had graduated from UCLA and spent two years backpacking in Asia. He was married. He hated injustice and most of his colleagues. He had a great voice, low and a little gravelly, and whenever he spoke I found myself leaning forward to listen.
It was an English class, but we often found ourselves leaning towards philosophy. Usually we’d come in, having read a couple chapters for homework, and he’d pose some great existential question and let us answer it.
“Proudhon,” he said, one day, sitting, legs dangling, on his desk, as he often did. “We know that ownership only exists in theory, right? Nothing is really ours unless someone else deems it so. Is it the same thing with identity? Do we get to decide who we are? Or are we nothing more than what other people say we are.”
“It’s like Holden on the train,” someone said. “When he’s talking to Ernest’s mom-now she believes all this stuff about her son, right, but that doesn’t make it true.”
“I didn’t ask you to summarize the book, but thank you for restating that unrelated information we all read last night,” said Mr. Clare. He could be cruel, sometimes, without meaning to be. “Eden?”
“I don't think it matters,” I said. “There’s no way to know for sure who you are, whether you’re a good person or not. Perception is as good a way as any.”
“And if that perception is wrong?”
“Does it even matter?” I said. “I mean, once everyone has made up their minds, does it make a difference whether they’re right or not?”
He grinned. “Answering questions with questions. Very socratic.”
The bell rang, and he jumped off his desk. “Read the next six chapters, but I don't want to hear about them tomorrow.” The girl who’d spoken earlier flinched.
“It’s fucked up,” Duke said, a couple days later, watching one of the wheels on his skateboard spin. The recent developments hadn’t disrupted my schedule much-I didn’t have any extracurriculars listed on my transcript, but I had a strict, set after-school routine; the 7-11, for energy drinks and bags of Sun Chips, the skatepark, where I watched Duke glide on the hot grey pavement, the benches behind it, where he smoked Menthol cigarettes; too cool for Juul, but not too cool for compulsion.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said.
“You guess?” he repeated, trying to light the cigarette clenched between his teeth. “She fucking shot him, Eden.”
“Maybe he deserved it,” I said. I watched a small figure slip up and down the cement hills behind him. There was a liquid element to their motions, a fluidity, that reminded me of fish, the glide between the waves, scales glinting, reflecting the sun.
He shook his head. “You’re psycho.”
And maybe I was, if he said I was.
I stayed late after Mr. Clare's class sometimes, when I had English last, pretending to have a homework question, at first, and then let the original discussion fade into a different one, something current or politically relevant, usually, or sometimes something more personal. We talked about the chapel in the basement, once, which had been closed for years but was being cleared out and turned into another classroom that summer. How we were a secular school now, despite a Protestant history, but how churches could be secular despite being churches, at times, or at least feel that way. Churches were frequent hosts of soup kitchens and food pantries, or community cornerstones in times of crisis; hurricane relief regardless of faith. I told him my parents were atheists but how I’d walked past a Catholic church on my way to elementary school, how I’d be late sometimes, standing behind the solid wooden doors, too afraid to go in all the way but so tempted by the stained glass windows, the silence. There was a collection of paintings on the walls, of Christ performing the miracles, and he looked the same in each one, like he was mine, and I remembered a sense of real, weighing pain when I realized he wasn’t.
Mr. Clare kept me after class once, saying he had a book he thought I’d like. I hoped for a classic, maybe, even poetry, but it wasn’t, just a chapter in a student anthology he’d stolen from a college library. It was thickly worded and pretentious, and the author wrote as though he’d had a thesaurus open in front of him. It took me an hour to get through, pages sixty-four through eighty-six.
Duke would sit in the parking lot and hold down on the car horn until I showed up, even though I wouldn’t even hear it until I was outside and already a minute away from his car. This didn’t win either of us any friends, and someone always glared as I walked, slower than usual, towards the passenger seat. When I opened the car door, he would bring his hand up immediately and twist the key in the ignition, and neither of us would mention any of it.
Once when I went by Mr. Clare’s room, the door was closed, but I opened it. I thought, in a way that wasn’t fully formed yet, that he’d closed it for my sake, somehow, but he hadn’t. He was on the phone, his feet up, splayed sideways, and when I came in he frowned and held up a finger. His phone was on the desk and he leant into it, so I couldn’t hear much, though I could tell it was his wife on the other end.
“Are you a ghost?” he asked, after he hung up. I stared. “You know, floating through doors. Pale and hovering. Hah.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“Did you read the chapter? From the book I lent you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I liked it.”
“I thought you would,” he said. He looked at me. “You've got identical points of view. I bet you’d get along with the author.”
I tried to swallow, and something pressed sharply against the back of my throat. I felt the airway close, and started to choke.
“Hey,” he said, standing. “Are you okay?”
I kept coughing, and he brought his hand down against my back until I stopped, using a little more force than was necessary.
“You okay?” he said again, and I tried to nod. “C’mon, you’re fine.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I’m coming down with something. I’m going to get a ride home.”
“Well, I hope you make it back alive,” he said, and my throat started to close again.
I hated cigarettes but started forcing myself to smoke a couple every afternoon at the park, thinking eventually I’d get over it. I still hated the taste, though, like asphalt, and the smoke stained my clothes, so I stopped after a couple of weeks. I started stealing tubes of lip balm and Butterfingers from the checkout counter at Walmart, then stopped as soon as I’d started. Duke said if I was gonna do one or the other he’d suggest the shoplifting; he didn’t like to share his cigarettes, but he liked the free candy I’d slip into his backpack. I told him I was starting to think I was in hell, and he said then it was a little late to be worried about Kit Kats.
I stopped going to the skatepark then, and he didn’t ask after me. When I got home, sometimes I was so exhausted I’d lie on the top of my bed for hours, the sheets pulled tight, not sleeping, just staring at the ceiling. I’d prop a pillow up in front of the air conditioner, sometimes, and let it run, just to hear it buzzing. Hanna would come in at six and send me out of the room while she vacuumed and dusted the top of the bookshelves, but once or twice she took pity on me and let me stay, and I closed my eyes and listened to her hum, without thinking, her headphones in.
There were orientation videos on the Dartmouth website, a couple of them, one just on navigation, and another on dorms. There was one about clubs and activities on campus that followed a group of students around campus, rowing practice and poetry coffeehouses. Two of them were blonde, with perfect teeth, and a third Asian, with braces, and they all beamed throughout the entire video, just too tickled for words to be on Dartmouth grounds. That was my favorite video, and I watched it more than the others, though I watched all of them many, many, times. By June, I’d memorized the scripts, and I’d recite the dialogue alongside Sam and Laura and Mei.
At graduation, Duke was drunk and tripped over his gown and l looked for Mr. Clare in the bleachers. If he was there, I didn’t see him.
It was a hot, claustrophobic summer. When it rained, it looked as though sweat was dripping off the balding branches, leaves browning and crumbling in the heat. I stayed inside from June to August, brought up the electricity bill. At Dartmouth everything was green, and all I could think of was irrigation, pesticides. When winter came and the world froze over, it was almost a relief.