At the very pinnacle of irony is the convention of high schools to seek out those students who do not fit the mold of standard and acceptable behavior, and normalize them, considering that most of these institutions are named after tyrants, megalomaniacs and phrenologists, none of whom was particularly normal. Nowhere is there a more mixed message than in the backdrop of these schools, where students pledge allegiance to the flag, are made to empty their lockers upon command and organize their lives around the dictates of a bell; yet be told by the administrators of these draconian practices that such an educational system is the bedrock of America’s success, the guardian of intellectual freedom. I will attempt to answer, through this and other stories of fiction, how the country’s dominant social regime treats the most self-isolated individuals, and how such policies shape the behavior and attitudes of their peers towards them.
What we learn during our years in school is what we learn in spite of so much that’s wrong.
Richard Grody brought fear and disgust to almost everyone at Francis Bellamy High School. Almost all high schools in suburban Northern California had someone kind of like him. He never wore a trench coat but was nevertheless suspected constantly of being in possession of dangerous weapons and dangerous thoughts. The clothing image he did choose –bomber jackets, dark sunglasses, stylistically neutral pants – did incite a fear in many people that he indeed eventually would do something disastrous. And somewhere deep in his diseased mind he must have, according to the school-wide rumors, believed that upon committing this vile and extreme act, his combat boots and wardrobe would save him from discovery.
The administration at Francis Bellamy could not stand him. His frizzy medium brown beard, his unpresumptuous short hair and his combat boots was too subtle a style to prosecute; too odd an image to ignore. Richard had been to the office three times in the month of February and as March began the teachers began to make wagers over whether Richard would make it to the end of the year without being barred from graduation due to a disqualifying number of disciplinary events. He often got in trouble for his writing edgy letters to the school newspaper, or simply saying something morbid about the Battle of Verdun in class. Incidentally, everything he said about the Battle hit the nail on the head perfectly and eloquently.
Richard spoke out in math class once, and was sent to the office having done nothing wrong at all. The teacher had written the value of pi on the blackboard, or at least the first hundred digits, and he erred on the 37th. Richard spoke up, correcting the teacher, who in turn became red and told the troublemaker to stop being one. All was well until later in the period while the teacher was correcting papers and the class was pretending to be working on graphing parabolas and he happened to look up the value of pi in one of his books, accurate to one hundred digits. Upon realizing that Richard was right, the teacher sent him straight to the office.
Richard’s schoolmates were just as hostile toward his differences as the administration was. Tina Horowitz, for example, spilled wood glue into the outside pocket of his backpack once, either on a bet or a dare or to prove some point. She doesn’t remember why now.
Although as a general rule the faculty and students held contempt for Richard fairly equally, no one in the Francis Bellamy community was more annoyed by him than his English teacher Ms. Watson, who saw him as somewhere between a rotten loner student and an archenemy to academia. For the most part this conception of him was entirely unjustified. On one particularly unusual and warm April afternoon, only ten minutes after the students had finished eating lunch, a battle begun between teacher and student, with an unusual resolution. It began when Ms. Watson scolded Richard simply for refusing to speak during a discussion on Walt Whitman’s "Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry." Richard was pretty sure that he knew what he thought about the poem, but he did not want to subject his opinions and inner most reactions to the work – some of which were quite personal and telling – to the rest of the class who he knew would use their new insight into his most impassioned secrets towards what he believed to be inimical ends. On the other hand, he did not want to hide his true interpretations under a mask of post-modernist gobbledegook, the latter being a method of class discussion that Richard’s classmates often utilized. Instead of satisfying Ms. Watson and her entire 5th period English class, Richard stated quite simply, "I have nothing to say."
"It’s a requirement of this class," pleaded Ms. Watson, quite annoyed by his temerity.
"Well I don’t care. I refuse to do this assignment."
Richard’s response was met by half the class with rolling eyes and virtually silent gasps. Some couldn’t believe his insolence; others could and were impressed by their own tolerance for his bizarre behavior. The other half of the class was not paying attention at all.
"What did you say?" asked the wide-eyed Ms. Watson.
Ms. Watson was not well liked by most the class. Conceited, unintelligent and despotic, the English teacher was often rumored to have a sexual relationship with Mr. McClone, the principal. The females in the class thought this idea grotesque, and the males of the class felt envious that such a maraca-shaped, half-witted administrator could hook up with Watson, whom none of them liked as a teacher or a person but whom many secretly enjoyed as a fantasy.
But none of this mattered in the context of Ms. Watson’s feud with Richard. Almost all of them sided with her, wanting least of all things for the school’s quintessential loser to prevail over the English teacher, whose omnipotence was feared more than her evil grading practices. She was a mighty and merciless deity; for her mortality to be unveiled by the pathetic Richard Grody would have destabilized their faith in order of their social universe.
Disrupting the students’ metaphysical rules that separated Richard from all potential friends and allies, Alexis Carver, the new student recently moved from Maryland, stood up during this staring contest between Ms. Watson and her disruptive student and cried:
"Why don’t you leave him alone?" She was sneaking back into her chair on the last word.
"What did you say?" Ms. Watson asked of Alexis, thus being the second consecutive utterance of that phrase on her part.
Levering herself into an intermittent position between sitting and standing, Alexis said "I didn’t say anything." By this time, the half of the class not previously paying attention, for the most part, was.
Ms. Watson turned toward Richard, assuming that her victory over Alexis would keep his bravery at bay. "Now, what do you think of this poem? You must answer me."
On the word must, Alexis flinched. She said under her breath "the freedom of speech includes the freedom to stay silent." Those close to her heard it, and wondered if their teacher did as well. Their short-term wonder was shattered when the sharp silence followed by Alexis’ soft protest was penetrated violently by Watson’s sequel to her previous words.
"…or you fail."
It was determined then that Richard would fail his English class. He found this out a few mornings later, called out of third period PE to go to the office. This was an unusual practice, but the principal did it for dramatic effect upon the request of Ms. Watson, whom he was happy to oblige since they were fuck-buddies. Richard’s parents were at the office as well.
Sitting in the principal standard-issue gym shorts and a faded plain gray t shirt, Richard blanked out for the next twenty minutes as his mother and father and Mr. McClone and Ms. Watson alternated between criticizing him in the first and third person. The complaints and reprimands sounded to Richard like a poorly written, poorly performed quartet, and aside from a brief curiosity as to why Ms. Watson wasn’t tending to her third period class, he decided not to think much about anything at all. He certainly didn’t speak any, knowing that there was absolutely nothing he could say that would improve his situation.
At lunchtime that day, Richard sat alone in the library as he always did at lunch, reading comic books and historically out-dated monograms, sneakily munching a tuna fish sandwich from his bomber-jacket pocket, concealing it from the view of the nearby librarians, all strict enforcers of the no-eating rule. He pondered his circumstances seriously, and decided as he had many times before that a lot was wrong with the world.
Those very few who had gotten to know Richard could find nothing about him really to dislike on any rational basis. It was rather a general air about him that discouraged his peers from befriending him, and anyone who learned anything about Richard would fear him even more, having discovered discover attributes of Richard that almost everyone shared to one extent or another. Richard’s behavior at times did seem fairly eccentric in his delivery and style, but all in all it was his sheer honesty that disrupted the common tranquility at Francis Bellamy High. Richard was a deadly accurate mirror, allowing and compelling those who paid him attention either to forsake their previous conception of the world by accepting such a social outcast, thereby bringing imbalance to their very psychological compass – or else perpetuate the trend of finding fault in his tactless loyalty to human nature, and in doing so doubly finding fault in themselves.
Everyone targeted their anger on Richard, and the introverted side effect of such anger turned the high school’s collective distaste for Richard into an ever accelerating, ever enlarging snowball. The ball finally collided with rocky ground one otherwise normal April Thursday morning, when a bomb threat was called in and the entire school was evacuated. No one was hurt. There was no bomb. Naturally, everyone stipulated it was Richard.
"This is all because that weirdo ass-monkey failed English," said one astute theorist.
" They’ll surely take him away this time. Good riddance" exclaimed another.
In the back of many people’s minds though, there was doubt that Richard had called it in. But far from adding a new stress to the sociological problems that Richard’s presence raised, one that concerned a possible second person much more dangerous and ambitious than the well-known loner, most people wanted the case closed so Richard could be taken away, and so a stone could function in killing one bird as opposed to operate in spawning a second.
There was no proof, however, that Richard had called the threat in. Many students, and even some teachers, considered long and serious the idea of bearing false witness against Richard to expedite the process and eliminate the outcast from their lives entirely, such plans never left their early stages. Though some might say this was for selfless reasons, the truth is that everyone needed a loner like Richard. He served as their mirror but also as their foil, and in high school the most self-conscious individuals take every opportunity to look at their classmates thoroughly, only to leave the fun-house every day laughing and grateful. Richard was everybody’s broken reflection.
After a while, the population of Francis Bellamy High began to crave another scapegoat. The elaborate rumors circulating around the school about Richard’s mysterious role in the social order began to morph into something lavishly elaborate, borderline conspiratorial. From somewhere unknown originated the notion that perhaps Richard had never called in the bomb threat. Perhaps it was Alexis Carver, who without explanation defended the indefensible on that landmark day in Ms. Watson’s 5th period English class.
" It was the new girl, I know it. She’s on the same crazy wavelength as Grody, but she has the guts. Grody wouldn’t actually have the guts for a stunt like this," said one classmate, thinking himself quite privy to the inner workings of others’ mental devices.
The fact is, no one had really liked Alexis anyway. She was odd. And her oddness at times rivaled Richard’s, if not in persistent resistance against outside exploration of character than in her presumptuous attempts to be so well known with the pupils and instructors, having only a few months experience with her new surroundings. She participated heavily in class discussions. She talked to strangers on the bus. She tried out for cheerleading and defended Richard in class. She seemed to want to fit in everywhere. Couldn’t she see she didn’t fit in at all? And what was more disturbing was her beauty. It was natural, unobtrusive and subtle. She possessed a confident and delicate face that held classic femininity in place, and yet would sometimes slip into sheer boyishness. Her tanned complexion relied on its own grace, uncovered by makeup and unaccompanied by excess jewelry. She had light brown hair, straight and tied back in a pony-tail, with bangs gently decorating her forehead. Her smile was genuine and secure. She usually wore tight blue jeans and over-sized sweatshirts, but sometimes came in ornate and sheik dresses of the highest caliber, without explanation or apology. During the spring though, it being so warm in the southern Bay Area, she wore jean shorts and plain white t-shirts most days.
Using her as a secondary reflecting point, Francis Bellamy High’s student body was able to stand perfectly balanced on a tight rope of ideal personality, optically connected at one end to Alexis and the other to Richard. Mocking the endpoints of their social orientation, the students began to feel safe and stable only in respect to their two jesters. To approach with optimism either end too much was to risk losing touch with their proper place in the middle. To lose either of these anchors was to fall off the line entirely.
One lunch period weeks after the bomb threat, Alexis found herself unable to cope with the staring eyes and whispering gossip in the cafeteria or in any of the main building’s halls. Seeking sanctuary, Alexis came upon the library upstairs, checked her book bag at the entrance, and moved over to the card catalog. Over a shelf of biographies of persons whose names ranged from Henry Ford to Kruschev, she caught a glimpse of a familiar boy slouched over a Spanish American War picture book, scarfing down a tuna fish sandwich and quietly saying "damn" repeatedly.
"What you reading?" inquired Alexis.
"I’m looking at pictures of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders," replied Richard, without looking up.
"More interesting than Walt Whitman, I’m guessing?"
"Depends on your mood. I like Whitman a lot, actually. I like poems that approach being prose."
"What do you think of that picture book there?"
"A picture’s worth a thousand words," Richard clichéd.
"Do you read the words in those books?"
"I skim them."
"Is it good writing?" asked Alexis.
"Oh yeah. It’s like prose that reads like poetry."
Looking up, Richard saw Alexis’ eyes for the first time. Excited a good deal already from the book and the sandwich, he was still far from intellectually and viscerally prepared for those two blue crystals. A week went by before Richard stopped swimming in their twinkle. He gathered himself together, suddenly became frightened as he saw he was still in the library in the same exact spot, and uttered thoughtlessly "I’m sorry but I have to go."
And he went.
After school Alexis walked up to Richard as he was waiting for the bus.
"Are you following me?" asked Richard after a short and awkward silence.
"No. I’m waiting for the bus."
"I’ve never seen you take this bus before," retorted Richard as he attempted to ignore her eyes.
"I never have. I usually take the 26L but I missed it. This is quicker than waiting for the next one."
"I still think you’re following me," asserted Richard, attempting to be isolationist and flirtatious in the same breath.
"Well so what if I am? Perhaps I only want to know how your day went."
"How my day went?" parroted Richard, "every day’s the same for me. I wake up, come to this Gulag and watch the world shun me. They joke, they gasp, they even make wagers over what I’ll do next. They’re obsessed with me. In fact, let me take that back. Every day’s not the same for me. Every day is worse than the last."
"I’m very sorry to hear that."
"You wouldn’t understand," remarked Richard as he turned forward, staring blankly at incoherent graffiti on the side of the Chinese Take-out place across Francis Bellamy Road.
"I didn’t say I could," insisted Alexis. A full minute passed, during which Richard’s only visible movement was about fifteen blinks of the eyes, and during which Alexis looked around desperately. Then, turning towards Richard ever more confident, Alexis said "but I do."
Three blinks later, Richard exclaimed with ascending pitch, "wha-at?" No one had ever claimed to understand Richard before.
"I understand. And I have it worse. I know that you’re everybody’s freak. I know. They laugh right in your face and rush home after school to laugh some more. You give them comfort. Everybody needs a clown in life, to make them feel good in comparison. But I’ve got it worse than you."
"How could you possibly have it worse?" asked Richard as he flinched.
"You have an identity, a meaning. You have a personality to them as well as yourself. Sure, they have you totally wrong, and its’ terrible how they treat you. But you mean something very important to their own emotional well being, deep down inside. You play a crucial role in the shaping of their lives. They only hate me because I defended you. You symbolize true pain for them. I only symbolize you."
"They think I called in that bomb threat," responded Richard.
"Did you?"
"Of course not. What good would that do?"
Richard and Alexis gazed at each other. A few weeks went by in Richard’s head, before he remembered he was at a bus stop with Alexis, and snapped out of it. She realized that she did not know anything about the young man she was looking at. He realized that perhaps he did not know anything about himself. After a few moments in real time, Alexis lead them back to conversation.
"Some of them suspect that I called it in."
"Did you?" asked Richard.
"I don’t think I have to answer that."
"Everybody knows I’m the biggest loner around."
" ‘Everybody knows,’" emphasized Alexis.
"So do you like poetry?"
"I do. I can’t stand Walt Whitman though," answered the girl.
The most popular topic of discussion in the hallways of Francis Bellamy High was now how Richard, the loner nobody cared about, and Alexis the new girl were always together in the libraries during lunch. Were they lovers, like Mr. McClone and Ms. Watson? What kind of sick shit was going on with them? Did they do stuff together after school? Everyone took notice of this, but some pupils at Francis Bellamy found it more particularly interesting than others did.
At the end of lunch one day in the middle of April, Richard had gotten some insight into the possible reasons for his new acquisition of a companion. He had just finished playing chess with Alexis in back of the magazine rack in the library, when he went to his locker to exchange his math book for his books for English. Richard’s newly found friend had made him so much happier that he even became more concerned with his schoolwork, even though he knew he would not graduate. The glow on his face, like the bloody smirk on a killer clown had disrupted the fabric of nearly every popular student’s well-being, causing grades to crop and acne to grow. It was at the end of lunch this day that Richard found the letter that read:
Cupid’s thinking of you
Cupid picked up the phone
Warned there was a bomb
Bang! You’re not alone.
Richard had no idea what to think of this. At first he assumed it was a joke spawned from the mind of Alexis. He shrugged it off, and tried not to think to much of it. Over the next few days, though, he became increasingly irritable in Alexis’ presence. He could not help but wonder about the letter’s origin. The tension exploded on a Friday in the library.
"Cupid’s a boy, you know."
"I know," replied Alexis. "What’s that have to do with anything?"
"Nothing. Unless you could think of anything."
She thought a bit. "Nope."
"Well," insisted Richard, "I’d prefer to know when I’m being set up."
"It wouldn’t be much of a set up if you knew, now would it?" replied Alexis.
The bell rang. Alexis and Richard walked to 5th period together. She watched him the whole walk there, but he kept his eyes on the ground moving backwards under his combat boots. In Ms. Watson’s class that day, the class was charged with the tasks of thirty minutes of discussing Hamlet and twenty minutes of silent reading. No one was allowed to nap during silent reading. Richard never looked toward Alexis once, but she stayed devoted, turning towards him several times a minute to check on his happiness. A couple people took note of this. Suddenly, an alarm sounded, and the class was evacuated in a stampede of ritual boredom. Students mocked the activity, just as they had during every evacuation since the third grade.
On the hockey field, standing in alphabetical order and in their designated classes, the Francis Bellamy students heard that there was another bomb threat. Richard kept his head to the ground. Alexis did not know where to look at all. She assumed that it must not have been Richard, because he was sitting fifteen feet from her when the threat was called in.
Then she learned on the news that the threat was a letter this time.
The day after the second bomb threat, Richard spent his Saturday morning reading out-dated monograms, trying to ignore the trauma of the day before. He wondered for a while whether he did actually arrange the bomb threat, and then forgot about it. The other students thought he was insane; perhaps he was. He went online that day and opened his email. It was then that he found the message from an unknown address that said:
Cupid cares for you
And so wrote a letter
Exploded so loud
So you won’t forget her
On Monday, when Alexis went to the library at lunch time, Richard wasn’t there. She walked desperately and swift through the halls, asking the friendliest-looking faces if they’d seen Richard. The faces responded with silent laughter.
She finally found him sitting behind a building under construction in the parking lot. He was smoking a cigarette. He looked up at her, grunted, and looked forward again.
"Did you make that bomb threat?" they both asked simultaneously.
"Ha," said Richard.
"Well, did you?" cried Alexis.
Richard sat puffing on his Winston, gazing thoughtlessly toward a pretzel bag and some soda cans strewn along a fence in front of him. A minute passed. Alexis walked away, a solution of tears and sweat falling down her face, sticking her stray bangs to her temples.
That night, Richard lay in his bed, deceptively smiling. Hoping to feel relieved that all the pressure of having a friend like Alexis would soon be gone, he couldn’t help but miss her already. He couldn’t understand why she would do this to him, but he was starting to think he could forgive her.
Then the phone rang.
Richard’s "hello" was greeted by an ambiguous female voice, saying:
They called you "freak"
They took you as stupid
At the school at midnight
You’ll meet your Cupid
Richard tried hard to ignore the temptation and anger. He began to read a comic book. At a quarter ‘till midnight, Richard went to the kitchen and told his mom he was going for a walk.
"Have fun," said his mom, drunk on Bicardi 151 and pineapple juice.
"Can I take a cigarette?"
Mrs. Grody gave Richard one of her cigarettes, and closed her eyes and said "bye."
High schools at night always looked like Alcatraz to Richard, based on his memory of visiting the island as a little kid. The small rooms and hallways were desolate and benign. Without the context of what actually went on when these buildings were populated, one might easily confuse a high school or an abandoned prison as a sort-of second rate motel. But Richard was told what went on at Alcatraz. And he knew what happened at Francis Bellamy High every day.
Circling the music room and smoking his mom’s Marlboro, Richard reflected on his four years of humiliation at Francis Bellamy, and thought of how when he returned he would again dwell in the shadows of other peoples’ self respect. He considered the elusiveness behind himself, and wondered what new stories would surround his mystery in the next year; how would the new class be introduced to the lore of Richard, the proto-hermit on the five-year plan.
Richard’s concentration broke when he heard from behind his first name. He spun around, and from out of the darkness slowly approached a feminine figure. The words "You pick at my heart / You gnaw at my marrow / Your direction’s been chosen by Cupid’s fine arrow" were only just done being recited when he could finally make out her face. It was his classmate Tina Horowitz.
"Oh, Richard, I knew you’d come. I knew you’d do it all."
"What are you talking about?"
"I was going to teach you love. I knew you could teach me hate. What could be more perfect? You always sat there, as everyone directed their anger towards you. Even I did. I put glue in your backpack, and did all sorts of other nasty things to you. I got off on it, just like everyone else.
"But then I realized how special you were. You had everyone’s anger and hatred and jealousy and pride coming at you violently. And it all ended up in you. You. You are a beautiful, terrible creature. I love you."
"You’re crazy," protested Richard.
"When my plans to impress you backfired," went on Tina, ignoring Richard’s accusation, "when you went for that new girl Alexis, thinking she was the one behind the threats, I couldn’t stand it at first. But then I realized how perfect it could work out. Alexis could teach you love; warm you up to it so you’d be ready for me. And if I planned it right, which I did, she would teach you even more about alienation than you even knew before."
Tina waited a moment, and then continued, "It was perfect. You resented the bomb threats. They made your life even more of a hell than it was before, which you never thought possible, and they were fake. They didn’t do anything. Instead of striking back at the world they only made matters worse, and gave your enemies some free time out of class to think up more rumors about you. So you got mad at Alexis. You didn’t know what to think. Was she nuts? Was she uncreative? And so you lost your first love.
"And now you’re ready for me. You know just as much about love as you did about pain, and you know that they’re one in the same. I already knew love was pain. I loved and pained after you ever since I saw you freshman year. I only realized it when I put glue in your backpack. She was no good for you. I’m what you need. And now…"
Tina paused as Richard stared at her speechless. She pulled out a pipe bomb and resumed her last thought: "…and now you’ll realize you love me."
"What the hell are you doing, Tina?"
"This is no childhood prank, Richard. Bomb threats have lost whatever power they ever had. This is real. I’m going to blow up the school. Right now. We’re going to blow up the school."
"Give me that!" Richard grabbed the bomb from Tina’s hand.
"It doesn’t matter, Richard, I already planted fifteen throughout campus. They’re going to go off. When it happens, I want us to watch it from the football field bleachers. It will be a great view there to watch our baby together."
He looked in her eyes, confirmed that she was serious, threw down the pipe bomb in his hand and said, "Okay. Let’s go, darling."
Richard and Tina sat on the bleachers, listening to crickets and waiting for the big explosion. She said, "Do you know how special it is that a man like you and a woman like me met like this, Richard? It makes perfect sense. The world wasn’t made for people like you and me. It must be changed. And this is the best way to do it. We don’t have to skill any of the enemies just yet. Destroying this symbol will be enough for now to unleash all the concentrated anger it contains in its walls.
"This is where we’re supposed to be right now! It’s all going to be over soon, and we’re in the perfect place to see it. This is what life’s all about. I love you, Richard."
Caught up with her speech, Tina didn’t see Richard sneak away. She simply thought she heard, "I love you, Tina."
Richard was hundreds of yards a way and hidden among some bushes where the left side of the field’s perimeter touched Francis Bellamy Road. He looked at the bleachers and could still make out Tina’s silhouette, stationary and singular on the top bench. And then he saw several flames emerge from some classrooms and the cafeteria, first slowly and then fast, bright and everywhere. Then he heard the sound of the explosions, as pieces of lumber, trees and sections of roof shingles landed on the ground. He was quite far away enough not to be hurt.
And then he saw the bleachers on which Tina was still sitting explode. A flaming bench landed about forty-five yards away from him. He was overcome with roaring heat and flashing sound. He did not blink or turn away. He didn’t flinch.
It was then that he realized that Tina had taught Richard an awful lot about love. In spite of all that was wrong with the world, Richard new what to do. The next day, Richard would try to work things out with Alexis.