hi, here's my latest story about a girl who is the only graduating student of her high school class. any comments or criticism would be much appreciated. thank you!
"Easterbrook"
It was a curious cosmic lapse that caused Sara Easterbrook to be in 1999 the only graduate of Middlesin High. That Spring the entire high school, which consisted of only 23 students, took its yearly field trip. Adam O'Connell, school president, pushed for and was granted permission to visit Polk County, home of a large population of Kentucky Mennonites. Adam positively bubbled, lecturing on the commonweal, especially barn-raising and other cooperative ventures.
So Middlesin High one bright Tuesday morning loaded into its yellow schoolbus for the hour's ride to Amish country. Mr Grambling, the organized sports coach, was to drive and supervise. Mrs Reynolds and myself, with no small relief, enjoyed our in-service at home. Only one student cut school that day: Sara Easterbrook.
Sara was different than the other students: she called herself straight-edge, wore her hair short and dyed black with silver rings and necklaces, and refused to smoke, drink, and have sex, and told everyone so. This in a county whose other students raced their pickup trucks on rutted farmland, drank in dry counties, and broadcast their lovemaking on CB radios. The idea of leaving one backwards hick village to visit another was, to her, just one more cross to bear until she turned 18. So she skipped the trip, and it saved her life.
It was a curious cosmic lapse. Roger Kent was wheeling home from a weekend camping trip in which he'd failed to bag a single out-of-season deer. Out of the winding trees darted a heavy 8-point buck, a real beauty. Roger and the deer nearly collided, but the deer veered and ran alongside his truck, parallel at 30 mph. Roger, with a gun rack in the back and feeling very Starsky and Hutch, cut the wheel at the deer to knock it from its footing.
The car went into a rut, vaulted a rock, and fishtailed. His shotgun was jarred and went off, hitting the buck square in the neck. Roger took all this in as he spun, kicking gravel, laughing. Then the world went white. The shotgun fired again, skipping to the shoulder. When he could open his eyes Roger stepped from his truck gingerly, its bed and back wheels crumpled. There was a terrific echoing bang at the bottom of the holler and Roger did a gainer, thinking the gun would keep firing til it hit him. The echoes grew faint and died.
Roger peered into Spooktoe holler at what looked like a serrated tin barrel, the color of the mid-day sun, upturned and burning. His face felt hot. A chickenhawk plopped at his feet, its stomach full of shot. He ran, howling, like he'd been kicked in the Jenkins.
**********
Back home there was talk of Judgment Day, of closing the school, even of abandoning the county. The hysterics went hysterical. And Sara Easterbrook still had six weeks til graduation. I suggested we declare her education complete. Had Sara been a cheerleader, or at least gone out for 4H, the superintendent might have agreed.
As it was, with first through eighth graders sharing desks and blackboards in the small school building, he made a solemn speech about the evils of favortism, and of the tried and true means of prepping students for the realities of the harsh world outside, a world where their 22 best and brightest could be called to heaven, ahem, lickety split.
That first week back I felt ghosts in the row of empty lockers. Mrs Reynolds, after she taught math and science, left for the day and I would come in and teach English and social studies. Each footstep from the teacher's lounge echoed like fireworks in a holler, and I was glad we agreed to move everyone into the large multimedia room.
Sara returned on time, haughty, like the DA on a courtroom drama. I spent the afternoon, as usual, teaching in chunks: reading to the first through third graders, memorizing the Presidents with the fourth through sixth graders, and introducing the junior high kids to Huckleberry Finn. Once I had everyone busy, I approached Sara as a friend.
"Listen," I told her, "we both know it's silly for you to be here. I don't know what Mrs Reynolds has you doing, but as far as I'm concerned you can keep sketching or writing, poems or whatever you like."
"That's nice," she said without looking up.
"Oh. You don't have to hand it in, just, as long as you keep busy."
She closed the book on her hand and waited with bangs in her eyes.
"I'm here if, oh that is, if you have any questions."
Across the room I noticed a raised hand, and I responded with the purpose of a fireman.
**********
One thing we did for the older students was give them recess. One lunch period Sara was stepping past a kickball game as Chad Washington came to the plate. Each day Sara spread her books out on the asphalt around the visitor's bench. Chad kicked one through the infield and galloped toward third. His shoelaces, flapping like a wounded bird, were caught underfoot and he stumbled, scraping palms and elbows.
"Poor booby," Sara said kneeling beside him. "That's why you keep your shoes tied."
She tied them, and watching her Chad forgot he was crying. She stood him up. He stepped back from her, his eyes on alert.
"Go," she pointed. "Before you get tagged out."
He wavered.
"Hurry!"
Off he ran. At the end of the day I asked Sara to stay a minute.
"It would be a big help to me if you would read to the kids tomorrow morning," I said smiling wide, holding A Great Day for Up out to her. "How about it?"
"Like Adam O'Connell used to?"
In my hands the Seuss creature on the cover beamed through apprehensive eyes. "It would be a big help."
She precisely arranged the lipsticks and acryllic markers in her cloth bag. "Doubtful," she said and buckled the bag.
**********
Chrissy Gowan, a mousy eighth grader, came to school with jet black hair. Over the following week the ripple passed through more of the older girls, and dyed hair and silver jewlery became common. Twice I saw the girls talking in a group when Sara walked by, and both times they fell silent and watched her pass.
The next day Sara brought a stretched canvas and an easel to class. All day in the corner she painted. Whenever curiosity overcame trepidation, a younger student would sneek close for a peek. Each time Sara turned the canvas away and glared, sending the would-be Mata Hari into a sprint. At the final bell she covered it with a piece of long lavender fabric.
I snuck my own peek. The traditionally defined lines of the acryllics were blotted and smeared, dabbed with perhaps a wad of toilet paper, yes, to give the painting an unearthly haze. The colors were pastels and the composition was solid, with a loose three-point perspective. Miss Easterbrook had studied.
The following morning she appeared with a hammer and a dusty antique frame, one that might have embraced a family portrait of a century gone by. Influenced I spoke about the Civil War. After recess I saw her smiling in the corner and I knew the painting was finished. In the middle of Sherman's march and its ties to Gone With the Wind, Sara banged a nail into the drywall between the blackboard and the door, stepped back, and squared it. The class and I waited, all eyes upon her.
"What is that?" asked Chad Washington.
"That," I announced, "is Sara's senior project. Now, when General Sherman's troops set fire to Atlanta, Scarlett was..."
Later I sat at my desk relieved it did not face the painting. Only after the final bell did I appraise it. Sara hovered in the doorway feigning nonchalance. The viewer looked at a room of hazy, empty-faced students, dozens of them, sitting at their desks. Before them was a large podium, spotlit, with no one behind it. Each empty face was arc'd with a golden fan, a symbol common in pre-Renaissance depictions of Jesus. My eyes stayed drawn to the empty spotlight. The effect was direct, and chilling.
I crossed my arms and shifted my weight to my back leg. "This is very good, Sara. Very good. Have you thought about art school?"
She paused, staring past the painting at the atlas on the wall opposite. "No," she said, and left.
That evening at home I was troubled. I looked around at the sparse furnishings and congratulated myself on my prudency. I would never be able to afford my own house, on this salary, near a big city.
**********
The next morning, Friday, I arrived before Mrs Reynolds and explained about the painting. She was adamant that it should be taken down. It might be upsetting to the younger students. They saw it all afternoon with no visible signs of distress. Let's leave it up and see what happens, we can always take it down over the weekend. You can display it during your class if you desire, Mr Carlisle, but that thing will not distract from my long division.
The students arrived, chattering. Two of the older girls, eyes ringed in black shadow, tacked papers to the wall under Sara's painting. One was a poem, written in tri-colored bubbly script. The other was a sketch, charcoal I thought, of one small figure saluting a field of white crosses. Mrs Reynolds said nothing.
**********
The end of the day again saw Sara and I alone in the classroom. She stormed to my desk, started to speak, stopped, and grunted in frustration. She tore the papers from the wall and threw them into the wastebasket beside my desk.
"Sara!"
"It's not fair! Why do they have to copy everything off me?"
"You're the oldest, and..."
"I'm sick of it!"
"We're all in mourning, even the first graders who may not understand what happened. All of us have feelings that we're trying to deal with."
"Yeah, I bet you have feelings. You and Adam."
"What?"
"I know about you and Adam."
I started, said nothing. It was true.
"You know how I know? Whenever Adam read to the second graders you'd watch him. There'd be a stack of papers on your desk and you'd watch him the whole time."
"That's crazy."
"I won't tell."
"There's nothing to tell. It was." I thought about what it was. "Crazy."
"I mean, what are you? Thirty?"
"I'm 26," I said evenly. "And those girls made that art, just like you did."
She stepped to the door. "I was going to go down there tomorrow. Memorial Holler. You can come if you want."
"Sara, I have to say this behavior is unacceptable."
She nodded. "Twelve o'clock, it's up to you," and left the room.
**********
I saw her on the ridge of the holler hunched over her sketchbook. Her hair was brown dabbed with red, like mahogany. The noonday light reflected violently off the tall bronze plaque below. It was etched with 23 names and ringed by clumps of gardinias, mums, and daisies.
She glanced up. "Last night I had to watch some crappy Disney movie," she said. "My brother is all about baseball and that's what the movie was. Somebody's dad goes back and makes it in the big leagues. And I knew I saw it before already. When I was a kid. Some old guy has a bat that's struck by lightning and he goes back and makes it too. Only this one just came out. It was so predictable. I knew what was going to happen, the same thing that happened in the old movie, and it did."
"It's good you notice these things."
"They basically made the same movie, and everyone went and saw it all over again."
"It's safe. People like safe things."
She put laid the sketchbook on the crabgrass and clover beside her. "I almost went on that stupid trip. Adam organized it, but I skipped. Adam O'Connell."
"Sara, listen. I'm not some, well, I'm not some Internet weirdo. Like you said, it was crazy."
She sketched.
"It won't happen again, I promise."
She stood and took a step toward the flowers.
"You know what I think? You know there's a place in England called Middlesex? I think they came here and called this place Middlesex too, like Jamestown and York and all that. And some preacher a hundred years ago changed it to Middlesin, cause sex is a sin."
"It sounds logical."
"Why do people do that? All this crap."
"I don't know. Some people want to control as much as they can. The more they control, the better they feel about life, here, in this world. It makes it easier, when things like this happen."
"It doesn't seem right," she said.
"No, it doesn't."
She had nothing left to rebel against, and neither did I. I became conscious of her as a living creature, breathing and walking on the surface of a living planet. The dead were at the bottom, underneath, and they didn't matter. I imagined us off in the Louvre, my arms around her waist, jawlines touching. It settled as it was formed, pristine, and I sat down, inactive, to let the fantasy play.
END
thank you for reading. what do you think?
http://www.thetrentaffair.com
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Ummm...and I have to say, I feel a little lame for making you wait three or four days for a totally insubstantial response, but -- upon finishing the story -- I just kind of stared at it blankly for a while, because I was so hard-pressed to tell you anything that you could do different. I mean, that's good, sure, but I can't help but feel there must be *something* I could say.