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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
"I just can't go," I finally said.
"I beg your pardon?" Mrs. Van der Hoef was in her late fifties, a tall, thin woman with a bony nose. I'd heard that she was the widow of a famous archaeologist, not that any archaeologists were famous to me.
"See, my presentation is -- or it was going to be -- I thought I was supposed to talk about -- but maybe, now that Jamie --"
"You're not making sense, Miss Fiora," Mrs. Van der Hoef said. "You need to speak clearly."
"If I go, I'll be saying the same thing as Jamie."
"But you're presenting on a different topic."
"Actually, I'm talking about architecture, too."
She walked to her desk and ran her finger down a piece of paper. I had been looking at her while we spoke, and now that she had turned away, I didn't know what to do with my eyes. My classmates were still watching me. During the school year so far, I'd spoken in classes only when I was called on, which was not often; the other kids at Ault were enthusiastic about participating. Back in my junior high in South Bend, Indiana, many classes had felt like one-on-one discussions between the teacher and me, while the rest of the students daydreamed or doodled. Here, the fact that I did the reading didn't distinguish me. In fact, nothing distinguished me. And now, in my most lengthy discourse to date, I was revealing myself to be strange and stupid.
"You're not presenting on architecture," Mrs. Van der Hoef said.
"You're presenting on athletics."
"Athletics?" I repeated. There was no way I'd have volunteered for such a topic.
She thrust the sheet of paper at me, and there was my name, Lee Fiora -- Athletics, in her writing, just below James Lorison -- Architecture. We'd signed up for topics by raising our hands in class; clearly, she had misunderstood me.
"I could do athletics," I said uncertainly. "Tomorrow I could do them."
"Are you suggesting that the students presenting tomorrow have their time reduced on your behalf?"
"No, no, of course not. But maybe a different day, or maybe -- I could do it whenever. Just not today. All I'd be able to talk about today is architecture."
"Then you'll be talking about architecture. Please use the lectern."
I stared at her. "But Jamie just went."
"Miss Fiora, you are wasting class time."
As I stood and gathered my notebook and poster board, I thought about how coming to Ault had been an enormous error. I would never have friends; the best I'd be able to hope for from my classmates would be pity. It had already been obvious to me that I was different from them, but I'd imagined that I could lie low for a while, getting a sense of them, then reinvent myself in their image. Now I'd been uncovered.
I gripped either side of the lectern and looked down at my notes. "One of the most famous examples of Roman architecture is the Colosseum," I began. "Historians believe that the Colosseum was called the Colosseum because of a large statue of the Colossus of Nero which was located nearby." I looked up from my notes. The faces of my classmates were neither kind nor unkind, sympathetic nor unsympathetic, engaged nor bored.
"The Colosseum was the site of shows held by the emperor or other aristocrats. The most famous of these shows was --" I paused. Ever since childhood, I have felt the onset of tears in my chin, and, at this moment, it was shaking. But I was not going to cry in front of strangers. "Excuse me," I said, and I left the classroom.
There was a girls' bathroom across the hall, but I knew not to go in there because I would be too easy to find. I ducked into the stairwell and hurried down the steps to the first floor and out a side door. Outside it was sunny and cool, and with almost everyone in class, the campus felt pleasantly empty. I jogged toward my dorm. Maybe I would leave altogether: hitchhike to Boston, catch a bus, ride back home to Indiana. Fall in the Midwest would be pretty but not overly pretty -- not like in New England, where they called the leaves foliage. Back in South Bend, my younger brothers would be spending the evenings kicking the soccer ball in the backyard and coming in for dinner smelling like boy-sweat; they'd be deciding on their Halloween costumes, and when my father carved the pumpkin, he would hold the knife over his head and stagger toward my brothers with a maniacal expression on his face, and as they ran shrieking into the other room, my mother would say, "Terry, quit scaring them."
I reached the courtyard. Broussard's dorm was one of eight on the east side of campus, four boys' dorms and four girls' dorms forming a square, with granite benches in the middle. When I looked out the window of my room, I often saw couples using the benches, the boy sitting with his legs spread in front of him, the girl standing between his legs, her hands perhaps set on his shoulders briefly, before she laughed and lifted them. At this moment, only one of the benches was occupied. A girl in cowboy boots and a long skirt lay on her back, one knee propped up in a triangle, one arm slung over her eyes.
