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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Jenny Hubbard

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hubbard, Jenny.

  — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In 1982 Buncombe County, North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Alex

  Stromm writes of the aftermath of the accidental drowning of a friend, as his English teacher reaches out to him while he and a fellow boarding school student try to cover things up.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89942-3

  [1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Boarding schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. North Carolina—History—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H8583Pap 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010023462

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To the steadfast shepherds of the second floor—

  Ted Blain, Ben Hale, Tom Parker, and John Reimers

  The title is the writer’s stamp of approval.

  —ANONYMOUS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - Call me Is Male.

  Chapter 2 - These are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.

  Chapter 3 - Are the green fields gone?

  Chapter 4 - Meditation and water are wedded for ever.

  Chapter 5 - Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

  Chapter 6 - Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror.

  Chapter 7 - I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

  Chapter 8 - … one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

  Chapter 9 - Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.

  Chapter 10 - I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

  Chapter 11 - There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes.

  Chapter 12 - It is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.

  Chapter 13 - Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.

  Chapter 14 - But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley.

  Chapter 15 - And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. (from the first chapter of Moby-Dick and the book of Job)

  Chapter 16 - The great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open.

  Chapter 17 - The Drama’s Done. Why then here does any one step forth? —Because one did survive the wreck.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Call me Is Male.

  When my dad gave me this journal two years ago and said “Fill it with your impressions,” I imagine he had a more idyllic portrait of boarding school life in mind. I imagine he pictured a lot of bright things, sending his only child to an institution whose official motto is Ad Lux. But these pages have remained blank. I have not had much to say until now—when now is everything.

  If you are reading this, you have happened upon it by accident. Call me Is Male.

  My apologies to Herman Melville, from whom I may have to steal a few words to tell the story that is about to be told, that is in the middle of being told, that will never stop being told. Such is the nature of guilt; such is the nature of truth. But it is also the nature of guilt to sideline the truth.

  Welcome to the sidelines, Dear Reader.

  If you get bored with my literary efforts, with the plot or characters, if you find that good ol’ Is Male is putting you to sleep, read a real novel, a Great American one. Read Moby-Dick. Read to your heart’s content. Though if you are a reader, the heart is never content.

  Newspapers may tell you the plot, but they never tell you the real story. And they never, ever tell you what started the whole thing to begin with. But when the end is death, maybe what comes before doesn’t matter. What happens on September 30 is still going to happen.

  So, what happens?

  1. The bell rings at exactly 11:45. I have been waiting for this bell. I own a watch just so I can set it to Birch School time, just so I can know exactly when this Saturday bell, the one that dismisses us from six days of classes in a row, will ring. The Birch School, like all boys’ boarding schools, is timeless; time drags on forever here, which makes the bell mean something.

  2. I leave the classroom for the dining hall and eat lunch. (Not worth elaborating on—sorry boys’-school food.)

  3. I go back to my room to change clothes. (We all wear blazers and ties to class.) My room feels depressing at this time of day, when I am normally in class during the week. The carpet looks like it hasn’t been replaced in twenty years because it probably hasn’t, and in the corner near my closet, some other guy who had this room before left cigarette burns that I have never noticed until this moment. My roommate, Clay, hasn’t made his bed (typical), and a half-eaten bag of Doritos sags near his pillow.

  4. I start down the hill to the river by myself at approximately 12:30, but my friend Thomas catches up with me. We arrive at the designated meeting spot at approximately 12:50. No sign yet of Glenn and Clay, so Thomas asks me a question: “Do you remember what it is that makes the sky blue?” Because on this day, the sky is bluer than it has ever been.

  “I think it has something to do with the spectrum of light and the nitrogen in the atmosphere absorbing all of the other colors except blue,” I say.

  “It’s weird to think about living under a green sky, or a red one.”

  I agree.

  Thomas says, “Blue is the right color for it, that’s for sure.”

  I say, “I always thought it was weird to think about how you’re under the same exact sky as some kid in China who has no idea that you exist, and you have no idea that he exists, only that there has got to be at least one kid in China looking at the sky right now.”

  “Isn’t it night over there, though?”

  “Yeah, but there still has to be some Chinese kid looking at it.”

  “Maybe he’s counting stars,” says Thomas. “Did you used to do that?”

  I did.

  Thomas says, “I wonder why we don’t do that anymore.”

  This is our last real conversation, verbatim. Every conversation you will find in this book I am writing is verbatim. There may be a comma where the speaker intended for there to be a semicolon, but other than that, my journal/Not-So-Great American Novel is entirely accurate. Even though I haven’t slept for two nights in a row, what you see scrawled throughout this journal that my dad gave me is real. I am big on verbatim because I am big on truth. Truth: as important and essential as rain.

  (copied verbatim, punctuation and all, from the newspaper in the library)

  Death Notice, Raleigh News & Observer,

  October 2, 1982

  Thomas Edward Broughton, Jr., 17, of Raleigh, died September 30 as the result of a swimming accident in Buncombe County, NC. Thomas, a j
unior at the Birch School, was a member of the varsity football and track teams and a good friend to all who knew him there. He was born September 21, 1965, in Raleigh, where he was a member of Christ Episcopal Church. He spent the summer volunteering at the Boys Club, an organization for underprivileged youth, while working toward becoming an Eagle Scout. Thomas is survived by his loving parents, Thomas Edward Broughton, Sr., and Grace Banes Broughton, and by his younger brother, Trenton Banes Broughton, all of Raleigh; by his grandmother Lucy Elvington Broughton, also of Raleigh; by his grandparents Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks Folsom Banes of Oxford, Mississippi; and by various aunts and uncles and cousins in Raleigh and elsewhere. A service in celebration of Thomas’s life will be held at Christ Episcopal on Friday, October 6, at 11:00 a.m., to be followed by a private burial. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Thomas’s memory to the Boys Club of Raleigh, P.O. Box 957, Raleigh, NC, 27607.

  Rock, Paper, Scissors

  After the accident, Thomas’s body is carried up to the infirmary on a stretcher, and the whole time Glenn and I are sitting on the bench outside, I’m picturing Thomas’s drowned body inside, wrapped in towels. Mr. Armstrong, the Headmaster, and Dean Mansfield, the disciplinarian, question us out on the porch so that we don’t get the infirmary furniture wet. Glenn and I both know enough to let Glenn do the talking because he is athletic, popular, smart—prefect material—and I am not. I am what is thought of at Birch as a Good, Solid Kid, one of many. Glenn is thought of as a Golden Boy, one of a few.

  Dean Mansfield tosses up question number one like a tennis lob, and Golden Boy delivers it neatly back into the Dean’s court: “We told Thomas everything we knew about jumping from the rock, not that we’ve done it that many times ourselves, but, yes, we have done it before, haven’t we, Alex?”

  Good, Solid Kid nods his head, and Golden Boy continues. “Teenagers take risks, Mr. Mansfield; that is part of growing up. A person doesn’t grow if he doesn’t take risks.”

  “That is true, Mr. Everson, but the seed of risk does not always grow into a straight trunk. The tree can rise crookedly out of the ground.”

  “Yes, sir,” Golden Boy and Solid Kid say in unison.

  “You hold in your hands the opportunity to tell the truth about what happened at the river,” Mr. Armstrong says.

  “Yes, sir,” says Golden Boy.

  “Yes, sir,” says Solid Kid.

  “You, the students, are the caretakers of the Birch School Code of Honor,” says Mr. Armstrong. “It is your code, not mine. Do you understand me, boys?”

  Yes sir yes sir yes sir yes sirree Bob. We are, like most of our peers, unfailingly pragmatic. If the school finds out we’ve been drinking, we’ll be kicked out, no questions asked, and the call will be made to our parents, who will have to stop whatever it is they are doing, hop into the car, and make the winding ride across the mountains to take us home. So Glenn and I do what most any other boy in our shoes would do: we lie.

  I lie to my dad, too, over the office phone that Dean Mansfield lets me use while I stare at the poster on the back of Dean Mansfield’s closed door. “Character: Build It,” it says in red capital letters that arch, rainbowlike, over a kid standing by a pile of bricks. My dad wants to come right then and check on me, but seeing as he is currently in Maine on sabbatical from his university professorship, that proves difficult. I convince Dad that I’m okay, that I will be okay. I call my mother, too, but she isn’t home, and I begin to worry that if the school reaches her first, she will drive down, unannounced, from Potomac, Maryland, where she lives with her boyfriend, a man named Victor with thick white hair. So I call my dad back and ask him to call his ex-wife. He says that he will.

  My dad is good that way—responsible to a fault, calm in crisis—and whatever goodness I have is because of him. He had been a boy who, if presented with a pile of bricks, would have built a tall tower—not a fort, but something that made you thoughtful, that lent you foresight. If someone had given my mother a pile of bricks, she would have thrown them at every window she could find, delighted at the drama of breaking glass.

  If I were good the way my dad is good, then I wouldn’t be filling up these pages. They would be blank, the way they were when I came to Birch. Tabula rasa. They would be clean, the way I used to be.

  I belong in a janitor’s closet, which is where I hide after I change out of my wet clothes and call my dad. As you might expect, the janitor’s closet is full of cleaning supplies. I unwrap a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of I-don’t-know-what, spray the I-don’t-know-what onto the paper towels, strip down to my boxers, and clean myself, over and over, sixteen times, one time for every year I have lived. I use up two rolls and the whole bottle of spray, and although my skin is burning, I am still not clean. Out, out, damned spot. I am running scared; I am curled into a ball in the dark; I am as far away from the sky as I could possibly be.

  Until it has scared you with its endlessness, sky is just sky.

  These are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1982, 9:05 P.M.

  Hide-and-Seek (a Leitmotif)

  Someone is going to pop around a corner and scream, “You’re it!” That is why this particular landsman is clinched to a desk in the Samuel E. Walter IV Memorial Library, his face hiding behind a large novel about a dead whale. He is the proverbial “it.” The sentence at the top of the page is from the first chapter of said novel, which seems to fit the moment, which is why Is Male records it faithfully, strange punctuation and all. He has never kept a journal before, but his father has kept them for years, noting the time, date, and location.

  Is Male does not need to note the location: the location is the library because the dorm is not safe. Is Male cannot do anything, doesn’t want to do anything, except watch the black ink of his pen roll over the white page. So he might as well do his homework for English—see the rough draft for yourself. By the way, Is Male has a big crush on his teacher.

  Alex Stromm

  English 500

  Ms. Dovecott

  10/03/82

  What I Carry

  I carry a backpack full of things I’m not supposed to have, a pack of cigarettes and a tattered Playboy magazine—adult things that speak of the burden of adolescence and of the line we have to walk between childhood and adulthood. Parents and teachers expect us to be both. Besides my backpack, I carry a fishing pole. So do my friends Thomas and Glenn because that’s why we’re headed to the river, to swim and maybe catch some bass. I don’t know why, though, because we always throw them back.

  What I carry are simple things that you could find on any Birch School boy at any given time. I think about the things that I could have carried to the river instead, my Latin reader, for example, but I come here to escape school. Or I could have brought a sweatshirt, but cold water on skin, like the cigarettes, makes me feel real again. The students here think that they are missing out on the exciting lives that their friends back home are living. People in our hometowns think we were sent off to boarding school because we are discipline problems or drug addicts or just bad kids with bad genes. “What else could their parents do with them?” they probably say to each other.

  That is not how my parents felt about sending me here. They wanted to give me brothers; they wanted to give me the opportunity to try things I wouldn’t have tried at home. What I carry, too, is the burden of proof that they were, in fact, right. That I am coming to know who I am. I now run cross-country, I have more endurance and drive than I knew that I had, and I also have friends, good friends. But one of these good friends is dead, and so I carry his life, and his death, inside me, too. I was close to him when he lived, and I was close to him when he died. I don’t think my mom or dad ever expected this kind of closeness.

  What I carry in my backpack down to the river, I carry not knowing that in less than an hour Thomas Broughton will be dead. That is not a knowledge I carry yet
, but I will carry it soon—the knowledge of my darkest self—and I will carry it forever.

  Landsmen, Soldiers

  After Thomas dies, everything seems outlined with electricity as if the school is at attention, poised for war. The boxwoods along the brick sidewalks appear taller, topped with a hundred little eyes. Even the lampposts look as if they are conspiring. Guys who have barely shown their faces for two whole years are wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, flushed as if with fever. They huddle on the grass outside the classroom buildings and whisper, jerking their heads around to make sure the enemy doesn’t creep up on them. And who is the enemy, other than the element of surprise? I can’t believe it myself, and I was there: Thomas Broughton, dead nine days after his seventeenth birthday.

  But even death does not stop the Birch School schedule. Sunday, the first of October—for most guys, a day of rest; for me and Glenn, a day in hell, filled with interrogation (to be detailed later, once I can stomach the reliving of it) and the beginning of sorrow. No matter how sad or sick or angry or wounded any of us here are, everything (as in: life) marches forward as planned. That is the Birch way. So on Monday morning, we all go to class.

  What I Think About on the Way to English

  I am the only one here who knows that Thomas lost his virginity to Kelly Somebody-or-Other, a girl he met at the beach on the Fourth of July. I know so much about it that it feels like my own loss, but in any boy’s case, it’s not loss, is it? It is gain, big gain, one of the biggest gains, if not the biggest gain, in the journey to manhood. So here is how Thomas does it, and I admire him mightily for it. He says to Kelly, who has just handed him a beer, “If I drink this, will you take advantage of me?”

  According to Thomas, Kelly looks like Farrah Fawcett with dark hair, which she tosses around as she answers with a question: “In what way?”