LION
IN FRENCH, JUSTIN JACKSON SAT ON the edge of my desk. “Hey, what’s your name?”
Justin was that kid with the deep brown eyes who during my first visit to Dalton had claimed, “You won’t miss me.” Though I’d seen him a few times, he hadn’t seem to recognize me, so I ignored him right back. I overheard him laughing with his friends, “Everyone thinks I’m on scholarship for basketball.” In fact, he played tennis, and his scholarship was academic, not athletic. He’d won some kind of trophy in math. Socially, he wasn’t a jock or a nerd, but belonged to another, mysterious crowd of ironic, smirking kids whose circle I couldn’t place because it hadn’t existed at my old school.
“What kind of name’s Ari?” he asked, setting his briefcase on my desk like an explorer planting a flag to claim some undiscovered country. Justin carried a slender black leather briefcase and a silver pen, and no one mocked him. It was part of his image. “Is it French? Is that why you’re so good at French?”
I loved speaking French. It made me feel more sophisticated, allknowing, confident, and less Jewish. Also, in French class I didn’t have to invent interesting things to say to people. The lines of dialogue were already printed for me to simply memorize.
“No, it’s Hebrew for lion,” I explained. Under my desk, I flattened my palm as Brad had taught me, in case I needed to smack him in the nose.
Justin stared at me. “Lion, huh? You seem more like a dove. Well, I’ll just call you Brain. Did you do that workbook assignment last night? Mind if I take a look?”
I took this as a command, not a request. “Okay.” I dug through my bag for it.
“Hurry, if you don’t mind, before Monsieur Gilbert gets here.”
While copying my answers, Justin asked why I’d transferred to Dalton. I recited my standard excuse: My parents felt my old school didn’t offer enough “enrichment.”
“I love the suburbs. The land of enrichment.” He resumed copying my work in swift lacy writing, with the bored efficiency of a British lord signing a check. “Thanks, Brain,” Justin said in his slow, careful baritone, handing me back my workbook when he was done. He got up to sit with another black kid in the back of the room. “You’re cool.”
I was so startled to hear it that I almost dropped the workbook on the floor.
Was I really? Why did he think so? I wanted to know more.
THE QUITTER
“WHO DIED?”
Not understanding the question, I looked up blankly at Justin from my seat on the bench by the school entrance. A brass plaque indicated it had been donated by a local car dealership in honor of Dalton’s girls’ softball championship team, 1982.
“Why do you look so down in the mouth?” he asked, swinging his briefcase.
I said I was waiting for my mother to take me to karate, and then, maybe because I’d been suppressing the thought for so long, I admitted, “I hate it.”
“Then don’t go.”
“But my mom is coming to take me.”
Justin cocked his head to the side. “Follow me,” he said.
Flattered by the invitation, I went with him to the art room, shut up for the evening. Justin calmly unlocked the door. How did he have the key? “Ms. Hunter likes football players. My buddy Marlin made us all copies.”
Inside, we sat there with the lights out, swiveling on the metal stools and staring at the paint-speckled floor, like a Jackson Pollock painting. “Just hide out here until your karate class is over,” said Justin.
“Don’t you have to be somewhere?” I asked, but I didn’t want him to go.
“It can wait.” He had a lean, hungry look that I liked. I felt uncomfortable on my hard stool, but I didn’t dare move, or do anything that might disturb the moment.
“Want to listen to something?” he asked and pulled out a tape out of his briefcase. The tape was marked on the front: MIX. “This is Nirvana,” he said.
The band’s name, Nirvana, made me think the music would be soothing, New Agey, like Enya. But the song announced itself with a brief guitar snarl, followed by a fury of driving drumbeats and metal. I didn’t usually like loud metal music—it sounded too much like violence—but this song didn’t seem to qualify exactly as heavy metal, with all the sounds fitting together in a pattern. It was more like separate noises, each with its own direction, like the paint splatters on the art room floor.
Just as I got used to it, the noisy part died down, and Kurt Cobain began to sing.
What first caught my attention was the ache in his voice. First he’d mumble, even growl for an unintelligible line or two, then he’d fling out the next few words in a trembling, cracked yelp edged with a nervous resentment, or draw out words with a strange sarcasm. He held a sarcastic yowl for several strained seconds that felt more like ages, giving them a mysterious, eerie emphasis. His voice sounded both tired and anxious, as if he’d been ignored all his life and was finally sick of it. Why will no one listen?
Justin drummed his silver pen against one of the tables along with the song. I wanted to tell him to stop so I could hear everything. I didn’t want to miss a note of it.
The chorus was a storm of guitars, drums, and Kurt Cobain’s ragged yowl. I made out a few words in flashes, like “contagious” and “stupid.” But I didn’t need the words to know what Kurt was feeling, an emotion I too had felt, though I couldn’t name it just then. Yes, I too have been as desperate as you. I was thinking of how I felt right after Mark, when my mother found out and she folded me in her arms, and I grabbed her tightly, rubbed my cheek against her warm sweater, yet it didn’t help.
When Justin shut off the tape, I was perched on the edge of my chair, my brain tingling. I’d never heard a pop song like this, complex like a work of art, with a deep emotional pull like a novel or a movie. By comparison, everything else on the radio sounded candy-coated and fake.
I realized what that feeling was, the one Kurt was singing about. It was anger.
Justin was staring at me, waiting for me to speak. He must have felt as I did about the song, and I wanted so desperately to say something meaningful, important.
“Uh, are they British?” I asked.
“No, they’re American. But not commercial.” He said the word “commercial” with a pained look on his face.
All I could think of was, “Neat.”
“Neat?” he said.
My stomach sank. I’d messed this up. “Why? Was that wrong?”
“No. You never get anything wrong. You’re an intelligent young man.” He ejected the tape from the stereo.
“Why?” I asked. “Wait, what did I do?”
“That’s all I got. I didn’t bring any Julie Andrews to play you,” he said, and left.
I sat alone and replayed the conversation. What else could I have said? Cool. Cool beans? No, just cool. And “cool” was supposed to be my new word! Why couldn’t I have remembered it? I could even have said nice, good, great, anything but neat.
Maybe I could run after him, or find him tomorrow and say I’d been taking some kind of medication that had messed with my head. “Neat,” I’d say. “Can you believe I said that?” And then we’d laugh together about it. Yes, that might work.
I got off the stool and went to the parking lot to find my mother, who was livid.
My punishment and reward were the same: I was grounded for a week, which wasn’t much of a punishment since I never went