“Have a good first day at school, son,” Vijay giggled.
“Okay!” Kiwi waved Vijay off the premises. “Thank you! I can take it from here.”
Night school was held in a chilly top-floor room of the community college, now dark and humming, the moon floating like a buoy just outside the window. Kiwi opened door after door onto empty classrooms. “Hello …? Uh, is this … school?”
Kiwi had purchased all these rainbow multiclip folders, which he carried fanned against his chest, like a float in search of a parade. The floors squeaked under his sneakers. The same moon greeted him in all the empty rooms. Kiwi wondered if he’d messed up the time and date.
“Are you looking for Miss Arenas’s class?” snapped a janitor. “You’re on the wrong floor.”
“Cool. Thank you.” Kiwi could feel the janitor’s hatred rising out of the darkness like heat from a vent; this was another new mainland experience for Kiwi: to feel immediately hated, to be anonymous and hated. “Wow, those are some quality gloves, sir. I work at the World of Darkness and the management is really parsimonious about our supplies …”
The janitor, a whiskery man with blue exhausted eyes, gaped up at him.
From the stairwell, Kiwi heard the always-intimidating squeal of mainland girls’ laughter — a wolf pack howling for blood on an open glacier would have been less terrifying, the bellow of a thousand Seths would be a lullaby — and he followed their voices to a crack of light below the stairwell. When he touched the knob the door swung back.
“No, I don’t want to hear excuses. You’re late. I was about to lock up.”
Had he missed the class? The teacher was a tall, unsmiling woman in high-waisted pants with a nickel-bright Afro. Her body had a switchblade beauty that Kiwi was not encouraged to continue appreciating by her face.
“You just going to stand there? Shut your mouth, find a desk. One warning. You can’t get here on time, don’t bother coming.”
She wrote her name on the board and underlined it with a defiant little flourish: VOILA ARENAS. “I will be your instructor,” Voila Arenas said, chalking urgently, as if human life were an equation they were going to solve together in the next hour and twenty-two minutes. Facts screamed at meteoric speeds across the board.
“We’re all adults here, so you can call me Voila.”
Somebody in the back left corner made a crack about a magician’s hat and a vagina and the room roared.
“Excuse me? My parents were first-generation immigrants.” Voila locked black eyes with Kiwi as if she suspected him of being the joker. “It’s a beautiful word.”
“My name is Kiwi,” Kiwi offered.
Everybody had to introduce themselves and say something about why they had chosen to enroll in Voila Arenas’s GED class. When it was Kiwi’s turn, he told the truth: “I am a Bigtree alligator wrestler. I’m here because my dad put us under a mountain of debt, and I need to make money, and to do that I need to get my high school equivalency.” He paused. “I aspire to get a scholarship to a four-year university.”
“I ass-pire to fuck a bitch with great ass cheeks!” The kid behind him giggled.
“White boy’s here to tutor us,” said another white boy, a corncob-haired Midwestern-looking kid. “Community service! White boy trying to …” Kiwi heard sniggers and a few affirmative grunts. The insult drifted into something unintelligible. It took a beat to realize that he was the joke here, the punch line — he didn’t think it came naturally, to see yourself as an object. It was like conjugating your own name in a foreign tongue. So: in Loomis County he was a “white boy,” apparently. This was news. Well, it’s not like I can disagree—Kiwi stared at his skin in the pencil’s aluminum rim. He wished he could explain the island to these city kids, though. Could tell them about Chief Bigtree’s “Indian” lineage; how as a kid they’d put makeup and beads on him, festooned him with spoonbill feathers and reptilian claws; how at fourteen he’d declared: “I’m a Not-Bigtree. A Not-Indian. A Not-Seminole. A Not-Miccosukee.” This category “white” gave him a whistling fear, a feeling not unlike agoraphobia. “White” made Kiwi Bigtree picture a vast Arctic plain, a word in which one single person could never survive. Whitey, white boy—Kiwi didn’t like getting snowballed into a color. But maybe everybody felt that way about their adjectives, Kiwi thought. He remembered the feeling of coming down the Loomis ferry dock with his battered Swamplandia! duffel into a wilderness of faces.
Kiwi wondered if Miss Voila Arenas always began the class with this question. Several female students in the class had gotten pregnant and had to drop out of regular school; one slight young man had escaped a horrific home life, alluded to by the student in monotone; several admitted to having fallen into Loomis solution holes of drug use or unintelligent, repetitive crimes and crawled back out again; or they were ESL, new arrivals from Ecuador and Pakistan and Cuba. There were many older folks, too, older women especially. The oldest student, a woman with sparkling, hooded eyes, was wearing a bomber jacket worn to peach fuzz at the elbows and had brought a stack of old textbooks with her from her high school in Havana. She’d covered them in plastic. Kiwi disliked her immediately. How stupid could you get, carting all your Communist books to Loomis County? It wouldn’t occur to him until their fifth class together that his classmate’s stack was perhaps not so dissimilar from his own Field Notes and the soggy 1962 encyclopedias shelved in his bedroom at Swamplandia!
That first night Voila passed around a sheet. Diagnostic Test. Kiwi’s neck ached. He could hear the clock tick and the distancing breaths of the other thinkers, the way their cognition seemed to be happening down long, echoey corridors, somewhere impossibly remote. Words he hadn’t understood in the questions appeared again, in new orders, in the choice of answers. It was like an evil game of musical chairs. Names crowded into his brain, a drunken stadium of names, refusing to get quiet and organized.
Part I: True/False/Uncertain
“The fact that total revenue rose when half the crop was destroyed indicates that demand for coffee is inelastic …”
“Substituting in the information about price and utility, we get …”
“Cross-multiplying for x, we get …”
“Five minutes,” said Voila, turning the page of a bodybuilding magazine called Bulk Up. A woman with an Arctic-white smile and scary bauxite skin grinned out at him from the cover. Skinny Voila was underlining something, her face pensive.
When Kiwi got stuck, which happened every third question, he would stare up at this grinning bodybuilder. He felt as puny, as desperate as he ever had during the Bigtree shows. In his sweaty fingers his pencil kept slipping; he’d already broken one. Kiwi had taken many tests on Swamplandia! his pencil moving at a steady clip in the evergreen light of his own kitchen; he couldn’t understand why his intelligence wouldn’t make a fist now, and pound reliably, like his heart.
He couldn’t remember the quadratic equation, or which one the rhombus was, or whether the perimeter of Griswald Wallace’s fence would be fifty-four meters or seventy-two, given the area of his outhouse and the volume of his well. Where the Christ did Griswald Wallace live, anyhow? Why did Griswald Wallace need a fence around his outhouse? Kiwi couldn’t make sense of the reading comprehension portion, either: some excerpt from a poem about a sick dog and blueberries. “What is the theme of the passage about Rochester the dog?” “What do the blueberries symbolize for the dog named Rochester?” Kiwi’s eyes were swimming. He began to bubble in indiscriminate letters.