When people asked Hal when he was going to grow up, he said, “Never.” Inspired by this, when the teachers asked Samuel what he wanted to be, he would say: “I don’t know. I just turned fourteen.”
Almost fifteen now, Ruth Connors knew. Out in the aluminum toolshed behind her house, surrounded by the doorknobs and hardware her father had found in old houses slated for demolition, Ruth sat in the darkness and concentrated until she came away with a headache. She would run into the house, past the living room, where her father sat reading, and up to her room, where in fits and bursts she would write her poetry. “Being Susie,” “After Death,” “In Pieces,” “Beside Her Now,” and her favorite – the one she was most proud of and carried with her to the symposium folded and refolded so often that the creases were close to cuts – “The Lip of the Grave.”
Ruth had to be driven to the symposium because that morning, when the bus was leaving, she was still at home with an acute attack of gastritis. She was trying weird all-vegetable regimes and the night before had eaten a whole head of cabbage for dinner. Her mother refused to kowtow to the vegetarianism Ruth had taken up after my death.
“This is not Susie, for Chrissakes!” her mother would say, plunking down an inch-thick sirloin in front of her daughter.
Her father drove her first to the hospital at three A.M. and then to the symposium, stopping home on the way to pick up the bag her mother had packed and left at the end of their driveway.
As the car pulled up into the camp, Ruth scanned the crowd of kids lining up for nametags. She spotted my sister among an all-male group of Masters. Lindsey had avoided putting her last name on her nametag, choosing to draw a fish instead. She wasn’t exactly lying that way, but she hoped to meet a few kids from the surrounding schools who didn’t know the story of my death or at least wouldn’t connect her to it.
All spring she’d worn the half-a-heart pendant while Samuel wore the other half. They were shy about their affection for each other. They did not hold hands in the hallways at school, and they did not pass notes. They sat together at lunch; Samuel walked her home. On her fourteenth birthday he brought her a cupcake with a candle in it. Other than that, they melted into the gender-subdivided world of their peers.
The following morning Ruth was up early. Like Lindsey, Ruth was a floater at gifted camp. She didn’t belong to any one group. She had gone on a nature walk and collected plants and flowers she needed help naming. When she didn’t like the answers one of the Science Nerds provided, she decided to start naming the plants and flowers herself. She drew a picture of the leaf or blossom in her journal, and then what sex she thought it was, and then gave it a name like “Jim” for a simple-leaved plant and “Pasha” for a more downy flower.
By the time Lindsey stumbled in to the dining hall, Ruth was in line for a second helping of eggs and sausage. She had made a big stink about no meat at home and she had to hold to it, but no one at the symposium knew of the oath she’d sworn.
Ruth hadn’t talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she’d seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.
As Lindsey walked blindly to the next open spot in line, Ruth interceded. “What’s the fish for?” Ruth asked, nodding her head toward my sister’s nametag. “Are you religious?”
“Notice the direction of the fish,” Lindsey said, wishing simultaneously that they had vanilla puddings at breakfast. They would go great with her pancakes.
“Ruth Connors, poet,” Ruth said, by way of introduction.
“Lindsey,” Lindsey said.
“Salmon, right?”
“Please don’t,” Lindsey said, and for a second Ruth could feel the feeling a little more vividly – what it was like to claim me. How people looked at Lindsey and imagined a girl covered in blood.
Even among the gifteds, who distinguished themselves by doing things differently, people paired off within the first few days. It was mostly pairs of boys or pairs of girls – few serious relationships had begun by fourteen – but there was one exception that year. Lindsey and Samuel.
“K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” greeted them wherever they went. Unchaperoned, and with the heat of the summer, something grew in them like weeds. It was lust. I’d never felt it so purely or seen it move so hotly into someone I knew. Someone whose gene pool I shared.
They were careful and followed the rules. No counselor could say he had flashed a light under the denser shrubbery by the boys’ dorm and found Salmon and Heckler going at it. They set up little meetings outside in back of the cafeteria or by a certain tree that they’d marked up high with their initials. They kissed. They wanted to do more but couldn’t. Samuel wanted it to be special. He was aware that it should be perfect. Lindsey just wanted to get it over with. Have it behind her so she could achieve adulthood – transcend the place and the time. She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport. You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.
“They’re going to do it,” Ruth wrote in her journal. I had pinned hopes on Ruth’s writing everything down. She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her – literally, she felt, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day.
When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the cornfield in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too.
“You’re a really good poet, Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.
I could see back to an afternoon when Ruth watched her teenage cousin undress to take a bath while Ruth sat on the bathroom rug, locked in the bathroom so her cousin could babysit her as she’d been told. Ruth had longed to touch her cousin’s skin and hair, longed to be held. I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls’ crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.
The last week of the symposium was always spent developing a final project, which the various schools would present in competition on the night before the parents returned to pick the students up. The competition wasn’t announced until the Saturday breakfast of that final week, but the kids had already begun planning for it anyway. It was always a better-mousetrap competition, and so the stakes were raised year after year. No one wanted to repeat a mousetrap that had already been built.
Samuel went in search of the kids with braces. He needed the tiny rubber bands orthodontists doled out. They would work to keep the tension tight on the guiding arm of his mousetrap. Lindsey begged clean tinfoil from the retired army cook. Their trap involved reflecting light in order to confuse the mice.