Jack Burns avoided what was called “the quad,” even in the spring, when the cherry trees were in bloom. The ground-floor rooms for music practice faced the courtyard; you could overhear the piano lessons from the quad. Jack occasionally imagined that his dad was still teaching someone in one of those rooms. He hated to hear that music.
And the white, round chandeliers in the dining room reminded him of blank globes—of the earth strangely countryless, without discernible borders, not even indications of land and sea. Like the world where his father had gone missing; William Burns might as well have come from outer space.
Jack looked carefully for evidence of Lucinda Fleming’s silent rage for the longest time, never seeing it. He wondered if he would recognize the symptoms—if he’d had a rage of his own here or there, but had somehow not known what it was. Who were the authorities on rage? (Not Miss Wong, who’d clearly managed to lose contact with the hurricane inside her.)
Jack wasn’t used to seeing so little of his mother; he left for school before she got up and was asleep before she came home. As for rage, what Alice had of it might have been expressed in the pain-inflicting needles with which she marked for life so many people—mainly men.
Mrs. Wicksteed, who did Jack’s necktie so patiently but absentmindedly, stuck to her be-nice-twice philosophy without ever imparting to the boy what he should do if he were pressed to be nice a third time. That he was instructed to be creative struck Jack as a nonspecific form of advice; no silent rage, or rage of any kind, was in evidence there. And Lottie, despite having lost a child, had left what amounted to her rage on Prince Edward Island—or so she implied to Jack.
“I’m not an angry person anymore, Jack,” Lottie said, when he asked her what she knew about rage in general—and the silent kind, in particular. “The best thing I can tell you is not to give in to it,” Lottie said.
Jack would later imagine that Lottie was one of those women, neither young nor old, whose sexuality had been fleeting; only small traces of her remaining desire were visible, in the way you might catch her looking at herself in profile in a mirror. Glimpses of Lottie’s former attractiveness were apparent to Jack only in her most unguarded moments—when he had a nightmare and roused her from a sound sleep, or when she woke him up for school in the morning before she’d taken the time to attend to herself.
Short of asking Lucinda Fleming to talk to him about her silent rage, which would have been far too simple and straightforward a solution for any six-year-old boy to conceive of, Jack worked up his courage and asked Emma Oastler instead. (If Emma wasn’t an authority on rage, who was?) But Jack was afraid of Emma; her cohorts struck him as somewhat safer places to start. That was why he worked up his courage to ask Emma by asking Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford first. He began with Wendy, only because she was the smaller of the two.
The junior school got a half-hour head start for lunch. How fitting that it was under the blank globes of the dining-hall chandeliers, those unmarked worlds, where Jack spoke to Wendy. How well (and for how long!) he would remember her haunted eyes, her chewed lips, her unbrushed, dirty-blond hair—not forgetting her scraped knees, as hard as fists of stone.
“What rage was that, Jack?”
“Silent.”
“What about it, you little creep?”
“Well, what is it, exactly—what is silent rage?” he asked.
“You’re not eating the mystery meat, are you?” Wendy asked, viewing his plate with disapproval.
“No, I would never eat that,” Jack answered. He separated the gray meat from the beige potatoes with his fork.
“You wanna see a little rage, Jack?”
“Yes, I guess so,” he replied cautiously—never taking his eyes off her. Wendy had an unsettling habit of cracking her knuckles by pressing them into her underdeveloped breasts.
“You wanna meet me in the washroom?” Wendy asked.
“The girls’ washroom?”
“I’m not getting caught with you in the boys’ washroom, you dork.” Jack wanted to think it over, but it was hard to think clearly with Wendy standing over him at his table. The word dork itself unsettled him; it seemed so out of place at a mostly all-girls’ school.
“Forgive me for intruding, but aren’t you having any lunch, Wendy?” Miss Wong asked.
“I’d rather die,” Wendy told her.
“Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear that!” Miss Wong said.
“You wanna follow me, or are you chicken?” Wendy whispered in Jack’s ear. He could feel one of her hard, bruised knees against his ribs.
“Okay,” he answered.
Officially, Jack needed Miss Wong’s permission to leave the dining hall, but Miss Wong was typically in an overapologetic mood (having blamed herself for attempting to force lunch on Wendy Holton, when Wendy would rather die). “Miss Wong—” he started to say.
“Yes, of course, Jack,” she blurted out. “I’m so sorry if I’ve made you feel self-conscious, or that I may have delayed your leaving the table for whatever obvious good reason you have for leaving. Heavens! Don’t let me hold you up another second!”
“I’ll be right back,” was all he managed to say.
“I’m sure you will be, Jack,” Miss Wong said. Perhaps the faint hurricane inside her had been overcome by her contrition.
In the girls’ washroom nearest the dining hall, Wendy Holton took Jack into a stall and stood him on the toilet seat. She just grabbed him in the armpits and lifted him up. Standing on the toilet seat, he was eye-to-eye with her; so he wouldn’t slip, Wendy held him by the hips.
“You want to feel rage, inner rage, Jack?”
“I said silent, silent rage.”
“Same difference, penis breath,” Wendy said.
Now there was a concept that would stay with Jack Burns for many years—penis breath! What a deeply disturbing concept it was.
“Feel this,” Wendy said. She took his hands and placed them on her breasts—on her no breasts, to be more precise.
“Feel what?” he asked.
“Don’t be a dork, Jack—you know what they are.”
“This is rage?” the boy asked. By no stretch of his imagination could he have called what his small hands held breasts.
“I’m the only girl in grade seven who doesn’t have them!” Wendy exclaimed, in a smoldering fury. Well, this was rage without a doubt.
“Oh.”
“That’s all you can say?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” Jack quickly said. (How to apologize was all he had learned from Miss Wong.)
“Jack, you’re just not old enough,” Wendy declared. She left him standing precariously on the toilet seat. “When I knock on the door from the hall three times, you’ll know it’s safe to come out,” she told him. “Rage,” Wendy said, almost as an afterthought.
“Silent rage,” Jack repeated, for clarity’s sake. He saw that he should approach Charlotte Barford a little differently on this subject. But how?