Grotonian, Fall 2015 by Groton School

The Grotonian

Exposition Fall, 2015

This issue of “The Grotonian” features a variety of Sixth Form essays, written for the course nicknamed “Expo.” During the fall term of the Sixth Form year, this expository writing class aims to broaden the perspectives of every Sixth Former through shared stories. The pieces are brilliant, each illustrating the diverse ethos and experiences of the Sixth Form. These particular essays were selected anonymously by the editors of “The Grotonian,” and then chosen for their particular grasp of the written word. To the Sixth Form, thank you for writing such beautiful narratives. They were wonders to read.

Head Editor Logan Deming Writing Editors Ethan Woo Langa Chinyoka Jack McLaughlin Arts Editor Ella Anderson Cover Art by Maddie Ferrucci ‘17

Featured Works Alone Again in the Unquiet Darkness Georgia Brainard 1 Of Glamour and Grit Claudette Ramos 5 She is All that i have left Angus Cameron Bankston Warren 9 Majesty Suzanne Kuczynski 13 Don Logan Deming 18 Apples and Oranges Ross Ewald 21 Roman Sugar Ethan Woo 26

Head Editor Logan Deming Writing Editors Ethan Woo Langa Chinyoka Jack McLaughlin Arts Editor Ella Anderson Cover Art by Maddie Ferrucci ‘17

Alone Again in the Unquiet Darkness Georgia Brainard I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. -Maxine Kingston Change cannot be seen under relentless scrutiny; it is best perceived at a time and from a distance, when the mind and the eye are far enough removed to observe the entirety of the image. Hours and days staked in front of a fishbowl reveal no falling water—it is only upon your departure and return, weeks later, that you find the thing evaporated, your lonely fish lying limp on the bone-dry bottom. The same goes for stars, fifty-fold in that blanket sky. Someone once told me that the sky was just a blanket thrown over our little earth, the stars needle pricks full of the other world’s light. I used to watch these stars every night, always the same time and place. I used to watch one star in particular; in reality they were (they are) a group of stars, clustered in a form more perfect than themselves, hung delicately each night, but to me they were one. Each night I walked out to a place, and I knew that was where I was because it’s where that star (those stars) hung just right, to the left of the chapel and up a little ways. It was just visible over the tree tops, all the better without their leaves. I searched every night until I found that star, and I found it to be the little peace I could grant myself at each day’s end. This place where I watched my stars is of little significance without the moments it holds. It is no more than a gentle hill, caught between more significant destinations, 1

overlooking a tired baseball diamond and grass fields. Soft needles bed the ground beneath two young trees, between whose crowns you will find a large gap, wide enough to give a window to the night sky. If you lie here at night, or just after dawn as I sometimes do, you will find that the sounds of the campus drain here: conversations, whispered but fully intact, footsteps and laughs from across the Circle. At first it was a place I used to wait. That is what first brought me out, on a cold November night, to stand under the stars for a while. Waiting is a patient task; waiting for someone you’re sure will never come is especially so. But it was in waiting for his company that I found comfort in my solitude, and it is this gift I hold most dear. Learning to be alone is not something easily found, and I found it quite slowly, without ever knowing I was searching. I searched for my star in the sky every night as I waited but I found some things of myself that were there waiting for me. I found that I love to hum, just to myself and just when I am alone. I like the feeling of my throat tickling more than I like the actual sound. I found that to lie on the floor of the earth is something we do not do as often as we should, and that the stars do not lose their glory no matter how often you look at them. I did not feel myself coming to enjoy those nightly moments. I resented the solitude because it reminded me of his absence, of another night, hopeful first and later lost. Being alone meant being forgotten again, night after night, alone with my thoughts and all the noises and the stars. I did not feel myself coming to crave this place or the solitude that accompanied it. Change is best perceived from a time and a distance, even from oneself, but my nose was pressed hard against the glass, ignorant of the 2

very water evaporating in front of my glossy eyes. There is a fine line between solitude and loneliness, and I tread this precipice lightly even now. The difference lies not so much within the choice but within the result; you can chose to be alone and find yourself lonely still. Loneliness is absence; solitude is entirety. Loneliness is incomplete, an expectation always waiting and never met. I returned to campus this fall, eager to be done with waiting. He was gone, no one to wait for now, and I went straight to bed—the first night I had not returned to my place to watch the stars here in almost ten months. My racing mind and heart kept my eyes open into the late hours of the night, until my restlessness claimed victory. At three in the morning I found myself back on that gentle hill, still barely warm from the late summer sun, searching for a star. I learned I had been lied to. My star was not where he had said he’d be (he had promised every night before). The space next to the chapel lay naked, lonely, absent. I found him a little ways away, hidden directly behind me toward the west. Only then did I witness the movements of the stars, five hundred kilometers per second, spinning endlessly against the Earth’s orbit and going nowhere fast. I could not perceive those unperceivable movements each night prior when I had watched; my nose was pressed against the fishbowl firm, and I did not see the falling water until the lonely fish already was limp on the ground.

distance revealed that to me as well. I had learned how to be alone, quite slowly, through those long and empty nights. I no longer waited on a boy who never came, on the absence and the loneliness—the loneliness had died, and my solitude became my solace instead. The gentle hill where I used to wait, where I found my star and my solitude, now overlooks a turf field. The vibrancy of the artificial grass forgets the beauty once held here, and a massive scoreboard marks the ground where I once sat, glowing through the night. It is hard to see the stars with the scoreboard’s red lights polluting the sky. This place has changed, not at all and then all at once, and it has changed me in the same way. I soak in the nostalgia of it for a while. But it is no more than a place, a spot of grass on a gentle hill in a big, wet world, and I am no more than a minnow. It is solitude that this place gave me, but it is mine now. I have found new places to be alone, to look at the stars unchanging and to know that they are. Balls of gas, paradoxes of the sky. Moving and flying and still, tiny pricks of enormous light, unchanging and never the same. I am held together by my own gravity and collapsing in on myself at the same time, and I think of all of these things when I am alone again, under the stars.

Those tiny unperceivable movements every night made a leap across the sky in my absence—time and distance—but I was comforted by this change more than I was disturbed by it; I had moved and changed, an unperceivable amount each night on that hill, and time and 3

Of Glamour and Grit Claudette Ramos My city is dressed up frequently. This does not bother me very much; in fact, I myself am strongly guilty of romanticizing New York, of coming up with abstract but pretty phrases to describe such an interesting place and using the word “shimmer” at least once within the text. I am familiar, intimate even, with the atmosphere of coffee shops downtown and the energy of the night air, and I daresay I quite like that side of my home. But while there is a shard of truth to that side of the city and my place within it, there is a fantastical fey glamour, a truth-bending, a disguise of another side I have not as beautifully described. In fact, I have shied away from any description at all, and so this is my attempt, however late, to start at the beginning and lay it bare. My mother arrived in the dead of a particularly dark, desolate winter; her plane landed four months after 9/11, and she told me when I was old enough to understand that when she drove past the wreckage, the debris was still smoking. She repeats the phrase “culture shock” when she describes her transition, looking up at all the buildings and marveling with her thick accent. She lived at the very tip of Manhattan for a little while; her aunt had paid for her plane ticket, and she lived with her cousins in a tiny apartment in Washington Heights, teaching during the day and babysitting in the evening. As the months passed, and the hours and pay checks accumulated, she moved further downtown and purchased three more international tickets for the rest of her family. Our arrival in March marked the end of a twoyear separation, the start of an entirely new age. I remem5

ber particularly well my first snowfall: my sister and I are only two years apart, and our childhood was an era of matching clothes. We wore identical red jackets and bootcut jeans that day, and we donned black gloves to caress the snow and squealed when it melted in our new home, an area my mother chose because a fellow Filipina lived in the same apartment building, a small piece of familiarity to chat with about adobo recipes. My neighborhood goes by many names. My favorite, “El Barrio,” translates literally to “the neighborhood” and pays homage to its Hispanic demographic, but the area is more commonly called East Harlem or Spanish Harlem. I have lived here for more than half my life, and I confess this place is something I have hidden; I talk often of sparkling lights and people-watching in trendy streets and cafes common in downtown Manhattan, and I emphasize the glamour of this lifestyle, rarely mentioning streets above 96th. I practice a selective exposure; while I establish my neighborhood in introductions and reference my home in conversation, it is more of a surface poke, a brush-over of a key aspect of myself. A downplay. A covering. During the summer the concrete sidewalks of my block transform into gigantic mirrors of the sun’s rays, and it becomes impossible not to squint. I am located between two avenues on a wider-than-usual street, and when the heat becomes unbearable in past years, I have walked home and discovered the fire-hydrant in full bloom, gushing cold water from across the street. It stains the concrete darker, and in fifth grade my sister and I would cool our feet as we ate icees on the pavement and argued about the color of our shoes. 6

There was a corner store at the end of my block that was open all my life and closed suddenly two months ago. Everyone called it Marketa, and my mother would chat up the three Koreans who owned the place as she browsed for fresh fruit. When Clyde and I were younger, their assortment of various Asian snacks never ceased to captivate our appetites, and we would leave clutching bags of Pocky, those ridiculously thin, chocolate-dipped sticks and those jello things in plastic cups that tasted like freedom at four on a weekday. Now the storefront is all metal shutters and silence, and I can honestly say that a piece of me will reside forever within those eclectic walls, searching the cluttered shelves for a tub of sprinkles and a bottle of soy sauce. Around the corner from the apartment my mother does laundry every Sunday, which costs infinitely more in New York than it should in any place ever. The laundromat is very run-down with good lighting, and my mother knows, like she knows how my father likes his coffee, which machines to avoid, which ones work best. She also converses with the various managers here, and she teaches me Spanish phrases she learns each week either from eavesdropping or actual learning. There is a small television that is always tuned to the channel of Spanish soap operas, and I try to hone the Spanish I have learned from school as my mother asks after every sentence, “What does that mean, Claudette?” There is a certain realistic unpleasantness, a grit to my neighborhood; the streets I am most familiar with are, more often than not, littered with trash, and the concrete is cracked. The windows of my room face the sidewalk, and as people walk by late at night, the shouted curses and loud music waft through the glass. Graffiti adorns bridges 7

and tunnels and apartment buildings, and the only bigchain businesses in the area sell French fries and chicken nuggets that aren’t made from actual chicken. Single-parent families abound, and I have been very fortunate in comparison to the circumstances of my friends from El Barrio; so many children here grow up too fast. My New York is something like this. Through these vivid, literal descriptions of my block, I have aimed to convey truth, to recover from my covering; these places are all real, and while they are neither new nor shiny nor glass, they are still beautiful. My neighborhood’s beauty lies in its realness, its honesty, its flawed appearance and its complicated relationship with my identity. I come from this place, this gritty, true, and beautiful place, and I do not hide this fact now. As I have gotten older, my parents have relaxed their hold, and I can more or less travel the city by myself. Although no one will ever be able to explore all of New York, I’ve been to quite a few worlds within this tiny island. I’ve sat at coffee shops studying for APs, I’ve acted like the very people I am meant to despise: tourists; I’ve walked the city streets late at night and romanticized the emotional shimmer. I feel as if I’ve belonged in them all. But this part, my original New York, is something I have failed to properly acknowledge and analyze. This is a terrible, inexcusable crack in my concrete heart I hope these words have helped fill.

She is All that I Have Left Angus Cameron Bankston Warren Red Dog was still alive when I got my first motorboat. In fact, he promised it to me—a thirteen-foot Boston Whaler—for my thirteenth birthday. Of course, Red Dog was not his real name: the epithet came, rather, from the color of his hair, which in his youth had been a startling flame-orange. The boat arrived in January, its hull ratty and its wooden console and seats decayed beyond hope of repair. In years to come, I would rebuild all the mahogany—varnishing and sanding, varnishing and sanding. But for the time being, the ancient mariner lay dormant on the concrete pad outside our barn, and a family of mice took up residence among the ropes in the bow locker. Red Dog and I discovered their hairless bodies later in the spring, curled in death. They had drowned after a shard of fiberglass clogged the drains and left three inches of stagnant, oily water in the cabinet. When the summer sun had warmed the waters of Lake Huron, the time came to christen the ship. She was barely seaworthy: holes and fractures littered the gunwales just above the waterline. Clumps of excess sealant interrupted the brilliant sky-blue of the deck, and the nonskid surface was pocked with rust stains and fungus. Three decades of spilled fuel had pooled in the back sink, leaving a stubborn black ring. Over the winter, we had dismantled the electric starter system, and lengths of wire still protruded from the battery casing and steering console. Standing on the dock above my newly-launched ship, I shook a bottle of ginger ale, cracked it open, and sprayed its contents over the bow in a sparkling cascade. 9

It was a fiddly boat to operate. The first morning,

we took her out on the Lake and discovered that the steering was completely unresponsive. The gas tank could not maintain appropriate pressure, as it was dried and cracked and lay hissing on the deck, fuel bubbling from its nozzles and fissures. We floundered in the wake of other, bigger boats, and the ride was spine-shattering, especially for the pilot, who wedged himself into the seat, his arms, legs and back at firm right angles. At certain speeds, the Mercury engine stumbled badly: sometimes three, but more often two, of the original four weary cylinders fired, sending tremors through the hull, as if all forty horsepowers were stampeding about the cockpit. There was a method, Red Dog taught me, to setting this beast in motion: the grimy, red safety lanyard had to be fastened to my wrist; the oil level, barely visible through the hazed and cracked meter on the motor housing, had to be just high enough; the motor itself had to sit just so in the water, but not so low that the propeller might scrape the bottom. If merely turning the key was not enough to wake the creature from its hibernation, I could choke the engine. Then, starved for oxygen, the savage machine flailed with its last breath, clutching at the fleeting threads of gasoline. If it was quick enough to capture its prey, it stood erect, opened its blood-spattered jaws, and roared to life. But if it whimpered and collapsed, I let it idle. Even with a running start, the rusty, old lion only sometimes reached its octane antelope. Years of hard running and imperfect maintenance had deteriorated the machine, even before I owned it. By the time I came along, it creaked and groaned, straining behind the weight of the hull. Its arrhythmia worsened with each passing day. A faulty alarm on the dashboard screamed, “Let me die! Let me die!” whenever I put the 10

It was a fiddly boat to operate. The first morning,

key in the ignition, yelping for me to stop poking its wounds. Even when I could get it going, it maimed itself, like a soldier shooting himself in the foot to achieve discharge. Once, the fuel line ruptured in the middle of the lake, leaving me to paddle ashore. I never acquired the magic touch required to light up the old Mercury. Red Dog, though, soothed the machine, coaxing it with a gentle, practiced hand. The same engine that snapped and snarled at me rolled over for him, subdued like a tame puppy: no choke, no idle, no throttle— one try. Year after year, he showed me again how to launch the ship and how to dock it, how to coil the ropes and repair the running lights. He even taught me to drive his truck a year before it was legal, so that I could take the boat in and out of the water myself. But the engine was unreliable, and I lived in mortal fear of starting the damned thing. It petrified me to think that I might disappoint the man who had dedicated so much of himself to me. My uncle was, and indeed is, not an easy man to love. He shrouded his self in confidence and practicality and radiant virility. The Red Dog was a mere facet of his being, a wild and charismatic streak, but it was the part of him I knew best. He was the nearest thing I ever had to a father, but I never felt worthy of being his son.

Red Dog is deceased now, and the man that remains has lost the will to live, or rather the life he led ran its course and came abruptly to an end. A beating heart can yet be dead. He hasn’t gone near the boat in ages— it’s been in dry dock anyway, awaiting a fresh coat of paint and repairs to its hull. The rear seat, the last panel of the original woodwork, has developed a terminal hairline fracture, but I daren’t replace it without Red Dog’s guidance. To do it wrong would be to do injustice to his memory.

So it’s only a matter of time until I find myself plopped squarely in the bilge, having shattered the flimsy board. He has always talked vaguely about selling the Whaler. I never use it, he says. I don’t take good enough care of it. I don’t seem to have any interest in it, even. And I think to myself, “If only you could know why. I am afraid of the lion. I am afraid of you.” Despite my caution, or more likely because of it, Red Dog has deserted me. I am stranded at the dock without a working motor.

Majesty Suzanne Kuczynski “the snow doesn’t give a soft white / damn Whom it touches” - e. e. cummings

We sit in the milky snow, under a crippled pine. Hazy clouds shroud the sunlight. The world swirls around us and our stinging red noses. It brushes the flurries into a cold and slicing white smoke. A chorus of rattling branches echoes in from the forest. Grayness swallows a sky that skims the stars. The blizzard quakes through the once-still air. They march past, masters of their world. They stomp into the frost, exhuming the yellow corpses of grass from their white tombs. Their breaths are deep and hot, so close that they whisper against our ears. Only the weeping needles of a tree shield us, but it is enough. Their battle-line trudges by. It takes little notice of us. Even after the last one has lapsed into the swirling white, we remain silent and still under the sinking tree. Never having felt so small, we stare in awe at the prints left in the snow. *** My house, its walls and roof the gray of winter skies, sits nestled on the remote hill. Although it is perched on the highest point in the county, it is not visible from a distance. This was always the point. The architect had wanted the house to melt into the land, to become a small drop in a vast ocean of trembling trees and humming grasses. The house knows its place. It is humble, meditative, part of something bigger than itself. It is part of the wild. 13

However, here I see my powers as limitless. It is

my castle, and I am its queen. The forest is my kingdom, the shy squirrels and whistling robins my subjects, the berry bushes my royal banquets. Every time I come here, I am above, watching the rest of world from my empire on the hill. No one can tell me what to do. In this wilderness, I rule alone. The closest neighbors are farmers many miles away. Their daughter, Jordan, is my age, with hair the color of sunlight. When I am at my house, she will always come. In the summer, we walk under the trees, our faces dazzled by the light filtered through leaves that seem much too green. We fill our mouths with berries as blue as the depth of the sky. We dance in the field; we march proudly through the trees. It is as though the sun never sets. Time is pliable, yielding. *** But now, it is cold. Ice snakes like vines up the windowpanes; the birds are quiet. My kingdom has withdrawn into the white. The world is entrenched in darkness. In this stillness, my body quivers with energy. I make any excuse to go outside. Jordan and I sled down the gentle hill, laughing as ice-winds tickle our cheeks. We build snowmen; we write our names in footprints. We have conquered winter and its frozen melancholy. In the vastness of the cold forest, we whistle and sing, punctuating the air with our limitless power. One day, the air is born clear. Silence stirs in the frigid breeze and the receding clouds reveal the sapphire of the sky. The white ground dances in the sunlight, sparkling. It is a perfect day to survey the kingdom. Wrapped in our fathers’ coats, we trudge outside into the glisten14

Majesty Suzanne Kuczynski “the snow doesn’t give a soft white / damn Whom it touches” - e. e. cummings

However, here I see my powers as limitless. It is

ing clarity. Our boots stomp and squelch the untouched snow. The trees, slouching under the winter weight, guide us through the forest. Determined, we parade up twirling slopes, covered with snow so deep we must swim our way out of it. The winter cannot stop our power. The sun beats a feeble warmth onto our rosy faces. We are gloriously loud, hooting at the stark trees, as we lie swaddled in the deep frost. We jump up and march on, shaking the sparkle off our jackets, past ponds and frozen streams. Only our procession punctures the blanket of white. We kick up the snow, shake the frosty branches, and crack the ice in the creeks. We take pride in our singular loudness; we alone make paths in a wayless wood. Strengthening stormy winds, however, soon blow away our imagined authority. A deep blizzard descends from the heavens; it envelops us in a sudden gray fury. We are lost amidst the frozen mist. With our arms outstretched, we probe for trunks along the path that will guide us to the safety of our castle. The winds whip and scream through the naked trees. They are louder than any of our laughter or whistling or yelling. We are alone in a dark wood, coats wet from a thrashing frost, betrayed by our kingdom, feeling insignificant. Panting, we reach a clearing at the bottom of the hill. Knives of ice, flying in the breeze, stab our cold skin. We cannot tell which way is which. The air is thick with white. Squinting and shielding our eyes with wet mittens, we see the pine. It is old but short, its needles hanging dense and long like an overgrown beard. We know we must take shelter soon or we will never be found. Jordan motions me towards it, and we crawl under its green embrace. The wind filters in calm and soft. Our fate, it seems, is bound to a dying tree, and we surrender. 15

An hour passes. The storm twirls on and on. I breathe deep and cold and calm. My head leans on the rough bark; my hair gets caught in its dry, ancient grooves. The scent of wet wool in my mittens fills my rough nose. I stare past green lines into eternal nothingness, doing nothing but waiting for the storm to end. It is then that they come. Something deep and strong punctures the grey. Twenty deer trudge into view. Their skin glistens with the stinging snow. Their black noses are chapped. They clack their snaking antlers and brush up small blizzards from the ground with every stride. Bobbing their heads, they rub against the needles of the tree. They assert that this is their land with each and every step. Their hot breaths are carried far by the gusts. They stand taller and prouder than I could ever be. They rebel against the wind, venturing onwards, pushing harder. A fawn turns its head to us, looking down curiously. Its mother nudges it forward. *** I often think about this moment. In my mind, it is always tinged blue. Not a sad blue, but a pure blue: something like the water in the oceans or ponds or lakes or the rain or snow. The air is blue and the snow is blue and they are too. I’ve tried to describe it before, but never with success. I’ll bring up my synesthesia, or how I don’t really think in words, or that it was simply an indescribably powerful moment, but the point doesn’t ever really get across. It has clung to me, after all these years, as the color of water, Jordan’s eyes, and clean skies. *** 16

We are under the tree, staring with ever-widening eyes, in awe at this sight. We are where I thought they should be. My throne, my make-believe power over this endless place, tumbles as I sit under an old tree at the hill’s edge, watching the world unfurl before me. Then, they are gone. I melt like springtime snow into a vast ocean of trembling trees and humming grasses; I melt into the blue. The air clears a bit. The house appears, only subtly, at the top of the hill once more. We stand and venture onwards to what we once called our castle, now simply a home. *** It is funny how the small always seem to think that they are the biggest. But, we are as cold as the ice in the creeks. We are as rattled as the branches in the wind. We are as quiet as the mice and as loud as the earth. We are more afraid than the deer but stronger than the storm. We are so, so infinitely small. But, it is enough. Although the blizzard rages on, the trees will shelter us and the deer will let us be. We are nothing, yet part of everything, part of the blue, and I think that is all that I could ever want.

dON Logan Deming Once, when I was younger, my cousins began to play a game I didn’t know. I watched as they scampered around my grandparents’ lawn, squealing with joy. The rules were intricate, too complicated for me, the youngest cousin. I went back inside. There I saw Don, reading in his favorite chair. His feet were planted firmly on the floor, his back parallel to the wall. Carefully, I sunk into the chair next to him; I cocked my head to the side, studying the grand pages and sturdy binding. I couldn’t understand what in those words could keep him so grounded, so immovable. The next day, I begged my father to take me to a bookstore to buy a book, disregarding the activities that had kept me engaged before: the games on the lawn or the ever enticing television set. My father agreed, and I bought “The Mysterious Benedict Society.” As soon as the cash register printed out a receipt, I sprinted back to my grandparents’ house, plopped in the chair next to Don and opened to the first page. We read until the sun’s rays bathed us in red and yellow, until one beam of artificial light illuminated the pages. My feet were planted on the floor, my back parallel to the wall. And reading became an anvil, forging an unspoken bond between us. The slow inhale and exhale of our breaths composed a collective rhythm, the flipping of the pages a song. I devoured “The Mysterious Benedict Society” and soon ran back to the bookstore to pick up the rest of the series. I mirrored Don: I soaked in the words and phrases, learning through their narratives. Ironically, we connected over our shared passion for words, although during this time we never spoke. We read side by side.

When I got older, we started to play chess. We stared at the pieces for hours, conversing in the language of rooks and knights, bishops and queens. We sparred through strategy, and he challenged me to think further and further ahead, holding different aspects of the game in my head all at once. My grandmother, Grandy, and my parents would leave us throughout the day, going to the grocery store, the movies, the bank. They would come back periodically to check on us, but we never moved. We would still be seated in our favorite chairs, staring at the checkered board in front of us. Sometimes, we would share a few words when one of us was in a compromising position, trading small jabs as the game became tighter. And then quiet laughter would animate the silence. We always had the same sense of humor. Dry and sarcastic, both of us loved to make quiet comments that no one else would pick up on, jokes no one else heard. No one else understood. After he got sick, the doctor told him to walk every day. So, to get his daily dose of exercise, we would take long walks along the perimeter of the retirement home where my grandparents lived. The road was long and twisting. Trees lined the side of the path and white crested waves lapped the shore. Grains of sand twinkled on the pavement. On those strolls, we would listen to squawks of the ospreys in their nests. We saw dolphins travel in packs and manatees float under the surface of the sea. Chipmunks scampered up chipped bark, and flecks of wood would fly off trees as the woodpeckers looked for their next meal. Near the end of our walk, there was an eagle’s next. Don always pointed out eagles’ nests. There we would stop. And sometimes, when we were lucky, we would see those mighty wings swoop down into its 19

bed of twigs. We would both smile, gazing at the bird as she greeted her young. Slow breathing and shuffling feet marked the silence, and I was at peace. We began to look through his possessions near the end. My father sat with Don and Grandy at the kitchen table, going over finances and legal affairs, slowly sifting through piles of crinkled paper. I read by myself then, escaping through words. Sometimes my father would ask me to join them: Don, Grandy, and the rest of the family. We looked through boxes lined with grime, sealed shut with age. We needed to know which ones he wanted us to keep. One box, coated in the thickest layer of dust, about the size of my mother’s hand, had the seal of the Army. Carefully, my mother opened the dark wood, and we looked inside. It was a medal. A purple medal resting on soft velvet. Softly, Don closed the box once more. With one gesture, Don said thousands of words The urn is a deep blue. Waves of white and sapphire dance among the sea of that dark, rich blue. It is beautiful. Misshapen stones line the edge of the clearing, and carved dates rest on each. It smells of pine and freshly cut grass. Black heels dig into the soft dirt as we circle the small plot of dug up earth. A priest stands in front, a conductor for Don’s last song. Over the crashing waves in my ears, I hear the priest ask if anyone wants to speak one last time. My mother rubs my back. They go around one after another: aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters, sharing their memories. Unshed tears glimmer like the dew beneath our feet. When they reach me, I cannot speak. I breathe out silence. So I listen to the whistling of the leaves in the branches and the words laden with grief and the collective breath as we watch that deep blue sink into the soil. I think he would have known what I was going to say. 20

Apples and Oranges Ross Ewald I’ve never liked having to choose between binary opposites. When I was four, my father asked me, “What weighs more, a hippo or an elephant?”

“A hippo and an elephant.”

“I said a hippo or an elephant.”

“And I said a hippo and an elephant.”

“Ross, you’re funny.” “No, I’m right.”

Funnily enough, I was right. I learned this in the summer before seventh grade, when I was taking a course in mathematical logic at what we campers affectionally called a “nerd camp.” I was sitting between two eighth graders: a girl who was researching possible implementations of microrobotics on cancer cells and a girl who had scored a 790 on the SAT’s Reading without having studied. They grasped the concepts of modus ponens and conjunctive syllogism much more easily than I did. This was my first time being hemmed in by so many bristling and menacing IQ Points; I was quaking in my converse and braces. When we were learning about the different logical operators, our teacher defined “or” as necessitating at least one of the given options as true. “Or is inclusive.” Or is inclusive. This meant that if someone were to ask me if I wanted ice cream or cake, I could choose both 21

without defying the laws of logic. It also meant that, so many years ago, I really was right about the hippo and the elephant. Most importantly, it allowed me to avoid choosing between binary opposites. My mother has her own way of combatting unfair comparisons—she calls them “apples and oranges.” They are incompatible; they are incomparable. At first glance it seems to be one of those strange old-world idioms, incapable of evoking what it intends to. I’d roll my eyes when she’d say that, but I don’t any more. Another of my least favorite phrases growing up was the “there are no bad questions” of my fifth grade teacher, Jennifer. There are bad questions, lots of them. “Who do you like more, Addie or Jessie? Do you like riding English or Western better? Are you a science and math person, or a humanities person? Do you like Latin or Greek more? Do you like the East Coast or the West Coast better?” I fought these questions with my all-inclusive or. I developed passionate narratives enveloping and exalting both, watching the expression on the unfortunate asker’s face shift from jovial and mild curiosity to regret and discomfort. “I go to Addie and Jessie for different things. I love doing groundwork Western, but I love jumping English. I love both. Greek is harder, but really rewarding. I love both.” These systematic responses to insincere questions wrap my discomfort with choice in logical cleverness. When you wrap a truth in cleverness, it sounds like a lie. When you say something enough times, it sounds like a lie. What, other than a lie, can one expect, having

Apples and Oranges Ross Ewald I’ve never liked having to choose between binary opposites. When I was four, my father asked me, “What weighs more, a hippo or an elephant?”

“A hippo and an elephant.”

“I said a hippo or an elephant.”

“And I said a hippo and an elephant.”

“Ross, you’re funny.” “No, I’m right.”

asked someone to reduce their existence to a choice? ***

Do I like the East Coast or the West Coast better? Apples, or Oranges? ***

My childhood tastes of citrus. Behind my house there is a grove of six orange trees, two mandarin trees, two lemon trees, and two lime trees. My sisters and I were suffused with Vitamin C whenever one of the fruits was in season. Through this abundance, picked or pressed, citrus became our language of love. In the summers, my sisters and I would run barefoot outside with a woven wire basket and hobble over the gravel path with indolent bees weaving between our bare legs. On hot days the air would be heavy with the fragrance of honey and the lavender would droop with butterflies. We’d twist oranges off the boughs, carefully, softly, and drop them into the basket. We’d lug our load upstairs into the dark, cool kitchen, and cut the oranges into segments, consuming them greedily, perching at the counter. This was summer in its purest form.

We have an old-fashioned orange juicer sitting on the countertop. Making a glass of orange juice from that juicer is a laborious art. It’s rusting, and the lever always squeals and catches halfway down. When the glass is almost full and a stack of orange carcasses lies beside you, the final touch is adding one Meyer lemon. This often causes the glass to run over, leaving you with a sticky, dripping mess over the counter and a sore shoulder. The

juicing seems not worth the juice. Yet it is—it’s sweet and sour and just a little bitter, and it’s ambrosia. To give this away is the simplest form of selflessness; unmerited orange juice is the purest kind of love. There is no order in “orange,” just a slow unpeeling, a sweet meandering interrupted by pips. The truths of childhood, conversation, and characters alike are scattered, like seeds in sectors, heterogeneous and varied. There’s no congruity to catch up in a perfect phrase, no truth to hint at hauntingly. There is only California, yellow-orange stroked with the slightest touch of green, warmed by the summer sun, falling off the branch. *** The East is a dish best served cold. When I think of “East” I will always remember the crispness and the acceleration of the russet leaves sifting down through the air, this deliberate flourishing of life in preparation for winter. The word doesn’t convey redolent glory and rebirth, no matter how sweetly spring sings. Within my first week Groton brought me into a communion of apples. I learned that apples taste best chilled, even when the cold tugs at the nerves in your teeth. I learned to find the still moments in the rabble. I learned to jockey in the overwhelming and turbid Conference crowd, then by chance catch sight of Jessie and retreat with her to the quiet benches up the stairs. The combination and continuation of these chance moments developed our relationship into a communal train of thought, into a real understanding.

Perched uncomfortably on wooden seats, crunch-

asked someone to reduce their existence to a choice? ***

Do I like the East Coast or the West Coast better? Apples, or Oranges? ***

Perched uncomfortably on wooden seats, crunch-

ing cold apples, we saw the world’s secrets fanning around its core. Everyone walked around hiding their seeds so very carefully, so carefully you could guess them all just from watching. Watching the way he picks up a book, how her mouth smiles without her eyes, how he stares at the stained-glass medallion of the West windows during a particular chapel talk. We all have our secrets laid out at our heart’s core in a perfect ring of russet seeds, so obvious, so predictable to the first person ready to take a bite. I ask Jessie why we dance between all these pretenses. “It’s important to keep up appearances.” It’s important to keep up appearances. It’s important to assert ourselves without revealing ourselves. It’s important to use the all-inclusive “or” to draw a clever insincerity from an unfair question. *** In the East, oranges taste bland and sad, and I long for those of my backyard orchard. In the West, apples are mealy and cloying, and I think of the cold, crisp ones shared with Jessie at conference. There’s a certain incompatibility between the coasts, and at times I feel caught between Western simplicity and Eastern complexity, between my content incompleteness and the terror of finding myself multifarious and whole. The constant and impossible choice between two points of reference, between apples and oranges, East and West, hippo and elephant, has led to my effervescent choice of the all-inclusive “or”. It is as insincere as it is pervasive.

rOMAN sUGAR Ethan Woo I was once completely in love with Kerry Conway. She had greasy blonde hair matted constantly to her forehead and a buck-toothed smile that glowed. In class, she was loud and brash and constantly being sent to sit in the corner. Ruddy cheeked and round bellied, she’d scream at the top of her lungs in brassy ploys for attention. She shoved people into the dirt at recess, stomped the pavement in her flashy white sneakers, pulled at hair, and bit into flesh. She was all awkward angles and jutting elbows, fiery confidence and skinned knees—the polar opposite of me. Almond Elementary was the local public school. Kerry and I were in the same second grade class, and on the first day of school, we locked eyes from opposite ends of the hallway and sprinted towards each other, giddy with excitement. My mom glared at Kerry’s, who took a sudden interest in the tips of her silver heels. Kerry’s mom worked as a hairdresser at a salon outside of the district. Kerry’s dad was out of the picture–a detail I never concerned myself with at the age of six. They lived in a trailer park at the other end of town; even then, I knew that the Conways led very different lives from the Woos. As the parents trickled out of the classroom, my mom leaned down, her lips perched on my shoulder. “Do not talk to Kerry this year,” she muttered. Each hard consonant left saliva along my collar. “I mean it.”

In first grade, I spent all my recesses and lunch 26

breaks in the library. Air-conditioning and baby blue carpeting were preferable to the scalding asphalt outside. Every year, the sixth graders created models of the Roman Colosseum as a final project for their history classes. It was a storied and time-honored tradition at Almond, and the models were made out of anything the students wanted: dominoes, pencils, paperclips, and so on. After they were finished, eighty different renditions of the same architectural structure were scattered all over the library to be gawked at by the underclassmen. And gawk I did, every recess and every lunch break. There was a model made out of sugar cubes. One afternoon, Kerry glided in as I thumbed through an installment of the Boxcar children. I watched her run her fingers through the shelves, browsing books she’d never read as she tracked the librarian’s movements in her peripheral vision. The librarian’s head cocked towards her computer screen. Kerry’s wrist flicked. A four-unit column of sugar cubes vanished, and the Colosseum crouched precariously to one side. Kerry popped a cube lazily into her mouth, jutting out her chin in bold defiance as she marched out the back door.

Something in my chest stirred.

This went on for three days. I loved watching the confidence with which Kerry commanded herself, loved the immovable whimsy to her outright rebellion. I was so obsessed.

On the fourth day, I ran out behind her, and as the class lined up in single file formation, I tapped Kerry on

the shoulder. She spun around, grinning toothily. “I saw you break the Colosseum,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation. Or a threat to tattle. Just a fact.

“Yep,” she said.

Kerry stuck out her hand, holding a half-melted sugar cube. Her palm looked like a flower, its ridges blossoming outwards in lovely shades of pink; a white diamond served as an imperfect center. I plucked it out of her hand and popped it into my mouth, trying desperately to be as easy and breezy as she. The sugar dissolved on my tongue—diamonds in my throat. The next day, I joined her. Nobody saw us. In increments of two or four or sometimes even five, we’d snap and crackle, the cardboard underneath creasing as we tore into the structure. The bookshelf teetered as we reached on our tip-toes. We’d pop the cubes into our mouths, chattering quietly as we escaped through the back door and into the single file line of class 1C. By the end of the week, the Colosseum was gone. The librarian, who had been watching us every day, let the principal know that two first graders had shamelessly defaced a shoddy replica of one of the wonders of the world. Our parents were called, my mother was furious, and I was dropped off early on a Saturday morning to recreate the building under the strict supervision of the sixth grade teacher. Kerry was at the table when I walked in. She looked up and smiled at me. I grimaced. I had never been in any kind of trouble. My report cards were thick with check-pluses; my worksheets were blanketed in smi-

Something in my chest stirred.

This went on for three days. I loved watching the confidence with which Kerry commanded herself, loved the immovable whimsy to her outright rebellion. I was so obsessed.

On the fourth day, I ran out behind her, and as the class lined up in single file formation, I tapped Kerry on

the shoulder. She spun around, grinning toothily. “I saw you break the Colosseum,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation. Or a threat to tattle. Just a fact.

“Yep,” she said.

ley face stickers. My head throbbed with guilt as I sat down across from Kerry, humiliated as I began to dip sugar cubes into water and stick them together. We rebuilt the stupid thing in half an hour. It looked better than the original. The edges were cleaner and sharper. The proportions were better. The teacher had gone to grab her lunch from the faculty room and Kerry and I were left alone as we finished the top ring of the Colosseum.

“This is fun, right?” Kerry asked.

I didn’t answer.

“This looks so much better than before,” Kerry said, undeterred by my Spartan silence.

completely and utterly genuine. Kerry dipped one sugar cube into the bowl. I did the same. We held them between our thumb and index finger as we brought ours together. The cubes kissed gently. We set them inside the perimeter, completing the final gap of our model.

“That was fun,” she said again.

She smiled. I smiled back. And wordlessly, we agreed that everything was fine.

I was once in love with Kerry Conway. Completely, completely in love.

I moved away after second grade. The Conways reportedly moved to the Midwest three years later. Kerry does not have a Facebook. She left Almond with few friends and no one with whom she kept in contact. She vanished from the community and left nothing behind. It has been over ten years. And even now, I admire Kerry in a way I have never admired anyone. There was an elasticity to her spirit, an ability to flash an unabashed middle finger salute to any and all who dared to stand in Kerry Conway’s path. Nothing, absolutely nothing could faze her. Her positivity was unmatchable, an outlook on life that I could never even begin to fathom.

I hope that wherever she is, her smile is as toothy and asymmetrical as ever. I hope she stomps everywhere she goes. I hope she’s bull-headed and disrespectful and