The Boy Who Lived
The Weekly Lately #046
Hey all - here’s a true story I’ve been working on. Have a nice week! - Max
The Boy Who Lived
When I was a senior in high school a boy from my physics class fell out of a window. I remember hearing the news. I was a boarding student living on campus, and my friend Alex came by my room one morning before breakfast.
“Did you hear?” he said.
“Hear what?”
“Dumbledore is gay.”
“What?”
“J.K Rowling just said it in an interview, or something. Oh, and Ben Roth fell out of a window.”
Alex’s bluntness made me laugh. Though I fully supported Dumbledore’s extratextual sexuality, I was caught off guard by the topic. And Ben was a nice enough guy. He was a quiet sophomore who mostly kept to himself, I thought. Being a teenager naturally adept at hiding my many insecurities behind whatever I thought passed for wit, I went out of my way to be kind to him, because I assumed his silence masked a craving for approval as strong as mine.
“Is he ok?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t read the books.”
Ben sat behind Alex and I in a physics class – advanced for him, remedial for us – which contained twelve boys and zero girls. There’d been one, at the start of the semester. Emily something. Our first class was quickly derailed by another kid sitting behind her, who casually raised his hand and asked whether he could, theoretically speaking, spread his scrotal skin to glide from tree to tree. Emily, wise beyond her years and probably sensing the direction the class was headed, quickly fled to another section.
Months after her departure, without fail, someone would start every class with a raised hand and a question:
“Mr. Smith, where’s Emily?”
It was funny every time. We’d practically fall over laughing, and eventually Mr. Smith would, too. Teenage boys, being stupid. It was that kind of class.
“Seriously, did he live?” I asked Alex, who was leaning on my doorway, fiddling with his tie.
“I think so. They would have said something if not. Apparently he was sleepwalking. Third floor. Upper School.”
“Jesus.”
Upper School was a boys’ dorm in the middle of campus. It looked like the mental hospital from Shutter Island, and its inhabitants played the part: sophomores and juniors, mostly — third sons sent to boarding school, wandering around with lacrosse sticks and pink belts and Birkenstocks, nauseous from chewing tobacco. Ivy grew along the back side of the building, high above a paved road. It was that road that had loudly welcomed Ben at approximately three in the morning the night before, breaking many of his bones. Someone heard the impact and called for help.
Later, Alex and I headed to the Science Building for physics. It was a musty old place and our class was on the second floor. We climbed the stairs with everybody else – a tired stampede of navy jackets and backpacks. By this point the news of Ben’s fall had spread. Someone said he was alive. I pictured him on a stretcher, borne high by helicopter, swung too-wildly over the campus and up, up, up into the wild blue, headed to some emergency room in Philly.
The class was quiet. Mr. Smith entered and put his bag on the table. He looked tired and sad, and I remembered that he was a “dorm parent” in the very same Upper School floor from which Ben had fallen. That meant he lived in the building, with his own family. The younger kids reported to the seniors, who in turn reported to him. He was in loco parentis, and the burden – and, maybe, concern over his personal liability – clearly weighed heavily on him that morning.
Mr. Smith looked at us and sighed. I avoided eye contact, studiously flipping through blank pages in my notebook as if I’d done the homework. Even the ball sack guy seemed cowed by the seriousness of the moment. It reminded me of my sixth grade class the morning after September 11th.
Alex looked over at me. Our eyes met, and I saw his twinkle with a quickly muted glee. He fixed his mouth grimly and raised his hand.
“Yes. Alex?”
“Mr. Smith – if Ben falls from a window at nine point eight meters per second squared—”
The room exploded.
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<3 Max