Sunlight
“Do you know why we called you in here, Calvin?”
“Because I’m in trouble.”
Mr. Grutter’s eyes flicker toward Ms. Ankely. He sucks his teeth and continues, “No. You’re not in trouble. We’re…,” he pauses, searching for any one of the euphemisms they must dole out in counselor school like sedatives, “…concerned,” he decides.
How generic. Regardless of their concerned expressions, I will inevitably end up in detention or suspended. Last time they called me in, I was suspended for too many cuts. It’s their “you haven’t been coming to school so don’t come to school” policy that makes absolutely no sense. But Ms. Ankely wasn’t here last time. This time is clearly not about cuts. I wonder what I’ve done.
Ms. Ankely leans forward. “Calvin. We’re here because of the poem. Your response to the ‘Sunday Morning’ analysis I asked you to do.”
“You said we could write a poem. I followed the assignment.”
“Yes. You did.” She extracts a photocopied page - my poem, looking skeletal without the lines of the binder paper, which had not transferred to the photocopy.
“It’s very dark, Calvin.”
I meet her gaze. “Wallace Stevens is very dark, Ms. Ankely.” She has very green eyes. Mr. Grutter stares at her, waiting for an answer. She could be his daughter. I wonder how old she is. Cayla Tellehan told me that Ms. Ankely is sleeping with Mr. Garrison, the biology teacher. Cayla’s older brother is friends with Mr. Garrison. Of course, her brother’s also a liar.
Mr. Grutter takes the copy of the poem from Ms. Ankely’s lap and skims it.
“’And sunlight, like the metal of my gun, is thick and cold and full of air. Grievings in loneliness, all will be beautiful one day, even loneliness.’ Why is ‘grievings in loneliness’ italicized?”
“It’s from the Stevens’ poem I had them analyze.” Ms. Ankely explains. Her gaze shifts to me. “We’re worried about the gun imagery, Calvin. It’s disturbing.”
“Why?”
She bites her lip. “Well, for one thing, guns have nothing to do with the poem.”
I shake my head. “The gun is a metaphor. Stevens is talking about death and the fact that it allows us to perceive beauty. I’m using the gun as a metaphor for death, and, indirectly, all the beauty around us. Like the beauty of sunlight.” Let them chew on that for awhile.
Ms. Ankely swallows it whole. “I understand your metaphor, Calvin. What concerns me is the use of the personal voice, ‘my gun.’ Do you own a gun, Calvin?”
“No.” Though this is not a lie, I don’t trust them to believe me.
“We’re just concerned, Calvin. We’ve seen a change in you in the last year.” Mr. Grutter’s eyes take in my outfit. “The black clothes, the eyeliner, the hair. Who are you angry with?”
“I’m not angry.” And I’m not. Not angry, though sometimes, I feel fearful and fragile, like straw. It is a recent fear, one full of thick dreams that examine me each night with wide, staring eyes. In these dreams, there is always sunlight; it pushes at the edges like a thin band of optimism to frame the nightmare, to restrain it. Each night I wake from these dreams in the dark morning hours. I crack the length of my body like a knuckle, and flip over onto my belly. In these dreams, Calista is an itch I can’t reach to scratch.
“Calvin?” Mr. Grutter reclaims my attention.
“What?”
“Why did you stop playing basketball?”
My gaze slips away from him, weary of this question. “I didn’t feel like playing basketball anymore. I got bored with it.”
He nods and looks at Ms. Ankely, who sighs and avoids his stare by staring out the window.
“I’m not going to bring a gun to school and shoot a bunch of people, Mr. Grutter.” I tell him. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
Surprise ripples his features; I’ve thrown a pebble into the clear, smooth lake of his counselor face. “Why do you say that, Calvin? No one’s accusing you.”
Being here is an accusation, but I let silence respond for me.
Ms. Ankely begins to stand. “I have a class, Roger.” It sounds strange when teachers call each other by their first names. Then, her green eyes are on me. “Calvin, I think you have a lot of talent. And a lot to say. I just need you to be appropriate in your writing for school. Does that make sense? This poem really scared me.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you, Ms. Ankely. That wasn’t my intention.”
“I’m just worried about you.”
“You don’t need to be.”
The door clicks shut behind her. Through the glass of Mr. Grutter’s door, I watch her cross the counseling office toward the main hall.
* * *
Calista Wells has her locker above mine. This will be the great irony of my junior year. On good days, she says hello to me before looping her arm through her boyfriend’s. He never says hello.
Calista kissed me once, a year ago, behind the gym in the rain. Her lips were soft and scented with vanilla chapstick. The next day she apologized, telling me that she had been carried away by the great game I’d played. She had loved me for a rainy vanilla minute because I’d scored twenty-eight points and we’d won in overtime. And now she loops her arm through her boyfriend’s and sometimes says hello.
Calista has hair the color of sunlight. I die my hair magenta and wear thick dark eyeliner. Good days are days she says hello.
* * *
Only one of my classes has windows. I sit in the back because Ms. Ankely lets us pick our seats. She looks through me today as I pass her, perhaps embarrassed by yesterday’s meeting with Mr. Grutter. I settle into my plastic seat. The late morning light is foolishly hopeful, slanting through the window by my desk in fat, dust cluttered beams. We continue to read poetry about death in my one window class. Somehow, it is not inappropriate when old men in poems talk of guns and grief.
We will have an exam tomorrow. In our review of the poem about Sunday mornings and oranges and loneliness, Ms. Ankely reminds us that “death is the mother of beauty.” I won’t put guns in my exam. I won’t scare her.
I stare out the window, watching as the light tips toward noon.
Nick Cho arrives late. The door’s ancient hinges squeal as he attempts to slink in quietly. Nick is the resident Goth who occasionally graces our English class with his presence in the back corner by the window.
Ms. Ankely makes a note in her attendance book.
Our eyes briefly meet, and he nods before sliding into the seat behind me.
* * *
She didn’t say hello today.
School ticked away and now I am here at the beach again for the second afternoon in a row. I seem to be coming here more often, addicted to the sea air, to the small thin blades of grass that taste sweet between my teeth. I sit near the ocean, my back to the waves, and watch the light until it is gone. The air is cold and tastes of salt. Tonight, I will smell my clothes and remember this moment.
The beauty of death is in the sunlight as it fades against a gray hillside. I scrawl this line onto the back of my plastic binder, using a fat black Sharpie, and hold it so the wind can dry the slippery ink.
I watch as the light, once buttery against the afternoon hills, fades to a blue-violet haze. Sunlight dies each day. I realize that I will die, too, and feel hollow at the thought. I think: I want to kiss Calista again before I die. Then I laugh at my own melodrama.
* * *
Calista slams her locker and doesn’t say hello. She leans into it, her head buried in her arms, her face masked by her sunlight hair. She is crying.
I wait behind her because I need to get to my locker for my Algebra book, but I don’t want to ask her to move. No one should have to move when they’re crying. We are alone in the hallway. First period doesn’t let out for two more minutes, and somehow, we are both here early.
“Calista?” I have said her name out loud only twice, and it seems halting and awkward in my mouth.
She pushes away from the locker. “I’m sorry, did you need to get in?”
I nod, and she steps out of the way.
I twirl the dial of my lock, conscious of her near me. She doesn’t smell of vanilla. She smells like rain.
“Calvin?”
I realize for the first time that our names start with the same first three letters. How strange. “Yeah?”
“Why did you dye your hair?”
I shrug. “I just felt like it.” Hesitating, I take a chance. “Why are you crying?”
She shrugs. “Oh. It’s nothing. It’s just Eric. He’s just being a bastard.”
Eric is the boyfriend who never says hello. I never gave him a name.
“What happened?”
She smiles in a watery way and drags a hand across her wet cheeks. “Nothing. He just made a promise he didn’t keep.”
“Breaking a promise isn’t nothing.”
She eyes me; she seems full of skepticism, ready to ask me something. Instead, she says, “I miss watching you play basketball.”
I tell her, “I just got bored with it.”
We look at each other and I remember her in the rain. Maybe she is remembering it, too. I want to ask her what promise had been broken. I want to know why she stays with him. But the bell rings and people spill into the surrounding hallways, extinguishing any bravery I could muster.
“Well, bye,” she says slowly, cradling her books in her arms. With a downcast smile, she turns away.
“Bye,” I whisper, and watch her retreat down the hallway, and out into the gray morning.
* * *
That rainy morning, after Calista, instead of going to Algebra, I walk the lonely valley path out to the beach. I want to be alone. My chest feels tight, ready to split open. The valley is gray with rain; the sky blends with the distant ocean – polished, a brighter gray than the path and hills.
Just off the path in the thick muck of the marsh, I see a bird. He is snow white, a blinding cut-out in the midst of all the rain. He gleams as if all of the sunlight in the valley has concentrated in his feathers. He takes a slow step forward and I am aware of my body moving with him, emulating his clean white movements. He steps and then I step. He pauses, the black knife of his beak turning just slightly toward me. He looks like he is listening. I listen, too. His feathers flutter in a light wind, and then he just freezes, as if I have intruded on his grace. He waits. Perhaps, I will simply go away. But I can’t move. I am mesmerized by his stillness, his starkness. His white light amid all the gray.
Then, almost in slow motion, he folds his long neck into his body and I watch him as he joins the blank light of the sky.
I stare after his vanished body. The light on the valley path struggles as I continue my journey to shore.
On the beach, I notice that someone has cut the wet sand with jagged letters. death is the mother of beauty
The waves have already begun to eat away at the bottom of the letters.
“You come here a lot.” I start at the statement. A figure sits, smiling at me, on the ragged rocks at the lip of the shore. His face is a pale orb under that shock of blood black hair.
Nick Cho.
“I just saw the most beautiful bird,” I say. I don’t know why I tell him that, share the moment of light with him.
He smiles again, a smile that adds no light to his face. “Snowy egret. Saw it on the path walking out here. Epic.”
I nod and dig the toe of my shoe into the wet sand. “Why are you ditching?” “To kill myself,” he says. His eyes are cast at me and not out over the water. They are clear gray eyes.
I stare at him blankly, aware that he is serious. “Any reason why?” I don’t know if this is a good thing to say to such a comment.
“Why not?”
I fumble with this one. “Because then you would be dead.”
“Undoubtedly.” He shifts on the rock and a back pack riddled with patches appears. He sifts through it and pulls out a small white bottle. “Pills.”
“So what?” I try to be unimpressed with the pills. Too easy. “Seems sort of cliché to me,” I add, mostly to fill the silence left by his proclamation. And because I don’t think it is cliché. He frightens me.
His eyebrow ring raises with his eyebrows. It is the color of the sea and of his eyes. He is the valley – all pewter polished light. “I was afraid of that.” He returns the pills to the back pack and looks out at the sea. He seems to forget me.
Is the discussion over now? Are we no longer debating his death?
He lights a cigarette. His first real cliché. “Why are you out here?”
I hesitate. I won’t share Calista. So I tell him, “I just couldn’t deal with school today. And I like to watch the light on the hills.”
He holds the cigarette up into the wind and watches the smoke curl away from it. I wonder if he will actually smoke it, or just watch it disintegrate.
“I like macaroni and cheese.”
“What?” My eyes move from his cigarette to his face.
“The Annie’s kind. The white cheddar? In the purple box.”
A cold wind off the water catches me in the throat. I am familiar with the purple box, but I am unclear about the rationale for its induction into our conversation. I had been talking about light. About sunlight.
“And that’s a reason to stay,” he tells me, brow without furrow. He seems to have hit on something internally profound.
I take a moment to realize we have returned to the reason for his presence here. “Annie’s macaroni and cheese is a reason not to kill yourself?”
He nods. “It’s something.” Using both shoulder straps, he pulls on his backpack. “Everyday I find something. Today it’s Annie’s macaroni and cheese.” He scrambles down the rocks. “And that.” He points to the quickly disappearing letters in the sand. Little pools of water form in the grooves of each letter. “Annie’s white cheddar and Wallace Stevens.” Turning, he disappears up the craggy hillside and into some bushes. I hear him thrashing through them and then I hear only waves and the call of a seagull. He is gone.
School is less bizarre, so I decide to return to it. The light today only reminds me of Calista’s hair, muted by the dim light of the hallway. Perhaps I have been spending too much time at this beach. Turning back, I wonder if anyone will notice my absence. Ms. Ankely will notice if I skip English. If I hurry, I will only be a little late. Today she is handing back our exams. I think I did well. I said what she wanted to hear.
On the path back, the valley is empty. No snowy egret. But a slash of sunlight has cut through the dim of the clouds. I am suddenly filled with it, and I imagine that gash is where the egret broke through the sky.