S K Y L A R
I was finishing my homework for Calculus at the kitchen table, struggling to get through my oatmeal, when mom came in, ready for work. On Mondays, mom left for her office at the same time as I left for school. She had insisted she could give me a ride, but I had insisted I could just take the bus, so she didn't have to go out of her way. That wasn't really why I didn't want her ride, but she had believed me all the same.
"What are you doing, honey?" she asked me this morning, a look of confusion on her face as she grabbed a banana from the fruit basket.
"I couldn't finish this last night," I told her, forcing another spoonful of oatmeal into my mouth, mostly so I didn't have to go on talking.
Mom's confusion dug wrinkles into her face, "What do you mean? You always finish your homework on time. You're so organized."
"I know, but half the class got an F on the last quiz, so the teacher sent us a bunch of homework to make up for it." This wasn't exactly a lie. Half of the class really did get an F, but the teacher hadn't really cared for it. Homework was the same as it always was, a couple of exercises I could usually do in less than half an hour, which was why I had decided I would just do it over breakfast today.
"What did you get on the quiz?" mom asked. I reached for it under the Calculus textbook and handed it to her. I had gotten an A. Mom was going to ask why not an A plus.
I answered before she could, "He doesn't give A plus to anyone."
"Why not?"
"I don't know."
"Right," she said, handing me back the quiz and kissing the top of my head. "Well, I have to go to work. Have a good day at school, honey."
"I will," I lied. I was a very good liar. I thought my mom knew but mostly pretended she didn't. I watched her walk out the door. After a couple of minutes, I heard her car start in the driveway.
I got back to my homework and abandoned the oatmeal. The real reason I had left Calculus for last minute was because I had spent the whole of last night doing the homework for English, even though Mr. Wyatt had said it wasn't really homework, but more of a challenge we could take on if we felt like it. It had been years since I felt like anything, but I had done it all the same.
The challenge was to write anything we wanted in the voice of Kurt Vonnegut. Except there was no word limit and so I hadn't known when to stop. I had just kept on writing. I stopped only to go have dinner, and then I went up to my bedroom again, and kept on writing some more. I had written well into the night and had woken up with dark circles under my eyes, which I had covered up with my mom's concealer. She hadn't noticed. I had printed the pages in my dad's copy machine just before breakfast. They were still warm in my backpack.
I finished my homework and then forced myself to finish my oatmeal too. I spent the bus ride to school thinking about those pages, stuck in between all my textbooks. In many ways, I felt like I was still writing them. My mind was still in that other place. I couldn't stop thinking about what would happen next, and how I would put it into words, not my words, but someone else's. Mr. Wyatt had given me permission to use someone else's voice for lack of one of my own, and I had. For hours last night, I had.
I came back to the real world a few steps away from my locker, when I saw Luke Martin standing in front of it, cleaning whatever had been spray painted on it today. It had been a while since I had to clean it up myself, and so I had been under the impression that whoever usually did it, had finally grown tired of it. It turned out I was wrong. They were still at it. It was just that these days Luke was at it too.
I walked over to him, and said, "You don't have to do this."
Luke turned around, a sponge dripping soap down his wrist, "Hello to you to. And yes, I do. I want to."
I asked, "Why?"
Luke moved the sponge away so I could see what the word of the day was. DORCK.
"I have a theory," he said with a smile. I didn't think there was anything to smile about. When I reached for the sponge, he moved it away from me. "I might be giving these idiots too much credit, but hear me out â"
"We're gonna be late for class," I stopped him.
"Mr. Wyatt doesn't care." He shrugged again. Then, "So, I think they actually misspell everything on purpose because they think that will annoy you even more, since, you know, you're a little bit of a grammar Nazi."
"A grammar what?"
"You know, someone who's very anal about grammar," he said, a smirk on his face. "I just learned that word yesterday. Anal. Did you know you could use it to mean someone who's very careful and precise about something? I didn't."
"I did."
"Of course you did," he said, going back to scrubbing the door of my locker. I wanted to stop him again, but I didn't have the energy for another back and forth, especially not one that might end up with me being compared to fascists again. Was I really going around making people feel horrible about their grammar? Acting like I was so much better than everyone else? And if so, what was wrong with me? Probably a lot.
"Thank you," I told Luke eventually, but he just shrugged and kept on scrubbing.
The bell rang by the time the last letter was gone from my locker. Luke turned to me and said he was going to give the sponge back to Mr. Plemons, but that I should just go, so I wouldn't be late.
"I thought you said Mr. Wyatt didn't care."
"He doesn't, but you do." And then he was gone, running through the halls, barely making it without bumping shoulder with someone, anyone, backpack going up and down his shoulders, a name tag on it with the words trying my best written in bad handwriting instead of his actual name. Altogether, it read, hello, I'm trying my best.
I turned around and walked to class. Mr. Wyatt was already inside, writing something on the board. I said good morning under my breath and walked over to my seat by the window. He must have heard it because he said it back without turning around.
In their seats, Daisy and Zoey were talking about whatever had happened in the new episode of the show they were both watching, and behind them, Jason was struggling to get rid of his crutches so he could sit down. Behind him, Jacob was rolling his eyes.
I put my backpack on top of my desk and started taking off my books. On the desk next to mine, Allora was braiding Kylie's hair and saying something about a party I hadn't gone to this weekend. When Edward walked in after Isaac and Ethan, she stopped talking and grabbed his arm before he could follow the others.
"Where were you this weekend?" she asked him.
Edward smiled, "Good morning to you too."
She returned his smile, and said, "Good morning."
So he said, "I was home. Did I miss something?"
To which she replied, like it was obvious, "Jacob's party."
I sat down on my seat, but it was hard not to go on listening.
Edward was saying, "Oh, right, how was it?"
"The usual. Finn Walker threw up in the pool."
"That must have been disgusting."
"It was."
"Did you have fun?"
"I had a lot of fun."
"And you?" He was asking Kylie.
She said, "What she said."
"Why didn't you go?" This was Allora again.
Edward shrugged, "I wasn't feeling like it."
"Why?" Kylie insisted.
"Everyone, sit down please." Now, this, was Mr. Wyatt cutting in and finally turning around from the question he had written on the board: What matters most, where you start, or where you finish? "Right, we have a lot of things to do today, but before we start, I wanted to ask you â"
Luke came in through the door then, running like it had been half an hour since the bell rang, and not just minutes. Mr. Wyatt endeared him with a smile and then motioned for him to get a seat, which he did, right next to Jason, who pushed him off almost immediately, so hard, Luke fell on the floor.
"Jason," Mr. Wyatt warned him. "Please don't start."
Jason threw his head back to groan and let Luke take a seat.
Mr. Wyatt pointed at the question on the board, "So, anyone has any thoughts?"
No one did.
"Tristan," Mr. Wyatt said, turning to the door as he walked in with Caitlyn. "Maybe you could give us your opinion on this?"
Tristan didn't even look at the question on the board before saying, "I don't think so."
"You don't think what?" Mr. Wyatt said, leaning against his desk.
Tristan kept on walking to the empty desk at the very back, Caitlyn still behind him, "I don't think I can give you my opinion on anything."
"Because you don't have one?" Mr. Wyatt asked.
Tristan sat down and read the question on the board. Then he said, "I definitely do have an opinion on that."
"Which is?"
"A secret."
"Come on. Share it with the class."
Tristan rolled his eyes, and finally, he said, "I think it's where you start."
"Why?"
"Why not?" He shrugged.
"Come on, I know you have more to say on this â"
"So do you, right? Isn't this just your segue to a sermon on meritocracy? On how everyone has a chance to get ahead if only they work really hard for it? You're probably gonna say something like, diamonds are made under pressure, but definitely leave out the part where they're exploited by the filthy rich after. That's what you're going to say, right?"
"No." Mr. Wyatt laughed. "But please do go on."
Usually teachers didn't entertain Tristan, because Tristan, despite seeming like one of the least religious people at school, liked to play devil's advocate every time he was forced to participate in class. I wasn't religious either, but if the devil was real, I doubted he needed a seventeen-year-old kid as his mouthpiece. Mr. Wyatt seemed to disagree.
"So you agree?" Tristan went on. "Meritocracy is a conscious attempt to cover up the fact that some people just have it way easier than others, not because of merit, but because of where they started, because they got lucky. That's just how the world works, and anyone who thinks otherwise, is, with all due respect, which is none, an absolute idiot."
Mr. Wyatt was smiling. I wasn't. I had just been called an absolute idiot. Mr. Wyatt looked at the rest of us. I looked down at my copy of Slaughterhouse V.
"Anyone wants to counter what Tristan said?" he asked.
No one did. Obviously.
"What do I win?" Tristan asked. "A golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory?"
Mr. Wyatt laughed again, "Well, you didn't win, did you? I, for one, don't really agree with the idea that it's where you start that matters, not at all."
"Then I think he just called you an absolute idiot," Jack said. I knew Jack and his brother because I had been once forced to do a group project with them, which had ended with me doing the whole of it, and them calling me a bitch because I hadn't used any of what they had sent me at the very last minute, even though I hadn't used any of it because it was all wrong.
"Well, no," Mr. Wyatt said. "I agree that meritocracy is often a false pretense to justify inequality â Tristan's right about that â and this actually goes back to that passage we read the other day about poverty and how society frames it as a personal failing rather than a structural problem, but that's not what I'm trying to get at here. I think, in the grand scheme of things that is our day-to-day life, where we start doesn't matter at all."
"So it's where we end up," Luke said.
"No, it's not where you end up either."
"So it's a trick question," I said. "The answer is neither?"
"The answer is something else entirely, yes," Mr. Wyatt said. "Any idea of what it might be? Anyone?"
No one had any, or if they had, they didn't feel like saying it. I personally had no idea at all. If he had asked me what mattered most I would have said where we ended up. Mostly because I didn't want where I was starting to matter at all. Mostly because I hated it. I hated every part of it. I needed the ending to be what mattered most. I needed all this to be worth it, the end to justify the miserable means.
"Well, that's no problem. You'll get there eventually," Mr. Wyatt said when it was obvious no one was going to give him an answer, at least, not the answer he wanted. "Moving on."
He moved on. When the bell rang everyone left except for me. Mr. Wyatt was putting his things back in his bag, but he looked up when I walked to his desk.
"I wrote those pages you asked for," I said, holding them in front of him. Mr. Wyatt seemed surprised, maybe at how many pages I had written, and so I added, "I got a little carried away, I'm really sorry. Maybe just read the first few pages, or actually, I meanâ I don't know, are you going to read them at all or was I just supposed to â"
"Of course I'll read them," he stopped me, grabbing the pages from my hands, all of them. "I'm really excited actually."
"I had fun writing them," I said. I didn't know why. Maybe because it was true, and it hadn't been true for anything for years. If I had fun making up stories inside my head, did that count? Did that fun count?
"That's great," he said. "That's all that matters really."
"So you're not gonna grade it?" I asked. I didn't know if I wanted him to. I knew I had first picked up the challenge because I thought maybe I would get some extra credit for it, but after a while writing, I had stopped caring about them. I just wanted to write.
"Well, I'll give you feedback on it, but it doesn't count for your final grade, no. Is that a problem?" he asked as he finished putting his things away, including my pages.
"Not at all," I said. "Thank you."
"No, thank you," he said, moving for the door. "I gotta go. Mr. Hernandez doesn't know how to work the copy machine. Can you believe that?"
"I can actually," I said and regretted it.
Mr. Wyatt laughed, "I'll see you soon. Have a good day."
"I'll try," I lied.