After ten minutes, Mr. Archer appeared, carrying his tub of Mango sherbet and I’M EARTH FRIENDLY biodegradable satchel (see “Red-eyed Tree Frog,” The World of Ranidae: From Frog Princes to Tadpoles, Showa, 1998). He had so much sweat on his forehead he looked like a glass of iced tea.
“Would you mind helping me set up the slide projector for the lecture?” he asked. (Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE.)
I agreed, and was just finishing loading the 112 slides, as the other students began to arrive, most of them with big, slurpy grins on their faces, tubs of sorbet in hand.
“Thank you for your assistance, Babs,” Mr. Archer said, smiling at me and affixing his long, sticky fingers to the top of his desk. “Today we finish up with Lascaux and turn to the rich artistic tradition that emerged in the area that is now southern Iraq. James, will you get the lights?”
Unlike Pierre Fromande, I’d heard the man correctly. Unlike Truman’s cabinet members, I’d understood his true meaning. Certainly, I’d been given aliases by teachers before, from Betsy and Barbara to “You in the Corner” and “Red, No, I’m Kidding.” From years twelve to fourteen, I actually believed the name was cursed, that it was whispered among instructors “Blue” had the erratic properties of a ballpoint pen at high altitudes; if they uttered the name, a permanent blueness, dark and inexorable, could very well leak all over them.
Lottie Bergoney, Instructor of the Second Grade in Pocus, Indiana, actually telephoned Dad and suggested he rechristen me.
“You won’t believe this!” Dad mouthed, cupping his hand over the receiver, gesturing for me to listen on the other line.
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Van Meer. The name’s not healthy. The kids in class make fun of it. They call her navy. A few of the smart ones call her cobalt. And cordon bleu. Maybe you should think about alternatives.”
“Might you suggest some possibilities, Miss Bergie?”
“Sure! I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved Daphne.”
Perhaps it was Mr. Archer’s particular choice of name, Babs, the nickname of a restless wife wearing no bra during her tennis lesson. Or perhaps it was the confidence with which he said it, without a trace of uncertainty or second thought.
Suddenly, at my desk, I couldn’t breathe. At the same time, I wanted to leap from my chair and shout, “It’s Blue, you sons of bitches!”
Instead, I reached into my backpack and removed the three letters, still tucked into the cover of my assignment notebook. I reread each one, and then, with the same clarity that overtook Robespierre as he lounged in a bath and liberté, egalité and fraternité sailed into his head — three great merchant ships coming into port — I knew what I had to do.
After class, I used the student payphone in Hanover to call Dad at the university. I left a message explaining I wouldn’t need a ride home until 4:45; I was meeting with Ms. Simpson, my AP English teacher, to discuss her Great Expectations for research papers. At 3:40, after confirming in the Hanover ground-floor ladies room that I had sat on neither gum nor chocolate, that I had nothing in my teeth and had not accidentally pressed my ink-stained hand against the side of my face leaving it a mosaic of black fingerprints (as I had once before), I walked, as composedly as I could, over to Barrow. I knocked on the door of 208 and was instantly greeted with a few flat, unsurprised voices: “It’s open.”
Slowly, I opened the door. Four flour-pale kids sat at desks in a circle at the center of the classroom, none of them smiling. The other desks had been pushed to the walls.
“Hi,” I said.
They stared at me sullenly.
“I’m Blue.”
“You’re here for the Dungeons & Dragons Demonology Guild,” a kid pronounced in a squeaky voice like air being let out of a bicycle tire. “There’s an extra player’s handbook there. Right now we’re choosing our roles for the year.”
“I’m Dungeon Master,” clarified a kid quickly.
“Jade?” I asked hopefully, turning to one of the girls. It wasn’t a terrible guess: this one, wearing a long black dress with tight sleeves that ended in medieval Vs on top of her hands, had green hair that resembled dried spinach.
“Lizzie,” she said, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.
“You know Hannah Schneider?” I asked.
“The Film Studies teacher?”
“What’s she talking about?” the other girl asked the Dungeon Master.
“Excuse me,” I said. Holding onto my tight smile like some crazed Catholic her rosary, I backed out of Room 208, hurried back down the hall and stairs.
In the aftermath of being brazenly hoodwinked or swindled, it’s difficult to accept, particularly if one has always prided oneself on being an intuitive and scorchingly observant person. Standing on the Hanover steps, waiting for Dad, I reread Jade Whitestone’s letter fifteen times, convinced I’d missed something — the correct day, time or location to meet, or perhaps she’d made a mistake; perhaps she’d written the letter while watching On the Waterfront and had been distracted by the pathos of Brando picking up Eva Marie Saint’s tiny white glove and slipping it onto his own meaty hand, but soon, of course, I realized her letter was teeming with sarcasm (particularly in the final sentence), which I hadn’t originally picked up on.
It had all been a hoax.
Never had there been a rebellion more anticlimactic and second rate, except perhaps the “Gran Horizontes Tropicoco Uprising” in Havana in 1980, which, according to Dad, was composed of out-of-work big band musicians and El Loro Bonito chorus girls and lasted all of three minutes. (“Fourteen-year-old lovers last longer,” he’d noted.) And the longer I sat on the steps, the cruddier I felt. I pretended not to stare enviously at the happy kids slinging themselves and their giant backpacks into their parents’ cars, or the tall boys with untucked shirts rushing across the Commons, shouting at each other, cleats slung over their bony shoulders like tennis shoes over traffic wires.
By 5:10 P.M. I was doing my AP Physics homework on my knees and there was no sign of Dad. The lawns, the roofs of Barrow and Elton, even the sidewalks, had tarnished in the fading light of Depression-era photographs, and apart from a few teachers making their way to the Faculty Parking Lot (coal miners plodding home) it was all quite sad and silent, except for the oak trees fanning themselves like bored Southerners, a coach whistle far off on the fields.
“Blue?”
To my horror, it was Hannah Schneider, descending the steps behind me.
“What are you doing here at this hour?”
“Oh,” I said, smiling as joyously as I could. “My dad’s running late at work.” It was critical to appear happy and well loved; after school, teachers stared at kids unattended by parents as if they were suspicious packages abandoned in an airport lounge.
“You don’t drive?” she asked, stopping next to me.
“Not yet. I can drive. I just haven’t gotten my license.” (Dad didn’t see the point: “What, so you can cruise around town for a year before you go off to college like a nurse shark lazing around a reef desperate for guppies? I don’t think so. Next thing I know you’ll be wearing biker leather. Wouldn’t you prefer, anyway, to be chauffeured?”)