The Boy Book (20 page)

The island was awesome. Even with all that was going on, I was cranked to see the place. We were staying in a lodge that had rooms full of bunk beds, a big kitchen and a dining room with a view of the water, two saunas and a swimming pool. The teachers let us wander around and get settled, and once I’d dumped my stuff on a bunk bed I went out into the woods. There were broad paths running off in several directions, and I walked a ways on one, by myself.

It was peaceful. So peaceful that I could even imagine the trip would be civil and possibly fun. Kim would smile tightly at me, like she had on line for the boat ride, and we’d essentially ignore each other.

I’d spend the week with my friends, and nothing horrible would happen.

Peace would reign. Life would be sweet and easy.

Of course, I was wrong.

Canoe Island worked like this. In the mornings, we got up and straggled to breakfast and fended for ourselves. Glass cooked up scrambled eggs or pancakes if people got there by eight, but if you slept late you could eat peanut butter toast or something like that. There was a stack of Xeroxes on the breakfast table, and you were supposed to take one and read it before ten a.m. One day it was a section from Plato’s
Republic
about a cave; another day it was from a book called
The Wretched of the Earth,
by Frantz Fanon; and another, a bit from
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
by Robert Pirsig. Different kinds of readings, all chosen to make you think.

Then we’d have a group discussion for an hour and a half, led by Glass and Wallace. I didn’t love the readings, but they were both so cranked over everything that the conversations were pretty interesting. Kim always sat off to one side, away from where I was.

Then we broke for lunch, which was sandwiches, and always un-vegetarian, so I ended up eating peanut butter again most days. Nora and Noel and I hung with Varsha and Spencer and Imari, and Kim stayed mainly with the senior girls. Hutch joined us sometimes, but overall he kept to himself.

After lunch, Glass offered a meditation session for an hour, which I did a couple of times. It was voluntary. You sat cross-legged on a mat in the big dining room and tried to think of nothing.

Which was impossible.

I’d think I was thinking of nothing, and then these thoughts would like attack my brain. About Angelo, and whether there was any hope for us. About Jackson, and how he was stepping out on Kim and she didn’t know it. About Doctor Z, and how I kind of missed her.

Hutch fell asleep once and snored. I gave him a nudge to wake him up, and Courtney and her friends laughed. “Shut up,” I said.

And they did.

In the afternoon, we were free to swim, go in the sauna or explore the landscape. We were supposed to be thinking over the philosophical readings and connecting to the natural world. But mainly we checked each other out in our bathing suits or walked through the woods, talking about TV shows and fashion and stuff.

There turned out to be one other house on the island, I guess belonging to the owners, and it was a pretty big hike up a hill to get to it. Once you got there, though, they had three llamas in a big pen.

Llamas!

Varsha, Spencer and Nora, who were with me when I discovered them, were nervous. But I had dealt with Laverne and Shirley at the zoo, so I went right up and patted the white one on the neck. He nosed my fingers, hoping for treats.

“Are you sure you should pet that thing?” asked Varsha.

“Don’t they spit?” muttered Spencer, hanging back.

“They’re really soft,” I said. “They won’t spit unless you scare them. Come try.”

Nora held out her hand shyly, but she yanked it back when the llama snorted. Varsha and Spencer kept a safe distance.

I scratched the soft fur, and whispered some llama compliments such as what a fine-lookin’ specimen he was, what nice clean hooves he had, and so forth. And I felt, for the first time in a while, like I was good at something.

Something other people weren’t good at.

Those of us on the swim team (Varsha, Spencer, Imari and me) worked out with Mr. Wallace in the later afternoons, though the pool was hardly long enough to build up any speed and it was harsh cold when we got out of the water. I worked on my flip turns, which have always been slow.

Then people were assigned to cook dinner, and other people were given jobs like making the Xeroxes for the next day or tidying up the central living area, and we did that until it was time to eat.

In the evenings, Wallace and Glass put movies on the DVD player. They said they picked films that were meant to spur our thinking on the issues we’d been talking about in the mornings, and also that they felt were just good for us to see, since we all probably watched lots of movies that were complete crap.
⁵

We saw
Badlands, Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, Citizen Kane, The Piano, Do the Right Thing
and
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

And you know what? I was the only one who’d seen them all before.

None of the other people had seen
any
of them, except for Noel, who’d seen
Dr. Strangelove,
and Grady (one of the senior boys), who’d seen
Citizen Kane.

Mr. Wallace got all cranked when I told him I knew the movies already, and started (half jokingly) referring to me as a cinema expert. He’d turn to me, in the discussion, and say something like, “Ruby, have you seen
Twelve Monkeys
? Do you want to make any connections for us between that and what Gilliam is doing in
Brazil
?”

And the thing was, I
had
seen
Twelve Monkeys
—twice, actually—and I’d seen most of the other movies he asked me about as well, like
A Clockwork Orange
and
The Shining,
and
The Portrait of a Lady,
so I ended up talking quite a bit in those evening discussions.

Maybe people thought I was annoying or show-offy, talking so much in class.

But I found I didn’t care.

Such was the general way things went over the course of the week, but on Wednesday night, when we were discussing
Do the Right Thing,
Noel looked kind of gray in the face. He was sitting next to me, but he was staring down at his shoes, not saying anything.

While Grady and Courtney were disagreeing with each other over the movie, I wrote Noel a note on a scrap of paper. “Do you want to get up early and go see the llamas?” (He hadn’t seen them yet.)

He took the note absently, read it and folded it into a tiny square. But he didn’t answer.

Halfway through the discussion, he stood up and left the room. Just waved to Mr. Wallace (who was talking)—not even asking to be excused.

Mrs. Glass followed him.

I sat there as Wallace went on about Gilliam’s dystopia in
Brazil
versus Spike Lee’s in
Do the Right Thing,
feeling slightly huffy that Noel had ignored my note. Why, after we’d been to
Singin’ in the Rain
and pizza and all of that, after he’d said to me, “You are my thing,” and signed up for Canoe Island, and told me about his asthma when he didn’t tell anyone else; after we’d been lab partners and formed the Rescue Squad and eaten lunch together lots of times, why were we not on more regular friend-type terms? We didn’t go to each other’s houses, didn’t call each other up, didn’t hang out on weekends except for that one time.

I mean, why couldn’t I pass him a note like a normal friend and get a note back?

Thursday morning, when I went to breakfast, Noel was standing in the dining room. At first, I thought, Oh, we’re going to the llamas after all—but then I saw that he had his suitcase packed and his sleeping bag in a roll at his feet. He was looking out the window at the water, scanning for the charter ferry on the horizon.

“You’re leaving?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Why?”

He cracked a false-looking smile. “The Hooter Rescue Squad needs my expertise.”

“What?”

“I got a telegram. There are Seattle hooters in serious danger. I need to bring on my supply of Fruit Roll-Ups.”

“Noel, really. How come?”

“What, you don’t take the Squad seriously anymore?”

“Noel!”

“I know you’re Mission Director, but this assignment came from headquarters in Los Angeles. Hooter-exploitation central.”

“Are you really not telling me why you’re going?”

He turned away from me. “I just am, okay?”

I backed off. “Okay.”

“Not everything is your business, Ruby.”

“I said okay.” I walked from the dining room into the kitchen, where Mrs. Glass was frying eggs, Mr. Wallace was drinking coffee and Imari was putting strips of bacon onto the grill. I opened a cupboard and pulled out the peanut butter, deliberately starting a conversation about swim team and the meet coming up week after next.

Noel stuck his head in to tell the teachers that the boat was coming into the dock.

“Take care, DuBoise,” said Glass.

“I will.”

“See you back in school.”

And Noel was gone.

At the start of our philosophy discussion, Mr. Wallace announced that someone in Noel’s family was sick, and he’d had to go home. Afterward, I so wanted to call him and apologize, but no one besides teachers had been allowed to bring cell phones to Canoe Island, so there wasn’t a lot I could do.