Lydell Nelson had been going to Harriet Tubman High School for three years. He was a senior now, but hardly anyone in the class knew him. He was slightly overweight, wore glasses, and always chose to eat alone. During lunch he was always writing in a journal. Nobody ever bothered to ask him what he was writing, and he never volunteered any information. Many students attended Tubman High. Many strong friendships had been forged when the kids were freshmen or even before then, at Marian Anderson Middle School. Little groups of students always ate lunch and hung out together. Lydell didn’t belong to any of these groups. He seemed to be a lonely person. But, when people tried to be friends, he turned them away.
Some people thought he was crazy. Some even thought he was dangerous.
Sami Archer, a senior, was also a little overweight. She was always on the lookout for the lonely outsider. She had noticed Lydell way back in tenth grade when he first appeared at Tubman. Sami had a radiant smile and a bubbly personality. If anybody could bring someone into her circle of friends, Sami could. But Lydell politely turned aside all her efforts and went his way. Sami didn’t know why.
“He’s weird,” Sami confided in her closest friend, Alonee Lennox. Alonee was very lovely and popular. “He all the time writing away in that journal. I wonder what he’s writing there. It’s almost like he’s a time traveler or something. Like he’s taking notes about us.”
“Maybe he’s writing a novel,” Alonee suggested. “The great American novel.”
One of the senior English teachers was Langston Myers. He was actually a writer with poems published in obscure literary journals like Mississippi Mud Ink. He was paid for his work in copies of the journals. Some of the more unkind students, like Marko Lane, enjoyed making fun of him. Marko found Mr. Myers’s poems in Bayou Bard on the Internet. He read them aloud to amuse his friends. Jasmine Benson, Marko’s girlfriend, howled in laughter. Then word got around that Myers had written a novel and that he was having trouble getting it published. Marko found more humor in that.
But nobody was sure what Lydell Nelson was up to.
“He’s probably terribly lonely,” Sereeta Prince told her boyfriend, Jaris Spain. “I feel sorry for him. He sort of hides in that journal.”
Sereeta and her friends always went to lunch together. They ate in a special spot at Tubman under some eucalyptus trees. Alonee Lennox had originally gathered all of them together, and they were called Alonee’s “posse.” The group included Kevin Walker and his girlfriend, Carissa Polson. Derrick Shaw, Destini Fletcher, and Alonee’s boyfriend, Oliver Randall, were also in the group. Sami Archer was often the center of things.
When they were at their lunch spot, Jaris made an announcement. “Pop did something he’s never done before. He’s been cooking a lot lately, but he never packed lunches for me and Chelsea. My little sister, chili pepper, she was watching Pop make our lunches. She said it’s Swiss cheese, corned beef, creamy coleslaw on rye bread. I’m tellin’ you guys, I’m ready for lunch!”
“Trade you a dried-up chicken breast on white bread,” Alonee giggled.
“No way,” Jaris laughed. He’d been thinking about Pop’s sandwich all morning.
Munching on his sandwich, Jaris looked over at Lydell. He was sitting by himself. “I’ve smiled at Lydell,” Jaris remarked, “and said ‘hi.’ But he sorta ignores me. I even asked him to join us for lunch a couple times. But he didn’t want to.”
“I’ve asked him to come with us to lunch too,” Sereeta said. “I smiled at him and he didn’t even smile back.”
“Anybody who wouldn’t smile back at you, girl, has got to be one sick puppy,” Sami Archer laughed.
“You can’t force people to be friendly,” Kevin Walker asserted. “I remember when I first came here from Texas. Alonee, you were chattering away and trying to make me feel at home. But I wasn’t ready for it. But eventually you guys won me over.”
Kevin finished his lunch and stretched out on the grass, looking at the clouds building in the sky. The weatherman promised rain, and Kevin was hoping for it. Back in Texas the clouds would gather quickly, and drenching rain would fall. It made everything green, and the creeks ran fast. Kevin was kind of a loner himself. He knew where Lydell was coming from. Kevin carried a dark secret when he came to Tubman as a junior. His father had murdered a man, and he died in prison. That cast a shadow over Kevin’s life. He thought maybe Lydell had dark secrets too.
“Maybe he just doesn’t need anybody,” Sami mused thoughtfully. “I guess there’s people like that. I don’t understand ’em, but they out there. Makes you wonder, though. He okay, or he got bad feelings swirling in his soul? Maybe we think he’s just happy bein’ a loner, so we give him his space. But maybe he’s thinkin’ we all hate him and he’s fixin’ to explode.”
From their comfortable place under the eucalyptus trees, they could see Lydell sitting on one of the stone benches on campus. He always brought his lunch in a brown bag. It was always a sandwich and cottage cheese. He’d quickly finish his lunch and then start writing again in his journal.
Oliver Randall also joined Alonee’s posse at Tubman after he moved from Los Angeles. His father taught astronomy at the community college, and his mother sang opera. Oliver was bursting with personality and good looks. He wanted as many friends as he could get. Oliver asked, “Has anybody ever just walked up to Lydell and asked him what he was writing in his journal? Maybe he’d open up.”
“Don’t look at me,” Jaris Spain protested. He was a warm, friendly guy, but he wasn’t pushy. “To tell the truth, he guy sort of freaks me out. I’ve said stuff to him. Like there’s a test coming up and is he ready, ’cause I’m not. And he didn’t even answer me. At first I thought maybe he didn’t speak English. I thought he was from some country in Africa where they spoke French or something. But then I heard him answer in class. He speaks regular English, no accent.”
“I’m really curious,” Oliver asserted with a grin. “I think I’ll just do what my dad always says. I’ll grab the bull by the horns. I’ll walk up there and ask him what he’s writing in his journal.”
Trevor Jenkins was another member of Alonee’s posse and Jaris’s best friend. Trevor shook his head. “I wouldn’t bother that dude, Oliver. I’m with Jaris. He freaks me.”
The others knew Lydell from years back, even though they were not friends with him. But being new himself at Tubman, Oliver hadn’t seen Lydell for very long. Oliver walked up the little path leading from the stand of eucalyptus trees. He slowly approached Lydell Nelson. The boy had finished his lunch and was writing in his journal. He had a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen.
“Hi,” Oliver greeted. “I’m Oliver Randall. I came to Tubman in my junior year.”
Lydell ignored Oliver and continued writing in his spiral notebook.
“Uh, you’re Lydell Nelson, right?” Oliver asked.
“Yes,” Lydell replied. “What is it that you want?”
“Uh, nothing,” Oliver said. “I just see you writing in your journal all the time. I was curious. I wondered if you were writing a novel or something. That’s interesting to me ’cause I try to write short stories sometimes.”
Lydell looked at Oliver for another moment. Then he returned to his writing. He didn’t say anything else. Oliver walked back down to the eucalyptus trees, where his friends were waiting. They had seen what happened. Both Jaris and Trevor had half smiles on their faces that said, “I told you so, dude.”
Oliver shook his head. “He’s got the coldest look in his eyes. I’ve never seen such a cold look,” he commented.
Jaris nodded and agreed. “That’s why he freaks me out. I can make friends with most people but . . .”
Kevin was still lying on the grass. He was still watching the clouds form into odd shapes. His mother, who died last year, used to go for walks with Kevin. She’d point out the shapes of animals and people in the clouds. It was fun walking with her in Texas and picking out animal shapes in the sky. Now Kevin remarked, “Maybe Lydell has demons. Just leave him be. Some guys have demons.”
Kevin himself had had demons. He was such a fast runner back home in Texas that his mother nicknamed him “Twister.” He reminded her of a tornado. But Kevin struggled with a bad temper. Last year, when Marko Lane bullied Kevin, he almost killed the bully. Kevin was about to beat Marko up when he heard his dead mother’s voice pleading, “No, Twister, no!”
“It’s scary to think what dark corners we have in our minds,” Sereeta commented.
“Yeah,” Kevin agreed.
After lunch, Sereeta and Jaris walked to Mr. Myers’ English class. Lydell Nelson sat in the last row. Sereeta always noticed that Lydell seemed very intent on Mr. Myers’ lecture. Maybe, she thought, Lydell was writing a novel in that journal. Maybe because Mr. Myers was a novelist too, they had something in common.
As Sereeta and Jaris walked toward English, Jaris put his arm around her shoulders. She seemed so small and delicate. He wanted to protect her. He’d wanted to do that since middle school. She was always a lovely, fragile beauty. Her parents had divorced and left her on her own. She often cried over the chaos in her life.
Sereeta’s parents each remarried after the divorce. She had been living with her mom and stepfather, Perry Manley. But she never liked her stepfather. And Mom was in rehab, recovering from an alcohol and depression problem. So now Sereeta was staying with her grandmother.
Sereeta was trying to get along better with her stepfather. She was worried about how it would be when her mother got home next month. Sereeta sure wouldn’t be helping her mom if she and her stepfather weren’t getting along.
“You and your stepdad doing a little better since you talked the other day?” Jaris asked.
“Yeah,” Sereeta replied. “He asked me out to a restaurant tonight. He wants to talk some more. I’m kinda nervous about it. I’m not looking forward to sitting there through a whole meal trying to say the right thing.”
“I guess this is maybe a crazy idea, Sereeta,” Jaris suggested. “But would it help if someone was there with you?”
Sereeta turned and looked at Jaris, her eyes filling with hope. “Oh Jaris, that would be so fabulous!” she responded. “Would you really come? Would you do that for me?”
“Babe, for you I’d do anything,” Jaris smiled at her. “Of course I’d come, but do you think that’d be okay with your stepfather?”
“Yeah, I think he’d be more comfortable too if it wasn’t just the two of us,” Sereeta replied. “We’ve, you know, been sort of enemies for so long. There’s so much garbage. Jaris, you have this great personality that it’d just make everything better.”
“I don’t know about that, babe,” Jaris protested, “but I’ll do my best.”
“Oh wow!” Sereeta exclaimed. “Now I don’t feel nearly as bad about tonight.”
“So, I’ll pick you up at your grandma’s. We’ll drive to the restaurant and meet your stepdad there,” Jaris asked. “Then I’ll take you home.”
“We’re eating at Angelo’s,” Sereeta said. “It’s a reasonably priced place just off Algonquin. You sure it won’t be too much trouble, Jaris?”
“Sereeta,” Jaris sighed, “don’t you get it yet? I would do anything in the world for you.”
“Jaris . . .” she cooed.
“I love you, babe,” Jaris told her. “I’d walk through Death Valley in August for you.”
Sereeta leaned in close to him as they went down the pathway to English. She smiled up at him and wondered, “What did I ever do to deserve you?”
“Likewise,” Jaris agreed.
The couple took a few more steps together in silence. “Your mom,” Jaris remarked, “is gonna be so relieved when she gets home. You know, if you and your stepfather are getting along better. I think that’s gonna do her a lot of good.”
As Jaris and Sereeta neared the classroom door, Mr. Myers hadn’t arrived yet. Lydell was coming from another direction. He passed them, hurried into the classroom, and took his usual seat in the back. The boy opened his spiral notebook and began writing. Suddenly, Jaris heard a familiar but unwelcome voice.
“Hey Lydell,” Marko Lane taunted as he walked in, “you still writing in that book? You a spy from Transylvania or somethin’? Takin’ notes on us to give to Dracula?”
Marko had found a new target for his bullying, Lydell.
Lydell continued writing, ignoring Marko.
“Look at that dude, Jasmine,” Marko remarked to his girlfriend, Jasmine Benson. “He don’t stop writing for a minute. Hey man, level with us. What’s up with you? You’re making us all nervous. Like, you gonna put stuff about us on YouTube or something?”
“Knock it off, Lane,” Kevin growled. “Mind your own business.”
“Uh . . . I’m just trying to be friendly to poor old Lydell here,” Marko protested with mock innocence. “He’s got a big problem. He’s a weird loner. We need to help this dude find a place in the real world.”
Mr. Myers came in then, slamming his expensive briefcase down on the desk. Last year for junior English, they had Mr. Pippin. His briefcase looked as if it was falling apart. Unlike Mr. Pippin, Mr. Myers was not frightened of his students. Mr. Pippin would look out over the class like a cowed animal. He was always waiting for the next outrage from Marko Lane and his friends.
But Mr. Myers was angry and arrogant. He glared at the students. He acted as if they were all way below his intelligence level. He seemed as though it was tragic that he had to waste his time with them. He respected only one of his students: Oliver Randall, who was kind of a genius. Mr. Myers saw himself as a brilliant novelist on the verge of being discovered by the critics. Getting his book published would free him forever of having to deal with high school students. What fueled Mr. Myers’s anger was that stupid editors kept sending his book manuscript back, rejected. Each rejection only delayed his liberation from teaching senior English.
“It is an abomination,” Jaris heard Mr. Myers declaring to Mr. Pippin the other day. “You send out a great manuscript, and some book companies don’t even have the courtesy to return it. Instead they shred it, even when you have included a self-addressed stamped envelope. The Neanderthals now in charge of publishing are unfit to edit alphabet books.”
“Terrible, terrible!” Mr. Pippin agreed, though he had never tried to sell anything he had written. He wrote a few letters to the local newspaper about pet peeves, but even these never saw print. Mr. Pippin was always so busy trying to keep discipline in his classroom that he had no time to write. He barely had time to write his checks at the end of the month. Mr. Pippin looked up to Mr. Myers. Mr. Myers was quite a bit younger. He seemed superior to Mr. Pippin in education and in his ability to control a classroom.
Now everyone grew quiet as Mr. Myers began to lecture. Even Marko Lane knew better than to create a disturbance. When the lecture began, Lydell Nelson looked up, his dark eyes behind his thick glasses seeming to grow even larger. Jaris had been in classes with Lydell before, and he often seemed disinterested. He seemed to view Mr. Pippin with contempt last year, though he earned good grades. This year, he seemed enthralled by Mr. Myers.
“I am going to recite a very famous quote from literature,” Mr. Myers announced. “One that comments powerfully on the human condition. I want you to listen to the quote and to tell me the meaning it has for you. I also want you to identify the author if you can.”
In his powerful baritone, Mr. Myers intoned the quotation: “’The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’”
Marko Lane raised his hand. He wanted very much to get on the good side of Mr. Myers. At the beginning of the semester, Marko had stumbled badly. Marko had been snapping his fingers to a rap song in his mind. Mr. Myers went ballistic. Then, to make matters worse, Marko pretended to like one of Mr. Myers’s poems in an obscure journal. Marko called it by the wrong title and obviously didn’t understand it. That only annoyed Mr. Myers more. Now, in a grand effort to redeem himself, Marko stated, “Those are very fine words, Mr. Myers. I bet you wrote them. They sound like something you wrote.”
In spite of the discipline in the classroom, uncontrollable laughter broke out. Even Oliver Randall was laughing. Mr. Myers looked as though he could have killed Marko on the spot. Then, as the laughter died, Lydell Nelson spoke up in a shrill, high-pitched voice. “Henry David Thoreau wrote that. It means we are mostly miserable. But we hide the fact from the world because nobody cares.”
“That’s right, Mr. Nelson,” Mr. Myers said approvingly. “Can you expand on that?”
“Yeah,” Lydell replied. “It means you keep on going and doing your own thing. You’re frustrated, but you hide it.”
Alonee raised her hand. “The quote is very sad,” she commented. “It means that most people are unhappy, but they pretend they’re okay. They believe people don’t want to see your heartache.”
“It’s kind of a fatalistic attitude,” Oliver Randall added. “If people feel that bad, maybe they can do something to change their lives.”
“Sometimes you can’t change things,” Lydell countered in an animated voice. “Sometimes you’re trapped. You can’t get out of where you are. You’re looking for an escape hatch but there isn’t one.” Jaris had never heard so much passion in a classroom discussion. “Lot of people like that. You see ’em in cars on the freeway. Like rats trapped in their cars. They’re trapped by other people in their lives or by stuff they can’t change. We’re trapped right here at this school. A lot of us don’t want to be here. We hate it, but we can’t get out!”
A moment or so of silence followed Lydell’s little speech. Even Mr. Myers was quiet. Jaris glanced back at Lydell. He seemed to be shaking with emotion. The boy was getting a little scary. Usually he was so absorbed in his writing that he seemed oblivious to everything. The Thoreau quote seemed to unlock deep feelings.