SO, FROST.
Deedee, Bench, Wolf. Tribal names. All names we gave to each other. All except Frost. I was Frost before I ever met them.
Word of advice: if you ever get the chance to win your fifth-grade district-wide poetry competition, don’t. Or if you do, try to keep it to yourself.
Because sometimes things stick. They attach themselves like burrs on your socks and they follow you. Like that story your parents always tell your friends’ parents at dinner about how you got into the pantry when you were four and ate a whole box of lemon Jell-O—the raw powder, not the jiggly stuff—straight out of the package, turning your tongue bright orange and forcing them to call Poison Control. From that moment on, you know those people will never eat the stuff without laughing. You will forever be Jell-O Boy, in addition to all the other things you’ve become.
More often—in school, at least—it’s a label, thrown out on a whim, maybe, by some kid trying to get a giggle from the kid next to him. But then it’s picked up on and passed around until it becomes a part of you.
Kid Who Never Brushes Her Hair.
Kid Whose Crack Is Always Showing.
Kid with the Giant Schnoz.
Kid Who Always Gets Picked Last.
Kid Who Blew Chunks Onstage.
These are all real people, except I can’t tell you most of their names. Even I know them only by what stuck. Except the Kid Who Always Gets Picked Last. That’s Deedee.
If you’re lucky—or at least not terribly unlucky—the thing that sticks to you will just be a nickname, and not a pathetic one.
Like Frost.
Ask most twelve-year-old kids to name a poet and they will probably tell you Shakespeare or Shel Silverstein or Kendrick Lamar. Some of them will probably say Dr. Seuss, though, like my dad says, just because your stuff rhymes, it doesn’t necessarily make you a poet. I don’t imagine a whole lot of kids would tell you their favorite poet is Robert Frost. I’m probably the only one.
I blame my father, in fact. He’s the one who introduced us—me and Frost. On a tedious summer Sunday, a glass of wine in his hand, sitting across from me on the porch and handing me a copy of Frost’s Selected Poems. This was before the Sarasota Shuffle. The Big Split. Back when my parents tried to just ignore each other as much as possible and I tried to ignore their ignoring. When the house would speak to us in creaks that we could hear because nobody else dared to speak because they were afraid of what they might say.
We sat on the porch in the backyard by my mother’s bright fuchsia azaleas, just the two of us, the sun baking the grass. “I think you’re old enough,” he said to me with a nod, and for a moment I thought he was going to hand me his glass for a sip. Instead he gave me the book.
Some dads take their kids fishing. Or play catch. My dad wrote for a living. Just my luck.
“I don’t like poetry,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true then and certainly isn’t now. When we did the fifty-book challenge in the fourth grade I was the only one who had a volume of poetry on my list. Jack Prelutsky. But the book my dad handed me wasn’t anything like Jack Prelutsky. For starters, there were no illustrations. Plus the cover looked kind of prissy, all blue-and-white flowers. I tried to hand it back, but my father just reached over and flipped to a flap-cornered page.
“Start with this one,” he said. “It’s one of his most famous.”
The poem was called “The Road Not Taken.” Dad told me to read it out loud. He wasn’t the kind of father you said no to, not unless you wanted an hour-long lecture on the topic of “things that are good for you.”
“‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’” I began, and I read it all, careful not to sound too bored, so as not to offend my father, or too interested, so as not to encourage him either. When I was finished he asked me what I thought about it.
I shrugged. “Pretty good, I guess,” which is actually what I thought. I’d had to read worse stuff in school. I figured that was the end of it—it hadn’t dawned on me that my dad might actually be interested in my opinion, but he told me to read it again. Quietly. To myself.
So I did. With him sitting across from me, looking out over the porch at the heavy clouds and grimacing at the birds in the maples. I read it again. And again. And when I looked back up after the third reading he asked, “How does it make you feel?”
I could feel his cloud-gray eyes on me. He wanted a real answer. He seemed to be holding his breath.
“Guilty,” I said at last. Though I wasn’t sure why. That was just the first word that came to mind.
My dad reached over and scuffed my hair. “It’s not guilt,” he said, “it’s regret. They aren’t quite the same.” He took another sip of wine and went back into the house, leaving me and Robert Frost on the porch.
He moved out three months later.
I read all 114 poems in the book that summer. Most more than once. That next winter, with my father and mother still haggling on the phone about what to do with the house that he didn’t even live in anymore, I came home with an assignment to write something for the thirteenth annual Branton School District Young Authors’ Competition. It could be a poem or a short story. You could illustrate it if you wanted to. The winner would receive a medal and a fifty-dollar gift card to Barnes & Noble.
I wrote a poem inspired by Frost’s “Mending Wall,” my personal favorite of the 114. Frost’s poem was about these two guys who meet in the middle of a field to repair this broken old stone wall that separates their properties, and it has this line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” which the speaker of the poem thinks is total crap, and yet he goes on and keeps building the fence anyways. And you kind of wonder why? What would happen if they left the wall broken, or tore it down completely? Wouldn’t they still be good neighbors? Would they maybe be better neighbors? Would they maybe be something more? Like friends?
My poem was called “The Elf’s Mischief” and it began, “I am the thing that does not love a wall.” It was about all those questions. About broken walls, and whether good fences ever made for good families too.
Maybe it was because it wasn’t another haiku lazily written in the back of the bus on the way to school. Or maybe the teachers who were acting as judges had fence issues of their own or divorced parents or both, because I won. Pretty much the only time in my life I’ve won anything.
The day after the awards ceremony my name was called over the morning announcements at school. The teacher made me show everyone the medal and then asked me to stand in front of the class and read the poem out loud. The other kids asked if they could have the gift card. Without even thinking, Mrs. Beck said, “We now have our very own Robert Frost.”
Boom. That was it. One comment from my fifth-grade teacher and I became someone else, the junior poet laureate of Falsin County.
That same night that I earned my new nickname, my mother drove me to the Barnes & Nobles in Portage, about an hour away, to spend my reward. I bought her a Frappuccino and spent the rest on comic books. As we passed the sign welcoming us back to Branton, sitting right out in the middle of an empty field, I thought about my father and Sarasota and Frost and how there were actually a whole buttload of fences out in the world, but most of them were invisible. Deep thoughts for an eleven-year-old, I guess, but reading Robert Frost all summer after your parents split will do that to you.
When I got home I called my father to tell him about my victory and what the kids were calling me at school, but he wasn’t there.
I didn’t bother to leave a message.
I told you the whole thing started with Ruby Sandels, and in a way it did. But it was another girl who got the most attention.
Her name—her actual name—was Rose. Like the delicate flower. Though “delicate” is not the first word I would use to describe her. I know most of it—the war, the notes, the thing with Wolf—probably would have happened regardless. But without her it would have gone so much differently.
She came the same week that the school’s ban on cell phones took effect, the same week Ruby was allowed to return to school after her suspension, the same week that my father wrote me an email telling me about the trip we were going to take next summer to Cape Canaveral. At least it wasn’t to Miami for a ball game—space shuttles and giant rockets were more up my alley.
Rose Holland came that week and everything changed.
There’s a famous Alfred Hitchcock movie called The Birds. It sounds like a documentary, but trust me, it’s not. In the movie all the birds in this small California town go all avian apocalypse and start attacking people—plucking out eyes, blowing up gas stations, pecking everyone to death—just about the same time that this one woman shows up. Whether or not she’s the reason the birds attack isn’t entirely clear. It could just be a fluke. Or maybe there is something about this lady that makes the birds batty. I watched the movie with Bench, who conked out about halfway through after muttering for an hour straight that any movie without at least one CGI character was bound to be boring. I watched to the end, though. I wanted to see if the woman was going to make it out of the town alive or if the birds would get her.
I won’t spoil it for you, just in case, but I will say that sometimes somebody shows up in your life and throws everything out of whack. Or just happens to show up the moment the out-of-whackness starts.
I wasn’t thinking about The Birds when Rose Holland appeared at school though, the day after the Great Confiscation. At the time I was thinking about algebra. I had a quiz in second period—the dreaded Ms. Sheers—and had barely bothered to study. And then here comes the new girl, already six weeks into the semester. In two-plus years I had finally gotten comfortable with my surroundings. I knew who I could copy off of and who to avoid in the halls. I had the people I high-fived and the people I nodded to, and the people I slunk right by (which was still most of them). Then here comes this unknown. That’s what I saw when I looked at her: not the girl from the bird movie, but a variable. Person X.
Capital X, because if there was one thing you instantly noticed about Rose Holland, it’s that she was uppercase. Not big around, like Mr. Jackson or like Sean Forsett, who looked kind of like a beach ball with limbs glued to its sides. Not even overweight. Just big. More squared than rounded, like she had been constructed of cinder blocks. Of course this was middle school: I was used to taller girls. But most of the girls at Branton who were tall were also skinny, like stretched taffy. Rose Holland was tall and wide. Muscular, like Bench. I figured she was an athlete. Volleyball maybe. Or soccer. She’d make an excellent goalie. Practically impenetrable.
Yet she walked through the hall the same way all of us did on our first days, with her eyes on the tiles below her feet. Her frizzled brown hair, lighter than mine, hanging over her face like a veil. Dark jeans and a black sweater that could probably fit two of Deedee. You could hear the sound of her boots from a mile away.
“Who’s she?” Bench said, standing beside me.
“Who knows,” I replied.
“She looks like she can hit. Linebacker material.”
“Be careful,” I told him. “She might replace you.”
Bench didn’t have an answer to that. I glanced at the new girl again, noticing everyone step out of her way only to give her a long second look after her back was to them. You’d be tempted to tell them Take a picture, it’ll last longer, except, of course, nobody had their phone on them anymore. Already there were whispers trailing after her, though, and you could tell just by that brief walk down the hall that she was going to have a tough first day. I muttered a short prayer for her under my breath.
“I’d stay out of her way, if I were you,” Bench remarked.
I snickered, though it was really more of a grunt as I pictured this new girl bowling over everyone in the halls, leaving smashed Play-Doh versions of them stuck to the floors with only their eyes bugging out. It wasn’t really funny, but I’m a sucker for a good image. The new girl disappeared around a corner looking lost. I shut my locker and headed to first period with a promise to catch up to Bench later.
I met Wolf and Deedee outside the door to English. Wolf looked exhausted. “Long night?”
“George and Martha were at it again,” he said.
George and Martha were Wolf’s nicknames for his parents. He says he got the names from an old movie he saw once about this couple that is always arguing. His parents’ real names were Todd and Trina.
That’s something Wolf and I had in common: front-row seats to the failing-marriage show. Except where my parents mostly refused to talk to each other, his parents never shut up. His dad hadn’t moved out of the house yet. I figured it was only a matter of time, but Wolf said it would never happen. His parents would never split. That would require them to agree on something. Strange thing was, I actually kind of liked Wolf’s parents, from the little time I’d spent with them. They seemed like nice people and they seemed to like me. They just didn’t like each other. Made you wonder how they got stuck together in the first place.
“You want to talk about it?” I asked. I knew the answer already, but I asked anyway.
“What’s there to talk about?” Wolf said. “I just wish they’d let me move down into the basement. It’d be quieter at least.”
“But what about the piano?” I asked.
“Yeah. We’d have to move that too.”
We ducked into class and found our seats, Deedee on one side, me on the other, Wolf in the middle where he belonged, all of us ignoring the dirty looks from the three boys who sat behind us. Normally you’d get a comment from one of them, a completely unoriginal “here comes the dork patrol” kind of thing, but today we managed to slip by. Mr. Sword finished scrawling something on the whiteboard and humming loud enough for the whole class to hear. Wolf leaned over and told me it was classical. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. I told him no self-respecting eighth grader should know that. Mr. Sword turned to us and started taking attendance.
He had just worked his way down the roster when the variable burst into the room.
“Sorry I’m late. Got turned around,” she said. Her face was red, flushed from running or embarrassment or both. Her eyes, I noticed, were deep blue, like her jeans. She filled the doorframe completely.
“It’s all right, Rose,” Mr. Sword replied. He turned to the rest of us. “I’d like to introduce our new student. Everyone, this is Rose Holland.”
The girl put up a hand self-consciously. It was that moment. That terrible, blood-freezing, ashy-mouthed moment when you suddenly realize that sixty eyeballs are fixed on you, deciding what to do about you, where you fit in. I gave the new girl a smile, just a small one, to let her know we weren’t so bad. She didn’t smile back.
“Rose comes to us all the way from the Windy City.”
“I’m surprised the wind could carry her,” somebody—probably Jason or one of his friends—whispered from the back of the room. Okay. Most of us weren’t so bad.
“Excuse me?” Mr. Sword said sharply. Whoever it was didn’t bother to repeat it. Mr. Sword turned back to the doorway. “You can take any open seat, Rose.”
I looked around. There were three empties. One of them was on the other side of me. She took the one closest to the door and I felt a twinge of relief. It would have meant something—her coming all the way across the room just to sit next to me. Maybe not to her, but to everybody else.
“This week,” Mr. Sword said, already moving on even though most eyes were still on the new girl, “we will be starting our unit on Elizabethan drama. Raise your hand if you are already an expert on drama.”
Half the students groaned and raised their hands, some of them pointing to each other. I nodded to Deedee, encouraging him to raise his hand too, but he just gave me a dirty look. I noticed Wolf was still looking at Rose. Her eyes were fixed on the front of the room.
“The rest of you are lying, then,” Mr. Sword told us. “I think most of you create more drama in one day than Shakespeare could imagine in a lifetime. But when he did it, at least, it was all in good fun.”
To prove his point, Mr. Sword launched into a lecture on Elizabethan theater, which was actually pretty boring until he described how actors would fill animal bladders with sheep’s blood and keep them beneath their stage clothes so that they would explode in a gruesome display during fight scenes. Sometimes, he said, if you were one of the lucky ones sitting up front you’d get some of the blood on your clothes too. He called it the sixteenth-century splash zone.
“Sheep’s blood?” Christina Morrow said with a grimace. “Gross.” She pronounced the word as three syllables. Guh-roh-ohss.
“I think it’s cool.”
I looked at the girl by the door, cheeks still pink, eyes still fixed on Mr. Sword. All the girls sitting near Rose Holland recoiled, wrinkling their faces. Beth Strands even scooted her desk over an inch. Mr. Sword made a motion for Rose to elaborate.
“No. I mean, it’s really creative. Like special effects,” Rose added. “Before there was even such a thing as special effects.”
“And the audience would agree with you, Ms. Holland,” Mr. Sword said, smiling. “All that gore helped to account for the theater’s popularity. It wasn’t a good drama if somebody didn’t get stabbed, hanged, or poisoned by the end. Preferably all three. The audience was always out for blood.”
People were still eying Rose. A couple of the girls in the back started whispering, no doubt about her—what she said, how she looked, her clothes, her hair. Deedee scrawled something on a yellow sticky note—he had a stack of them sitting on his desk. He handed it to Wolf and I leaned over to see.
Guess things haven’t changed much, the note said. Deedee glanced sideways at the new girl. I smiled. Wolf didn’t.
No blood yet, just dirty looks. If Rose noticed the reaction of the people around her, she didn’t seem to care. Or maybe she was just good at ignoring it. Not an easy thing to do.
I told myself to stop looking at her, just in case she got the wrong idea.