THE WIND BLEW ORANGE AND red leaves off the trees as Jeremy biked furiously home after the game. The colors were ridiculously bright against a wide blue sky dotted with clouds. He could see the beauty but felt separate from it all.
Rachel was having pizza with the rest of the volleyball team, and Jane was still at school waiting for their mother, who was a secretary there. She was supposed to be taking the minutes for a meeting of a new committee Director Powell had formed. It was called the Legacy Committee, though Jeremy’s mom mainly called it the Idiot Committee.
So today he was on his own, biking the two miles from the hilly campus of St. Edith’s to his house in the next town over. He didn’t mind the ride. He needed time to think.
First he rode through the village, with its brick storefronts and wrought-iron benches. Red Mill, where St. Edith’s was located, called itself “the prettiest village in western Massachusetts” and even had signs all over town proclaiming so, something that caused frustration and the occasional rumbling about lawsuits from other, equally attractive towns whose leaders believed the nickname should have been at least voted on or something.
Nobody would call Lower Falls, where Jeremy lived, the prettiest town in anywhere. If Red Mill was the sort of place Bostonians who’d made a killing in finance moved to to open art galleries and send their kids to prep schools, then Lower Falls was where they went to get a crack in their windshield fixed at one of the body shops out by the old railroad tracks.
That’s why even with Andrew Marks gone, Jeremy knew his mother would never let him transfer. She was a school secretary, which was how he and his sisters managed to go to St. Edith’s in the first place—they got free tuition, part of a staff scholarship program nobody else but his family ever applied for. Without that scholarship, they would have had to go to the local public school, what his mother called “that” school: Warren G. Harding Junior/Senior High.
The school had been in the news recently thanks to a spate of violent fistfights among a gang of girls. News stories abounded, all using words and phrases like “gritty” and “former mill town” and “depressed area of the Berkshires.”
The kids at St. Edith’s spread even worse rumors about Harding. About kids stuffed into lockers—which Jeremy couldn’t picture, because the lockers at St. Edith’s were only about a foot square—and someone getting robbed right in the middle of the cafeteria by a classmate wielding a sharpened butter knife, plus one often-repeated story about a teacher who flipped out so badly over his class’s behavior that he had to be escorted out of the school in a straitjacket.
“There is no possible way you are ever going to that school, even if I got hit by a truck,” Jeremy’s mother had announced a few weeks earlier, clicking off the TV news program featuring the fights at Harding. “Look at those girls! Are they the kind of kids you want to surround yourself with? At a school like that?”
Jeremy had seen pictures of the girls who got into fights at Harding, and he thought he could say with complete certainty none of them would ever hang out with him whether he went to school there or not. Beat him up, maybe.
But that didn’t matter to his mother. It only furthered her resolve to keep him at St. Edith’s until graduation, when hopefully his good grades would earn him a scholarship to a private high school.
Which is why he needed to take more drastic measures.
Jeremy biked past Red Mill’s tea shops and dog boutiques, then cut around its small cemetery with dark and ancient headstones littered with orange leaves, like a Halloween display in a variety store, until he reached a long stretch where the bike lane ended. Now he was riding on the shoulder next to nothing but trees and brush. This was his favorite part, where he could be alone except for the occasional car veering into the opposite lane to avoid him.
Then the road opened up again, and there were car dealerships and overgrown train tracks and in the distance tall, thin, brick smokestacks that hadn’t smoked in years, the buildings themselves turned into condos and old folks’ homes. Lower Falls.
When he reached his house, he went straight to his room, in the back, across from his mother’s. The girls shared the upstairs, an attic space with a sloping roof. That plus a living room and an eat-in kitchen was pretty much the whole place.
He threw his backpack on his bed, rummaged through his desk drawers, and pulled out his list of the remaining boys at St. Edith’s. He took a pen, crossed out Andrew Marks, and wrote number two next to his name. He hadn’t liked a lot of these guys, it was true. But he’d been unhappy to see every single one of them go. Number twenty-six, Will James, once invited all the boys in their class on a big camping trip, before his parents sent him to boarding school. Number twenty-one, Carlos Martins-Diaz, tried to get the school to start a Boy Scouts troop, but not enough people were interested. Jeremy wasn’t sure where he’d gone, but he imagined a place filled with boys whittling wood and helping little old ladies cross the street. Number fourteen, Matt Kepler, had been the only boy shorter than Jeremy in sixth grade. He went to MacArthur Prep now and pretended he didn’t know Jeremy when they ran into each other at Rachel’s volleyball games.
Each of them had faced the same humiliations Jeremy did, day in and day out, and each of them had cracked under the pressure. And now Jeremy was the only one left.
He ripped up the list. He didn’t need it anymore and looking at it made his head hurt.
Instead he grabbed his notebook and wrote a title across the top of a fresh piece of paper, like he was writing an essay for school. He almost put his name underneath but stopped himself. This was a secret document. The thought made him smile, but the smile faded as he contemplated the pros and cons.
HOW TO GET KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL
1. Set a Fire
Pros: Immediate. Dramatic.
Cons: How do you set fire to an almost 150-year-old stone building?
Jeremy had no idea. It wasn’t like he set things on fire recreationally all that often. Or ever, actually. Also, he might end up going to juvenile hall instead of getting to transfer to public school.
And what if someone got hurt? Or his mom lost her job? And if he burned down the school, then his sisters wouldn’t be able to go there either. And maybe Jane would end up being one of those tough townie girls, with drawn-on eyebrows and hair scraped back into painfully tight ponytails, who stood around smoking on the corner near the donut shop, and Jeremy’s mother would blame him forever.
2. Start a Fight with Someone
Pros: ???
Jeremy had trouble thinking of any. He hated fights. All the rocking back and forth and shoving. But maybe people would think he was tough if he got in a fight? It could improve his reputation. And he might have to learn how to fight at least a little bit if he went to a coed school.
Cons: The juvie thing again.
Plus he was the only boy in the building. And while there were a few girls he’d like to see get punched in the face, he had to be realistic—the only ones it would be fair to start something with would probably win.
3. Flunk Out
Pros: This would hurt no one but me, and I wouldn’t have to punch anybody.
Cons: Time-consuming.
Jeremy got practically all As. It would take months, maybe even the whole year, to fail. Also, if he flunked, then he’d never get a scholarship to high school, and was getting out of St. Edith’s worth that?
If only his mother could figure out a way to send him somewhere else—anywhere. But his mom was, well, his mom. Frazzled. Next to impossible to talk to. Always saying “I don’t want to yell” and then turning around and yelling like five seconds later.
He stared at the paper for a minute, then ripped it out of his notebook and crunched it into a ball. He almost tossed it in the trash can but instead dropped it back on his desk.
Voices were coming down the hall. His mother was home. He should probably go talk to her—again—about how he felt, before he did anything drastic. But it seemed so pointless.
“The girls . . . they’re just too . . . distracting,” he’d said once, trying a different tack.
“Distracting how? Do they talk in class? Because I know you talk in class. I’ve had more than one teacher mention it. So don’t think for a second you can blame the girls for that.”
“No,” he said patiently. Or somewhat patiently. Patience was hard with his mother. “Well, yes, they do, but that’s not it. It’s more because they’re girls that’s distracting. To me.”
But she just laughed at him. It wasn’t a mean laugh—his mother was a lot of things, but she wasn’t mean, exactly—but it was still a laugh, that knowing and loud laugh grown-ups do when they think kids are being funny even though to the kid the situation is not funny AT ALL.
“Honestly, Mom, you have to admit it’s a little weird,” Rachel had chimed in. “How would you feel if you were the only woman in a place full of men?”
“That actually happens more than you think, Rachel,” she said, her tone serious again. “Besides, it’s not that I’m not sympathetic. I know it’s not the ideal situation. But, Jeremy, you’re going to live in a world surrounded by women your whole life! You’ll have to study with girls in college and work with women when you grow up. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll find someone who wants to spend the rest of their life with you, and that person might be a woman too. At some point you’re going to need to learn how to deal with them as people. Fifty percent of the population is female!”
“Fifty percent,” he had argued. “Not one hundred percent.”
It was no use. He couldn’t really explain—not to his mother. In fact, he strongly suspected she thought this total-girl immersion experience was good for him, like she was making sure he wouldn’t be a macho jerk when he grew up—her own little feminist science project.
He wandered to the kitchen and paced listlessly as his mother set down her purse, took off her coat, and stuck a carton of milk in the fridge.
“You seem quiet,” she said. “How was school?”
“Andrew Marks transferred,” he said, not looking at her.
“Your tennis friend? Sorry to hear that,” she said, pulling a pan out of the cupboard.
“He wasn’t my friend,” Jeremy said with an eye roll she didn’t catch. “But that’s not important. Because now I’m the last boy.”
“Really?” his mother asked. “I thought there were more.” Her tone was light, like they were talking about the weather. Infuriating.
Jeremy shut his eyes. “You really have no idea, do you?”
She turned to look at him. “Well, why don’t you try me? Give me some idea.”
He let out a long breath. “Okay, how about the fact that every single day the volleyball team laughs at me. Every single day.” They were eighth graders, like Rachel, and they always seemed to be headed into the first floor bathroom in a pack whenever he walked by. He knew they were laughing at him; he could hear the echoes off the tile walls, and the sound followed him all the way down the hall.
“They’re not laughing at you! They probably don’t even notice you.” His mother opened the fridge and stared at its contents without taking anything out.
“Oh, they’re laughing at me,” he said grimly. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew.
Rachel walked in, hair wet from showering and looking as well put together in pink sweats as she did in her school uniform. Jane trailed behind her. “Who laughs at you?”
Jeremy’s mother rolled her eyes. “The volleyball team, apparently. They are persecuting your brother by laughing in his vicinity.”
“I need you to sign this form for my field trip,” Jane said, ignoring the conversation entirely.
“Can’t you see I’m right in the middle of making dinner?” their mother said. Jane looked around, probably confused since there was no actual evidence of food preparation anywhere in the kitchen. “Fine, just let me find a pen.”
Jeremy’s mother went over to a drawer and started rummaging. “Rachel, these girls are your friends. Why don’t you talk to them? Tell them they’re making Jeremy self-conscious—”
“Oh God no,” Jeremy and Rachel said at the same time with such force their mother laughed.
“Okay, okay, bad idea,” she said. “But maybe I could make some calls? Like to Allie’s mom? She seems nice.”
Jeremy groaned.
“Well, fine then. If you won’t let me help, I don’t know what you expect.”
“You could let me go to another school?” he offered. “I mean, now I’m the only boy at St. Edith’s. That has to be a good reason to transfer.”
At this, the bemused expression his mother had worn through most of the conversation immediately vanished.
“You know I can’t, Jeremy,” she started, and it sounded like she was going to get mad. But she just sighed, and her voice changed. “I’m doing the best I can, okay? Give me some credit, please.”
“It wouldn’t have to be the public school”—he knew all too well how his mother felt about Harding—“but maybe someplace like MacArthur Prep? I could get a scholarship.”
She sighed in that deep, heavy way he hated. “Do you think scholarships to MacArthur grow on trees? There’s a waiting list for the waiting list. And even with financial aid, there are all sorts of fees at a place like that, and we’d have to figure out how to get you there and back every day, plus you’d need completely new uniforms. I can barely keep up with the three of you at St. Edith’s, and I get almost everything covered because I’m staff. There’s no way we could afford it. I’m sorry.”
“How do you know? I mean, we’ve never even tried—”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“Try? Try? You want me to try?” She laughed, but not her full and happy laugh. This time it sounded hard, like a bark. “All I do is try. I’m sorry it’s not good enough for you.”
Rachel jumped in. “That’s not what he meant to say, Mom.” She shot Jeremy a look that told him to keep his mouth shut. “He’s just asking; he doesn’t understand.”
His sister’s calming tone seemed to help. When Jeremy’s mother turned to look at him, her voice was softer and firmer. “Look, Jeremy, I know it’s not what you want. You’ve made that abundantly clear, time and time again. But it’s the best we can do right now. You get an excellent private school education for free. If you want, we can start going back to the YMCA or something so you could play basketball? Meet some other boys that way?”
Jeremy had no interest in joining the Y, but he nodded listlessly. “Sure, Mom, that would be great.”
She slammed shut the drawer she’d been searching. “Why can’t I find anything around this place?” she asked, and went into the living room.
“She does kind of have a point, as surprising as that is,” Rachel said.
“I heard that,” their mother called.
“What I mean is, you complain and complain, but you never want to actually do anything to fix your problems. It’s like you want to be stuck.”
He shook his head. What could Rachel know? Perfect Rachel was never stuck. Even though she faced the same pressures he did to earn good grades and get into a good high school, she didn’t really understand. And they’d been a team for years, ever since she stopped calling him Germy and they both realized it would take more than just their stressed-out mother to hold the family together. Rachel tried, of course. She was more sympathetic than almost anyone. But there’s no way she could truly get it.
“I just asked Mom to let me switch schools. How is that not doing anything?”
“You wander in here and ask her to let you go to MacArthur just as she’s walking in from work, the absolute worst time to ask Mom for literally anything,” Rachel said. “You call that trying?”
He shrugged.
“I get it; I do,” she said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to be you either. But if Mom won’t let you transfer, I don’t know what else we can do. If it makes you feel better, I don’t think most of the girls at school even notice you’re there.” She caught the look on his face and added, “No offense.”
As though that wasn’t half the problem. Even when there had been other boys, everything at St. Edith’s was completely geared toward girls—what they thought, what they needed, what they wanted. The books they read in English class, the topics they learned about in health. For Jeremy, it was like being on display and invisible at the exact same time.
It’s not like he wanted to be a superstar like Rachel or Claudia. Or the captain of a sports team or top of his class. He just wanted to be normal, whether it was at MacArthur Prep or some other school or even Harding. Was that really so wrong?
Jeremy opened the back door and walked out into the yard. There were a couple of Adirondack chairs out there, weathered and broken. When his dad had still been around they used to take them inside after summer ended and store them in the basement, but somewhere along the way that stopped, and now they were beaten soft and creaky by years of snow.
He stared at the trees in the fading sun and at the rusted metal swing set and his little sister’s old plastic ride-on toy, long abandoned, and wondered what his dad would do if he were around. How things would have been different if his father had never taken off on his boat.
It had been so long since he’d seen him that Jeremy had trouble picturing his face. Even when he’d been living at home, his father always had one foot out the door.
Mr. Miner was, at least in theory, a grad student. A “perpetual grad student” Jeremy’s mother liked to say, because he’d never finished his thesis. She always said it like she also meant he was still a child—that he had never grown up.
His specialty was marine biology. “Who studies marine biology one hundred miles from the sea?” his mother would say, making that face she only ever made when she talked about Jeremy’s father. “But I guess I thought it was romantic. I should have known he’d take off on a boat, eventually.”
One time when his parents were fighting, he heard his father accuse his mother of not believing in him anymore. At the time, Jeremy had thought it meant like not believing in Santa, and he was mystified.
But now that he was older, Jeremy realized he hadn’t been all that far off the mark. One day his mother had stopped believing like you stop believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and like those things, his father had disappeared. It was almost as if he had never been there at all.
But thinking about his dad wasn’t going to help him solve his current dilemma. What he needed was a plan.
Who could help him? Emily? She was one of his best friends, even if they didn’t really hang out as much as they used to. She lived in the house behind his, and she’d always been there, like the trees in his backyard and the mountains in the distance.
But Emily was a law-abiding girl, serious and studious and not at all a person who would approve of him getting expelled. Claudia said she was a dork and it was kind of true, and not in a cool way either. But he could see the back of Emily’s house through the dusk, and the light was on in her room. He had to at least try.
“I’m going to Emily’s,” he yelled at the back door, but didn’t stop to listen to the muffled reply.