Skip breaks Silence in the traditional way, by reaching over and shaking Trudy’s hand. The Meetinghouse stirs to life as everyone follows suit and shakes hands with their neighbor, then disperses for first period, still aglow over the already-legendary Great Meetinghouse Fart of ’02.
Despite the ongoing efforts of our teachers to separate the F&N unit, we’ve managed to get most of the same classes this semester. Wednesday first period is Slavery, Capital, and Empire: Rethinking the American Experiment, taught by Glenn Harding.
“Okay, settle down,” he intones, as if he’s bored by us rather than terrified of us. No one is fooled. He is twenty-three years old. His monotonous delivery is a protective mechanism, as is his slouch, his scruff, his emo glasses, and his ironic trucker hat. According to our informant Jimmy Frye the IT guy, he moonlights as lead guitarist for a local band called Automatic Caution Door. Ergo: we the F&N unit have the right—nay, the duty—to haze the shit out of him.
F: “You’re gonna have to be more assertive than that, Glenjamin.”
N: “Come on, Glennifer, speak from your diaphragm!”
Idlewild is a Quaker school, which means we call our teachers by their first names. There are exceptions, like Mr. Prins and Ms. Caputo, who earn their honorifics by exuding authority. Glenn obviously hoped to be one of them. On the first day of school he slouched at the front of the room and mumbled, “I’m Glenn Harding. You can call me Glenn, or Mr. Harding …” in a studiedly casual way that simultaneously (1) made it clear that he keenly hoped we’d opt for Mr. Harding and (2) ensured that he would never, ever be called Mr. Harding. Indeed, he’s lucky if we call him Glenn.
F: “You can do it, Glennothy!”
N: “We believe in you, Glennifred!”
“Whatever,” he mumbles, like this isn’t crushing him inside, and turns to the blackboard to write something about the British East India Company.
Losing interest, we the F&N unit survey the classroom. The girl sitting to our immediate left—the girl whose name is Lily Day-Jones but to whom we refer to as Daylily Jones because that’s obviously better—is crying.
We harbor complex feelings toward Daylily Jones. Her defining personality trait is her beauty, and if you don’t believe that physical beauty is a personality trait, then you’ve never met anyone as beautiful as Daylily Jones. With her porcelain skin, plump lips, and cascading waves of glossy hair (naturally chestnut, lately tinted with a raspberry sheen) down to her waist (a white sliver of which is currently exposed between her tank top and her jeans), she’s beautiful like a rose or a sunset or a swan. As a result, she’s widely mistaken for a talented actress. In the last three years Daylily has appeared on the Meetinghouse stage as Titania, as Perdita, as Ophelia (in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but still). In eighth grade she landed the role of Philia in the Upper School production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—and she can’t even fucking sing.
Yet try as we might, we’ve never been able to hate her: she’s just too nice, in the way that extraordinarily beautiful people tend to be, because the world is always smiling at them. When you look like Daylily Jones, the world leaves flowers in your locker on Valentine’s Day. It throws in a free blueberry muffin with your Frappuccino. It comes up to you on the street and asks you to model for Teen People, and when you show up at the fashion shoot, it does not turn out to be a sex trafficking scam and you really do appear in the January 2002 issue of Teen People looking, if anything, a notch less beautiful than you usually do, because professional makeup and airbrushing can only gild the refined gold that is your face. When you look lovely, everyone is lovely toward you, and thus life has never given Daylily Jones a reason to be anything but lovely toward everyone in return. This is also why she’s not funny.
So it is with a mix of concern and curiosity that we the F&N unit collaborate on a handwritten note—Are you OK?—and paper-airplane it her way.
She reads our note and looks over at us all dewy-eyed and trembly-lipped, her complexion rosy with sorrow. (Okay, sometimes we do hate her.) Glenn is droning on about commodity fetishism and the birth of consumer culture, and teachers never reprimand Daylily anyway, so she replies to us aloud in a sob-choked stage whisper.
“I don’t think today should be a normal school day.”
We nod sympathetically, as anyone would at the sight of Daylily in distress, though we are not necessarily in agreement with her.
“I can’t believe it’s been a whole year,” she says. A single tear actually slides in slow motion down her cheek, which we thought happened only in the movies.
So Daylily is our first crier of the day. We failed to anticipate that the first tear would not be shed until after Meeting for Worship, so it’s unclear whether the amended rules of Guess Who’s Gay are still in effect. Is Daylily Jones gay for the day?
We the F&N unit call an emergency meeting (location: N’s notebook) to adjudicate the question.
F: NOT GAY. Too pretty. Rules don’t apply
N: Lesbians can be pretty!!!
F: Not like DLJ
N: I’d do her
F: I’d do your mom
Glenn has the temerity to interrupt us. “Fay, can you give us another one?”
F: “What?”
“Another one of the main British imports. We’ve already got cotton and tea on the board. What else?”
F: “Homosexuality.”
The class laughs, which buys time as N flips through the textbook to refresh her own memory. This is our elegant system for textbook-based classes: only one of us buys the book, and we share joint custody of it. This saves money but also means that only one of us can do the reading on any given night. Usually N.
Glenn is getting passive-aggressive. “This was all in last night’s reading.”
N surreptitiously writes down sugar and flashes the page to F under the desk.
F: “Sugar.”
“Good one,” says Glenn. “Really important. We’ll talk a lot more about the sugar industry next week.” He writes SUGAR on the blackboard. “What else? Lily, can you give us one?”
Daylily looks at him like she’s Bambi and he just shot her mom. And even though we both know in our hearts that she is too pretty to be gay, for this or any other day, we make a split-second decision to treat her as one of us. Our hands shoot skyward.
F: “Hey! Glenningrad!”
N: “Glenntropy!”
F: “United Colors of Glennetton!”
N: “Glennifer Glaniston! From the hit TV show—”
F&N: “GLENNDS!”
“Jesus Christ.” Glenn looks to be on the verge of psychic collapse. “What is it?”
We have no idea, but it doesn’t matter; Glenn has lost any semblance of control over the room. The class is cracking up, not because they find us funny—we the F&N unit operate on a higher comic level than our peers can appreciate—but because it’s fun to watch a teacher get bullied and they appreciate us for fulfilling this necessary role in the Idlewild ecosystem.
As Glenn tries and fails to restore order, Daylily casts a grateful glance our way. We return to our scribble meeting.
F: Never mind, she’s totally gay for us
N: She’ll be eating our collective box by the end of the day
We are joking. Even if Daylily were gay, she would never go for either of us, because we are, on principle, absolutely disgusting. We have matching short haircuts, unbrushed. We shorten our fingernails by chewing them and leaving little Hansel-and-Gretel nail trails behind us. We cut the sleeves off all our T-shirts to let our armpits breathe, and we grow our armpit hair thick and fluffy so we can absentmindedly stroke it like a pet during class. Our classmates may be grossed out, but the joke is on all of them, because we have freed up our precious minds to contemplate important gay shit, like whether or not Daylily Jones is gay for the day. The question is still unresolved when the bell rings.
As luck would have it, she’s in our next class: Freud, Jung, and the Uses of Enchantment, one of the senior English electives. We the F&N unit signed up for it because the teacher told us that our ongoing quest for homoerotic subtext would be not only welcome but encouraged.
Once again we find a seat beside Daylily, who resumes shaking with photogenic sobs. Now would be a great time for us to think of something consoling to say.
F: “At least it’s a beautiful day, right?”
N: “Just like last year. Only windier.”
F: “Good thing it wasn’t this windy then, right?”
N: “Oh, shit, good call. Imagine all the …”
Together we ripple our fingers to convey ashes blowing through the air. Daylily continues to weep at her desk. The uncharitable thought is beginning to enter our shared mind that she is perhaps overdoing it just a little.
F: “Don’t you think the skyline looks better without the …?”
N: “Totally! They were an eyesore.”
F: “It’s a shame it had to happen this way, but …”
N: “Gotta look on the bright side.”
Enter Juniper Green. Her real name is Jennifer, but we the F&N unit refer to her as Juniper so we can complain about her while she’s in earshot. We do hate Juniper Green, uncomplicatedly. She’s loud and obnoxious in a way that only extremely petite girls can get away with. A fat girl with her personality would get her ass kicked, even at a Quaker school.
Juniper’s defining personality trait is that she’s a slut, or at least she wants you to think so. Her AIM screen name is Strumpet19, because (as she explains to everyone, unbidden) nineteen was the number of guys with whom she’d hooked up at the time of her AIM account’s creation—although (she always adds) if she were to create it today, she’d be Strumpet[19 + x, with x being the updated number of people up-with-whom she claims to have hooked since then]. Last year, as we stood backstage waiting for the curtain to go up for Midsummer, Juniper asked us, “Any guys in the cast you want to hook up with? I can make it happen at the cast party. I know all the tricks. Pick a guy, any guy.”
We the F&N unit were forced to issue a clarification.
F: “We don’t go to parties.”
N: “Plus, Fay’s into gay guys only.”
F: “And Nell is a lesbian.”
In response to which Juniper was speechless for a record-shattering few seconds before exclaiming, “I hooked up with a girl once!” and launching into a tedious anecdote involving a summer program at Skidmore. She recounted it at a volume that swiftly attracted the attention of every guy in the play. At the cast party, she made out with all of them. Or so she claims.
Now we watch in distaste as Juniper Green flings herself upon Day-lily Jones and smothers her with cheek kisses, hair strokes, and repeated murmurs of “Sweetie! Sweetie!”
“I don’t think today should be a normal school day,” Daylily says again.
“I know,” says Juniper, petting her like a dog. “I know. Let it all out, girl.”
Daylily, melting into the embrace, allows herself to sob into Juniper’s (surprisingly ample) bosom.
F, sotto voce to N: “Gross.”
N, sotto voce in return: “Get a room, lesbos.”
Enter our English teacher, Devi Saxena. Her punk aesthetic—kohl-rimmed eyes, pierced septum, curly black hair dyed magenta on only one side—belies her true nature, which is so gentle and conflict-averse that we the F&N unit call her Devi the Dove. Of all the teachers at Idlewild, Devi the Dove is the biggest pushover. She opens today’s class not by urging us to settle down, nor by telling Juniper to get off Daylily’s lap, nor even with any reference to last night’s reading (Act II of Oedipus Rex and a selection from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams)—but instead by asking, “How are you all feeling today? Be honest with me: are you okay with us having a normal school day?”
Daylily sniffles. Juniper seizes Daylily’s hand and raises it into the air with her own.
“Devi,” says Juniper. “Lily and I are not okay. May we be excused?”
“Of course,” says Devi, pinking with pleasure at this public display of vulnerability, and possibly also at the grammatically correct “Lily and I” construction. “I really appreciate your honesty. Anyone else?”
A few others rise and scatter, hardly believing their luck, but we the F&N unit can’t bring ourselves to do it. We don’t need any favors today. We’re tough enough to spend forty-five minutes half-listening to Devi the Dove talk about dream symbolism.
At least this is our initial stance. But halfway through class, N scribbles to F:
Bathroom meeting—NOW
Devi the Dove is the kind of teacher who allows unlimited bathroom breaks (we have actually heard her utter the words “When you gotta go, you gotta go!”). She does not protest when we the F&N unit get up and walk out together.
In the bathroom:
N: “You know where Juniper and Daylily went, right?”
F: “To smoke in the park, probably.”
N: “No! To the Witch’s office.”
Wanda the Witch (we mean the epithet as a compliment, though we’d never say it to her face) is the drama teacher. Juniper and Daylily are Wanda’s favorite students, making her their favorite teacher. These things do tend to go both ways, especially when said teacher has reliably cast said students as the female leads in every play since the eighth grade.
N: “You’re the Witch, okay? Daylily and Juniper show up in your office all sad and crying. What’s the one surefire way to cheer them up?”
F: “… Fuck.”
It’s so obvious: those assholes have pulled a fast one and now they’re off getting advance intel on what the fall play is going to be. The fall play of our senior year—the play in which we’re all but guaranteed the best roles of our high school acting careers.
F: “Those meretricious little fuckers.”
N: “We can still catch them.”
So we end up cutting English after all, without even returning to the classroom to retrieve our backpacks—there will be plenty of time later to worry about our notebooks and wallets and shared Discman and peanut butter sandwich. For now, we run. We run down four flights of stairs, leaping over the last two steps at each landing; we run outside across the noonday-bright Peace Garden to the gray-painted side door of the Meetinghouse; we body-slam it open and run through the empty Meetinghouse and up the creaky wood back stairs to the Meetinghouse Loft, where Wanda keeps her office and all her secrets.
Halfway up the creaky wood stairs we intercept Daylily and Juniper, accompanied by Bottom, on their way down. The three of them are beaming. They know exactly why we’re here. Before we can ask, they cry out to us in chorus.
“Othello!”
We the F&N unit repeat: “Othello?”
They confirm: “Othello!”
And the five of us jump and scream. What a day to be alive!