It’s the last day of school before winter break. No one ever falls asleep during Silence, but on this Friday morning it’s a struggle to stay awake. The cloudlight that shines through the bubbled-up window glass is a pale trace of warmth, the way the melted sugar-ice puddle at the bottom of a Frappuccino is a pale trace of coffee. The Meetinghouse is a gray cocoon and the Silence is a gray cocoon inside it.
A rustling of a coat, a creak and groan of wood as someone’s weight shifts on the floor—someone is rising.
Well, this is something. It’s been quite a while since anyone spoke during Silence. We the F&N unit haven’t gotten to play Guess Who’s Gay in weeks. Who will do us the honor of being gay for the day?
“I’ll never forget my first Meeting for Worship,” says Theo Severyn.
We the F&N unit jolt to attention. Guess who’s gay, indeed.
“As many of you know,” he continues, “I’m kind of new here.” He speaks at a thoughtful, relaxed pace. His voice carries well through the Meetinghouse. “When I started ninth grade last year, I was at Stuyvesant. But then …”
At this, the air in the Meetinghouse goes brisk and alpine with collective unease. Is he really going to talk about …?
“… I had to spend a month here,” he says (and the air warms with exhaled relief—he’s talking around it). “I’d never heard of Idlewild. I’d never even heard of Quakers. I thought you’d all be dressed like the guy on the oatmeal box.”
Jokes are rare in Meeting for Worship. This one gets a small, surprised laugh from the crowd.
“And to be honest,” he says, “I did think you guys were pretty weird at first. I mean, you called your teachers by their first names!”
This gets a bigger laugh.
“And Meeting for Worship. The Stuyvesant kids didn’t go to Meeting while we were here,” he says, “thanks to the whole public-school separation-of-church-and-state thing. But when I first heard about it, I thought it sounded insane. The whole school just sitting in silence? For twenty minutes? Like some kind of cult?”
Even we the F&N unit are laughing along now. He’s really working the crowd.
“But at the same time,” he says, “I was curious. I thought the Meetinghouse was so beautiful. Every time I passed it from the outside, I thought it looked like a dollhouse.”
We the F&N unit go suddenly still.
“And whenever I passed by during Meeting for Worship, I imagined the Meetinghouse as a big fancy dollhouse full of dolls.” He pauses. “Except the dolls were real people.”
Is he trying to communicate something to us, the F&N unit? We try to catch his eye from across the Meetinghouse, but he’s looking off thoughtfully into the distance.
“So one day,” he says, “on a Friday morning, I cut my physics class and sneaked into Meeting for Worship. Just to see what it was all about, you know? I sat next to some random kid on a random bench in the ninth-grade section. Which turned out to be a fateful decision.”
Glancing down at the kid seated next to him on the bench now—Christopher—Theo breaks into a quick half smile. Christopher squirms and casts his eyes downward. All this happens in a blink, but we the F&N unit catch it.
“And then Silence started,” says Theo, “and … I felt like I was home. Like I belonged. I’d never felt that way at Stuyvesant. Actually, I’d never felt that way anywhere.” He looks at Christopher again, takes a deep breath. “By the time those twenty minutes were up, I’d fall—” Fallen in love, he seems to be about to say, but he falters mid-word and starts over. “I knew I wanted to transfer to Idlewild.”
We the F&N unit can barely hear him over the pounding of our hearts. Is Guess Who’s Gay about to come true, for the first time ever?
“And now that I’ve finished my first semester here,” he says, “I know I made the right choice. I love it here. I love calling my teachers by their first names. I love that they’re not just our teachers, but our friends.” He’s talking faster now, getting animated. “And I still think the Meetinghouse is beautiful. Every morning, when I come in here—and every afternoon during play rehearsal, and at night when I was performing in the play—every time I come into the Meetinghouse, I still feel like I’m walking into an enchanted dollhouse. Like …” He shrugs, suddenly bashful. “Like anything can happen in here.”
He sits. Silence re-envelops us.
We the F&N unit wilt at this puzzling anticlimax. Theo did not, after all that, use Meeting for Worship to come out of the closet. Did he intend to, and then lose his nerve? Or did he wish simply to wax sentimental about Idlewild? But waxing sentimental isn’t Theo’s style at all.
Before we can think about it for long, another rustle and creak breaks the Silence. This would be extraordinary in itself—but it originates from the freshman benches. People don’t even bother to hide their head-swivels of amazement. Freshmen never speak during Silence.
It’s Maddy, she of the Rollerblades. In a small but determined voice, she says, “I love it here too. I love Quaker values—like how everyone is equal, and no one is above anyone else. And for me, being in the play was when I really got what Quakers mean about everyone having an Inner Light. And I think …” She hesitates anxiously, then blurts in a burst of nerve, “I think it’s really disappointing when Idlewild doesn’t live up to its Quaker values.”
She sits. The silence, when it resumes, is confused and somewhat tense. But it’s soon disrupted by a third rustle and creak, once again from the freshman benches.
It’s almost unheard of for three people to speak during one Silent Meeting, let alone three underclassmen, and the collective surprise is palpable when the speaker turns out to be little Kendra Kwok. Her voice is so soft the Meetinghouse might swallow it entirely, if all Idlewild ears weren’t straining to catch her words.
“Being in the play,” she says, “was the most important thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole life. It made me … brave.”
She stands there a moment longer, as if she means to say something else, but then sits back down.
Silence barely has time to descend again before it’s broken by another rustle and creak—this time in the senior benches, right next to us, the F&N unit.
“Theo is right,” says Daylily Jones. “Idlewild teachers aren’t just your teachers. They’re your friends. And the best teacher-friend I’ve ever had … was Wanda Higgins.”
She pauses for so long that people begin to fidget, wondering if she’s done, but she’s still standing. When she speaks again, her voice is choked with tears.
“I’ll always be grateful to her for encouraging me to spread my wings,” says Daylily. “And …” She sniffs, and her next words come out in a sob. “I miss her.”
She collapses back onto the bench.
All eyes, with varying degrees of subtlety, turn toward Skip and Trudy, who keep their heads bowed and their eyes spiritually shut.
Daylily’s lingering sniffles are soon interrupted by another nearby rustle and creak.
“I miss Wanda too.” Juniper Green’s public speaking voice is unpleasantly loud, especially from two feet away. “And furthermore, I think it was totally unfair how she was treated by the administration. She was a member of the Idlewild community. Whatever happened to second chances? Whatever happened to Quaker values?”
She sits, huffily.
She’s barely seated again when a rare Quaker standoff occurs: two people stand at once, Christopher Korkian and Oliver Dicks. The whole Meetinghouse titters sacrilegiously as the two of them do a little dance of deciding who should speak first, half-sitting and standing and half-sitting and standing until it is wordlessly determined that Oliver Dicks is the loser.
“I was in Wanda’s freshman Drama class last year,” says Christopher. “She taught us that the number one rule of acting is to always accept the offer.” He pronounces that phrase with a slight British accent in imitation of Wanda’s. The Meetinghouse laughs again. Encouraged, he repeats it. “Accept the offer. I’ll always remember that. I stand with Wanda.”
He sits. The thwarted Oliver Dicks pops up like a blond whack-a-mole.
“I used to think Shakespeare was boring,” he says. Sheepishly, he addresses the English teachers: “No offense, Devi and Ms. Caputo. I know you’re big fans.” He pauses expectantly. No one laughs. “But then,” he says, undaunted, “I took ninth grade Drama, and Wanda taught me so much about the Bard. Did you know that he uses iambic pentameter for aristocratic characters, and prose for low-class characters?” (Yes, Oliver, everyone knows that, because everyone has to take ninth grade Drama.) “Well,” he says smugly, “even my parents didn’t know that. So now, thanks to Wanda, I know more about Shakespeare than my parents.” Again he pauses for laughter. Again none comes. “I stand with Wanda,” he says pompously, and sits.
By this point people are glancing at the big clock on the wall. It’s about 9:18. Meeting is supposed to adjourn at 9:20.
Kevin Comfort, an affable stoner in the senior class, stands. “One time,” he says, “my grandpa went into hospice, and in Drama I did an improv scene about a kid whose grandpa went into hospice, and it was mad healing. I stand with Wanda.”
He sits. An unfamiliar freshman girl stands.
“I didn’t do the play, and I never had Wanda as a teacher because I’m not scheduled to take Drama until next quarter, but I love drama. Like, as a concept. It’s the most important art form. So, I stand with Wanda.”
She sits. Someone else stands.