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FEBRUARY 8

It seems pretty stupid that applicants have to keep a diary that no one is going to read. I hope this one won’t get held against me in a court of law aimed at prosecuting scholarship fraud cases. What the hell. I’ll tell the truth, get things off my chest, and then I’ll burn this.

When I saw that the scholarship to get into Green Pastures was for the fashion program, I wanted to kick someone. I’d hoped it was going to be metal arts this year. Drawing. Carving. ANYTHING ELSE, FFS.

But the scholarship was for fashion, which meant no art school for me.

I got the good news from the girl who sits next to me in the class our teacher calls “Career Trajectories,” which is known by those of us learning to lower our expectations as “Career Tragedies.” The girl left the scholarship brochure on her desk while she went to the can, probably to tend to her weird makeup or to fix that lumpy-ass hairstyle she wears. I looked at it because I was tired of listening to Ms. Donner drone on about how a job in the oil fields or natural gas or the logging industry or mining was the only responsible choice for a “certain kind of student.” Meaning poor and working-class students. Meaning academically average or ungifted students. Meaning me.

Ms. Donner obviously never watched Dead Poets Society or To Sir, with Love or any of those other movies about inspiring students to do and be more. She didn’t say so directly, but Ms. Donner thought the smart thing for us was to check all hopes and dreams at the door. Put that shit away so it wouldn’t interfere with being a cog in the economic machine.

Her message of practicality had not gotten through to the girl who sat next to me. Only a mime or a pro unicycle rider could have been less practical than that girl. She dressed up every day like she was going to a costume party where the goal was to look forty years older than you actually are. She was probably ecstatic that the scholarship for Green Pastures this year was for fashion, since she seemed like exactly the kind of person who would want to be in fashion design. Exactly the kind of person who would want to work in the most corrupt, bullshit so-called creative industry there is, an industry entirely aimed at making people crave more than they need and feel bad about how they look.

I read the details. They made me want to set the piece of paper on fire. Or shred it up and put it on the bottom of a rabbit cage.

Granted, it doesn’t take much to set me off. My grand-parents have this embittered little schnauzer–Jack Russell dog called Bites who is truly the most miserable of animals. After he bit the meter reader, animal control made my Gran take him to something called Reactivity class. I joined them out of interest. The dogs in that class lost their mind at the slightest thing: other dogs, noises, movement, air currents. Dogs barked, snarled, and hurled themselves against the gates of their kennels and their leashes. Bites was the calmest one. He even seemed a little afraid, which isn’t like him. I think the class might have scared him temporarily obedient. The thing is that I understood those dogs and had a lot of sympathy for their position. I’d be better off in Reactivity class than high school. John Thomas-Smith, Reactive. If I ever get business cards, I’m getting that printed on them.

But back to the scholarship, Green Pastures, and fashion.

Green Pastures has been my main reactivity trigger ever since I was in ninth grade and our art teacher took us there on a field trip. A field trip! Like we were going overseas!

I clearly remember getting off our crappy yellow school bus and standing in the Green Pastures parking lot. We probably looked like inmates on a work detail.

In keeping with its overwhelming and oppressive specialness, the campus was luxe. The architecture, the interior design, the landscaping, and the furnishings: every detail was designed to nurture creative young people. But only rich ones.

We spent the whole day there. We got to sit in on an oil painting class. We watched a graphic arts lesson. Tried our hand at sculpting and saw the pottery studio. We walked the wide, bright hallways, passed a living wall made of plants for “enhanced air quality” (!), looked into the “dedicated carving shed” (!!), and ate our bag lunches in a huge glass atrium surrounded by semiprivate pod work spaces for seniors (I can’t even count how many exclamation points that needs). We walked around a goddamned “atelier” used by the fashion design students. It had a brick feature wall, vintage furniture, fitting rooms, a big dressing room, dedicated classrooms, and a runway. A runway.

The school had a room for students who wanted to learn “small-animal taxidermy.” Meanwhile, at our piece of crap school, a mere fifteen-minute drive away, we took half our classes in portable trailers, and there was talk of canceling gym because of the high price of balls.

My girlfriend, Barbra, was on the tour, too. She could tell I was rancid with resentment from the first minute we set foot on the campus. She kept putting a hand on my arm. Not telling me what to do or how to feel but reminding me that I exist, if that makes any sense. There was something about Green Pastures that made me feel invisible and angry. Barbra understood that.

She started making pointed little remarks at each new ultra-excellent detail. When we were shown the dark room she said, “We had one just like it when we were children. This really brings me back.” When we saw some kids editing their films in the film suite, she said, “They’ve really got them packed into that teeny little space. Poor things.”

In addition to siphoning off some of my feelings in a way that wouldn’t get me thrown off the tour, she also stopped me from getting charged with assault.

“John,” she warned, when we saw a kid sauntering down the hallway in a white suit, like he thought he was Tom Wolfe. (For anyone who doesn’t know, Wolfe is this writer who is known for dressing in white suits. We were assigned something by him in English. The story made no impression on me whatsoever, but our teacher, who told us on the first day that his undergraduate degree is actually in business, couldn’t stop talking about Wolfe’s white suits and how they were such a genius way for the guy to brand himself.) Anyway the kid, who had this little mustache, jaunted by us whistling, and it took every bit of dog anti-reactivity training I had and Barbra’s good influence to keep me from tripping him, hip-checking him, or otherwise interfering with his excessive well-being.

Back on the bus to go home everyone was quiet. Even our teacher seemed shaken by what we’d just seen. There was no debrief, just a lot of sighing except for one guy who kept talking about how “sweet” it would be to go to Green Pastures.

“You got a winning lotto ticket?” asked Gus Joseph, who is good at drawing cars but not known for his attitude.

“The good news is they offer scholarships,” said Mr. Fairfax. I admit that the old sphincter of hope tightened up at those words.

Dare I hope?

Mr. Fairfax checked his phone, then muttered “damn.”

“I’m sorry, guys. The deadline for the general merit scholarships was last Friday.”

He stared at the screen for a few more minutes.

“But it says here that they hold an Emerging Talent scholarship competition each year for students in grades ten through twelve. You missed it for this year, but you guys could apply for that next year.”

We took that tour in February. By the following September, thanks to government cutbacks and a general societal disinterest in lower-income kids, our school no longer had any art or music classes. Our main creative outlet was carving swear words into our desks and, in the most troubled cases, into our arms. A few weeks ago I saw Mr. Fairfax working at Starbucks.

As for the mythical scholarship to Green Pastures, which Mr. Fairfax had breathlessly referred to as “the Sorbonne of Vancouver Island,” the following year the Emerging Talent competition was in ceramics. That was a no-go for me. I nurtured my resentment at the unfairness of life, made angry metal art, drew my angry pictures, and was bitter. It might not have been the most productive approach to life, but it was honest, at least.

If the Green Pastures tour sparked smoldering class resentment in me, my job at the Salad Stop turned it into a blaze.

The Salad Stop is located between the Waterfront Pub and the Ocean Breeze Liquor Depot on Hammond Bay Road, not far from Green Pastures. Maybe Steve, the franchisee, who spends most of his time at his other businesses (a CrossFit gym and a weightlifter’s “supplement” store), located it there so that drinkers could replenish the vitamins they lost during their boozing.

We serve salads to the ladies whose sole job seems to be doing hot yoga twice a day. They come in between classes to grab a small organic greens or, when they’re feeling ready to risk a pot belly the size of an acorn, a half serving of ancient grain salad.

The serious boozers who move between the pub and the liquor store weave past our front window like fronds of kelp swaying on the incoming tide. They don’t bother with salads, which I appreciate.

Then there’s the youngest part of our customer base: the spoiled shitheads—sorry; reactive—from goddamned Green Pastures. They come in wearing their duck-hunting hats and goddamned mime outfits, carrying tin lunch boxes or those little round plastic buckets construction workers carry on their belts, the ones meant for nails and whatnot. The art kids keep them filled with chalk or paintbrushes or pens or feathers. They are hard to take, but the worst of the worst are the ones in the fashion program.

They’re instantly recognizable. They wear all black and have severe blond or severe black hair, severe bangs, or hair pulled severely away from the face. Smiles strictly forbidden! Red lipstick on both males and females. They vary in size from fat to thin, but they’re all super controlling about what they eat.

Samples of questions I have been asked by Green Pastures fashion students:

“Where do the greens come from? Are they local? How local? Like, do you have mileage you could share with me?”

“Did Chuck Wiggins in Parksville grow these? I’m partial to his produce.”

“Are the walnuts on the apple salad non-GMO? What about the apples? And the oil? What can you tell me about the oil?”

“Is this container biodegradable?”

“Did you wash your hands before touching the lettuce? I sort of have this thing about hepatitis. Not saying you have it or anything. I just like to be safe.”

Oh yeah. I’ve been asked these questions and more by the Green Pastures fashion students, who seem to be in training to be pains in the ass for the retail sector, which is probably going to be me and my kind if I don’t get a trade after I graduate. If I graduate.

So I wasn’t surprised that the girl who sat beside me in Career Prep felt she was Green Pastures material. She’s intensely precious, patently fake, and basically unbearable, all red-lipped, be-suited ridiculousness. She doodles her way through every single class, same as me, but she does it in an annoying way that causes me to have harsh reactivity.

On the scholarship pamphlet I’d pulled over to read, the girl had written several depressing things in the margins, such as “Me!” and “Destiny calls!” and “Charlie Dean Designs!!TM ®” There were a lot of exclamation points and sketches of dresses and shoes and patterns.

When she sat back down, I tapped my finger on the brochure.

“So you’re ditching this dump and going to Spoiled Brat Academy?”

“I hope so,” she said. “They have an amazing fashion program. Going to a school like that would be a life-altering experience.” Even though she’d only been out of the bathroom for sixty seconds, she whipped out this little compact and checked her lipstick, presumably to make sure it was still murder red.

She was right, though. Much as I hate to admit it, people who go to schools like Green Pastures have different lives. Better lives.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “I’ve always been real interested in fashion.”

She looked over at me, and her smooth, milk-white brow nearly furrowed.

“Really?” she said in a careful voice.

“I mean, what’s not to love? The glamor, the models, the money. That sort of shit.”

She looked down at the piece of paper, probably debating whether to get up and go to another seat.

“Is that contest open to anyone?”

Her mouth dropped open half an inch, but she didn’t answer.

“Because of how much I like fashion I might enter. Throw a few of my outfits in there for consideration. I might be the next . . .” For a second, I couldn’t think of a designer. “Hasbro,” I said, thinking that was probably the name of some designer.

“Do you mean Halston?” she asked.

“Him too,” I said. “Halston and Hasbro. Jules and Verne. I love all those guys. Their outfits are just, like, glorious to me.”

“You sew?”

“Are you kidding? All day, all night, as they say in the song.”

“What?” she said, getting a little testy now. “I mean, what do you sew?”

The girl was the awkward type. Hardly ever spoke. Just sat looking like she’d break into five sharp pieces if she fell over. But I had her blood up now. My specialty.

“You mean besides the seeds of destruction? Little of this, little of that.”

She smoothed her skirt, which looked like it used to belong to Queen Elizabeth. Wool. Pleats. Granny shoes. The whole bit.

“You should enter,” she said. “I’d like to see what you come up with. Maybe it will be as good as something by Jules and Verne.”

The “loser” at the end of the sentence was unspoken, but I heard it loud and clear. And didn’t care.

“Mind if I copy down the website address? I don’t want to miss the deadline. When is it? Next Friday?”

Wordlessly and maybe a bit reluctantly, she pushed the pamphlet to me. When I’d written down the address, she took it back, folded it neatly, and put it in a leather case the size and shape of a Buick’s fender.

“I really, really love fashion,” I said to her profile. “It’s so important and meaningful. I just hope you don’t mind some competition—what did you say your name was?”

“Charlie Dean,” she said. “And I welcome competition.”