Honey Pot
Wendy was a Chinese student attending a large state university in Texas. She was sharp, pretty, and sociable, and had many friends, Chinese and American. In her junior year, she decided to live with an American friend, Karen, whom she had met in her apartment complex; they shared a small apartment, not too far from the university. Before they moved in together, they had become friends, talking about boys they had crushes on. Wendy had a crush on a guy named Peter, a Chinese graduate student, who lived in an apartment complex nearby. Karen had a crush on a guy named Brad, a handsome but irresponsible undergraduate.
Unfortunately, soon after they moved in together, Brad and Karen went out together for a short time, and then Brad dumped her unceremoniously. He ignored her texts. He treated her poorly when they met. He made it clear it wasn’t going to work. Karen was heartbroken, and spent almost a month in bed, it seemed to Wendy. She stayed home, ate too much, and watched a lot of television in her room. She was still friendly to Wendy, but she was clearly depressed. Wendy worried about her.
Meanwhile, Wendy wasn’t having much luck with Peter, either. Peter was a researcher in social media, and his project involved what was called “honey pots,” social media accounts which attracted spammers and people who were using social media for illicit purposes. Wendy wanted to learn more about what Peter did and what he studied, as she used social media and was interested in it. But Peter and the people he worked with were very busy, and hard to get to know. She became more involved in the Chinese Student Association, hoping that he would attend, or that she would meet more people that knew him. Apparently, from what she heard, he did have a friend, Ming, who lived in his apartment complex, and who would often make him dumplings, but it was unclear to Wendy whether Ming was a girlfriend, or just a friend. Most of the people she met considered them just friends, but it was hard to tell with this kind of relationship, and she didn’t necessarily trust other people’s judgment. She seethed inside with jealousy. She wanted to be the one who made dumplings for Peter. She wanted to attract his attention, and she set about to do what she could to get in his path, so he would notice her.
Wendy would often think about Peter and his situation, and Karen and hers, while she was out picking up pecans. One thing her Chinese friends had found out was that there were lots of delicious pecans that fell from trees in the neighborhood where they lived, and people in Texas didn’t care about them; if you asked, they would often let you pick as many as you wanted. And pecans had become extremely valuable in China. When they had a friend going back to China, they could put a couple of pounds of pecans in their luggage, and it would be considered a valuable treat back in China. Wendy and several friends happily sought them out and picked them in their free time, and then shelled them, although you could get them shelled very cheaply. This had come to occupy parts of Wendy’s weekends.
About a month after Brad had broken up with Karen, Karen brought a woman named Lee over to the house. Wendy was pretty sure Lee was a woman, but not positive, because she dressed in a very male-like way and acted male. Wendy found herself doubting; she doubted her own knowledge of American males and females, of cultural conventions, of the sounds of voices. But Wendy, actually, had been in the states for several years, was pretty aware of this kind of thing, and still, upon watching Lee, got many mixed messages. Lee was male in many ways, and female in many others. And that was true both physically, emotionally, in every way, it seemed. She was stocky, and had a calm voice. Her hair was short on the sides with a kind of wild top. She had a calm voice that could be either male or female. Her eyes were always calm, with a great amount of control.
They sat down and talked for a while at the kitchen table; Wendy studied Lee a little. Lee was very calm and collected; if she had great desire for Karen, she didn’t show it. Lee was the one who first presented the concept of “genderqueer” to Wendy. This was the rejection of the idea that everyone was either strongly male, or strongly female; one could be in between, or could fluctuate. Lee told about this calmly, unemotionally. Karen was clearly very interested in the idea. To Wendy, it seemed possible, but probably wasn’t true for her. She had always felt like a woman, and still did.
It was not clear to Wendy whether Karen and Lee were having an affair; if they were, they kept it hidden from Wendy. Lee came over a lot, but usually in the day, or on weekends, and Lee and Karen went out together. They were clearly close, and Lee was introducing Karen to a whole new crowd of people. They had friends who were transgender; they’d changed, from male to female, or the other way; they had many friends who were gay, and everyone who hung around with this crowd knew that and was comfortable with it. Karen herself talked more and more like Lee; she made herself look male, or at least ambisexual, and she gave away a number of girlish things, like necklaces and earrings, many of them to Wendy. Wendy and Karen were still good friends. Wendy asked Karen about what was happening one night, and they talked for quite a while.
Karen said she felt it was unfair that society forced you into being entirely male or entirely female, when in fact the reality for many people, herself included, was much fuzzier. She didn’t feel entirely male or entirely female; she felt in between, some days one, other days the other, and a kind of in-between identity was actually what she was most comfortable with. The good thing, she said, about her new friends, was that they were accepting of this. She described gays and transsexuals who felt strongly about their sexual orientation, and weren’t ambivalent at all, as she was, but at least they could relate to the feeling of society pushing something on them that they weren’t. All of her new friends, tired of being misjudged by society, at least had that in common.
After her talk with Karen, Wendy had a long Skype chat with her mother, in which she told her mother the basic details of what was Karen had told her. Her mother was actually very supportive of both Karen and Wendy, and not especially critical, either of Karen’s choice of friends, or of Wendy’s. She said that you should remember that everyone has problems; no one is as happy as they seem. In fact, she said, her own problem was that she had lost any sexual desire at all, and it wasn’t really Wendy’s father’s fault; he was as nice and as charming as he’d always been. She just had reached a point where she just didn’t have any sexual desire. She told this to Wendy matter-of-factly, as if it could happen to anyone.
This totally confounded Wendy, and she lost a night of sleep after that conversation. It was partly that she had never considered her parents as sexual beings in the first place, much less people who could change, or have doubts about their identity, or not be what they’d always been to her. She was very unsettled, and felt a little unsure about what to do now.
Her feelings for Peter, however, were as strong as ever. She still had a huge crush on him. She still felt totally sure she was a woman, and she still felt he was the man she really wanted to meet and get to know, and she continued trying to do that.
Finally, one night, she got her chance. The Chinese Student Association was having a party and almost everyone she knew was there. Peter was there, and Wendy was pretty sure that Ming was there as well, though she wasn’t sure she’d know Ming if she saw her. The woman Wendy identified as Ming acted like a friend of Peter’s, but perhaps not a girlfriend; it was hard to tell. Wendy proceeded with caution, knowing she was being watched. But she couldn’t resist starting up a conversation with Peter, and getting him to talk about his research.
This was when she heard about the honey pot. Peter claimed that the object of his study was to use social media sites to find people who were preying on normal social media users, and study them - study their methods. He called them “content polluters” and occasionally referred to the different kinds: spammers, malware distributors, etc. His specialty, he said, as she watched him carefully, was harvesting and identifying these content polluters, in spite of what he called “strategic polluter obfuscation.” This, he explained, was their deliberate attempt to appear to be like real people, or real friends, or genuinely social beings.
As Peter talked, Wendy admired him. To her, he was a kind of god, so handsome, so smart, so successful in his research. All she could think of was how to find a way to get him to be hers. Suddenly, as they sat there, she had an idea. She was holding a pecan candy that one of her friends had made from the pecans they had picked. She held it up to him and claimed, right there, that she made delicious pecan candies herself, and if he ever wanted some, she’d be glad to bring him some.
He was a little taken aback, as he’d been involved in explaining his project, and it was hard for him to switch gears. He liked the idea that anyone would be willing to make candy for him, but unfortunately, he didn’t do what she wanted: give her an invitation, or provide an address, or even a phone number or way to get in touch with him. She was still a little traditional about that; she didn’t want to blurt out her own phone number, or social media account, as she considered that a little too forward. Their conversation moved on, and eventually he went off to talk to another friend, who was in his graduate department. She was frustrated. Perhaps she’d made her offer too early, or hadn’t provided the right incentive. To her, pecan candies were delicious. How could anyone refuse?
Wendy was further frustrated, not having his phone number, or an open invitation to just bring him some pecan treats. But she had been serious about making them, and within a week had found a good recipe, bought the ingredients, and made some acceptable pecan candies. She had a little container of them ready for him. Finally she couldn’t resist, and found his Twitter account. She had known about it all along, but simply hadn’t used it; now, she wrote him a quick message saying she had something for him if he wanted it. The message said, “have those treats I told u about - let me know when u want some.” She put his name in the tweet and very little else. She thought it was pretty straightforward – using “u” instead of “you,” but otherwise just a normal message. Later, she would go back and look at the message to see what was wrong with it: perhaps he didn’t like the use of “u”? At the time that she wrote it, though, it seemed like it was just a normal message. She flung it off and tried to go back to her studies.
That night, Karen came home in tears, and Wendy had another long talk with her. It was not clear to Wendy whether Lee was a love interest or not, to Karen, but in any case, she didn’t want to talk about Lee. The group she had been hanging around with was doing very crazy things: having wild parties, going to various bars, doing self-destructive drugs. Karen could see this clearly enough and was trying to get some distance; she had done a bit of this recently herself, but tonight, she’d had enough, and had come home instead.
Wendy studied Karen a little as she talked. Wendy considered Karen pretty, and could see, from talking to her, a sense of stress and self-doubt. Wendy thought she was still upset about Brad. But Karen got mad when she suggested that; she said that was suggesting that all pain had to come from men. She was still determined to have a life that was more free of gender expectations and traditional relationships. In the course of the evening, Wendy heard many new words: besides genderqueer, there were cisgender, gender fluid, pansexual, trans, and a few others. When she heard them she had to ask Karen what they meant, and Karen would have to patiently explain. Wendy was sure that there were people of all genders in China, though she hadn’t known about them, or imagined there were so many names for them. Together they talked for several hours; they made a pot of tea, and she ate several homemade pecan candies listening to Karen talk about her life.
One of Karen’s points, which Wendy found very interesting, was that because society often shunned LGBTQ+ people (Karen made a point of adding the plus), they often went down various rebellious, self-destructive paths, sheerly because of self-loathing, and this was far more destructive than simply experimenting sexually, or being unsure of what one really wanted, which was what Karen seemed to be going through. She said, and she’d said this more than once, that if society let people do what they wanted, and define themselves the way they wanted, everyone would be a whole lot happier. Wendy couldn’t help but think of “society” as Chinese society, with its rigid sex roles; to her, the U.S. already seemed somewhat easygoing in comparison. In other words, Wendy wondered, who exactly was forcing any sex role on Karen? In a college town, almost nobody, it seemed. But Wendy wasn’t a huge consumer of American media, and didn’t expect to fit into American society when she graduated; she was an outsider. She didn’t challenge Karen’s assertion. She was a good listener, and simply listened to Karen’s story of becoming disillusioned with her crowd.
During this time Wendy was almost completely absorbed in her social media accounts, looking for some sign that Peter had replied, but there was nothing. No reply on Twitter; no effort to friend her on Facebook. Nothing. She was crushed. She felt like sending another message, but didn’t. She had already gone too far, she thought. Peter was on her mind a lot. But she had heard nothing from him at all, and it was beginning to irritate her.
About a week later Karen disappeared altogether; she moved out, leaving much of her belongings, but clearly taking what was most valuable to her. She left a note to Wendy promising to pay the rent for the rest of the lease. She was dropping out of school, she said, and going home. Wendy found this hard to believe, but had little choice but to carry on without her, hoping she’d pay the rent. After about a week, she started using Karen’s room for storing pecans.
After about ten days, Lee came over, angry, and demanded to see Karen. Wendy had never seen Lee angry; it had always seemed to her that Lee had been calm and unemotional. Wendy wouldn’t let her in the door; whatever Lee wanted, she’d have to go through Karen, and Karen was gone, she said. They stood at the doorway, neither moving. What surprised Wendy about this encounter was seeing Lee in a completely emotional condition, when, having known her for weeks, she had never seen her express any strong emotion, love, hate, passion, or anything. It was another side of her. And now, it was clear that Lee definitely had strong feelings for Karen. She wanted to see her; she demanded it, now; she wanted an address; she wanted to see her things. Wendy wouldn’t budge. If you give me a phone number, she said, I’ll tell her, and perhaps she’ll call you.
Things were tense, but finally Lee left, and Wendy locked the door. There were pecans all over the house; Wendy and her friends had been using the front room and Karen’s bedroom to store them. From then on, she kept the door locked and kept her eye out for suspicious activity. What few things Karen had left in the apartment, she guarded; she felt like protecting Karen from Lee and from that kind of encounter. When Karen called, she told her of Lee coming over, but Karen didn’t want her number, and said she wouldn’t call it anyway. Eventually Karen came back, with a truck, and picked up the last of her belongings. Wendy studied her, grateful that they were still friends, and gave her some pecan candies.
It was a bad semester for Wendy, not because of her grades so much, but because she never did hear from Peter, and the whole obsession with him seemed to cloud the entire semester. She had felt sorry for Karen, who lost a whole semester as well, and who may not ever come back to the university, as upset as she was. When she called her mother, her mother helped her put it in perspective. Get another roommate, her mother said. Stop fixating on older graduate students who are probably taken, she added. Her mother was interested in the pecan candies, though, and asked Wendy to bring some home, the next time she came.
In fact, the pecans and the pecan candies turned out to be the only good thing about the semester; they were good because, when Wendy and her friends finally did go home, at the end of the semester, people were overjoyed to see them and try them. People came from around their apartment village to try them, as if she had brought home pure gold or the finest of foods.
It wasn’t until much later, back in Texas again, that Wendy found out, from a friend, that Peter had actually mistaken her tweet for that of a content polluter, and “harvested” it. It was not clear whether he actually judged her as a “content polluter” or not, but he’d been so wrapped up in what he was doing, that he was unable to just see her tweet as simply a tweet from a friend. According to this friend, Ming was not part of the picture; Ming had disappeared, and had been gone for a while. Wendy was insulted by the picture of Peter, so engrossed in his study that he couldn’t see Wendy as a friend; it was partly because she had invested so much into the whole effort: the recipes, the candies, the process. But in the end, she followed her mother’s advice. She tried to forget about him, and move on.
His “Honey Pot” study was published, and became well known; it was all over the university’s PR system, and even made it to the newsletter of the Chinese Student Association. Peter had a kind of celebrity, and was known as the “Honey Pot researcher.” Wendy cringed, every time she heard it.
(2-17)
Friday, February 24, 2017
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Survival
Roxanne flew into Omaha from Chicago, rented a car there and started driving out on the flat Nebraska prairie; it was about three hours to her destination, which was an old underground missile silo that had been converted into condos for survivalists. It had armed guards; it was plain from the outside, but fancy on the inside. She was one of twenty condo owners there, but she owned hers because her father had died and she had inherited it. She was now coming out to Nebraska to see what it was like, and decide whether she wanted to keep it. She was more than familiar with her dad’s desire to provide for everyone if society as we know it becomes unstable and unsafe; it was an obsession for him, but he was a millionaire, and this condo was his way of taking care of that. She herself did not have such an urge to have a hideaway bunker surrounded by concrete, way out in the middle of the prairie, and she had had some offers from people who wanted to buy it, but she had never even seen it, so she decided to take a trip to come out and take a look at it. Besides, she was tired of Chicago. She’d lived there all her life, and it was easy to get stuck in a rut, especially with friends. She needed to get away.
She liked Nebraska already. On the plane some wealthy rancher had started to hit on her and chat her up, and tell her about his thousands of acres and so many head of cattle, and all this stuff. He’d bought her a drink and insisted that she come out and visit him someday on his ranch way out southwest of Omaha, somewhere similar to where she was already going, no doubt. She actually liked the guy, whose name was Roger, but as she talked to him all she could think about was how different he was from the people she knew and talked to almost every day. He was wealthy, yes, everyone was wealthy, and that was a relief, because she didn’t like the feeling that some guys chatted you up just because they sensed you were wealthy. This was not an issue with Roger. But he was also much more direct, and refreshing. He told her almost instantly of his innermost feelings. And he understood exactly about the silo condo.
The idea of having it way out in the prairie would be that it would be easier to protect, and harder for people to come after them and disturb them. Roxanne could certainly relate to this, as she’d always felt vulnerable in Chicago, especially after 9/11, and even walking down the street to a grocery store. If you had money, you could alleviate this, say, by having your groceries delivered, but still, if you didn’t feel safe in your home, it grew on you, and she was tired of that. Out here, she felt safer right away; there just wasn’t anyone else around, except a few people like Roger.
When she got to the condo, they let her in, and a guy named Carl showed her around. Carl was bald, tall, muscular, and aggressive. Carl was the owner and the entrepreneur, and he also clearly liked her, although he mentioned, while he was talking, that he was already married. Carl had bought the old missile silo and had built the condos to perfection, and was very proud of them; he was building even more, having had great success with these. Each condo had plenty of room, and was well stocked, but because they were underground, instead of windows, they had a screen in a prominent place, where a window would be, and on that screen, a picture of the prairie from a webcam outside, so that, as far as one could tell, one was looking straight out at the prairie. Carl claimed that if you watched the screen, you would occasionally see a hawk coming after its prey, little mice or voles that skittered along at the base of the grasses. Roxanne asked him if he could stream in a webcam from Chicago, say the Miracle Mile, with its taxis and horns and street noises. Or, Fairbanks, where they had a webcam that showed extreme blizzards and whiteouts at all times of year except maybe July. She was just messing with him, but he took her requests very seriously, and promised to get back to her as soon as possible.
The silo setup was actually very impressive. It had a gym, and a pool, and just about everything they’d need to keep on going, if the world really went toward unstable. It had a room entirely filled with guns. All twenty owners, Carl said, were wealthy, and were concerned about that time, and the inevitability of that time, when they’d need to get away from it all, and have a safe place to get away. One owner had finally sold his condo, and bought a place in New Zealand, thinking that ultimately, even Nebraska wasn’t all that safe. In a sense, it was using some of their millions to calm that gnawing fear in their subconscious, that whatever they had in their primary residence, their mansions in Connecticut or California or wherever, it wasn’t enough.
She could look at it as a vacation spot, a place where twenty very wealthy people, or families, came to get away from it all, and she could enjoy it as that, except that it was mostly empty, almost all of the time. Carl was here, and he was here a lot, by his own admission, since it was his project, and he was the owner, with the primary job of watching out for the twenty owners and being responsible for their coming and going. He was available, he said, to help her sell hers, if that’s what she wanted. He was also more than eager to hear about her life in Chicago, as he’d been a friend of her father’s; he’d been one of his first investors. The survivalist side of him, the speculation about how society would become destabilized, how people would need to get far away from the centers of power and money, how fortification, invisibility, and remoteness would be keys to survival, were all very familiar to her, as she’d actually heard her father discuss these things with him over the phone, and discuss them with others. There was a community out there, of people who indulged their fears, who did what they thought they had to, to ensure their long term survival.
Carl was very attentive to her needs. He made sure she was happy in her condo, in the day she was to spend there, and kept asking her if there was anything else he could do for her. He offered to take her to town; it was fifteen miles away, a small ranching town, and didn’t have much, but he’d at least show it to her. No thanks, she said, settling in and trying to get a sense of the place. At one point a guy named Dave came around and introduced himself; it was right around the time they were talking about the screen, and Dave promised to try to see what webcams would be available.
Dave seemed to be the only other person around; he owned one of the other condos. Dave also was very interested in Roxanne, and let her know that fairly quickly. Dave was younger than Carl, more handsome, and single. He was a wealthy hedge broker from Silicon Valley, and had come out to the bunker to get away from it all one weekend about a month ago, and simply hadn’t returned to California. He owned the condo, he liked it here, and life was too crazy back in California. He was looking into ways to do his job online, from his condo, so that he wouldn’t have to go back, but he was a millionaire, so he didn’t have to go back anyway. If he was done with California, he could simply sell out on everything, and move out here.
But of course, it was lonely at the silo. Carl tolerated him, and made it possible for him to stay as long as he wanted, but they hadn’t had too many people who actually lived there, and weren’t used to the routine of having people around, coming and going, getting mail, going out for entertainment in the evening. There wasn’t much entertainment. They didn’t know the neighbors. The wide prairie was full of millions of stars at night, but after about a month of starry nights, one began to know the television channels too well. Dave was both too eager to meet and talk to Roxanne, and completely afraid that he was coming on too strongly to her, which he was. She talked to him for only ten minutes, and still got an overwhelming sense of someone who was completely at sea, cut off from his trading world in California, unable to be really happy or stable here, and having millions of dollars and literally nothing to do with it. He had computers; he had toys; he had everything a person could need, except company.
What Roxanne really wanted, what she had come this far to get, was to be absolutely alone, in a completely safe bunker underground, and to feel the absolute silence of being way out away from everyone. Eventually Carl and Dave both left her alone, and let her have that silence. It was late at night, and she was left with the webcam of the prairie in the screen window, and the steel furniture with comfortable leather cushions. She watched the gentle wind in the prairie grasses at night; it was the only movement anywhere. She didn’t actually care about the screen; she would never live here, so it didn’t matter whether it showed the Miracle Mile, or Fairbanks, or the prairie. She also didn’t care that much for either Carl or Dave, though they both seemed to be infatuated with her, and willing to do almost anything to please her. She had been married, for almost twenty years, and was divorced two years ago, before her father had died, in a very unhappy process. Her husband had been wealthy, neurotic, unwilling to have children, and never quite knowing himself, or, to put it better, never quite at peace with himself. This was the thing about Dave that bothered her too. It was ok, to her, to have a subconscious that told you you always had to be safe, you had to have a bunker with guns, you had to take care of the dark future that was certain to fall upon us. But to not quite know who you were, or what to do with all your money, that irritated her.
The following day, Dave came and found her again, and they talked. Dave, of course, claimed he was willing to try new things. He could sell out, in California, and start a new life, virtually anywhere, and provide perfectly well for her, and anyone else, in virtually any situation. He gave her a report on what could be done with the webcams, and all the different possibilities; he was big on technology, and knew that technology made virtually everything available to everyone, even here in a remote bunker. He was bright, aggressive, and assertive; that’s how he’d made his millions. Why was he still single? She couldn’t guess. But it was suspicious, a guy this rich, this smart, still single after all these years.
It was ironic to her that she’d been determined to have a day to herself, completely alone, and yet she was feeling overwhelmed by these three rich men, going back to Roger, doting on her with all this attention. She had broken up with a suitor back in Chicago; he’d come along too soon after her divorce, and wasn’t right for her. At 38, she was feeling a desperate desire for a child, but back in Chicago, the people she knew, even her first husband, didn’t even consider it. Out here, in the fresh air of the plains, it seemed ok to consider it again. But again, the missile silo itself was sealed. Whatever fresh air it had was shipped in. Her walls were concrete, with the one picture of the prairie glowing at her.
The following day she had to leave, but both Carl and Dave came around to make one more play on her. Carl said that although he was married, that would be temporary, and he was an entrepreneur who would be successful the rest of their days. She told him to go home to his family and take care of his business there. Dave, of course, was cheerful, and promised her the world. He could literally take her wherever she wanted, and live whatever kind of life she desired. This was totally unsatisfying to her, so she just told him no, and wondered how many women would be grateful to hear what she had just heard, or to have these handsome millionaires giving them attention. On the plane from Omaha to Chicago, she got two more texts from Roger, who still hadn’t given up, and was interested in seeing her on any conditions.
It was Roger who won her in the end. He made up an excuse to come to Chicago, and spent a weekend wooing her and taking her to shows and restaurants, all her favorites. His overriding sincerity and charm won her over, and she eventually married him and moved out to Nebraska; she bore him a daughter and he was a faithful and loving husband and father. She kept the condo, as she was now much closer to it, but she didn’t go there often, and Carl was rarely there when she went. She lost touch altogether with Dave, though someone said he was in New Zealand, as a lot of American survival fanatics were. If you really want to get away from it all, and you really have the money to do it, you can’t get much farther away than New Zealand. But to Roxanne, the desire for a totally safe concrete bunker, away from it all, just wasn’t that strong. It reminded her of her father, so she kept it. But now that she had a ranch of her own, and a daughter who was growing up on horses, she began to let go of some of the fear that had preoccupied her dad in Chicago. She didn’t need a webcam of the prairie; she already had a real prairie, right outside her window.
(2-17)
She liked Nebraska already. On the plane some wealthy rancher had started to hit on her and chat her up, and tell her about his thousands of acres and so many head of cattle, and all this stuff. He’d bought her a drink and insisted that she come out and visit him someday on his ranch way out southwest of Omaha, somewhere similar to where she was already going, no doubt. She actually liked the guy, whose name was Roger, but as she talked to him all she could think about was how different he was from the people she knew and talked to almost every day. He was wealthy, yes, everyone was wealthy, and that was a relief, because she didn’t like the feeling that some guys chatted you up just because they sensed you were wealthy. This was not an issue with Roger. But he was also much more direct, and refreshing. He told her almost instantly of his innermost feelings. And he understood exactly about the silo condo.
The idea of having it way out in the prairie would be that it would be easier to protect, and harder for people to come after them and disturb them. Roxanne could certainly relate to this, as she’d always felt vulnerable in Chicago, especially after 9/11, and even walking down the street to a grocery store. If you had money, you could alleviate this, say, by having your groceries delivered, but still, if you didn’t feel safe in your home, it grew on you, and she was tired of that. Out here, she felt safer right away; there just wasn’t anyone else around, except a few people like Roger.
When she got to the condo, they let her in, and a guy named Carl showed her around. Carl was bald, tall, muscular, and aggressive. Carl was the owner and the entrepreneur, and he also clearly liked her, although he mentioned, while he was talking, that he was already married. Carl had bought the old missile silo and had built the condos to perfection, and was very proud of them; he was building even more, having had great success with these. Each condo had plenty of room, and was well stocked, but because they were underground, instead of windows, they had a screen in a prominent place, where a window would be, and on that screen, a picture of the prairie from a webcam outside, so that, as far as one could tell, one was looking straight out at the prairie. Carl claimed that if you watched the screen, you would occasionally see a hawk coming after its prey, little mice or voles that skittered along at the base of the grasses. Roxanne asked him if he could stream in a webcam from Chicago, say the Miracle Mile, with its taxis and horns and street noises. Or, Fairbanks, where they had a webcam that showed extreme blizzards and whiteouts at all times of year except maybe July. She was just messing with him, but he took her requests very seriously, and promised to get back to her as soon as possible.
The silo setup was actually very impressive. It had a gym, and a pool, and just about everything they’d need to keep on going, if the world really went toward unstable. It had a room entirely filled with guns. All twenty owners, Carl said, were wealthy, and were concerned about that time, and the inevitability of that time, when they’d need to get away from it all, and have a safe place to get away. One owner had finally sold his condo, and bought a place in New Zealand, thinking that ultimately, even Nebraska wasn’t all that safe. In a sense, it was using some of their millions to calm that gnawing fear in their subconscious, that whatever they had in their primary residence, their mansions in Connecticut or California or wherever, it wasn’t enough.
She could look at it as a vacation spot, a place where twenty very wealthy people, or families, came to get away from it all, and she could enjoy it as that, except that it was mostly empty, almost all of the time. Carl was here, and he was here a lot, by his own admission, since it was his project, and he was the owner, with the primary job of watching out for the twenty owners and being responsible for their coming and going. He was available, he said, to help her sell hers, if that’s what she wanted. He was also more than eager to hear about her life in Chicago, as he’d been a friend of her father’s; he’d been one of his first investors. The survivalist side of him, the speculation about how society would become destabilized, how people would need to get far away from the centers of power and money, how fortification, invisibility, and remoteness would be keys to survival, were all very familiar to her, as she’d actually heard her father discuss these things with him over the phone, and discuss them with others. There was a community out there, of people who indulged their fears, who did what they thought they had to, to ensure their long term survival.
Carl was very attentive to her needs. He made sure she was happy in her condo, in the day she was to spend there, and kept asking her if there was anything else he could do for her. He offered to take her to town; it was fifteen miles away, a small ranching town, and didn’t have much, but he’d at least show it to her. No thanks, she said, settling in and trying to get a sense of the place. At one point a guy named Dave came around and introduced himself; it was right around the time they were talking about the screen, and Dave promised to try to see what webcams would be available.
Dave seemed to be the only other person around; he owned one of the other condos. Dave also was very interested in Roxanne, and let her know that fairly quickly. Dave was younger than Carl, more handsome, and single. He was a wealthy hedge broker from Silicon Valley, and had come out to the bunker to get away from it all one weekend about a month ago, and simply hadn’t returned to California. He owned the condo, he liked it here, and life was too crazy back in California. He was looking into ways to do his job online, from his condo, so that he wouldn’t have to go back, but he was a millionaire, so he didn’t have to go back anyway. If he was done with California, he could simply sell out on everything, and move out here.
But of course, it was lonely at the silo. Carl tolerated him, and made it possible for him to stay as long as he wanted, but they hadn’t had too many people who actually lived there, and weren’t used to the routine of having people around, coming and going, getting mail, going out for entertainment in the evening. There wasn’t much entertainment. They didn’t know the neighbors. The wide prairie was full of millions of stars at night, but after about a month of starry nights, one began to know the television channels too well. Dave was both too eager to meet and talk to Roxanne, and completely afraid that he was coming on too strongly to her, which he was. She talked to him for only ten minutes, and still got an overwhelming sense of someone who was completely at sea, cut off from his trading world in California, unable to be really happy or stable here, and having millions of dollars and literally nothing to do with it. He had computers; he had toys; he had everything a person could need, except company.
What Roxanne really wanted, what she had come this far to get, was to be absolutely alone, in a completely safe bunker underground, and to feel the absolute silence of being way out away from everyone. Eventually Carl and Dave both left her alone, and let her have that silence. It was late at night, and she was left with the webcam of the prairie in the screen window, and the steel furniture with comfortable leather cushions. She watched the gentle wind in the prairie grasses at night; it was the only movement anywhere. She didn’t actually care about the screen; she would never live here, so it didn’t matter whether it showed the Miracle Mile, or Fairbanks, or the prairie. She also didn’t care that much for either Carl or Dave, though they both seemed to be infatuated with her, and willing to do almost anything to please her. She had been married, for almost twenty years, and was divorced two years ago, before her father had died, in a very unhappy process. Her husband had been wealthy, neurotic, unwilling to have children, and never quite knowing himself, or, to put it better, never quite at peace with himself. This was the thing about Dave that bothered her too. It was ok, to her, to have a subconscious that told you you always had to be safe, you had to have a bunker with guns, you had to take care of the dark future that was certain to fall upon us. But to not quite know who you were, or what to do with all your money, that irritated her.
The following day, Dave came and found her again, and they talked. Dave, of course, claimed he was willing to try new things. He could sell out, in California, and start a new life, virtually anywhere, and provide perfectly well for her, and anyone else, in virtually any situation. He gave her a report on what could be done with the webcams, and all the different possibilities; he was big on technology, and knew that technology made virtually everything available to everyone, even here in a remote bunker. He was bright, aggressive, and assertive; that’s how he’d made his millions. Why was he still single? She couldn’t guess. But it was suspicious, a guy this rich, this smart, still single after all these years.
It was ironic to her that she’d been determined to have a day to herself, completely alone, and yet she was feeling overwhelmed by these three rich men, going back to Roger, doting on her with all this attention. She had broken up with a suitor back in Chicago; he’d come along too soon after her divorce, and wasn’t right for her. At 38, she was feeling a desperate desire for a child, but back in Chicago, the people she knew, even her first husband, didn’t even consider it. Out here, in the fresh air of the plains, it seemed ok to consider it again. But again, the missile silo itself was sealed. Whatever fresh air it had was shipped in. Her walls were concrete, with the one picture of the prairie glowing at her.
The following day she had to leave, but both Carl and Dave came around to make one more play on her. Carl said that although he was married, that would be temporary, and he was an entrepreneur who would be successful the rest of their days. She told him to go home to his family and take care of his business there. Dave, of course, was cheerful, and promised her the world. He could literally take her wherever she wanted, and live whatever kind of life she desired. This was totally unsatisfying to her, so she just told him no, and wondered how many women would be grateful to hear what she had just heard, or to have these handsome millionaires giving them attention. On the plane from Omaha to Chicago, she got two more texts from Roger, who still hadn’t given up, and was interested in seeing her on any conditions.
It was Roger who won her in the end. He made up an excuse to come to Chicago, and spent a weekend wooing her and taking her to shows and restaurants, all her favorites. His overriding sincerity and charm won her over, and she eventually married him and moved out to Nebraska; she bore him a daughter and he was a faithful and loving husband and father. She kept the condo, as she was now much closer to it, but she didn’t go there often, and Carl was rarely there when she went. She lost touch altogether with Dave, though someone said he was in New Zealand, as a lot of American survival fanatics were. If you really want to get away from it all, and you really have the money to do it, you can’t get much farther away than New Zealand. But to Roxanne, the desire for a totally safe concrete bunker, away from it all, just wasn’t that strong. It reminded her of her father, so she kept it. But now that she had a ranch of her own, and a daughter who was growing up on horses, she began to let go of some of the fear that had preoccupied her dad in Chicago. She didn’t need a webcam of the prairie; she already had a real prairie, right outside her window.
(2-17)
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Bottle Game
Bottle Game
Cadence was mortified one day to find a substitute teacher in her government class. The government class was full of rowdy boys, including one in particular, DaVon, who scared her. He didn’t scare her the way some boys scared her – with physical intimidation that implied she’d be in trouble if they were ever alone together – no, he was a personal friend, or rather, his mom knew her mom, so they considered each other friends outside of class. The reason she was afraid of him was that he knew a secret that she didn’t want him to tell. And he was dangerous because he’d say or do almost anything.
DaVon was part of a group of pretty wild boys, who got much wilder when there was a sub. In this case the sub was a woman, a young woman of about 25 who thought she might want to be a teacher someday. She was trying to explain to the class that the nation was in a constitutional crisis, and the very balance of powers was endangered and being tested as never before. But the class was apparently not interested. After all, she was a sub; why should they listen to her? In the back DaVon and another boy, Antonio, were playing the bottle game, but they were being very careless about it. They kept hitting each other with the bottle. Two other boys also started the bottle game.
In the bottle game you take a half-full bottle of water and flip it, and try to land it on its base. The more you flip it, the better. While you flip it, the water that’s in it sloshes around and makes a terrible noise. Teachers don’t take the water away from the students because they think water is good for them and even encourage them to drink it. But this has nothing to do with drinking. It’s something to do with your hands; it’s a kind of dance; it’s a way to get attention. If kids throw carelessly, they hit other people with the water, in a casual, semi-aggressive kind of way. If the teacher lets them, at the beginning of class, they get water for everyone. Then lots of people can play the bottle game.
Cadence felt ill about the whole game, about the class, about everything. These were kids she’d known for years. Now, the games didn’t seem so fun. She alternated between putting her head in her arms and resting, and trying to listen to the teacher, or perhaps open the book. Actually, like most people, she had mastered the art of noticing things very carefully, even when she appeared to be sick, or unable to pay attention, or unable to read. She was still watching her friends. But she wasn’t able to concentrate very well. The book wasn’t helping. She couldn’t concentrate on balance of powers.
There was an assignment they were all supposed to read out of the Government textbook. About half the kids in the class actually did the assignments, including Cadence, but almost nobody did them in the class time when the sub was supposed to be overseeing them. They were young and full of raging hormones, and the girls really wanted to shake their full heads of hair around and look at the boys with dreamy eyes, while the boys played the bottle game or showed off their rakish enthusiasm for almost anything but studying. Some boys threw little spitballs, often at the girls. Others played the bottle game so erratically that it was hard to tell when they’d do it again. One boy, Xavier, couldn’t sit still, and he often got up to argue with nearby boys or walk around. He would go sharpen his pencil, for example, even though he had no intention of writing anything. The few kids that studied during the class hour, one of whom was Robert Brown, got angry about the general anarchy and the sub’s inability to control it. But the kids were many; she was just one, and as they got rowdier, it got harder for her to assert any control at all. Cadence kept a wary eye on everyone even as he had her head down, and tried to clear her mind of everything except making it to the end of class. She especially kept her eye on DaVon, though, because he could do anything. He was kind of a leader, a leader of the wilder boys, but he seemed somehow different today, like he was going through the motions. His passion, his temper, his edge, were a little blunted.
The sub had brought a whistle to this class this time, because she had had trouble controlling her class before. So at one point, she brought out this whistle, and used it. It made her sound like a policeman in a crowded street. She pleaded with them to keep down the noise and the general mayhem. But somehow the whistle and the pleading had the opposite effect. They took it as a challenge. The boys went around harassing the girls, and they harassed Robert Brown, or they would scold Xavier, who was a short kid, and at one point one girl even lit into another, in some dispute that involved a lunchroom incident and another guy, who was not in the room at the time.
Cadence knew these girls too; she knew everyone pretty well. Often they would eat lunch together, and gossip about other girls who were pregnant or something that happened in one of their eleventh grade classes. Some of these kids were growing up early; Antonio, for example, had a new job, and another kid’s parents were splitting up, causing him to go back and forth at a time when he needed stability. These personal issues often made them wilder; when a sub came, it was almost as if pressure were released from a bottle. She shared many classes with many of these people, but today, she felt sick of them all. Some days she just wanted to go home and go back to bed.
Back in the corner, DaVon and Antonio started shoving each other. At first Cadence thought it was about the bottle game; one had perhaps hit the other in the face with the bottle. But no, it appears hot cheetos were involved. DaVon had simply taken a bag of them out of a girl’s pack, and Antonio was trying to retrieve them for her. They both had their hands on the one small bag of hot cheetos. Unfortunately a few hot cheetos were lost in the struggle and went flying onto the carpet. Some kids were alarmed that it went that far, Robert Brown in particular yelled out at them. The girl herself, Yvette, who had lost the hot cheetos in the first place, didn’t seem to mind having two boys fight over her, or over her cheetos. She giggled and led them on.
Hot cheetos were like the currency of the ninth grade, for some reason. Their bright red stringy appearance made each one seem like a valuable coin. To the boys, constant starvation was the norm, and they didn’t mind doing whatever they had to do to alleviate it. Cheetos, anything was fair game. They didn’t even have to enjoy eating it. But the girls, it seemed, were at that age where they felt intense dramatic guilt over every single thing they ate, in their attempt to starve themselves down to a level that the boys would notice them better. To Yvette, it was easily worth a few cheetos to watch two boys have this epic struggle over the little bag. Yvette truly didn’t mind losing the cheetos; she considered them everyone’s now.
To Cadence, at the moment, even the sight of hot cheetos made her sick, as she didn’t feel well, and certainly wasn’t hungry for that kind of very hot junk food. It was strictly against the rules to have food in the classroom, and everyone knew it, even the sub. Cadence was such a rule-follower that it didn’t even occur to her to bring food into the room, generally. But today, she had no appetite either. She couldn’t bear to watch the struggle, and put her head back between her arms.
The cheetos were not allowed in class, unlike the water, and the sub knew it, so she went to the back of the room to confiscate them. But she was no match for DaVon and Antonio, who simply turned so their back was to her, and kept up their tugging battle. She was yelling shrilly at them, but she had left her whistle on her desk. She told them to stop, and to give her the cheetos. They continued to struggle, and acted like she hadn’t said a word. The tension in the class rose as her shrill orders were being totally and completely ignored. A few cheetos were still flying, too.
Now Cadence took another quick look around the room. Nobody was doing the homework, as far as she could tell. Having a sub meant taking a day off of doing anything serious. Xavier was going from desk to desk trying to get something to eat or find somebody to bother. Robert Brown had given up on his homework and had a look of disgust on his face. One girl simply got up and left the room. Maybe she needed what they called a “safe space.”
Xavier, who was a small, nervous wreck of a kid, never sat still. They could ask him to read a page of the book, but he wouldn’t get more than a sentence into it, and pretty soon he was throwing a pencil, or playing with his jacket zipper. He’d play the bottle game, if he had a bottle, and today he’d gone over and thrown the bottle a few times before Antonio and DaVon’s game got a little rough. Xavier wasn’t into trouble; he didn’t intimidate people or take cheetos, but he never sat still, either. And he was sensitive, so the struggle at the back of the room bothered him. The teacher was yelling at the boys in a high voice and the boys were ignoring her. It looked like the boys were hurting each other, although all their actions, all their tugging and slapping, were deliberately designed to not hurt each other, to simply look like violence.
So now Xavier stood on the teacher’s desk; he stood right up on the papers and everything, and blew the whistle, with all the force of his lungs, a high pitched continuous whistle. He just let it out. And everyone was shocked, and more or less stopped in their tracks. Robert Brown laughed out loud.
This brought a teacher from the other room, who was shocked upon stepping in the door, and who reprimanded the students sternly. This teacher, an older woman from some other social studies class, seemed to have an authority they listened to; Antonio and Davon stopped their struggle, and most of the students now slunked back in their seats with low “yes ma’ams” and tried to start to appear to be reading the textbook again. Some kids who hadn’t even got their book out now reached below their chairs to get their books so they could pretend to start reading about balance of power. The older teacher apologized to the sub for the class’s horrible behavior, and promised they’d be better from now on. There was only ten minutes left in the class now. The sub, more than slightly ruffled, went back to her desk. She thought about saying something else about balance of power, but gave up that idea. There wasn’t much use trying to get them to think about balance of powers, she figured. Just get out of the hour alive.
The drama continued, though. It happened that a necklace had come out of Yvette’s bag, with the cheetos, and had even come apart in the struggle. Yvette hadn’t known about the necklace until later, but Antonio had known about it all along, and was quite mad at DaVon for starting the whole thing, just because he was so hungry he would steal hot cheetos from a girl’s pack. There was a kind of rancorous exchange of accusations, and this is what scared Cadence the most, because a kid who’s in the middle of an accusation war, who knows what he’ll say?
Cadence’s secret, in fact, was that her older sister, in the tenth grade, was pregnant. It was a family scandal, not well known by everyone, but DaVon knew it. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he knew it. And DaVon was not one to keep secrets, even if everyone around him demanded that he not tell a soul. He was accusing Antonio of stealing a bicycle and said bitterly that nothing was beneath Antonio, that Antonio wouldn’t mind stealing even the necklace if he thought he could get away with it. Antonio in return accused DaVon of every bad action known to the eleventh grade, hitting people, stealing food, locking a sub out of the room, beating someone up; in fact, Antonio knew quite a bit and was probably not lying.
This whole argument was in the last minutes of class, and spilled out into the hallway, on their way to the next class. Cadence tried to slip away in the other direction, so as to not be involved. The boys were still pushing each other; the sub had disappeared. But now there were hallway monitors to deal with. You could hear them a mile away. Cadence had fled down a back stairwell, but she knew that DaVon and Antonio would be in some trouble. They just couldn’t help themselves.
In a later class, Geometry, she had DaVon and Xavier and a few of the other kids from her government class. She was still worried about DaVon. After a kid gets in trouble, that’s when he’s most likely to say bad things about other kids or in general get other kids in trouble. DaVon, to her relief, never said a word to her, or about her. Xavier was enjoying praise, the praise of having done a heroic deed in the midst of battle, in the earlier Government class. It was a story to be told and retold, how he climbed right up on that desk and blew the whistle. The Geometry class, like the Government class, degenerated into general anarchy and not doing homework. It was afternoon now; kids had been inside most of the day; they were restless. Several boys were playing the bottle game again. Cadence couldn’t believe she was still in school; would school ever be over? The water sloshed around in the bottles when they were tossed. It made her feel like throwing up, again.
The ironic thing was, DaVon had not only fixed the necklace, but had also given it back to Yvette. He and Antonio, having gotten in trouble together, were fast friends, and this friendship hadn’t really been disturbed by all the bad things that had been said, although most of those were true, and quite severe. Each kid knew enough bad things about the other to get them in serious trouble, yet, the secrets were safe. As bad as these boys were, on a day-to-day basis, they actually had a sense of morality, of not stealing what they really truly weren’t supposed to steal, of trying to stay on good terms with each other. The sub, in her panic, had left behind both her phone and her wallet, the wallet full of money, a commodity in desperately short supply, of course, but one of the boys made sure she got it, untouched.
The afternoon sun came into the back of the geometry class, just as DaVon, by some coincidence, landed the water bottle right on its base. This was actually quite rare, and he spread his arms in a kind of victory gesture, and everyone was impressed. It was a tiny moment among many; they went back to their usual roughness immediately afterward. Cadence didn’t know it, on that day, but DaVon was the father of the baby, and she also didn’t know whether he knew, at that moment. Either way, life in the eleventh grade is temporal; they’d all have more serious concerns soon enough. Cadence, now feeling a little better, and having survived the school day, felt that she should enjoy these friendships while she had them. The bell would ring in minutes, and she’d be off to her last class, English. It occurred to her that it was possible that life itself had all the anarchy, but none of the camaraderie that her eleventh grade had.
(2-17)
Cadence was mortified one day to find a substitute teacher in her government class. The government class was full of rowdy boys, including one in particular, DaVon, who scared her. He didn’t scare her the way some boys scared her – with physical intimidation that implied she’d be in trouble if they were ever alone together – no, he was a personal friend, or rather, his mom knew her mom, so they considered each other friends outside of class. The reason she was afraid of him was that he knew a secret that she didn’t want him to tell. And he was dangerous because he’d say or do almost anything.
DaVon was part of a group of pretty wild boys, who got much wilder when there was a sub. In this case the sub was a woman, a young woman of about 25 who thought she might want to be a teacher someday. She was trying to explain to the class that the nation was in a constitutional crisis, and the very balance of powers was endangered and being tested as never before. But the class was apparently not interested. After all, she was a sub; why should they listen to her? In the back DaVon and another boy, Antonio, were playing the bottle game, but they were being very careless about it. They kept hitting each other with the bottle. Two other boys also started the bottle game.
In the bottle game you take a half-full bottle of water and flip it, and try to land it on its base. The more you flip it, the better. While you flip it, the water that’s in it sloshes around and makes a terrible noise. Teachers don’t take the water away from the students because they think water is good for them and even encourage them to drink it. But this has nothing to do with drinking. It’s something to do with your hands; it’s a kind of dance; it’s a way to get attention. If kids throw carelessly, they hit other people with the water, in a casual, semi-aggressive kind of way. If the teacher lets them, at the beginning of class, they get water for everyone. Then lots of people can play the bottle game.
Cadence felt ill about the whole game, about the class, about everything. These were kids she’d known for years. Now, the games didn’t seem so fun. She alternated between putting her head in her arms and resting, and trying to listen to the teacher, or perhaps open the book. Actually, like most people, she had mastered the art of noticing things very carefully, even when she appeared to be sick, or unable to pay attention, or unable to read. She was still watching her friends. But she wasn’t able to concentrate very well. The book wasn’t helping. She couldn’t concentrate on balance of powers.
There was an assignment they were all supposed to read out of the Government textbook. About half the kids in the class actually did the assignments, including Cadence, but almost nobody did them in the class time when the sub was supposed to be overseeing them. They were young and full of raging hormones, and the girls really wanted to shake their full heads of hair around and look at the boys with dreamy eyes, while the boys played the bottle game or showed off their rakish enthusiasm for almost anything but studying. Some boys threw little spitballs, often at the girls. Others played the bottle game so erratically that it was hard to tell when they’d do it again. One boy, Xavier, couldn’t sit still, and he often got up to argue with nearby boys or walk around. He would go sharpen his pencil, for example, even though he had no intention of writing anything. The few kids that studied during the class hour, one of whom was Robert Brown, got angry about the general anarchy and the sub’s inability to control it. But the kids were many; she was just one, and as they got rowdier, it got harder for her to assert any control at all. Cadence kept a wary eye on everyone even as he had her head down, and tried to clear her mind of everything except making it to the end of class. She especially kept her eye on DaVon, though, because he could do anything. He was kind of a leader, a leader of the wilder boys, but he seemed somehow different today, like he was going through the motions. His passion, his temper, his edge, were a little blunted.
The sub had brought a whistle to this class this time, because she had had trouble controlling her class before. So at one point, she brought out this whistle, and used it. It made her sound like a policeman in a crowded street. She pleaded with them to keep down the noise and the general mayhem. But somehow the whistle and the pleading had the opposite effect. They took it as a challenge. The boys went around harassing the girls, and they harassed Robert Brown, or they would scold Xavier, who was a short kid, and at one point one girl even lit into another, in some dispute that involved a lunchroom incident and another guy, who was not in the room at the time.
Cadence knew these girls too; she knew everyone pretty well. Often they would eat lunch together, and gossip about other girls who were pregnant or something that happened in one of their eleventh grade classes. Some of these kids were growing up early; Antonio, for example, had a new job, and another kid’s parents were splitting up, causing him to go back and forth at a time when he needed stability. These personal issues often made them wilder; when a sub came, it was almost as if pressure were released from a bottle. She shared many classes with many of these people, but today, she felt sick of them all. Some days she just wanted to go home and go back to bed.
Back in the corner, DaVon and Antonio started shoving each other. At first Cadence thought it was about the bottle game; one had perhaps hit the other in the face with the bottle. But no, it appears hot cheetos were involved. DaVon had simply taken a bag of them out of a girl’s pack, and Antonio was trying to retrieve them for her. They both had their hands on the one small bag of hot cheetos. Unfortunately a few hot cheetos were lost in the struggle and went flying onto the carpet. Some kids were alarmed that it went that far, Robert Brown in particular yelled out at them. The girl herself, Yvette, who had lost the hot cheetos in the first place, didn’t seem to mind having two boys fight over her, or over her cheetos. She giggled and led them on.
Hot cheetos were like the currency of the ninth grade, for some reason. Their bright red stringy appearance made each one seem like a valuable coin. To the boys, constant starvation was the norm, and they didn’t mind doing whatever they had to do to alleviate it. Cheetos, anything was fair game. They didn’t even have to enjoy eating it. But the girls, it seemed, were at that age where they felt intense dramatic guilt over every single thing they ate, in their attempt to starve themselves down to a level that the boys would notice them better. To Yvette, it was easily worth a few cheetos to watch two boys have this epic struggle over the little bag. Yvette truly didn’t mind losing the cheetos; she considered them everyone’s now.
To Cadence, at the moment, even the sight of hot cheetos made her sick, as she didn’t feel well, and certainly wasn’t hungry for that kind of very hot junk food. It was strictly against the rules to have food in the classroom, and everyone knew it, even the sub. Cadence was such a rule-follower that it didn’t even occur to her to bring food into the room, generally. But today, she had no appetite either. She couldn’t bear to watch the struggle, and put her head back between her arms.
The cheetos were not allowed in class, unlike the water, and the sub knew it, so she went to the back of the room to confiscate them. But she was no match for DaVon and Antonio, who simply turned so their back was to her, and kept up their tugging battle. She was yelling shrilly at them, but she had left her whistle on her desk. She told them to stop, and to give her the cheetos. They continued to struggle, and acted like she hadn’t said a word. The tension in the class rose as her shrill orders were being totally and completely ignored. A few cheetos were still flying, too.
Now Cadence took another quick look around the room. Nobody was doing the homework, as far as she could tell. Having a sub meant taking a day off of doing anything serious. Xavier was going from desk to desk trying to get something to eat or find somebody to bother. Robert Brown had given up on his homework and had a look of disgust on his face. One girl simply got up and left the room. Maybe she needed what they called a “safe space.”
Xavier, who was a small, nervous wreck of a kid, never sat still. They could ask him to read a page of the book, but he wouldn’t get more than a sentence into it, and pretty soon he was throwing a pencil, or playing with his jacket zipper. He’d play the bottle game, if he had a bottle, and today he’d gone over and thrown the bottle a few times before Antonio and DaVon’s game got a little rough. Xavier wasn’t into trouble; he didn’t intimidate people or take cheetos, but he never sat still, either. And he was sensitive, so the struggle at the back of the room bothered him. The teacher was yelling at the boys in a high voice and the boys were ignoring her. It looked like the boys were hurting each other, although all their actions, all their tugging and slapping, were deliberately designed to not hurt each other, to simply look like violence.
So now Xavier stood on the teacher’s desk; he stood right up on the papers and everything, and blew the whistle, with all the force of his lungs, a high pitched continuous whistle. He just let it out. And everyone was shocked, and more or less stopped in their tracks. Robert Brown laughed out loud.
This brought a teacher from the other room, who was shocked upon stepping in the door, and who reprimanded the students sternly. This teacher, an older woman from some other social studies class, seemed to have an authority they listened to; Antonio and Davon stopped their struggle, and most of the students now slunked back in their seats with low “yes ma’ams” and tried to start to appear to be reading the textbook again. Some kids who hadn’t even got their book out now reached below their chairs to get their books so they could pretend to start reading about balance of power. The older teacher apologized to the sub for the class’s horrible behavior, and promised they’d be better from now on. There was only ten minutes left in the class now. The sub, more than slightly ruffled, went back to her desk. She thought about saying something else about balance of power, but gave up that idea. There wasn’t much use trying to get them to think about balance of powers, she figured. Just get out of the hour alive.
The drama continued, though. It happened that a necklace had come out of Yvette’s bag, with the cheetos, and had even come apart in the struggle. Yvette hadn’t known about the necklace until later, but Antonio had known about it all along, and was quite mad at DaVon for starting the whole thing, just because he was so hungry he would steal hot cheetos from a girl’s pack. There was a kind of rancorous exchange of accusations, and this is what scared Cadence the most, because a kid who’s in the middle of an accusation war, who knows what he’ll say?
Cadence’s secret, in fact, was that her older sister, in the tenth grade, was pregnant. It was a family scandal, not well known by everyone, but DaVon knew it. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he knew it. And DaVon was not one to keep secrets, even if everyone around him demanded that he not tell a soul. He was accusing Antonio of stealing a bicycle and said bitterly that nothing was beneath Antonio, that Antonio wouldn’t mind stealing even the necklace if he thought he could get away with it. Antonio in return accused DaVon of every bad action known to the eleventh grade, hitting people, stealing food, locking a sub out of the room, beating someone up; in fact, Antonio knew quite a bit and was probably not lying.
This whole argument was in the last minutes of class, and spilled out into the hallway, on their way to the next class. Cadence tried to slip away in the other direction, so as to not be involved. The boys were still pushing each other; the sub had disappeared. But now there were hallway monitors to deal with. You could hear them a mile away. Cadence had fled down a back stairwell, but she knew that DaVon and Antonio would be in some trouble. They just couldn’t help themselves.
In a later class, Geometry, she had DaVon and Xavier and a few of the other kids from her government class. She was still worried about DaVon. After a kid gets in trouble, that’s when he’s most likely to say bad things about other kids or in general get other kids in trouble. DaVon, to her relief, never said a word to her, or about her. Xavier was enjoying praise, the praise of having done a heroic deed in the midst of battle, in the earlier Government class. It was a story to be told and retold, how he climbed right up on that desk and blew the whistle. The Geometry class, like the Government class, degenerated into general anarchy and not doing homework. It was afternoon now; kids had been inside most of the day; they were restless. Several boys were playing the bottle game again. Cadence couldn’t believe she was still in school; would school ever be over? The water sloshed around in the bottles when they were tossed. It made her feel like throwing up, again.
The ironic thing was, DaVon had not only fixed the necklace, but had also given it back to Yvette. He and Antonio, having gotten in trouble together, were fast friends, and this friendship hadn’t really been disturbed by all the bad things that had been said, although most of those were true, and quite severe. Each kid knew enough bad things about the other to get them in serious trouble, yet, the secrets were safe. As bad as these boys were, on a day-to-day basis, they actually had a sense of morality, of not stealing what they really truly weren’t supposed to steal, of trying to stay on good terms with each other. The sub, in her panic, had left behind both her phone and her wallet, the wallet full of money, a commodity in desperately short supply, of course, but one of the boys made sure she got it, untouched.
The afternoon sun came into the back of the geometry class, just as DaVon, by some coincidence, landed the water bottle right on its base. This was actually quite rare, and he spread his arms in a kind of victory gesture, and everyone was impressed. It was a tiny moment among many; they went back to their usual roughness immediately afterward. Cadence didn’t know it, on that day, but DaVon was the father of the baby, and she also didn’t know whether he knew, at that moment. Either way, life in the eleventh grade is temporal; they’d all have more serious concerns soon enough. Cadence, now feeling a little better, and having survived the school day, felt that she should enjoy these friendships while she had them. The bell would ring in minutes, and she’d be off to her last class, English. It occurred to her that it was possible that life itself had all the anarchy, but none of the camaraderie that her eleventh grade had.
(2-17)
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