When the bell rang for recess he acted like there was something important in his desk that he couldn’t find. After everyone left the classroom, he stood up and maneuvered himself in such a way that, for anyone watching, would have looked like someone slowly hula-hooping without a Hula-Hoop.
The kids marched to the playground, marched with purpose and slow resolve even though they were by now surging with the energy that accumulates in an eleven-year-old body sitting rigidly still for hours under Miss Bowles’s imperious gaze. They marched in total silence, single file on the far-right side of the corridor past all the signs the faculty had helpfully taped to the white concrete walls, one or two of which promoted some kind of LEARNING IS FUN! message, while the rest attempted strict behavior management: KEEP HANDS AND FEET TO YOURSELF; QUIET VOICES ONLY; WALK, DON’T RUN; WAIT YOUR TURN; USE POLITE LANGUAGE; DON’T USE MORE TOILET PAPER THAN YOU NEED; EAT BEFORE TALKING; USE TABLE MANNERS; RESPECT PERSONAL SPACE; RAISE YOUR HAND; DO NOT SPEAK UNLESS CALLED ON; STAY IN LINE; APOLOGIZE WHEN NEEDED; FOLLOW DIRECTIONS; USE SOAP APPROPRIATELY.
To most of the students, the education they received at school was only an incidental thing. To them, the overwhelming point of school was to learn how to behave in school. How to contort themselves to the school’s rigid rules. Take, for example, bathroom breaks. No subject was more highly managed than the students’ various excreta. Getting a bathroom pass was an elaborate ritual whereby Miss Bowles would—if you asked really nicely and convinced her that it was, indeed, an emergency and not some ploy to get out of class to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol or do drugs—fill out this bathroom pass about the length of the Constitution. She’d write down your name and the time of your departure (down to the very second) and, horrifyingly, the nature of your visit (i.e., number one or number two), and then she’d ask you to read the hall pass aloud, which listed your “Rights and Restrictions,” primarily among them that you could leave class for no more than two minutes and that while gone you assented to walk only on the right side of the corridor and go directly to the nearest bathroom and not say a word to anyone and not run in the halls and not be disruptive whatsoever and do nothing illegal while in the bathroom. Then you had to sign the hall pass and wait while Miss Bowles explained to you that you had signed a contract and there were severe penalties for people who broke contracts. Most of the time the kids would listen to her wide-eyed and panicked and doing that uncomfortable pee dance because they were already on the clock and the more Miss Bowles talked about contract law the more of their precious two minutes she cut into, such that when they finally got to the hall they had maybe ninety seconds to get to the bathroom and do their business and get back to class, all without running, which was impossible.
Plus you were only allowed two bathroom passes per week.
Then there was the rule about the water fountain: after students returned from recess they could only drink from the water fountain for three seconds each—this was probably meant to teach them about cooperation and selflessness—but of course the kids were panting and exhausted after a frenzied recess letting off all their stored-up angst, and there was a heat wave, and they were rarely allowed bathroom breaks, so the only water these sweaty and sunburned and overheated kids got all day came at the water fountain for these three seconds. This was a perverse double whammy for the students, because if they ran off their energy at recess, they would be parched and exhausted for the rest of the day, whereas if they didn’t run around during recess, they’d feel so hyperactive in the late afternoon that they’d almost certainly get in some behavior-related trouble. So mostly the students played hard at recess, then gulped as much water as they could during their tiny three-second interval. And by the end of the day they were desolate, dehydrated lumps, which was actually how Miss Bowles preferred it.
So she stood over them and loudly counted out their time and each kid popped up at three, their chins dripping, not even close to enough water on this hot and humid and terrible Midwest day.
“This is bullshit,” Bishop said to Samuel as they waited in line. “Watch this.”
And when it was Bishop’s turn he leaned over the fountain, pressed the button, and drank while making direct eye contact with Miss Bowles, who said, “One. Two. Three.” Then when Bishop did not stop drinking, she said “Three” again, more pointedly, then when Bishop still did not stop she said, “You’re done now. Next!” And then it became clear that Bishop was not going to stop drinking until he was good and ready, and it appeared to most of the kids in line that Bishop wasn’t even drinking anymore so much as letting the water run coolly over his lips, still looking directly at Miss Bowles as she finally realized this wasn’t a matter of the new kid not knowing the rules but rather a direct challenge to her authority. And she responded to the confrontation by gathering herself into a rigid hands-on-hips, chin-jutting-out kind of posture and her voice dropped an octave as she said, “Bishop. You will stop drinking. Now.”
He stared at her with this bored, lifeless expression that was just so incredible and daring, and the kids in line were already bug-eyed and giggling dementedly because Bishop was about two seconds away from a paddling. Anyone who so blatantly disregarded the rules got paddled.
The paddle was famous.
It hung on the office wall of their principal, the school’s chief disciplinarian, the unfortunately named Laurence Large, a short and oddly-shaped man who carried his weight almost entirely from the waist up—his legs were skinny and frail while his upper body ballooned. He looked like an egg standing on toothpicks. One wondered how his ankles and shinbones didn’t snap. His paddle was made from a single three-inch-thick slab of wood, was about as wide as two pieces of notebook paper put together, and had about a dozen small holes drilled into it. For aerodynamics, the kids hypothesized. So he could swing it faster.
His paddlings were legendary for their force, for the technique required to generate enough power to, for example, shatter Brand Beaumonde’s glasses, which was a historical fact that lived on as oral history among the members of the sixth-grade class, that Large struck Beaumonde’s ass so hard the shock wave traveled up through the poor boy’s body and cracked his high-prescription lenses. Comparisons were made to professional tennis players uncoiling 140-mph serves, how Large could transfer his weight in such a way to deliver a devastating—and athletically unlikely—blow. Sure, occasionally a parent might complain about the principal’s retrograde punishment system, but since a paddling was the ultimate misbehavior prevention and deterrent, it was, for the most part, pretty rare. Certainly not frequent enough to spur any PTO campaigns. The absolute fact of assured backside annihilation was enough to keep even the rowdiest children in a more or less calm and low-decibel and narcotized fearful stupor for the whole of the school day. (That they went into spasms of wild hyperactivity as soon as they got home was something parents sometimes grumbled about to teachers, who quietly nodded their heads and thought: Not my problem.)
Every teacher had a unique point at which rebelliousness would no longer be tolerated. For Miss Bowles, that moment came after twelve seconds. For twelve seconds Bishop was at the water fountain. For twelve seconds he stared at Miss Bowles as she demanded he move along until finally she yanked Bishop by his shirt, physically grabbed him near the neck and with a stitch-tearing noise pulled him momentarily up off the ground before marching him toward the terrifying office of Principal Large.
What typically happened when a kid came back from a paddling is that somewhere between ten and twenty minutes after being sent away there would be a knock on the classroom door and Miss Bowles would open it and there would be Principal Large with his big hand on the back of some crimson-faced, snotty, sniveling kid. The faces of the recently paddled were always the same: wet and grim, eyes rubbed red, runny-nosed, defeated. There was no more rebellion in them, no more bravado. Even the loudest, most attention-seeking boys looked in this moment like they wanted to curl up under their desks and die. Then Large would say “I
think this one is ready to rejoin the class” and Miss Bowles would say “I hope he’s learned his lesson,” and even students as young as eleven were sophisticated enough to know that this bit of dialogue was all theater, that the adults were not talking to each other but rather to the whole lot of them, the easily grasped subtext being: Don’t step out of line or you’re next. The kid would then be allowed to return to his seat, where his secondary punishment would begin, since his ass would be throbbing and bright red and tender as an open wound all over, and so sitting on the school’s hard plastic chairs brought a sharp pain that felt, they said, like being paddled again. And so the kid would sit there in misery and cry and Miss Bowles would say “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. Do you have something to add to our discussion?” and the kid would shake his head no in this pathetic, broken, miserable way and the whole class knew that Miss Bowles wanted to draw everyone’s attention to his crying as a way to shame him more. In public. In front of his friends. There was a ruthlessness in Miss Bowles that the genderless blue sweaters she wore just barely contained.
That day they were all waiting for Bishop to return. They were excited. They were eager to accept him, after this initiation. Now he’d know what they’d been through. He was one of them. So they waited, ready to welcome Bishop back and forgive him for crying. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, and finally right at the eighteen-minute mark came the inevitable knock on the door. And Miss Bowles made a big show of saying “Who could that be?” before putting the chalk onto the blackboard tray and striding to the door and opening it. And there they were, Bishop and Principal Large, and she was shocked, and the whole class was shocked, to see that not only was Bishop not crying, but he was also visibly smiling. He looked happy. Large’s hand was not on Bishop’s back. In fact, the principal was an odd two to three feet away from Bishop, as if the boy had some contagious disease. Miss Bowles stared at Principal Large for a moment, and Large did not stick to his usual script about Bishop being ready to rejoin the class, but only said, in a kind of distant way that soldiers sometimes talk about war: “Here. Take him.”
And Bishop walked to his desk and every kid in the class watched him go and sit down, jumping into his seat and landing hard on his butt and looking up fiercely as if to challenge anyone to try to hurt him.
It was a moment that lived in the heart of every sixth grader who saw it. One of their own had taken the worst of the adult world and come out victorious. Nobody ever fucked with Bishop Fall after that.
5
SAMUEL’S MOTHER told him about the Nix. Another of her father’s ghosts. The scariest one. The Nix, she said, was a spirit of the water who flew up and down the coastline looking for children, especially adventurous children out walking alone. When it found one, the Nix would appear to the child as a large white horse. Unsaddled, but friendly and tame. It bowed down as low as a horse was able, so the kid could leap onto it.
At first the children were afraid, but, ultimately, how could they refuse? Their very own horse! They jumped on and when it stood up again they were eight feet off the ground and they were delighted—nothing this big had ever minded them before. They became bold. They would kick at the horse to go faster, and so it broke into a light trot, and the more the kids loved it, the faster the horse would go.
Then they wanted other people to see them.
They wanted their friends to stare with envy at this brand-new horse. Their horse.
It always went like this. The kids who were victims of the Nix always felt, at first, fear. Then luck. Then possession. Then pride. Then terror. They’d kick at the horse to go faster until it was in a full gallop, the kids hanging on to its neck. It was the best thing that had ever happened to them. They’d never felt so important, so full of pleasure. And only at this point—at the pinnacle of speed and joy, when they felt most in control of the horse, when they felt the most ownership of it, when they most wanted to be celebrated for it and thus felt the most vanity and arrogance and pride—would the horse veer off the road that led to town and gallop toward the cliffs overlooking the sea. It ran full bore toward that great drop into the violent churning water below. And the kids screamed and yanked back on the horse’s mane and cried and wailed but nothing mattered. The horse leaped off the cliff and dropped. The children clung to its neck even as they fell, and if they weren’t bashed to death on the rocks, they drowned in the frigid water.
This was a story Faye had heard from her father. All her ghost stories came from Grandpa Frank, who was a tall and thin and intensely withdrawn man with a perplexing accent. Most people found him intimidating in his silence, but Samuel always thought it was a relief. Whenever they visited him in Iowa on those rare Thanksgivings or Christmases, the family would sit around the table eating and not saying a word. It was hard to have a conversation when it was met only with a nod of his head, a dismissive “Hm.” Mostly they ate their turkey until Grandpa Frank was finished eating and left to watch television in the other room.
The only time Grandpa Frank was ever really animated was when he told them stories of the old country—old myths, old legends, old tales about ghosts he’d heard growing up where he’d grown up, in far-north Norway, in a little fishing village in the arctic that he left when he was eighteen. When he told Faye about the Nix, he said the moral was: Don’t trust things that are too good to be true. But then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”
Samuel didn’t understand.
“The Nix doesn’t appear as a horse anymore,” she said. They were in the kitchen hoping for a break in the heat wave that now seemed endless, sitting there reading with the refrigerator door wide open and a fan blowing the cold air onto them, drinking ice water, glasses sweating wet circles on the table. “The Nix used to appear as a horse,” she said, “but that was in the old days.”
“What does it look like now?”
“It’s different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it’s someone you think you love.”
Samuel still did not understand.
“People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,” she said. “They love each other because it’s easy. Or because they’re used to it. Or because they’ve given up. Or because they’re scared. People can be a Nix for each other.”
She sipped her water, then pressed the cold glass to her forehead. She closed her eyes. It was a long, tedious Saturday afternoon. Henry had gone into the office after another one of their fights, this one on the issue of dirty dishes. Their late-seventies-era avocado-colored dishwasher had finally stopped working this week, and not once had Henry volunteered to clean the growing pile of plates and bowls and cookware and glasses that had overrun the sink and much of the counter. Samuel suspected his mother was intentionally letting the pile get out of hand—maybe even contributing to it more than usual, using several pots for a meal that probably required only one—as a kind of test. Would Henry notice? Would he help? That he did neither of these things was something she extrapolated great meaning from.
“It’s like home ec class all over again,” she told him when the pile finally became unbearable.
“What are you talking about?” Henry said.
“Just like in high school. You go have fun while I cook and clean. Nothing’s changed. In twenty years, absolutely nothing has changed.”
Henry washed all the dishes, then claimed urgent weekend duties at the office, leaving Faye and Samuel alone, together, again. They sat in the kitchen and read from their respective books. Incomprehensible poetry for her. Choose Your Own Adventure for him.
“I knew a girl named Margaret in high school,” Faye said. “Margaret was a very bright and witty girl. And in school she fell in love with a boy named Jules. A handsome boy who could do anything. Everyone was jealous of her. But it turns out Jules was her Nix.”
“Why? What happened?”
She set her glass in the puddle it had made on the wood. “He disappeared,” she said. “She got stranded, never left town. I hear she’s still there, working as a cashier at her dad’s pharmacy.”
“Why did he do that?”
“That’s what a Nix does.”
“She couldn’t tell?”
“It’s difficult to see. But a good rule to remember is that anyone you fall in love with before you’re an adult is probably a Nix.”
“Anyone?”
“Probably anyone.”
“When did you meet Dad?”
“In school,” she said. “We were seventeen.”
Faye stared into the yellow haze of the day. The refrigerator chugged and hummed and clicked and all at once, with a brief final electrical zap, it quit. And the light went out. And the countertop digital clock radio died. And Faye looked around and said, “We blew a fuse.” Which meant of course that Samuel had to flip the breaker, because the breaker box was in the basement and his mother refused to go into the basement.
The flashlight was heavy and solid in his hand, its aluminum handle dimpled, its big round rubberized face an appropriate size for striking something violently in a pinch. His mother didn’t go into the basement because the basement was where the house spirit lived. At least that was the story, another one from his grandfather: house spirits that inhabit basements and haunt you your entire life. His mother said she’d encountered one as a child and gotten spooked. She never liked basements after that.