The Chalk Artist

  Alone in his bedroom he dumped his backpack on the floor. Heavy-hearted, he sat at his computer, and checked his news feed and message boards, U.S. politics, and Arkadian alliances. He followed the news, real and imaginary, but he had not been qwesting since the contagion. His dream life with Nina upstaged all others.

  Dracon sent bulletins from his new company, but Aidan didn’t join them. Hey we’re in 8th circle, Dracon wrote in chat. Old and experienced, Aidan replied as Tildor. Watch for scorpion.

  A new message flashed on Aidan’s screen. Nina Lazare.

  What r his powers? Dracon typed.

  She had never sent a private message before. Subject: Apologies. Dear Aidan, she began. Dear! To his eyes the opening was intimate, not standard. He didn’t get letters, and his friends’ messages did not begin like that. I’m sorry we missed our appointment this afternoon—especially because it was our last meeting before the assembly. I wanted to show you these performances by other kids in last year’s nationals. Here’s the link. They’re really excellent—but so are you. He read that last phrase twice, and then twice more. He read it even as he opened the link to the Poetry in Action website. So are you. He heard her say it as he watched clips of kids reciting Billy Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.D., Robert Frost.

  Dracon was typing, r u there?

  Aidan minimized Dracon’s chat box.

  Here was the mission statement of Poetry in Action. The list of past winners. A list of eligible poems. Seasonal poems, nature poems, most viewed poems. He clicked through categories on the website, and hundreds of titles appeared. Love poems. Short poems (under twenty-five lines). Poems about animals, poems about illness, poems about loss.

  Clicking on LOVE, he scrolled down through page after page of titles and first lines. How like a winter…How sweet I roam’d…I carry your…I went out to the hazel wood…Sing me a song of a…One line jumped out at him, two sentences: No, No! Go from me. I have left her lately. He clicked on those words and an entire poem materialized, the story of a knight worshipping a noble lady. I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness, / For my surrounding air hath a new lightness; / Slight are her arms, yet they have borne me straitly / And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether…

  He sat back in his chair to stare at the fourteen lines onscreen. Message boards crowded against the poem’s white space. Discussion of Arkadian weaponry, shortcuts to the Keep, new mods for EverSea. He hardly noticed. He felt so strange. How did the author know? How did “Ezra Pound, American, 1885–1972” write so specifically about his life? The poet had it all down—her slender arms, her fair skin, his new lightness, even his sword. These lines scared him. Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness. He felt haunted. A stranger had been telling his secrets, publishing his dreams before he was born.

  “Okay, listen up!” Mr. DeLaurentis announced. “Take your seats. We need your full attention.” Last period, last day before winter break, 450 students filled the auditorium to overflowing. “Nobody in the aisles. Everybody in a seat.” The chairs were hard and loud. They dropped open with a satisfying bang.

  DeLaurentis planted himself center stage. Square-shouldered, massive in his suit, he looked out at the student body, a sea of legs and arms. “We’re starting now. Shhhh. Settle down. People in the back! Let’s move along.”

  Behind him, in folding chairs, sat twenty-one contestants, a daunting number for a competition scheduled to last an hour. Mrs. West had instructed the competitors to sit in rows, to stand and walk to the front as soon as their names were called. That way they could recite, one after the other, without wasting time. On a white screen above their heads, Mrs. West would project title and author as each student recited. She was sitting on one side of the stage to judge the competition along with Mr. Allan and the school librarian, Miss McGahn.

  “Let me start by welcoming all of our guests and visitors.” Mr. DeLaurentis looked out at the parents peppering the audience. “And let me express our gratitude to Mrs. West, who brought Poetry in Action to Emerson High School and spearheaded this unit. Let me thank our three judges.” The judges looked up briefly from numbered printouts of each poem in competition. “And all our language-arts faculty for taking time out of their busy schedules to hold classroom recitations. Each and every one of our students has memorized and performed a poem this year. I’m waiting…” he broke off, as the roar of students drowned him out. “Shhhh. The winner of this competition will go on to represent our school at the district level. But let me say this. Every one of our students up here onstage is already a winner in our book. Win, lose, or draw, you are all, each and every one of you, victorious, for everything you did to get up here and everything we know you will accomplish today. And now, without further ado…”

  Mrs. West announced the first contestant: “Keisha Mori.”

  “Go, Keisha!”

  Scattered applause and whistles as the first contestant took the stage. Mrs. West had to stand up. She took off her reading glasses and said, “People. We have a lot of poems to get through in a very short time, so please hold your applause until the end.”

  Keisha wore a black skirt and blazer and high heels. In the middle of the auditorium, where she sat with her tenth graders, Nina saw that several of the contestants had dressed like that, as if for church. A couple of boys wore dress shoes. Xavier even wore a tie. These kids were performers, the best in the school. Several sang a cappella in the Emertones. At least five were actors in the drama club. Nina recognized the Stage Manager from Our Town. The contestants sat up straight, gracious in the spotlight. All but Aidan, who leaned back in his chair.

  He was wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt that looked too small, and he was stretching in the second row, eyes open, but unseeing. Was he listening to Keisha recite Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”? He didn’t even glance at her.

  Khalil stood up, shook out his dreadlocks, and recited Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” A girl named Natalie performed Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106: “When in the chronicle of wasted time…” and tripped up, stumbling on the blazon of sweet beauty’s best.

  “The blazon of…the blazon…” She stood for a moment in distress.

  “Go, Natalie. Go, Natalie,” kids chanted in the audience, as though she were standing in the gym, preparing for a free throw.

  Natalie swallowed hard. Once again, Mrs. West had to stand up and shush everyone before the poor girl could finish.

  Even then, Aidan leaned back, as in a trance.

  Ismail Brown gave everything he had to “Mending Wall.” Daniella Kovatcheva performed “Ozymandias.”

  They’re good, Nina thought, as students jostled restlessly around her. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings…” Regally, Daniella commanded, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” and Nina sat up, entranced. This girl from Emerson owned Percy Bysshe Shelley. But Aidan could do just as well—or better—if he wanted. That was the question. What did he want? He was still staring into space.

  She began dreading Aidan’s turn. Other students excelled with Sharon Olds, Robinson Jeffers, Wilfred Owen. Wake up, she pleaded silently. The other kids were known quantities. They smiled, they ran cross-country. They went to prom. They did what teenagers were supposed to do. Aidan was the one in doubt. He could capture the audience if he wanted. He could astonish the entire school—or he could slip away.

  She kept her eyes on him as a girl named Jacqueline Ing recited Amy Lowell. “I walk down the garden paths, / And all the daffodils / Are blowing.” For the first time, Aidan straightened in his chair. He seemed to gather himself. Jackie’s voice was soft but intense with repressed emotion. “I too am a rare / Pattern. As I wander down / The garden paths.” Almost imperceptibly, Aidan’s right foot jiggled. “And the splashing of waterdrops / In the marble fountain / Comes down the garden paths.”

  Aidan gazed out into the audience and found Nina. In all those hundreds of people, he found her eyes. She smiled at him, hopeful, encouraging, and for a moment he gazed b
ack at her, as if he were starting on a journey and he had to memorize her face.

  Elegant, tremulous, Jackie painted a word picture with her recitation. She paced her patterned garden in her patterned brocade dress, waiting for news of her lover, who was fighting in a pattern called a war. But even this poem couldn’t last forever. Just a few moments left, as Jackie built slowly to her anguished cry, “Christ! What are patterns for?”

  Scattered applause, despite Mrs. West’s injunction, as Jackie returned to her chair. She sat down, ducking her head modestly.

  Now Aidan unfolded himself and pulled down his sweatshirt, too tight, too short.

  EMILY DICKINSON flashed on the screen as Aidan ambled to the front. He took his time, adjusting the microphone. He was easily a foot taller than Jackie.

  Halfway out of her chair, Mrs. West gestured for him to move along. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “No,” Aidan shot back.

  The entire student body gasped in admiration. “What are you doing?” Nina murmured in despair. Mrs. West sat down in shock.

  “No, go from me,” Aidan said. “I have left her lately. / I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness…”

  Now all three judges were flipping through their printed poems in confusion. Where was Dickinson? This was not “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.”

  “Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly…” The lines were tender, but Aidan delivered them with a hard, defensive edge. Voice defiant, he seemed to stand alone onstage against his audience, against the world. “Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness / To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.”

  Nervous laughter. He ignored it. Whispered conference of the judges.

  Nina stared at him in disbelief. Why, Aidan? Why choose this poem no one knew?

  He looked out into the audience and kids gazed back, awed by his intensity.

  At the back of the auditorium, Diana’s hands clenched as she watched her twin. Her heart was pounding, she was so nervous. She heard rebellion in his voice; she saw him flouting the competition, breaking rules, and she was proud and embarrassed. Her brother was so fierce, so serious. Her palms were sweating. She was afraid everyone would laugh at him.

  “No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour, / Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.”

  Strange, archaic, the words came naturally to Aidan, direct as ordinary speech. “Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches.” What a relief to tell his teacher how he felt, to give up his secret in this safe place, an auditorium full of people. The words weren’t his, but he gave them breath and life, repatriating them like looted artifacts. Thrumming with the poem’s subtle pitch, his body swayed. “As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches, / Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour: / As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.” He stopped, and everybody waited. No one knew what would happen next.

  Even Diana sat back, mystified. Aidan ambled to his folding chair and Diana felt a pang and then relief to watch like everybody else. He was speaking a language incomprehensible, even to her.

  Aidan didn’t see his sister in the crowd. He hardly noticed anyone. All he knew was that the ordeal was over. He knew he wouldn’t win. He’d never won anything before, and Mrs. West hated him for having plagiarized.

  When all the recitations were done, Mrs. West was the one who led her fellow judges offstage to confer, while competitors shifted in their chairs onstage, and the student audience surged, noise level rising, clock ticking toward dismissal. West was the one who took the microphone to tell everyone to settle down so that she could announce the winners. She raised her hand for silence. “People? People. Listen up.”

  When the other judges filed back onstage a few kids applauded, and one guy whistled in the back. Teachers tried to hush the audience, but the auditorium rustled with impatience and hilarity. Only the contestants’ parents gazed at the stage with perfect concentration. Among them, Kerry sat transfixed as she watched Aidan.

  “First, let’s have one more round of applause for all of our contestants,” said Mrs. West. “We are so proud. We are so very proud of you.” Once again, Mrs. West made a show of donning reading glasses as she unfolded her list. “Please come to the front when I call your name. Honorable mention. Claryce Williams for ‘Harlem.’ Come on up, Claryce. Khalil Watson for ‘If—.’ Yasmine Singh, for ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.’ Congratulations! You three, stand right over here. Now.” She paused. “We have three more outstanding performances—and let me just say, we had some debate.”

  Were they debating me? Aidan could not suppress the question.

  “This was such a close competition. Third place. Ranazia Donyon for ‘Jabberwocky.’ ” Hoots and whistles, applause and foot stamping—not just for the performance but for Ranazia herself, since she was so popular. “Come here. Take your prize.” She handed Ranazia a book, a glossy anthology of poetry.

  “Second place,” Mrs. West continued. “Daniella Kovatcheva for ‘Ozymandias.’ ” She got almost as much applause as Ranazia as she took her book.

  “Finally. Our winner. The student who will represent us at the district competition. A student who chose a difficult poem…”

  Difficult! Aidan thought.

  “Which was also very powerful.”

  Powerful!

  “A student who went above and beyond.” Mrs. West paused, and everybody in the auditorium thought, Oh come on, but Aidan experienced a private agony of expectation. “Jacqueline Ing, for ‘Patterns’ by Amy Lowell,” said Mrs. West. “Congratulations!”

  Okay, thought Aidan, as Jackie walked to the front, and applause rained down.

  He hadn’t won. He stretched his arms above his head and stood up, joining the others crowding off the stage. He hadn’t won and he was glad. He was sure of that. The disappointment he felt, the quiet comedown, could not be real. He had never wanted any prize. He didn’t take this competition seriously—hadn’t then, and didn’t now. Therefore, he was more than fine with losing. Only his heart dissented: But you were good; you were really good.

  Students stampeded for the doors, but parents stuck around. His mother appeared, and although he’d known she was coming, he was surprised to see her there. She stood right in front of the stage, stretching out her arms to him. Looking down from the stage, he almost laughed because she reminded him of swimming lessons, those afternoons when she stood in the shallow water, urging him to jump. He took the stairs instead, but he could not escape her. She latched on, pinning his arms to his sides in her embrace.

  “Mom?” She held him so long that he started worrying about her. “You’re okay,” he said, extracting himself, and Kerry smiled through tears. Who was this child? So tender and so patronizing? “You’re gonna be okay.”

  While Kerry went to shake hands with DeLaurentis, Mrs. West was congratulating all the contestants as they milled around on the floor below the stage. “I’m proud of you, honey,” she told Xavier. “Good job, sweetheart,” she told Khalil.

  “Aidan.”

  “What?” Aidan doubted Mrs. West would say, “Good job,” to him.

  “Hey, hold on. Come back.”

  That wasn’t Mrs. West calling him. He spun around and saw Nina standing in her white parka. She had been waiting for him! She was standing underneath the EXIT sign.

  “Aidan! First of all—you were amazing. Second of all…” For a split second, she took him by the shoulders, as if to shake him. “What am I going to do with you?”

  Don’t stop, he thought, overwhelmed by her brief touch.

  “You realize that the judges disqualified you for switching poems.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “What were you thinking?”

  He met her eyes, and of course she knew what he’d been thinking. She had known it all along, but she had pretended otherwise, convincing herself that her student was in love with poetry.

  Instantly he saw the cha
nge to adult concern, a teacher’s worried face. Missing her, he couldn’t help fishing. “I’m sorry if I disappointed you.”

  She shook her head with her old warmth. “I wasn’t disappointed. I was proud. You silenced everyone!”

  She didn’t say how much she’d wanted him to win. Oh, he could have shown DeLaurentis and the whole school—even Mrs. West.

  —

  Snow was falling when Nina left school. Cement steps, black wrought-iron fence, schoolyard—all turned pure and white. The last few students were leaving the building. The big painted doors slammed behind them.

  “Hey, Shakespeare!” she heard one of the kids shouting. “Bard of Avon!”

  Collin was waiting for her. He opened the gate, and when he saw her face, he opened his arms as well.

  His snowy collar brushed her cheek. He clasped her shoulders, and she rested in his embrace.

  “That bad?” he asked, taking her bag.

  “It wasn’t bad,” she said.

  “What was it, then?”

  She tried to find the words. “Exciting, and difficult, and…surprising.”

  He kissed her ear and when she turned toward him, he kissed her lips. His kiss was sweet and eager, but he was laughing at her too. “Yeah, that’s exactly how I remember assemblies in high school.”

  —

  They drove to Maia’s place to bake gingerbread and move furniture around. Collin set up Maia’s little white lights to frame the windowsills. Nina saved the empanadas from burning, while he ran out for paper napkins and more wine.

  As the winter light began to fade, Maia’s guests and neighbors came bearing brownies, latkes, trays of stuffed portobello mushrooms, for the solstice party. Melissa and Sage arrived. Sage carried a bowl of bulgur wheat salad with dried cranberries. Melissa led Henry by the hand. Lois brought caramel corn. Dawn came with steamed artichokes.

  Maia set the food out on the table, and listened to her neighbors ask Collin, Hey, bud, how’s Arkadia?

  “It’s good,” said Collin.