Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,84

me. He gives me a quick history of the school: founded by three local suffragettes, all girls until ’72, defunct from ’76 to ’78, rose from the ashes with the help of an anonymous donor whose only stipulation was that admission be need-blind.

The room quiets down. A gaunt woman with straight, gray hair to her shoulders has climbed up the steps to the stage and is standing at a podium in front of the closed curtain.

‘Head of school,’ Manolo whispers to me. ‘Aisha Jain.’

‘What I thought was love in me,’ she says, ‘I find a thousand instances as fear.’ She looks up and around and back down. ‘Of the tree’s shadow winding around the chair, a distant music of frozen birds rattling in the—’

A hand shoots up in the audience, and she stops, points to it. ‘David.’

‘Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones. I can’t remember the title.’

‘Title, anyone?’

Another hand down in front. She nods. ‘Claire.’

‘The Liar.’

‘Good job, both of you. Bon appétit.’

‘They get a free treat at the snack bar for getting it right,’ Manolo tells me.

‘Enjoy your education today,’ she says and walks off the stage and takes a seat off to the side.

Students, lined up on the stairs, come onstage one by one to make announcements: photography field trip, green sneaker found on the roof (a large boy in back lumbers down the aisle to the base of the stage to retrieve it to much cheering), POC meeting after school here in the auditorium, Debate Club in 202, Gay-Straight Alliance in the library. When the announcements are over, the lights go down and the whole school starts screaming and stomping their feet as if we were at Fenway and the Sox had just put it over the wall. The curtain opens on two men with guitars, a woman on drums, and another woman with a sax at the mic.

‘Mama,’ she starts singing, low and slow, over the noise from the audience. It’s ‘Misguided Angel’ by the Cowboy Junkies. A song Paco and I danced to in his kitchen in Central Square.

Manolo leans over. ‘Math department band.’ There’s a makeshift piece of cardboard stuck on the front of the drum set that says: THE COSIGNS.

Next they play ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’ and end with ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’ They’re good. And they’re having a blast. The whole school rises in a standing O, and we filter out of the room.

Manolo has a huge smile on his face. Everyone does, including me.

‘Wow,’ I say. ‘What a way to start the day.’

We’re walking more slowly than the rest, who are rushing past us to class.

‘Aisha told me once that the number-one quality she looks for in a candidate when hiring is happiness. I thought it was cheesy when I first heard it, but you can tell. This is a pretty happy place.’

We go back through the glass entrance area and down a wide hallway, bright with sun pouring through a line of high windows. Honestly, I don’t remember windows in my high school. Every memory is cast in dim tube lighting. Was anyone happy there?

Manolo points through an open office door and says that’s Aisha’s office, and we’ll go in there in a bit. I follow him to his office, which he shares with another colleague who’s in class. We chat in the middle of the room in matching chairs that spin before we cross the hall to my interview. He asks me what I read when I was in high school, and I tell him that I was assigned the standard fare of The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, Updike and Cheever stories, tales of boys being disillusioned by humanity, but on the side my mother was supplying me with Wharton and Didion and Morrison. I see a copy of Macbeth on a desk and tell him about this article I read recently about how Lady Macbeth has all the qualities of the tragic hero, but no one teaches it that way. He asks me if I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which his seniors are reading, and I say I have and he asks me what I thought about it and I say I couldn’t get past the writing to enjoy the story, that he seemed to be alternating between imitating Hemingway and imitating Faulkner. He looks disappointed, then a bell rings and he says he has to get to class. He grabs his book bag and says it was great to meet me