I never had friends in school. Which isn’t to say that no one knew who I was, or that no one liked me. Quite the contrary, I was both well known and well liked. I never had friends for a reason both more cruel and more kind than simple ostracism. As a matter of course, I was simply seen as something other than an actual child.
In pre-school, I was never without a safari hat stolen from the toy bin. I wandered around the classroom, examining things with a magnifying glass. I then drew detailed diagrams of them in a log book I had made out of construction paper. The other students, gleefully eating paste found this odd and left me alone.
In second grade, the class began the Scholastic Reading Achievement Program. We read short pamphlets called SRA’s, which contained an essay on a topic of historic or social interest. We then answered several questions on the back of the pamphlet about the essay. At the end of the school year I had finished ninety-six SRA’s. The child with the next highest score had finished twelve. I had only stopped because we ran out of SRA’s half way through the school year.
In community projects, I was not allowed to join groups. The first few times I had been allowed to, the other students had copied my answers, and we had finished in the course of five minutes. By the time I was in high school it was a foregone conclusion that if the teacher was absent, I was to be instructor of that day’s lesson. As was the classroom, so to was the cafeteria. In junior high, I ate my lunch alone in a corner by the main entrance. I was not one of the jocks, the nerds, or the freaks. I was Brandon Woods. It was an exclusive group, of which I was the only member.
Thusly, in the eighth grade, I sat at my desk diligently carving a figurine of Santa Claus from a cylindrical piece of paste. It was a week until Christmas break, and I thought that a decoration was in order. My room was in the basement of the house and needed cheering. I was neither happy nor unhappy about this state of affairs. I was neither complacent nor content, because it was all I could remember. I simply was who I was, and did not think to be anyone else.
I finished the carving by filling in the features with oil paints. Even killing time I had finished a week ahead of schedule. My instructor jokingly said “is this all?” and signed off my work. He made the same joke every time I finished a project. Usually, I gave my projects to whoever wanted them first, but thought I would keep Santa Claus at least for a little while, so I took it to my art tray. As I dropped my project into my space, I noticed a slip of paper turned upside down. I picked it up, thinking it was a sketch that needed to be returned to its owner.
I flipped it over, looking for a name. It read:
Dear Brandon,
I like you. Will you go out with me?
Love,
Katherine Hallister
In my previous years at school, two girls had been unwise enough to develop crushes on me. One, in the third grade, I had simply ignored until she left me alone. The second had been in the seventh grade. She wrote my name surrounded by a heart on her back pack in white-out. She showed it to me in science class, with a smile on her face. I shouted “What the hell is wrong with you?” and then I proceeded to yell at her with such vitriol that she ran away in tears screaming that she hated me. I had sat back down at my desk with the joyful satisfaction of having done someone a great favor.
This note was different. My heart skipped a beat, then several more over the course of the next minute, before I could think again. It was like a discovery that toppled a scientific paradigm. This was Katherine Hallister. This was a good person. I had fallen in love with her moments after I had met her the first day of seventh grade. This was a girl whom I had admired from afar for two years, fully accepting that she would never be mine. This was a girl I sat next to the following period in geography.
For the remaining half hour of the class period, I held the note crumpled in one hand, soaking it with sweat, like a man enduring torture. I could not read it again. It challenged almost everything I had ever come to believe about myself.
I do not remember the first time I began to think of myself as a bad person. It was long ago in childhood, either when I was hiding from my parents in the laundry hamper or behind the freezer. Wishing they would not find me, as they yelled, screamed, swore, and brought up my name as a weapon against one another, I had a revelation. Good people attract goodness. Good people come from goodness. What then was I if lived here? For I neither attracted goodness nor came from it.
It followed then that I was a bad person. This was an agonizing for me as a child, until I then had several more revelations. Yes, I was a bad person. I had seen and understood too much about bad people to ever really be good, but I was different because I understood that I was bad. This was clearly not true of my sister Rachel.
Rachel liked to hurt people. Rachel didn’t think of herself in moralistic terms. Rachel rolled her eyes when people said there was a right and a wrong. Rachel shat on a toilet made of Absolutes and wiped her ass with the concept of Truth. Furthermore, Rachel hurt good people. This I found unspeakable, and it became my chief excuse for continuing to live. Surely, I would never be a good person, but just as surely I could exist without causing harm to good people. I could straddle the zero on the number line.
I had lived thus for the whole thirteen years of my life.
The crumpled note in my hand changed that. My knee began to tremble, as I sat wondering.
Good people attract goodness. What was more, good people were attracted to goodness. Katherine Hallister was goodness incarnate. She was smart, able, compassionate, and faithful. I was a genius sociopath, who had been an atheist since the first time someone had explained God to me.
My brain began to hurt as sweat beaded on my brow. If I was bad and Katherine Hallister was good… then how could Katherine Hallister love me? Either Katherine Hallister was worse than she pretended, or… I could not consider the alternative. I avoided the alternative till the class bell rang. I avoided the alternative all the way into geography class.
I endured by thinking of myself purely in mechanical terms. The book comes out of the bag. The paper is headed with my name, date, and period. The pencil is laid on the desk. Katherine Hallister sat down next to me, and I flinched. The alternative hit me full on. Could I be a good person?
I squinted like a man held prisoner in a dark cell, given his first glimpse of the sun in years. If I could be a good person…. could I be happy?
I had never been happy. Neither had I ever hoped for happiness. Happiness was for other people. For people who had not yet put their ear against the Universe, tapped, and found it hollow. I had lived all my life by simply being not unhappy. Yet when Katherine sat next to me… my stomach turned as I wondered… could the Universe not be hollow? Could the Universe in fact be full? Could it be full… of love?
“H… hey,” I said. It was like the first word ever spoken by the first man. I felt like a new man, divorced of all I had ever done before.
Katherine smiled back, and slugged me in the arm. “Hey yourself! What’s up BC?”
I had to look at my shoes to make sure my feet were anchored to the earth, “I… umm… I got your note.” I had a momentary thought: would I get to hold her hand if we went out? The pores on my fingers unleashed an ocean.
Katherine was beautiful in the way that only a young woman can be beautiful. She was pure. Untouched. A child of God, whether God was real or imagined. Her look was disinterested confusion. “What note?” She wasn’t even looking at me. She was taking books out of her back pack. I fell back into darkness as easily as a life long convict commits a crime to be sent back where he feels at home.
“Oh… uh… it was nothing. Sorry.” The muscles of my cheek spasmed only once. I am very good at not crying.
I flipped open my school calendar. I admonished myself for stupidity. I had to learn to analyze with less passion. After all, people could only hurt you if you cared enough to let them. Yes, I told myself, if I cannot love I can analyze. I can analyze very well. Looking at the calendar the conclusion seemed only obvious.
It had been parent teacher conferences the day previous. My mother had brought my step-father Mike. Mike had teased me about having a crush on Katherine. He had wrestled her name out of me by threatening to fart in my face if I didn’t tell him. Mike had been in my art classroom. Mike had seen my art tray. Mike loved practical jokes… and suddenly my view of the Universe made sense again.
It was like realizing God wasn’t real for the second time.
