You may conceive of the decision before you as a strictly personal one, Ms. Watkins, but it is not. Your arrival at St. Philomena’s resulted from the generosity of our community, and your experience here thus far has resulted from the generosity of our teachers. Your departure would betray this collective generosity. Your merit qualified you for the Aquinas Scholarship before you enrolled, your talent and work ethic allowed you to thrive once you arrived, and you owe it to your own astonishing potential to stay now that you only have one year left, but you are not the only person involved in this choice. The year you were awarded the Aquinas Scholarship, St. Philomena received 748 applications. That’s 747 students—about the population of our student body—who could have benefited from the valuable resources that our committee chose to invest in you.
As you make your decision, please consider your responsibilities to the community of St. Philomena. Consider the donors who have funded your education thus far. Consider each student who would have made the most of the Aquinas Scholarship had he or she received it. Consider your teachers, who have tirelessly advocated for you, devoted hours before and after school to your advancement, and prepared you to qualify for a place at the best universities in the world. Consider the precedent that you will set for the rest your life if you terminate your studies now. The decision before you will either fortify a pattern of resilience or initiate a pattern of defeat. We—donors, advocates, administrators, students, priests, nuns, and teachers—have devoted our goods and services to you because you were and remain one of the most promising students ever to enter this fine institution. You only have one more year of work to go, and you have the entire staff on your side. It will be a gift to all if you stay, and a disloyalty to all if you quit. Do not betray us, Ms. Watkins.
Which was also enraging.
But the most enraging aspect of all the aspects is the Situation’s banality. Blandine is thereafter cursed with the knowledge that one of the defining events of her life was nothing more than a solution to a tired equation. The internet pummels her with proof: an actor sleeps with his nanny; the head of the International Equestrian Games has fucked at least sixteen participants; yet another intern blows yet another president; a philosophy professor proposes to an advisee who was born when he was fifty. One nation flashes its nuclear weapons at another. Most of the world’s debt belongs to one guy. Rich countries are fucking up the weather in poor countries. In a nature documentary, a low-ranking chimpanzee rises to power by wreaking havoc in his community for a week, until the other males begin to submissively groom him. In the Valley, Blandine overhears three preteen girls tell a fourth preteen girl that she smells like socks. The redevelopment will begin its renovation of Zorn Automobile factories this summer, and demolition of the Valley will begin after that. At the Vacca Vale Zoo, the male polar bear eats one of his cubs while the mother looks on, too depressed to intervene. The moment Blandine felt most alive, she was nothing but a variable.
The rage shovels her out of herself, like it’s mining her for something to burn.
One evening in July, Blandine sits on a stump in the Valley and holds a translation of a letter that Hildegard von Bingen wrote to Richardis—her friend and fellow nun—nearly nine hundred years ago. An earlier rain makes the woods breathe, and the fragrance of mud perfumes the air. All over the world, millions of people are managing not to think about James Yager. How do they do it? He has appeared in her consciousness every day, every hour, since the Night, and Blandine is glad that she has heard nothing from him, or at least that’s what she tells herself because she can’t trust her reaction to his attention—her reactions so far have been involuntary. Messages build themselves in her mind, in her hands, but she never sends them. She knows that not contacting James is the right thing to do, but God—how much like a sneeze unsneezed it feels.
Hildegard wrote the letter in the early twelfth century, shortly after Richardis was removed from Hildegard’s convent and appointed Abbess of Bassum. Hildegard, so opposed to earthly attachment, ardently loved Richardis and fought her relocation. She wrote a letter to the archbishop in the voice of God—first person!—condemning the decision. When that didn’t work, she wrote one to Richardis herself. Blandine reads the letter, then contemplates the open notebook in her lap, which is a relic of St. Philomena, a tool originally purchased to ferry Blandine from one school to the next, paper once covered in physics. She has ripped out her school pages and filled the remaining lines with drafts of letters to James that she will never send.
My grief rises up, wrote Hildegard. That grief is obliterating the great confidence and consolation which I had from another human being.
If there was anything unethical about our arrangement, wrote Blandine, it wasn’t that you were a teacher and I was a student, or that you were the director and I was the actress, or that you were married and I was a kid, or that you were rich and I was poor, or that you were a father and I was an orphan, or that you were forty-two and I was seventeen. It was the fact that this was always going to mean infinitely more to me than it meant to you, and you fucking knew it from the start.
Which means that a human being must look to the living height without being obscured by love or by the weakness of faith, which the aerial humour of the earth can have only for a short period of time.
You always already mattered. I did not.
A man should not wait upon a person of high rank who fails him like a flower that withers; but I broke this rule in my love for a certain noble human being.
My whole life has educated me against investments whose rewards depend upon the benevolence of others. For seventeen years, it was impossible to unlearn this lesson and then, in a span of months, impossible to learn it.
Alas for me, a mother and alas for me, a daughter. Why have you forsaken me like an orphan?
You are a metaphor. I don’t know what you represent, but you’re not just yourself. You’re also not a father, if that’s your conclusion. I am not so cause-and-effect.
I loved you for your noble bearing, your wisdom, your purity, your soul, and all your life! So much so that many people said, “What are you doing?”
What were we doing, James? What were you doing?
Blandine receives the email one evening at the end of July, long after dropping out of school. Next week, she’ll move out of Stella and Wayne’s and into La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex. U can hav the biggest bed room, texted Malik that morning. Coz ur a girl. Then he sent a winky face. Now she’s sitting at a sticky computer in the Vacca Vale Public Library. Confused, she leans closer to the screen: the sender is Zoe Collins, a student from St. Philomena’s—a senior when Blandine was a freshman. The year they overlapped, Zoe was the lead in all the theatrical productions. After she graduated, St. Philomena often bragged about her—she won a scholarship for piano performance at some prestigious institute of music. Twice a week, on her way to World History, Blandine would pass a photo of Zoe in the hallway, smiling merrily, her teeth bright under the banner: alumni excellence. Blandine has never spoken to Zoe before. As dread pulses in her stomach like a war drum, some animal part of her knows the content of the message before she reads it.
No subject.
So he got you, too?
PART III
It Wasn’t Todd’s Idea
After the fish incident in February, Blandine avoided the apartment, as though she sensed a shift. I told myself that the fish was a peculiar, one-time case, but I knew, deep in my body, that our ritual had been gaining momentum since we moved into the Rabbit Hutch. I knew we would kill something again.
The next time it happened, Malik was strumming on a shitty guitar, and Blandine was out. Nighttime, March, all of us a little bit drunk. Malik was sitting on the futon, and Todd sat on the floor, glaring at the TV. It was a Wednesday night, as it always seemed to be in those days. The heating in the Rabbit Hutch was too intense, and we couldn’t control it, so we had the window open, even though it was blustery outside. While Malik worked out a song, I was throwing a ball of rubber bands into a bushel basket that we’d sliced the bottom from and nailed above the door. He assured us that once he was finished, he would upload it to his numerous channels. Fame, riches, and sex would follow.
“How does this sound to you, Todd?” Malik cleared his throat and started to sing, striking the same three chords over and over in different patterns. And you know what? Motherfucker has an excellent voice. Makes you think of apple cider and somebody else’s childhood.
“Your eyes are like the ocean, yeah, your soul is like a bird. Do you wanna go home? If you do just say the word. Our home, home, home, our home’s the same home, home, home, so if you feel alone, alone, alone, I’ll loan you my phone.”
“What ocean?” I asked. “What fucking ocean, Malik?”
“No one asked you, Jack,” snapped Todd.
“No really. I’m curious. Have you ever touched an ocean? A lake, even?”
Malik ignored me and continued to the next verse. “You don’t have a phone, and I think that is so damn bold, and your hair is like a moonrise, yeah, your hair is like white gold. Blandine, baby, blondie, you’re a weirdo, yeah it’s true, but my God, you smell like roses, and girl, there’s no one else like you.” Malik stopped strumming and beamed at Todd. “S’all I have for now. Still working it out, you know. The kinks. But what do you think?”