[I am haunted by my characters. Nathan is the most persistent. I have been writing him for 8 years, at various stages of his life. For the first several years, I never wrote from his POV. I wanted an enigma. A black box of a character. A man who acted solely under his own internal logic, to which we could never be privy. More recently I began to let him speak. There are still many ‘episodes’ where his silence says far more.] please note: story contains brief use of homophobic slurs

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Free Verse

The final raspberries are tart and demanding

You will go through the bracken and the apple trees

Wilded from forgotten orchards

The hill a hard climb

To reach them

When you stand knee deep in trillium and the canes arch overhead

The frost-sharpened fruit like blood on their thorns

She will be not there

Not there too in the next room

The scent of her perfume

Blown away by your arrival

Forever elsewhere

Turning the corner before you

Leaving the room as you wake with your hand hollow for want

Looking always away and the back of the head is not hers

Though the laugh and the wave was

You are there

Where you go

She is not there

Where you are

You are not anywhere

You are not

One day you will let go

At the top of the arch of the swing

In spite of the lake and the cliffs and the sky and the steel

You will let go and she will be there

To catch you

The second last line was the clincher, the typed page clearly showing where the word ‘not’ had been included, then redacted, then penciled back in by hand, then erased, more than once. Ray couldn’t expect the kid to read this aloud in front of the class.

He knew–everyone knew–that Nate Tallent’s mother had taken off when he was in grade seven. Between that and his father’s friendship with Hillebrand’s principal Jasper Urkell, you tended to give Nate a pass most of the time, though he never took advantage of it like other kids might have. He was smart for starters, not a screw-up but an intelligent kid dragged down by his peers. Smart but indifferent, and between Ray and a few of the younger teachers, it was agreed that if you cracked down on him he’d probably stop trying.

It showed in his grades. Nate was more than smart enough to average better than a C in English, but he hated doing the work, often spending more effort to get out of it than it would take to just sit there and do it. The results were usually below his best, but with no interest in post-secondary and a family business waiting to pick him up, he could get away with not caring.

Ray Fletcher cared, always a sucker for students with untapped potential, whose meager expectations he could raise, or so he liked to tell himself. Nate was a different breed, not selling himself short so much as wholly disinterested in school, so deep in his own head that Ray didn’t have the time to draw him out.

And then Nate had handed in his free verse assignment. Asking for ‘free verse’ was optimistic, as few kids had ventured beyond ABABCC, as if all the best poems rhymed, as if Whitman and ee cummings and everything since sonnets hadn’t happened. Nate got it, not just the form of real poetry but the feeling, the couching of impossible emotions in a few spare lines describing a walk in autumn, a trace of memory, a hint of one’s mortality. He was fifteen.

Usually Ray asked other people’s advice. Jake Urkell was a legendary principal, genuinely devoted to his pupils, unlike others Ray had known, to whom the kids had seemed an obstacle to the work instead of the work itself.  You could ask him anything, questions about protocol, discipline, keeping the attention of the smart kids and bailing out the rest, and when he was wrong, it was only when he didn’t know enough about the situation.

Ray didn’t need to know any more.  Everyone too much about Nate Tallent already. He was the sort of kid who set off every teacher’s curiosity: a careless genius who was a waste of a brilliant mind, a sterling individual athlete who lacked the temperament for team sports, a habitual shit-disturber playing them for fools, and a bastard in the biblical sense, his parents unmarried, though they were rich enough no one talked about it. To ask anyone about Nate’s poem was to publicly dissect the kid yet again.

Making Nate read the poem in class would lead to the same result. Ray could barely make it through without choking up, struck fresh every time by that second last line, and the first of the stanza: one day you will let go. If Nate cried in front of his classmates, Ray would have ruined every minute of rest of the kid’s high school career, if not his life.

That day as Ray passed along the rows of students silently gnawing on a passage of Macbeth, he touched Nate’s shoulder so the boy looked up. “Come see me at the end of class.”

Sitting behind Nate, Peter Conroy snickered, glad someone else was under the gun for a change. Peter thought he was sneaky for sourcing Iron Butterfly lyrics instead of Zeppelin, as if Ray was an old man and not twenty-six. He still drove a damn Camaro, which at times had made him the coolest teacher in school and at other times made him feel like a try-hard.

“And Peter,” Ray went on, letting his exhaustion harden his voice. “Next time you pinch song lyrics for your poetry assignment, you might try to reach back farther than five years ago. I don’t want to see you after class. I just want you to hand in something tomorrow that’s worth grading.”

Nate barely reacted: a widening of the eyes and the hint of a smile. When the bell rang he stayed in his seat. Ray closed the classroom door then slipped into the desk beside.

“What’s going on?” Nate asked after a prickly minute. “You’re not dying or anything, are you, Mr Fletcher?”

“No. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“Then what did I do wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s your poem, Nate. It’s outstanding. Really well written. Clearly it’s about something very personal, though. So I wanted to give you the chance not to read it tomorrow.”

The boy looked hard at him. “Why wouldn’t I read it? Isn’t that part of the assignment?”

“It is, and yours is one of the best poems I’ve ever seen from a student. And I don’t mean technically, though that’s there too. It’s just…it’s rare for someone your age to show so much feeling.”

“What about Marcy’s poem? That had plenty of feeling.”

“Melodrama, we call that. It looked less…expressive on paper.”

“They say delivery’s everything.”

“Nate, your poem made me cry. I can’t imagine what it was like to write. And I want you to know that if you don’t want to read it in front of the class, I’m okay with that.”

 “Are you worried I’m going to lose my shit up there?”

“I wouldn’t use those words, but kind of.”

Nate took a deep breath then sat back. “Look, Mr Fletcher, you shouldn’t read too much into it. Into the poem, I mean.”

“But isn’t it about your…” The chill in Nate’s eyes told Ray he was overstepping. This was the very interrogation he had been trying to spare the kid. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr Fletcher.”

***

If he hadn’t been able to see the parking lot from his second story classroom, Ray might have sold the Camaro by now. It was what the kids called a heat-score, a beautiful machine that made people stop in their tracks to look, and every time Ray gave out an F or a detention, he felt the need to keep half an eye on the car for the next few days.

It also made him early, as he needed to get the right parking spot, in his line of sight but not under the pine trees and their drips of paint-corroding sap. As a bonus, it had put him in good standing with Mr Leonard and the other veteran teachers, who thought of him as the punctual one.

Ray had grown to love the serenity of the school before the bells rang, as he nursed the morning’s first coffee and took in the view. In June the sun would have risen hours ago, but on this November morning the pines’ shadows still lay long across the frost-rimed grass when he heard the fighting.

Yelling you heard plenty of, but he knew that edge, when it was more than two kids trying to shout each other down. Whatever was happening, others were gathering to watch. During his practicum he’d had to break up a near-riot at a football game, when two factions of children had turned on each other with shocking speed. He’d been herding his charges onto their school bus when the name-calling started, suspension-worthy insults flying back and forth. He’d looked back in time to see a canvas backpack flung by one of his kids sail across the gap and slam into the other crowd. He’d had no time to notice whose backpack, as their side had immediately returned fire. Like iron filings to a grade nine science magnet, every kid in sight had been sucked into the maelstrom of undirected anger.

The voices this morning had that same anxiety, the same urgency of craving yet fearing the sight of blood. Ray grabbed his coat and ran. By the time he got downstairs, other students were running across the grass towards the parking lot, drawn by the sound. He couldn’t see the source until he got around the corner, where a couple dozen kids stood in a loose crescent around a pair in the centre. Ray’s heart dropped as he recognized one of the pair as Nate.

At least it was only a standoff, nobody bleeding, the boys a few yards apart though both bristling with rage. “You ought to shut up about things you don’t know, Conroy,” Nate was saying as Ray approached.

Pete didn’t answer, the taunts coming from his cronies behind him. “Oooh, little orphan Annie’s gonna cry.” “How was that ‘special meeting’ with that faggot Fletcher? Your ass sore?” “No wonder your mom took off, fucking queer.”

“What the hell is going on?” Ray shouted. “This stops immediately or every one of you is suspended.” Other teachers were running this way, and in Ray’s moment of inattention, Pete Conroy made his move.

 Not much of a move, as by the time Ray turned around Pete was on the ground, clutching his face and howling, blood seeping through his fingers. Nate lowered his fists from his boxer’s stance as the crowd scattered.

“Sorry, Mr.  Fletcher.”

“It was self defense.”

Nate frowned, at Ray, at his own hands. “I hit him first.”

“He antagonized you.”

“You weren’t even here. Are you saying you’re gonna lie?”

“Are you?”

***

Ray never found out how the fight started. It was however the excuse Urkell had been waiting for to expel Conroy, already on probation for what staff referred to as the Volleyball Incident. Nate got the mandatory minimum of three days suspension. By the time he returned to English class, they had started The Merchant of Venice.

Cleaning out his desk at the end of the semester, Ray found Nate’s poem, ungraded. He’d given Nate a hundred percent on the unit, enough to raise his overall grade to a B minus. The typed poem he had hidden, not wanting it to become evidence. Nate had never asked for it back.

Ray read it now in the pale light of a waning January afternoon, then again out loud, because poetry is meant to be heard, then once more because he liked it so much, because he could feel the want in the hollow of his own hand. Nate had never needed his help.