BONFIRE
During the day, the pile of wood had looked very much out of place: an unruly heap in the middle of the hill next to the precise lines and angles of the soccer field. In the evening, though, it seemed to Brian that the darkness had made room for it. Sometimes the wood was like a shadow against the deep blue of the sky, and sometimes, in Brian's view, it was the sky that darkened behind the pile, and what he had seen before as a mysterious mountain became distinguishable again as logs and planks and a cardboard dragon as he stood alone and watched. People had always talked to Brian, to everyone at Choate, in fact, about
being lonely. The first few days at
school, all of the teachers, peer counselors, and team captains gave speeches; everyone, it
seemed was on the lookout for people who were lonely. “You can be lonely, even in a crowd,” they’d
say, again and again.
Brian liked being lonely, though. At least, he liked being alone. The
basement of the library, the laundry building, even the back corners of the
cavernous dining hall always teemed with students: students studying, students
playing tag in the math building with its enormous windows, students hurrying
to this and that. People were always
watching you, sitting down with you, and talking to you. His room didn’t help either. First of all, Brian had been assigned one of
those happy, chatty, effervescent roommates. Energetic at any hour of the day, Fred had come to Choate with dozens of
friends already—friends from summer camp, friends from his old school, and
friends that he seemed to Brian to make without any effort at all, and their
dorm room, even though it was all the way up on the third floor, was seldom quiet and never empty. They called
him “Bri,” and “B-dog”-which he loved
and hated at the same time.
Besides, Brian’s idea of solitude wasn’t about being hidden. He could have done that easily enough by
finding a desk in the language lab, putting on headphones, and pretending to be fascinated by Spanish
verbs. What Brian liked was to be
somewhere, a real place, a place with space in it, but still to be alone, to
look at things without worrying about other people getting in the way. His favorite moment at the school so far was
one Tuesday when his English teacher cancelled class, the last period of the day,
and Brian went down to the gym early for soccer and found the building silent
and vacant. He kicked a ball against the wall of the basketball court for half an hour or so, listening to it echo until the crowds
appeared, first in a trickle, then a flood, filling the building with their clomping cleats, and he fled to the fields. With the whole school, it seemed, at the Pep Rally in the Arts
Center, Brian examined the wood that was waiting to become the
bonfire from every possible angle. Every now and then, he could hear laughter or applause from across the street, and every second or two,
the pile was illuminated in time with the blinking lights on the security car as it
waited for the hundreds of students to rush across the street, as they would, inevitably, in
a matter of minutes, taking over what Brian had already come to think of as
“his” place.
“Everyone’s inside.”
Brian looked up.
He had not really assumed that he was totally alone. That never happened. There were so many rules, it seemed to Brian, and most of them appeared to him to have been invented in order to prevent his solitude. He was almost always
afraid of getting in trouble by accident, like by waking up too early and leaving the dorm before he was allowed to, or by
wandering off "campus" without knowing where the boundaries actually
were. Anyhow, there were security people and firefighters somewhere nearby, and there were people
whose job it was to keep the woodpile unlit until the students arrived. It would be, Brian admitted to himself,
pretty funny if someone were to burn down the bonfire before everyone got
there. Still, from his spot on the hill, Brian
had thought that he was observing unseen, if not actually alone. The voice startled him, and he turned around,
almost losing his footing in the mud.
“I’m sorry?” Brian’s apology came
out sounding like a question.
“I said ‘Everyone’s inside.’”
She was almost invisible, with a dark blue sweatshirt on that read
“Welcome To Skullcrusher Mountain” and the hood up, so that she had practically
blended into the darkness.
“You’re not inside.” Brian felt like they were somehow in the middle of a
conversation, not the beginning, and he wondered momentarily if he just hadn’t
been paying attention.
“Well, I’m special. What’s your
excuse?”
“I’m sorry, but do I know you?” he said.
“Why do you keep apologizing? That’s twice, and we’ve only been talking
for like a minute.”
“Sorry. No. I mean, it’s just that I thought I was
alone.”
“You’re at a bonfire. There’ll be
about eight hundred screaming people here in ten minutes.”
“I’m not at a bonfire yet. Nothing’s lit. I’m at a pile of wood.”
“And what makes that worth staring at? Anyhow, you do know
me. I know you, that is. I’m Max’s sister. Bethany.” She said it with three very distinct syllables.
Max was one of Fred’s friends, the pack that surrounded
Brian’s roommate, night and day. They
were always nice enough to Brian, and he was grateful for the fact that he never had to enter the dining hall with its high ceiling and its frightening choices of
tables without being summoned and welcomed to Fred’s group. Brian certainly liked being alone, but not in
the dining hall. Never in the dining
hall. Sitting alone would be the sort of
public solitude that Brian couldn’t even imagine, the kind that he and his
mother had discussed that summer, getting ready for the new school year.
“What if I’ve got nobody to eat with?” he asked, over and over.
“Well, you’re nice. Make new friends,”
she had suggested. “If you just walk up
to a stranger and say ‘Hi, I’m Brian Decker,’ I’m sure it will all work out.”
Brian was just as sure that that would lead to failure and
humiliation. "Hi, I'm Brian
Decker"? He'd rather not eat. He'd rather never eat. Only once, so far, had he gone to dinner without a plan and a table full
of guys he knew, and it turned out to be a disaster. It was a crowded day in the room, and he sat at a miraculous empty table, only to be joined by one of
the faculty families, complete with a toddler in a
high chair and a sleeping baby in one of those plastic things with handles that they wound up
plopping right in the middle of the table: a bizarre centerpiece. Then, because such people were too nice to
simply ignore him, which he would have preferred, he wound up having to talk
about where he was from and how the first few days had been treating him to
this lady whose husband taught Physics and who paid most of her attention not to Brian but instead to the baby, who woke up with a roar and attracted the notice of everyone in the room.
He’d been more careful since then, making sure to be ready to
head to dinner whenever Fred and what seemed like a herd of others were heading out the door. He’d tried to make it seem natural, and only once he’d
felt conspicuous in his worry.
“Are you guys going to dinner soon?” Brian heard himself ask one evening,
while Fred and his gang were discovering just which sorts of YouTube videos the
school’s internet filter had banned (sex and violence involving people) and
which it had not (the exact same acts involving cartoon animals). He’d meant, as he did every night, to work his question into the social
flow of what was going on in the room: lacrosse balls bouncing, music, various
pings and beeps from computers. However,
Brian’s words found one of those pockets of silence that sometimes
happen, even in noisy places, and it was his question, all alone, that everyone
heard. His voice rang, high and awkward.
Everything seemed to stop. "Are you
guys going to dinner soon?"
There was a pause.
“B-Dog’s hungry!” someone said.
“He’s a hungry dog!”
"Feed the B-Dog!"
“FEED THE B-DOG!!”
That night at dinner, everyone at the table scraped leftovers onto
Brian’s plate. Fred barked. Max, whose sister was even at this moment
looking at him with amusement in what were lively eyes—he could see that even
in the darkness of the evening—scratched his ears and asked, “Who’s a good
boy?” to the laughter of the table. He
didn’t mind terribly; if you were the family pet, you were still in the family.
It was just that he tired of it long before everyone else did. Two months had passed, and, if anything, it
had only gotten worse.
“You’re the one my brother bought the dog biscuits for.”
“I guess,” Brian answered. “I
mean, somebody put them by my door one night.
Another time they were under my pillow.
I didn’t know until you said just now that it was Max.”
“Max is an idiot.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s a big deal to me. My
brother’s an idiot, and I share his DNA. It’s clear neither of us is adopted. I mean, look at me. I look exactly like him.”
Brian looked at her. Even in the
dark, Bethany certainly did resemble Max.
They had the same wide open eyes, the same curly brown hair. Brian didn’t look anything like his brother,
who was a freshman at Cornell. Will was
taller, with red cheeks and hair that was almost black. By three in the afternoon, every
day, Will needed a shave. By evening, it
looked like he’d been working on a beard.
Brian was, in contrast, fair, with long eyelashes that made him look
even more sensitive than he was.
“Are you ever going to answer my question?” Bethany asked, standing next
to him and looking, instead of at Brian, down the hill at the pile of
wood. The hill was just steep enough so
that they both had to lean back, just a little, onto their heels in order to keep
standing up straight.
“Which was?”
“Why are you looking at an unlit bonfire?” It was a
fair question, Brian had to admit, as the two of them stood, side by side,
watching the wood and the grass and the trees and the sky in dark silence, or what would have been dark silence if it
hadn’t just then been broken by drums and horns from across the street as
students burst from the Arts Center and turned into an army that advanced across the
street and up toward Brian in the startled November air.
