TELLING STORIES-Episode One

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.