EVERY INDICATION

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

There are a number of things to be learned from the striking document posted on the outer wall of the school, and the first is that we should practice restraint as we process the incidents it describes. The anonymous author, who self-identifies as a student and goes by only by the letter “A”—likely a first initial, though it is rendered here with no period—says that he or she arrived for morning class five minutes late as a result of a broken shower at home (“Water came, but in frigid form, and it was impossible to step into without the body recoiling powerfully”). A was met at the school gate and denied entry by administrators, who used as justification A’s friendship with another student, L, who had in previous weeks made a stray remark construed as threatening the safety of a teacher. A continued to insist on entering the school, at which point L was retrieved from class (“Math, I think, where numbers masquerade as truth”) and both students were given detention under the supervision of Coach Tepper (“Once a titanic figure in state baseball, now put out to pasture in the form of semi-retirement and ‘disciplinary consulting’”). Tepper, frustrated with his own lot, treated the students shabbily, subjecting them to foul language and worse. The vivid description of Tepper’s conduct during detention (“his meaty hands seemed close even when far, and his voice was like a trap that had been set”) contains the only consequential clues as to the sex of the author, though they are not definitive. After two days of detention, A and L were released. The document could easily remain mired in a world of grievance, and it would be powerful on those terms—there can be no question that the document is honest and accurate, and that the events it describes are deeply unjust ones—but the author hints at, and then insists upon, the joyful embrace of life, what he or she terms, in exuberant capital letters, the BIG BEING. This is the first lesson of this piece of prose. The second is that D is a writer of the first order and force, one who goes at life with a bounding energy that must be experienced first-hand to be fully believed. The school administrators, both those who are culpable and those who are not, have already been urged to reprint and distribute the piece throughout the school. There is every indication they will do so.