Part 75: James
The only paper James had in his room, it turned out, was the backside of his English test. He’d thrown the rest out when he cleaned earlier this weekend - a weekend that was probably going to last forever, now that Hannah had gone out to chase her dream and left him behind. It was always going to end like this, he saw now. In their conversations about the future; in the words he’d written (or imagined writing) about her; in the characters he compared her to. (Surely To Kill A Mockingbird ended with Dill leaving Maycomb forever.) There was always a hint of the too-good-to-be-true about her, a touch of the past. She seemed already like someone you “used to know” and never stopped thinking about, because no one else in your boring, gray life would ever live in quite so many colors.
And there was nothing he could write, do, or say that would bring her back. So he might as well do something of his own (that’s what she would do); follow his passion the way she had followed hers. Since this afternoon, with roots stretching further back, his strongest passion was hatred for the computer and Myssenger and that whole fake world. So he would write a blistering, fiery manifesto (all great words) hold a mirror up to his class and show them how shallow, how petty they had allowed themselves to become.
Then, if she did reach out in some way - a phone call from a truck stop, her last thirty-five cents - she would see that he had been busy without her, that he hadn’t needed her after all, that he was his own person. He had been before he met her, so why not again? There had to be such thing as life after love.
The back of an English test wasn’t ideal - some yellowed scrap or fast-food napkin would been better - but it was what he had. He wrote furiously, messily, punctuationlessly (but careful of spelling) until he reached the bottom of the page. He could have kept going but there was something about one page, some line about “if you can’t say it in one page . . .” Who had said that? (A writer, take it as gospel; a teacher, toss it out.) The quote had stuck, but its source hadn’t. Oh, well. Now that he put the pen down, he was done.
It was brilliant, perfect, complete.
James tore off a corner, smeared the ink with his palm just a little bit.
All that remained was getting them to read it. No point condemning people if they never knew it. He imagined himself slapping his manifesto up in some prominent public place - nailing it to the door of a church (an image from school, he figured, but this too came without a name attached, he wanted to say Martin Luther King but the image was definitely someone white: European, dark-hooded, sinister.) Taping it to his locker: was that the modern equivalent? But it would be torn down, and not as an act of censorship or indignation at his audacity, but by some idiot like Sean who didn’t even read things, just tore them down because someone else wanted them up. The only place people actually read anything was . . .
Myssenger, of course. The very thing he was criticizing was the reason no one would hear his criticism. They were all too blind to see the person telling them they were blind. (Or too deaf to hear - which was better?)
Unless he posted it there. One last time, one last post, and then he would delete his profile, leave that fake world forever. (That was the Garden of Eden! That was what he needed to escape. And Hannah was the snake, but the snake was good.)
Now, while he was still fired up?
No, his family was still awake down there, and he had just said he didn’t want to use the computer, and they wouldn’t understand the poetic perfection of what he was doing. They would think he was just being polite before, and they would buy him a new computer, and he would have to use it, to be polite, and he would be trapped.
Plus, that would mean seeing what Sean and Courtney and Victoria had been saying all this time - the people he had just finished calling shallow and pathetic - and feeling like he had to respond. Surely they were still online, what else did they have in their lives.
First thing in the morning, before school? No, what if people didn’t see it, and he had to spend all day in a weird posthumous world of waiting - that tense moment between sending a risky message and getting a reply, stretched out over seven hours?
No, it had to be tomorrow afternoon. Susan worked on Thursdays - good. So he would post it at precisely 2:50 PM (close out the chat boxes without reading them first, to save time), give them some time to read it, ask him their inevitable follow-up questions - and then he would delete his account (somewhere around 4:00) so by the time anyone got home he could be doing something else, and it would all be behind him.
Plans made - triumphant, satisfied, eagerly anticipating tomorrow, thinking of Christmas Eve and how it was even better than Christmas - James went straight for the shower.