Where'er I walk, ten thousand flies precede me / Where'er I walk, ten thousand serpents follow at my feet —Lingua Ignota
“Maybe our hands-off approach was not the right one,” Vanessa muses as she scans the alterations Kelly had made to the gymnasium on the night of the Rose Ball.1
Katie surveys her formally attired classmates for discontent. “No one else seems to mind.”
“We may still get in trouble for it.”
“Black balloons,” Katie observes with a hint of euphemism. “Where on earth do you get so many black balloons?”
Both marvel in silence at how easily the place where they do dodgeball can be turned into a place of mourning. Black balloons and streamers stretch the ceiling. Black roses bend out of vases on the tables. The light fixtures hang low and alternate between blood red and absinthe green. Neither can make out the music from the DJ booth. The sight of boys in football and soccer uniforms holding trays like servants is a different matter.
“Well,” Vanessa sighs, “hello, safety school.”
“What is your safety?”
“I’ll need to find one. This is not Bard caliber.”
“It might be NYU at worst,” Katie counsels.
“We need to avoid every adult tonight.”
“I think our parents may devour the Principal.”
“Poor him,” Vanessa says through her visible teeth.
“I see some poofy sleeves,” Katie points into the mass of students. “And they may be connected to Kelly.”
Vanessa waves Kelly over, who approaches in a rather dated dress and clutching her clipboard like a mortally wounded fawn.
“Well,” Kelly bursts, “what do you think?”
“It is … something …,” Vanessa says gazing around the space, “… that is happening … in real life.”
“It’s a unique interpretation,” Katie interjects in a rescue attempt.
“What do you think of what the art club did?”
Through the crowd they could see murals painted on every available wall space in black, the only immediate point of reference to which was illustrations in salacious old novels their grandfathers might have kept under their beds.
“No school colors,” Vanessa notes with severity.
“I guess in our minds,” Katie mutters with some compassion, “we were thinking closer to Sadie Hawkins dance—less Sadie Hawkins’s funeral.”
“Is that dress from the ‘90s?” Vanessa says with reinforced severity.
Kelly smiles. “It’s something I had laying around.”
The discontent among the crowded revelers is present but vague. Eccentricity of ambiance is mitigated to no small degree by the more typical accents. A bowl of fruit punch is given the impression of inexhaustibility by the Biology Teacher acting as sentinel and supplier for a sufficient arsenal of juice concentrate, with containers of Tang nearby for emergencies. Boys in uniform send finger foods in every conceivable direction, from pigs in blankets to that day’s surviving tater tots. The anxiety rises more distinctly around the DJ booth, where requests to play literally anything else are met by shrugs and grimaces never absent from the powerless. The remaining unease of having either overdressed or underdressed for the occasion hangs over the gymnasium like skin-turning fog. Few are comforted seeing Patty making here way through the crowd in her scuffed Keds, unfashionably worn-out jeans, and a parentally proportioned Dartmouth sweatshirt.
“I didn’t know you were coming to this,” Dale says.
“I was brought here. Some jocks showed up at my house. ‘Your chariot awaits,’ one of them said,” she sardonically reflects.
“You came in a chariot?”
“In an Acura.” Patty takes in the atmosphere and winces. “I feel out of place.”
“Everyone does.”
“Are those tots?” Patty asks surveying Dale’s tray.
“Yeah but they’re really soggy.”
Patty judges Dale’s warning as a matter of taste out of sync with momentary pressures. She grabs a handful of tater tots and shoves them into her mouth with the eagerness of an overextended laboratory rat. She turns away from her servant boyfriend toward the mass where Kelly’s disconcertingly warm face and puffed shoulders meet her comparably more uneasy countenance.
“Hi …” Patty says warily. “You’re in my … American History class?”
“So glad you came,” Kelly says more decidedly.
Kelly puts her pen to her clipboard and flicks a checkmark on an unseen item. A feeling of condemnation coats Patty like a November drizzle.
“I feel like,” the Principal preludes, having escaped the parental mob and joined Vanessa and Katie in their conspicuous huddle in a far-off corner of the gym, “I feel like someone needs to answer for this. And I can’t think of a better pair than the planning committee co-chairs.”
“Wow,” Vanessa huffs, “so hierarchical.”
“What about Mr. Herndon?” Katie proposes.
“Mr. Herndon is not available for comment at this time,” the Principal says hoping that the Math Teacher remains where he saw him list: listening to Jonathan Franzen in his car.
“It’s mostly Kelly,” Vanessa says servilely.
“I have bigger fish to fry with her.”
“There you all are!” Kelly says as, appearing as if conjured by name to a mirror.
“We need to discuss this,” the Principal holds up a folded piece of paper.
“What about it?”
“I didn’t pre-approve it.”
“I recall Mr. Herndon nodding generally in its direction.”
“Be that as it may, there’s only one. Aren’t both queens supposed to make a statement before voting? And for that matter, where are the ballot boxes?”
Kelly sighs with a babysitter’s dwindling patience. “There will be no voting.”
“No voting?”
“And there will be no statements from Angela or Danielle.”
“Girls,” the Principal turns to Vanessa and Katie in mostly submerged panic. “A little help?”
“Actually I agree with that.”
“Totally, yeah.”
“I think we’re all set,” Kelly says, positioning her clipboard. “I have to go to the locker room and make sure everything is ready on my end. You’re up on the platform in 20.”
“To do what?” the Principal asks.
“To give that statement.”
“Why me?”
“Don’t worry, I spent a long time working on it,” Kelly says in affected cuteness.
“But …”
“And it needs to be taken seriously,” Kelly insists in words seemingly stone-cut.
“Whatever you want,” the Principal surrenders, trying to remember the last time anyone had said that to him, if ever it had been.
“Fantastic!” Kelly’s pen makes another check mark as she sinks back into the crowd.
“Now I know you are both feeling overwhelmed on your big night,” the Resilience Coach says to Angela and Danielle, hunched into each other like misshapen, gowned gargoyles at the side of the platform, “but if we do some breathing exercises we can ease your anxiety.”
“No amount of breathing will save us at this point,” Angela seethes.
“I acquiesce,” Danielle concurs to the identical visual perplexity of both women. “What?”
“Well, whenever I’m feeling that resilience is nowhere in sight, I like to think of this … proverb: ‘There are no absolutes in human suffering.’ Then suddenly I’m over the horizon!”
“Who said that?” Angela says with an incredulity bestowing honorary, if mythical adulthood.
“I think Ellen Degeneres was paraphrasing Glennon Doyle.”
“Hey,” Danielle says in unusual meekness, “was I supposed to be red or …?”
Before Angela can register her own uncertainty on the matter all are frozen at the blade-like strikes of two final items on Kelly’s to-do list.
The music halts and the lights stabilize to accommodate the spotlight shining on the platform. The feedback from the tapping of the Principal upon the microphone corrals their silent, somewhat respectful attention in that direction.
“Thank you,” the Principal greets in relentlessly flat tone. “I’d like to welcome you all to this year’s Rose Ball. As you can see this one promises to be somewhat of a departure from previous years in more ways than one. But first, allow me to introduce your white rose queen, Angela Peterson.”
The crowd claps solemnly as Angela hobbles upon the platform now adorned with a rose crown and two sticks jutting out from it. With veneered teeth and satin-gloved hands she smiles and waves through her mortification.
“Congratulations, Angela,” the Principal continues. “And now, your red rose queen, Danielle Chamberlain.”
The crowd and Danielle repeat the previous procession clap for clap, mortification for mortification.
“In lieu of the usual customs, I have this statement on behalf of the planning committee.” He pulls Kelly’s prepared remarks from his pocket and unfolds it like delicate origami. “And before I begin, I just want to say that this statement relies on the first person plural, but this does not strictly reflect any views of the administration or faculty. Just as a disclaimer …” He focuses intently on the piece of paper.
“‘Ritual,’” he begins, “‘teaches us about the importance of community. Tradition teaches us about respecting past generations. Not much is said about how the newest generation can do better than the previous ones. This, to us …’ This is what I’m talking about,” he asides. “‘This, to us, is a problem. Sometimes rituals become lame. Sometimes traditions lose meaning. Each new generation that repeats them sleepwalks through one and complains about the other. The community becomes strangers to each other.
“‘Any new generation that ignores this denies the joy of imagining something new and forfeits the responsibility of making it real. We should be the generation who rejects those denials; and we invite you to complete this creation.’”
The Principal pauses to signal to the uniformed boys in the back, whose trays now provide multiples of plastic skeleton masks.
“‘You’ll see members of the football and soccer team behind you. As they move through the crowd, each girl is to take one mask. (Sorry if we did not get enough.) Now turn to the boy nearest you and hand it to them. Now for the boys:’ carefully ‘place the mask onto the girls who gave it to you.’ I added that ‘carefully’ by the way.
“‘Sometimes the only way to honor a tradition is to end it. And sometimes the only way to respect your elders is to bury them. Because we cannot literally do that, your masked faces will serve in their place. Past and present will bear witness to the end and the beginning. To do so, I call upon the black que—’ Black queen?” The Principal dramatically scrutinizes the page. “‘The black queen … Patty Mansfield’?”
Patty walks onto the platform, wearing her own crown but also two lit sparklers in each hand, a sash that reads “Miss Abyss ’00,” and a face having ascended beyond fear into a dissociation that, to cruder observers, appears narcotized. Kelly stands directly behind her, puppeteering her movements like a mom teaching her child to walk.
“‘I give you Miss Abyss for the class of … zero zero … zero zero …’”
The Principal falls silent as if completing an incantation, and the audience falls into a paralysis as if hexed. Kelly motion’s Patty’s sparkler-wielding arms toward the sticks on each of her sister queens’s heads.
“Principal Carlyle,” Dale calls from the crowd, “is that supposed to happen?”
Faculty, staff, parents, students, and anyone else with the fortune or misfortune to be a witness are rendered indistinguishable in their sudden break from the spell into a kind of frozen ghastliness that often follows a devastating scientific breakthrough, divine revelation, or any other anomalous event that falls well outside of the fire code for a school building. Few sane people can withstand the unfolding of such a secret of the universe. Such is the Biology Teacher’s thinking as she seeks to obscure it with a coating of Tang.
The Principal regains enough of his own cognizance to run through the crowd and alert the proper authorities, or at least the Janitor. As he nears the exit to the hall where Cleo Lehman leans against the wall imbibing on a cigarette.
“Miss,” he says in stifled shriek, “there’s no smoking on these premises.”
“That policy appears to be in doubt,” Cleo purrs as she exhales.
“I have no words for what’s happening right now,” Vanessa admits among her masked peers.
“I have some,” Katie says. “‘Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.’”
“Who said that?”
“I can’t remember.”
“I remember,” chimed Amber, who, if you recall from a previous chapter, exists. “Dakota Johnson said it in Vogue.”
So concludes what is basically a novella. Albeit one that needs reworking and elaboration into a respectable standalone form. I wish a desolate holiday season on no one; but if yuletide desolation is your lot, if literally every other available diversion fails you, and if you did not dislike this series, I festively but humbly offer these installments anew.