Education and other preparations
Larry FlynnWe, the boys, found joy in our boarding school days at St. Thomas Preparatory when we looked out the windows of Pennington Cottage and down upon Flower Boy—the ruddy Irish kid from Buffalo who tended the dormitory garden as part of his work duty—and relieved ourselves, if only for a moment, of our deepest inadequacies. “Brought your kneepads today, Flower Boy?” we’d say, or “Oh me, oh my, what pretty flowers you are planting, Flower Boy!” We fist-bumped and shrieked, following the model of recent alumni who showed off their tattooed biceps when they returned to visit The Prep from college.
In these moments, I wanted to be Flower Boy.
With earphones on, Flower Boy tended the garden, as had been written in his scholarship contract. He planted pink, yellow, and red annuals. He installed a trellis and guided tomato vines along its frame. When we overheard someone talking outside the dorm, it was usually Flower Boy, who stained his grey Costcobrand sweatpants and tees with mulch. Was he talking on the phone? Was he talking to the plants? Was he—okay? We had never seen him sitting in the waiting room with us at The Prep’s Clifford Health & Counselling Center, the one adorned with oversized farmland paintings on all three walls and newly installed white tile. We only saw Flower Boy gardening or sitting at his desk, buried in labor, gripping a Capri-Sun in his right hand and a mechanical pencil in his left.
I needed to become Flower Boy.
His sunflower-patterned bedsheets were so comfortable and overused that they had ripped. We’d say to Flower Boy, “Did your grandma die in those sheets? Jesus Christ, talk about stank,” or “Aren’t you around flowers enough, Flower Boy?” During free periods, I would sneak into his room and rest in his bed because my sheets were brand new and too stiff. Flower Boy caught me once. He simply nodded and set his backpack down on the wooden chair.
“I was never here,” I said, and left.
When Flower Boy’s mom came to visit—Flower Mom, we called her in the shadow of our dorm rooms—she wrapped her arms around Flower Boy’s bony neck and rocked back-and-forth. She sang something that sounded like a lullaby. Most of us averted our eyes in a moment like this, but I watched. Flower Mom wore her hair up in a messy bun and always looked on the verge of sweating. She patted her son on the back and Flower Boy rode passenger, in a seat that was always empty until he sat in it.
After I passed my Massachusetts driving test sophomore year, I would sometimes follow Flower Mom and Flower Boy into town. Sometimes, they hit the expressway heading west, and I wasn’t yet comfortable driving on I-495 where Merrimack Valley drivers were always losing a bumper or tire. Once, though, I saw them drive past the highway exit, turn onto Main Street, and park in front of the cheapest place in town: the Shawsheen Diner. From the parking lot and through the blinds, I watched them sip coffee. They looked across the table at one another. Although the blinds covered their mouths and left me with a fractured portrait of their conversation, I could see something growing in their connected eyes.
That night, I called my parents and cried.
When I was just a boy, I twirled mom’s hair with my rotating index finger until it created a knot. “Pull your finger out gently,” she would say, “gently.” She balanced me at the intersection of her hands and breasts and pregnant belly. She sang Polish lullabies— aaa, kotki dwa!— and poured my milk in a plastic, baby-blue babia. I brought my babia to my first soccer game and sipped it on the sidelines. Some other kid’s dad was the coach and he told me to put the babia down. “This is soccer, not the circus,” he said. Mom yelled back at the coach from the bleachers. “He’s just a boy,” she said.
She had embarrassed me. I quit soccer. Then, mom wasn’t pregnant anymore and yet I still had no siblings and that was the last I saw of dad for a while—until it was time to apply to high schools in eighth grade and dad came back with a tan and a beard. I’m not sure why, but he seemed to care about where I was accepted. Dad went to The Prep, but that’s all I knew about it. No one talked about dad because he didn’t seem like the sort of man worth talking about, the sort of man you didn’t want to become.
When mom and dad came to visit me at The Prep, I missed them enough to give them half-second hugs. That was just about it. For parents’ weekend, they had to sit in on classes where teachers spoke glowingly about the top students as if the kids were their own children, but when my parents introduced themselves as mine, the teachers would welcome them generically to class. Biology was the worst of it. When Vi’s parents and Tony’s parents visited, teachers spoke as if they were part of the second coming of a new generation of scientists. I learned their names were
Aashvi and Zecheng from overhearing their parents use them. I felt having two parents come for parents’ weekend was such overkill; it cramped the classrooms with folding chairs and made the parents complain about their backs all day.
I felt Flower Boy was lucky he had only one visitor. It was a sick thought, but I was told boys have a hard time controlling their thoughts.
After my first round of report cards, my parents and I had difficult conversations. Dad told me they weren’t paying The Prep fifty-five thousand—fifty-five thousand, he repeated—to teach me how to cry. I told him the quantity of homework was getting to me. Dad said he could do it, so why couldn’t I? Mom’s silence hurt more.
We were assigned Lord of the Flies. Then, Stop Time. We would have connected with these books if we had taken the time to read them.
The Prep called its reading program rigorous, but we could get by on SparkNotes and minimal in-class contributions, so who knows what we were being “prepped” for, exactly. Occasionally, the teacher would slip in texts with minimal Wikipedia entries, like this Dostoevsky novella which none of us understood. But then we could simply admit our lack of understanding and the teacher—in this case, the legendary Dr. Knight who had been teaching at The Prep for thirty-five years—would appreciate our honesty and gave us some much-needed context around Dostoevsky’s anti-socialist bent. We accepted what he said because how were we to know any different?
I had actually enjoyed the first page or so of the Russian story because it began with, “I am a sick man,” and I felt that I, too, was sick.
We wrestled in the hallways. We compared bad grades. We whipped each other with towels in the bathroom. We smashed empty bottles on the ground. We threw ballpoint pens out our windows for sport. We lit joints. We played dubstep so loud the bathroom mirrors started to shake, and we could no longer discern the reflections and contours of our bodies. I punched the shaking mirrors lightly at first, then over and over until my knuckles turned blue. I told the boys that I had failed to max out my chest press and I had been so mad I punched the white brick wall in the gym. They told me that was badass. They high-fived me, which hurt my hand even more.
We explored places on campus deemed off-limits by administration. The roof of Pennington Cottage was infamous for this reason. Everyone knew it was easily accessible by fire escape. Legend had it that a disgruntled groundskeeper in the 90s climbed all the way to the top on a Monday morning and jumped. I guess it was easier to jump than to finish the work week. The headmaster sent out a reminder email to students and parents that no one was to climb on fire escapes except for emergencies.
No one ever changed the structure of the fire escape in order to avoid people from walking to the top, so someone was bound to do it again. I never thought it would be me.
One minute, I’m making fun of Flower Boy. The next, I’m becoming a father and my wife is having a boy and he is due by winter. I own property and fill out I-9s and vote and restart a sputtering car engine and spend an entire Saturday cleaning the gutters and shovel the cobblestone walk because the UPS guy is coming today and I can’t be liable for his fall because I am having
a child and I will need to write checks for his piano lessons, Little League, and SSAT prep, then SAT prep, and then ACT prep just so I can write another check to another institution just in time to fill out another I-9 and decompose on the couch after work because my client chewed me out which means my boss chewed me out which means my wife will chew me out, fairly, because we are having a child and he is a boy and he will need parents to help him make sense of how, and why, we live. §
During study hours on a Wednesday, I climbed up on the roof for the first time. I was just following instinct. I leaned forward on the railing, as I would many times. I made the mistake of looking down—not because I was afraid of heights but because I saw the beautifully tended garden, out of season.
I took a deep breath and watched how the chickadees were flying and then I felt someone touching my shoulder like I imagined a father would and next thing I knew my head was on Flower Boy’s chest and I was crying into the fabric of his mulch-stained hoodie.
At lunch the next day, I sat across from Flower Boy. The chicken fingers were crunchy, so we could only hear our own chewing and didn’t have to talk to each other. That night, Flower Boy found me on the roof again, and carried me back to my room. This became my routine throughout my time at The Prep, often instead of brushing my teeth and using deodorant. Supposedly, adults were in charge at this school. To me, they were invisible. And I was invisible to them. I was just another boy. §
What tremendous role models we had at The Prep. We heard Mr. Gibson did all sorts of hard drugs on the back porch of Flemings
House once the students left in June. I overheard Mr. Chamberlain after class telling Flower Boy he should slow down and try not to answer every question, to give other people a turn. And it felt wrong or unfair or unjust, though I couldn’t explain why. We knew so little. We didn’t know why Ms. O’Neal changed her name to Mrs. Dwyer midway through the year. We believed the ghost of a former class president who overdosed at an Ivy in the 80s haunted the lectern where he used to give the announcements at all-school chapel meetings. It was one of many reasons we never ran for class president.
Flower Boy had run for Freshman Rep, though. He didn’t quite dress the part and his candidacy ended early, but I would have voted for Flower Boy. He could have played the role in his own way—beautifully.
In the stir-fry line at the beginning of junior spring, I learned Flower Boy would be leaving The Prep.
“It’s just not for me,” Flower Boy said.
“But it’s a good school,” I said. “Are you going back to public?”
“I just need to be closer to my mom.”
“Which is it? Not for you? Or the thing about your mom?”
“It’s both, buddy,” Flower Boy said, taking his stir fry in one hand and patting me on the back with the other.
This was the season when we, the boys of Pennington Cottage, admitted to our collective self that we saw Flower Boy as a member of our family even if we hadn’t chosen him. We could smell the fear in each other when we slowly, deeply understood that Flower Boy’s departure meant we would all be departing, that if one of us left it meant we would all be leaving, that we might be individuals forced to become something other than we, the boys.
So began our little Stay, Flower Boy, Stay! campaign. Luke and Cooper made posters. Jason and Francis passed them out. Russell and I held up signs outside Wallingford and I had a conversation with a girl that wasn’t confined to in-class groupwork. She pointed to the poster.
“Who is Flower Boy?”
“Do you know Declan Finley?”
“Oh, Declan. I love Declan. He’s leaving?”
“Well, not if we have anything to say about it,” I said. And she laughed. This was the first time I had ever called Flower Boy by his real name. I asked the girl for her name too. For the rest of our days together at The Prep, Bella and I waved to each other when passing by. Senior year, we made out at a Sadie Hawkins dance. Now she’s downstairs, pregnant with our baby boy. “Who is Flower Boy?” was the first thing my wife ever said to me. Bella reminds me of this often. We hold our baby in her belly and laugh.
When dad left us again at the end of spring break, I spent my evenings in Declan’s room, playing 2K against the CPU while he read books. Occasionally, I read too: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Native Son, and even a little bit of Don Quixote. When you’re in the presence of someone else thinking hard, it makes you think a little harder too. When you’re around people smashing bottles, you smash bottles too. When you don’t have anyone of substance in your life, you start to lack substance too. “We” is an important word to define. This seems like a universal truth—one of the lessons taught at boarding school.
Mom came to our April parents’ weekend alone. My English teacher, Ms. Lambeau, spoke highly of me though still considered my energy in class to be “inconsistent.” At least dad wasn’t there.
Mom took me to the Shawsheen Diner, and even let me drive the Subaru. We ordered French toast with whipped cream and butter. We provided joy for one another in a way I hadn’t felt before, like we were relieved to be away from the boys and the men, and it was just two people with no agenda except to love the human being positioned in front of them. I told her when her face had powdered sugar on it. She told me to eat slowly. She was human, I could see for the first time in my life. I imagined her coming home from her office and encountering the deafening emptiness of our New England colonial. I imagined her looking across the table at the Shawsheen Diner and thinking about who could fill the empty seats. This moment could have been so different. She could have been sitting beside a husband who wrapped his arm around her—a different husband. She could have been with her son and another child, one who could have come to fruition alongside me. She could have been preparing a new freshman for admission into The Prep. To anyone looking through the diner’s blinds, they would have thought the image of mom and I sitting together was a full portrait of all there ever was and all there ever would be. No one could see what was growing.
I wanted to crawl onto her side of the booth and rest my head in her lap, though we were at the Shawsheen Diner and people from The Prep might see us. But it was not embarrassing to be seen in public with mom anymore. And it was not embarrassing to be seen with Declan.
We, Declan and I, sat on stones in the garden, flecking mulch in the faces of the gnomes and talking about the Patriots and Bills. The boys would sometimes still throw pens down at us, as had been Pennington tradition according to the boys who were not on the gardening scholarship, but it was less frequent—in part
because I had stopped throwing pens altogether. One day, when our hands were full of soil, I noticed I hadn’t been up on the roof in weeks.
In world religions, I learned about Buddhism and Shintoism and Hinduism. In history, I learned about capitalism and democracy and communism and socialism. In English, we read transcendentalists and post-colonialists and modernists. The garden seemed like a place where all the forces on the world coalesced into flowers growing, labor completed, identities created. Practically, though, the garden didn’t make much sense. By junior year, I started to see and think about these sorts of things.
“Why does the school even need a garden? Who is the garden for?”
“I think it’s for me,” Declan said. “Made for me and made by me.”
“Like for the people, by the people,” I said.
“It’s ‘by’ first, and ‘for’ second.”
“Right, right.”
“They think I should be earning my stay here.”
“But then why don’t I have to?”
Declan smiled and that’s when I understood just enough about the world The Prep was preparing us for. When I walked back to Pennington Cottage after classes every day, I felt the weight of carrying a backpack I did not deserve.
I will always walk with such a burden, though I carry a satchel to work now. I sell insurance to people who need to feel secure.
When the last day of junior year arrived alongside fickle May clouds, I privately acknowledged to myself that our Stay, Flower Boy, Stay! campaign had proven unsuccessful. Declan and I finished our finals and brought all our boxes of clothes and books down to the edge of the front porch. We played our final game of 2K, and I let Declan win. Behind Pennington, Declan and I sat in emerald Adirondacks that overlooked the flowerbed. The wind
pushed our comb-overs in the wrong direction, and we squinted into the high sun.
The boys were inside while we were outside.
When Declan’s mom pulled up outside Pennington minutes later, I heard myself asking them to take me with them. I remember their laughs. Declan gave me a hug with both hands. He was wearing the same grey hoodie he wore the first night he carried me down the fire escape. He said something I can’t recall, but I can still remember all I need to remember: the security of Declan’s embrace, imprinted and embodied.
I have only another decade or so to decide whether or not our boy should go to The Prep. He will get the legacy boost. Maybe a scholarship too. Bella and I have already begun talking about this future. She tells me we have time; then I watch her grow bigger. Sometimes, when I need to think about the future alone, I still climb to the roof of my apartment complex to feel my legs shake again. There are no gardens below to catch me, only asphalt and parking meters and cars. Sometimes, I stand on my tiptoes and, when I do, St. Thomas Prep’s school song rings in my head. I still hear the boys. They are shouting the finale: ad astrahhh! per asperahhh! The boys shout louder than car horns barking at the edge of my peripheral vision. The noise always becomes just a bit too loud, so I come back inside.
Our apartment smells like lavender and chrysanthemum. I rub Bella’s feet with cocoa butter lotion to alleviate her pain. I lift her belly to hold, for a moment, the weight she carries. I place my hands on her hips like I had at prom, and we sway to twinkling jazz instrumentals. Our bodies converge. Our heat is collective. Our boy blossoms in the pauses between notes, in the space where someone might sing.