First Man Page 7

  I still worked diligently in the classes that I genuinely liked. English received my full attention, and I’d always enjoyed history and French, but math and science definitely slipped. For all the teachers liked to warn us that “colleges can still take back your acceptance if your grades drop too much,” we all knew it would take absolute academic failure to get the schools to say no to those fat tuition checks our parents would be writing.

  So I skipped a few homework assignments in calculus and gave my lab reports only the most cursory attention in physics and barely noticed my grade drop from an A- to a solid B. My head was firmly entranced in Joseph Campbell’s world of mythology, and my stack of source materials grew larger each day.

  Far from just being an hour of reading under his supervision each day, my meetings with Mr. Edwards were filled with lively discussion. He heaped more reading upon me, handing over copies of excerpts from obscure British fantasy novels and sections from Bulfinch’s Mythology.

  Any other teacher would have stuck to the role of simple facilitator, keeping an eye on me and grading my work without actually reading alongside me, but not Mr. Edwards. He devoured the course material with an enthusiasm that matched my own, always eager to bring in additional sources to increase my understanding of the material, even if they never made it into the final paper.

  “In the universes created by the authors of these books, fantasy is reality, and, intentional or not, they are perpetuating a tradition that dates back to the days before writing existed.” Mr. Edwards fell into the lecturing mode out of habit, seeming to almost be speaking to himself as he flipped through a paperback copy of Mists of Avalon. “The myth of the great hero triumphing over whatever evils were set before him has become so much a part of humanity’s collective unconscious that nearly every work of literature or film follows this archetype on at least some level.”

  Glancing up from the passage detailing Morgaine’s priestess training, I added, “I’d almost be curious to try this with other types of genre fiction. Fantasy’s an obvious choice to parallel with mythology since most of the books tend to involve quests and epic battles, but I wonder if the same would work with horror or historical fiction.” I paused, my mind wondering how I’d be able to work the plots of The Shining or Pet Semetary into the hero’s journey.

  Mr. Edwards laughed, and I remember having to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out, “You should do that more often.”

  “Let’s finish one genre before you start integrating every subject you can think of into this project,” he said, reigning my ideas back in. “It’s not a bad idea by any means, but you have more than enough material just with fantasy.” He gestured to the constantly growing mountain of thick books that had taken up residency on his desk. “It’s not as though you selected a subject that lends itself to short fiction.”

  I couldn’t help agreeing. My mythology texts were the shortest by a large margin, and even those clocked in at about 400 pages. I was a voracious reader, but the ever-growing stack was beginning to look daunting, even to myself.

  “I think focusing on The Lord of the Rings for a fair portion of the paper is a good idea,” Mr. Edwards said. “You could easily get bogged down with far too many universes and end up writing a paper that’s too disjointed if you don’t specialize.”

  I nodded in agreement, having come to the same conclusion myself. My mind started to wander as Mr. Edwards listed off a few other books he recommended I reference.

  Our daily sessions had been going on for two weeks already, and with each passing day, I was seeing him less and less as a teacher and more and more as a co-collaborator in this paper.

  One glance at his desk told me that I wasn’t exactly alone in that assessment. Post-it notes peppered to surface of his desk, covered in his spidery scrawl.

  “Game of Thrones? Too long for one semester, find excerpts re: Tyrion.,”

  “Harry Potter – possible discussion re: myths used as behavioral tools for children.”

  The notes went on and on.

  I felt mildly guilty at first for occupying so much of his time with my silly project, but Mr. Edwards’ pleasure at watching the project begin to take shape matched my own.

  The bell rang, startling us out of the insulated world we had created. He handed me a stack of copies he’d made of sections from Game of Thrones and our fingers brushed, just the barest bit of contact. I froze for a moment, looking up into those warm, dark eyes and wondering if I was being a foolish girl or if he felt it too.

  He broke my gaze and quickly said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ember.” He stammered, ever so slightly, on my name. I made him uneasy, and I knew I hadn’t imagined that spark.

  “Can’t wait to read these, Adam.” That was the first time I’d called him anything other than Mr. Edwards, even inside my own head. I waited for him to correct me, pushing me back into the safe formality of student/teacher interactions.

  Instead, he said nothing, and I walked out of his office wondering just what I had begun.

  COMING STORM

  Adam

  Icicles hug down from the trees, glinting in the pale sunlight like frozen blades. It had surprised no one more than myself that I had grown to love the bitterly cold town. In the beginning, I’d chosen this place almost as a penance, with Hawthorne-esque images of puritanical deprivation in my head.

  Every city I’d ever spent more than a few days in had been warm, blistering sun beating down on dry sands. Only England had been different with its near constant rain peppering the fields from a steel-grey sky.

  New England was an even larger change. The first bite of winter always slipped in unnoticed, riding the winds of autumn, hiding the cold taste of frost behind the scents of wet leaves and apple orchards. Every year, I’d step outside one November morning and find the world glinting with a thin layer of frost that singed your nose when you inhaled, and I’d wonder how I missed the signs.

  January was a bleak time, even for people born and raised in this climate. The whole world seemed to be a uniform shade of muddy grey, the color of the skies blending into the dirty slush on the sidewalks.

  Everyone went a bit stir crazy that time of year. The frenzy of the holidays had ended and the colorful distractions had disappeared. The Christmas trees and balsam wreathes had been hauled away by the city to be shredded into mulch for the next far distant growing season. With the absence of the reds and greens and golds that blanketed the town, we were left with grey and brown. If we were lucky, we’d get a fresh coat of white with the next snowfall.

  Summer seemed years away in January, and even the rare sunny days did little to lift our spirits. The sunlight filtered through the bare trees, weak and watery, almost mocking us with its complete lack of warmth. Times like that made me wonder how anyone survived here long term.

  January was in its last days when I walked into the school that morning. Janet was on a ladder in the middle of the hallway while Laura handed her bright red paper hearts to staple to the bulletin boards. As we crept closer to Valentine’s Day, the school would turn into even more of a den of teenage hormones than it normally was.

  A thin rain had started to fall, and I had lived here long enough to know that it would turn into sleet within a few hours. The stories I’d heard of “snow days” were an illusion in New Hampshire. Unless a full-blown blizzard roared in, life continued on as usual.

  I taught my first classes in a fog, lecturing on autopilot. Deep into the winter with no end in sight, I wanted to do nothing beyond hunker down and hibernate until the spring thaw, but one thought nagged at me, tugging be out of my winter-induced boredom.

  She called me Adam.

  I knew that I was playing a dangerous game by not instantly correcting her and drawing a boundary in the metaphorical sand between us. The rules of formality between teachers and students existed for a reason, even in a society as obsessed with casualness as America, but I had stopped seeing her in the same light as the other students for quite some tim
e.

  Even the books we were reading for her independent study showed my change in perception towards Ember. Older fantasy might have been considered suitable for any audience, but my more recent suggestions involved more modern books that didn’t shy away from violence or sex. In a world where even relatively tame books like The Catcher in the Rye come under fire, I was treading a dangerous line with handing a student a copy of A Storm of Swords.

  I couldn’t even pretend to myself that I still saw Ember as just another student though. Our hours together had become the highlight of my dull days, and I was beginning to see her independent student as a project we were working on together as colleagues instead of merely teacher and student.

  “Hi Mr. Edwards!” Ember stood in my doorway, wrapped in a sweater of thick red wool as protection against the chill that never seemed to leave the halls of this school. She paused pointedly after saying my name, and I realized that calling me Adam hadn’t just been an accidental slip of the tongue.

  For one brief moment, I could hear Laura’s words in my head, warning me away from getting too close to a student. I pushed the thoughts aside.

  “Call me Adam.” I nearly missed the quick quirk of her lips, but I’d grown familiar with her ever-changing expressions over the past month. She’d gotten the answer she wanted then. “In class, I’ll still be Mr. Edwards, but I see no need for that level of formality here.”

  “I agree, Adam,” she said, settling herself in the chair across from me.

  The door still hung open behind her, but for the next hour the world outside it all but disappeared.

  IGNITION

  Ember

  “I don’t know why you’re so weird.”

  I glanced up from poking at the limp carrots on my lunch tray to see Angie staring at me. Angie Simmons was my best friend, and the only person that had stuck with me since freshman year. At a diminutive five foot nothing, I towered over her, but Angie always felt larger than life to me. The head of our high school stage crew, she was used to constantly shouting orders to overly dramatic theater kids and fighting the demands of the divas in dance classes, so she could make a stage whisper heard across the cafeteria.

  Angie was wearing her usual uniform of all black with her dark brown hair coiled around her head in a tight braid. “Stage crew needs to be invisible,” she always said, and the outfit had become a habit even on days where she didn’t have rehearsal.

  And for some reason, I was the weird one.

  “Please elaborate, Angie.” I said, pouring salt over the carrots in an effort to make them somewhat palatable.

  “It’s our senior year. The last year before you run off to the city and never set foot back in this. . . what was it you called Portsmouth again? ‘Frozen tundra that saps your lifeblood and replaces it with dirty slush?’”

  “Sounds about right.” I took a bite of the carrots. Nope, still not anything resembling food.

  Angie continued, “Anyway, it’s our senior year, and you decide to do this project that takes every freaking minute of your spare time. For no reason!” The third member of our little group sat down next to Angie, a sad approximation of a taco on his tray. “Brian’s fun and all, but I would like to spend some time with my best friend.”

  “What are we talking about?” Brian Hamilton asked around a mouthful of taco. We’d both stopped being amazed at his ability to stomach the school’s food ages ago. Brian had moved to Portsmouth from Florida the middle of junior year. His tanned, Southern body had not coped well with arriving in the frozen North in the middle of December, and he’d been grumbling about it ever since.

  A bit too lazy to fit in with the nerds, and not nearly athletic enough to fit in with the popular kids, Brian had sat alone with an iPod and a bored expression for a week until we invited him into our little group.

  “Pay attention, Brian,” Angie snapped, only half-joking. “I’m trying to figure out why our dear Ember suddenly decided to become a super nerd when it no longer benefits her.”

  “It still benefits me!” I argued, finally giving up to disgust and pushing away my tray. “It’s good practice for college! And I like Mr. Edwards.”

  Angie smirked. “Oh I bet you like him. I remember you from freshman year.” Angie’s voice rose about three octaves as she imitated me. “’Oh Mr. Edwards, I just want to hear him say my name in that sexy accent. I like to read books too! Now take off your shirt.’”

  I shrugged. “You’re not wrong. That accent gets me every time.” I sobered immediately though, well aware that even joking about something like that could get my favorite teacher in big trouble. “Seriously though, I like the project. I don’t care if I get credit. Hell, I can probably save the paper and use it for some class in college if I major in English. So I’m just planning ahead.”

  Angie scoffed, and nibbled daintily at the bland approximation of pizza the cafeteria served. “So what’s he like, outside of class?” she asked.

  I didn’t need to clarify who “he” was. “About the same as in class, I guess,” I replied. At Angie’s unimpressed look, I added. “It’s still a class, Angie. It’s just a lot less formal.” I paused, considering my words carefully. “He’s a lot more relaxed. He laughs more.”

  “And?”

  I shook my head. “That’s really it. It’s still school.”

  That wasn’t it, though. I could have told them that Adam was so different in our meetings that he might as well have been another person. The buttoned up stiffness that colored his usual lectures had vanished, replaced with a quiet intensity about the material that made him impossible to ignore. Something stopped me though, and it wasn’t fear of Angie starting a rumor about just where Adam focused his intensity.

  I simply didn’t want to share. Our daily sessions might have just been debates and discussions, but they were our own, and I had no desire to invite any interlopers into that quiet world, even my best friends.

  “I think it was a good idea,” Brian said, finally speaking up after his taco had been successfully devoured. “Study halls are worthless in this school. Ms. LaPorte actually yelled at me for reading a magazine.” Brain’s lip curled in disgust. His rants about Ms. LaPorte were becoming a near daily occurrence. The skinny chemistry teacher who facilitated study hall apparently had a nefarious plan to make Brian’s life miserable.

  “I didn’t have any homework!” he grumbled, “But I guess it’s a better use of my time to stare vacantly into space.”

  “But I thought you were good at that,” Angie said, innocently.

  The bell rang, cutting off Brian’s reply. I stood up and followed the crush of students out into the hallway and to my next class.

  I didn’t plan to kiss him.

  It’s easy to say that now, but it really was the truth. I walked into his office brandishing a finished copy of my first draft. I knew it was rough and my ideas still had a tendency to run away from me, but that didn’t keep me from being absolutely giddy with pride. At close to forty pages, it was the longest and most detailed paper I’d ever written.

  Beaming, I dropped it on Adam’s desk.

  He looked up at me, surprised. “I thought you weren’t planning on finishing this until next Monday?” he asked, flipping over the cover page and scanning my intro.

  “I was, but I was on a roll this weekend, and I just kept going.” I’d spent the entire weekend shut up in my bedroom, furiously scribbling notes, editing and re-editing endlessly until the ideas started to come together in a real semblance of cohesion.

  Now came the nerves.

  “Ember, I’m sure you don’t want to sit here and watch me read this,” Adam said, flipping the cover page back over. “Why don’t you take a walk for a few minutes? I’ll write you a hall pass in case anyone stops you. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll do a quick read through, and I’ll read it over thoroughly tonight.”

  I reluctantly agreed, even though I knew expecting him to read a thirty-eight page paper while I stared at him was a bit silly. A
dam handed me a hastily written hall pass, and herded me out of his office. Faced with the sudden freedom, I pushed open one of the side doors and walked out into the courtyard.

  March had arrived and winter was finally showing signs of releasing its hold on the town. Large drifts of dingy snow still peppered the school grounds, but muddy patches of earth were beginning to show through in spots. We’d, no doubt, have a few more storms before spring really arrived, but the hope that the bleak season would end finally seemed like more than an idle dream.

  My boots crunched on the dry snow as I made a slow circuit of the school grounds. With every other student cloistered in class, the normally bustling courtyard was silent except for the persistent whistling of the wind.

  Nothing ever seemed to change here. I’d lived in the same small town since my birth, and the constant sameness had grown stifling. I loved my parents, and I understood, at least abstractly, how they’d wanted to build a home in the same familiar place that they’d grown up in.

  They weren’t so provincial to have never left the state. They’d both gone to UCONN for college, travelling a few hundred miles to Connecticut. They’d taken me on family vacations across the country, visiting both coasts in an effort to make me worldly.

  We’d hopped a plane to California one summer when I was 12, and I’d stood at the edge of the ocean, staring out at the impossible blue of the Pacific, so different from the cool steel of the Atlantic.

  I wanted to run off to the big city and experience the difference and the endless possibilities that books and movies promised that cities held. I had surprised everyone with my decision to attend BU. Boston might have fit my criteria as a large city, but it was still a place locked in winter and far too close to home.