“This morning I see young people on the cusp of great things.” His words boom from the speakers, everything pronounced so clearly it’s almost uncomfortable to hear: long vowels, hard consonants, like being lulled to sleep only to be jerked awake. What he says boils down to the same clichéd stuff—reach for the stars, who cares if you fall short, maybe you’ll land on the moon—but he’s a good speaker and somehow makes it seem profound.
“This academic year, resolve never to stop striving to be your best possible selves,” he says. “Challenge yourselves to make Browick a better place. Leave your mark.” He reaches then into his back pocket, pulls out a red bandanna, and uses it to wipe his forehead, revealing a dark sweat stain seeping out from his armpit.
“I’ve been a teacher at Browick for thirteen years,” he says, “and in those thirteen years, I’ve witnessed countless acts of courage from students at this school.”
I shift in my seat, aware of my own sweat on the backs of my knees and in the crooks of my elbows, and try to imagine what he means by acts of courage.
My fall semester schedule is Honors French, Honors Biology, AP World History, Geometry (the non-math-genius kind; even Mrs. Antonova calls it “geometry for dummies”), an elective called U.S. Politics and Media where we watch CNN and talk about the upcoming presidential election, and Honors American Literature. On the first day, I crisscross campus from class to class, weighed down with books, the workload increase from freshman to sophomore year immediately apparent. As the day wears on and each teacher warns of the challenges that lie ahead, the homework and exams and accelerated, sometimes breakneck pace—because this isn’t an ordinary school and we aren’t ordinary young people; as exceptional young people, we should embrace difficulties, should thrive on them—an exhaustion sets in. By the middle of the day, I’m struggling to keep my head up, so rather than eating during lunch, I sneak back to Gould, curl up in my bed, and cry. If it’s going to be this hard, I wonder, why even bother? That’s a bad attitude to have, especially on the first day, and it makes me wonder what I’m doing at Browick in the first place, why they gave me a scholarship, why they thought I was smart enough to be here. It’s a spiral I’ve traveled before, and every time I arrive at the same conclusion: that there’s probably something wrong with me, an inherent weakness that manifests as laziness, a fear of hard work. Besides, hardly anyone else at Browick seems to struggle like I do. They move from class to class knowing every answer, always prepared. They make it look easy.
When I get to American lit, the last class of the day, the first thing I notice is that Mr. Strane has changed his shirt since the convocation speech. He stands at the front of the room leaning against a chalkboard, arms folded over his chest, looking even bigger than he appeared onstage. There are ten of us in the class, including Jenny and Tom, and as we enter the room Mr. Strane’s eyes follow us, like he’s sizing us up. When Jenny comes in, I’m already sitting at the seminar table a couple seats away from Tom. His face lights up at the sight of her, and he motions for her to sit in the empty chair between us—he’s oblivious, doesn’t understand why that is absolutely out of the question. Gripping her backpack straps, Jenny gives him a terse smile.
“Let’s sit on this side instead,” she says, meaning the opposite side, meaning away from me. “It’s better over here.”
Her eyes skim past me the way they did at the dorm meeting. In a way it seems silly, putting all this effort into pretending an entire friendship never existed.
When the bell rings to signal the start of class, Mr. Strane doesn’t move. He waits for us to fall into silence before speaking. “I assume you all know each other,” he says, “but I don’t think I know all of you.”
He moves to the head of the seminar table and calls on us at random, asking our names and where we’re from. Some of us he asks other questions—do we have any siblings; where’s the farthest we’ve ever traveled; if we could choose a new name for ourselves, what would it be? He asks Jenny at what age she first fell in love and a blush takes over her whole face. Beside her, Tom turns red, too.
When it’s my turn to introduce myself, I say, “My name’s Vanessa Wye and I’m not really from anywhere.”
Mr. Strane sits back in his chair. “Vanessa Wye, not really from anywhere.”
I laugh out of nerves, from hearing how stupid my words sound when repeated back to me. “I mean, it’s a place but not really a town. It doesn’t have a name. They just call it Township Twenty-Nine.”
“Here in Maine? Out on that down east highway?” he asks. “I know exactly where that is. There’s a lake out that way that has a lovely name, Whale-something.”
I blink in surprise. “Whalesback Lake. We live right on it. We’re the only year-round house.” As I speak, an odd pang hits my heart. I hardly ever feel homesick at Browick, but maybe that’s because no one ever knows where I’m from.
“No kidding.” Mr. Strane thinks for a moment. “Do you get lonely out there?”
For a moment, I’m dumbstruck. The question slices a painless cut, shockingly clean. Even though lonely isn’t a word I’d ever used to describe how it feels living out there deep in the woods, hearing Mr. Strane say it now makes me think it must be true, probably has always been true, and suddenly I’m embarrassed, imagining that loneliness plastered all over my face, obvious enough that a teacher needs only one look to know I’m a lonely person. I manage to say, “I guess sometimes,” but Mr. Strane has already moved on, asking Greg Akers what it was like to move from Chicago to the foothills of western Maine.
Once we all introduce ourselves, Mr. Strane says his class will be the hardest we take this year. “Most students tell me I’m the toughest teacher at Browick,” he says. “I’ve had some say I’m tougher than their college professors.” He drums his fingers against the table and lets the gravity of this information settle onto us. Then he walks to the chalkboard, grabs a piece of chalk, and begins to write. Over his shoulder, he says, “You should already be taking notes.”
We scramble for our notebooks as he launches into a lecture about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” which I’ve never heard of, and I can’t be the only one, but when he asks the class if we’re familiar with it, we all nod. No one wants to look stupid.
While he lectures, I sneak glances around the room. The bones of it are the same as all the others in the humanities building—hardwood floors, a wall of built-in bookcases, green chalkboards, a seminar table—but his classroom feels lived-in and comfortable. There’s a rug with a worn path down its center, a big oak desk lit by a green banker’s lamp, a coffeemaker and a mug with the Harvard seal sitting atop a filing cabinet. The smell of cut grass and the sound of a car engine starting drift in through the open window, and at the chalkboard Mr. Strane writes a line from Longfellow with such intensity the chalk crumbles in his hand. At one point, he stops, turns to us, and says, “If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.” I do my best to copy down everything he says word for word.