Page 24 of The Academy
Tiffin’s college counselor, Honey Vandermeid, abandons her morning swim; Jewel Pond becomes arctic in a matter of days. Honey sighs; she’s too busy to swim anyway. Since Tiffin has been rankednumber two, a slew of colleges have decided they’d like to visit the campus. Honey, who once had to curry favor with the Ivies, as well as places like Duke, Tulane, and “the U” (University of Miami), is now hard-pressed to find enough dates.
Honey is also busy deflecting invitations from Cordelia to spend the night in her cottage. Honey is the dorm parent for the four upper floors of Classic South (she agreed to take four instead of three because Simone Bergeron is brand-new). Surely Cordelia realizes she can’t sneak out. What if someone vomits in the middle of the night and needs her help? What if there’s a blow-up between roommates? What if the fire alarm goes off and Honey isn’t there?
It’s not like summertime, Cord. My week is full to bursting.
That’s the thing about boarding school… the academic rigor, the long athletic practices, the clubs and affinity group meetings, the assignments, the tutoring and study groups, the meals and robust social calendar, are all meant to keep everyone—students and faculty alike—too busy to think about sex and romance.
On any given day, Audre Robinson can gaze out the east-facing windows of her office in the Manse and imagine the fine instruction and engaging discussions taking place in the Schoolhouse. Señor Perez is teaching Gabriel García Márquez’sLove in the Time of Cholerato his AP Spanish class; they’re fundraising to go to Barcelona over spring break, though Señor is a little disappointed that only half his class has signed up to go (and not the students who would be the most fun either; the fun kids are planning to go to Harbour Island in the Bahamas, an unofficial Tiffin tradition).
Roy Ewanick is teaching differential equations to his advanced math students—all of them sixth-formers except for Royce Stringfellow and Andrew Eastman, who is surprisingly gifted withnumbers and abstract mathematical concepts, if not with turning in any of his assignments.
Simone Bergeron’s students are reading Hakluyt on colonization. Simone longs to be the kind of teacher whom the students want to please, both academically and behaviorally. She feels she’s succeeded on this front except in the case of Charley Hicks, whose work is impeccable (really, she could teach the class) but who glowers at Simone with barely disguised contempt.
Simone isn’t sure what to do with East from an academic standpoint. With each passing day and each missing assignment, the need to speak to him alone becomes more pressing. And yet Simone puts it off because she’s afraid of what will happen.
Finally, she sends him an email.
You presently have a zero in my class. If you’re finding the reading challenging, I’m happy to set you up with a tutor.
He responds immediately.I’m not doing the reading LOL. Want to meet in the tunnel again tonight after lights out?
Simone gasps and deletes the email, then deletes it from the Trash folder. She can’t believe he had the gall to send that on the school’s server. She can’t believe he had the gall to send it, period. She’s particularly horrified by his use of the word “again.” She can’t report this email even if she wanted to, because she hasn’t told a soul about finding East in the tunnel.
She has made eye contact with East once or twice per class up until now, but the next day, she avoids looking at him completely.
She sends an email to Audre that says,I have concerns about Andrew Eastman. He has yet to turn in a single assignment. What should I do?
Audre writes back,Thank you for letting me know. I’ll handle.
Simone feels guilty about asking Audre to take this bit of classroom management off her plate. She wasn’t looking to completelypass the buck, nor did she necessarily want to sic the Head of School on East. Oh well—what’s done is done. Simone is off the hook for now.
But at the end of the third week of school, there are still no assignments from East.
Rhode Rivera is teaching the transcendentalists: Emerson and Thoreau. Their themes of self-reliance and connection to nature should resonate with Tiffin students—here at boarding school, in pastoral New England—but only a handful of kids seem to click with the material. Most find it dull and impenetrable. Madison J. raises her hand and says, “Why do we care that these old white men went out to live in the woods?”
Why, indeed?Rhode wants to be teaching Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Wright. Following Emerson and Thoreau is Hawthorne, and then he’ll tackle Arthur Miller’sThe Crucible.After his due diligence with texts that are still somehow embraced by Tiffin’s board of directors, he’ll move on.
He greatly envies one of the other English teachers, Ruth Wully. Ruth is married to the science teacher, Kent Wully.They should really be named “the Woolies,” Rhode thinks, because they both have prodigious amounts of hair and they wear what look like homespun garments. They live in an old Victorian in Haydensboro and also have a summer cottage on Sweet Pond, across the border in Vermont. Ruth teaches third- and fourth-form English as well as a senior elective called Boarding School Lit, which has a waiting list every year because who wouldn’t want to spend a semester readingThe Starboard SeaandPrep?
But then the magical moment Rhode has been waiting for finally arrives. Charley Hicks, Dub Austin, and Taylor Wilson getinto a debate about what Emerson means by the “transparent eyeball.”
“What,” Rhode asks the class, “is he talking about when he writes, ‘I am nothing, I see all.’”
Dub Austin—whom Rhode has perhaps misclassified as a football bro—says, “Emerson believed that when he stepped into nature alone, he achieved a greater understanding of the world. And self-awareness, maybe? I’ve dealt with a bunch of stuff in the past six months that… I don’t know… changed the way I think about things. If you leave yourself open to learning about the world and other people, then no matter what happens to you, good or bad, you become wiser.”
“Interesting answer,” Rhode says. “Does anyone have other thoughts?”
Charley says, “I think what Emerson means is that, when he goes into nature alone, he loses his… ego, I guess you’d call it? And becomes one with nature and therefore closer to god?”
Taylor jumps in. “Thatiswhat he’s saying, but it discounts the importance of individuality. Like, your personality and opinions cease to matter when you walk in the woods, and he thinks that’s a good thing. To Emerson, all that matters is nature.”
Ahhh, brilliant.The bell rings, class is over, the kids slap their laptops shut, pack up their books, and pull out their phones to take pictures of themselves to snap to whomever. The golden bubble they were sitting in pops, but even so, Rhode is suffused with a sense of purpose.
Maybe he should put off his lesson prep for an hour and go for a walk in the woods, he thinks. There are definitely some things he’d like to transcend—such as the unease he’s been feeling since the night of First Dance and what he thinks he saw happening down in the tunnel.
After our school day ends, we transition to afternoon activities. Tiffin has a theater troupe run by Mr. Chuy—but for most of us, the afternoon means athletics.
Charley Hicks spends three weeks as a member of the Thirds field hockey team, where she reluctantly laces her cleats and charges up and down the field alongside her teammates, holding the stick backward on purpose in hopes that she might get cut. She eventually learns that Thirds field hockey is like the trap in the sink drain: It scoops up all the misfits and half-asses. Nobody gets cut.
