Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Events described herein are products of the Narrator’s—Speaker’s—Whatever’s—imagination. Any resemblance to factual incidents, places, or persons (real or deceased) is purely coincidental. Besides this, any relationships between consecutively narrated events is also purely coincidental. Causality, whether by natural or supernatural means, is neither expressed nor implied.
The Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—must confess that he was far from the only student to have had his ego deconstructed by the splintering ordeal of Ms. Rilke’s group essay assignment.
Perhaps the time has come to reveal the source of the malaise that had afflicted the cast and crew of the Drama Club’s 2004 Spring Play, like a haunting.
Flashback to November—December 2003 (Sophomore Autumn)
At the heart of it all was a grudge between Peter Marin and Brin Brown, who had been cast in the farce as an onstage couple, and who were both at the time in the very same section of Rachel Rilke’s Advanced Junior English class.
What had actually happened was that the previous semester, Ms. Rilke had assigned Peter and Brin to work together for the group essay in their turn. They were placed with two other students less engaged, but equally apt to get annoyed by the nerves that the assignment inevitably entailed. Between the four of them, they had all agreed together far in advance, that each person would write exactly one fourth of the final paper that got handed in, and that Brin and the other two students would then hand their contributions in to Peter in hard copy—warm and freshly printed from the school’s brandspanking-new laser printers, recently installed by Mr. Kohl, the IT administrator.
Peter’s responsibility was that of a factotum. As far as the others were concerned, his duties did not include editing or ghost-writing. The others, including Brin, simply assumed he would do what they had all agreed together in class: re-type the other three parts of the essay verbatim, into the Word document that already contained his own quarter-length contribution to what would become the completed group essay.
But it was not for nothing that Peter had by that point been referred to at least once, as a “Walking Talking Disrespect Machine.” He was uncannily skilled at tap-dancing his way out tight corners, sometimes literally, to the chagrin of many an irate teacher, administrator, student, parent, or scandalized donor, at the curious institution that was that Catholic high school.
Bad decisions make good stories. That’s what Peter seemed to believe, anyway.
So the night before the assignment was due, he finally pulled out Brin’s contribution, and the other two parts from their mates. He read everything through carefully—and summarily decided that what the others, including Brin Brown, had written was obviously garbage.
I, Peter Marin, will singlehandedly re-write the entire essay all, and successfully mimic the “voices” of Brin Brown and the other two like a belletrist ventriloquist (try saying that last thing aloud) with the dummy squawking and honking on my knee, such that my written illusion of a shared effort will be convincing enough even to evade Rachel Rafaële Rilke’s self-described third person omniscience in the question of whether an essay represents a sufficiently collaborative effort, among students conditioned to replicate with each other the psychological dynamics of the Roman circus!
So Peter said to himself, alone and silent in front of that computer screen, cracking the knuckles from which his soon-to-be-typing fingertips extended.
He proceeded to do just this, and handed forward the essay to Ms. Rilke the next day in class. Brin Brown and the others saw Peter Marin turn in a printed document that they all assumed—having no reason (yet) to suspect foul play—contained their own untampered-with contributions to the tragic essay.
Interpreting what came next is partially a matter of speculation.
There are two possibilities that seem equally likely. But the only way to know for sure which one is true would be to ask Rachel Rafaële Rilke directly, and hope she tells the truth, which—truth be told—is not, and was never, one of her strong suits, during the entirety of her teaching tenure at that benighted and curious institution. She was the singular personality who might or might not answer a question posed to her at all, or if she did, might or might not answer truthfully, and it might as easily depend on an entirely arbitrary factor like the interrogator’s Zodiac sign, as it might on the day on which she was interrogated, or the particular mood she happened to be in when interrogated.
Because the fact remains:
A day after the due date, despite previous professions of omniscience, Ms. Rilke handed back the group essays. She had apparently been fooled by Peter’s writing, into granting his group essay an “A” inscribed in red ink, at the top of the first page.
Nothing beside remains.
But it was not for nothing that Brin Brown had, by that point, acquired a reputation for her famously fanatic devotion to Drama with a Capital D. Resultantly, she was not content simply to leave well enough alone by taking satisfaction in the “A” that Peter’s ghost-writing had (so it would seem) poached for the group, including her, in an essay about the rudiments of classical Drama.
Oh, no.
Brin Brown, the Actor with a capital A, just had to bask in the reflected glory of her own precisely written paragraphs on the Aristotelian transfiguration of pity to terror, comprising precisely a quarter of the essay’s full length, that she had personally contributed to the handed-back “A” grade.
That was when, with an eerie sinking feeling coursing through her veins, she realized her poetic ruminations on pity turning to terror had not merely been ghost-written-over.
They were gone.
Gone.
Gone, with a capital G!
Ms. Rilke followed up with the entire group the next class period, because Brin Brown had approached her after class, in a state of looming terror.
It was not for nothing that Brin had dedicated her life to Drama with a Capital D. She was perfectly willing to dedicate her life to something, especially if it involved making others’ lives miserable, because misery did after all bring her great joy.
The girl had deposed in ringing cadence against the misbegotten “A” grade.
She had alleged Foul Play!
The group was summarily stripped of its grade.
Ms. Rilke informed the errant members that not one among their wretched number would receive an assignment grade, nor yet, if push came to shove, a semester grade, until the offending document was revised in a way that all group members confirmed to satisfy the assignment’s shared effort requirement.
The two slackers of the group were sufficiently fed up with Peter and Brin’s power struggle for creative control, that they conspicuously omitted to follow up on scheduling a revision bull session.
By that point, it would have had to take place after school, or during a coordinated lunch or study hall, because the rest of the section had received their grades for the group essay and moved onto other activities, without incident. Rachel Rafaële Rilke was as terrible as her word. A teacher of lesser self-determination would eventually have had to cave to the combined pressure of wealthy parents and irritated administrators intervening on behalf of students in such a hole as what Peter, Brin, and the other two had dug themselves into by increments. They would have been obliged to grade the group essay as an “F” in order to get semester grades in on schedule.
And despite that, Ms. Rilke saw to it—and presumably Mr. LeCaptain the interim head would have backed her decision in this matter if push came to shove—that neither Peter nor Brin nor either of the other two could evade the imposition of a good two-hour-long custom detention, during the week of first semester finals in January. They were obliged to sit down with each other in front of a desktop computer in the Journalism Lab that Mrs. Humperdinck donated for the singular occasion, despite that every person implicated would by that point have said it would simply be too soon, if they literally never laid eyes on their late unlamented group mates again. And they didn’t want to—but they had to—crank out, at length, an essay of belletristic merit inferior to Peter Marin’s rogue solo effort, but signed off on by each member of the group, and verbally confirmed in person, to Ms. Rilke herself, as finally fulfilling of the assignment’s treachery.
Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
But see the gracious ambiguities of fate…….. . . . . . . .
“I lie to you guys all time—get over it,” Ms. Rilke had boldly incanted to more than one section of her advanced juniors from year to year, with predictable results.
If Peter Marin’s annexation of that essay was initially, as he had hoped, a successful deception—then Ms. Rilke’s initial warning about “knowing” each student’s individual writing voice was clearly a bluff intended to scare all but the most audacious and/or grandiose among her advanced juniors, into toeing the line on the shared effort requirement of the (self-referential) tragic essay. This would not, if you are wondering, have been out of character for Rachel Rafaële Rilke—at a different point in the year, she successfully bluffed the majority of each section into writing in-depth prose paraphrases of twenty Shakespearian sonnets, that the juniors all only discovered on the day of the reputed “due date” that she in fact had no intention of collecting, or checking, or evaluating in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
But if, in fact, Ms. Rilke did indeed know all along what Peter had attempted to do with the essay on (apparently) an eleventh hour whim—then her observed actions in suddenly flouting her own assignment parameters by returning the plagiarized essay with an “A” would seem to have indicated a deeper, more twisted, form of bluffing: a careful orchestration of chaotic variables precisely calibrated to maximize the explosive impact of the unstoppable force of Peter’s hubris colliding with the immovable object of Brin’s hubris.
Which, again, would not have been out of character for Rachel Rilke, given her rabble-rousing capabilities.
Bad decisions make good stories. That’s what Ms. Rilke seemed to have taught Peter Marin.
He thereafter became one of her special favorites, and deferred College Credit Composition with Fr. Gottlieb the following year, in favor of the lesser workload entailed by a second year in the shadowy and mysterious realm of Advanced Senior English taught by Rachel Rilke—along with Andrew LaBoone, the football player who played the cop in the play for which Peter and Brin had to pretend to be married to each other.
Did Rachel Rafaële Rilke realize Peter Marin’s deception immediately, or didn’t she?
It’s a mystery.
But the fact remains: the consequences were self-evidently tragic.
Nothing beside remains.
It is fair to note that at about this same time, that autumn, the N/S/W’s mother came home one evening with a funny story. She had just visited the chocolate shop down the road from their house. Harold Schuler, an old elementary school friend of his, was working there now. Harold and the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—had lost touch after one enrolled at the Catholic high school, while the other went to Central High, the public school. Later on, Ms. Rilke would reveal that she too had graduated from Central, twenty-seven years earlier.
When she walked into the shop, his mother saw Harold working behind the counter. A woman was already ordering chocolates, and she got in line behind her. Harold waved quickly, but kept his attention focused on the woman. She was pretty, slender and dark, with almond-shaped Mediterranean eyes. A young son stood at her side as she talked Harold’s ear off shamelessly. She seemed to have forgotten about her order of chocolates because she had determined instead to make sure Harold knew every single person she needed to buy chocolates for:
“Oh yes, we just need to get chocolates for my divorce lawyer who is currently helping me finalize the details of my SUCCESSFUL DIVORCE from my philandering husband. We also need to get chocolates for my son here, because he won his elementary school’s spelling bee—tell him how you won, Woody, tell him.” Not waiting for a reply, the woman bounded onward, “Oh and we also need to get chocolates for my surgeon who operated on my brain the other week. And we need to get chocolates for my priest and my therapist who are helping me work through a lot of personal shit, and we need to get chocolates for…”
She went on and on like this, for nearly forty-five minutes, revealing several further lurid details about her personal life during her litany of chocolate recipients.
The N/S/W’s mother tuned out after awhile, as did Harold. At one point, she caught his eye. It unglazed momentarily, and a suppressed smile played around the corners of his lips. Then he averted his eyes to avoid falling over laughing at the woman’s chatter. She continued oblivious, until finally she got around to asking for the actual chocolates. Harold gave them to her. With that, she swept imperiously from the shop, the spelling champion son trotting close behind.
Both his mother and the N/S/W would have forgotten the chattering woman except that a few weeks later, she spotted her again at the first parent-teacher conference of the year.
“Her name’s Connie, and she’s the mother of a girl named Lily from your Spanish class, do you know her?”
“Lily Fredricksen? Not well, but yeah.” He and Lily barely ever spoke, except to talk about things directly related to the class they had together. She seemed like a quiet girl. No wonder, if that was the mother she had grown up with. “The crazy chocolate-buying lady is her mother?” he mused. “Huh, what a small world.”
He archived the matter in his mind. He did not yet realize how much the random connections between people he knew could cause his small world to contract. Nor did he realize what a curious, lonely, and poignant offstage character Connie Fredricksen would become in his life over the years to come.
Everything gets remembered for a reason.
. . . . . . . ……..aaaaaaand we’re back to November 2004! (Junior Autumn)
Around the time that the group essay finished, there was a planned school assembly. They always happened right after second period.
That particular assembly included several school-wide announcements, and school spirit pep talks and activities. Then, as the final announcement, the associate head Mr. Debauch addressed the students with the microphone:
“Mr. Kohl, our IT administrator, is vacating his position. Filling it from now on will be Ms. Frida Genessee, an alumna who graduated from here just over ten years ago, and is kind enough to return now to give something back to the school in gratitude for her own wonderful experience studying here in her own time. Let’s give Mr. Kohl a hand, to show appreciation for the wonderful services he has rendered to the school!”
And there was Mr. Kohl, the now-ex-IT-administrator, standing at Debauch’s side, smiling and waving like an outgoing Miss America winner, to the applause of the students—mingled with the odd catcall from various teenage boys, who knew that the size of the crowd afforded them a certain degree of anonymity.
Mr. Kohl, in his own time, was a frequent subject of the more vulgar graffiti that got written on the boys’ restroom walls, and quickly painted over by custodians—only to return again and again and again, like a haunting.
Despite the public nature of his exit, it would remain unclear whether Mr. Kohl had left voluntarily, or been terminated, and what, in either case, the impetus for the departure might have been.
The question of how or why is a labyrinth from which only the percipient reader can find—or make—their endless way.