Chapter 12
I’m speed-walking through the hallways, a rage boiling in me that scares me, that’s bigger than me, that controls me, that takes me over and leads me to do things I later regret.
I know anger. I can handle anger, when it’s at a seven or an eight or a nine and I can buy my way down to a four or click my way to a five.
But rage. Rage is a ten. Rage is a burning, seething ten that annihilates me.
“Where’s Mr. Korgy?” I ask every teacher I pass. “Where is he?”
Mr. Adams says he thinks he’s in the library where he usually eats lunch, so I charge toward it and shove open the heavy double doors, my face on fire, my heart pounding in my ears.
There he is. At a back table, his lunch spread out in front of him. Just a casual sandwich with a casual bag of chips, his legs crossed casually, no idea what’s about to hit him.
“Hey,” I call out.
He doesn’t hear me.
“Hey,” I say again, louder.
Nothing.
“HEY.”
If Frannie hadn’t said that fucking word, I wouldn’t have to do this. I’d have gone on thinking what Mr. Korgy said was a compliment, ignorant to the backhanded nature of it.
We were sitting at lunch and she asked which classes I was enjoying. I should’ve deflected, but a feeling had swelled in my chest, a little ball of excitement, of pride, that I couldn’t override, and it just spilled out of me.
“Creative writing,” I told her. “Actually, my teacher said my stuff is pretty good.”
Her face twisted with something—I mistook it for curiosity but now know it was suspicion—and she asked if it was personal writing, and I said yes.
“Oh yeah,” she said, her eyes melting with clarity. “I bet that’s really harrow-een.”
There it was. That word, like an expletive. Harrowing.
“It’s not harrowing,” I shot back, hitting the g especially hard.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” she said, even though I knew she did. “Just a reality. It’s emotional, you know? Your life story. Harrow-een. I’m sure that makes it a really impactful read. Like you said, your teacher really liked it.”
Frannie took a long, bubbling sip of her chocolate milk and gave me that look that I get from my co-workers when they overhear me dealing with a difficult customer. That bug-eyed “somebody needs to relax” look, only it hits differently when you’re the one who needs to relax.
“I’ve gotta go,” I said, leaving my lunch tray on the table, my half-frozen slab of pizza untouched.
“It wasn’t a fucking compliment,” I say as I approach Mr. Korgy.
“Waldo, what’s goin’ on?” he asks. He wipes a tiny glob of mayonnaise off his lip and sets his sandwich down in its Tupperware container next to the stack of papers he’s grading.
“What you said to me the other day, that I’m talented? That I have a voice? You said that cuz you pity me. Cuz you think my life was hard. Or is hard or whatever.”
Mr. Korgy reaches out slowly, as if he’s got an endless amount of time, and grabs the Tupperware container.
He snaps one corner of the lid so it seals tightly, then rotates the container and snaps the next corner, then the next, then the next.
There’s something about the gesture that irks me.
The ease to it, the absolute measured nature, the complete confidence, the unaffectedness.
“You think I pity you?” he asks.
“Yes. I do.”
“Huh,” he says. There’s something to the way he says it. A certain smugness. I shift from one foot to the other.
“What?” I ask.
“No, nothing. Just…you’re very perceptive in your writing. I would’ve expected you to be able to read me a little better.”
I can’t tell if I’m offended or infuriated or just stunned. So now I’m pitiable and a fucking idiot?
He picks up his coffee thermos and takes a long pull from it while staring directly at me the entire time. It’s disarming. Unnerving. He sets the thermos back down on the table and crosses his arms one over the other.
“You said I’m a good writer,” I say, “but I think what you really meant is that my life’s been harrowing.”
“Huh,” he says again, slowly scratching his arm.
“Well, being harrowing doesn’t automatically make writing good.
Or impactful. It can bog something down.
Make it heavy-handed. And actually, some of what you write is quite funny.
Good writing has nothing to do with how tragic or not the facts of the story are.
Good writing is in how you tell the story.
In getting people to feel what you want them to feel when you want them to feel it.
And I think that’s the kind of writer you are. ”
I soften and as I settle into myself, I realize that he’s the one who made it happen. He took my unmovable rage and made it pliable, dissolved it into something tender. He took this thing that controls me and he controlled it. He is the secret. The key. The answer.
“Waldo,” he says, “rest assured, I do not pity you. Far from it. I respect you.”
Mr. Korgy glances at the wall clock and says that he has to get going.
He stuffs his sandwich container and his papers into his messenger bag and slings it over his shoulder, but the strap snaps and the bag lands on the floor, the contents of it spilling out.
Mints and papers, pens and notebooks. He blushes and says the bag is fifteen years old, that he’s had the strap replaced twice but this still happens all the time, that his wife, Gwen, begs him to get a new one, a nicer one, a trendier one, but that he doesn’t want to.
“Because you can’t get rid of it?” I ask him.
He grins. “Because I want to keep it.”