Chapter 6
Fall Fest was Sawyer’s version of homecoming, but without the football games and ridiculous pageants.
Admin wanted a more dignified affair. “Homecoming for nerds,” Colin said; he’d done undergrad at Penn and thought Sawyer was denying us all a good time.
Student clubs hosted events: Smart Tech for Social Problems and A Conversation about Sex Trafficking—Karaoke After.
Art majors curated an exhibit of student work in the campus gallery.
The theater department hosted a showcase of experimental monologues, about which Safie said, “Those parents must really love their kids.” And one suspected they really did; the weekend was Sawyer’s biggest fund-raising event of the year.
It had become lucrative for the town as well (although the town would need more than a few flush days).
As the weekend approached, Sawyer’s streets and shops filled with visiting parents and siblings and nostalgic alums. It was disorienting; one got used to the near-deserted feel of living here.
Restaurants and the few hotels and inns offered specials.
A street fair took over the downtown blocks around my building.
The nearest Mennonite community, ten or so miles away, transformed an unused stretch of field into a “traditional village experience.” Horse-drawn buggies took visitors from the parking lot to a circle of tables laden with items for sale, dense cakes and wooden bowls with the MADE IN CHINA stamp scratched off.
The women behind the tables, saddled in heavy, drab smocks, lived in suburban tract homes and had discreetly parked their leased sedans behind an abandoned barn.
They named the site Amish Land because most people didn’t know the difference.
I had been working at the lecture steadily; in fact, I wasn’t doing much of anything else.
I’d seen neither Safie nor Stephen outside campus the past few weeks.
But I felt like I was going in circles. I’d gone back to Ohio State a few times and was building a real relationship with Lucy—youngest child of six, third-generation librarian.
I had uncovered a number of surprising details about the court proceedings in the archives.
The industrialist seemed to think Leopold was the innocent victim of Loeb, seduced into a lurid life of sex and crime—no one had written on this.
Despite these discoveries, each day, as I sat down to work, a growing dread greeted me.
I started dreaming up ways to get out of the lecture: I’ll just quit; I don’t like this job anyway.
Or I could say my grandmother died—it worked for students, an alarming number of whose senior family members seem to conveniently croak around midterms and finals.
Of my life and what should be made of it, my parents had no real expectations.
I got through high school with them hardly aware it was happening.
By senior year, I could produce an uncanny facsimile of my mother’s signature, and I wrote my own checks for my college application fees.
I applied only to in-state schools; the logistics of loans and winter clothes felt overwhelming, too much to figure out on my own.
I got in everywhere and enrolled at Florida State in Tallahassee, kissing distance from Georgia, across the entire length of the peninsula, because it was the farthest away.
I arrived at college with no idea what I wanted to study or what my interests might be.
I signed up for a gender studies seminar because this girl from my dorm who had purple hair and didn’t shave her legs told me to.
The professor, Marianne Wahls, was new to the school.
Our first class meeting she announced, “I will not pander to you. We are not going to keep journals or look at our cervixes, although I encourage you to do both. We are going to work hard.” A few weeks in, she assigned Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
I read the first ten pages over and over again until the library closed and they kicked me out.
I couldn’t understand what I was reading but I knew there was something there, a promise reaching toward me.
By the week’s close I had made it to the end, having scribbled the near equivalent of a second book in the back pages and margins.
In class we debated the central premise of the book, the question of whether sexuality was a true thing inside you, waiting to be discovered, or whether society had erected an entire apparatus that made you feel there was something inside you called “sexuality”—a thing you must find, understand, and name.
The conversation was electrifying, dizzying, and I felt I was getting both closer and farther away from understanding who I was—and that was the point.
And being in those conversations, with kids my age who wanted to question everything they’d been told—it felt like, here’s the truth of who I am.
I was testing a new way of seeing myself and the world, and feeling for the first time that I might have a place within it.
I took every course that Professor Wahls offered and when we ran out of classes senior year, we set up an independent study.
We met in her office on Fridays, late in the afternoon.
The sun would often set before we finished.
One night, she asked about my plans after graduation.
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought of it and until then, no one had asked.
“I think you should consider a PhD,” she said.
I tried to recall the last time someone talked to me about my future but came up with nothing.
I remember sitting in her office and thinking—if she cares enough to ask, she must be right. And so I did.
Seven in the morning. I made a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table.
It got the best light during the day; I hoped it might illuminate my path forward.
I set to work but whenever I found a thread it slipped away, leaving me grasping at nothing.
Tyler had missed class again yesterday—he’d been absent a lot, another away match.
Without him, the time dragged on. I had gotten used to an expectant, uneasy feeling in his presence which, strangely, I found myself missing.
Again and again, I checked the clock and its slow progress.
Afterward I found an email from him. I rushed to open it.
It was just his make-up assignment and a single sentence: “Thank you for accepting this work and for your support of athletics at Sawyer.” A boilerplate message, copied and pasted. He didn’t even bother to sign his name.
I got up to brew a second pot of coffee.
My stomach rumbled. I opened a cabinet, looking for a snack—and then suddenly I remembered: Tyler’s Adderall.
A few days after our trip to Columbus I found the bottle rattling around beneath the passenger seat.
I had meant to return it. As more time passed and the silence between us grew, it had started feeling like the trip never happened, which somehow made me morose with regret.
The pills were proof it had. I reached to the top shelf where I’d hidden them—it was weird stashing them like this, I knew, creepy even—like a serial killer’s trophies.
I found the bottle of pills and pulled it down, the cheap plastic light in my hand.
I was old enough to have missed the Adderall craze—kids at my elementary school didn’t have ADHD, they were just hyperactive or, if they weren’t white, they got labeled “troublemakers” and that was it.
Scores of Sawyer students were on it, part of the chemical mix propelling them through their days: Adderall or Ritalin to amp them up, Xanax to calm them down, a steady rotation of weed and alcohol to smooth out the transitions.
I felt bad I’d kept them from Tyler. What if he couldn’t get a refill?
I wondered what it felt like to take, if it could help with my focus.
In grad school, of course, tons of people used it, prescribed or otherwise—someone I know even slipped in a thanks to “Dr. Adderall” on his dissertation acknowledgment page.
And then, before I quite realized what I was doing, the bottle was open and I was swallowing a pill, bitter and chalky on the way down.
I sat down at my desk, waiting to see what would happen.
In a short while, it started working, spreading a fuzzy electric charge across me.
And then it hit like a bolt of espresso, or like that time I did coke at a party in New York—this girl I’d met in the bathroom line so pushy about it I finally said yes.
But this was without any jangly harshness.
I felt the space inside my head expand. I could see the thoughts as they came to me, I only had to write them down.
Whatever worry and doubts had clouded my thinking broke apart, dissipating in a hot and scopious light.
And as I wrote, rolling beneath the ideas falling into place, another chain of thoughts: Is this how Tyler’s body feels?
This soft rush and warm charge? I felt I was learning him from the inside and the feeling of that kept me company as I worked.
The day passed like that and suddenly it was 4:00 p.m. I had just enough time to shower and get dressed.
The pill had worn off but a residue remained, a low combustion across my skin.
I was stepping out from the apartment when I remembered—I’d left the bottle on the counter.
We would go for drinks after the lecture and then Stephen was staying over.
I went to stash the pills again. As I picked them up and reached for the cabinet, something I’d seen but hadn’t registered clicked into consciousness.
I turned the bottle over in my palm. There, along the edge of the pharmacy label, in small block letters: Addison Stewart Mitchell.