Chapter Eight
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Jae
I step into the cool shade of the grove and feel the soft grass bow beneath my feet. The sharp whistles from the soccer field are far away now, and it’s eerily quiet. The only voices I hear are the birds tweeting from their branches overhead. I wonder if I’m in the right place.
Then I see the gold flash of Mrs. Aldana’s scarf.
She’s sitting on a giant log behind a huge fire pit.
A white boy with carefully coiffed red hair is lying on a blanket on the forest floor with an Asian girl.
She’s wearing a jean jacket that looks like a scrapbook of her favorite things: buttons, feathers, colorful patches, and pins.
Her eyes are lined with thick black eyeliner, and she has leopard-print makeup on her eyelids.
William’s sitting on a tree stump nearby and waves me over like he’s been waiting to see me all day.
He nods toward an empty stump next to him and I sit down and drop my bag with a thump beside me.
“You made it,” he whispers, leaning sideways. “Welcome.”
“Thanks.”
“As we wait for our last student,” Mrs. Aldana says, “let’s take in the beauty of what surrounds us. There’s a reason so much poetry is written about nature.”
There isn’t much time to take in any beauty before I hear a twig snap behind me. The birds silence overhead. Someone gasps. The footsteps stop and I turn around to see him standing there, as unexpected as the first time I saw him.
“There you are! Our star student,” Mrs. Aldana sings. “Take a stump, Derek!”
Derek walks past me, his head lowered, staring at the ground through dark lashes.
The air around him smells like cigarettes and I’m glad I’ve found another reason to dislike him.
Besides the fact that he failed to stand up to his friends for me—not once but twice.
Or that he threatened to beat up a kid in the bathroom.
Why did I ever leave the stall to talk to him? Why didn’t I just let the jerk cry?
He sits down and leans over with his elbows on his knees and stares hard at the ground.
“What are you doing here?” I hiss under my breath.
“Hell if I know,” he answers, not even sparing me a glance.
Mrs. Aldana is saying something, but my mind is spinning like a marble in a drain and I can’t hear a word. He’s not supposed to be here. This is supposed to be my place to get away from people like him.
“You can’t be here.”
He laughs.
“What’s so funny?” I snap.
“What’s funny is you actually think I wanna be here.”
Mrs. Aldana claps her hands together. “Welcome to the Free Verse Society, everyone! I promise I won’t be here long.
I’ll soon leave you to your own devices—for better or for worse.
But first, I always like to begin the introductory meeting with a small exercise.
So settle into your seats and close your eyes.
Breathe deep. Fill your lungs with fresh air. ”
“More like toxic ashtray,” I mutter.
Derek guffaws and I cross my arms over my chest and lean away from him. I don’t want to breathe deep and all that. Not just because Derek stinks of old casino, but because I didn’t sign up for a meditation circle. I didn’t sign up to get inside my own head. I don’t like it in there.
I just don’t have the time for this mess.
There’s calculus homework today, which will probably take me twice as long to complete as everyone else because we didn’t have calculus at my old school.
Bellwood is in a different league academically.
You’ll have to work hard. When Uncle Rowan asks me what I was doing after school, what will I say?
I was taking deep breaths and touching trees?
“If you’re feeling resistance to this, it’s normal,” Mrs. Aldana says quietly, and I peek through one eye to see if she’s hovering nearby, maybe sucking up my energy, reading my thoughts.
But she’s sitting calmly on her tree stump.
“Just take a few minutes to observe all those thoughts wandering through the corridors of your mind like uninvited guests. Watch them come and go.”
My arms are still crossed, but I take a deep breath. I can’t leave. After what happened with Derek’s friends, I need someone. I need this group. And I can’t let Derek ruin this for me.
And then there’s Dad. Dad loved poetry. His poems sat at the kitchen table with his physics books, side by side like the contradiction he was. I need poetry like I need memories of him. I burrow deep, hoping someday I’ll find him in a title, at the end of a stanza, at the signing of a poet’s name.
So I take a deep breath, and I observe.
The corridor of my mind is dark and it’s full. Thoughts wander in and out like lost souls. One stays long. It’s familiar. It says, They can’t love you if they know you. It says, Everyone stops loving you eventually.
I see Uncle Rowan’s face. His stern eyes, his bald, shiny head.
At any moment, he could disappear. He could decide I’m too much trouble and send me away.
A disappointment. That’s what Mom’s eyes said for the past year.
And now Austin’s looking at me with that slippery smile and his face is getting closer to mine until it disappears too.
Then I’m riding the bus to the hospital, wearing nothing but loneliness around my skin.
I’m standing at the street corner where my world changes again.
“Good,” Mrs. Aldana says, and I’m sitting in the grove, surrounded by people who don’t know what I am or who I’ve been.
She reads us a poem, “The Meadow” by Kate Knapp Johnson, and asks us, “What’s your interpretation of that line? What does it mean to leave thinking for thought?”
“It’s complete drivel,” Derek says. “Doesn’t make any sense.”
“To you,” I snap, and my face flushes. “Sorry. I mean, it does make sense if you think it through. To me, the word thinking feels active here. It’s something you do with intention. But the word thought feels passive. It’s something you get lost in.”
Mrs. Aldana nods, looking back and forth from me to Derek.
“In your silence, how many thoughts did you plan to think? Of course, that’s not how thoughts work.
The beauty of writing is paying attention and exploring the thoughts that are worth our time, letting go of the thoughts that aren’t.
Giving our thoughts their proper weight.
The page is where we can re-create ourselves into who we want to be. ”
It’s not that easy, I think. You can’t write away the truth.
“We can’t always know what a poet means,” she continues. “Our only job is to approach the text with curiosity. Keep this in mind when you read each other’s poems.”
Mrs. Aldana reaches into a large tote bag and pulls out a stack of small notebooks.
She walks around the fire pit and gives one to each of us.
I look at the notebook on my lap, lit by the sun peeking through the canopy.
It’s a beautiful dark blue with white swirls.
I look down at my high-waisted blue pants and white shirt.
Each notebook is different, and each one seems to belong to the right person.
“You’ll have five minutes at the beginning of each meeting to write a free verse poem. Can someone tell us what free verse is?”
“It’s poetry without a prescribed form,” William says.
I smile at how the word form fills his English mouth.
“Right.” Mrs. Aldana nods. “It’s poetry that has its own form.
It creates its own rules. Your five-minute poem is where you can unleash your thoughts without judgment.
You cannot ask questions about anyone else’s poem.
Understand? You’ll have other opportunities to critique and give feedback.
With that said, I want you all to write your first poem right now.
This is your attempt to answer the question Who am I? ”
Derek lets out a slow, loud sigh. He’s rude, but I agree.
I didn’t come here to talk about me. The last thing I want to do is talk about me.
When I signed up for this club, I saw myself in a beanbag chair in a brightly lit classroom, reading the works of famous poets like Langston Hughes.
Not the inner thoughts of Janelle A?enyo from Georgia.
Mrs. Aldana claps her hands together and her shoulders spring up to her ears. “Begin!”
I open the notebook to a lined page. I lift my pen and press it down, over and over again, deepening the single dot. What can I say without saying too much?
I sneak a glance at Derek, who’s turning his blue-and-yellow notebook over in his hands. It’s the school colors, and I wonder if he’s some kind of jock. Unfortunately, when he pulled up his shirt in the bathroom, I saw abs that could have been spray-painted on. Very unfair.
His eyes snap toward me and I look down at my notebook.
Five minutes pass like five seconds.
“Ready?” Mrs. Aldana asks. “William? Will you share first?”
“Certainly,” he says, picking up his notebook.
It’s a serious gray, but when the light hits it at different angles, it glimmers like a kaleidoscope.
He stands up and tucks a stray wisp of blond hair behind his ear.
His mouth is moving, but my heart is thumping too loud to hear him.
Am I reading next? He’s saying something about his name, but before I realize, he’s already sitting down again and everyone is clapping. I join in, sorry I didn’t really hear.
Mrs. Aldana extends her hand to the girl on the blanket. “Ready, Swan?”
Swan crosses her legs and confidently takes in the whole group before beginning.
i can’t remember the streets
i never walked
my Seoul
is empty
of memories
Korean American
but i don’t think i can be me
sometimes
Cho Su Hwan / Swan Cho
i am neither and i am both
when i find my Seoul
maybe i’ll know
who i am
Everyone claps. Derek gives his notebook half-hearted pats.
“CJ?” Mrs. Aldana calls.