Gifting Words
I don’t remember anything about him, his face blends in with countless other faces of that summer. Unidentified young boys, entering their first summer after starting high school still draped in their boyhood. He was quiet which might be why he doesn’t stick in my memory as anything more than a series of actions. I was not quiet, which might be my curse.
I had to be the best, the brightest, the most valued. Everything I did had to receive some sort of attention as if the only way I knew of my own existence was through the applause of others. He made me uncomfortable, I remember the feeling. He was one of those people who no matter how hard I tried to speak to would respond in one word answers or shrugs. I wanted his approval; the quiet self analyzing creature within me sought his Indy stamp of approval for my passport of multiple acceptances. But most likely he was warded off by my overzealous participation in all things that summer. I had to be the shining star, if only to excuse my actions during that fall of utter disregard and collapse, I liked to prove that I was capable of being involved and active, if only in short bursts. He seemed to embrace his role as the outsider, never seeking the attention or applause that I so desperately and compulsively chased. I admired this in him, desperately wish that I too could toss aside the meaningless search for approval and sit in my room reading and listening to endlessly trendy music by bands I had never heard of.
I don’t remember him having any actual friends, but perhaps they existed on the periphery of the group which I centered. He wasn’t mocked, or bullied. We were a strangely accepting band of summer camp kids, all rejects from various different walks of life, happy to spend the summer not facing rejection. I don’t remember his name, otherwise I might be able to track him down, the internet being what it is, and tell him that I admired him. He was trendy and cool in a way I would never be, the way that required no effort. He did not choose what to listen to because of the reputation or the effect of you listening to it would have on other people, he just did. But what I really remember about him was truly epic. I often wonder if he was an actual person or a character come alive from a novel.
One morning when the boys floor awoke and the dorm room doors cracked open to send their inhabitants on their journey to breakfast, they discovered a single quarter in front of each door. Each quarter was wrapped in strip of paper which had a single line from A Clockwork Orange. Each strip had a different line, unique and handwritten. It made me sad to have been born a woman, since I would never have a quarter on my doorstep with a borrowed line from a classic novel. I often imagine what it was like to have chosen those lines, each one selected for the inhabitants of the rooms which would discover them. Treasuring the words so much that to not share them would have been unbearable.
Perhaps it is a romanticized version of what really happened; it could have been a dare to prove that he had been out after room checks. But it will always be a mystery for me. I never received the quarters, but I would have liked to. I would have appreciated the gesture. Some words are too important not to be shown off, some single sentences too perfect to not be taken out of their context and shown to the world just to prove that beauty does exist. I would have countered his quarter with one of my own, and on his single strip of paper I would have scrawled “She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing.”
