The Perfume Burned His Eyes. Michael Imperioli
class—but our study of The Scarlet Letter took longer than expected and cut into the time originally allotted to Faulkner.
Socially, in many ways it was just a smaller version of the same old shit. You could separate all the kids into the same little boxes you’d find anyplace else: jocks, nerds, druggies, brainiacs, and sluts. The boundaries of these personality types were a little blurry at Hobart, though. There was more overlapping between species and more fluidity in the grayzone kids who drifted between categories.
What Hobart did lack were the Cro-Magnons: the psychotically deranged violent types who stalked the halls of Newtown High. For this I was grateful; there was no love lost leaving that lot behind.
The biggest demarcation at Hobart, however, was economic, the Great Divide separating the scholarship kids (who needed to show financial hardship and a modicum of academic merit) from the ones whose parents paid the sticker price (and had to prove even less scholastic ability).
Naturally, this system separated the school into the haves and the have-nots. The favorite sport of the haves was exposing the have-nots and making certain they understood that theirs was a lower place in this tiny galaxy and, by natural extension, society at large.
Some scholarship kids were easier to spot than others. Skin color being the most obvious giveaway (the haves were often bred on prejudice for generations), and clothes a close second. Some of the scholarship kids were dirt poor, lived in the crumbling slums of the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy, and often had to wear the same clothes for two or more consecutive days. The repetition being duly noted by those who wielded the power of popularity and means.
Reconnaissance and intelligence were the other methods used to ferret out and denounce the underprivileged. A few of the haves had parents on the board of the school. Some of these noble altruists were bigger assholes than their kids and they liberally leaked information on who paid and who didn’t.
I was suspected of “being on the tit.” I kid you not, that’s what getting a free ride was called. The endowed beneficiaries being “Tittysuckers” and often just the diminutive “Suckers.” The most prevalent name for Hobart’s poor and indigent was the even more abbreviated “Suck,” as in, “I think the new kid’s a Suck.” This novel transposition of verb into noun a testament to the linguistic proficiency of our ruling class.
I dressed more like a Suck than a rich kid, which I wasn’t, even though we paid. I didn’t like a lot of the new clothes my mother bought me before school and I hadn’t grown much over the summer so I stuck with my Wranglers and T-shirts. I was called a Suck to my face by two athletic seniors who punted a stack of books out of my hands. You see, the white Sucks were more likely to be confronted physically than the black or Puerto Rican Sucks; racist urban paranoia instilled a fear of blades and jailbird siblings into our future titans of industry and stewards (and stewardesses) of culture.
The homecoming theme that autumn was “The Best Days of Our Lives.” But on the glittery blue-and-gold banner they hung over the gym’s big double doors, the word Lives appeared as Live’s.
Nobody bothered to change it.
eight
I noticed her on my very first day of school but it wasn’t until a few weeks had passed that I found the courage to speak to her.
“You dropped your pencil.”
That was it. The sentence fell from my mouth and tumbled into the abyss. The four separate words slurred into one unintelligible sound. At least that’s how I remember it.
By the time this magical pencil had fallen, I had imagined all kinds of scenarios that would crack the glacier that loomed between knowing her and being a mere stranger.
“You dropped your pencil.”
It’s strange how things that unfold into such monumental events begin with such tiny, mundane, and ordinary moments.
“Oh . . . thank you.” She smiled. It was warm and sincere, like her eyes as they focused on me and the tone and timbre of her words.
She looked down at the pencil and paused for a long second. I was paralyzed and failed to realize that she was politely (without a trace of presumption) offering me an opportunity to be chivalrous and pick it up. I was clueless and missed my cue. I just stood there timid and unsure.
I watched as she started to bend at the waist. A black shirt strained to stay tucked into a black skirt, but a small field of white flesh surrendered on the left flank. My brain reengaged itself and responded to the stimulus. Moving faster than I ever thought possible, I swooped down and scooped up her number 2 Ticonderoga. It was new: fresh-honed and stiletto sharp.
I handed it over. Standing closer to her than ever before, I was enveloped by an invisible fog, a cloud of sweet smoke and flowers. Essential oils of rose and lilac, I would later learn. It intoxicated me, made me high. I lost my bearings and my breath.
I knew her name was Veronica only because I’d heard Ms. Baker call out to her as she left the art studio one day. We had no classes together that semester, but I would see her in the halls between periods two and three and later between fifth and sixth. I knew nothing else about her.
“Who do you have for science?”
I have no recollection of saying this but Veronica later swore that I did as I gave her the pencil. I cringed when she first told me, but it doesn’t really shock me that I’d say something so idiotic at such a critical moment. No surprise at all. It’s a particular skill I have.
Veronica was Nica if you knew her well, but never Ronnie. Ronnie was too casual, too common, and too male for such a perfect specimen of human female. She was a beauty and a genius. She was open and innocent. Yet worldly and wise beyond her years.
She was also a Suck.
But she was one of the few, perhaps the only, Suck who hid her true identity from the population at large. This was a tribute to her intelligence and resourcefulness. Yet it required her to keep a distance from her classmates and create a persona of aloofness and eccentricity. Black clothes, eyeliner, fingernails, and hair. Clove cigarettes. Quiet, imperious, haughty, and disaffected. Nietzsche, Plath, and Yoko Ono. No interest in the school’s social scene or strata. No policy with the Hobart boys. No gossiping with the girls. A loner.
And the character she created had the desired effect: she gave off no Suck vibration and she was rumored to be very, very rich. But as compensation for her nonconformity she was branded a slut and a whore, a VD-ridden nympho who’d had an abortion. Maybe two.
Veronica was an autodidact (her word, not mine) who taught herself German and Italian over two consecutive summers after the sixth and seventh grades. This was in addition to fluency in Romanian, French, and English. She had aced the Hobart entrance exam with a perfect score. The first in the school’s history.
Her fingers were always stained with violet ink and she was endlessly filling up pages of notebooks during, in between, and after classes. She was a writer and said so. Not “one day I hope to be a writer.” But was in fact at work on her second novel. She had read in an interview with Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or someone like that that one’s first novel should be put in a drawer until the second novel was finished. True to this axiom, she stowed her debut in a box under her bed as she toiled away on volume two.
“Never give them any ammunition.”
This was the reasoning behind keeping herself a mystery to our fellow students.
“Subvert them from within their own rank and file.”
Brave words from a courageous young woman, but deep down I think she was embarrassed about being poor. I think it made her feel ashamed.
nine
My mother thought it would be a good idea if I got a part-time job. I agreed with her. I liked to work and I liked having my own money. It made me feel mature and manly. When I was fourteen I got a job stocking shelves in a small hardware