When We Travel at Night

As our second chapter begins, on the longest night of the school year, Flipper remembers how he ended up at Saint Alban's and with two friends like Jimmy and Ross.

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Jimmy woke up at the same time Flipper did. Flipper was knuckling his eyes and sitting up on the bed. He yawned, but Jimmy didn’t, he was so quickly brought from sleeping to waking.

Ross was fast asleep in the chair under the great window, and Flipper said:

“Look at us. We’re the two worst white people in the world. We’ve come into a Black man’s house and taken his goddamn bed.”

“Should we wake him up?” Jimmy whispered.

Ross turned over contentedly and Flipper said, “That might make us even worse.”

“I feel awake now,” Jimmy said.

“It’s an illusion,” Flipper insisted. “You don’t really feel awake. You just think you do.. In five minutes you’re going to want to roll right over and go back to sleep.”

“I should go to my room.”

Ross said we should all stay right here.”

“That was before. I was feeling strange before. I don’t feel strange anymore.”

The phone ran suddenly, and none of them was expecting a phone call, and so for a moment Jimmy and Flipper stared at each other, and then Ross immediately picked up his phone and answered.

“Hello? Who the fuck is this?”

“Ross?” said the voice on the phone.

“Who is it?” Jimmy mouthed.

“Macy?”

“Are you up?”

“I’m up now. What the hell time is it?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t sleep.”

Ross looked to the clock and said, “Holy hell, it’s four in the morning.”

“It doesn’t feel like four in the morning,” Jimmy said the same time his cousin Macy did.

“Well, I’ll admit you’re right,” he said.

“We should go somewhere,” she said.

“Like to bed?”

“Like an adventure?”

“When’s your first class?”

“Eight o’ clock.”

Ross cleared his throat.

“It’s no real use getting you to be sensible is it?”

“I would sensibly like to get up and have an adventure,” Macy said. “You want to?”

“I do,” Ross said.

“It’s too bad nobody else is up, but it can be just you and me.”

Ross looked over at Jimmy and Flipper who were sitting on the edge of the bed staring at him.

“I would be lying if I didn’t tell you Jimmy and Flipper are in my room wide awake at this very moment.

“Sounds like a party,” Macy said.

Natively, Ross Allan had no desire to do anything but climb back into bed. But his teenage years had been dull, and even though he was barely twenty he had the idea that he had missed a lot of life by being sensible. These days he wished to miss none of it and took whatever chance he could to do something ridiculous. So when Macy said, “Sounds like a party.” Ross responded:              

“Sounds like a party indeed.”

 

 

Richard Sanders the Third, born in Kentucky, but raised in the cold, flat Midwest,  had hated Saint Hugh’s Episcopal Military Academy, or rather he hated the idea of himself going there. As a kid, his parents had sent him to Catholic school because except for a few silly things, it was the closest to getting an Anglican education, and it was certainly better than the weird Christian school on the edge of Latavia, Michigan. He had loved it, but he’d loved it a little too much, and after the third expulsion, which may or may not have involved smoking pot in the bathroom, his parents, at a loss, had thought of sending him to public school.

That was what he didn’t want. What he wanted to suggest was Saint Catherine’s where his friend Marty went, but he also knew he wasn’t in much of a position to suggest anything. His pastor suggested Saint Hugh’s. Aside from the fact that being packed off to boarding school seemed like a punishment, and it was, Flipper had to admit he had an idea, possibly gained from his Catholic friends that Episcopalians were basically uppity Catholics, and he didn’t want to be uppity. He had seen funerals at Westminster Abbey and English boarding school movies, and he didn’t want to go to school with a bunch of pricks. What was more, he was afraid he would be a prick. But his parents didn’t know what else to do, and they weren’t having a repeat of the foolishness at Saint John’s, so Saint Catherine’s was out, and he found himself, mid year, and by his own doing, at Saint Hugh’s.

That’s a whole chapter, several chapters he never talks about because no one ever asks. Life is lonely, and it’s sort of surprising how no one cares. You have to have things in common with people for them to ask questions. Flipper wanted to go to Saint Alban’s. He wanted to go to Catholic school again. He was used to it, and it wasn’t far from home, but the thing about these Catholics was they were kind of tribal and, again, they didn’t ask a lot of questions. He spent a lot of time saying, “Yeah, my church is a lot like yours.” He even thought about just going to mass with them on Sundays except at this stage in the game he actually didn’t really like church that much anywhere.

And, he never thought about this much anymore, though, the thing was he had enjoyed Saint Hugh’s. He had loved those last few years. He had liked being at an all boys high school. He’d always loved girls, and he’d always had a girlfriend, but it was at Saint Hugh’s that he discovered he liked boys. He enjoyed the company of other boys. He felt close to other boys. Boys without girls were very different than boys trying to impress girls. It was rowdy here sometimes, but a different kind of rowdy, and it was at Saint Hugh’s that he knew he looked impressive with a military hair cut in his grey trousers and jacket, and that he actually liked doing little military drills, and it was the first time he realized he liked what other boys looked like and what was more, that they liked what he looked like too.

It shocked him at first, but  didn’t bother him for long. He wasn’t the only boy like that, and apparently it was a big deal in the Church now, all these talks about female priests, gay priests, bi priests and the dignified decision to stay out of peoples’ business. As much as he had loved Catholic school and his little town, Flipper had the feeling that if he’d stayed there he would have felt very differently about the desires he was discovering in himself.

Because every day of his life he was doing military drills, and there were three pictures of him in his grey uniform and epaulets that made his parents very proud and very convinced that Saint Hugh’s was the right choice for a school, because the yearbook already had several pictures of Flip in shorts and jersey, covered in mud, pushing through a rugby game, and in his football uniform, Number 37, with his shoulder pads making a touchdown and throwing off opposing tacklers, her decided to shock the fuck out of people at the talent show right before graduation. He chose to confound them after he and his friends had gone into town and seen the new film Dolores Claiborne. Having seen it once they saw it three times, and Flipper began his love of movies falling in love with Judy Parfitt as Vera.

The curtain opened, and there Flip Sanders was, utterly serious in an auburn wig, pearl earrings and necklace and a blue dress and he demanded:

“How far has he gone, Delores

“How far has he gone?

“Has he fucked her?”

There was laughter and the uneasy scooting of chairs against the floor. Someone probably getting up to do something. And then he had launched into his favorite part.

“It’s a pressingly masculine world we live in, Delores. Husbands die every day, Delores. Why one is probably dying right now while you’re sitting here weeping. They die and leave their wives their money. I should know, shouldn’t I? Sometimes they’re driving home from their mistress’s apartment, and their brakes fail. An accident, Delores, can be an unhappy woman’s best friend.”

There was silence in the darkness beyond at Flip’s monologue. It seemed that people in the crowd really didn’t know what the fuck to do, and so he went on.

“Sometimes, Dolores, you have to be a high riding bitch to survive. Sometimes… being a bitch is all a woman has to hang onto.”

And then he walked off the stage.

There was confused laughter and then clapping and then mostly clapping, and Flipper had simply gone back to his room as if nothing had happened. He was prepared to be thrown out of the school, to be dismissed and take his final exams somewhere else, but Saint Hugh’s was feeling liberal and not entirely sure what to do about him, though they sent pictures home to his parents. Mr. and Mrs. Sanders had been shocked and that was all he really wanted.

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