Alice Hoffman

Flight

Eugene Kessler was supposed to be my brother's best friend, but he and I actually had a lot more in common. It wasn't so much that Eugene and I liked each other, or that there was any possibility of romance between us. It was more that we both despised Franconia, the suburb where we were doomed to live. In Franconia, no one's imagination was working overtime, that much was evident from the moment you first walked through town, where you could find the Franconia High School, the Franconia Mail, the Franconia Diner, and, for special occasions - proms, for instance, or extramarital trysts - the Franconia Steak House, which Eugene and I called Marie's, not only because Marie Fortuna's husband caught her there, eating antipasto with her boyfriend, who happened to be the soccer coach at the high school, but because we couldn't stand to hear the word Franconia used one more time.
Eugene and I were in business together, earning money for our escape from town by selling term papers, and June was our busiest time of the year. By the end of the month, however, we were no longer doing our best work. The pressure was on, the stupid among us had panicked, and I was writing all night. In part, I kept odd hours because my brother strongly disapproved of our venture, and Jason was so honest and good that a single look from him could make a person feel sordid and corrupt. But the real reason I was writing three or more papers at a time was that Eugene was in charge of the division of labor, and he'd divided it so that two thirds of the labor was mine. After all, he had started the business, so it was only fair that he administered everything, including our finances, which were kept in a joint savings account. Or at least, this was Eugene's line every time I complained. And when I really considered my situation, it wasn't so difficult to accept the deal he offered and keep my mouth shut. In August, Eugene would be leaving he and my brother had done what no one in our town had ever managed before and had both gotten into Harvard - at which point the business would be all mine.
So I kept cranking out term papers [...]. I had a lot not to think about back then, including the horrible noise the cicadas made all day and night, an echo that could lead you to believe little bombs were going off on your neighbors' front lawns. I certainly didn't want to dwell on the fact that I'd probably ruined my hair for good. I had dyed it black and cut the front much too short, using a dull nail scissors, so that I now looked as though I were in a constant state of shock. Well, maybe I was, and maybe I had good reason to be. Not long ago my father had moved out and now my mother barely left her room. Even our dog, a Labrador retriever known to do little but sleep, had attacked Mrs. Fisher's cat across the street and now, instead of roaming the neighborhood, he was chained up in our yard, eating cicadas, making himself sick.
Through it all, the heat just kept getting worse. At school, people fainted during homeroom. There were fights in the parking lot of the Franconia Mall, real fights that were bloody and unforgiving and hot. After a while, all anyone could hear were those horrible cicadas and the whirring of air conditioners. It got so that I hated everyone - not Jason of course, who was too pure to hate just everyone else who lived and breathed inside the Franconia town limits.
The only one who seemed to understand me at that point in time was Eugene Kessler, and this notion was just about as scary as any I'd ever had. On truly hot nights, when the air was so humid and thick it was a triumph to draw a deep breath, I would sometimes see Eugene out in his yard. Somehow, I knew how alone he felt, and it gave me the shivers to think that alienation could be a shared experience. Eugene had found a great horned owl at a rest area on the parkway two summers earlier. Now, on nights when everyone else was at home with the air conditioner turned on high, Eugene would let the owl fly free. He'd been informed by a lieutenant down at the police department that he'd better keep the owl caged at all times, because of an incident involving a toy poodle that had been carried off, but Eugene had his own view of natural selection. He figured that the Yorkie who lived on the corner, and the Chihuahua who snarled from behind a fence over on Maple, had better run for cover when they spied the owl's shadow above them. In Eugene's opinion, their fate was in their own paws.
Jason was different. He wasn't like Eugene, and he certainly wasn't like me. He always played by the rules. My brother was so serious and straightlaced that teenage girls were constantly after him. Several had spent all year attempting to seduce him, but Jason had other things on his mind. He'd devoted every free minute to his senior science thesis. Twenty hamsters were kept in cages in his bedroom. Ten had been given a so balanced diet of seeds and grains, but the other ten had eaten nothing but Twinkies, My brother hoped to finish his research before leaving for college, although to me it already seemed obvious that the Twinkie ten were not only fatter but far more intelligent. As soon as they heard my brother's bedroom door open, they ran to their feeding stations, while the grain and nut hamsters just went on running on their wheels, making the same hopeless circles they spun every night.
Maybe Jason would have finished his research if Eugene had remembered to write Joey Jergens's history paper, but Eugene was too busy planning his future, plotting his imminent escape, to pay much attention to our schedule. Eugene had missed the delivery date and Joey was outraged when he called me. I had to soothe him with promises of ten pages on the Salem witch trials by eight the following morning.
"Don't be mad," Eugene said as soon as he saw me the next day.
We were in the field behind the high school and Joey was headed straight for us. Of course, I refused to speak to Eugene. I had slept for two hours. I was in no mood for this. "I’ll do the Romeo and Juliet for Sue Greco," Eugene vowed. He knew I dreaded Shakespeare papers, and had one of my own past due. "The Industrial Revolution for Horowitz?" Eugene whispered. "Consider it done."
By now, Joey Jergens was upon us. "Got my paper?"
Joey was not a conversationalist, but it was enough that he had taken fifteen dollars out of his jeans pocket. I started to hand over the opus I'd written, but Eugene grabbed for it. "Let me check for typos," he said.
"No way," I said. "Who sat up all night with this thing? This paper's mine."
"Be careful with that," Joey Jergens warned me, and maybe I was clutching on too tightly. But Eugene was trying to pry my hard work away, and I wouldn't let him, and that was how Mr. Prospero, the vice principal, found us, struggling over a report neither of us cared about, enmeshed in a battle that would only cause us grief.
By nine-fifteen we were all suspended. Joey Jergens had been expecting to go to summer school, so it didn't matter much to him, but now Eugene wouldn't graduate. Maybe he stood there for a while, staring at the high school, and maybe he didn't. I so don't know. I immediately headed for home. I was thinking about myself and no one else. I had just lost the summer, after all. Other people would be having a life, I'd be reading Romeo and Juliet in a classroom hot enough to bake bread on the desks.
Naturally, my brother blamed me for everything. He didn't care that Eugene had started the business and had practically drafted me. "He can still go to Cambridge with you," I told my brother, even though I knew it wasn't true. You couldn't enroll for more than two classes in the summer, and Eugene would be missing four credits".
My brother phoned Eugene, ready to let him have it for throwing his future away for fifteen lousy dollars, but when Jason came back into the living room he didn't seem mad anymore. Eugene had already been to the bank and withdrawn our entire joint savings. Then he'd gone home and left a note for his mother in which he swore he would pay me back someday, although I certainly wasn't about to hold my breath. Eugene had also informed his mother that he was buying a plane ticket and by the time she read his note he'd already be on his way to San Francisco. Maybe I should have been angry about working all year for nothing, but I wasn't. I went over and let Mrs. Kessler tell me about the way Eugene had taught himself to read the dictionary when he was two and a half, even though I'd heard the story about a million times before. Mrs. Kessler had a weird look on her face, and it made me think of my mother, just after my father had left her. It made me think that summer would never be the same, not now and not ever.
I guess deep inside I did believe everything that had happened was my fault. I must have, because sometime between the moment when I got to the Kesslers' and the moment when I left, I told Eugene's mother I'd be glad to take care of the owl until Eugene returned. Of course, Mrs. Kessler was delighted to get rid of the owl. She got down on her knees and helped me coax it into its cage. I walked home carefully, trying ns not to jostle the owl, but as soon as I set the cage down on our living room floor, I realized my mistake. Somehow, the owl looked much bigger in our house. Its feet were as big as our Labrador retriever's. I couldn't even stand to be in the same room as Eugene's horrible pet. I went to the kitchen and telephoned everyone I knew to announce my suspension from school, but it wasn't the same as talking to Eugene. Still, I talked for a long time, long enough so that Jason was the one who discovered that the owl had killed every one of his hamsters. Either the cage had been left open or the owl knew some tricks I wasn't aware of. Frankly, its method of escape didn't matter. By the time Jason walked into his bedroom, the owl was sitting on the air conditioner, distressed and thwarted, its feathers ruffled; although it had managed to kill all the hamsters, it still couldn't get to them through the meshing of their cages.
My brother had hoped to finish his experiment before leaving for college; now he didn't have to worry. It was over. If the owl hadn't belonged to Eugene, I think Jason would have killed it. Instead, he went out and bought six live chicks at the pet store. But the owl wouldn't eat. We watched over it for days and then weeks, but the owl never really recovered. Maybe the heat was what caused its feathers to drop out, one by one, as it perched on the air conditioner. Or maybe it was only longing for someone who wasn't afraid to let it fly above the poplars and crab apples, searching backyards, a streak of lightning in our dark sky.