Look Again

25

JOEY

The chapel feels very different with kids in it. Better, and at the same time, somehow lonely. I didn’t feel that sense of solitude when I was in here with Dexter. Or when I was in here by myself, for that matter.

It felt perfect to be here alone. Strange that I got that sense of rightness with Dexter.

The kids here on setup are all my students and a few of their friends. They’re working on display spaces. I know a few of them pretty well, but I leave them alone to do their thing, watching and listening from just far enough away. I’m here if they need me. Otherwise, this is a project they can do together, a memory they can make.

One of the kids, Reuben, is up a ladder. He asks his friend Dierdre, a painter, “If you get to be a professional artist, will you use your real name or have a street name?”

“You mean like Banksy?” Dierdre responds. I bite my tongue and hide my smile.

“Yeah, sure. Or not at all.” Reuben manages to sound both polite and mocking.

“I don’t know. Dierdre Ellis-Long is not a very artistic name. It sounds more like a soap opera star.”

Briley, a girl from my 3D class who shows a lot of promise in nontraditional composition and design, takes a nail out of her mouth (gross) to chime in. “We can’t all have artist names. My dad wanted to name me after his grandmother, had it all planned for me, but my mom said if it didn’t sound like the name of a Supreme Court Justice, it wasn’t going to fly.”

“Really? Like, she practiced The Honorable Briley Jacobson? The Honorable Dierdre Ellis-Long? The Honorable Reuben Espinoza?”

Briley laughs. “Yep, exactly like that. Except my dad’s grandmother’s name was Joan. Try it. Joan Jacobson. Nope. So, Briley it is.”

The kids laugh in the friendly confidence that all parents are basically nuts. She added, “Not that it ended there. She told me that if I choose to marry, I should strongly consider not changing my last name unless it’s a two-syllable trochee foot.”

A girl named Stella howls with laughter. “Have you told Mr. Grantham that? He’d be thrilled that anyone uses the language of poetic devices outside a Shakespeare class. He’d probably give you extra credit.”

“Or at least he’d give extra points to your mom.”

I like that they tease about Hank as a teacher. It feels like they love him.

“Confession,” I finally break in, turning around and no longer pretending I can’t hear them from three feet away. “I don’t know what a trochee foot is.”

Briley gasps. “And you became a successful human adult? How is that possible?” She laughs. “It’s one of those things that people who major in Fifteenth Century British Literature feel morally obligated to bring up at every possible opportunity to prove that their liberal arts education was unwasted. I promise you can continue to live without this knowledge.”

I nod, I smile, and I keep going. “But now I need to know.”

She shakes her head. “It means I can marry someone whose two-syllable last name has a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Here’s an alphabetical sampling, just off the top of my head. Andrus. Bateman. Caldwell. Davis. Elway. Francis. Ginsberg. Hansen.” She stopped. “I can’t think of an I.”

It jumps out of my mouth. “Ingalls. Like the little family on the prairie.

“Exactly.”

Reuben shakes his head. “Parents, man.”

“My parents made up my name, and they get more annoyed every time I meet another person named Briley.” She jumps off the ladder she was standing on and moves a foot to the right. I climb up while she holds on to the legs of the ladder and keeps talking. “I tell them about new Brileys at least once a quarter. I haven’t met a Briley since Vail, Thanksgiving of my sophomore year. All the latest Brileys are fictional.”

I stand on the ladder tightening the wire in its eyelet connector. “At least you’re not named for your father,” I say, pointing to myself. “Second daughter perks.”

Dierdre Ellis-Long laughs. “I’ve got you beat. My middle name is Eunice.”

“Are you making that up?” I hear Briley ask.

I love listening to these kids talk about things that never come up in the classroom. This is fun, I realize. I like hearing their insides.

The door swishes open, and a frosty wind pushes in. Dexter sticks his head into the room, and the kids go quiet. I wave him in, assuming the chatter will resume. It doesn’t. It seems like my assembled team doesn’t include any of our crossover students. They don’t know him, and his entrance shut them right up.

Dexter wanders in and checks out the setup, which is not terribly impressive at this point. Mostly a few wires strung into hook eyes. But I can see where it’s going, and I feel like I want to explain all the progress. However, it’s still way too quiet in the room, and I don’t want to be the only voice.