Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen Read Free Book Online Page A

silhouette of a tuxedoed bunny printed on it. Nevertheless by lunchtime you had been summoned to the school nurse, who kept extra clothes in her office, and made to change into a striped shirt such as little boys were supposed to wear.
    In the following years I saw you here and there, around school and the neighborhood. You were always alone. One of the more memorable aspects of your personality was that despite your solitude you couldn’t stop talking, some feature in your brain demanding you dictate whatever you were doing as you did it, whatever you were thinking about as you thought it. Often what you were thinking about was what you had recently watched on television, or heard on the radio. Your head was full of jingles, slogans, mottoes, theme songs, indeed you were a marketing man’s fantasy, you couldn’t get those songs out of your head: Oh, I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener, you sang, that is what I’d really like to be.
    Once you caught the attention of our principal, a WWII purple heart who ran the school much like a basic training camp and who was, that year, embattled in a lawsuit involving a student and allegations of physical violence. His name was Mr. K., and indeed he carried about him all the mystery and absurdity of a Kafka character. Silver-haired, acne-scarred, with the angry profile of a bald eagle, he walked the halls in shining suits and polished, clacking shoes, commanding silence in every room he entered. Often he would walk into the cafeteria and call a handful of kids away from their lunches, line them up on the stage at the front of the room, where he drilled them on the basics of American education—the states and their capitals, the dates of wars and treaties and ratifications, the terms of presidents. Most of us performed badly, stuttering and stammering, at which point Mr. K. liked to give a speech, the same one every time, about the statistical likelihood of our pending worthlessness. “In this city,” he’d say, “the high school graduation rate is well below the national average. One out of four of you won’t make it through. And out of the pathetic rest of you who graduate, only half of those will go to college, and only half of those will finish. Look around your tables,” he’d say, “and ask yourself if you’re going to make it that far.” He’d stop for a moment to let us make our calculations. And when we looked around it was already clear who was who, the handful of kids taking all of this seriously, sitting at attention wondering, Is it me? Could it be me, could it? while the rest of us had already resigned, thrown in the towel, for kids like us there was no point even wondering. “The answer is,” Mr. K. would say, “probably not.” He’d pace up and down through the rows of tables, hands clasped behind his back. “I’m standing here today on behalf of that small handful of you,” he’d say, “who are willing to work hard to become worthy of the resources spent on your upbringing. As for the rest of you,” he’d say, “I hope you enjoy your lives shoveling other people’s shit.”
    When your turn came for questioning, Mr. K. asked you to name the countries involved in the war of 1812. I dunno, you said, and Mr. K. told you to take your time, to think about it for a moment. I dunno, you said again, and Mr. K. said to at least take a guess.
    Massachusetts, you said, and Boston, and Mr. K. stopped in his tracks. He stood for a long moment regarding you, as if seeing you for the first time. The room was silent. “Step forward,” he finally said, and you stepped out of line to the front of the stage, hesitant, sensing that you were in some kind of trouble but unsure of the cause. “Look at those trousers,” said Mr. K. You looked down at your corduroys, which were covered in mud. “I want you to tell me what happened to your trousers.”
    You