Victoria Frankenstein, III: Part 4

 

Three

His name was Irv. Irv Washington.[i]

He was in several of my classes, and he was clearly a smart kid—a very smart kid. He wasn’t the kind who raised his hand all the time. But when he did raise it, and when a teacher did call on him, he almost always said something remarkable. Surprising. Surprising and smart.

Here’s an example. In English class one day—and, remember, we were doing Frankenstein stuff that fall—Mr. W. asked if anybody felt there was something wrong about calling Victor’s creation a “monster.”

No one really offered anything. I, of course, could have said a few things, but there was no way I was going to. I was, remember, in my don’t-notice-me mode.

Then Irving’s hand went up. Mr. W. called on him.

“Well,” said Irving, “I think what Mary Shelley is saying is that we all manufacture things in our lives—and all of them, of course, are part of us. So if some of them are ‘monstrous,’ well, that means that part of us must be monstrous, too, right? I mean, it came out of us—out of our minds and imaginations.”

No one said anything. Some of the other kids just looked at him with that What?!? look on their faces. I mean, what he said was so beyond what most of my classmates could  come up with that they had no real way to respond to it.

I sneaked a look at him (didn’t want him to notice me).

And he was … good-looking.

Even thinking such words surprised me. As far as I could remember, I’d never looked at a boy and thought what I had just thought about Irving. But here he is—see if you agree with me:

Dark hair—kind of long and messy. Sort of medium height—not one of those eighth-grade boys who hit puberty early and look like young giants. But not little-boy small, either. Bright brown eyes that could never conceal his intelligence—no more than a shiny new Porsche can conceal wealth.

 He didn’t seem to care all that much what he wore—nothing that leaped out at you and said I’m expensive! Nothing about him that said I look like a male model, don’t I? Just ordinary clothes that somehow didn’t look ordinary on him.

He carried a backpack that he slung with no effort over his right shoulder when he got up to leave for his next class. It was sort of full and sort of not full—just the right balance. And, later, I noticed him moving down the hall with the grace of a dancer.

Okay, this is getting to be too much. Did I just write with the grace of a dancer? I’m starting to sound like an idiot.

Which, of course, is how you start to sound when you first feel yourself … attracted … to someone else.

***

One of the things that really attracted me: his writing. Whenever we had a writing assignment (which wasn’t all that often—Mr. W. had lots of students[ii]), I was always really surprised by the quality of what Irv came up with. (I, of course, tried to stay below the radar—did not give any evidence of any real talent at all.)

One assignment was this: Take a story that you’ve read and liked (or hated) and change it some significant ways.

Irv chose “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and he yanked his version of the story into our very town and school! Ichabod Crane was Mr. W., and the Headless Horseman did not ride a horse but a bicycle—“The Headless Cyclist,” Irv called it. We all laughed a lot that day when he read it aloud in class—all except for Mr. W., of course, who came off like the ridiculous Ichabod Crane.

At the end, Mr. W. is coming home from chaperoning a Halloween dance, takes a shortcut through the little local woods. The Headless Cyclist came wheeling after him, wearing a costume like Ronald McDonald’s—and threw a Big Mac at Mr. W., covering him with sauce, other toppings, and a couple of patties, soiling his favorite suit.[iii]

***

What drove me crazy about the whole thing? There was no one I could talk with about it—about my feelings. About my … attractions.

And then, suddenly, there was …

***

No boy, except poor Gil of course, had ever “liked” me, and I had “liked” him, too. But his illness—his death—had put an end to that. And, as I’ve said a few times already, I was doing my utmost not to be noticed at this new school. But one boy did notice me—not Irving. No, this other boy’s name was John. John Howard.[iv] And I had not noticed him at all, not until I felt someone sit down near me at “my” table in the school cafeteria—the table where I always sat by myself.

“Okay if I sit here?” he said in a high voice that actually sounded musical.

“Fine,” I mumbled, not even looking up from the book I was reading—the most famous short stories of Washington Irving. I’d gotten more interested in him because Mary Shelley had once had a crush on him … they’d even had a date. It must have scared him off because he quickly left England.

He opened a little bag of chips. Took a deep breath, said, “You’re new, aren’t you?”

I didn’t look up. But said, “Yes.”

“Where you from?”

I finally looked up. “Are we really going to go through all of this?” I asked in as snotty a voice as I could manage. “Where I’m from, my favorite color, what I want for Christmas—”

“Guess not,” he said quietly. And munched some more chips.

Then said, “What do you want for Christmas?”

I couldn’t help it … I laughed a little.

“Maybe a cloak of invisibility,” I said.

“Like Frodo’s in The Lord of the Rings?”

That surprised me. “You’ve read that?” I asked.

“Only about a dozen times,” he said. “I’m kind of an addict.”

I smiled—I knew what a reading “addict” was. I saw one in the mirror every time I looked.

***

            John starting sitting at my lunch table now and then—not every day (he probably knew that would bug me) but a couple of days a week. We sometimes had small conversations though often we were mostly silent the whole time.

One day he asked me, “You going to go see the school musical?”

This sounded like he was leading up to inviting me—a “date.” I had no interest in that—no, it was even worse: I had a fear of that. So I decided to cut it off as quickly and painlessly as possible.

“Probably not,” I said. “I’ve got stuff to do at home.”

He sighed. “That’s too bad.”

“Hmmmm.”

“You’ll miss a chance to criticize me.”

I looked up.

“I’m Dracula,” he said.

“I don’t see any red juice in your cup,” I said.

“No, no … not really Dracula.”

“Duh.”

But he was still smiling. “I’m Dracula in the school musical.”

“There’s a musical about Dracula?” I kind of laughed.

“Quite a few, as a matter of fact.”

“And what’s this one called?”

“Dracula, Baby.”[v]

“And you’re Dracula in the show?”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” I said, “then I might just go.”

  And then I asked him if he knew Irv. He did. And then I asked him if he could see if Irv would be, uh, interested in sitting with me.

John got a pained look on his face. But he told me he’d see what he could do.

And the next day, he told me at lunch that Irv “wouldn’t mind” if I sat near him and some of his friends.

“Wouldn’t mind” is not the greatest encouragement—but when you’re sort of “interested” in somebody, well, you take what you can get.

And so it was that I decided to go see Dracula, Baby. And that decision changed everything.

---

[i] Mary Shelley had a brief friendship with writer Washington Irving (“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle,” etc.) in the 1820s. She wanted more; he didn’t.

[ii] Vickie is right about that! Oh, the time it takes to grade many sets of student compositions!

[iii] I have no memory of this whatsoever.

[iv] John Howard Payne (1791–1852), an American in Europe—an actor and a playwright— was a friend of Mary Shelley’s—and of Washington Irving’s. For a while, Payne, though he was attracted to Mary himself, acted as a go-between for Mary and Irving.

[v] This is an actual script for middle school students. Available from Dramatic Publishing; Woodstock, IL.