Donorboy Read online

  I want to be with Jen all the time. But I don’t really feel like I want to kiss her. I don’t know what that means. Maybe Lisa the adolescent grief queen can tell me if there’s some kind of lesbo checklist or something. I guess I could ask Aunt Karen. I don’t know. I love her and everything but I think she still thinks I’m this little kid and I don’t know how I would ask her how she knew, when she knew or what. I think I might have been able to ask Mom and she would have been cool about it, but then we get back into the icky thing about moms having sex or even thinking about sex and so maybe I wouldn’t have even asked.

  I am tired, tired of being me all the time.

  CHARLESBOROUGH HIGH SCHOOL 10/07/04.

  INFORMAL MEETING.

  Participants: Rosalind Butterfield, Sean Cassidy, Richard Mould

  SEAN CASSIDY: Is it okay with you if I record this? It’s one of those lawyer things.

  RICHARD MOULD: Sure. Is that some kind of digital thing?

  SC: Minidisc.

  RM: So you get, what, about eighty minutes on a disc?

  SC: Something like that. If my batteries hold out. (Laughs.) Once I had to take this deposition (pause) well, never mind.

  RM: So, before we begin, I just want to turn to Rosalind here and ask if you have anything to say before we begin.

  ROSALIND BUTTERFIELD: No.

  RM: So I have here, and Mr. Cassidy I’ve made copies for you, e-mails from all of Rosalind’s teachers. (Pause.) You can see that it’s much the same thing across the board. With the exception of English, which is a notable bright spot. All of your teachers, Rosalind, are very worried about you. (Pause.) Right now you are not on track to pass anything but English this quarter, though Mr. Stinson says if you pass the constitution test, it is still possible.

  (Pause.)

  SC: So she could still pass history and English for first quarter.

  RM: Yes. Now, of course, failing for the first quarter is not necessarily destiny in terms of failure for the year. But I do need to tell you both … well, Mr. Cassidy, we consider ourselves to be a family here, and we’re frankly very concerned about Rosalind’s success. As I said, it’s mathematically possible to fail the first quarter and pass the remaining three, but I have to be honest with you and say that I don’t see it happen very often.

  SC: Well, in the cases where you do see it happen, what makes the difference?

  RM: Well, of course a variety of factors—

  SC: I am a little concerned about what I’m hearing here, because it sounds to me like you are writing off Rosalind’s ninth-grade year here based on four weeks of grades. It just feels premature to me.

  RM: No no no, not by any means. But I would like to just have you keep an open mind about all of the possibilities here. We all hope that Rosalind will turn things around, but down the road, if she doesn’t, it wouldn’t hurt to consider the idea that a therapeutic setting might be more appropriate given the nature of the trauma—

  SC: Are you suggesting that you can’t meet Rosalind’s needs here?

  RM: Well, we are unclear right now about exactly what Rosalind’s needs are, but it is clear she’s suffered a terrible tragedy, and while we certainly will continue to do our best for her here, we may find down the road that she needs more of an intervention than we are equipped to provide.

  SC: Well, she is going to counseling.

  RM: Which is fantastic, but it seems to me that Rosalind may have some issues that she is working out that may supersede her academic—

  RB: Bingo!

  RM: I’m sorry?

  (Silence.)

  SC: Rosalind, what are you doing there? Is that a buzzword bingo game?

  (Silence.)

  SC: Now, when we do this at diversity training at work, you actually have to raise your hand and work the word bingo into your comment. I mean just to shout it out like that—

  RM: (Clears throat.) This is the kind of behavior that—

  SC: Yes? Have you had complaints about Rosalind’s behavior?

  RM: Well, not as such, but her teachers—

  SC: Are very concerned about her, as you said. So am I, but I have to tell you that I find the content of this meeting frankly disturbing from both a personal and professional standpoint.

  RM: I’m sorry?

  SC: Well, Mr. Mould, Rosalind and I were under the impression that we were here to talk about solutions, to try to move forward, and you’ve opened with the suggestion that Rosalind find an alternative placement. It seems to me that should be the very last thing we consider.

  RM: Well, no, I am not suggesting that a therapeutic setting would necessarily be more appropriate, but I do think we should investigate all of our options down the road if it becomes clear that Rosalind is not succeeding here. I’m just trying to open the conversation so that if, down the road, we reach that point, we’ll have a clear idea of what we’re looking at.

  SC: Is this district willing to foot the bill for a therapeutic setting?

  RM: Well, most of our parents naturally choose private facilities that—

  SC: Yeah, yes, I’m sure that they do. And the district pays for these settings?

  RM: Well, on a case-by-case basis we review the—

  SC: Mr. Mould, I’m sorry, I wonder if I can just talk to Rosalind privately here for a moment?

  RM: Certainly.

  (Sounds of papers shuffling, door closing.)

  SC: So, let me see what you’ve got: “consider ourselves a family,” “therapeutic setting,” “investigate our options,” “issues that supersede,” “down the road.” Well, you really shoulda put that one at least twice. You were briefed for this meeting, huh? I mean, you knew what was coming?

  RB: Yeah, I guess.

  SC: I wish you would have told me. If I knew this guy was this full of shit, I never would have wasted our time coming in here. (Silence.) Ros?

  RB: Don’t call me that, okay? It sounds weird coming from you.

  SC: Fine. Rosalind? (Silence.) We’re on the same side here. You know? (Silence.) Did they make you read A Man for All Seasons in English? (Silence.) You should read it. There’s a whole thing in there about how silence implies consent. Thomas More tries to use it as a defense to stop Henry the Eighth from cutting his head off. Anyway, so if I say, “We’re on the same side,” for example, and you say nothing, for example, we can take that to mean that you assent to the statement.

  RB: Whatever.

  SC: Do you want to stay here?

  RB: You mean now?

  SC: I mean do you want to keep going to school here? Because I think this guy is an idiot, and you should stay here just to spite him, but if you’d rather start over somewhere else, we can do that. I just want to help you get what you want here.

  RB: Yeah, you care a lot about what I want. Drop me off at Karen’s then.

  (Silence.)

  SC: Okayyyy … Well, I guess we’re done here.

  END OF RECORDING

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Counselor meeting

  Good afternoon. I’ve just returned from a meeting with Rosalind’s guidance counselor, which, apart from providing the food and shelter, was supposed to be my first official real dad act and ended horribly. The guidance counselor essentially wants me to put Ros in some kind of group home for troubled teens, and Ros doesn’t want me to call her Ros and wants to live with Karen.

  I really didn’t know what to do, and it just went horribly. I started getting all lawyerly with the counselor, which didn’t appear to make any progress, though I thought up a good line to use: “Do you understand that I sue schools for a living?” But I want to save that one for something special.

  In any case, it’s clear that Rosalind is having a hard time with her grief, and I appear to have hooked her up with a real dud of a therapist, at least to start with, and the school is just flummoxed. I suppose they have fifteen hundred kids there and just have nothing in place for the small p
ercentage in crisis, but it really made me angry. The counselor made it clear that Charlesborough is not a school for kids with problems.

  So, at the end of the day, the counselor is angry at me, I am angry at him, and Rosalind appears to be angry at both of us.

  Then again, she pretty much appears to be angry at all times, but her playing the Karen card seems to indicate a spike in her anger level.

  I am once again finding that I have no talent for this parenting business, which may be why the eligible bachelorettes have been less than inclined to stick around in the last few years. Do you think they have some sort of radar about that? Well, given the number of troglodytes who father children, I suppose the answer there has to be no.

  Ugh. Please tell me that this is going to get better.

  —Sean

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: Counselor meeting

  Hmm … so the counselor was a tool and the teen was sullen? Sounds like every parent meeting I’ve ever been to. Seriously, I go to like five or six of these a year, and if you didn’t scream at anybody, you did good. I’ve seen parents look like they were about to hit their kids and also sat there for twenty minutes with the counselor and the kid and no parent while the kid looks at us like, “Well, failing stuff to get attention was evidently a bust.” But I have also seen people who appeared normal and loving hit a brick wall with their kids. Nobody knows what to do with teenagers, and most administrators are dicks. Give yourself a break.

  I don’t know what to tell you about the bachelorettes and why they haven’t stuck around except what I’ve already told you a million times. I will say that whenever I am at the playground with just Max, there are many opportunities to mingle with the single moms if I wanted to, so maybe taking Rosalind in will pay some unexpected dividends, like you will meet some nice woman when you are both bailing out your kids or something.

  That was supposed to be a joke.

  Call me later.

  —D

  Dear My Favorite Grief Journal:

  Hey I never noticed this but when I typed that the computer tried to make it say Dear Mom and Dad which would be a funny kind of letter for me to write.

  Well, Lisa is much better than Denise, she will at least say stuff to me, I mean say not ask, so when I said I was sort of worried about the lesbian thing she said something I had to stop listening to because it bored the shit out of me but basically I think she said that’s not something I have to make up my mind about right now or really even ever.

  And when I told her that I can’t cry she said that was normal and probably me trying to protect myself but that it will happen and it doesn’t mean I don’t love my moms or maybe I guess I should use the past tense there.

  Today I was thinking about them a lot. I miss them a lot even though I can’t cry about it. That was probably why I was a bitch to Sean even though he kind of stood up to Mould which I did appreciate because he is a dick. But I was like if they were still alive I would be getting A’s and Mould would barely know my name and they’d come home from parent night all “your teachers say the most wonderful things about you” and all that stuff and I was sitting there in that meeting like I just slipped out of my own nice life and into somebody else’s crappy one. That’s not really Sean’s fault, I don’t think he made the turduckens, but it is his fault he took me instead of giving me to Karen which probably would have been the humane thing to do but then I probably would have had to change schools since she lives in Dedham and who the hell wants to live in Dedham.

  But I did kind of change schools already because there is a whole school here that I never knew about but I actually walked into the caf to get some fries and saw Jen and her friends sitting at a table and they kind of motioned me over and I got all like I think I blushed or something but I went and I was really happy to go and to see how Sasha and Kristen and all of them looked at me like quickly looking and pretending not to look and then huddling close so they can talk about how I’m a druggy now, which I’m not even though I had lunch with Bitches With Problems. That is what Kate said anyway and she is an artist who shoplifts or that’s what Jen told me. But when I sat down Kate was like welcome to the Bitches With Problems table and I was like, okay, I guess I fit both categories. Nobody asked me what my problem was. Maybe Jen told them already, but even still they didn’t look like they wanted to talk about it and they didn’t ask me anything about oh my god how am I doing and I liked that.

  I used to look over at this table just the way I noticed people looking at this table today, like there go the freaks with the weird hair and clothes and too many piercings and the fact is that they have been way better to me than my own non-druggy friends the bitches without problems or anyway the bitches with different problems, but I shouldn’t even say that because Kristen anyway is very nice and I do know that Sasha was trying, it wasn’t like she didn’t try.

  So I guess except for the fact that I am still an orphan living in some strange guy’s house, things are looking up. Except I still haven’t done any work in geometry or history or earth science or espanol unless you count watching Dos Mujeres, un Camino which I did for like ten minutes last night with the captions on so I could read the words but I still didn’t understand it. But I am pretty sure one of the mujeres is in love with that guy with the long hair.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

  That subject line is a Roberta Flack joke. She also did “Killing Me Softly,” which was a big hit for the Fugees a few years ago. Of course, now that I think of it, you were only five or six when that came out, and so you might not even know what I’m talking about. Lauryn Hill … well, never mind.

  The meeting certainly was a disaster. Of course, as I look at it now, I am not certain what I hoped the meeting would accomplish, except to show you that I care about the fact that you are failing everything. Except English. I have no idea if it was a success in that respect and if knowing that I care might be counterbalanced by the fact that your counselor obviously doesn’t.

  In any case, should we ever have another meeting at school (perhaps it could be something along the lines of “Rosalind has really turned it around!”), I would deeply appreciate it if you could share your intelligence with me. That way I will have a better idea of what to say. Also I might be able to compete with you on the bingo front, which always makes it more entertaining. I won during the last diversity training, having put “baggage” in nearly every square. I raised my hand and said to the facilitator, “When you described the cycle of oppression, I thought about this Haitian client that I just couldn’t connect with and I thought, ‘Bingo! That’s it!’” There were audible groans from my co-conspirators.

  Well. Several days ago I promised to tell you about the first time I saw you, so here we go with that. After you were born, I went to the hospital and saw you with your moms. Looking at it objectively, of course, you were a baby much like every other baby, but I couldn’t believe what I felt. I looked at you in Eva’s arms and saw the most perfect, wonderful baby ever in the history of the universe. This may sound corny and unbelievable, but I honestly felt like my heart would explode. It was the strongest emotion I have ever felt, tied with intense grief, which is saying something.

  I am at a loss as to how to explain this, but feeling that much love is terrifying. I was very young, and therefore terrified of the responsibility of raising a child, but I was also terrified of the way looking at you made me feel. It was an entirely positive feeling, but, well, as I said, it was terrifying. I hope you will get an opportunity to experience the same thing. But not soon. In any case, your mothers and I had essentially agreed that I was not going to be a real parent to you. I always assumed that I wasn’t really supposed to participate—that in addition to the lack of St. Vitus’ dance in my family history, my youth was a positive factor in my selection be
cause it implied that I would not try to be your father. That sounds unfair to your mothers, so let me say the following things. First of all, when they asked me what I envisioned my role to be, I panicked and mumbled something about how I wasn’t ready for any kind of responsibility. My memory is that they appeared relieved at this answer, but I may be projecting my own relief that they accepted my answer well. They did say they would leave the door open should I change my mind. Once I actually saw you, I was terrified of the strength of my emotion, so I went to law school and worked hard and didn’t socialize with anyone, and eventually I fell out of touch with your mothers. This was my own doing. I didn’t know how to conduct myself around you, and, as I said, I was frightened, so I backed off. I do believe that they were sincere about the door being open to me having more of a role in your life, but I never walked through. I am sorry about that. When I reflect on my life I see a series of missed opportunities, and that is certainly the greatest one.

  Your mothers wrote to me every year on your birthday with a picture and an update on how you were doing. I rarely wrote back but always appreciated the letters. I still have them if you would like to see them. They are in the black photo album on the bottom shelf in the living room.

  Well, I do have schools to sue here, so I must return to work. My coworker Ramona informed me that there is a new and delicious vegetarian restaurant a mere ten minutes out of my way on the way home. I will come home bearing takeout tonight, so don’t fill up on enchiladas. (I found them somewhat of a letdown after the pleasant surprise of the high-quality burritos. Well, I guess nobody bats a thousand …)

  —Sean

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

  I know you care about me failing everything. The only problem is that I don’t. I actually kind of wish I did, but I don’t.

  Don’t be so hard on yourself about not being around. I am actually not trying to be mean, but it’s not like I missed you, if you know what I mean. I had two great parents which is more than a lot of kids have.