Liam's Journal

When I was called to my father's office during the first period of that last day of Winter Quarter, my English teacher Mr. Clemmons gave me a sympathetic look. We both knew what was about to happen and my public school classmates, oblivious as ever just continued to softly jabber and exchange Year Books, utterly ignoring the decade old film of A Christmas Carol running jerkily on the battered old projector. Final Exams had taken place at the start of the week and everything wound down from there just like it always did with more screwing around and watching films and dumb holiday-flavored educational games. I kept my eyes low as I slung the wired notebook I'd been doodling into my blue canvas school bag with its white crest with a rearing blue horse- the high school's mascot- and then yanked it up over my shoulder and trudged to the Vice Principle's office.

Being the son of Vice Principle Hughes had been a rollercoaster for the past four years, a mashup of expectations and responsibilities. The bullies had kept their distance but so most of the other kids too. My closest friends from Junior High had gotten placement in private academies through sheer scholarship or parental endowments; anyone else but me who genuinely loved books and math and science had taken advantage of the Dominion's examinations to get out of the public school system, fast-tracking to an academy to start preparing for university and all the privileges and status that came forthwith to anyone capable of obtaining an Ivy League degree. Champion High School wasn't the worst public high school in Boston- that dubious honor belonged to Resiliancy in South End.

My father's door was open and he was on the phone but wrapped up the conversation as I started to hover and waved me in.

"Close the door and sit down. You aren't in trouble," my father began as he reached for his tie and loosened it. "I just wanted to talk to you about a conversation I had with the District Proctor today. It was about your examination scores.  You did really well, Ethan..."

I felt the bile surging into my throat. Of course I'd done really well! I had gotten soaring marks on placement exams four the past four years, every since I'd began to take them when I was twelve. Back then, I'd just assumed that was what mattered, that is how I'd get myself out of the public school system and into a five star academy and then Harvard where my mother and her stupid religious beliefs could not stand in my way.

Something on my face must have given me away because my father frowned and leaned back in his chair.

"We shouldn't even be having this conversation until after the results are officially delivered on New Year. But I don't want to go through it all with you and your mother again; she isn't going to budge on this Ethan and-"

"How is it fair that she gets to choose my life for me!" I didn't mean to get out of that chair so fast I nearly toppled it over. "I belong at university! I belong in Cambridge!  There is no way I'm going to let send me over the border to marry some mountain girl cousin.  Why aren't you helping me like you helped Faye!"

Faye is my older sister who still lives as home per custom but attends the City College of Art & Design. I already know, deep down, that there is no winning this but my father lets me rage at him, lips pressed together as he stands himself on the other side of that desk, eyes level. He is taller than me and with a more narrow frame. I get my stockiness from my halfblood mother but it isn't like me to yell at anyone, much less a parent or any kind of authority figure. That is all Faye, my long-limbed gorgeous sister who thrives in chaos especially with an audience whereas I'm happiest by myself with books or a sketchpad and my own imagination.

"I didn't help Faye," my father says but in a tone that is all the worse because he sounds so sad all of a sudden. "Believe me, if custom allowed it, I would have packed Faye's bags for her and driven her to East Hoosac the day she turned seventeen which is what she had wanted just like you want Cambridge. But your mother is committed to a promise she made your maternal grandmother before we got married- and to the Haudenosaunee, a promise is a legal contract.  The Fisher Clan is very interested in having you marry into them and forget how tv shows portray life across the border; it just isn't that rustic and provincial any more.  East Hoosac has a community college, a public library, all the things you are used to."

"But my scores- they were good. Not just those, the aptitude tests for the Adyton!  Once they see them, they are going to offer me an entrance exam again and I turn sixteen in June.  I can emancipate if I have to!" It was stupid; even as the words started slipping out over each other. Sixteen was the age of majority in not only the Dominion of New England but in most nations. "I'm not the one who made a stupid promise to a Lodge Mother. Mom is such a hypocrit.  She didn't want that kind of life across the border so she came here.  She got herself knocked up to stay."

The sound of my father's hand hitting his desk was suddenly deafening and the words choked off in my throat, eyes watering and room spinning and I heard him bellow for me to sit down in the voice of the scary Vice Principle of Champion High School, not my father. He was so angry and I didn't dare look at him. My eyes squeezed shut and I hugged myself, wishing I hadn't done it, wishing I hadn't come in here at all.

There was a long moment of silence and then my father must have moved around the desk because he was lumbering over me and his hands gripped my shoulders tightly but not with the kind of violence that would have been evoked if it was my mother instead.

"You are never going to say something like that about your mother to me or anyone else again, Ethan." His tone lacked all ambiguity, all sympathy now. "And you aren't going to make that kind of threat. Emancipation isn't freedom no matter what it looks like on tv or in books.  It is losing your family, your home, having to make your own way through life with nothing and no one to depend on.  There was never a chance that you would be accepted into the Adyton.  Right or wrong, the Brotherhood is a fraternity and a closed practice.  A very racist and hidebound practice."

Now it is his turn to sound bitter and I look up as his grip eases.

I whisper an apology that I don't feel, cheeks still burning. He takes a deep slow breath and then looks at the clock. Sure enough, the bells ring out in the halls and students start to pile out, changing classes and I start to pull myself up but he gestures me back down.

"It is the last class for the day. Its probably for the best that you don't go.  You can stay in here and just read and then I'll drive us both home when I wrap up for the day too."

Trapped. I felt so trapped.