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Byron by Nature?
Earning your letter can be expensive
by Audrey Keeldar

I was certain that we were dealing with a tortured poet.  I figured that his dreamy looks, diverted eyes, and general aloofness indicated nothing if not a brooding nature--a Byron or a Keats, to be sure.  We were just closing out the Romanticism unit in English and I was convinced that my crush exhibited all the requisite characteristics of the type.

He was a senior who had the locker next to my friend Donna's.  The intrigue lay in the fact that each day he went through a set routine at the locker and went on his way without ever uttering a word or making eye contact with anybody.  And anyone who was that quiet and self-contained was mysterious in my book.  It wasn't that he was shy--I could've allowed for that--rather, he just seemed to be content with whatever other world he occupied.  Obviously, it was the life of the mind he was living, I supposed.  He never seemed to socialize with others, but did seem serious about gathering his books and heading off to class well before the bell rang.

Yet, at the end of the day, he never took any books home with him.  He'd simply collect his letterman's jacket, gloves, and wool ski cap and go. As for the hat, it was really a ski mask rolled back and Donna would often see him wearing it down as he walked to school on chilly mornings.  Occasionally, he would return for the gloves he'd forgotten, swearing under his breath--these were the few instances in which we'd heard him speak.  His letterman's jacket was painfully plain, devoid of the prestigious pins earned in varsity sports and adorned only with his name and the letter "R" for our school.  I took pride in thinking he probably disdained sports, rejected the social conventions of competition.

Because he did not fit into any one social clique, I could easily imagine him being a tough guy, a sensitive soul, or the composite of both.  He was too short to be in the running for tall, dark and handsome, but the Fonz had been short and sexy--one of the few non-literary characters high on my list of swarthy antiheroes.  Or perhaps a sullen rebel à la Jim Morrison.  Or a melancholy member of the Beat movement.  In any case, Donna proposed that all he needed was the love of a good woman--a classic theme both in great literature and "Days of Our Lives."

One day it occurred to us that he hadn't come to the locker in over a week.  Neither of us recalled having seen him around the school, though admittedly, he was pretty unnoticeable.  Donna was figuring him for a dropout in good company with her brother; I was resisting her theory and clinging to the idea that he was weighed down by a dark, introspective episode--his delicate sensibility unable to face the slings and arrows of high school.  "If we have no way of knowing where he is, I say we at least try to get a glimpse of what he is," I proposed deviously.

The janitor did not think twice when I approached him that day.  I tried to look sufficiently demure and the request rolled easily off my tongue.  It seemed reasonable to him that our classmate was absent for an important presentation and thus we needed the notes on which the group had collaborated.  He unlocked the locker for us.  Everyone else was in class, so Donna and I took our time deciding which notebook to survey, trying hard to stick to the plan.  Secretly, I'd hoped to discover a sonnet or two.

We chose his "Personal Finance" notebook as a place to start.  Everyone was required to take two semesters of Personal Finance their senior year.  The thought was that this would, upon graduating, equip us at least to balance a checkbook, get a job, and plan a wedding--not necessarily in that order.  While the section on wedding planning had terrific appeal to us, I felt that it should be a treat to savor later and so turned ahead in the notebook.  The next page was a draft of a résumé.

The "objective" section listed a position of park ranger; I thought that quaint enough.  The "experience" section listed conservation work for the city; I thought that admirable enough.  The "personal interests" section listed photography, which I thought imaginative, and locksmith work, which seemed unusual.  The overall style and format of the handwritten page struck me as primitive, yet the highlights hinted at the well-rounded constitution of a Renaissance man.

The "education" section listed reading and general math.  The "accomplishments" section listed only school and working.  The heading displayed his full name and address--with the name of his street misspelled.  I could only hope that Donna wouldn't notice; she wished that she hadn't noticed.  The janitor was passing by again; I couldn't speak, Donna called out, "Thanks for your help--we've found what we were looking for."

The next week I read about it in the newspaper.  Raised in the routine of reading the Sunday paper, front to back, I always went first to the "Community" section and took perverse pleasure in seeing which classmates had given birth, been picked up by the police, etc.  The article was short and placed inconspicuously in the lower right corner of the page.  He was a fugitive.  He'd held up a local convenience store, wearing a ski mask and wielding a gun.  He fled the scene and would not have been identified except for one thing--he was wearing his letterman's jacket.