This chapter contains very little dialogue, and takes place mostly inside Jerome's own head, but I hope you guys enjoy it anyway.
Chapter Nineteen
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Miss[/i] Winfield’s classroom was an upheaval of excitement when Jerome and Esmé arrived. Seeing such bedlam reawakened in him memories regarding his first day of kindergarten. Loud voices choked the air like smoke, making routine conversation impossible lest you shout. While most students sat properly in chairs, others preferred the surfaces of desks. One of them—an attractive, ginger-haired girl whose overabundance of makeup Jerome thought made her appear older than she undoubtedly was—had even dared to sprawl herself across the desk of Miss Winfield, who was nowhere in sight. The girl had positioned herself in such a way that Maxwell Squalor would have deemed inappropriate. Although he very rarely sided with his father on anything, Jerome felt the phrase ‘gratuitously provocative’ cross his mind. This belief was quickly reinforced, however, when Ernest Denouement strode over, took the girl in his arms, and kissed her like Rhett Butler had kissed Scarlett O’Hara.
Not wanting to invite anymore of Ernest’s cruel remarks, Jerome led Esmé through the chaos. The couple retreated to the opposite side of the room, where a pair of empty desks was located. Beside the desks stood a row of large windows, which offered a lovely view of the courtyard. Below were bushes blossoming with red, blue, yellow, white, and yes, even the
purple roses Esmé had compared Jerome to earlier.
What made Miss Winfield’s classroom more striking than any other Jerome had ever been in was its distinctiveness. A distinctiveness exhibited in the form of twenty or thirty Victorian lamps made from both stained and solid glass. The lamps had been placed with the utmost of care on every desk, including Miss Winfield’s. Hers was a lamp of stained glass, whose colorful floral pattern was like a symbol for her gentle spirit.
“Our teacher seems to have a fascination with Tiffany,” Esmé remarked with a small smile.
Jerome had no idea what had sparked such a random statement from his girlfriend. Were there various girls in their homeroom named Tiffany? “What?” he asked.
“Tiffany.” Esmé took her finger and gently tapped the solid, baby-blue shade of a lamp with beaded fringe on the desk nearest her. “A company that makes very beautiful—though unfortunately expensive—lamps and glassware.”
“Oh.” Jerome suddenly remembered his mother having a few lamps she had referred to as ‘Tiffany’. Because his interests were limited to things like cooking and books, he hadn’t realized at the time she’d been talking about lamps. He wondered if the crystal chandelier suspended above their dining room table was also Tiffany.
“Could you imagine,” Esmé asked, almost as if she was speaking to herself, as she stroked the fringe suspended from the lower part of the shade, “seeing one of these amongst the mediocrity of my parents’ house?” Before Jerome could say no, he couldn’t, since he’d never visited Esmé’s childhood home before, she continued. “When I was a child, I waited in anticipation for the last Saturday of each month. Then, taking my little red wagon, I would walk into the city. There I would wander the alleyways of various shops, collecting discarded fashion and home-decorating magazines and filling my wagon with them. I spent the rest of the day at home in my bedroom, leafing through the magazines and cutting out the pictures I liked best. I pasted the pictures all over the walls of my bedroom, just to feel myself surrounded by beautiful things. I hated being poor. Really,
really hated it. Not so much because it meant not having nice things, but because of the treatment I received at school. Most kids were from middle and upper-class families, so if you didn’t fall in with one or the other, then no one wanted to be your friend, let alone know you. I can’t
tell you how many times I came home crying, or was forced to stay after for fighting, because of something someone else had said.”
While Jerome couldn’t exactly relate to Esmé’s account of being poor, he could easily do so when it came to being teased. Long ago he had assumed that people who lived modestly tended to be more compassionate than those of a wealthier lifestyle. Where that left him and the other kind-hearted members of his family, Jerome had little to no idea. He just figured it had to be true because so many of the books he’d read as a child involved wealthy, villainous characters. He had even read stories in which characters were willing to do villainous things in order to
become wealthy. But as the years past and his interpretation of the world broadened, Jerome realized that the wealthy
and the poor could be equally wicked, and vice-versa. It was around this same time that he’d learned the meaning of the word ‘xenophobe’. He’d encountered it one day while leafing through the Dictionary, for a word to include in his history report. Next to mathematics and science, history was his worst subject, and he’d needed a word that would be sure to boast his cleverness. He had received an ‘A’ on his report—his first one ever in history. Proud as he was of himself, he couldn’t help feeling guilty that the subject which had earned him that A was indeed a grim one.
“I’m sorry you were teased,” Jerome said and squeezed Esmé’s hand, which he was still holding. “I was, too, if that helps any.”
“It does.” Her curious eyes turned up to meet his empathetic ones. “May I ask what it was
you were teased for?”
He shrugged awkwardly, his gaze averting hers and falling to the floor. He never liked going into detail of how he’d been bullied from nursery all the way through middle school. And for what? For being just one of several kids who was overweight? He had never understood what it was that spared others like himself from such torment. How they could walk the hallways with their heads held high, not at all concerned with what the next derogatory insult would be or who’d be the one to fling it. In the end, he’d concluded that these other kids were simply better at defending themselves. Not to mention their confidence was ten times stronger than his. How he’d envied them! Were it not for his bashfulness, he would have surely made allies of these other children. If that failed, then he would have gladly offered them some reward in exchange for shielding him against his oppressors.
Esmé’s hopeful eyes were still resting on Jerome’s hesitant face, when both heard the door open from across the room. The students’ voices immediately died down, and those who hadn’t already scrambled quickly to find an empty seat. Jerome, sliding into one seat while Esmé took the one in front of him with the fringed lamp, spied Miss Winfield as she entered the room. He watched, amazed, as the instructor spun back her chair with the same elegant grace as a dancer to face the door.
“Good afternoon.” Her cheerful tone was muffled by the slight clamor initiated by the door, as she pulled it shut. “I do hope none of you had difficulty finding the classroom.”
Her concern was met with an equal amount of yes’s and no’s. The students’ voices were joined by that of Esmé who, together with Jerome, had been given explicit directions to the classroom by Dewey and R. They, along with Frank and Ernest, had taken the exam in this very room. All four had what Kit Snicket referred to as ‘a pictorial memory’ which was, according to her, a common attribute among librarians.
“An easy way to remember the location,” Miss Winfield went on, as she positioned herself into standardized teacher position at the head of the room, “is to keep in mind that my classroom is the first to last door on the left. As long as you take this into account, then you shouldn’t have any trouble finding it. However, if any of you are the type who forgets easily, then I’d advise you to take note of it.”
“Wow!” Jerome smacked the back of his hand against his forehead in astonishment. Leaning over, he reached into his satchel for the commonplace book he’d purchased the previous week when he’d gone shopping with Cora for school supplies. “Imagine that! It’s as if she were speaking directly to
me.”Esmé giggled, and twisted around in her seat. Her white teeth gleamed as brightly as the light emanating from beneath the shade of the lamp on her desk. “Why is that? Do you often forget things?”
“Only things that are of no interest to me.” Jerome scribbled a quick note down on the first page of his commonplace book, and then closed it. “I’m sure I’ll remember this, though, if only because
you’re in my homeroom.” He grinned, making Esmé blush so that she dipped the lower part of her face behind one pigtail. “But it never hurts to be careful. Besides, it’ll come in handy, in case someone who thinks they’ll remember ends up forgetting. Or they know they won’t remember but didn’t bring any paper or a pen. Or perhaps they
do have a pen, but no paper, and prefer to write on that as opposed to their hand or arm. Or maybe they have paper, but their pen has run out of ink. Or the eraser on their pencil has run out, or they’ve chewed it off. Or—”
“Goodness! But are you
always this concerned for others?”
“Are you
kidding? It’s my weakness,” he smiled, recalling all the times he’d stopped on the street to feed his last cookie to a stray cat or dog.
“I wouldn’t call it a weakness,” Esmé remedied. “It’s more like an idiosyncrasy. Weakness holds a person back from their dreams and ambitions. But an
idiosyncrasy makes them unique and that much more interesting. So don’t be so quick to judge yourself, Jerome David Squalor.”
Jerome had spent more than half his life doing just that. While most people’s earliest memories were of lying in their crib or taking their first steps, Jerome’s were of being criticized. Although most of these criticisms came straight from his father, the habit itself was one instilled by Charlotte Squalor, Maxwell’s mother, who never failed to side with him when it came to assessing her grandson. According to her, Jerome was the spitting image of Gerald, Charlotte’s husband, in his younger years, though his and Jerome’s personalities had always been one in the same. Jerome, whose closeness with his grandfather was on the same level as that which he felt for his mother, could not help but feel it was his resemblance to Gerald that had labeled him an outcast in the eyes of his father and grandmother. While the exact reasons for Maxwell’s and Charlotte’s indifference were unclear, Jerome believed it all led back to the troubles that had plagued his grandparents’ marriage for many years.
“Well, now,” Miss Winfield proclaimed, startling her young student away from his reverie, “I see we have a daydreamer in our midst.”
Jerome turned apologetically to his instructor, whose gaze, he saw, was now fixed on his face. Kindly a gaze as it was, he felt embarrassed that his father’s opinion had made him the object of so many staring eyes. He caught sight of Ernest Denouement, who was grinning mockingly back at him from across the room. Quickly Jerome looked away, letting his concentration fall to the open notebook on his desk. It was near the lower part of the page, where he noticed one of the blue lines had failed to extend all the way to the pink margin. His mind, as it so often did whenever he was bored or felt cornered, began to drift like a boat along the water. Was the incomplete line the result of a faulty machine? Or had the person in charge become distracted and not noticed when the printer produced only
part of what it was supposed to?
It’s just like in books, he thought, reflecting back to the many typos he’d encountered in his years as a reader. Once he had considered writing to the publishing companies of these books, in order to inform them of their editor’s flaws. Then he’d realized how similar doing so would be to arguing, and immediately abandoned his plan. The entire top drawer of his desk was now a graveyard for all the letters he’d written, expressing his passion for the importance of decent sentence structure in published works—or lack thereof.
“Would anyone care to clarify for me the definition of a daydreamer?” Miss Winfield asked.
Jerome watched from the corner of his right eye as what seemed to be every hand in the room aimed skyward.
“Yes?”
“A daydreamer is someone who dreams during the day,” a girl’s voice returned. “The reason they’re called daydreamers is because that’s the time of day when people are at their most alert. When we dream at night, our sleep cripples our senses. Another way to describe a daydreamer is someone who has succumbed to fantasies built on hopes and dreams.”
“Correct. And might I say that I’ve always been partial to the latter passage myself. There’s something about the way it’s presented that separates it from descriptions found in dictionaries and thesauruses.”
“My parents consider daydreaming a waste of time,” someone else said. “They think anyone who does is just being lazy and trying to avoid amounting to their true potential.”
“Yes,” Miss Winfield agreed. “Typically, that is the way others perceive a daydreamer—as unfortunate as that sounds.”
Jerome took this moment to shift his attention from his commonplace book to his teacher. As his eyes fell across her face, he saw that a mysterious smile had formed on her pretty face.
“…Unfortunate because so many people fail to realize that daydreaming is actually a type of art. ‘A doorway to the imagination’ is the term my father used. My father,” she repeated, her voice low and wistful, “was my greatest teacher. For he is the reason why I’ve come to believe so firmly in creativity being the key to success.”
Jerome felt a pang of jealousy. From the time he was a very small child, he had longed to see the light of acceptance in his father’s eyes. But even a glint had been too much to hope for; not unless Jerome managed to pull an A on something that relied upon fact rather than imagination. While his poems and short stories won him high grades and praise from his teachers and schoolmates, Jerome had never received anything more than a neutral mutter from his father. “If only you would put the same effort into doing real work as you do wasting time,” Maxwell had said during one such incident, “then perhaps
I would have more to brag to the boys at the club and office about.”
Oh, how that had hurt! In fact, it had done more than just hurt. It had
stung. Stung so much that Jerome had spent the entire evening and part of the early morning hours in his bedroom, door locked from the inside, spilling his tears
and his heart out to Tiago. Tiago, his favorite cousin, who had, without any resentment, sacrificed his evening plans to pick up the pieces of Jerome’s broken heart. “People place too much importance on the present,” Tiago had spoken patiently over the telephone, “and so they fail to consider the future. High school isn’t real life, Jerome. It’s only something we must endure in order to move forward to bigger and better things. Like a theatrical advertisement when you go see a film. You may not believe it, maybe not even realize it, but you
do possess amazing abilities. Abilities that will be nurtured and improved upon, once you come of age and enter Training School.” This was the kind of person Tiago was, Jerome recognized as he’d crawled into bed at three o’ clock that morning. The kind of person who was so easy to talk to, and always knew the right things to say…the kind of person
all the Squalors were. Well, all except Maxwell, whose attitude made him an outcast among his family the same way Jerome’s learning difficulties made him
feel like an outcast among his peers. Then, of course, there was Charlotte, who was only a Squalor by marriage.
Jerome took this moment to gaze over at Esmé, who had become unnaturally quiet.
Miss Winfield’s story has probably got her thinking of her own father, he thought, noting the way Esmé’s head had lowered so that her chin touched her chest. Her rosebud mouth, now tightly pursed, suppressed the fullness of her lips.
Or, more likely, her father and
her mother. Jerome was suddenly seized by a fierce longing to reach out and lay a comforting hand on the arm of the beautiful girl before him. In doing so, he wondered if she had someone like Tiago to confide in. Or was it that she let her troubles pile up inside like pennies in a jar?
The touch of Jerome’s hand on Esmé’s arm coaxed a small smile from her. She reached up and placed her hand on top of his. “How many classes do you think we’ll have together?” she asked softly.
“No idea,” he replied, “though I should hope one or two, at least.”
“Me, too.” As if fearful this wish might not come true, she squeezed his hand. “I just
hate the thought of only being able to sit beside you in homeroom and at mealtimes.”
“You forgot the hours between after dinner and before bed.”
“Hmph!” Esmé pushed out her lower lip, producing the most adorable pout Jerome had ever seen on anyone. “That’s hardly any time at all.”
A dream, he thought, unable to comprehend how someone like him could mean so much to someone like Esmé.
That’s what she is. A wonderful, beautiful, absolutely perfect dream. Any second now I’ll wake to the realization that none of this is real. I’ll still be the same kid who’s good at creative compositions, but throws a curve ball when it comes to essays. I’ll still be the black sheep of my family and Andrew the apple of our father’s eye. Beyond this world I’m nearly seventeen, but a year behind everyone else my age in school because I repeated the first grade. I’m—A piece of paper being slid onto his desk by five long, graceful fingers silenced Jerome’s thoughts of self-condemnation. Raising his head, he saw Miss Winfield smiling back at him from the opposite side of the desk.
“Your class schedule,” she said, indicating the sheet of paper before him.
Had she called his name and he hadn’t heard? He wracked his brain, trying and failing to induce any such memory.
“You are the cousin of Tiago and Emma Squalor.”
Jerome nodded; he knew it wasn’t a question.
“They were two of my finest students,” Miss Winfield began, a note of fondness adorning her soft tone. “And, from all I’ve gathered, are now living their lives as extraordinary volunteers. It will be a pleasure to have yet another member of the Squalor family in my class.”
“I b-beg your p-pardon, ma’am.” Jerome’s face reddened, and he cursed himself for being unable to keep his stutter under control. He thought he heard what sounded like Ernest Denouement snort, followed by a cruel chortle. Jerome ignored this, instead forcing himself to press onward. “But I-I’m afraid y-you might n-not think th-that after y-you’ve gotten t-to know m-me.”
The look Miss Winfield gave him was one of pure astonishment. “What makes you say a thing like that?”
“Well, y-you see, I-I’m nowhere n-near as c-clever as m-my cousins.”
“How very funny you should say that…and expectedly coincidental, too. That was your cousin’s exact observation of
herself the first time she came to my class.”
Jerome found this bit of news as difficult to swallow as the fish-flavored pancakes served at Emma’s favorite restaurant. Emma, in all the years he’d known her, had conveyed some of the very best confidence he had ever seen. It was true she’d been a quiet child, and perhaps kept to herself a little
too often, but it had had nothing to do with the way she’d seen herself. Then again, a person is never too old to learn something new about themselves, let alone someone else. “She just has a lot on her mind,” Gerald Squalor had said once in defense of his granddaughter, after his wife had been complaining of how Jerome was well on his way to becoming as ‘uncouth’ as his cousin. “Emma’s silence is not insolence, but a glimpse into the future: an indication of her role in the Volunteer Fire Department. For as long as I’ve been associated with the organization, I have seen many individuals considered taciturn go on to become all sorts of things. From musicians and fashion designers, to researchers and writers of books. And there is
nothing wrong with Jerome taking after someone whose heart has been lit by the fires of artistic passions.”
“I don’t know how the teachers at your former schools did things,” Miss Winfield addressed the class in the same temperate manner she’d used while speaking to Jerome. “But rest assured that I do not run my classroom with a ready hand. While I believe young people benefit from proper rule and regulation, they also require a generous amount of patience and understanding. Take this lamp, for instance.” Ever so carefully, she sashayed the tip of one finger over the smooth glass particles of the lamp placed on Jerome’s desk. “See how no two pieces of glass are exactly alike. The same is true of people. While learning something one way may work well for one person, it may not be the best option for another. My objective is to help those who come to my class identify new ways of learning.” This time Miss Winfield’s eyes met Jerome’s. As she spoke, he knew it was
he she was aiming her words at: “Especially those who have always had difficulty remembering not-so-fascinating details.”
All of a sudden, Jerome saw the clouds lift and the sun reveal itself before his eyes. For the first time since he had been told he had a learning disorder, he felt hope envelop him like a warm bath. While he understood the importance of believing in oneself, he had never truly thought himself an able candidate. Now, as he looked up into the confident, smiling faces of his teacher and girlfriend, he knew he was well on his way to learning how.