Independent Study
Charles goes to boarding school when he is thirteen years old because his mother isn't sure what to do with him anymore. He isn't supposed to know that, but of course he does. It gets tiring remembering what he isn't supposed to know. It's almost as tiring as remembering what he isn't supposed to say.
He knows there are things he could say to make his mother cry and gather him into her arms and tell him that of course he can stay. It's very easy to find the right words already sitting there in her head like a key tied with bright ribbon and hung on a hook. But he doesn't particularly mind; things will probably be easier for him at school, and he hears they have a good chemistry lab.
It's not a hard school, although many of his classmates seem to think it is. For some of them that's because they're not trying, but he can tell that some of them are. They struggle with their homework and dread exams. Charles tries not to lose his patience when they ask stupid questions in class, because he knows they don't know the answers. He's already realized he'll have to be responsible for his own education.
Charles does his own homework promptly and makes a show of studying for exams. He's careful not to do startlingly well at anything. He gets straight A's, and always has, but there's no need to make himself hated by standing out. He works out interesting problems in the notebook that he keeps under his mattress at night.
He has carefully filled the first few pages with anatomically-correct if not artistic sketches of naked women. That will explain the notebook and its concealment to any of his classmates who might find it, and will not earn him an unbearable amount of punishment if it is found by a teacher. Besides, being punished for that reason would probably only make him more popular with his classmates, and it might actually reassure his stepfather, who thinks that reading too many books can't be doing Charles's masculinity any good.
Charles isn't sure whether he should be worried about his masculinity too. He has read the book on Health and Hygiene that is available in the school nurse's office, and as far as he can tell everything is proceeding as it should; he's not sure he feels the stirring of tender sentiments toward girls, but he doesn't actually know any girls, so that will have to wait to be experimentally tested until summer, or until they are old enough to have dances.
He has also studied anatomical diagrams in the medical books in the public library over the summer, which were informative as well as helpful in his attempts at creating convincing notebook graffiti. They are strangely fascinating, bodies reduced to bright, flat pictures with everything labeled and understood. It's a map that ends abruptly where he needs it to begin. There are no labels for the things he can see when he looks inside everyone.
It's frustrating. The Health and Hygiene book suggests Sport as a good way of dealing with frustration, which is convenient because Sport is also a good way of convincing people that he is well-adjusted and a good team player. He rows crew, which he rather likes. Rowing makes the noisy minds around him go quiet, focused on the steady rhythm of the oars sliding through the water. Or thrashing through the water, as the case may be.
Their coxswain has rowed before and is not patient with the rest of the boys. Charles can see in his mind what he wants them to do, and does it, a few seconds before he calls out the commands. This is problematic, and the other boys glare at Charles and think uncomplimentary things about his sense of rhythm. He makes himself listen to the words, and after that he does all right.
He can't help making it easier for the other boys to pick up the pattern of the strokes and move the boat gracefully into the turns; it's not making them do something, he tells himself, just helping them do it. He's aware in a distant sort of way that he could probably also make it harder for the boys in the other boats, but that wouldn't be Fair Play. By the time he's old enough to understand that helping his team that way is also unfair, he's old enough to know that the only way that he can play fair is to not particularly care if he wins.
It makes him wonder in frustration what he is ever going to be allowed to care about. The timeless mystery of womanhood is still only of mild interest, although he's learned how to dance and how not to spill punch on girls' dresses. He is pinning his hopes on college, where he thinks it will be safer to be extraordinary, and where possibly he will actually have friends.
Charles is aware that he doesn't really have any friends now, but he's fairly sure no one else has noticed this. He thinks if you asked any of the boys who share his dormitory or his classrooms about him, they would say that he's all right, a regular guy. His notebook remains undisturbed in its resting place under his bed. He's a little disappointed; some part of him wishes someone would find it and flip past the sketches of girls to read the equations he's painstakingly worked out while pretending he was still reading King Lear .
He knows that's not really going to happen; it's a fantasy, like the way he hoped as a child that he would find out that his father wasn't really dead but had actually been working on a secret project all these years. It's childish, and he's growing up now, as the Health and Hygiene book has made clear. If anyone else were interested in the kinds of things he's interested in, he'd know.
If anyone else could do the kinds of things he can do, he'd know. He keeps hoping each fall that there will be a new boy who meets his eyes across the dining hall and lets him know they share a secret. Maybe it won't be at school. He looks around him when he's in the city, searching the crowds with their clamor of noisy thoughts. There must be someone else who's listening too.
That's something he cares about, he tells himself late at night, after his current notebook has been put away and his roommate has finally fallen asleep and stopped broadcasting lustful thoughts about starlets with bottle-blond hair. There must be someone else like him somewhere. He thinks if he could only listen hard enough, he could hear that other boy now, curled up in some other bed under some other window, breathing in his sleep.