Whispers of Hope: Emma's Story

The dorm room was silent and shadowed. Sixteen mahogany bed posts towered like ancient masts, casting blue shadows across four billowing white bedspreads. A whisper of a breeze wafted through a window, dissipating the scent of moth balls and age with the fragrance of autumn.

“Tink.”

“Plink,” a tiny stone had hit the glass of the window above where Emma slept.

Emma had started ninth grade that September. Until this year, school had been a nightmare. She had been so unruly, some teachers thought her mentally impaired, but one teacher had thought to have her IQ tested, then tested again to ensure no one thought it a mistake. “She’s just bored,” the teacher had said, then recommended the parents apply to the Silver Oak Academy High School for the Gifted.

But here, Emma’s audacity and perky spirit were about to be swallowed whole like Jonah. This place is eerily cliquish, she thought.

Now in a restless, shallow sleep she dreamed of home, her sisters, father, but most of all her mother, gaunt from chemo treatment in her fight with cancer.

“Clink.”

Emma raised herself up on her elbow, her auburn curls cascading over her shoulders. She swung her legs over the side of her bed. Her toes barely touched the dark wood floor. She scooched forward, and stood. The floorboards creaked. She stopped. Her wide, startled eyes shone in the moon’s silver. Every muscle in her body quivered.

Stepping ever so softly, she inched toward the window, turning left and right eyeing her three sluggishly sleeping roommates. She reached the curtain lace, ducked behind it, and peered between the branches of a magnolia tree into the gloom below.

Freddy stepped out from behind the shadowed trunk and met her gaze. He beckoned wordlessly. Emma’s heart beat like a runaway foal.

She knew the rules. This was walking on thin ice.

Freddy was a classmate although they hadn’t exchanged a word. The rule of the separation of genders was iron fisted. But the two had brushed sleeves in passing along the sidewalk. It was only a moment, but a certain understanding had coursed between them like electricity.

As Emma stood at the window ledge, a great world of excitement opened before her, and she stared into the dark, wild night. She threw on her hoodie and swung a leg over the window sill. The ivy tickled her bare toes. A branch above her was just in reach, and she catapulted into the darkness. Now sure footed, she scrambled, heart alight like fire, the silk skirt of her nightgown awash in the moonlight.

As her foot touched the dewy grass, Freddy’s hand slipped in hers, and he pulled her into the shadows of the building’s austere stonework. Their hearts both pounded now. Was it young love? Or the excitement of breaking rules?

“Emma, we don’t have long…” Emma’s eyes shone as she looked into his earnest face. She reached for his hand again, warm and comforting in the night air.

“Oh Fred, the girls here are dreary, their conversations dull. But with you I can talk, share my dreams, my pain. If only you knew about my family, my mother…” Tears welled in her eyes, deep and vulnerable. Her voice faltered. “I feel like I’ve become older than my years, my heart cracked with heart ache. If my mother’s treatment fails…”

“I understand. Do you know the heart ache of having parents who are so disconnected it’s like they’re not there?”

Emma’s lips brushed softly on Freddy’s cheek. “Silence and loyalty. Promise?” Emma nodded, grabbing hold of a branch. In less than it took to suck in a breath, Emma scaled the tree back through the window and slipped soundlessly under her cover, heart pounding.

Fred dashed from tree shadow to tree shadow toward the boys’ dorm. Just as he reached his ground floor window, he caught the whiff of tobacco. He stood motionless under the courtyard elm. Listening, straining his eyes to see more clearly. A clink of glass, and a sliver of light reflected off a crate of bottles. Two men under the stone entry talked in low undertones Fred could not make out.

“It’s Master Albright.” He shuddered as he flattened himself around the dark, twisted trunk, not daring to move. He watched two cigar ends glow. Two masters stepped out from the shadows and teetered along the cement sidewalk that passed right by his hiding place.

“Albright, these new-fangled ideas of letting in the Mistresses! It’s preposterous. It was bad enough they opened this elite institution to girls twenty years ago. I knew it was a mistake,” Master Sterling’s voice was slurred.

“What are we going to do?”

“The day a Mistress is hired in this establishment, I will oppose it, and it may not look pretty,” Master Albright’s voice was higher and nasal.

“You know we have backing in high places. I believe in the next year we can lobby to get the girls kicked out entirely. You in with me?”

“Keep me supplied with your apple jack…That secret distillery down by the pier needs to up its output…”

The figures passed, and Freddy couldn’t hear the rest. But he knew the Prohibition law.

During the school days, Silver Oak Academy ran like a well-oiled institution for the privileged and wealthy. The waiting list for students was a mile long, and violators of rules were easily dispensed with. Freddy’s father, grandfather, and great grandfather had all attended this elite school. He had endless patronizing endorsement. Emma did not.

Freddy and Emma’s secret rendezvous continued. Once they found refuge in the tunnels under the colossal building—around the side of the boiler that had been added after electric heat had been introduced. Freddy led the way, the beam of a small flashlight catching the dust molecules dancing in the slight draft. The ceiling was low, rough stone.

“What’s that?” he whispered as two dark figures stepped from a side tunnel ahead of them, too far to make out clearly. They vanished like frightened specters.

“Let’s not go any further,” said Emma. “What do you think all these barrels are, stacked up here, Fred?”

Fred felt their dusty tops and noticed their weight and unlabeled contents and didn’t say anything.

Another night the two friends crept the quarter mile to the river where they sat inside an old wood slat boat house listening to the waves lapping the rocks.

“Master Albright, what a thug. He was so rude to us in class today,” said Emma.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if he was out prowling tonight.”

“Righteous, suspicious fiend.”

“Yeah, him and the giant Master Sterling. The misdemeanors of others are their food and drink.”

“His skinny little crooked nose spying on everyone.”

“He’s up to no good. Wish I could catch him out in his own evil. But you know, he bores me to death. Freddy, you are so much more...well, interesting.” Emma wrapped her arms around her knees, and tilted her head back against the wall in thought.

A grating of footsteps on the gravel road made her sit up straight and grab for Freddy’s knee.

A nasal voice, low and secretive, spoke. A whining tenor voice replied. Emma grasped Freddy’s sweating fingers and cowered low behind some lifejackets.

“Speaking of the devils…”Freddy whispered once they had passed.

“What the heck could they be up to?”

Weeks passed, and it seemed no staff members or dormitory monitors had noticed Freddy and Emma’s secret friendship. The two friends had invented a system of exchanging notes by taping them to the bottom of the ink pots inserted in the ink wells of their desks. No one used the ink anymore except for the occasional calligraphy class, but many old timers thought they added an air of sophistication to the school, and so they had stayed.

Freddy’s classes were one period before Emma’s classes. Girls’ and boys’ classes were taught separately by masters who strutted about in gowns and mortar board hats.

Emma craved the whispered, yet lively discussions with Freddy. What was life if just a parroting of professors, regurgitating facts and figures, and following regulations? She longed to plunge herself into the depth of life, to live passionately. Her mind and heart were aflame with curiosity. Freddy, too, had always been a brilliant boy, but never seemed to harbor the fear of authority many demanded.

“What good will come out of such an unruly thing?” his father had once commented.

But times were changing. This year, to some people’s horror or amazement, a woman professor had been hired to teach Greek and Roman philosophy. She was a motherly lady with steel rimmed glasses and a kindly smile. She disregarded formal title of “mistress”, and chose to be called by her name, Mrs. Linville.

Within days of arriving, she perceived a tight circle of masters that looked her up and down with an icy glare. But no one could argue Mrs. Linville’s brilliance. Rumor had it she graduated top of her class at Oxford with scores that broke the charts.

The headmaster had assigned Mrs. Linville the class: Masterpieces of Greek and Roman Literature. The previous master had retired, much to the delight of the students, but some of the masters who had been around for donkey’s years were sure Mrs. Linville was not up for the challenge.

Her first period was the all-boys class. The boys were captivated with Mrs. Linville’s classes on The Iliad and The Odyssey and Homer’s recounted tales of war and adventure.

“How heroic is Odysseus considering his flaws and the violence he enacts?” she asked the boys. “Consider his cunning and deception.”

She questioned the girls in the next period, “How does Penelope demonstrate intelligence, resilience, and loyalty? And how is loyalty tested and rewarded?”

As September gave way to October, Mrs. Linville plumbed the depths of Greek tragedy: Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. “’Even in our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair, against our will, comes the awful grace of God.” A shiver slid down Emma’s spine. Tragedy. Fate. Grace. She had never felt such a stirring, a gnawing like hunger in her soul.

October was the month for philosophy: Plato’s The Republic and Symposium. Aristotle’s works on ethics and politics. In Mrs. Linville’s classes, argumentative skills were honed and encouraged, not stifled.

Emma darted in ahead of the main push of girls that noon. Busts of Socrates and Aristotle stared down from the high counter in the back. The wall opposite the windows had a portrait of the founder of the school, a spectacled old gray beard that looked stern and uninspired. The long black slate stared empty and dusty down the long classroom.

Mrs. Linville sat behind her mahogany desk watching the girls jostle into their places. Each dressed alike like a set of dolls: pleated plaid skirts, knee length socks, black shoes, navy jerseys, and hair tied back in braids. She got a kick out of observing teenagers in all their fresh ways—each so different yet so alike the world over.

Emma rushed, a little too impatient, to her desk. She didn’t realize Mrs. Linville was eyeing her with a twinkle. Emma lifted the ink bottle and pulled off the note, scrambling to hide it under her desk. The others were heaving out their editions of The Aeneid by Virgil. Emma unfolded the note, then surreptitiously read it beneath her desk. The writing was different, a neat loopy cursive. It read: “Ah, merciless Love, is there any length to which you cannot force the human heart to go?” Emma’s face grew hot, then red. They had recently studied these lines in the Aeneid by Virgil.

That night Freddy met Emma in the basement tunnel, crumbling with cement and dust, smelling of dampness, mold. The water pipes hissed and whined and dripped. Although it was night, Emma’s heart was aflame with energy.

“Freddy, I think we might be found out. But somehow I still feel safe. What do you think of Sappho?”

“Your period is a couple days ahead of us, Em. We’re still on Aesop and his blessed fables.”

“Oh Freddy just listen to this, ‘Love shook my heart/ Like the wind on the mountain/ Rushing over the oak trees.’ Life can be so beautiful. I want a life that’s free, Fred. I want a life with feeling and depth. I want a life that I can share with someone special…like you. Words and rules and conformity, these will kill me.”

“Emma, your philosophy is all well and good—but I have a feeling of foreboding. There is something going down in this school. This might be spooky, but there is something bad afoot, and it involves Master Albright and Master Sterling. You up for some detective work?”

“I’m all in,” said Emma.

The next day, the teenaged girls filed into their classroom. Mrs. Linville sat at her desk, thrumming her fingers on the wooden desk top. She didn’t rap for silence or attention. The kids looked at each other with curiosity. They looked at Mrs. Linville. She returned the look but said nothing.

All at once Emma spotted a star shaped creature on the floor between the front row of desks and the board. “Hey, look guys!” Emma said.

“It’s alive!”

“I think it’s dead.”

“It’s a starfish!”

“Its arms are shrinking and shriveling.”

“Doesn’t it need water?”

“But look —look what it says on the board!”

Rule: Do not touch the sea star.

“Save it!”

“Don’t touch it. You’ll get in trouble!”

A commotion of do’s and don’t’s exploded. The girls jostled to get near the starfish. They scooted the desks to make more room around where it lay, its five golden arms grew stiller and stiller. One kid touched it. “It feels like sandpaper.”

“Turn it over!”

“I read once it has eyes on the end of each of its arms. Do you think it can see us?”

“I think its dying.”

“It needs water!”

The door opened and Freddy from a classroom across the hall looked in, a crowd of curious boys around him.

“Hey Fred, what should we do?”

“Mrs. Linville?” Mrs. Linville’s shoulders lifted in a silent “I don’t know” gesture.

“You dummies,” Emma said walking over to Mrs. Linville’s desk. “There’s a bowl of water right here!” She stuck in her finger and licked it. “It’s salt water, just what it needs.”

“But the rule is don’t touch it!”

“Who gives a crap,” said Emma scooping it up boldly and laying its star shaped body across both hands. “It’s tube legs feel creepy, but guys, this is none too soon. Starfish can only live an hour out of water.”

“Can I hold it?” asked Freddy.

“Sure, but put it in that bowl, quick!”

There was a little splash of water, a great hubbub of students gathered from several classrooms—both boys and girls.

Just then a sharp spectacled nose appeared, above a clipboard. Master Albright was scratching notes. He scowled, muttered, and strode toward the headmaster’s office.

Then Mrs. Linville spoke at last. She called the students to push the heavy black desks back and to sit in a circle on the floor. She placed the glass bowl with the starfish in the center. Everyone grew quiet. She strode to the door and closed it.

“What have we learned here?” she asked. “Is it ever good to disobey a rule? When Socrates was condemned, he held to his convictions. The Greeks taught us that high minded individuals must care for truth rather than for what people think. Emma, you did well to disregard the rule to save the starfish. That is commendable. Your conviction was converted into conduct, and you took action. A starfish is a symbol of resilience. That is what I wish for you young adults. You must foster a character 'stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, more sensitive than nerve…'”

“That’s Sappho,” Emma said behind her hand to Freddy who sat next to her on the floor.

“In addition, starfish are a symbol of healing. If a starfish loses a limb, it can regenerate a new one. In fact, one arm, as long as it has a part of the inner disc, can grow completely new parts. If by chance I am not in class tomorrow,” Mrs. Linville eyed the doorway where a face appeared and then disappeared, “remember the starfish, its remarkable resilience and tenacity to survive harsh environments. Remember its beautiful star shaped symmetry, a sign of divine love, guidance and intuition, like Odysseus and his special link to Athena.”

Just then the door opened and five men, led by Master Albright and Master Sterling, strode to the front of the room.

“Mrs. Linville, we are to accompany you to the headmaster’s office immediately. Students return to your respective classes. Mrs. Linville’s class will be resumed by Master Sterling.”

Master Sterling rapped on the teacher desk, and a stiff order was restored.

Shortly before midnight, two students stood closely in an oak grove. Leaves rustled and shifted in a light night breeze. The chill of autumn bit around their bare arms.

“Mrs. Linville’s been fired… But I have a plan, and I need you.”

“You know I’m in,” Freddy answered.

“Loyal, right?”

“Always.”

Emma grasped both his hands and squeezed. Their eyes locked. Fred let her hands go and held her flushed cheeks. He stroked her unruly red curls, then folded her in his arms. He felt the smallest shiver race down her spine, and he opened his jacket and wrapped it around both of them like a cocoon. Their heart beats pounded in unison as they lifted their faces to watch the racing moon through the silhouetted branches of the mighty oak. For a moment time stood still.