Elena by Thomas H. Cook

that simply can’t deal with a gifted child.”
    â€œWhat system can, Martha?” I asked quietly.
    She tried to answer, tried conscientiously to answer, calling forth a wealth of learning I could not help but admire. But in the end I was left with Elena, the image of a piece of paper crushed in her hand, of her arm flinging it through space, and it seemed to me that Mrs. Nichols mattered no more to Elena than the school system Martha was excoriating; that there exists a kind of person who cannot be stopped so easily in his course, the sort for whom passion is not so much an energy as a fate.
    I suppose Elena felt betrayed in what we later referred to as “the affair of the poem.” I had joined the other camp, that chorus of voices cheering for a scrubbed and polished world. She was left with only one ally: Elizabeth.
    They spent almost all their time together now, the two of them shrinking from my approach. I often heard their voices in the shed out back, or behind the bedroom door, which Elena now kept closed to me.
    Of course, I was not the only victim of their exclusiveness. Poor Mrs. Nichols suffered far more than I. Elena and Elizabeth launched a conspicuous campaign of silence against her. They sat at the back of her classroom, arms folded over their chests, eyes staring straight to the front of the room, never speaking unless called upon directly. They did the standard exercises well enough and always read what was assigned them. But when asked to produce a poem or a short story or an essay — something, that is, of their own creation — the two of them would conspire to produce works of frightening banality, singsong verses about bluebirds, for example, which went on for page after ludicrous page. Sitting morosely in the front room, I would hear them giggling uncontrollably over their latest creation, and often, when they finally emerged from Elena’s room, they would quickly pass out into the yard without so much as a glance in my direction. I was fifteen years old and should have had a life of my own. But I didn’t, and so their scorn stung me. Tall, lanky, inhumanly shy, I was plagued by an awkwardness that accompanied me everywhere, an invisible demon forever tripping me in public places or turning over water glasses.
    All of this — the loneliness, the sense of being hopelessly awkward and unattractive, the unmistakable scorn of my sister and Elizabeth — produced in me a self-loathing I could not escape except in fantasy. And so I dreamed of friendship and communion, of some wild boy from a distant land. I imagined him as having a dark complexion and fiery black eyes, telling tales of Krishnapur in a voice accented with that exotic place. Together we would discover a world of dark, vaguely sensual adventure. He would summon forth my self-confidence, dismiss my self-hatred, laugh all my pain away.
    This wild boy never came for me, but from time to time I can still see him, dancing at the edge of McCarthy Pond or swinging from the limbs of the enormous elm that shaded our front lawn. He was the piece still missing, as Elena once described it, from the puzzle of my life.
    Which is not to say, of course, that my childhood offered no adventures. The first one, I suppose, the very first, was a trip to New York.
    I was sitting on the front steps when my father pulled into our driveway in a new car. Elena instantly came out of the house, with that look of eagerness she always had when she saw him in those days.
    The car was a Wills Sainte Claire, a long, sleek convertible with a silver eagle hood ornament. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life, and it seemed to me that my father had somehow found the secret to happiness: a life of high-class vagabondage.
    I quickly got to my feet and raced toward him. Elena leaped off the porch behind. My father’s arms spread out to her.
    â€œHow ya doing, Princess?” he said happily as he swept her up. “Missed