Byrd Read Free

only privileged people or New Yorkers ever have to deal with. She recites Franny’s Jesus prayer. She goes on Franny’s cheeseburger diet. She doesn’t have a mystical experience, but the ritual is comforting. Eaten every day, even a cheeseburger (she likes hers with pickles and mayonnaise) can be holy.
    She reads The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A Separate Peace. Huckleberry Finn. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. To Kill a Mockingbird. A Clockwork Orange. Light in August. Brave New World. Mrs. Dalloway. In Cold Blood. The Stranger. All the King’s Men . She reads Daybreak by Joan Baez and Tarantula by Bob Dylan, a book that makes her decide to write poetry because she sees how you can write anything and call it a poem.
    She and Roland have one class together, an elective called “The American Counterculture” taught by Mr. Saraceno, a young teacher with horn-rimmed glasses and black hair that curls down onto his shoulders. He wears jeans and blazers with patched elbows and comes from “places too many to name.”
    They read the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs. They talk about sex and drugs. They can’t believe they have a teacher like Mr. Saraceno in Carswell, and figure he’ll get fired when their parents find out what he’s teaching.
    In his class, Addie is outspoken, brazen, always raising her hand, always arguing. “Why weren’t there any women Beats? It’s not like women hadn’t already been part of the literary scene. Look at Edna Millay in the twenties. She wrote better than any of these guys. She was a bohemian. She was sleeping with everybody in Greenwich Village while Jack Kerouac was being fussed over by his mother and all those Catholic nuns who thought he was some kind of saint.”
    â€œThere were women Beats,” Mr. Saraceno says.
    â€œSpectators,” Addie says. “Disciples. They sat around listening to all that crap poetry, snapping their pretty fingers. They cooked and cleaned and had sex and helped their men get famous. And ended up in mental hospitals, hanging themselves. They didn’t write, and if they did, why aren’t we reading it? They were nothing like women now. Look at Joni Mitchell. She’s a poet and a painter and a musician.” She pauses to catch her breath. “You know, Mr. Saraceno, American counterculture didn’t begin and end with the Beats.”
    Roland, sitting in the desk behind hers, leans forward. “Tell it, baby,” he whispers. She can feel his breath in her hair.
    Smokers congregate at the wall outside the Language Arts building after class and light up. The guys walk out in a row, three or four across, bent-kneed, jeans scraping the ground, long hair fanning out over the collars of their denim jackets. They lean against the wall and shake cigarettes out of Winston and Camel and Marlboro packs, cup their hands around matches, narrow their eyes, lean back, blow smoke rings, flick ashes.
    Addie sits on the ground, the brick wall warm against her back, her composition book open on her knees, her long red hair falling around her like a curtain.
    Betsy in her wrinkled shirt
makes coffee out of kitchen dirt.
    She tries to write like Edna, like Joni, with rhythm and rhyme.
    I’m seventeen, my skin is pale,
my eyes are green, I bite my nails.
I wish that I were someone else.
    When she writes, the rest of the world disappears. She doesn’t notice when Roland sits down beside her.
    â€œCan I see?” he says.
    This is the first time he’s ever sought her out. He barely knows her, though she knows everything about him. He’s a musician, a guitarist. He has a Fender Stratocaster strung backward so he can play it left-handed. His favorite thing to talk about is music; his favorite music is the blues. Duane Allman is his hero. He is still mourning Duane’s death.
    When he talks about music, people flock to