Hallelujah!

Abstract

Hallelujah! Katherine Damm (bio) Everybody’s parents are splitting up: that’s what the junior class discovers when they all come back to school after winter break. And everybody means everybody: the only exceptions are the parents who were already divorced or widowed or never married in the first place. In some ways, this is a relief. Many of the students spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s more imminently preoccupied with the question of how to tell their friends than with the fate of their families. Noah, for example, hates attention; he can barely look a waitress in the eye when he orders, let alone deliver bad news about himself. Zach can’t stand the idea of anyone feeling sorry for him. April has reported so much drama in her life this year that she thinks her friends might not even believe this latest piece of news. But when they and the others finally work up the courage, their confidants’ faces bloom not with pity but rather surprise: it’s happening to their parents, too. Eventually, even those that planned to tell no one admit what’s happening, feeling, some of them, in consonance with their peers for the first time. It’s a hell of a coincidence. People think: GMOs? People think: Sunspots? Mia, Taylor, and Preston talk about ordering a kit online and sneaking out to the reservoir one night to test the water supply, but they never quite get their act together. Stephanie says it’s been a long time coming for hers. Dustin walks the halls glassy-eyed and confused. Lauren says her father has left them; her twin sister, Elizabeth, corrects her: no, their father has escaped from their mother. Christina’s brother, a college freshman, tells her that the failure of their parents’ marriage was rooted in its unstable foundations in the bourgeois dream, and he sends her a copy of The Marx-Engels Reader. She likes the idea of reading it better than reading it; there is almost nothing about women in it at all. Cystic acne is at an all-time high. Everyone’s cuticles are ragged. Some of them Google the new medicines in their parents’ cabinets to see if any will help them sleep. The guidance counselor locks her door. ________ Mr. Cole, the physics teacher, can tell that everyone is restless, but he doesn’t know why, and it makes him nervous in turn. He jingles the coins in his pocket as he lectures. [End Page 91] He’s explaining quantum tunneling, telling them that due to the wave nature of matter, the molecules that compose a solid wall could—theoretically—spontaneously align such that a hand or even a whole person would pass through; a person sitting on a chair could all of a sudden tumble to the floor, like some sort of stochastic prank. Elijah never raises his hand when he talks, but teachers love him anyway, and now he asks, “How likely is that to happen?” His parents split up a long time ago, like the day after he was born, so he has a little more energy than the rest of the class. Kelsey sticks a piece of gum under her desk for the first time in her life. “I’m glad you asked that,” says Mr. Cole, turning back to the Smartboard. The school is outfitted with digital whiteboards, complete with a set of stylus pens in blue, green, red, and black that correspond to the hex shades #0000FF, #00FF00, #FF0000, and #000000, respectively. The machines can do anything: they can act like a computer monitor, play movies, record lessons, et cetera. Some teachers are quick to adapt, but most have been slow. They tease Mr. Proulx, the French teacher, for using his as a blank screen for his overhead projections. Mr. Cole is partial to the blue stylus. He writes “1” and then divides it by a denominator with a long, long exponent, underlining for emphasis. Then he drags a dashed box around the figure and clicks the button that is supposed to convert his handwriting to text. Nines and zeros in Times New Roman fill the screen, scattered...