Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

Jane and I shifted our focus slightly from horses to the opposite sex, and were graciously able to overlook the fact that we were a full head taller than all the boys our own age.

In the seventh grade, Jane and I threw spitballs. We became expert. Pages of wadded-up semi-masticated notebook paper went into our daily stockpile of spitballs, which, at a prearranged signal, were fired off with devastating accuracy at any target. (Only our Latin and French teachers, burly and dangerous, were exempt.) We spent a lot of time in the principal’s office. The principal, Miss Campbell, informed us that we were unruly, reckless, wanton, anarchistic, and natural ringleaders. We were responsible for the ruined health (heart attack) of our kindly homeroom teacher who’d taught upper-school English there for thirty years; for the dismissal (nervous breakdown), a few months later, of her unfortunate replacement; and for the last-ditch hiring of our first male teacher (to straighten out the rapidly disintegrating morale of our class). We came, said Miss Campbell, from fine families who had given us fine upbringings, and she knew she could depend on us, as we stood on the brink of disgracing both our parents and the Greenwich Academy, to rally.

The main reason we rallied was the male teacher. Centering our scattered competitive drives on him, Jane and I geared up to a creative frenzy. In the last semester of the seventh grade, we co-authored a short story laced with what we glibly assumed was authentic patois (inspired by my copious reading of Donn Byrne): an old Irishman’s account to his grandson of the time his decrepit mare won the Grand National. We diligently spent three nights writing it, and entered it in the school feature-story contest. To everyone’s amazement, it won. We repeated our victory a year later with “Khangua” (“I remember that sweet Irish spring. Oh, the fresh green fields of daisies …”), a variation of the previous tried-and-true theme, this time with a gypsy as the protagonist. After that, until I went away to boarding school two years later, I never let the story contest go by without winning it. There was nothing in the world as pleasant as the long walk to the front of Assembly while I arranged my countenance into a haggard artistic expression.

I had made up my mind to be a writer. Unable to engage Jane’s attention for such a prolonged venture, I persuaded another friend, Susan Terbell, to collaborate with me on a book. It was an ambitious undertaking, but I smelled money. My scheme was to write a book for and about twelve-year-olds by twelve-year-olds. During weekends for the rest of the seventh grade and over the next six months, Susan and I battered away on legal pads until the project was complete. It was entitled The Riders of Red Devil; the main action took place on a plantation and its climactic sequence was the upset winning of the Kentucky Derby by a pair of black twins (their combined weight that of a single jockey) improbably aboard the plantation owner’s prize three-year-old (trained from colthood by the boys’ father). I also executed a series of illustrations in watercolor. After reading it, nobody in either of our families took this enterprise seriously, but, out of kindness, Kenneth Wagg sent the finished manuscript to a friend at Simon & Schuster, where it created quite a stir. (“As to Brooke Hayward’s manuscript, everyone agrees that it’s wild, wooly, and quite wonderful.…”) Mother, however, alarmed by the idea of the ensuing publicity, which, she felt, would capitalize on her name and have a negative influence on my budding career, vetoed the book’s publication. I was furious, mentally having banked my first million.

But along the line I had become a good student. Bridget already was one. While I was out testing my new environment and rebelling against its restrictions, she had settled in. Methodical and industrious by nature, she always got excellent grades in every subject except gym. The only physical activity she enjoyed was modern dance, and she was good at it, with her agile, bony, double-jointed limbs, and saber-shaped legs, as Mother called them.

Wrapping them behind her head like a contortionist, she would, on request, manipulate herself hideously across the floor upside down on her hands and knees. She was well liked by her classmates and adored by her teachers, but kept very much to herself. She liked to be alone, preferred solitary amusements: painting, sketching, writing, sculpting, needlepoint—and was talented but very shy about it. “I have an inferiority complex,” she used to say. Yet she could be gay, witty, charming. And at thirteen, with her fastidiously typed daily news bulletin, still the family chronicler:

Bridget and I were alternately best friends and archenemies. She was both repelled by and envious of my recklessness. I thought she was pallid and craven. The more flamboyantly I sprawled in every direction, the more righteously she pursed her lips and withdrew into herself. She became secretive. Her room was sacrosanct. Nobody was allowed to enter without her permission. This filled me with disgust, a disgust tinged with satisfaction; her behavior conceded my superiority. As we grew further apart, I was able to look back and recognize her ambivalence about me. For if, in the grand scheme of things, my chief combat was with Mother, Bridget had two dragons to slay: Mother and me. I didn’t envy her that. Every so often I took Bridget’s part against us (confusing, as I was apt to do in those days, myself with Mother or Mother with me). On Bridget’s fourteenth birthday, Mother gave her another doll. Bridget may have loved it, but I was incensed. I thought she was too old for dolls even if she didn’t look it. To add insult to injury, her first evening dress, which accompanied the doll, had polka dots and little sleeves. The temptation to treat Bridget as a baby was hard enough for me to resist without Mother making