Updated: 4 days ago
A Scamp is Born
The Scamp received her education at Wellsworth Academy, an institution known for producing well-rounded individuals at a price “Wellsworth” the money, and this is where she attended a Charlie Chaplin marathon on a particularly brisk Saturday in the October of her sophomore year. A number of students went so they could write reflections in order to receive extra credit in their humanities courses, but the Scamp went for the joys of learning, discovery, and community. These were the tenets of a meaningful life that she had been taught to cherish and uphold. The day was spent watching Chaplin’s feature-length films in chronological order and when it came time to break for dinner, the Scamp emerged from the auditorium in a daze. They had been allowed neither food nor drink inside—no carrot, no Oreo, no mineral water, no splash of Coke—but her inspiration overshadowed any pangs of hunger that she might have felt.
She crossed through the courtyard, where many of the tables were already full of students eating dinner, drinking pots of Lapsang tea, reading the New York Times, sketching trees, and playing small instruments such as the harmonica, thumb piano, and ukulele. Birds hopped around the courtyard, pecking crumb from cobblestone, and landed on the edge of a fountain (often referred to as “Plato’s Spit Take”) where water flowed from the mouth of a philosopher carved out of stone. She passed through the courtyard at the heart of campus and went down into the amphitheater that overlooked the dark band of woods surrounding the school, beyond which rolled fields of green and deeper green. The sky was also green, due to bearing acid rain, and it glowed in the day’s waning. There she began to practice the art of pantomime.
Students who had come from the movie marathon followed her to the amphitheater, laughing and talking. They sat on the concrete steps and looked down on the lone performer as she, the lone performer, looked up at the audience. She found a long stick and tested its flexibility against her leg. She walked across the stage with out-turned feet, swinging her makeshift cane every now and then. No matter how silly it must have looked, she had felt the impulse to give it a try and knew that the only course of action, in situations such as this, was to follow her instinct, to see it through, because she had been taught it was the action itself that mattered, not the outcome of “success” or “failure.”
One student called, “Nice Tramp!”
Another said, “That’s not the Tramp. I mean, I get she’s doing an impression, but there won’t ever be another Tramp. She is a girl, after all, and it’s almost a hundred years after the fact.”
“What you’re saying is,” a third student said, “the Little Tramp is a reference point, but the creation is new, as the creator is new, as the context is new.”
“I’m saying that we don’t want to offend the Tramp’s memory.”
“That assumes a memory can be offended.”
“I think we both know that a memory cannot be offended, at least not in the literal sense, but surely you can accept the turn of phrase for its intended meaning. Anyway, we’ve spent the whole day watching Chaplin, so forgive me if I’m being overprotective. He feels like a friend.”
“He does, doesn’t he?”
Down in the amphitheater, the lone performer tapped her chin. She scratched her head. These classmates of hers were intelligent citizens of the world and yet they laughed when next she scratched her butt. They lived so much out of their heads that physical comedy would have felt below them previously, but they were all riding a high from the movies they’d just seen, and were warmed up to it now, susceptible, open, vulnerable. The mind could feel like a den, suffocating, constrained with thought, and it was a relief to escape through silent film into the heart, where feeling begot freedom. She had only ever heard laughs like this when they found a typo in their Classics textbook, when Euripides had been misspelled as “Euripedes” and a student named Fritz shouted, “Euripedeez nutz!”
Someone rose from their seated position in the amphitheater, with a proposal: “OK, so Tramp is out, but what about Scamp? She looks like a scamp!”
The crowd agreed:
“Very scamp.”
“Extremely scamp.”
“The scampiest I’ve ever seen.”
“Scampier than scampi?”
“Oh, definitely.”
There was ink on her hand where a pen had burst. The chop of thick, dark hair was disheveled in a way that seemed to indicate, paradoxically, both laziness and manic go-get-’em. Her eyes were large and brown, with a touch of orange, and brimming on the surface of their color, drawn to the light, was an intense curiosity and desire for life. She wore a lavender sweater of mohair that had been found on the floor of the laundry room and a pair of skinny jeans that had candle wax dripped down the knee, as it was her habit to balance a candle on one knee when reading at night, illuminating the pages and making her feel positively Victorian. The Converse on her feet were mismatched—white on the right and black on the left, both scuffed from scampery.
In summation, the crowd yipped:
“Yep, a scamp!”
“A millennial scamp!”
“We’ve cracked the code.”
“Code rhymes with chode.”
It was decided that this variation of the name honored Chaplin’s memory, rather than insulting it. In lieu of roses, the students threw pine cones on the stage. The Scamp smiled at the sky, the limelight warming her skin, and said, not with her voice, but with the expression on her face and the language of her body, that universal language, “Oh, you wonderful, sweet people!” She was overwhelmed by the adoration of her fans and took a few steps back. As she did, a pine cone dropped and she tripped over it, tumbling backward and rolling with the momentum, feet overhead, eyes closed, body tucked . . . she looked up from her splayed position on the ground. Would they laugh? They did. Did the laughter feel like rain on her skin? It did. Tickled and quenched. (It had begun to drizzle, in reality, and the tickle was the acid rain.) A little band of musicians formed at the lip of the amphitheater, the harmonica player and thumb piano player and ukulele player, and they scored the Scamp’s attempt at juggling pine cones.
This was just a single incident, of course, that took place during the Scamp’s many years of schooling, but it was the day she received the nickname that stuck. Some would argue that she tried to become “someone else” through this adopted name, which was not invented by her, as many would later assert, but was given to her by the chorus in the amphitheater. The Scamp would always uphold that the nickname was not a departure but an arrival. The same could be said of many of her fellow classmates who had also received nicknames, such as Ice Queen, Jell-O, Tube Top, Lil Smokey, Smurf, Fuck Face, Puppy Breath, Bodysnatcher, Wanker, Buster, and Muffy. There was always truth in a nickname.
Then it was time for the Chaplin marathon to resume. How funny that, despite it being cold and dark in the auditorium, those impressionable young souls found themselves warm and enlightened.
*
In the Scamp’s senior year, the president of Wellsworth Academy announced that a talent competition would take place during Parents’ Weekend. The school had originally booked a world-renowned pianist as the entertainment, but the pianist had freezer-burned her hands in a cryotherapy chamber and as a result had suffered a nervous breakdown and canceled all bookings for the calendar year. “Apologies,” the pianist’s publicist wrote in a postcard mailed to the school. “Maybe another time, or maybe not. I should point out, contrary to what you stated in previous correspondence, that I do not play music, I interpret music. Now, I can only interpret what thoughts play in my head. Staccato. Unbearable. Unbeautiful. I think of Schumann hearing A5 in his mania and whether the nature of torture is sound or silence. Through the window of my rented flat, I see a busker setting up on the corner. Shall I shoot to kill? [This message has been dictated.]”
The Scamp surged with pity upon hearing the pianist’s story, but only for a moment, because when the pity receded she had the idea of doing a comedy routine for the talent competition. She knew that trying was the important thing, but she couldn’t help but imagine how good the applause would feel if she won. There was only one problem: the harpist. The harpist was a fellow senior who was very skilled at her instrument, very confident, and very Irish. The Scamp’s own heritage was primarily English, with a touch of Dutch, a whisper of Huguenot, and a gentle caress of Portuguese royalty in the Early Middle Ages.
The Scamp sat at her desk one night, wondering what could be done. She had already changed into her pajamas and wore a light robe with pockets brimming with sunflower seed shells. She stared into a burning candle. The light cast a glow over the bookshelf, the alarm clock, and the table lamp that largely went unused. The Scamp’s roommate, Chantel, was already under the covers of her twin bed across the room. She had a mess of black hair, which resembled an octopus on her pillow, and she had made her own quilt by cutting up old band T-shirts and sewing them together.
The Scamp said, “What am I going to do about the harpist? At this very moment, she’s probably hammering a nail into the wall where she can hang the winner’s ribbon.”
The Scamp wandered over to the window and looked out into the settled darkness, the trees like silver-edged swords stuck in the black earth. The resident advisor knocked and said, “Room check.” She entered and went down the checklist on her clipboard, ticking box after box. The little trashcan beneath the sink had been emptied, the girls had brushed their teeth, and the Scamp had closed the window so no one could catch cold. Before moving to the next room, the RA said, “We’ve got enough goodwill built up between us, Scamp, that I won’t report you for the candle. But you know they’re listed as contraband in the handbook.”
“I do.”
“As long as you don’t burn down the school. Good night.”
“Good night,” the Scamp said, crawling in her bed, with no intention of going to sleep.
When enough time had passed that all was quiet in the hall, the Scamp hissed at her roommate. “Chantel,” she said. “Psst, Chantel.” The Scamp sharpened a pencil and threw it across the room, where it bounced off the wall and hit Chantel in the face. “What is it?” she muttered.
The Scamp said, “Are you blinded?”
Chantel said, “No.”
The Scamp said, “Good.” She sat cross-legged in bed, twirling her thumbs. She said, “People love the harpist. I’m afraid I can’t compete.”
“It’s the music.”
“Go on.”
“It’s . . . enchanting.”
The Scamp knew it was true. She said, “The competition takes place during Parents’ Weekend, so that means her parents will be there and she’ll be even more inclined to show off.”
“Parent, you mean.”
“She has only one?”
“I think they’re divorced,” Chantel said, yawning. “Her father lives on a yacht. Or in a treehouse—no, a yacht.”
“Don’t the Irish burn easily?”
“There aren’t only hot, sunny places to sail.”
“Aren’t there?”
“There are cold, dark places, too.”
“With any luck,” the Scamp said, “he’ll drown in a terrible storm and his body will be eaten by sharks.”
Chantel didn’t respond.
The Scamp said, “What, should I feign goodwill toward my enemy? Is that what you would have me do? While you were sleeping, I had an idea. Even if the harpist is talented, she’s too cocky, don’t you think? She thinks the world is hers and hers alone. Can you show me Fritz’s hiding place?”
Fritz had been the school pranksman up until a month earlier, when he had been expelled for making knock-off Chanel No. 5 in the chemistry lab and selling it on the Wellsworth black market. (Also available on the black market was brandy, schnapps, Lucky Strikes, Nicorette, Adderall, melatonin, fountain pen ink, keys to utility closets, vintage smut, “Howdy Doody for President” pins, jade, ivory, truffles, Sriracha, and a now-mummified apple that had been carved into a marijuana pipe that actor Richard Burton had supposedly hit when he’d been a visiting artist a half-century earlier.) When Fritz had arrived for his Honor Council hearing, he was reported to have said, “Let the butchering begin,” and then emerged three hours later with a look of despair on his ermine face, for he had been browbeaten by his fellow classmates without so much as a bathroom break.
Chantel glanced at the perfume that sat upon her own bookshelf in that cramped little room in the girl’s dormitory. It was in an old rubber cement bottle, unlabeled, hidden in plain sight. “I’ll help you, Scamp,” she said. “Did I ever tell you that, when it was just me and him, Fritz used to call the perfume Chantel No. 5?” She wiped a tear from her eye.
“Yes,” the Scamp said. “You have told me many times.”
The roommates crept into the hallway that night and headed for the stairwell on bare feet. They paused at the end of the hall, where the resident advisor kept her apartment, and the Scamp pressed her ear to the door and heard a rerun of A Prairie Home Companion playing on NPR. She pressed a finger to her lips, miming “shhh,” and they pressed forward. They went to the top floor of the dormitory and headed for the very last room at the very end of the hall. There on the floor was a circle of moonlight that fell through a stained-glass window depicting dancing lepers. The door opened before they could even knock. The faces of Kia and Impala appeared.
The twins said, “What do you want? We have riding lessons in the morning.”
Chantel pointed inside their room at a trapdoor in the ceiling. The trapdoor was to be the Scamp’s passageway to the boys’ side of the dormitory, where Fritz had hidden his stash of prank goods in a fire extinguisher cabinet.
The twins said, “What do we get in return?”
The Scamp had heard rumors of passage from the girls’ side to the boys’ side, but this was her first encounter with the portal itself. She had noticed an electronics kit on the twins’ desk, a box full of wires, gears, and tubes that would create a little robot when assembled. Although it wasn’t her passion, engineering came naturally to the Scamp, and she said, “I’ll do your science homework if you let me through.”
The twins exchanged a glance. They said, “Deal.”
They put a chair on top of the desk in order to reach the trapdoor, and before the Scamp climbed into the ceiling, she said, “It might be useful to know whose room I’m dropping into.” As it so happened, no one had a clue. The Scamp was unbothered by the mystery and ascended quickly, feeling her way through the darkness, hands probing through mystery fluff. She was not afraid for a second, nor was she startled when her fingers brushed against a Jacob’s ladder of condoms, an empty wine bottle, and a pile of cherry pits (alternatively: a pile of cyanide). She had faith that all would be well.
She found the trapdoor to the boys’ side of the dorm and dropped in. She had expected a scream or maybe a book thrown at her head—but nothing. Looking around, she found herself in a single occupancy room, and the occupant was gone. Who was the boy? And where was he? The only sign of life was a terrarium that sat under a heat lamp on the desk. The inside of the glass beaded with water and silverfish squirmed in the soil, with the apparent date of the terrarium’s creation written on a piece of painter’s tape and stuck to the glass. The Scamp propped the door open with a shoe plucked from the laundry heap, then tip-toed out into the empty hallway and found the fire extinguisher cabinet. There was a grocery bag crammed behind the extinguisher, which she stuffed down her pajama pants. Back in the room, she was about to make a clean getaway when the door to the attached bathroom opened and a freshman emerged, a wisp of a young man, a waif, stoned out of his ever-loving mind. The bathroom fan whirred. He had been smoking a joint in there, standing on the toilet and exhaling directly into the vent. He looked as if he had seen a ghost.
She looked at the trapdoor and he looked up, too, with fear and astonishment in his eyes like he had never noticed it before.
He said, “You’re the Scamp.”
She said, “That’s right, sonny boy.”
He said, “Should I be afraid?”
She said, “Do you fear the Scamp?”
“No.”
“Then why are you afraid?”
“Death is imminent.”
“Shh,” she said. “You never saw me and I never saw you. Got it?” She started to leave and he said, “Wait. Wait.” He lifted his hands. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.” He put his hands on her shoulders, looking at her in the face, and blinked those heavy, pink lids. “There’s something on your face,” he said, and the Scamp thought it might have been dust or a spiderweb. “Wait,” he said. “It’s your nose.”
She said, “Give me a boost,” and he helped her back into the ceiling. She dropped down on the girls’ side, revealing the grocery bag of contraband that had been successfully recovered. When Chantel and Kia and Impala asked who had been on the other side, the Scamp said that she hadn’t bothered to ask his name. His real name didn’t matter, anyway. Once he received his nickname, then he would become who he really was. No one probed further. The Scamp could not sleep the rest of the night and so built the twins’ robot, which was zooming around on the floor vacuuming up biscuit crumbs by the time the sun came up. That was how the Scamp got her water balloons and how the school did not burn down, at least not that night, and at least not due to a burning candle, because she never left a burning candle unattended and always paid attention when she had one lit. She was the Scamp, after all, not Briquette Bardot.
*
Parents’ Weekend kicked off with a large breakfast in the dining hall, complete with waffle station and coffee bar, and this was enjoyed by everyone but the Scamp. She slept in since her own parents hadn’t come. She had, in fact, instructed them not to come, because she thought it would help her performance if she felt like an orphan. Her forebear the Tramp might as well have been an orphan, as it was impossible to imagine him with a mother and father, and Charlie Chaplin himself had been something of an orphan, with a largely absent father who died of alcoholism and a mother who was in and out of asylums due to syphilis run rampant. When thinking about how Chaplin managed to soldier on, given his inauspicious start, there was only one answer: The key to survival for animals was food and drink, but for the animal burdened with consciousness there was an additional requirement: optimism.
With the dormitory empty, the Scamp made her preparations. She filled water balloons at the sink and lowered them into her backpack, one by one, where they trembled and glistened like caviar on the fuzzy mohair sweater that she had lovingly laid across the bottom. Then she went down into the basement of the dormitory, where a “common use” electric guitar waited for her in one of the practice rooms. She plugged it into the amp, cranked the volume, and sang, “Gonna fight ’em all, a seven nation army couldn’t hold me back!” When she began to sweat and feel the pads of her fingers screaming on the fretboard, she knew it was time.
She took her position in an open-air walkway on the second story that connected the academic building to the arts building. From this walkway, she could look across the central courtyard and see visitors admiring the campus’s Tuscan-inspired design. Parents drank coffee in the amphitheater. Students sat on the fountain’s edge, running their fingers through the water. Plato’s Spit Take spat beautiful water, clear and blue and containing only trace amounts of E. coli. The Scamp took up this position because directly below was the archway where students posed for photographs with their parents. Families were already lining up to have their picture taken. The Scamp stayed low, waiting, watching, balloon in hand. The harpist came into view. Her mother stood beside her, an exceedingly tall woman in an emerald pantsuit. They approached the archway. Then it was their turn. The Scamp looked down and saw the tops of their heads. She dropped the first balloon. It missed the harpist, who was the intended target, and landed on the mother instead.
Before they could even look up, the Scamp panicked, thinking the entire operation was botched, and turned her backpack upside-down. The balloons fell heavily, eggily, and somehow all of them landed upon the mother.
“She’s allergic to latex!”
“Help!”
“Help!”
The Scamp stayed low and ran into the arts building, dragging the empty skin of her backpack behind her. She slipped into the photography studio and hid in the dark room, heart pounding every time the occasional parent, on a tour of the facility, came through the revolving door and peeked inside. She finally emerged when it was time for the talent competition’s dress rehearsal and kept her eyes trained on the ground, as if that would prevent anyone from identifying her as the culprit. (The student newspaper ran with “Water Balloon Buffoon.”) Others were already in the auditorium discussing how an ambulance had taken the harpist’s mother to the hospital.
The Scamp sidled in, asking, “She dead, by chance?”
“Not dead,” someone answered, a girl with a bandana tied around her neck like a dog. “I heard her throat closed up, though. I heard she turned the color of a lobster and I heard the swelling was so great that her skin split to the bone. That’s only what I heard, though. At the time, I was in line for seconds at the waffle station.”
“And the balloons?” the Scamp asked. “Does anyone know who dropped them? Or where they came from?”
“No one knows.”
“I see.”
The dog-girl said, “It’s funny, though, isn’t it? It’s something Fritz would have done.”
“Is it funny?” the Scamp asked.
It was funny, everyone agreed, because the harpist’s mother hadn’t died. If she had died, it wouldn’t have been funny—at least not for ten years. In ten years, they would be in their late twenties.
The Scamp said, “And will the harpist play?”
Dog-girl said, “It seems unlikely. She didn’t make it to the dress rehearsal, so . . .”
“That’s a shame,” the Scamp said, not quite lying but also not telling the truth.
“Yes, but you can’t blame her. Who is to blame, I wonder? Fritz’s spirit perhaps. The ghost of Fritz. Yes, it was the ghost of Fritz. And where have you been today, Scamp? Did your parents not come?”
The Scamp froze. She said, “Who are you asking all these questions? Do I know you?”
The girl with the bandana tied around her neck said, “We’ve been friends for years. We were roommates when we first arrived at Wellsworth. Remember the late nights studying and the tin of Christmas popcorn we shared the night before everyone left for winter break?”
The Scamp said, “Right. I was just kidding. My parents were busy this weekend. I am an orphan.”
“Are you feeling all right, Scamp?”
“Yes, of course. I’m gonna break your legs—I mean, break a leg.”
As rehearsal began, the Scamp hovered in the wings, waiting for her name to be called. This was good, she thought. Nobody knew. And yet she didn’t feel good. It wasn’t in her nature to do real harm, as it is not the nature of any scamp, only a little well-meaning mischief, and she was feeling unsettled. She never would have dropped those balloons if she had known the enemy’s mother would have suffered an allergic reaction to latex, or if she had known her aim would be that bad. She was only playing around, and wasn’t play how people grew and learned? Mr. Hammer walked over, one of the Scamp’s favorite teachers. He was on the short side, with features that seemed to have been shaped by prairie winds—a wide, flat face, with a sensitive squint and a receding hairline. He always wore short-sleeved button-up shirts, carpenter jeans, and hiking boots, with reading glasses pushed on top of his head. He had volunteered to help behind-the-scenes at the talent competition and asked the Scamp what was the matter. She shrugged, not wanting to show her hand.
He said, “Is it the news of Imogen’s mother?”
The Scamp nodded.
“They’re saying Fritz’s ghost dropped the balloons,” he said. “But I’m sure you’ve already heard that.” He looked at nothing in particular, crossed his arms, shook his head.
The Scamp said, “Funny.”
Mr. Hammer said, “It isn’t funny at all.” He turned toward the Scamp, with a look on his face that was partly accusatory and partly protective. In a hushed voice, he said, “Fritz is, in fact, dead. It hasn’t been announced to the student body yet, so I’d appreciate your discretion, but we just received word. His parents sent him abroad after his expulsion, where his aptitude for chemistry apparently led him to invent a truth serum more powerful than anything currently available. He sold it on the dark web and got tangled up with some Italians. His body was found in a barrel of olive oil. They could barely get him out. He kept slipping out of their grasp.”
The Scamp, stunned, imagined how heartbroken her roommate Chantel was going to be over the news. She was sad, too, because Fritz had been a kindred spirit. She said, “So no one knows how the balloon accident happened?”
Mr. Hammer said, “Between you and me, Imogen’s mother only suffered from a bout of excitement and a mild rash, so I don’t think the incident deserves all the hubbub. She does love the attention, though, doesn’t she?” He put a finger to his lips, indicating that was not something to be repeated. He said, “Balloons fell. It was an accident. I wouldn’t let it affect your performance. Laughter is a powerful tool, both for the audience and the performer. You can lift everyone’s spirits.”
The Scamp was relieved for herself, but then she felt disheartened for another reason. She said, “I can’t lift Fritz’s spirit.”
“Maybe you can. Who knows what happens when we die?”
“What if nothing happens?”
“You’re young,” he said. “Don’t go making hasty decisions about what does or doesn’t happen.” He opened his arms and then put his hands on his chest. He said, “Take a deep breath.”
He took a deep breath.
So did she.
They exhaled on a count of one, two, three.
The Scamp said, “Thanks.”
When her name was called, she went onstage to practice the comedy routine that she had originally planned for the talent competition. The routine involved discovering a laptop that had been left on the ground and acting like she didn’t know what to do with it. She used it as a mirror, but couldn’t see herself in it. She tried to kiss it, but found it cold. She tried to burp it, but found it wasn’t alive. She sat on it, but found it uncomfortable. She tried to scoot on it, but found it wouldn’t move. She tried to throw it like a boomerang, but it wouldn’t come back to her. Not knowing what it could possibly be used for, she threw it in the trash can, and there, in the trash, she pulled out an old tin can, which she used to play Kick the Can offstage.
The whole time she was thinking that this was no longer the right routine and that it had never been funny to begin with. She had something else in mind. As she exited the stage, she saw the freshman whose room she had dropped into on the boys’ side of the dorm. He was in charge of props and waved her over to his table, looking nervously from side to side. There was color in his face now that he was sober. She said, “Hello, stranger,” and he handed her the fuzzy mohair sweater that had been in her backpack, which had fallen out when she had, in a mad rush, dumped out all of the water balloons. He’d found it in the courtyard and taken it before anyone could see. The Scamp was so grateful that she kissed him on the cheek, which was soft as a pat of butter. A group of students spotted them and this is how the freshman became known as Lover Boy, a name that would follow him to the grave. (At age thirty-two, his fiancée called off the wedding the night before the big day and he got so stoned that he put on his tuxedo, minus the shoes, and tried to eat an entire jar of peanut butter with a spoon while watching The Masked Singer. Cause of death: Asphyxiation. There were bruises on his stomach from where he had flung himself repeatedly on the kitchen table, trying to make the Jif un-stick.)
The Scamp clutched the balled-up sweater and said, “Thank you.”
Lover Boy blushed. He said, “You’re welcome.”
She said, “Do you think you could help me with something later?”
He said, “I’d love to.”
*
The Scamp walked onto an empty stage. She twiddled her thumbs and kicked the ground. Smiling absentmindedly, she let out a flowery whistle . . . then a water balloon dropped ten feet away. She jumped like a cat, looked up, a curious expression on her face. She took a few steps, scratched her head. Nothing. So she started whistling again, twirling about the stage, lifting her arms overhead and pirouetting. Just when she seemed to have forgotten the first water balloon altogether, a second water balloon fell. This one was only a few feet away. She jumped, even higher this time, and looked up. She ran to the opposite side of the stage. She let out a mournful whistle. Another water balloon dropped, this time on her head. She ran to the middle of the stage and shook like a dog. She puckered her lips, as if to whistle, and then covered her mouth. Was it the whistling that prompted this balloon dropping? She took a step, looked up cautiously. A water balloon dropped on her head. She ran across the stage. Another water balloon dropped on her head. She ran in circles and more water balloons dropped on her head. She fell into the fetal position. Water balloons fell in rapid fire, one after another, until she became sopping wet. Then they stopped. She stood slowly, her sweater soaked, her skinny jeans sucked to her legs, her mismatched Converse squishing, and yet a giddy expression crept across her face. She whistled a familiar melody and leapt across the stage, splashing through puddles. I’m singin’ in the rain, just singin’ in the rain, what a glorious feeling, I’m happy again! The Scamp threw her arms open and smiled, showing her beautiful, young, glistening teeth. At this point, the audience was applauding and students were laughing. A final water balloon dropped onto her head and she bounded into the wings like a spring-sprung doe.
The stagehands gave her high-fives as they scurried off with mops to clean up before the next performer could go on. Lover Boy descended from the catwalk, where he had been dropping water balloons during the performance. The Scamp whispered, “We did it! Listen to them! Just listen!” Lover Boy was not laughing, though. He pointed behind the Scamp and she turned to see the harpist standing there like a Celtic reaper in a green velvet dress and high heels.
Imogen said, “Caught your act. Very mature.”
The Scamp was so surprised that she barely managed to say, “It’s comedy.”
The harpist said, “It’s not comedy if it’s not funny,” and then two stagehands carried her harp onto the newly cleaned stage, along with a stool, and she flicked her long, red braid over her shoulder. She snapped at Lover Boy and said, “Carry me onstage,” and he said, “What?” and she said, “Carry me.” He struggled to pick her up at first, but when he’d finally found his balance, he shuffled with her in his arms to the middle of the stage. There, where the harp stood proudly, he dropped her in a minor swell of pity-applause and returned to a scowling Scamp in the wings.
The Scamp whispered, “And who decides what’s funny? She does? Yeah, right. This isn’t Carnegie Hall.”
Lover Boy rubbed his tired arms, saying, “Maybe she’ll choke?”
In her address to the audience, the harpist said, “I’d like to perform a piece that I composed at the hospital this afternoon. It’s dedicated to my mother, who is doing much better now and has, out of the goodness of her own heart, decided not to pursue legal action against the school and, more specifically, against the little piece of shit that did that to her. This piece is entitled ‘A Flower Opens When Her Throat Closes.’”
The Scamp whispered, “It’s titled, idiot.”
The harpist plucked a wrong note here and there, and she seemed to get lost in the composition on more than one occasion—and not in a good way—which everyone later attributed to it being her first time performing a brand-new piece from memory. She received a standing ovation, although the audience applauded far less enthusiastically than they did for the Scamp. Everyone had known that the water balloons were a reference to something dramatic that had happened earlier that day, and because it felt timely, and like a precious inside joke, and because it felt a little bit wrong, and a little bit naughty, and because nobody had died, they had laughed even harder.
At the end of the talent competition, all of the participants lined up across the stage and the president of Wellsworth Academy marched out in his gray plaid double-breasted suit and held up a large ribbon pinched between his fingers. The Scamp was disappointed when the harpist was deemed the winner. When everyone was herded offstage, the president squeezed the Scamp’s elbow and walked alongside her. “And you,” he said, close enough that she could smell the ylang-ylang on his breath. “That was very creative, and how quickly they mopped up afterward! You understand why I had to make the decision that I did.” The Scamp said, “Yes, sir,” and he said, “You’ll go on to do great things, no doubt. As much as I’ll miss your presence once you graduate, I look forward to all the wonderful things that will come next for you.” The Scamp believed every word that he said. She had no reason not to. He looked like a member of the British royal family and was also rumored to be well-endowed by some students who had once seen him in tennis whites, leading to the underground circulation of the nickname Buckingham Phallus, which the Scamp refused to employ, finding that it made her blush. She thought the president was cute, after all.
Afterwards, evening milk and cookies were served in the courtyard. Mr. Hammer walked over to the Scamp, raising his paper cup, and said, “Cheers to you.” The milk had come from a nearby dairy farm, where farm-forward students volunteered on weekends, and it was very good and very thick. The cookies, oatmeal raisin, were also good, but that statement had to be qualified with “and healthy.”
The Scamp said, “Thank you for the pep talk earlier. It gave me the courage to do the new routine.”
Mr. Hammer said, “It was a hit, but you already know that.”
“Yes,” she said. “I kind of blacked out when I was up there. I remember people laughing, but I don’t really remember what I did. It was over so quickly.”
“You lost yourself in the performance.”
“Or I was so unprofessional that I couldn’t stay in it.”
“I don’t know about that,” Mr. Hammer said, swirling his milk, “but once upon a time, a lass with a harp played a sad song. It was only okay, but the lass got a pity vote. The real star was a scamp who made everyone laugh by taking a sad thing and making it funny.”
The Scamp looked up at the sky, where the stars were so distant that their light shined in the past, a time long before Chaplin was even born, and she wished she could have been there to see him take over the world. She said, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up and a comedy in long-shot.”
Mr. Hammer said, “That’s Chaplin.”
The Scamp looked around and said, “Everything is.”
Mr. Hammer raised his cup in silent cheers, then wandered mistily into the crowd. People had gathered around the harpist. The president shook her hand. She showed off the ribbon to her audience, talking and harping, harping and talking, although the Scamp could not hear what she was saying.
The Scamp walked to the edge of the amphitheater and looked out into the surrounding woods. She saw the old lamplighter Joe going through the twilit trees and lighting the gas lamps that made a ring around the school. There were always some students who found this kind of environment to be claustrophobic. They felt stifled and trapped and crushed by nothingness. The Scamp never felt that way, though. Her world felt big, enormous. She could look through the band of woods and see the acres and acres of land that stretched beyond, including the fields and pastures and gardens, and it all felt like something, not nothing. She was not trapped, but free. She was not stifled, but enabled. She was not crushed, but expanding. Rather than being lost, she found herself every day—in the books she read, the music she heard, the films she saw. She found herself scattered out in the world and the pieces reflected back at her, glimmering. In this particular case, at this particular moment, the glimmering came from the old lamplighter Joe, who’d had a heart attack while lighting his final lamp, fallen to the ground, and started a fire that began to spread rapidly toward the very spot where the Scamp stood. It had been a dry summer and fall.
She looked for Lover Boy among the milk and cookies. She found him and said, “Do we have any water balloons left?”
WYNNE HUNGERFORD's work has appeared in EPOCH, Subtropics, Blackbird, The Brooklyn Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. She received her MFA from the University of Florida.