When Kevin was in high school, his junior English literature class read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. He enjoyed reading then and most of the stories they read for class entertained him. He’d sit under the sun on the grassy hill just behind his house and get lost for hours in novels. He read the Scarlet Letter in a couple of days and he was glad that he didn’t live in a world with such a feeble expectation of privacy that a woman’s sex life would warrant a public trial and result in public shaming. Not that he had ever done anything that would warrant a shaming, his behavior was kept in check by the Christian morals that he’d inherited from his mother, though his convictions weren’t strong enough to compel him to church every Sunday. Kevin had no problem sympathizing with the female protagonist, as a boy from his class told his teacher he had, which in reality was the boy’s excuse for not reading the book and, predictably, every other boy in the class said they had a similar problem. The girls in the class were offended, “we have to read books with men as main characters all the time,” and one girl pointed out that even though it was about a woman, it was written by a man. The teacher managed to steer the discussion toward a theme of the work; the efficacy of shame as a deterrent from unfavorable behavior. And when the class took that up and debated it for the majority of the period, the teacher decided that the class might actually complete the follow up assignment suggested in the textbook that asked students to wear a scarlet letter of their own. So the next day, when Kevin and his classmates showed up, their English class looked more like an art class because the teacher asked them to make the letter that they would wear the following day. Kevin thought for longer than the other students about the letter that he would wear; the teacher asked them to think of a negative character trait that they wanted to correct or were ashamed of and they would wear the first letter of that word on their chest and be ready with an explanation if anyone asked what it meant. Most of the students picked L for lazy, or M for mean; but Kevin didn’t think that was comparable to Hester’s shame at all. Kevin racked his brain, not because he had no negative traits, he was not in short supply of those and he almost picked N for nail biter, but when he looked around the room at what his classmates were doing, he realized that he was in a back corner by himself, away from everyone else. He always chose the seat in a back corner, and he did it because he wanted to be far from others who might cheat off of his tests and because he didn’t like the distractions of notes being passed or secrets whispered. And while he watched others talking and enjoying the unexpected art period during English class, he thought about the other times in his life when he chose to sit by himself when there were others who were happy to welcome him. He stopped fishing with his dad because the man had to work third shift and was asleep in the mornings when they used to go; Kevin actually liked to catch fish and would go by himself early and turn down his father’s invitation to go in the late afternoons after he’d slept. His sister would sometimes watch movies with friends at his house and Kevin would take it as his cue to go outside with a book if the weather permitted; his sister and her friends could get loud when they enjoyed movies and Kevin wasn’t usually entertained by the chick flicks his sister and her friends gathered for. Kevin never had guests at his home and he never thought about why until the day he was making his scarlet letter. He was well liked by his classmates. They usually picked him early in gym class and they invited him to birthday parties, but Kevin got used to not having parties of his own because he knew that even though his parents would find a way to make it happen if he really wanted it, he didn’t want to give them any extra burden. Maybe that’s why he never had guests. Maybe that’s why he decided, unconsciously really, never to put undue burden on his family that already had enough problems. Kevin wondered if he would live the rest of his life that way, essentially hiding so as not to inconvenience anyone, including himself. “I don’t want to be a hermit,’ he thought, and he cut a capital letter H from the crimson red felt the teacher had provided.
The next day when he wore it, no one asked him what the letter meant; most everyone just looked at it and it seemed that they were trying to figure it out on their own. When he got to English class and everyone talked about their letters’ significance and how their day was going explaining their negative characteristic, someone said to the class, ‘I wish I was as brave as Kevin. Wearing that H for homosexual is a very bold way to come out.”
If his dark skin could blush, Kevin would have been firetruck red in the face and on his neck. “It’s for hermitry, like a hermit, someone who keeps to themselves; I don’t want to be a hermit.”
“Oh,” the other student said, “I didn’t even know hermitry was a word. You should have used L for loner, everyone thinks you’re gay. It’s cool if you are.”
Kevin knew that it was cool if he was gay and he didn’t want to be too offended, but he was extremely offended that no had asked him what the H meant. “If I was gay, why wouldn’t I use a G? And if your misunderstanding of my H inspired you so much, feel free to take this chance to come out yourself.” Before the other student could respond, the teacher moved on to another student.
Today, Kevin is living up to his scarlet shame. He is eighteen, and he has not been home to NC in about a year. He had been traveling the US Pacific Northwest, but for the past six months, he has called Vancouver, BC, home. Its an innocuous place, Kevin is taking advantage of the fact that no one who knew him would ever guess that he’d be in Canada. He isn’t hiding, or, not from his family, he is preparing for the day when the alien comes back for him; the alien who looked like a black man but gave himself away when he spoke a language that Kevin knew was not a human language because of the cadences and tones he made, almost like he was singing, and also the man used technology as cool as any he’d read about in any sci-fi book.
Kevin spends so much time alone that he sometimes forgets that there are other people in the world. When he walks the stairs of his apartment building at night after washing his clothes at a nearby laundromat, and the stairwell is free of people and the sounds of others behind their apartment doors, Kevin feels like he has suddenly found himself in an apocalyptic scenario that left him as the last man alive, punished to go through the motions of a life that he never wanted as recompense for his sins. If only he’d been more careful last summer, if he’d remembered his mother’s sound advice to keep his ability to himself, then others could still be alive. He is determined not to repeat the mistakes of his past.
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