FURTHERMORE, REQUIRING ATTENDANCE AT CHURCH-FORCING YOUNG PEOPLE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE RITUALS OF A BELIEF THEY DON'T SHARE-SERVES MERELY TO PREJUDICE THOSE SAME YOUNG PEOPLE AGAINST ALL RELIGIONS, AND AGAINST SINCERELY RELIGIOUS BELIEVERS. I BELIEVE THAT IT IS NOT THE PURPOSE OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION TO BROADEN AND EXPAND OUR PREJUDICES.'
And on and on. You should have heard him on the subject of required athletics: 'BORN OF A BROWN-SHIRT MENTALITY, A CONCEPT EMBRACED BY THE HITLER YOUTH!' And on the regulation that boarders were not allowed to enjoy more than three weekends off-campus in a single term: 'ARE WE SO SIMPLE, IN THE ADMINISTRATION'S VIEW, THAT WE ARE CHARACTERIZED AS CONTENT TO SPEND OUR WEEKENDS AS ATHLETIC HEROES OR FANS OF SPECTATOR SPORTS; IS IT NOT POSSIBLE THAT SOME OF US MIGHT FIND MORE STIMULATION AT HOME, OR AT THE HOME OF A FRIEND-OR (EVEN) AT A GIRLS' SCHOOL? AND I DON'T MEAN AT ONE OF THOSE OVERORGANIZED AND CHARMLESSLY CHAPERONED DANCESl'
The Voice was our voice; he championed our causes; he made us proud of ourselves in an atmosphere mat belittled and intimidated us. But his was also a voice that could criticize us. When a boy was thrown out of school for killing cats-he was ritualistically lynching cats that were pets of faculty families- we were quick to say how 'sick' he was; it was Owen who reminded us that all boys (himself included) were touched by that same sickness. 'WHO ARE WE TO BE RIGHTEOUS?' he asked us. 'I HAVE MURDERED TADPOLES AND TOADS-I'VE BEEN A MASS-MURDERER OF INNOCENT WILDLIFE!' He described his mutilations in a self-condemnatory, regretful tone; although he also confessed his slight vandalism of the sainted Mary Magdalene, I was amused to see that he offered no apologies to the nuns of St. Michael's-it was the tadpoles and toads he was sorry about. 'WHAT BOY HASN'T KILLED LIVE THINGS? OF COURSE, IT'S 'SICK' TO BE A HANGMAN OF POOR CATS-BUT HOW IS IT WORSE THAN WHAT MOST OF US HAVE DONE? I HOPE WE'VE OUTGROWN IT, BUT DOES THAT MEAN WE FORGET THAT WE WERE LIKE THAT? DO THE FACULTY REMEMBER BEING BOYS? HOW CAN THEY PRESUME TO TEACH US ABOUT OURSELVES IF THEY DON'T REMEMBER BEING LIKE US? IF THIS IS A PLACE WHERE WE THINK THE TEACHING IS SO GREAT, WHY NOT TEACH THE KID THAT KILLING CATS IS 'SICK'-WHY THROW HIM OUT?'
It would grow to be a theme of Owen's: 'WHY THROW HIM OUT?' he would ask, repeatedly. When he agreed that someone should have been thrown out, he said so. Drinking was punishable by dismissal, but Owen argued that getting other students drunk should be a more punishable offense than solitary drinking; also, that most forms of drinking were' 'NOT AS DESTRUCTIVE AS THE ALMOST-ROUTINE HARASSMENT OF STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT 'COOL' BY STUDENTS WHO THINK IT IS 'COOL' TO BE HARSHLY ABUSIVE-BOTH VERBALLY ABUSIVE AND PHYSICALLY INTIMIDATING. CRUEL AND DELIBERATE MOCKERY IS WORSE THAN DRINKING; STUDENTS WHO BAIT AND MERCILESSLY TEASE THEIR FELLOW STUDENTS ARE GUILTY OF WHAT SHOULD BE A MORE 'PUNISHABLE OFFENSE' THAN GETTING DRUNK-ESPECIALLY IN THOSE INSTANCES WHEN YOUR DRUNKENNESS HURTS NO ONE BUT YOURSELF.'
It was well known that The Voice didn't drink; he was 'black-coffee Meany,' and 'pack-a-day Meany'; he believed in his own alertness-he was sharp, he wanted to stay sharp. His column on 'THE PERILS OF DRINK AND DRUGS' must have appealed even to his critics; if he was not afraid of the faculty, he was also not afraid of his peers. It was still only our first, our ninth-grade year, when Owen invited Hester to
the Senior Dance-in Noah and Simon's graduating year, Owen Meany dared to invite their dreaded sister to their senior-class dance!
'She'll just use you to meet other guys,' Noah warned him.
'She'll fuck our whole class and leave you looking at the chandelier,' Simon told Owen. I was furious with him. I wished I'd had the nerve to ask Hester to be my date; but how do you ' 'date' your first cousin? Noah and Simon and I commiserated; as much as Owen had captured our admiration, he had risked embarrassing himself- and all of us-by being the instrument of Hester's debut at Gravesend Academy.
'Hester the Molester,' Simon repeated and repeated.
'She's just a Sawyer Depot kind of girl,' Noah said condescendingly. But Hester knew much more about Gravesend Academy than any of us knew she knew; on that balmy, spring weekend in , Hester arrived prepared. After all, Owen had sent her every issue of The Grave; if she had once regarded Owen with distaste-she had called him queer and crazy, and a creep- Hester was no fool. She could tell when a star had risen. And Hester was committed to irreverence; it should have been no surprise to Noah and Simon and me that The Voice had won her heart. Whatever had been her actual experience with the black boatman from Tortola, the encounter had lent to Hester's recklessly blooming young womanhood a measure of restraint that women gain from only the most tragic entanglements with love; in addition to her dark and primitive beauty, and a substantial loss of weight that drew one's attention to her full, imposing bosom and to the hardness of the bones in her somber face, Hester now held herself back just enough to make her dangerousness both more subtle and more absolute. Her wariness matured her; she had always known how to dress-I think it ran in the family. In Hester's case, she wore simple, expensive clothes-but more casually than the designer had intended, and the fit was never quite right; her body belonged in the jungle, covered only essentially, possibly with fur or grass. For the Senior Dance, she wore a short black dress with spaghetti straps as thin as string; the dress had a full skirt, a fitted waist, and a deeply plunging neckline that exposed a broad expanse of Hester's throat and chest-a fetching background for the necklace of rose-gray pearls my Aunt Martha had given her for her seventeenth birthday. She wore no stockings and danced barefoot; around one ankle was a black rawhide thong, from which a turquoise bauble dangled- touching the top of her foot. Its value could have been only sentimental; Noah implied that the Tortola boatman had given it to her. At the Senior Dance, the faculty chaperones-and their wives-never took
