Reading "Boys Go To Jupiter"

Flags and First Paragraphs

I had an undergraduate professor in the Writing Seminars who was fond of what he called the First Paragraph Game. We would close read the first paragraph of a short story, and try to predict as much as possible about what would happen. I would like to play this game with one of my favorite stories, “Boys Go To Jupiter,”¹ by fellow Writing Seminars professor Danielle Evans.

In six words, “The bikini isn’t even Claire’s thing,” our first sentence tells us the ostensible source of an ostensible conflict—the bikini, and the reason it is mentioned—and the ostensible response: deflection. The bikini and whatever is associated with it belong to someone else. There must also, therefore, be accusation. And we get a ironic little cherry on top: though the situation is not clear, we will navigate the story through Claire’s perspective. 

The next sentence tantalizes us with further deflection, a murky non-explanation: “Before this winter, if you had said Confederate flag, Claire would have thought of high-school beach trips: rows and rows of tacky souvenir shops along the Ocean City Boardwalk, her best friend Angela muttering they know they lost, right? while Claire tried to remember which side of the Mason-Dixon line Maryland was on.” The dominant tone is disorientation: Angela expresses discomfort as confusion, while Claire is actually confused about the state’s geography and history. We are even temporally disoriented, having slipped into a past tense without context. What has changed this winter? The rest of the first paragraph continues evasively:

The flag stuff is Jackson’s, and she’s mostly seeing Jackson to piss off Puppy. Puppy, Claire’s almost-stepmother, is legally named Poppy; Puppy is supposedly a childhood nickname stemming form a baby sister’s mispronunciation, but Claire suspects that Puppy has made the whole thing up. Puppy deemed it wasteful to pay twice as much for a direct flight in order for Claire to avoid a layover, and her father listens to Puppy now, so for the first half of her trip, Claire had to go the wrong direction—to Florida from Vermont via Detroit.

She doesn’t really care about this “flag stuff” or the boyfriend who has introduced it to her, an exponential deflection. Apparently, the real problem is the almost-stepmother, who explains her cutesy identity with a youthful story Claire does not believe (put a pin in that for a bit). At this moment, flying west to go from north to south while thinking of town geographically to the east, Claire is disoriented because her father cares less about her than about Poppy, who in turn cares less about Claire than about money. Specifically, her father listens to Puppy and not to Claire, who thus cannot choose for herself, and thus need not be listened to. Her disorientation is an ouroboric lack of agency. More simply, she is a child.

Evans’s first paragraph lands gracefully, each thought flowing into the next, yet crashes with force that becomes apparent only as it sends Claire tumbling, ripping off her bikini and leaving her exposed. And with nothing to cover her ass, deflect though she does, the undertow drags us swirling with her into the story. So let us stand back up and get our bearings: The Confederate flag suggests a racist controversy. Evans’ exceptional choice of setting (Maryland was a border state; Ocean City is a vacation spot for people all over the mid-Atlantic, where the North and South meet) and the narration’s insistence that the “flag stuff” is Jackson’s suggest that Claire is somehow unfairly or unintentionally caught in the crossfire. And the further digression about Puppy and her father indicates who Claire blames for her loss of control. However, Evans does not give the whole game away. There are three questions we still need answered: what exactly is Claire’s ongoing conflict; who is Angela; and where is Claire’s birth mother?

The first is immediately addressed. Jackson, a loser with a drawl and a pickup truck gives Claire a Confederate flag bikini. Puppy calls her “white trash,” but Claire dismisses the chance to consider what she is doing, to see herself literally caught in the flag’s crossed blue lines, preferring Jackson’s perspective: “She does look pretty hot: like someone she is not, what with the stars and bar marking her tits and crotch, but like a hot someone she is not.” Before having sex in his truck, she strips down to the bikini, which she has taken to wearing “as a habit,” exposing herself in public, yet privately. A clueless conduit for something like comeuppance, Jackson takes a picture of her and posts it online. Fully publicly exposed, Claire feels the same dissociation: “She is strangely embarrassed by the picture, the way it turns her into someone else. She wasn’t wearing the bikini to bother Black people—for Christ’s sake, there were none in her father’s new neighborhood to bother even if she wanted to—but to bother Puppy, who is half racist anyway, which makes her aggrieved reaction doubly hilarious.” The narration resumes its deflective tone. Claire simply cannot accept that she is looking at herself, especially not when Carmen, the lone Black student on her dorm floor, sees the picture too and tweets about it.

What would make Claire see herself? We see a thoughtless, careless girl who has made some poor if not completely irretrievable choices. If this were the extent of the problem, we might find Claire’s deflection persuasive—this is just a severe misunderstanding. We might, until she doubles and redoubles down every chance she gets. Her hall mate’s post gets attention online, so when Claire returns annoyed and embarrassed from break, she prints a picture of the Confederate flag, writes a wry welcome back message on it, and slides it under Carmen’s door. She posts this too, taking it as a threat, and the ensuing uproar quickly penetrates any digital confines when the school’s Office of Diversity asks Claire for a meeting. With an inbox full of hate (and sympathetic dick pics) and the ire of her peers at her door, she prints another Confederate flag and tapes it to her dorm window. When she suppresses her fear and frustration enough to leave her room, she fakes a southern accent, wears her mother’s pearls, and dismisses the administrators trying to deescalate the situation: “Bless your hearts for being so helpful.” Claire dawns jewelry from her mother and (unpinning that earlier point) acts like her step-mother, affecting a kind of cutesy disposition and making up an explanation for it. What would make Claire act like herself? We can extrapolate each bad decision from her first impression as a petulant child trying to piss off the only adult around. Speaking of her absent parents, although they grew up in Connecticut and Minnesota, Claire goes out of her way to make herself unsympathetic, lying to a student reporter that she is “simply celebrating her heritage[…] She affects a lilt to say so, but as soon as the words are out of her mouth she realizes that the affect is a mistake. She doesn’t sound like herself. She sounds like Angela.” What would make Claire hear herself?

In between scenes of the ongoing mess, Evans excavates Claire’s past, starting when she is six years old. Her family moves into a new neighborhood and she meets Angela’s family: “In Mrs. Hall’s mouth, Claire’s name is a tunnel from which a person can emerge on the other side. Claire is fascinated by their [southern] accents, and, yes, by the dark tint of their skin, but mostly she is anxious to be seen.” Young Claire may not know other Black people, but her connection with Mrs. Hall, an elementary school teacher who treats Claire with love, is not hampered. In fact, it feels actualizing. And note, it is specifically through Mrs. Hall’s mouth—that is, where this mother, this Black woman speaks—that Claire could emerge. On one hand, if Claire had grown under Mrs. Hall’s influence, Claire should already know better than to accept the bikini, or at the barest minimum be able to understand why her actions have been wrong and articulate a genuine apology. On the other hand, if Claire becomes a person under the influence of someone else, is she really her own person?

Well, yes. Everyone is always being shaped by personal relationships, everyone exists in society, and wherever and however our personal and cultural histories guide us, we all grow up into individual people somewhere along the way. The mark of social maturity is not being totally free to make one’s own choices; on the contrary, it is recognizing that one can never be truly, fully free to act without influence or consequence and accepting the agency of personhood anyway. Claire perhaps vaguely understand this: “She distrusts collective anger; Claire’s anger has always been her own.” Claire is frustrated with Carmen’s initial post but even more frustrated with the reaction it gets online from people, individual people, who literally exist but function as an amorphous, disembodied chorus of voices (well, words). Claire cannot conceive of anyone emerging from them because she cannot conceive of them as real. That frustration leads her to escalate the situation with the passive-aggressive welcome back note. At the same time, if her anger really is her own, then is she not a real person, responsible for her actions, whatever their motivation or intent? The key is that her actions are all, to her, reactions. In other words, Claire is implicitly following the logic of angry children and abusers alike: ‘look what you made me do.’

Remember too, Claire is a college student dating a high schooler who is older than her, dawning the flag of a would-be country that hasn’t existed for 150 years over her “bee-sting breasts.” Claire is thrashing about in her own flow of time, unable to mature even physically; she is yet to emerge a person at all, either from Mrs. Hall’s mouth or from her actual parents. “Her father keeps long hours, and her mother has a certain formality; Claire loves her, but feels, in her presence, like a miniature adult, embarrassed by the silliness of her six-year-old desires.” Claire just wants to be noticed, seen and heard and allowed to be—and by extension, to develop. Forced to behave with a maturity literally beyond her years, it is no wonder Claire is anxious to be seen, no wonder she gravitates away from her home toward her kind neighbors, and no wonder she acts like a child in the present. 

Speaking of raising children, we finally see Claire’s mother! Well, sort of. We watch Claire watching her pick out the cabinets and flooring for their house. “Everything is so new and shiny when they move in that Claire is afraid of her own house, afraid her presence will somehow dent or tarnish it.” Aside from her emotional absence, we are told nothing about her mother’s behavior or appearance, or even what materials she chooses! Instead, Evans again demonstrates her eye for setting: “The neighborhood is still brand-new: tech money is paving western Fairfax on its way out to Reston, which will be malls and mini-mansions and glossy buildings soon.” This is where Claire will, and will not, grow up. Unlike Maryland, Virginia was a Confederate state, although the greater DC suburbs are hardly the Deep South. Besides the general suburban history of White Flight after WWII, this particular suburb has no history. One stultifying effect of suburbs, especially wealthy ones, is the illusion of atemporality, of things never really changing and all being the same (hence the ever-present cultural ennui of adolescents and housewives, among other reasons). In a sense, Claire is trapped outside history, the personal and the cultural, barred especially as a child from knowing and learning. But just as no one is ever fully free from the social, no one is ever free from history (which is, in a sense, the social on a grand scale). Claire is, in fact, always already trapped within them.

Although we see young Claire in a series of learning environments, we never see her learn. If Mrs. Hall had been her second grade teacher, for example, Claire’s Martin Luther King Day poem about Angela probably would not have been staged at an assembly. The two girls have to perform again each year until they move on to middle school, which Mrs. Hall “permits only after mandating a costume change,” her daughter initially put in kente cloth. That is as much as we get of Mrs. Hall’s reaction, and we never learn how Angela feels being forced to recite her white friend’s thoughts on the simplicity of anti-racism: “I judge her for her character/and so I’m never mad at her.” Of course, Claire does not know better, does not recognize the dubious implications (Claire would be mad at if she judged Angela for her skin; MLK’s goal was approval from white people; antiracism is when a white person thinks their positive feelings about Black people matter; and so on). She is only 7 or 8, and evidently not being taught better at school or at her own sheltered home. Has Mrs. Hall ever interceded to educate Claire? Nothing Claire remembers, anyway. She also takes the wrong lesson from meeting Aaron, Angela’s brother. “Claire, not yet entirely clear on the rules of family, thinks of herself as having not a half brother [from her father’s first marriage], but half-a-brother, and shortly after meeting the Halls she thinks of herself as having half of Angela’s brother too.” Through the pun on “brother” as slang for a Black man, we see young Claire assume a proximity to Blackness without having to understand it or realize she does not understand it. That second grade teacher may as well say ‘Claire can’t be racist, her half-a-brother is Black.’ But she is just a child.

As Claire and Angela become teenagers, they grow so close that “they are often each other’s only mirrors,” Claire not merely assuming a pseudo-Blackness but now literally projecting it. Claire’s fake lilt sounds like Angela, but years earlier, Claire was already thinking of herself as an extension of Angela. Actually, that is not quite right. Claire wants it both ways: she is someone else when she wants to avoid responsibility, but someone else is her when she needs them. “As though their mothers’ bodies are their own,” Claire and Angela’s connection turns toxic when their mothers both get cancer. Now in high school, Claire thinks “even in its cruelty, the universe is being kind, giving Claire a person to suffer through this with.” Now Claire centers herself, not Angela’s reflection but the source from which Angela exists as a reflection. We are left with a systemic pycho-socio-cultural dynamic distilled to an individual scale. Claire treats Angela like an extension of herself rather than an another person—like a token. The friendship, or Claire’s perception of it, has lost any mutuality it might have had. As with the poem, we never get Angela’s perspective; unlike the poem, this time, “Claire doesn’t even have to give Angela words.”

Indeed, it seems unlikely Claire would ever be the one to give Angela words. The previous summer, they go away to “nerd camp” at a southern college, Claire for foreign language immersion, though she shows no particular interest in it, and Angela for poetry, another pair of tart ironies. To Claire’s chagrin, their groups are mostly separate, but during a night of drunken fun with Angela, Claire is so caught up in her feelings, her fantasy of the moment, that she cannot even give herself words, thinking “Angela is her best friend, her other self. Some day they will go to college together. The world will unravel for them.” If this were true in the way Claire imagines it, she would never need to speak. Angela would intuitively understand, want the same, and always act secondarily and according to Claire. As with Claire’s memories of her mother, and most of her memories, there is little substance. There are no other individuals, only Claire’s unwieldy feelings. 

And as horrible as it would feel to lose Mrs. Hall, “her second mother,” Claire realizes losing her own would feel far worse. As if pleading for a deal with the devil, she recognizes her desperation and cruelty “as soon as she feels it the first time[…] but that doesn’t change the feeling.” In time, that alarmed recognition numbs. Mrs. Hall makes a full recovery, but weeks before Claire’s senior year of high school, her mother dies. Claire fantasizes that Angela and Aaron are there for her—and presumably they would be in reality as well, as they always have been. But now, stewing in pain, her father replacing his second wife with Puppy in no time, any fantasy of comfort or family with the Halls is poisoned by the simple fact that their mother survived. “They are galaxies away from Claire, alone in her grief.” And without exactly meaning to, trapped in the gravity of her own misery, she pulls Aaron from college and sends him to Jupiter.

After meeting with the Office of Diversity, Claire sees a blog post connecting her ongoing controversy to a police report from the year before. “It takes [Claire] a full minute to connect it to herself,” just as she struggles to recognize herself in the bikini, perhaps in this case because “the article only has pieces of the story.” Graciously, Evans excavates this last, worst part of Claire’s past, the pit at the bottom of every ironic cherry. Aaron initially defers college while Mrs. Hall fights cancer, and when he comes home from his first semester for Thanksgiving, he finds a very drunk Claire at a party. She lashes out with the same selfish cruelty she felt in the hospital, but he is firm in offering help: “That’s fucked up, Claire. My mom misses you too. You’re messed up right now, I get that, but at some point you’re going to have to stop making it worse.” It is a rare moment of straightforward emotional truth. Isolating herself from her closest friends, from the ‘family’ that actually cares about her is making it worse. She refuses to work through her pain—literally, “it is all she can feel unless she’s making an active effort to feel something else,” but she is too stubborn, immature, and engrossed in her pain to make that effort. Her anger flashes when she hears “something firm and brotherly in his tone” because she cannot handle hearing the truth, and worse, because she cannot conceive of love from someone by whom she feels, for lack of a better word, betrayed. The Halls were her fantasy of a good family, her escape from home, her chance to grow up. Yet her own mother mattered more in the end, and how dare Aaron continue the familial charade now? 

She unleashes “a bestial noise she has been holding in for months,” again incapable of actually speaking. She has not aged but devolved, no longer blissfully nuzzling Angela on the quad like a beloved kitten but a distrustful feral cat. Yet, physically and emotionally exhausted, she does not fight when he insists on driving her home: “Let him deliver her to her father’s doorstep or the Halls’ guest room, let someone who is still alive yell at her the way her mother is yelling in her head all the time.” Helpless, too angry or incapacitated to communicate, and soon unconscious, she has become human again, but as a baby; Aaron’s insistence and her father’s displeasure or Angela’s frustration or Mrs. Hall’s concern become the stand-in for her mother; Aaron himself is the nurse, or the stork.

But he will never deliver her. White boys at the party see her scream, see a Black man hoist her into his car, give chase, and cause Aaron to crash. Claire survives unscathed. Aaron dies. It is as if Claire’s desperate pain born in the hospital has assumed the power of divine retribution, striking down a motherly Hall at last, evening the score. Furious and devastated, the Halls seek redress for the crash, but Claire’s father is a wealthy lawyer; “The Halls’ lawsuit is dismissed before Claire has to say anything in public,” and even when Claire tries to explain what happened to reporters, “the bones of that story don’t convince anyone it wasn’t all, at best, a tragic misunderstanding; at worst, a danger she didn’t see coming[…] after which she stops trying to explain.” Claire is of course devastated as well, and surely guilt-ridden. She could not have controlled the perceptions of those racist boys, but if she had simply not screamed, not let her grief consume her… But she did, and with even more grief piled on top now, reconciliation with the Halls is foreclosed. Amidst her “shame and relief, in which order she cannot say”, it is all Claire can do to try to move on, “tucked away at a small liberal arts college where no one has ever met her, and anything is possible.” 

When Aaron finally left for college, he probably felt similarly—relieved that his mom survived and his own life could now resume, ashamed that he might have resented having to stay home in the meantime, relieved that such shame has been rendered moot, and maybe even ashamed of his indirect role in Claire’s pain. We never know, Claire never considers, and Aaron, reduced to a racist trope by the boys who chase him and public perception thereafter, never gets to reinvent himself. Even Claire’s memories of him are stuck, mostly around childhood, like the taunt from which Evans takes the title, or Aaron’s favorite knock-knock joke: he says “Anticipation” and never answers when asked ‘Anticipation who?’ Claire and Angela always wonder if he might yet give a proper punchline, “waiting years for the right moment of revelation, for the payoff they’ve been promised.”

Which leads us to to our own payoff, waiting at the end of Claire’s winding tale. She never gets to reinvent herself either. Instead, she attends a campus forum about the controversy. A few white students speak, but Carmen and the other Black students do not engage. They leave blank comment cards in protest—perhaps thinking of Aaron’s voicelessness, unwittingly reproducing his non-punchline. Claire is left just like Aaron, her public perception overdetermined by social-historical forces, unable to speak for herself. But unlike Aaron—and unlike Angela in second grade, and in fact throughout the text—it is not for lack of opportunity. She has every intention of defending herself: “Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence[…] There are still ten feet between her and the echoing sound of her own voice, telling her she can still be anybody she wants to.” There cannot be a final payoff. Claire is never allowed to be a real person, to speak for herself, except that she always is. She does not know how to speak, or act, or be, except as a reaction—to her annoying step-mother, to Carmen, to a cruel twist of fate, to Aaron and those reporting on his deaths, to a cold and distant father whose anger she fears, and whose love and attention she craves but never seems to receive. It is not that she has not emerged from someone else as a person; it is that she is desperate to be seen and understood, by and through someone else, because she does not see or understand herself. She flails about like an infant desperate for and dependent on her mother, incapable of speech. She does not understand that is already is a person; Claire can speak, and must, and as a white woman is afforded every chance to, despite infantilizing herself. With her father’s money and connections, Claire’s life is not even over metaphorically! But until and unless she can grow up and develop some self-knowledge, she will only ever get more stupider.

1. Collected in The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead Books, 2020, pp. 51-81). Originally published in The Sewanee Review, Fall 2017.