Sarah Honenberger - Catcher, Caught

When I first met Holden Caulfield, I didn’t know I was dying. He’s way more cool than me, but I like how he tells what it’s like to be him. Straight out. Real. And even though his story is lots more exciting, I’m going to tell you mine anyway. It may be the last thing I do.

So how’d I hook up with Holden? The Catcher in the Rye is required reading for tenth grade, along with a long list of other books, mostly ones I’ve never heard of. The Essex County library has four copies of Catcher. Worn edges, faded covers. Obviously lots more people than me have read it. The front’s what grabbed me. Plain maroon with little yellow letters, like it was no great shakes. And the way Holden writes, you can almost hear him thinking. It’s wild how clearly the dude’s voice sounds in my head.

You have to excuse my skipping around. I don’t have a lot of practice at this kind of thing and I’m short on time. According to the doctors.

Daniel Solstice Landon, that’s me, soon to be dust. My name’s from the Bible, though my parents would never credit that. They’re into the great cosmos, not God. That’s where the Solstice comes from, straight out of my parents’ hippie phase, a phase they’re still stuck in. Another thing they don’t admit. My opinion is they picked Daniel because they liked the idea of the little guy, the underdog. To tell the truth I found out what my name really means from a girl I wanted to date last year but was too chicken to ask. Cassie Jones. She said Daniel translates as “judged by God.” Tough standard.

Being sick puts you right out there. Kind of like being the lead in the middle-school play when every little sixth-grade teenybopper stares at you in the caf and fights over the stool you used at lunch or insists on chewing the same kind of gum you do. Where we live in Virginia they still teach sixth through ninth in one school. According to Mom, educational theory says teenagers don’t settle down until tenth grade, so it’s better to keep the raging hormones all together. My take, they’re trying to wear you down. Four years with sixth graders hanging around you would wear anyone down. It’s definitely killed the teachers.

Last winter, before we knew about the leukemia, I played Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music . At the time I didn’t mind the attention so much. It was kind of flattering, even if the sixth-grade groupies tracked my every move. At least someone liked me. And I was lucky. I had only one song all by myself, I was the good guy, and I got to kiss Marissa Bennett. Counting practice and performances, twenty-two times. My big brother said to enjoy it, most ninth graders don’t kiss anyone no matter what they tell you.

Aside from the kisses, being in the limelight is more complicated than you might think. The whole time I was kissing Marissa I didn’t realize that someday I would wish people didn’t know everything in the world about me. When you’re sick, everyone talks about you behind your back. They pass around all the gory details like they’d share M&M’s, but don’t kid yourself, it’s not the same as wanting to know you. They won’t even talk to you.

That’s partly why I admire Holden. Everyone knows he’s been kicked out of that high-end prep school. The teachers, the headmaster, even his roommate, Stradlater, and the guys in the dorm, they all have an opinion on why he shouldn’t have let it happen. And they’re all hot to tell him what they think. Good old Holden just acts like he doesn’t care. Okay, sure, he blows them off partly because it’s not any of their goddamn business. They’re not people he respects. But mostly, I guess, because he’s already figured out where you go to high school doesn’t matter in the long run.

No matter how much I try to convince myself to suck it up that everyone knows about me and The Disease, having leukemia is different. Dying is the long run. So it matters. There’s just nothing I can do about it.

“Daniel, front and center.” That’s my dad calling.

It’s long past end-of-the-year report cards and I haven’t broken any rules this week, so I don’t have a clue why he’s in his regimental father mode.

You gotta like my dad. He’s bearded, sandaled, right out of The Love Bug . Even when he’s seriously off base, he’s okay and you feel a little sorry for him. He lost six or seven of his “best buddies” in Vietnam. His entire life since then has been a shrine to the loss. He goes to every antiwar rally within a two-hundred-mile radius. On New Year’s Eve he calls their families to show he hasn’t forgotten them. And G.I. Joe toys and vehicles and paraphernalia were seriously off limits for us. We weren’t even allowed to play with our friends’ army toys. Although he avoided the draft because of a childhood injury to his eardrum, he announces regularly that he would have gone to Canada but for the 4-F. He tells it to anyone who’ll listen. “Hard of hearing before my time,” he always says, as if it were hysterically clever.

Fathers, at least the fathers of my friends, are big into jokes. It’s like they’re cartoon versions of what a father should be. Even though they tell the same horrible shaggy dogs over and over, no one ever calls them on it because it’s what fathers do. It’s supposed to be endearing. The joke thing must occur like Immaculate Conception as soon as a man has his first kid. It doesn’t bother the fathers that no one else thinks the jokes are funny. It doesn’t bother them that the wives all say, “Oh, sweetie, not that one again.”

Me and Mack Petriano and Leonard Yowell, whose father is a state senator and probably wears a three-piece suit to bed, all cringe in unison at the jokes our fathers tell. Even though their dads are straight and mine’s a held-over hippie, the jokes are all lame.

The military lingo has gotta be a father thing too. Leonard’s dad is forever saying things like “battle stations” or “at ease.” It so fits Senator Yowell, he’s a star-studded ’Nam hero. But when my dad talks like that, it always surprises me because he lobbies so hard against war. Any kind of war. Local school boards, gestapo-like anti-immigration tactics, Palestine, even sibling rivalry. He’s a certifiable pacifist. But as far as being an all-right, sincere kind of person, he is.

He’s also a vegetarian. And recycling is his favorite pastime. We never use paper plates, even though it’s a big pain to wash things now that we’re living on a houseboat. Hot water’s sketchy and not enough water is typical. There’s more good about my dad than bad, though. He’ll watch any movie I want, and he refuses to wear a tie. Not at all like Antolini, that touchy-feely English teacher of Holden’s, with the silk bathrobe and the itchy hands. Holden could have stayed on Dad’s sleep sofa without a second thought.

If you want to know the truth, until I got sick my life was boring. Truly and completely boring. You wouldn’t have kept on reading. School and summer, summer and school, mostly hot and more hot in our part of Virginia. Holden’s cab rides around New York sound exciting compared with my life. Even my little brother’s soccer schedule is more exciting. Seriously, I’m not into contact sports myself, but Nick’s definitely the star of the team, a brilliant sweeper at thirteen, just too nice to admit it. A zillion times a game he stops the other team cold. Anyone can see how much his team relies on him and how he lives to be that indispensable guy.

My older brother is a first-year at UVA, with more girlfriends than anyone I know. As Holden would say, he’s Joe College to the umpteenth degree, too cool to hang with me much anymore.