Free Keeping Things Whole by Darryl Whetter

smiles were just for me, right? The computer labs in the brochures never had the broken chairs, flickering lights, and booger-studded keyboards of real life. Young, photogenic professors at University X sat amidst a handful of students, while in actual classes his ESL teaching assistant stood at a microphone in front of four hundred paying customers. All that education sold with photographs of gyms and exercise equipment. The StairMaster, seat of learning. A few years earlier, a national news magazine had rescued its revenue stream by handing out an annual report card to Canadian universities. Their hard-hitting pedagogical inquiries are illustrated annually by a young piece of fuck on the cover. A new cover girl each year, all dental work and blowjob eyes. Her representation of academic life in Canada, with its chilly September-to-April calendar, usually includes a robust tan.
    Until late high school my career as a mail recipient had been pretty limited, though not without potential. Until I was about ten, Mom and/or Gran always mailed me a birthday card from across the city. More than just a tender little surprise, these cards were designed to distract me from the one letter I waited for every weekday and prayed for constantly throughout the month of my birthday. Every day, day after day, year after year, I looked for an envelope with an American stamp addressed to me in Trevor Reynolds’s phantom hand. By grade two, I already knew mail days from holidays. Oh, the wasteland of a long weekend. Return address or no, I wanted him to trace all the letters of my name. I clung to the idea of that thin hello.
    When I told Kate of that aching young hope for a letter or a birthday card from a man I should have despised, found words so easily for this in our muzzy dark, she recognized that I wanted a letter because it was contact at its least confrontational or demanding, none of the awkward air or hanging silence of a phone call, none of the towering threat or paunchy disappointment, the balding, moustachioed weirdness, of a physical meeting.
    No high-school student can think the pile of university mail at his door, often with his name misspelled, is sent to him as an individual. I got so used to these bulk mail-outs I assumed anything mailed to our house from a university was for me. The Chicago School of Fine Arts taught me (m)otherwise.
    I swear my opening Mom’s envelope was just dumb habit. But Mom had a point: being inattentive is hardly an admirable defence. Even pre-MFA Mom knew that habit is the enemy. Honestly (I think), hers was just one more envelope I opened while inhaling a mini-pizza after school.
    Dear Ms. Williams,
    We are delighted by your interest in the Acting MFA program at the Chicago School of Fine Arts, one of the premier art and performance colleges in America
…
    Whoops. The fuck?! Whoops.
    Have that classic mixed lot of high-school friends—the rich kid, the muscular guy, the musician, the chick who doesn’t eat—and someone will have totalitarian parents who open their kid’s mail. Pure Stasi mind slap. Yet there I was, Mom’s envelope open in my hand. Equal to my guilt was electric, protean shock. And selfishness. An MFA? What about me?
    I was contrite, but I was also sixteen (and, you might say, male). When she got home, something leapt in front of my apology. “Looks like they’ve got the wrong Williams over in Chicago. I opened this accidentally, I swear.”
    â€œWhat, you
accidentally
thought you were me?” She hung up her coat, set down keys and bag.
    â€œNo, I just—well, it’s a school. When would you be going to Chicago?”
    â€œAnt, my going is far more a question of
if
than
when
. I’m just testing the water here.” Finally she directed me to the couch in the next room.
    â€œAt its least attractive an MFA would increase my pay. Each and every year. That means more money now, more money ten years from now, and more in