From My Perch in the Sandhills
"These scandals seem to spawn from the dead space in quiet towns where select boards order murals to be painted over crumbling brick exteriors."
Brendilou Armstrong is a 20-year-old writer from Nebraska studying English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
The names used in this essay have been changed from their original form.
In my memory, I claw through thickets just to find it all. Punctured window screens. Folding chairs as front porch decor. Tufts of sparsely spread grass and thorny undergrowth coiled around the legs of a charcoal grill. A wasp nest behind the rain gutter and a stretch of flatland a block or two behind that. I remember bent wire fencing, peeling paint, and a walkway splattered with bird shit. When I’d try to avoid it, I’d tiptoe in a way that I’ve learned to mimic in my mind sometimes. I don’t remember the address, but I can tell you that the house was a light, sun-bleached blue. I don’t remember how many windows it had, but I know the one in the bedroom stayed unlocked in case we didn’t have our key. There were always cobwebs in the mailbox, and the doorbell hadn’t worked for years.
There wasn’t much to look at. The house was small enough to be mobile, yet the foundation had settled long enough for thick patches of crabgrass to infest its cracks. The front porch was a long cement slab, six inches thick with no railing. A door and window adorned the right side of the otherwise bland facade — they made the house look off-kilter, but I never really noticed when I stayed there. I remember the front door with its knob installed incorrectly and the back door that wouldn’t close unless I threw my body weight against it. I remember the caulk in the clapboard siding and the moth carcasses that coated the inside of the porch light.
Then, through water-spotted windows, I’d let you peer into the rooms with me — although there wasn’t much on the inside either.
I describe the house in this way whenever someone asks. I like waxing poetic about how an oak tree shaded the front window, how the blinds splintered the sunlight into patterns on the dining room wall. How the house itself was situated in the town proper and all the surrounding homes had the same corroding features. How it was in a town in the Niobrara River Valley, a dirt-licked cluster of gas stations, churches, and secondhand stores for those who tightrope the poverty line. I only ever describe the setting — none of its bodies. The bodies I flesh out in my diary.
For that, my instrument of choice is the Pilot G-2, the kind of pen that leaves an ink stain on the skin of your hand if you move on to the next line too soon. The 0.38-mm ballpoint, in particular, is sharp enough to carve bits of sentences onto pages they weren’t meant for, precise enough to clarify my chicken-scratched thoughts. I capture the ephemeral ones before they leave; I put the worst ones on paper so that they do. I pick my own brain picking apart someone else’s.
I’ve picked apart my entire hometown.
In The White Album, Joan Didion criticizes the phrase, “If it bleeds, it leads.” She argues that when writing sensationalizes the violent, it does so at the expense of the mundane. But I’ve resolved to describe the pages of my diary as thin, the ballpoint of my pen as sharp. I don’t embellish. I observe.
I’m a freshman, one of three others in Student Council assigned to spend their first Saturday in high school stationed at a service window selling stadium snacks. I rest my chin in my left hand and toy with a ketchup bottle in my right. Herds of girls’ volleyball enthusiasts mosey into the gym, and I survey the clientele: booster club volunteers marketing school merchandise; grandparents with cushioned bleacher seats; alums who’ve never moved on; and a middle-aged man whom I’ve observed watching only the girls’ games. I sweat behind the concession stand as the customers rotate through; cheese-pumped brats and beef franks spin on a roller grill behind me, dripping with grease.
A gangly man rounds the corner in time to catch one of the gym’s metal-lined doors as it closes on the commencing set. I know him by his last name, though the sound of his shoes is more prolific: rhythmic clicks on the linoleum flooring, from the kind of cowboy boots that reek of administrative power in the Midwest. He believes in seniority and “C’s get degrees” and keeping his Twitter bio succinct: “HS Principal. Family & Friends, Horses & Harleys!”
Jeremy is known by most for subjecting the freshmen and senior classes to his annual pre-orientation “Senior Speech.” It’s an improvised exercise in fear-mongering — of lowering himself into a squatting position at the edge of the auditorium stage, clasping his hands together, and decreeing that the freshmen “be scared of what the seniors are capable of,” whatever that means. A strange principle. When the freshmen look sufficiently distressed, Jeremy jams his thumbs under his gaudy gold-plated belt buckle and hoists his jeans as high as they’ll go up his beanstalk legs.
Today, he dons a salt-and-pepper goatee, a Stetson-like hat, and someone else’s wife on his arm. During halftime, an upperclassman beside me shovels fresh popcorn into a paper bag and hands it to him as he passes the stand, free of charge.
“It’s what they make us do for him,” she tells me. “He never has to pay.”
It’s fitting, really, the affair. These scandals seem to spawn from the dead space in quiet towns where select boards order murals to be painted over crumbling brick exteriors. Towns where people choose a church to attend for routine, nothing more. I tell myself that it must be the topography that forces people to force excitement — the need to confront the gridlock of slow-living and the claustrophobia that ensues from lingering in it. The mundanity of it all must have been enough of an excuse for Jeremy. Openness so suffocating requires desperate remedy: buying Tony Lamas, editing a Twitter bio, sermonizing fear, click-clacking on linoleum, and flaunting the wife of the school’s AP Lit teacher on his arm for students behind a snack window to see — it all makes sense in my head.
The heat from the concession stand is making me sick.
Jeremy’s announced as the state’s “High School Principal of the Year” soon after.
By late February each year, the condition on the plains turns volatile — morning cold-fronts melt into room-temp afternoons. Dark soil fades into taupe on scattered patches of snowless ground, accentuating the bone-dry grass on top. Crystalline webs of frost spread across car windshields and acres of farmland. The ice annoys most early commuters, but I admire its fleeting allure. Before scraping the frost from my windshield, I’ll note its pattern. Then, I’ll predict how it’ll look hours later: feathers or veins?
Leaving my high school speech practice one evening, I predicted the fractured filigree pattern I’d find on my windshield. I wandered among oxidizing Chevy and Ford pickups, seeking my Volkswagen Beetle. “Spike,” my taxicab-yellow bubble on wheels, rested in her usual spot, hovering slightly over the line from my clumsy morning parking job.
This time, the ice pattern hadn’t completely filled out near the wipers. I noticed a glint at the bottom of the glass, an obstruction to the frost. It revealed itself as I approached: a Wrigley’s gum wrapper — crinkled and wedged between the glass and the blade — folded into the shape of a heart. I didn’t think much of it then or the unseen hand that had left it. I peeled it from its resting place and dropped it into the cupholder.
The next day, the cold came even stronger through the valley, but pinpricks of heat spread across my face. I left the school later than usual. In my palm, I fingered a wad of paper, torn from a bound journal and folded four times into a crooked rectangle.
“Did you like the present I left for you on your car yesterday?” he had asked before forcing the college-ruled clump between my fingers. He dismissed the rest of the speech team from practice and requested I call him by his first name, rather than “Coach,” from now on.
His letters usually began with confessions.
I know that I am not your Valentine this year. However, I was hoping that — just for the duration of this letter — maybe we could pretend. [If not, you should probably stop reading here.]
It was juvenile, the whole concept. The expectation that I’d play pretend, that I’d read a bracketed warning and commit myself to him by reading on. I tried to forget his words by quashing them in my diary, but they still occupy my brain sometimes.
What nightmares can’t you escape? Do you want to wait till marriage to make love?
Minor spelling errors, the penmanship. Rounded, condensed, more crude than I’d expect from a 27-year-old teacher. I recognized it from the margins of my essays, inking up my prose. I had admired him for his teaching. I wonder how long my admiration alone hadn’t been enough for him — and why it took me so long to notice the shift.
I guess maybe I’m afraid I’ll give in, and ask you for what I know you can’t return, that I’ll offer you a language of my love you can’t receive. I feel so good, and so myself with you, but in the moments of silence my heart races.
If you don’t find me by the time I’m 85 I’m blowing my brains out. If you called me tomorrow and asked me to blow my brains out I’d do it. What kind of fucked up shit is that? I didn’t know that degree of love existed.
He had escorted me into the hallway alone. As he scurried away from the rest of the team, his skinny gray-wash jeans rubbed together furiously like sandpaper on sandpaper. He spun the wad between his right thumb and middle finger, using his left hand to preen his oily scalp. Then, he thrust the note into my palm as though it were hot metal.
“Pretty icy out there,” he had quipped as I left practice that evening. He held the door open to the parking lot and ushered me outside. “Stay warm.”
When another teacher warned Jeremy about Coach’s behavior, Jeremy failed to intervene in time. Perhaps his boots needed polishing. Coach eventually “stepped down” from his position in a “spontaneous decision to move south” with his wife and young daughter. You won’t find him near the high school anymore. But his legacy is carved in the icy ledger of the state sex offender registry.
Maybe you earn authority at lease-signing age.
I’m seventeen, two years shy of the state’s age of majority. In May, I earn a diploma with Jeremy’s signature scrawled across the bottom. In June, before I leave for college, I hoist milk crates and canvas totes of my things onto the cement slab that was my porch. My high school boyfriend, a rising college sophomore, signs a lease, and the house with crabgrass in its cracks and moth carcasses in its lights is ours for the next year.
Its interior is bland. Patchy, white ceilings. Windows lined with chipping white moldings. Sterile, white popcorn walls partitioning its seven puny rooms. We furnish each of its spaces as best we can. The most notable additions are an abstract gray area rug, a plastic snake plant, and a Facebook Marketplace special: a matching vomit-beige sofa and ottoman, their polyester surfaces polka-dotted with stains. I store my toiletries in a wicker basket from Dollar General and my socks in a plastic Sterilite drawer.
For the most part, though, I live out of a suitcase in the 100-square-foot room that my boyfriend and I share. We keep the window unlocked in case he loses his key — he refuses to let me have one of my own. I pay for my half of the rent in chores.
Do you want to come over or no? I’d like help cleaning.
The state of our relationship banks on my response to texts like these. We’re three years in, but he’s one year checked out. I don’t find out for six more months that he’s been seeing a girl he met in college named Maya. A spindly, bespectacled blonde, she decorates the house with bone-straight strands for me to extract from upholstery and the elastic of my boyfriend’s Fruit of the Looms. He calls me crazy when I point them out and sweeps them under the area rug. For any other person, I’d agree to help with the chores. For him, I find saying “yes” nearly impossible.
The flies are getting bad.
Jake is a percussionist at the state college, where he further quenches his desire for control behind a trap set. He spends his afternoons in rehearsal halls forcing his tempo onto others and his nights sprawled on the living room sofa, inhaling synthetic beef patties and leaving his leftovers out to rot.
His mother hides a hole he punched in the wall with a photo of him as a child. She sees his rage as one of his quirks. Ruth works as a therapist and social worker at the state college Jake attends. In her free time, she likes to make bulk orders of plastic Temu toys for her pit bull mix and angers quickly if anyone tells her she’s wasting money. The dog is a good boy, but she’s raised her son to bark.
I keep a black leather Moleskine to record these observations. It has a frayed ribbon bookmark glued to its spine and a pocket attached to its back cover. I press purple prairie clovers and black-eyed susans between pages alongside dreams and rants. I record a day’s meals on one page and copy sentences from Coach’s letters on another. Then, I jam my Pilot G-2 into the spine and rest the diary on the nightstand beside our twin XL.
I am swatting fruit flies while scraping congealed condiments from dishes stacked around the sink when Jake enters. My Moleskine lays flat in his hand, its pages fanned out and exposed. As if on cue — my own private thoughts are weaponized, made flippant, contrived as fuel for an argument. He had taken photos of pages that offended him the most: the twisted declarations of love I had stored as evidence — the letters from my coach. This fight escalates quicker than usual. He wrenches a flimsy, full-length mirror off his bedroom wall, taking Command strips and paint chips with it. A guttural scream. He hurls it at the floor. Then, pinpricks of pain in my toes. I look down to watch minuscule shards bury themselves in my flesh and the skin around the slashes flush crimson. I had never seen glass shatter so cleanly.
In his grungy backyard fire pit, he forces me to douse my diary in kerosene and hands me a twig to coax it aflame.
We break up not long after.
Later in the week, I receive a text from Ruth. I’m forced to justify my rants and the letters. Letters that could have supported a legal case. Letters that had been set on fire by her son. Her response:
I am calling BS. My son will move on and be very happy as will I. Your therapist might get your interpretation of things and that is fine. My main priority is my son’s healing. You screwed around on him, let’s make sure we say that too.
Then, to really make it sting:
I shuck it to BS. I don’t buy it.
She blocked me soon after sending.
The pages in my diary are nearly transparent at this point. These haven’t gone up in flames yet. These haven’t been photographed or read or mocked yet. I’ve observed grease-spotted paper bags, misspelled misdoings, and foreign strands of blonde hair. I’m just writing how I’ve seen it from my perch in the Sandhills — at a snack stand, a high school hallway, and a house. Publishing these truths myself, under my own authority, is just a perk of having written them all down.
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Thank you for showcasing my work alongside such an excellent piece of writing. It’s an honor to be included.
Excellent