The Topeka School

It is several weeks after Adam’s championship debating tournament, where Adam won the extemp competition. Adam and his family visit Jane’s now senile and mute father in the nursing home. Though Adam and his family tell his grandfather about the win, Adam is unsure how to interact with “someone who may or may not hear you” (234). At some point during the visit, Adam’s grandfather “made a noise […] a groan or croak [that] lasted two or three seconds” (236). Adam is haunted by the noise, which he feels might be the “negation” of speech, “signifying nothing” (236). The encounter prompts Adam to realize that he has forgotten what his grandfather’s voice sounds like. Jonathan plays a tape recording of an interview he had conducted with Adam’s grandfather, so that Adam can hear his voice again. However, while listening, Adam becomes anxious that his grandfather’s voice will become “part of [him]:” “But what if he opened his mouth and his grandfather’s voice came out?” (241).

One night, shortly before he is set to leave for college, Adam wakes up to a woman’s voice yelling in the middle of the night. Adam soon realizes it’s his parents having a late-night argument, and he makes loud noises in his bedroom and the hallway in the hope that they will stop fighting. However, as the fighting continues, Adam decides to enter their bedroom. Jane yells at Adam asking for “some fucking privacy,” before apologizing to him and leaving to get some “fresh air” (245). Jonathan tells Adam that Jonathan and Jane are arguing because they’ve “been processing a lot,” and promises Adam that everything will be “fine” (246). Adam leaves use the computer in his mom’s office, where he types out poems based on what his Dad just told him. Afterwards, Adam attempts to view a pornography website, but quickly turns the power off before the website can fully load. Anxious that the image will reappear when his mom turns the computer on the next day, he turns the computer back on to clear its browsing history.

Adam attends a party at Jason’s house with his girlfriend Amber. At the party, Adam and Amber have sex in Jason’s parents’ (Sima and Eric’s) bed. Adam performs oral sex on Amber, after which Amber discusses her hopes for the future of their relationship. The couple then rejoins the party, which has moved into Jason’s basement so as not to disturb the neighbors. This is the same party where Darren will throw the cue ball.

The third-person narrator briefly enters the narrative, describing writing the scene of Darren’s violent assault in his room in Brooklyn in 2019. The implication is that the Adam is the narrator and writer of the novel.

Darren throws the cue ball at Mandy Owen’s face, hitting “her three inches below the temple, shattering the jaw in several places, dislodging multiple teeth, knocking her unconscious, forever altering her speech” (258). The narrator imagines playing the scene in reverse on his computer, magically fixing Mandy’s broken jaw and other injuries.

Adam narrates his section in the first person. Now an adult in 2019, Adam lives in New York with his family: his wife, Natalia, and his two young daughters, Luna and Amaya. After visiting Natalia’s mother, Doña Alana, Adam and Natalia take their children to a playground to play. At the playground, a young boy sits at the top of a slide, refusing to let girls go down. After the boy refuses to let Adam’s daughters use the slide, Adam speaks to the boy’s father, who is sitting nearby on a bench. Adam politely asks the “bad father” to rein in his son, but the father “angrily” refuses (268). As the interaction between Adam and the bad father grows heated, Adam walks away, but then returns, telling the bad father that “I recognize that my reaction to your son is not just about your son; it’s about pussy grabbing; it’s about my fears regarding the world into which I’ve brought them” (270). When the bad father still refuses to do anything about his son, Adam shouts and knocks the man’s phone out of his hands. Adam notes this means that he has also become a “bad father” (270).

Adam returns to Topeka, where he has been asked to do a poetry reading at Washburn University. Adam drives around Topeka by himself, feeling as if “twenty years had been erased […] an unsettling feeling” (271). Adam drives by the Foundation, but avoids Jason’s house, where Darren attacked Mandy. Adam is fearful “to be near their basement, where a version of myself was, is, permanently waiting to take up his position” (274). Later, when Adam arrives for his poetry reading, he sees that the Westboro Baptist Church protestors are in attendance. Darren is one of them, sporting the “the red baseball cap” worn by Donald Trump supporters (275).

Adam, Natalia, and Luna attend a protest at New York City’s federal Jacob Javits Building, where ICE offices are located. The protestors are a group of families who have gathered to protest the deportation of undocumented immigrant families. The families enter the building and gather outside the courtroom where the deportation trials are held. Adam anticipated a peaceful protest. He is surprised that guards push some of the protestors. The commotion frightens Luna, who repeatedly asks to be brought outside. Adam takes Luna out, leaving Natalia at the protest. Luna joins a young boy making chalk drawings on the sidewalk. A cop orders Adam to tell his kid to stop drawing, which angers Adam, who questions whether the cop has the “authority” to tell them to stop drawing on the sidewalk (281).