“I could wear a tuxedo and your parents would still hate me!” he shouted.
“That’s not my fault! You antagonize them!” She held up the car keys in front of him. “Look, we’re going now or we’re not going.”
“Fuck it. I’m not going anywhere with you,” the Colonel said.
“Fine. Have a great night.” Sara slammed the door so hard that a sizable biography of Leo Tolstoy (last words: “The truth is . . . I care a great deal . . . what they . . . ”) fell off my bookshelf and landed with a thud on our checkered floor like an echo of the slamming door.
“AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!” he screamed.
“So that’s Sara,” I said.
“Yes.”
“She seems nice.”
The Colonel laughed, knelt down next to the minifridge, and pulled out a gallon of milk. He opened it, took a swig, winced, half coughed, and sat down on the couch with the milk between his legs.
“Is it sour or something?”
“Oh, I should have mentioned that earlier. This isn’t milk. It’s five parts milk and one part vodka. I call it ambrosia. Drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the milk, so the Eagle can’t catch me unless he actually takes a sip. The downside is that it tastes like sour milk and rubbing alcohol, but it’s Friday night, Pudge, and my girlfriend is a bitch. Want some?”
“I think I’ll pass.” Aside from a few sips of champagne on New Year’s under the watchful eye of my parents, I’d never really drunk any alcohol, and “ambrosia” didn’t seem like the drink with which to start. Outside, I heard the pay phone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders shared five pay phones, I was amazed at how infrequently it rang. We weren’t supposed to have cell phones, but I’d noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried them surreptitiously. And most non-Warriors called their parents, as I did, on a regular basis, so parents only called when their kids forgot.
“Are you going to get that?” the Colonel asked me. I didn’t feel like being bossed around by him, but I also didn’t feel like fighting.
Through a buggy twilight, I walked to the pay phone, which was drilled into the wall between Rooms 44 and 45. On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker (
205.555.1584; Tommy to airport 4:20; 773.573.6521; JG—Kuffs?
). Calling the pay phone required a great deal of patience. I picked up on about the ninth ring.
“Can you get Chip for me?” Sara asked. It sounded like she was on a cell phone.
“Yeah, hold on.”
I turned, and he was already behind me, as if he knew it would be her. I handed him the receiver and walked back to the room.
A minute later, three words made their way to our room through the thick, still air of Alabama at almost-night. “Screw you too!” the Colonel shouted.
Back in the room, he sat down with his ambrosia and told me, “She says I ratted out Paul and Marya. That’s what the Warriors are saying. That I ratted them out.
Me
. That’s why the piss in the shoes. That’s why the nearly killing you. ’Cause you live with me, and they say I’m a rat.”
I tried to remember who Paul and Marya were. The names were familiar, but I had heard so many names in the last week, and I couldn’t match “Paul” and “Marya” with faces. And then I remembered why: I’d never seen them. They got kicked out the year before, having committed the Trifecta.
“How long have you been dating her?” I asked.
“Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn’t even briefly like her. Like, my mom and my dad—my dad would get pissed, and then he would beat the shit out of my mom. And then my dad would be all nice, and they’d have like a honeymoon period. But with Sara, there’s never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a rat? I know, I know: Why don’t we break up?” He ran a hand through his hair, clutching a fistful of it atop his head, and said, “I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.”
“But—”
“I can’t believe they think that,” he said as he walked to the bookshelf and pulled down the almanac. He took a long pull off his ambrosia. “Goddamn Weekday Warriors. It was probably one of them that ratted out Paul and Marya and then blamed me to cover their tracks. Anyway, it’s a good night for staying in. Staying in with Pudge and ambrosia.”
“I still—” I said, wanting to say that I didn’t understand how you could kiss someone who believed you were a rat if being a rat was the worst thing in the world, but the Colonel cut me off.
“Not another word about it. You know what the capital of Sierra Leone is?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” he said, “but I intend to find out.” And with that, he stuck his nose in the almanac, and the conversation was over.
one hundred ten days before
KEEPING UP WITH MY CLASSES
proved easier than I’d expected. My general predisposition to spending a lot of time inside reading gave me a distinct advantage over the average Culver Creek student. By the third week of classes, plenty of kids had been sunburned to a bufriedo-like golden brown from days spent chatting outside in the shadeless dorm circle during free periods. But I was barely pink: I studied.
And I listened in class, too, but on that Wednesday morning, when Dr. Hyde started talking about how Buddhists believe that all things are interconnected, I found myself staring out the window. I was looking at the wooded, slow-sloping hill beyond the lake. And from Hyde’s classroom, things did seem connected: The trees seemed to clothe the hill, and just as I would never think to notice a particular cotton thread in the magnificently tight orange tank top Alaska wore that day, I couldn’t see the trees for the forest—everything so intricately woven together that it made no sense to think of one tree as independent from that hill. And then I heard my name, and I knew I was in trouble.
“Mr. Halter,” the Old Man said. “Here I am, straining my lungs for your edification. And yet
something
out there seems to have caught your fancy in a way that I’ve been unable to do. Pray tell: What have you discovered out there?”
Now I felt my own breath shorten, the whole class watching me, thanking God they
weren’t
me. Dr. Hyde had already done this three times, kicking kids out of class for not paying attention or writing notes to one another.
“Um, I was just looking outside at the, uh, at the hill and thinking about, um, the trees and the forest, like you were saying earlier, about the way—”
The Old Man, who obviously did not tolerate vocalized rambling, cut me off. “I’m going to ask you to leave class, Mr. Halter, so that you can go out there and discover the relationship between the umtrees and the uh-forest. And tomorrow, when you’re ready to take this class seriously, I will welcome you back.”
I sat still, my pen resting in my hand, my notebook open, my face flushed and my jaw jutting out into an underbite, an old trick I had to keep from looking sad or scared. Two rows behind me, I heard a chair move and turned around to see Alaska standing up, slinging her backpack over one arm.
“I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. You can’t just throw him out of class. You drone on and on for an hour every day, and we’re not allowed to glance out the
window?
”
The Old Man stared back at Alaska like a bull at a matador, then raised a hand to his sagging face and slowly rubbed the white stubble on his cheek. “For fifty minutes a day, five days a week, you abide by my rules. Or you fail. The choice is yours. Both of you leave.”
I stuffed my notebook into my backpack and walked out, humiliated. As the door shut behind me, I felt a tap on my left shoulder. I turned, but there was no one there. Then I turned the other way, and Alaska was smiling at me, the skin between her eyes and temple crinkled into a starburst. “The oldest trick in the book,” she said, “but everybody falls for it.”
I tried a smile, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dr. Hyde. It was worse than the Duct Tape Incident, because I always knew that the Kevin Richmans of the world didn’t like me. But my teachers had always been card-carrying members of the Miles Halter Fan Club.
“I told you he was an asshole,” she said.
“I still think he’s a genius. He’s right. I wasn’t listening.”
“Right, but he didn’t need to be a jerk about it. Like he needs to prove his power by humiliating you?! Anyway,” she said, “the only real geniuses are artists: Yeats, Picasso, García Márquez:
geniuses
. Dr. Hyde: bitter old man.”
And then she announced we were going to look for four-leaf clovers until class ended and we could go smoke with the Colonel and Takumi, “both of whom,” she added, “are big-time assholes for not marching out of class right behind us.”
When Alaska Young is sitting with her legs crossed in a brittle, periodically green clover patch leaning forward in search of four-leaf clovers, the pale skin of her sizable cleavage clearly visible, it is a plain fact of human physiology that it becomes impossible to join in her clover search. I’d gotten in enough trouble already for looking where I wasn’t supposed to, but still . . .
After perhaps two minutes of combing through a clover patch with her long, dirty fingernails, Alaska grabbed a clover with three full-size petals and an undersize, runt of a fourth, then looked up at me, barely giving me time to avert my eyes.
“Even though you were
clearly
not doing your part in the clover search, perv,” she said wryly, “I really would give you this clover. Except luck is for suckers.” She pinched the runt petal between the nails of her thumb and finger and plucked it. “There,” she said to the clover as she dropped it onto the ground. “Now you’re not a genetic freak anymore.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said. The bell rang, and Takumi and the Colonel were first out the door. Alaska stared at them.
“What?” asked the Colonel. But she just rolled her eyes and started walking. We followed in silence through the dorm circle and then across the soccer field. We ducked into the woods, following the faint path around the lake until we came to a dirt road. The Colonel ran up to Alaska, and they started fighting about something quietly enough that I couldn’t hear the words so much as the mutual annoyance, and I finally asked Takumi where we were headed.
“This road dead-ends into the barn,” he said. “So maybe there. But probably the smoking hole. You’ll see.”
From here, the woods were a totally different creature than from Dr. Hyde’s classroom. The ground was thick with fallen branches, decaying pine needles, and brambly green bushes; the path wound past pine trees sprouting tall and thin, their stubbly needles providing a lace of shade from another sunburned day. And the smaller oak and maple trees, which from Dr. Hyde’s classroom had been invisible beneath the more majestic pines, showed hints of an as-yet-thermally-unforeseeable fall: Their still-green leaves were beginning to droop.
We came to a rickety wooden bridge—just thick plywood laid over a concrete foundation—over Culver Creek, the winding rivulet that doubled back over and over again through the outskirts of campus. On the far side of the bridge, there was a tiny path leading down a steep slope. Not even a path so much as a series of hints—a broken branch here, a patch of stomped-down grass there—that people had come this way before. As we walked down single file, Alaska, the Colonel, and Takumi each held back a thick maple branch for one another, passing it along until I, last in line, let it snap back into place behind me. And there, beneath the bridge, an oasis. A slab of concrete, three feet wide and ten feet long, with blue plastic chairs stolen long ago from some classroom. Cooled by the creek and the shade of the bridge, I felt unhot for the first time in weeks.
The Colonel dispensed the cigarettes. Takumi passed; the rest of us lit up.
“He has no right to condescend to us is all I’m saying,” Alaska said, continuing her conversation with the Colonel. “Pudge is done with staring out the window, and I’m done with going on tirades about it, but he’s a terrible teacher, and you won’t convince me otherwise.”
“Fine,” the Colonel said. “Just don’t make another scene. Christ, you nearly killed the poor old bastard.”
“Seriously, you’ll never win by crossing Hyde,” Takumi said. “He’ll eat you alive, shit you out, and then piss on his dump. Which by the way is what we should be doing to whoever ratted on Marya. Has anyone heard anything?”
“It must have been some Weekday Warrior,” Alaska said. “But apparently they think it was the Colonel. So who knows. Maybe the Eagle just got lucky. She was stupid; she got caught; she got expelled; it’s over. That’s what happens when you’re stupid and you get caught.” Alaska made an O with her lips, moving her mouth like a goldfish eating, trying unsuccessfully to blow smoke rings.
“Wow,” Takumi said, “if I ever get kicked out, remind me to even the score myself, since I sure can’t count on you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she responded, not angry so much as dismissive. “I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with figuring out everything that happens here, like we have to unravel every mystery. God, it’s over. Takumi, you gotta stop stealing other people’s problems and get some of your own.” Takumi started up again, but Alaska raised her hand as if to swat the conversation away.
I said nothing—I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy.
“Anyway,” Alaska said to me. “I thought the way he treated you was just awful. I wanted to cry. I just wanted to kiss you and make it better.”
“Shame you didn’t,” I deadpanned, and they laughed.
“You’re adorable,” she said, and I felt the intensity of her eyes on me and looked away nervously. “Too bad I love my boyfriend.” I stared at the knotted roots of the trees on the creek bank, trying hard not to look like I’d just been called adorable.
Takumi couldn’t believe it either, and he walked over to me, tussling my hair with his hand, and started rapping to Alaska. “Yeah, Pudge is adorable / but you want incorrigible / so Jake is more endurable / ’cause he’s so—damn. Damn. I almost had four rhymes on
adorable
. But all I could think of was
unfloorable,
which isn’t even a word.”