Authors: Peter Straub
'Thank you, Mr. Thorpe,' the senior said. 'Freshman initiation is nothing to be afraid of. If you know your stuff and learn the ropes, you'll do fine. You have your beanies and your lists. Wear your beanies at all times when not in class and between school and home. Wear the beanie at all athletic functions and all social functions. Address all seniors as Mister.
Learn our names.
That is essential. And so is learning the songs and the other information on the sheets. If a senior drops his books on the floor, pick them up for him. Carry them where he tells you to carry them. If a senior is standing in front of a door, address him by his name and open the door. If a senior tells you to tie his shoelaces, tie his shoelaces and thank him. Do
anything
a senior tells you to do. On the spot. Even if you think it's ridiculous. Got that? And if a senior asks you a question, address him by name and answer him. Follow the rules and you'll get off to a good start.'
'Is that all?' asked Mr. Thorpe. 'If so, you may go.'
Teagarden picked up a pile of books from Thorpe's desk and hurriedly left the little classroom. Thorpe continued to gaze at us, but the benignity had left him.
'Why is all of this important?' He paused, but no one tried to answer. 'What did Mr. Broome particularly stress in chapel this morning? Well?'
A boy I did not know raised his hand and said, 'School spirit, sir.'
'Good. You are . . . Hollingsworth? — Good, Hollingsworth. You listened. Your ears were open. The rest of you must have been asleep. And what is school spirit? It is putting the school first. Putting yourself second to the school. You don't know how to do that yet. Miles Teagarden does know how to do that. That is why he is a prefect.'
He stood up and leaned against the chalk tray behind him. He looked immensely tall. 'But now we come to your own unfortunate case. Just look at you. Just . . . look . . . at . . . you. Most of you look as though you couldn't find your way home at night. Some of you probably can't even see through the filthy hair on your foreheads. You look slack, boys.
Slack.
That is offensive. It is an insult. If you insult the seniors by looking slack in front of them, I assure you that they will let you know. This is not an easy school.
Not!'
He positively shouted the last word, jolting us upright in our seats.
'Not! Not an easy school.
We have to reshape you boys, mold you. Turn you into our kind of boy. Or you will be doomed, boys,
doomed,
an adjective meaning consigned to misfortune or destruction.
Destruction,
a noun meaning that which pulls down, demolishes, undoes, kills, annihilates. You will be doomed to destruction,
doomed to destruction,
if you do not learn the moral lessons of this school.'
Thorpe inhaled noisily, ran a palm across his smooth gray hair. He was a furnace of emotions, this Thorpe, and such terrifying performances were standard with him.
13
Teachers
As the first weeks went by, the personalities of our teachers became as fixed as stars and as dependable in their eccentricities as the postures of marble statues. Mr. Thorpe shouted and bullied; Mr. Fitz-Hallan charmed; Mr. Whipple, incapable of inspiring either terror or love,wavered between trying to inspire both and so was despised. Mr. Weatherbee revealed himself to be a natural teacher, and led us in masterful fashion through the first steps of algebra. (Dave Brick surprisingly turned out to be a mathematical whiz, and took to wearing an ostentatious slide rule in a leather holster clipped to his belt.) Thorpe could freeze your stomach and your mind; Fitz-Hallan, whose family was wealthy, turned his salary back to the school, and doing so, earned the privilege of teaching 'what he liked — the Grimms'
Household Tales,
the
Odyssey, Great Expectations
and
Huckleberry Finn,
and E. B. White for style; Whipple was so lazy that he took great chunks of class time to read aloud from the textbook. His only real interest was in sports, where he functioned as Ridpath's assistant.
Their lives out of the school were unimaginable to us; at dances, we saw wives, but could never truly believe in them. Their houses likewise were mysterious, as if they, like us, had not spouses but parents, and so much homework that their true homes were the old building, the modern addition, and the field house.
14
We had just come out of Fitz-Hallan's classroom, and a small number of seniors were leaving a French lesson in the next room. Bobby Hollingsworth had identified most of the older boys to those of us who were new to the school, and I knew most of their names. They began to look purposeful and superior when they noticed us gettmg books from our lockers. They sauntered over as soon as Fitz-Hallan had disappeared into his office. Steve Ridpath positioned himself directly in front of me. I had to look up to see his face. I was dimly aware of a prefect named Terry Peters standing before Del Nightingale, and of another senior named Hollis Wax lifting Dave Brick's beanie off his head. The other three or four seniors glanced at us, smiled at Hollis Wax — he was no taller than Dave Brick — and continued down the hallway.
'What's my name?' Steve Ridpath said.
I told him.
'And what's yours, insect?' I told him my name.
'Pick up my books.' He was carrying four heavy textbooks and a sheaf of papers under one arm, and let it all fall to the floor. 'Hurry up, jerk. I have a class next period.'
'Yes, Mr. Ridpath,' I said, and bent over. He was so near that I had to back into my locker to get his books. When I straightened up, he had bent down to stare directly into my face. 'You scummy little turd,' he said. The reason for his nickname was even more apparent than before. Exceptionally skinny, Skeleton Ridpath from a distance looked like a clothed assemblage of sticks; cuffs drowned his wrists, collars swam on his thin neck. Close up, his face was so taut on his skull that the skin shone whitely; a slight flabbiness under the eyes was the only visible loose flesh. Above these gray-white pouches, his eyes were very pale, almost white, like old blue jeans. His eyebrows were only faint tracings of silvery brown. A strong odor of Old Spice hung between us, though his skin appeared too stingy and tight for whiskers: as though it would begrudge them the room. 'You messed up my report,' he said, and shoved a bent sheet of paper under my nose. 'Five push-ups, right now.' —
'Oh, hell, Steve,' said Hollis Wax. I glanced over and saw that he bad 'braced' Dave Brick, who was now stiffly at attention, his forearms stuck out at right angles before him and piled with Wax's books. 'Shut up. Five. Right now.'
I stepped around Ridpath and did five push-ups in the corridor.
'Who was the first headmaster, jerk?' 'B. Thurman Banter.'
'When did he found the school and what was its name then?'
'He founded the Lodestar Academy in 1894.' I stood up.
'You zit,' he hissed at me, his face twisting; then as he turned away, he reached out a simian arm and smacked the back of my head with his fist — just hard enough to hurt. His knuckles felt like needles. The blow did notsurprise me: I had seen a witless hatred in his eyes. He swiveled his bony head on his neck and looked at me gleefully. 'Come on. I have to make a class.'
But we stopped after only a few steps. 'Who's this fat creep, Waxy?'
'Brick,' Wax said. Dave Brick was sweating, and his. beanie had been pulled down over his eyes.
'Brick.
Jesus. Look at him.' Ridpath took the fold of skin beneath Brick's chin and twisted it between two long fingers. 'How many books are there in the library, Brick? What's my name, Brick?' He jabbed one of his bony fingers into Brick's cheeks and pressed it hard against the teeth. 'You don't know, do you, fatso?'
'No, sir,' Brick half-sobbed.
'Mr. Ridpath. That's my name, dumbo. Remember it, Brick. Brick the Prick. You'd better cut your disgusting Zulu hair, Brick the Prick. There's more grease in it than most guys have in their cars.'.
Standing beside him with his books, I saw Tom Flanagan and Bobby Hollingsworth coming toward us. They stopped just down the hall.
'And who's this little greaseball?' Ridpath asked Terry Peters.
'Nightingale.' Peters smirked.
'Oh! Nightingale,' Ridpath crooned. 'I should have known. You look like a goddamned little Greek, don't you, Nightingale? Little cardsharp, aren't you, Nightingale? I'll have to take care of you later, Birdy. That's a good name for you. I heard you chirp.' He seemed very excited. He turned his ghastly face to me again. 'Come on, jerk. Ah, shit. Just give me the books.' He and Peters and Wax ran down the hall in the direction of the old section.
'I'm afraid it looks like you've got nicknames,' Tom Flanagan said.
15
Dave Brick was doomed to carry the obscene name Skeleton Ridpath had given him, but Del Nightingale'swas altered for the worse during football practice on the Friday evening of the first week of October. White Del and Morris Fielding and Bob Sherman and I sat on the bench with several others — freshmen and sophomores — our JV team had lost our first game the previous week. Chip Hogan had made our only touchdown. The final score had been 21-7, and Mr. Whipple and Mr. Ridpath had spent the four practices since the game frenziedly pushing us through exercises and play patterns. Sherman and I hated football, and already were looking forward to our junior year, when we could quit it for soccer; Morris Fielding had little aptitude for it, but suffered it gamely and performed as second-string center with a dogged persistence Ridpath admired; Del, who weighed little more than ninety pounds, was entirely hopeless. In the padded uniform which made the rest of us look swollen, Del resembled a mosquito weighted down with sandbags. All of the exercising tired him, and after we had run through tires and done fifty squat-jumps, Del could scarcely make his legs move through the rest of the practice.
After the squat-jumps, Ridpath lined us up before the tackling dummy. This was a heavy metal frame like a sledge on runners, with the front poles padded to the size of punching bags. We were in two long lines, and in pairs rushed at the padding and tried to move the dummy. Chip Hogan and three or four other boys could make it turn in a circle by themselves. Morris Fielding and I jolted it back a foot or two. When Tom Flanagan and Del hit it, Tom's side moved abruptly and Del's not at all. Both boys fell in the dust.
'Straighten it out and do it over,' shouted Mr. Ridpath. 'Push it
back —
we need blocking in the line.'
Flanagan and Nightingale pulled the cumbersome dummy back where it had been. They rushed the step and a half forward and grunted into the padding. Again Tom's charge pushed it in a jerky sideswiped movement and Del collapsed.