Ten minutes more. At 10 p.m. I’m off duty. Usually I’m frantically grading fifteen lab books, but classes haven’t started yet. The first lab books of the year, tedious, some disastrous. And here’s a knock on the door.
“Door’s open,” I say. I don’t get up from my desk.
“Mr. Song?” someone says. His voice is high, a Second Former. The door opens slowly.
“Mr. Harney, King of the Almost-in-Bed,” I say. Maybe he’ll about-face, go to bed. One never knows with the Second Formers what sets them off. They cry if I look at them. They cry for their mothers. They scream at their mothers on the phone. I can’t believe the way St. Timothy’s treats them: cubicles like rat mazes. Each boy behind a curtain, poster board for walls, one big, open room, the school too cheap to make real rooms. In all its wisdom, the school brings them here a week early to “bond,” the littlest here along with the jocks who are never around, always out on fields and lakes, doing their jockly double-sessions. Thirteen-year-old boys, first time from home, babies really, packed like rats.
This one is more mouse than rat.
“Mr. Wrong,” he says. Not funny. What is he up to? This kid. “I need help.” He’s in a gray turtleneck and gray sweats. His hair is sticking straight up. Bad personal hygiene, a bad sign.
“What can I do for you, Kyle?” I try his first name.
“You know physics, right?”
“Yes, that’s what I teach.”
“Then, you know stuff like how long it takes for a brick to hit the ground if you drop it, like from the second floor of the dorm, right?”
“Sure.” Where did he get a brick?
“What about a feather?”
“Gravity is gravity, but that’s a little different,” I say, but before I can factor in wind and weight, he keeps going.
“What about a body? Would that be different? Would a body be like a brick or a feather?” Pointy face. Blue eyes like the eyes in the Wyeth mural downstairs, but smaller.
“Kyle,” I say, “Mr. Inquisitive, what’s a Second Former like you asking questions like this right before curfew? Don’t you have books to read? Don’t you have countries to conquer? Hasn’t the sun already set on the British Empire?”
He looks down at the beige carpet. “Yes, sir,” he says. His eyes look up for a second to check my eyes. “No, sir. The sun never sets on the British Empire.” A little joke. A little smile. Then, he looks down again, says with a big voice, “I’m Imperial. I’m a Light Brigade.”
“Okay, then, General Light Brigade, to bed.”
He turns around, as if dismissed, a soldier. His back straight, he clicks heels, the socks he pretends are boots. Pulling diagonal from a belt he doesn’t have, he draws the royal saber he also doesn’t have.
“Charge,” he yells, and he hurls himself against the closed door, his arm still raised, his chin smashed to the side. A loud crash. Motion acted upon by imbalanced force. He has no sense.
“Mr. Harney,” I say.
A jock down the corridor yells, “You okay, Mr. Song?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Sorry, sir,” Kyle says. He makes a show of staggering back from the door. The saber in his right hand, he reaches for the doorknob with his left. As soon as the door is open, he leads with his saber, yells, “Charge” over and over, “Charge” as he runs down the corridor. “Charge” again and again. Down the corridor the boys from their rooms respond “Shut up” and “Dweeb” and “You’re dead.” The school year has certainly begun.
The door doesn’t shut.
Carla passes through the door before it shuts.
“Carla, you can’t,” I say. She closes the door. She is motion unimpeded.
“Before you say anything,” she says.
We didn’t see each other over the summer. I could have written her, but after Rehoboth, I had no words. Now she is a Sixth Former, eighteen years old. Is she taller? She’s tan. She’s thinner. Her curls are everywhere, hiding her eyes. From the door, she takes three steps toward me, puts three fingers on my lips.
Three fingers, cold. Her pale fingers, the last joint long. The pad of her middle finger crosses both my lips, fits into the crown of my upper lip. Cold and warm at the same time. Enough pressure to keep my words in my mouth. Something solid, no matter how slick, like a finger, meeting some vapor, like my breath, no matter how rapid, creates friction, and the boundary layer between the solid and the gas is the skin. The difference in velocity between the solid and the gas is skin drag.
She follows her fingers with her lips.