BRUNO WAVED A PAPER IN THE air. “Now, this is what I had in mind. This . . . is what I was talking about. This is history . . . but alive.” I looked over at Lucy, figuring it was hers. It took me a second to focus, to hear Bruno read a few paragraphs from a story about Oakhurst Hall, and King Carlton, and some rebel kids fighting the system.
“Whose was it, Mr. Bruno?” said Thorn.
“Not yours,” said Bruno, dropping it on my desk—with its big, red, circled A shouting out at me.
I’d never expected it. I’d expected a C, and I didn’t care. But a real teacher giving a good grade to a gonzo fairy tale? Maybe the Gothic castle was growing me up. Just not in the way it thought it was going to.
• • •
We had a bigger audience at the next band practice: not just Sam and Seo Woon, but Caroline. They’d all just had symphony rehearsal. I’d only asked her to sit in about five times. We did the piece, and it could have been better, because this time I was trying to show off on the piano, when by now we all knew that the only way it worked was if no one tried to outshine anyone else. Even Josh’s solos had started sounding more disciplined: less like Hendrix and more like Clapton.
After the final note faded away, everyone sat in silence for a good ten seconds before Caroline said, “You know, it really is good, guys. Like, beautiful.”
“It is a symphony,” Seo Woon said. “It’s original. So when does the school get to hear it?”
“Carlton doesn’t like it,” Josh said. “He won’t let us play at the Thanksgiving concert. So we’re going to play it anyway.” Simon laughed the crazy Simon laugh and whacked Danny in the butt with his sticks.
And so that was that. There was no going back. Everyone was on board.
Then Simon hit his tom-tom with both sticks, laid down a snatch from the “Wipe Out” drum solo. “All right!”
“Uh-huh,” said Danny, nodding, playing a cool, quick bass riff. “That’s what I’m talking about. A little guerrilla action.”
“We could catch a serious shitstorm for this,” I said.
Simon shrugged. “What do we have to lose?”
“Other than your place in school?” said Sam. “And no Yale, and no Harvard Business, and no First Boston, and then no possibility of eventually ruling the global economy? Nothing.”
“Come on,” said Caroline. “Do you think Carlton would kick out some kids who wanted to play music so badly they broke a few rules?”
“We’d shake the whole freakin’ foundation,” said Danny. “But what a way to go, huh?”
“Now,” Josh said, “all you have to tell me is how we pull this off.”
I’d been doing a lot of fast thinking lately. But it had been working out. “Okay,” I said, making it up as I went along. “As soon as Mario finishes his final notes, and he’s getting the standing O from everyone but Hopper and Carlton, we get the amps and drums on, kick the song off before people leave their seats.”
“And we do that how, exactly?” Danny asked.
“As Joe Cocker put it at Woodstock,” I said, “‘We get by with a little help from our friends.’ A few guys on the football team. Well, one of them, so far. Mike Clune. Maybe Will Martin.” I hadn’t actually asked Will.
“Seriously?” Josh said. “The Irishman’ll stick his meatneck out? For this?”
Simon flipped one of his sticks into the air. “Our own roadie!”
“Okay, so here’s how it goes,” I said. “We get there real early, get seats in the front row. That way, when Mario finishes and Clune brings the stuff on, we jump on the stage before anyone can stop us and just start playing.”
“That’ll be the first time I’ll ever rush a stage because I was supposed to be on it,” said Simon. “One way or another, we are definitely going to go out on a good note.”
“Lots of good notes,” Josh said.
• • •
We were walking back to the dorms when I reached my hand out for Caroline’s. She took it, eyes on the ground. Gentle squeeze. Just right. Yes.
“You really liked it?” I said.
“I loved it. It’s beautiful and crazy and original. It breaks every rule of conventional music except the only one that counts: it reaches you.” This girl was sort of amazing. “Unlike Hopper’s robots, who play the Fifth like it’s a math problem to solve.” And then she twined her arm in mine. I mean, just come snatch me up. To heaven. Or wherevs. “Well, gotta get to sleep. Big meet.” The last cross-country meet of the season was tomorrow. The whole league. “Will you be there?”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “How you guys going to do?”
“I don’t know. Chelton and Essex supposedly have these super-fast runners.”
“Its not just speed,” I said, thinking of the Reservoir. “It’s wanting it more than the next runner, right?”
“Well, I do know the course. I know those woods better than anyone. They’re sort of enchanted by now. To me, anyway. See ya.”
Enchanted.
• • •
It was a sunny, cold, and crisp. A good day for a possible girlfriend to be running through her Dionysian woods. All I could think of during practice was Caroline running . . . with those long legs, in those shorts. After practice I hustled up the hill and into the showers so I could watch the end of the race.
A cluster of parents and coaches had gathered at the cross-country finish line, a few hundred yards away from the spot where the trail came out of the woods behind the football field—her woods. I moved away from the pack of parents to the spot where the trees gave way to the open field—just in time to see Caroline burst out of the woods, into the sun, in her Oakhurst blue tank top and those shorts and . . . wait . . . first place? With only one hundred yards left?
Then, about three seconds later, two girls, one from Chelton and one from Essex, came out into the clear, side by side, arms and legs pumping. They were gaining ground on her as the three sprinted across the grass toward the finish line.
She passed right by me, ponytail bouncing from side to side, snorting like a racehorse. She had this cool, steely, powerful look on her face, seeing nothing but the tape at the finish line. Then I saw her glance back to see where the others were, then look back at the tape—and just like that, the other two girls weren’t closing in on her. Her back-kick was higher, her arms were pumping in perfect synch: she’d shifted into high gear. She was flying.
“Yeah, Callahan!” I shouted at her back, and started to run toward the finish line too. All I could see was Caroline shoving her arms straight up in the air.
She’d done it.
The crowd broke into polite applause. Most of them were visiting parents who’d figured their own daughters would win.
Then: one loud, joyous shout, a voice I knew very well. “YES!” Caroline was spinning in a circle, singing to the sky—and to the mountain behind her.
When I reached the finish line, Booth was high-fiving her. Caroline’s return high five was less energetic than her stupid coach’s. Then Caroline walked away, stopped, bent at the waist, hands on knees, exhausted. When she saw me, she rose up, laughed, and fell into my arms, half hugging, half hanging on to me for support. Damn, did she still ever smell good.
We broke apart.
“You’re the star!” I said.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, gasping, her cheeks all pink, her eyes lit up. “I was behind them by about fifty feet until the course went into that trail in the woods for the last half mile, where you have to run on dirt and dodge the branches. They weren’t used to running in a forest, I guess. I sort of had the home-field advantage.”
“Yeah, well, give yourself a little credit, girl,” I said. “You won the race. Not the trees. Where were your folks?”
“It’s a weekday, stupid. They’re both at work. They’ll be here for the concert.” Then she smiled a smile that had a whisper of some flirt to it. “Hey,” she said. “Wait till I take a shower, then you want to go see that chimney on the mountain I told you about?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I could do that.” I could so do that.
• • •
Even after winning the race, she was amped enough to skip up through the woods, hopping from rock to rock, leaping over dead logs, while I kept falling behind. She’d stop and wait for me to catch up, smiling in a way I’d never seen her smile. She was on top of her world. And she was letting me into it.
It took a good half hour to get to the chimney. Sometimes we were jogging on dirt paths. Sometimes we were picking our way through big rocks in a dry stream. Sometimes we were going right through the forest, sweeping weeds and vines and dead branches and spiderwebs out of our faces.
Then we were at the top of the mountain I’d been looking up at all season, without ever seeing it like this: through its lens, as it had been watching us down below.
The stone chimney rose above an old blackened fireplace, and nothing else, in the middle of a small, windy clearing full of weeds. It was perched right on the edge of a little plot of land that looked down, like, a thousand feet below, on the school. It looked like a school in a model train set.
An outline in the stubbly grass around the chimney showed where the cabin had once stood, probably built by some guy whose signature was on the Constitution. The chimney was made of really old rocks.
“Isn’t this cool?” she said. “It had to be someone’s house, with gardens and everything. Someone’s little farm.”
We sat down, doing our usual shoulder-to-shoulder thing, our backs to the chimney. Way below, the shadow of the line of the setting sun was slowly crossing the athletic fields, edging up toward the campus. From here, you could see the quad and all the buildings around it, and how all the buildings of the old campus were laid out in a pattern. Once upon a very old time, Oakhurst Hall had some very old logic.
Then I felt her hand curl into mine, and all I hoped was that mine didn’t start sweating and short out the electricity.
The bell tower tolled five times. This time, each note sounded like music.
I felt her look over at me, only now there was a different look in her blue eyes. I’d never seen it, but I recognized it.
The kiss was a real kiss. She tasted warm, sweet, good. Just right.
When we pulled apart, neither of us said anything.
Now what? Was I supposed to make some heavy move? As usual, she took the lead.
She turned her face to the view below. “Look at the campus,” she said. “It’s like a postcard, isn’t it? Look at the way that shadow sort of crept over the whole school. It didn’t even look like it was moving. Like nature moves. Slowly. But it gets where it’s going.”
“That’s what Simon would say,” I said, even though I wanted to move a little quicker.
Then she looked at me. She’d been reading my mind. “Jack,” she said, “I like that pace. Slow.”
And she stood up, and led me back down the hill. She was skipping. I was floating.