“HELLO, JACK. WE’RE SO EXCITED TO see you!” The woman behind the table held out a folder with my name on it.
JACK LEFFERTS.
She was wearing a pink sweater with a gold leaf pin up near her shoulder blade. She had hair that was sort of like a TV weather lady. “You’re in Scoville House,” she said. “And you’ll be seeing a lot of me! I’m Ginny Ward! Tom and I are your dorm parents!”
Dorm parents? I already had more than enough parents.
“Your roommate is Josh McPhail. This is his third year, so he’ll be able to get you up to speed. Tonight at dinner, you’ll be sitting at Mr. Carlton’s headmaster table with some of the other new fifth formers, and you can tell him all about yourself!”
That’d take about eleven seconds.
At the music registration table, a thin girl with brown hair who smelled really good was telling some old guy with slicked white hair and wire-rimmed glasses that she played the flute. When she walked away, it was her—the girl in gray. Yes!
The man stuck out his hand. “Jack, I’m Mr. Hopper! I hear you’re a Tchaikovsky guy!” he said.
“Well, I haven’t done much practicing this summer,” I said. This was true. About the Tchaikovsky, anyway. I’d done a lot of playing, but just trying to write songs, and I didn’t think this guy was into his students writing indie songs.
“I hope not! Summer is for relaxing,” said Hopper. “Now we get down to business! We’ll be meeting once a week for your private lesson. As you know, the top pianist in the fall term competition gets to play with the symphony at the Thanksgiving concert. Over the years, I don’t mind telling you, the labels have sent quite a few scouts.”
Scouts?
“And his year’s concert has drawn some television interest. Of course, whether Mr. Carlton will allow cameras into our family’s biggest night of the year is something I can’t predict. But that’s all the more reason to study those sonatas, isn’t it? Have you ever played a Steinway built in 1859, Jack? On that evening, the student who’s won First Piano will. Think about that, Jack.”
I didn’t really want to.
The line at the sports sign-up table was long, which gave me time to reconsider the possibly stupid thing I was about to do.
At University, I did rec-everything. In the fall, it was soccer, which didn’t feel like a sport because a half hour could go by without me kicking the ball, even though the coach kept saying, “Jack, you know you’re a natural athlete. Why don’t you get more involved in the flow of the game?” Well, first off, because I didn’t want to get kicked in the shins by some maniac from some other rival school. I didn’t mind getting hit playing a sport. I just minded rich kids playing a game like assholes.
In the winter, it was squash, which I was also apparently pretty good at, except everyone acted like someone from an Abercrombie catalogue, so I played club. In the spring, they kept telling me to run track, because I was really fast, but I didn’t like track because there was no team. Wasn’t sports supposed to be about teams?
At home, in the apartment, the only sport Dad and I watched was Yankees games, which didn’t exactly help the relationship. Dad liked them. I hated them because they bought all the best players, and Kansas City couldn’t afford to pay anyone anything.
“Real fans don’t root for the team,” Dad said. “They root for the uniform.” Which was like saying you had to like invading Afghanistan because the army uniforms were the same ones they wore in World War II.
But twice each fall, Luke took me out to a Giants game, which was completely cool, like a real video game, like when the Greeks decided to play sports instead of actually killing each other. It was even fun getting inside the stadium. In the parking lot, everyone was smashed and grilling meat and throwing footballs, and for the hell of it Luke and I would always just stop and join in someone’s game, tossing the ball. It became a tradition with us. In those catches, with fans from Jersey and kids from Brooklyn, footballs seemed to like my hands, maybe because my fingers were so long. I was terrible at throwing them, but since I’d never played the game—University didn’t have a team because the parents didn’t want their kids to get hurt—those random games of catch out in the Giants’ stadium parking lot were a really cool detour from the rest of my life.
And then, when the Giants scored a touchdown, this huge stadium actually shook, which was scary in a good way: 80,000 drunken people could make cement and steel move because someone had caught a football. And all the players had helmets on, which meant that the game wasn’t about who was handsome and who wasn’t, or who was ripped and who was fat, or even who was black and who was white (at least from the top of the upper deck, where Luke’s seats were).
One thing I knew for sure: when I had played piano at the U’s “Evening of Musical Magic” last year, I nailed the stupid Mozart, but when I finished, no one was standing up sloshing his beer in a plastic cup and high-fiving the guy next to him. And that was supposedly the highlight of my budding musical career.
• • •
The guy behind the athletic table was sort of shaped like a muscular cube. His tie was really loud. “I’m the AD,” he said, pumping my hand without looking at me. “I see you’re a soccer guy. Terrific. We’ve got a JV team, and the thirds are pretty competitive.”
“I kind of changed my mind,” I said. “I’m going out for football.”
He looked up at me as if I’d said something in Mandarin. “Well, okay,” he said. “Good. Sure, Whatever. So JV tryouts are tomorrow, three o’clock. That’s if you want to, you know, stay with that choice. Football.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.” Why not? What could happen? Other than I break some bones? Besides, girls are supposed to be into football players.
“Okay, then.” The guy flicked a checkmark onto his clipboard, then looked over my shoulder, and grinned. “Zowitzki! Dude!”
I turned around. A kid was staring at me with crazy-bright blue eyes. He had a blond buzz cut, and acne sprinkled his face like measles. His shoulders were about twice as wide as his waist. He was hopping from one foot to the other, as if he was listening to music. But he didn’t have any headphones on.
“We missed you in camp, Swicky,” the AD said.
“Yeah, well, summer school just ended yesterday,” the Zowitzki kid answered. “I aced that math shit. And I’m ready.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. We all are. This is the year.”
I drifted away.
• • •
The dorm room was in an old, dark building with heavy wooden doors. The first floor had a large lounge, a flat-screen on the wall, and some couches. My room, on the fourth floor, was small, but the view was pretty cool: trees and soccer fields, leading to the foot of a small mountain on the south side of the campus.
It looked as if my roommate had already checked in. A pile of textbooks lay on the top bunk, which had already been made. An open MacBook Air sat on one of the desks next to a pile of CDs: Feist, Elbow, the Decemberists, all pretty emo. His screen saver was the girl from the Dragon Tattoo movie. Two guitars leaned against a wall, and lots of magazines covered the floor: Mojo, INDIE, Spin, Guitar Player.
Grace put my clothes in the empty dresser and hung my jackets in the closet, and for a second or two, she seemed like a mom.
My father looked through one of my roommate’s econ textbooks. “Impressive,” he said. “There’s a whole chapter on low-end derivatives. Looks like we might just get our money’s worth.”
• • •
In the parking lot, Grace hugged me. “It’s going to be fabulous. I know you’ll love it. But keep your nose clean! That dean was a little . . . strict . . . wasn’t he, honey? And what about that girl who almost died?”
“Well, it was pretty routine, I thought, for a place like this,” Dad said.
A place like this? That sounded a little ominous.
“Your dorm parent owns your cell phone,” he said. “If you’re not doing approved research, the internet is open two hours at night, twice a week, and if you try to hack your way in, they’ll hack you out of school.”
“Tell him the . . . the hospital part,” Grace prodded him.
“Well, yeah. He said they’re real strict on the drinking and drug thing now, because they had to boot two kids last spring for making moonshine in the chem lab and then nearly killing themselves with it. One of them had to be hooked up to a respirator for a week. Pretty industrious, though.”
He tried to say it loosely, but I could see a slant of worry in Grace’s eyes.
“Now, if you get homesick,” she said, “just e-mail us when you’re allowed to.”
“Well, he won’t be homesick,” said Dad. “He had no problem being away for a month on Outward Bound last summer.”
That was another one of Dad’s character-building ideas, filed under “trying to make you what you’re not”—although since I didn’t know who I was, I had to cut him some slack. The funny thing was, I liked it. On my solo trip, the desert felt like Mars. Plus, with all the rock climbing, I put on some muscles—not muscles that you could see, but I could feel them anyway. Coming home on the plane, I imagined I had a superpower that no one could see. Okay, maybe just a power.
Dad clicked his keys to unlock the car. Like someone was going to steal it at a prep school.
“I’ll keep you posted on football,” I said.
His hand stopped as he was opening the door. “Going out for football?”
“Yeah, well, why not? I thought I’d try it.”
“Aren’t you a little light to be playing football?” he said, pretending to joke, but not pulling it off.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll dull the pain with moonshine.”
Dad’s goodbye handshake was like a fish fillet. The Lexus disappeared down the drive with the tires squishing. The rain was picking up.
I walked back toward the quad with the old iron railings. There was a touch football game going on, like last spring when I was interviewing with McGregor. One of the kids threw a long, wild pass, way out of bounds—right at me, but over my head. I threw my hands up, and suddenly, it was as if the ball was slowing down, like those old slow-motion films they show of games back in the Dark Ages with all that heavy Russian classical DUM-dada-DUM music, like the games were artillery battles on some battlefield in the Balkans.
Then, I swear, I don’t know why, but I could see the rotation of the ball and the writing on the label—SPALDING—and even the little dimples on the leather. This wasn’t like the parking lot outside the Giants’ stadium. This time, for some reason, part of my brain had decided to get superfocused. And somehow the ball rolled perfectly into my palms. It curled to a stop. I felt like it belonged to my fingers.
I underhanded the ball to a kid on the other side of the fence.
“Nice catch,” he said. “Good hands.”
Good hands. That sounded nice.
• • •
I started walking away, but I had to stop because I didn’t have a clue how to get back to my dorm.
“You lost?” It was a tall guy with skin like an iced-coffee with two shots of half and half, a medium Afro, and a goatee.
I shrugged. “Uh, maybe.”
“What form?”
“Fifth,” I said.
“They probably stuck you in Screwville. Big old gloomy building? Back-ass end of the campus?”
“That sounds right,” I said.
“Follow that path over there, take a left at the equestrian statue.” He could tell I didn’t know what he was talking about and smiled. “Horse statue. It’s an old dude on a horse, with a sword. I think he defended Oakhurst Hall in the Revolutionary War.” The guy loped off into the rain, then turned back. “Guillermo Martin. They call me Will.”
“Jack Lefferts.”
He flashed a peace sign and was gone.
I found the statue, found the gloomy hall, and climbed the stairs. Pieces of different kinds of music filtered out from each hallway, some Talking Heads, some Foos. I made it to the fourth floor without even breathing that hard. Outward Bound and the Reservoir. I was in shape.
“You’re a piano player, right?” was the first thing the kid on the top bunk in our room said. He had a shaved head a few days later than he’d shaved it, and he was wearing a sleeveless Killers T-shirt. He was wired. “What kind of music you into? New Garage? Electroclash? Punk DIY? We have a band. We could really use a keyboard. We’re indie all the way, like, Elbow meets King Crimson. A little Pixies, some Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and this year it’s time for a major dose of TV on the Radio. Not that I wouldn’t rule out a little Phish.”
“You’re talking my language,” I said. “Jams rule.”
He nodded like I’d passed some kind of first test. “And we need a drummer too, since Chipper got booted. He was too Allmans anyway. Word is this new Simon kid plays pretty good, but that he’s sort of a freakazoid.” Then he hopped down from the bunk and shook my hand. “Josh.”
“Jack,” I said. It was a good handshake. Like, whatever the handshake was invented for, he had it down. “So what’d your roommate do?” I said.
He vaulted back up onto his bunk and reached for a copy of Vice that had a girl with a tattooed forehead standing in front of a power plant. With the internet shut off most of the time I guessed that Oakies had to actually read paper magazines. It was like being in a place back in another time.
“Illegal cell phone with five speed-dial porn lines,” he said, “and twenty-five demerits in one year: the world record. First time someone had ever said ‘fuck you’ to Chipper Pratt.”
“So what happened to him?” I asked. I wanted to find out what the boundaries were in this place and what happened if you went outside them. I already knew that I was going to stretch them.
“He’s in one of those ‘therapeutic’ schools,” Josh said, “where they have wards instead of forms.”
This was a word I still hadn’t grokked. “What’s the deal with ‘forms,’ anyway?”
“It has something to do with old military formations,” Josh said, now leafing through High Times. I was guessing he didn’t get it through an Oakhurst Hall mail-room subscription. “We’re here for old Oak to form us.” He barked a one-syllable laugh. “Good luck on that. My dad went here. His dad went here. They both won the Brightfield Prize. I’ll be breaking that tradition. Or, make that ‘shattering.’”
“So, what, you didn’t want to go here?” I said.
“I wanted to go to Putney and carry milk pails,” he said. “Instead I had to carry on the tradition. When I got in here two years ago, I asked McGregor why in hell they accepted me. I mean, the family name was big here in the Middle Ages, but the money is, like, gone. My great-great-grandfather invented something called ‘men’s hair tonic.’ McGregor told me that my aptitude evaluations said I was way advanced in science things. So I guess I had to come here to get into Caltech and design missiles and leave a trillion to the old Hall. All I knew was that I wanted out. From home. Lake Forest, Illinois. And think about that: How can you have a lake and a forest at the same time?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My world was kind of fake too. But I try not think about it much.”
“So you got in for the piano? Or you do a sport?”
“I’m going out for JV football,” I said.
Josh dropped the magazine into his lap and looked me in the eye. “Seriously? You don’t look like a meathead. You some sort of football prodigy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No, I mean. No. I never played.”
Josh laughed loud, shaking his head. “Watch your ass. The football boys are kind of, like, territorial. They think they’re the fucking royalty or something, which our esteemed headmaster Carlton thinks they are too.”
Turned out that when Carlton played quarterback for Notre Dame, someone broke his leg with a dirty hit. He coached for a while in western Pennsylvania. Then he hit the prep hamster wheel at some middle school in Massachusetts. Wife left him when he had an affair with somebody in the development office, and he got this gig. Then two years ago, Josh told me, we’d won our league, but they took the cup away when somebody found out that one of the coaches had been filming upcoming opponents. Carlton was on a mission to win it legit.
“I’ll probably be thirds,” I said. “I don’t want to take it serious or anything.”
“Son, it’s all serious around here with sports,” Josh said. “Wait’ll you hear Carlton’s sermon about how the British Empire started on the playing fields of some fancy prep school back in the twelfth century or something. As far as I can tell, they all buggered each other, then married their cousins. Some empire.” He went back to High Times, and said, “So, Jack Lefferts, you like to get nice?”
The truth was, I did get high, if someone else was smoking, but only like the way I’d drink beer at one of the bars on the Upper East Side that served preppies if I was with Luke or one of the girls I asked out, but somehow never hooked up with. Mostly I didn’t like the way weed made me feel dumber.
“Yeah, sometimes,” I said. “You?”
“Usually practice nights for the band, after dinner, back of the arts building—if we have a band this year. And if we can get you and this Simon kid together with me and Danny, we could actually have a band. The practice room we use, you take a right at the end of the Hall of Piano Champions—you can’t miss the trophies—until you see the room that looks like a closet. There’s an old upright. Probably kind of out of tune. But I don’t think the Stasi faculty drones even know the room is there.”
“So that’s where you get high? Or where you jam?”
“Well, both. But we can definitely smoke. Scoville’s where we gotta be careful. Ward is gonna be CSI Oakhurst Hall this year. Last year, he busted three rooms in one night—vodka, pot, porn. The trifecta. The weed guy got booted. The vodka guy had to clean out the sports buses for a week, which means scrubbing scummy rubber floor mats with a rag, since half of them dip. But if it’s a girl’s team, you might come across some items that are highly sellable in the football dorm.”
The door suddenly swung open—no knock—revealing the entire Ward family: a life-sized snapshot of the American dream. Mr. Ward was about thirty, with a receding hairline and a frown. My guess was that Josh wasn’t his favorite dorm kid. His wife was in a dress full of flowers, and her face had that same frozen smile I first saw at registration. Two small blond children stood behind them: a girl of about five in a flowered dress like her mom’s and a boy about four in denim overalls that looked pressed and dry-cleaned.
“Hi, Jack!” Mrs. Ward said. “This is Tom, your dorm floor master, and this is Jess and Tommy.”
Tom Ward stepped forward and offered and a man-to-man nod and handshake, way too hard, but he was looking straight at Josh. “The hair grows back, McPhail. Starting yesterday.”
“Last year you said it was too long, Mr. Ward,” said Josh. “I only—”
“Hi, guys,” I said to the little kids, who immediately ran behind their mother.
“We’re just on our way to dinner,” said the wife. “Jack, we wanted to welcome you to the fourth floor of Scoville.”
“McPhail, you already know the drill,” Ward said to Josh. “So, Lefferts, lights-out is eleven. No exceptions. The internet is turned on for two hours, nine to eleven, two nights a week. No one knows the days in advance. Rest of the time, dark. Cell phones belong to me.” He paused. “Lefferts: your phone.” I reached into my pocket and hit the Off button, then handed him, basically, my old life. Other than Luke, I didn’t really think I’d miss it. “Wake-up is six forty-five, breakfast is seven thirty.”
Now Ward swung an imaginary golf club, driving an imaginary golf ball down some imaginary fairway in some imaginary country club, and then, just as quick, he was back on earth. “If you fail three room inspections in a week,” he said, putting my phone in his khaki pocket, “no dorm lounge privileges for the following week. Also, no food in the room. No loud music. Especially no rap.”
No rap? What kind of rule was that?
“No problem there,” I said. “Never touch the stuff.” For a second, I thought I’d crossed the line. But no one had been listening to me anyway.
“Hip-hop—can’t stand it,” said Ward, mostly to himself. “And one more thing: rooms are always open to search.”
He turned and walked out, followed by his wife and their ducklings. Then the door suddenly opened again. Mrs. Ward stuck her face in, with her cardboard smile. “You really don’t want to be late to dinner, dear,” she said to me, ignoring Josh. “Remember, this is your first week, and you can only make a first impression once.”
Then she was gone again.
I had to tell my dad about that one. It was such a Dad saying.
Yeah, they were definitely another set of parents. Great.