RIGHT BEHIND CARLTON’S TABLE, TWO LARGE bronze lion heads topped the andirons in the fireplace, which was big enough to walk into. This was obviously Table Number One.
The good news: the girl in gray from McGregor’s office last spring was standing to my right.
The bad news: the entire place was as freaking silent as a church. Everyone was waiting for Carlton to say the year’s first grace. It turned out to be something about the Lord and nourished souls. Then a senior table proctor in a madras jacket and a monogrammed shirt rushed off to get our food. A couple of guys in blue fleece sweatshirts with OAKHURST HALL MAINTENANCE emblems showed up out of nowhere to throw some logs on the fire, then disappeared just as quickly.
“Welcome, people!” said Carlton to all us new eleventh graders. “We’ve had great luck with our entering fifth formers in the last few years. But I’ll bet you’re going to outshine them all!”
He was trying so hard to be a headmaster it was like he was auditioning for that Robin Williams movie about a prep-school teacher. Or maybe it was all an act. Maybe he was actually supposed to have been the quarterback of Luke’s Giants—only everything went different, and someone forced him into this alternate universe.
“So how about we all introduce ourselves, give a little thumbnail sketch?” he said, with the fake grin. “I’m Charles Carlton: Fay ’77, Groton ’81, Notre Dame ’85, Columbia ’87. Hobbies: books, backgammon, and being sure to learn something new every day.”
A fat kid on my left named Spencer said his hobby was string theory. I wasn’t paying attention; I was trying to pick up the soft scent of the shampoo to my right without being too obvious. I heard Carlton say my name.
“I’m from New York,” I said. “I like playing the piano.”
“Your name precedes you, Mr. Lefferts,” he said. “You’re fortunate to be working with Mr. Hopper. He’s quite the star in our firmament.”
“And,” I said, “I’m going out for football.”
“Well, you’ll find our JVs are very competitive,” Carlton said. For the first time, his central-casting expression changed into something like confusion, since, I guess, none of the advance intelligence he’d gotten included me and the football thing. So he quickly asked about the girl with the good hair.
“I’m Caroline Callahan,” she said shyly, carefully laying her silverware on her plate. “I play the flute, and I run cross-country.” Then she looked at me, and I almost got excited, until I figured she was probably doing it because we both did music, and she didn’t want to be impolite by staring at her plate anymore.
The kid to Caroline’s right spoke next. I liked him immediately. His eyes were nearly totally hidden by his bangs. “I’m Simon Ridgway. I was born up in Boston, on a hill that’s supposed to be famous. Now I live in Brooklyn, on another hill.”
“Beacon,” said Carlton, “and Cobble. Am I right?”
“That’s them,” said Simon. I could tell that the Simon kid was fucking around with Carlton. “I play all the classics: Doom, Surreal, and Grand Theft Auto—San Andreas.”
Carlton obviously didn’t know what the kid was talking about. “And didn’t your father get a MacArthur Fellowship just a few years ago?”
“Yeah. The ‘genius’ award. As if.”
“Well, as I understand it, you’re the latest in a long line of quite brilliant scholars,” Carlton said, without listening to the kid. “And you were the winner of a statewide Latin competition last year.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I’m dropping Latin up here.”
“Really.” Carlton was no longer smiling. “Do tell us why.”
“Because,” the kid answered, weighing each word like an actor onstage, “it has ensnared me in the cold, dead grip of tradition.”
“Excuse me?” said Carlton.
“That’s from a graphic novel about turning zombies back into humans through microbial reanimation.”
Then the rest of the table recited their lives. I didn’t listen much, and tuned out completely when some kid said something about sailing and Nantucket. I was watching Caroline raise her food to her mouth when I heard Carlton’s voice.
“So, Jack, play much football down in the city?”
“Not a lot,” I said, which was not a lie. “A little wide receiver.” Okay, that was.
Well, no, come to think of it, I was a pretty little wide receiver.
• • •
Outside, after dinner, I caught up to Caroline as she walked toward the girls’ dorm.
“Hey,” I said. “How about that Simon kid?”
“Yeah, did you see the look on Carlton’s face?” she said. “Maybe it’s a defense mechanism or something, until he figures the place out. Like a porcupine throwing its needles.”
Or a girl being shy.
Old-style lamps half lighted the path we were walking on. She looked pretty in the dim light. Not glamorous, but . . . cool. She had brown hair, but her eyes were blue, and I could see the lamplight in them when she looked me in the face, which didn’t happen enough.
“So how’d you end up at Oakhurst Hall?” I asked her.
“My high school was supposed to be in the top five best public schools in America, or something. But it was just a bunch of cliques, and bored rich kids doing heroin and coke, and teachers who hated their jobs because they couldn’t afford to drive the cars the kids they were teaching drove. Last year my class president was fencing credit cards on school computers. The baseball captain totaled his Jaguar into the school goalposts.”
I kept my mouth shut, because it was kind of dry.
“The worst thing,” she said, loosening up, “was that being smart and getting good grades wasn’t cool. At least here there might be kids who are smart and don’t feel ashamed of it. Plus, this place looked so beautiful. The mountain and the fields. What about you?” she said.
Tough question. I took the easy way out. “It wasn’t my idea at first,” I said. “But when I got in, I figured it’d be stupid not to try it. I kind of felt like I was running in place back home.”
She smiled. “I love running. But so far it’s been a drag. I thought cross-country would mean I could run through the woods! But it turns out you have to keep running so hard that it all just goes by in a blur.”
I decided not to tell her that I liked running, too. It might sound like I was saying we should run together. Plus I could tell just by the way she’d said it that she was a real runner. Not like someone who did it for some sort of weird therapy.
We were standing in front of another one of those Gothic stone dorms. And she didn’t run away. “What’d you think of the summer reading?”
“I guess I should have done it, huh?”
“I loved it. You should check it out.”
She looked over her shoulder and smiled a small smile. Then she jogged up her dorm steps like a runner and disappeared inside the wooden door. I just stood there, savoring something.
• • •
Then the skies opened up, which was a definite omen for the Scoville 4 dorm meeting in the Wards’ living room in the apartment at the end of the hall. The walls and tables were covered with pictures of their kids, and their parents, and their barefoot wedding in a field full of flowers, and dogs. Lots of dogs.
Josh planted himself in a corner chair next to a table piled with golf books. I dropped to the floor with my back to a yellow wall. Three other kids crammed themselves onto a plaid couch and were punching one another in the arms when Ward came in, holding a bottle of Heineken in one hand.
“Hey, idiots, cut it out!” Ward yelled. Then he calmed down and took a sip of the beer. “Okay. Most of you know the drill. This is my home, and you are my guests. So let’s not get off on a bad foot here. Scoville 4 is my turf. But,” he said, now looking somewhere else, “I’m here for you.”
“So does that mean we can drink your booze and get back the porn you ripped off from us?” said one of the couch kids. They all looked the same to me—kind of dumb. “Can we get in on the poker game tonight?”
His buddies snickered until Ward stared them all down, and it got quiet.
“Let’s make this quick,” said Ward, doing that slow-motion golf swing thing again. “This year, I’m gonna be a fucking Nazi. Big Brother Is Watching. Bottom line? You’re fifth formers now. No excuses for messing up. I don’t want to have to explain to Carlton why this dorm is a bunch of losers. Which right now, as I look around, it is.”
“You said the F word, Mr. Ward,” said another couch kid. “Ten pushups.”
Ward’s face turned red. “That’s the first demerit of the year.”
Then he closed the door.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, loser,” said Josh, before we all piled back down the hallway.
• • •
I didn’t want to go back and bitch and moan with Josh. I was still thinking of Caroline Callahan, and I wanted to savor the buzz. I hopped down the stairs and went outside. The rain had stopped. I could smell wet leaves, and that was good.
In the soft air, I felt a hint of freedom.
Now all I had to do was find something to do with it.
Josh was a stoner scientist. Simon was a wiseass genius who knew exactly who he was. Me? Composer of a couple hundred song fragments. Good at the piano, but only when someone else wrote what I played.
In a good song, they say “it has a hook.” It was time to write a hook for myself.