The Expectations Read online

  And then he was on the stairs with Ennis under his arm on one side and Ian under the other, and his legs felt like long heavy socks. And then he was in his bed and he saw Ennis’s silhouette in the doorway against the fluorescent light of the hall, and Ennis was saying something to Ahmed, whose voice sounded very clear for someone who, Ben thought, must have just been woken up.

  And then Ben picked his face up from something sticky and the smell made his body flex again, and his head felt like there was another head inside it, a head relentlessly expanding. He looked down and saw that one of Ahmed’s thick brown towels lay over his pillow. He let his head rest against it.

  And then light fell through the window like a pillar. Ben was irreversibly awake. It was 6:40 a.m. The side of his face stung from where it had marinated in his vomit. He heaved again and nothing came out, but his body didn’t unheave for moment after moment, and when it finally relaxed he heaved again, and then was able to lie still for a while. He clung on to whatever rung of experience he was on now, because whatever was below it seemed capable of extinguishing him.

  * * *

  After a while, it seemed to Ben that he was involved in some devotional act, as though he were remaining motionless to placate the animal who controlled his pain. He wanted to make that animal read “Decision-Making.” Had the Chute done this to him intentionally, to pay him back for something Teddy had put them through? Had he already forfeited what little edge he had gained by going up there? Ben went into and out of an exhausted trance, lying again to Phelps and again having no financial claim to be here, and finally he woke up and noticed that the brown towels were gone and that there were newer black ones under him. The door opened and he saw Ahmed backing into the room carrying something. Ben wanted to turn toward the wall but couldn’t bring himself to move. Ahmed turned around and Ben saw that it was one of the orange dining hall trays with two tall, hard-plastic glasses along with what looked like a couple plates and a teacup. It was against the rules to take cups, glasses, plates, trays, or cutlery out of the Dish.

  Ahmed set the tray down on Ben’s desk, pulled out the chair, then picked the tray up, stepped up onto the chair, and put the tray on the mattress next to Ben. The smell of cooled tomato minestrone put the texture of overcooked pasta in Ben’s imagination and another heave came up in him but subsided. “I can’t eat, Ahmed.” Speaking hurt his throat and he was surprised by how low his voice was.

  “You cannot be the whole day without food.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Drink. The tall ones are water.”

  Ben was afraid that if he moved, the mattress would shift and the tray would spill, but slowly he pressed himself up to one elbow and reached for a glass of water. He looked at Ahmed, whose face was grim. That Ahmed had brought him this food made Ben want to weep. Ben wildly wished he hadn’t said those things up in the Chute. Ben tipped a water glass to his mouth and just wet his lips.

  He would make sure to wash all the towels. He would find out what brand they were and buy Ahmed new ones. He couldn’t buy new ones. He would apologize. He could taste the faint chlorine in the water and it nearly made him retch but he knew that the only way to feel better was to have some water, and so he took a sip and felt the liquid pass over his ragged throat. He took another sip. He saw the plastic packets of saltines—he wished they were oyster crackers—and tore one of them open with his teeth. When he put the corner of a cracker in his mouth, the flood of saliva was exactly like the one before throwing up, and he heaved hard but kept everything down.

  “I can’t eat with you looking at me, Ahmed.” Ahmed stepped down off the chair and sat down at his desk. He turned on the little lamp and began to mark down answers to a math problem set. “Thank you,” Ben said, and Ahmed turned to him and smiled briefly and turned back to his work. Ben looked down at Ahmed’s back, and then took another bite of the cracker and the salt tasted delicious. He finished the cracker and started another one.

  * * *

  When the sun was starting to set, Ben finally felt steady enough to leave his bed and go to the shower. He still hadn’t done any of his work for Monday. The hot water made his head hurt for a minute and then everything seemed to relent, and relief washed through him. Moneylessness couldn’t touch that feeling. He went back to the room hoping he wouldn’t run into anyone.

  “I’m going to bring this stuff back to the Dish,” said Ben after he got dressed. “Can I bring you anything?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Anything from the Den?”

  “I have everything I need.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you in a bit.” He paused. “Hey, where were you last night?”

  “Oh. I signed out and went to Boston for dinner.”

  “Oh.”

  “It is not far.”

  “Yeah. All right, see you soon.”

  “Okay.”

  Ben walked out into the clear dusk with the high scraping clouds still lit bright. The lamps along the paths came on, immediately darkening the trees and buildings. Ben’s body felt exhausted and relaxed and full of joy.

  * * *

  That same Saturday night after coming back from town, two Woodruff boys were caught checking in drunk. Jason Bowman managed “I’m in” when he came through the door and made it upstairs. When Mr. Rawlins, the Head of House, went to check on him, he found Jason passed out on his bed with all the lights on.

  Rawlins then went to the room of Jason’s best friend, Brett Tamor, who had apparently been lying on his couch listening to “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers loud enough that TJ Adkins across the hall had almost gone over to turn it down.

  Rawlins picked up a red plastic cup by the couch, smelled it, then looked in Brett’s closet, where he found two plastic half-gallon bottles of S.S. Pierce vodka. Both boys went before the Disciplinary Committee the following Tuesday evening, and while Jason was given six months’ probation, five sessions with a substance abuse counselor, and three days of work duty, Brett, whose closet had actually contained the vodka, was expelled. Everyone was shocked. When Aston read the announcements in Chapel, he described the beginning of a new policy. “If a student is known to have abused alcohol or drugs, that student will get help. But if a student purchases drugs or alcohol, brings them onto campus for themselves or others, he or she has knowingly damaged the fabric of the school, and has forfeited his or her place here.”

  In the secondary school market, it was clear that St. James now wanted to appeal to parents looking for a stricter atmosphere. Students were quiet but resentful. The new sixth-formers had waited their turn to be able to get away with the things sixth-formers had always gotten away with. Several girls cried when Brett’s parents picked him up and drove away.

  Meanwhile, Jason didn’t go to classes for three days, and instead served work duty with the school’s grounds crew. The general resentment toward the administration mixed with an envy of Jason.

  When you showed up for work duty, you were issued a pair of gloves: white leather palms and finger grips, red fabric backs and reinforced cuffs. Each glove had your last name written in Sharpie on the cuff. The grounds crew guys were Dennis and Terry instead of Walker and Ian. Most boys reporting for work duty suddenly appeared in double-kneed Carhartt pants.

  When kids on work duty came into the dining hall at the end of the day, still holding the paper coffee cups they had been given at the 10:15 a.m. break, still smelling of woodsmoke and the cold afternoon, they folded the cuffs of the gloves and slipped them in their back pockets, the empty fingers sticking up. They moved more slowly than the other kids. They had put in their hours and had something to show for it—the stones from a collapsed border wall regathered, a lawn leaf-free, a baseball infield raked—and now they owed no one any further effort.

  They would feel nostalgia for that work-duty time, not only when they returned to the constant anxiety of being a student, but also when they graduated from college and went into their working lives, always with the option o
f working more, but with the connection between work and reward never sharply defined.

  The school never had a student slop out the trash enclosure behind the dining hall, or dig up a collapsed drainage pipe, or take down a broken bough still hanging in a tree. No dishwashing, no dorm cleaning, no laundry pickup. Nothing in the power plant, nothing with machines (in the mid-eighties a branch being pulled into the teeth of a wood chipper had kertwanged out, smacking the shoulder of a student who had been caught making fake IDs), nothing on ladders. No electrical work, no plumbing, no hammers or nails, no prolonged heavy lifting, nothing around the ponds and streams, nothing that involved going off campus or outside the theoretical view of a faculty member.

  Despite all his exploits, Teddy had never gotten busted, and he had talked about his blemishless record with a mixture of pride and regret. One late night out cruising to see his girlfriend, Teddy had spotted Snake Eyes, the overnight security guard and Vietnam veteran, commando-crawling through the underbrush by the gym to keep his skills sharp. When Teddy was a third-former, a sixth-former in his dorm, Liam, had gotten busted ordering a margarita at Escobar’s, his third offense. On the day a student’s punishment is read, that student is excused from Chapel, not only to avoid direct shaming, but also in certain cases to enact the temporary forfeiture of the student’s place at the school until he or she has served work duty. But Teddy said that Liam was the only student ever to see his own funeral: on the morning his deed was read aloud, he had managed to get a key to the chapel tower, and he climbed out along the gangplank over the wooden panels in the chapel ceiling and looked down through an open panel to witness it. When the Rector announced that he was getting kicked out, Liam gave a rebel yell that echoed all throughout the chapel.

  Getting in trouble for something glamorous, working with your hands, having a justified grudge—all of it seemed to Ben like the best way to be. At the same time he couldn’t imagine doing anything against the rules. How wonderful it would be to get kicked out for actually doing something, not to have to wait.

  6. The Queen’s Guard

  WHEN MAIL CAME IN TO THE ST. JAMES POST OFFICE AT TEN thirty, the fence across from the PO was the place to sit to see the school come to check mailboxes. It had been this way since the little cylindrical pump house had been decommissioned and reopened for this purpose in 1931. Third-period classes were over and the Dish hadn’t yet opened for lunch.

  Ben sat there with Hutch and Evan. Even in the full sun the air now was like tearing paper. Not that anyone really cared with Brett’s expulsion so fresh, but Ben had explained away not showing up to go into town by saying his mother had gone to the hospital with a heart murmur and so he had needed to stay by the phone in case anything happened; luckily it had turned out to be nothing. Ben had also told them about drinking in the Chute and they seemed to afford him some respect for it, but still, here in the bare air, he had imposter’s skin. Every new minute, the administration could call him in to tell him he wouldn’t be asked back.

  The PO late-morning was also the best place and time to watch ladies. In the Dish common room people could get in the way and girls were maybe close enough to hear. But here in front of the PO boys had a clear view and they could say quietly but clearly that Laura Schwarzman had a better ass than Julie Mason. Their friends might say they were wrong and blind and crazy, but they could still say it.

  And so because everyone was there and watching, people nonchalantly planned to make an appearance. All of this made it a little risky for the three of them to be sitting there shivering on the chain fence, and without the other two, Ben never would have dared. It wasn’t the senior couches in the Dish, but it was a privileged spot.

  The site for Ahmed’s swimming pool was now being cleared, and the hiss of chain saws was audible everywhere on campus. When they had found out about the pool Hutch and Evan had just shaken their heads and laughed in fury. Ben had seen Manley Price twice from afar on the walking paths and managed to avoid him both times. Squash should have made him feel powerful and rooted into the school, but every time he thought about it he wanted to move his thoughts to something else. He waved to Markson whenever he saw him, and had started carrying the little blue Companion in his backpack all the time. He liked seeing it there when he pulled out his notebooks.

  Now Rosie Barton and a friend no one really ever noticed came up the path from the Schoolhouse, walked around to the front of the PO, and went inside out of sight. Everybody held a different opinion on Rosie. She was extremely pretty, with light hair and a good face, and she definitely had a decent pair, but a lot of guys thought she had no sex appeal. She had never had a boyfriend and she seemed girlish in a slightly blank way. To Hutch and Evan, it was a waste for such a good-looking girl to be someone sex just never occurred to. Ben was sort of ginning up his agreement with them but he didn’t really care.

  Hutch had already started hooking up with Tara Oliver, but they hadn’t seen each other in a few nights. Now he was talking to Ursula Childress, but her name. Evan had been going to Emma Ponsolt’s room but hadn’t made a move yet.

  “What’s up with you, Weeksy?” Hutch turned to him. “Where’s your beaver, man?”

  “Playing the long game,” Ben said.

  “You’re not that long,” said Hutch.

  “How would you know?” said Evan, and they laughed routinely.

  Ben looked for Alice. He found himself waiting to see her most of the time now and trying to calculate what he would say. Sometimes Ben would get the pang of recognizing her from far away, but then it would turn out to be Laurel Oppenheimer, who had similar coloring and posture. Ben now hated Laurel.

  He couldn’t imagine what he would ever say to Alice, and when he did see her across a lawn or at the end of the Schoolhouse hallway, she was always wearing her baggy green fleece with her arms crossed in front of her. Her shoulders hunched forward and her spine curved as though she were trying to suck her breasts into herself. Ben saw her with Ian a distressing amount. Once she was riding piggyback while he wove back and forth through the staked saplings in the Dish courtyard, and once they were standing near the rear entrance of Paige and she seemed unhappy.

  Now Ben and Hutch and Evan were watching intently for Rosie to come back outside, and so they all saw Ahmed when he moved out of the PO reading a postcard. He was wearing a loden-green cashmere sweater and a long crimson scarf. Ben saw him squint as the card came into the bright sunlight. Everyone liked physical mail, but it seemed to be a delicacy with Ahmed, who cultivated a number of pen pals around the world.

  Ahmed stopped there in the doorway so he could concentrate on the postcard, and two girls—not Rosie and her friend—came up behind him, unable to leave the PO until he moved. He just drifted a few steps farther forward, and finally the girls split and moved around him, turning annoyed glances on him as he continued to study the postcard.

  He began to turn it over to look at the photo. Ben had the feeling that Ahmed couldn’t move in such an unguarded way without something happening to him.

  Ben had forgotten to keep looking for Rosie, and then he saw a person in a gray hooded sweatshirt move quickly out of the Art Building’s side exit toward Ahmed. A shot of guilt passed through Ben; the dense body was indelibly Ennis’s. Ben decided to hope it wasn’t Ennis. The figure wasn’t running; he took long low strides with his arms held by his sides. He reached into the kangaroo pouch of the sweatshirt and came out with something short and black—for an instant Ben thought he was going to stab Ahmed. The figure closed the remaining distance in the time it took Ahmed to flip the card back over again.

  Ennis stepped up behind Ahmed, reached his free arm around his neck, and pulled back snug. The PO crowd turned and Ahmed’s mail slid across the ground. Ahmed tried to pull the arm down, but it didn’t move and he gurgled shortly. Ennis brought the black thing in front of Ahmed’s face and switched on the wireless hair clipper. Ben heard the faint buzz as Ennis brought it gently against Ahmed’s forehead. He slid the c
lipper up. Hair fell over Ahmed’s face and shoulders, and Ben saw it drift down onto the mail.

  Ennis released Ahmed, letting a sheaf of hair fall from where it had collected across his forearm. Ahmed went to his hands and knees. He had saliva down his chin. Ennis took the same long smooth strides down the path toward the Schoolhouse, and then he passed into the woods out of sight.

  Several seconds passed, and then Ahmed reached out to sweep a letter toward himself, and this seemed to break everyone out of their collective trance. The girls closest to him went to help him up. Still the bored, annoyed sound of chain saws. As Ben walked to Ahmed, remorse resounding through him for what he had said in the Chute, he nevertheless clenched his jaw with the same shiver as when he had put his flip-flop over a hobbled bumblebee in the dorm bathroom, feeling the resistance of its exoskeleton and then its sudden collapse. Hutch was behind him, but Ben knew exactly the look of triumph that would be in his face. As he came to Ahmed’s side, he saw that the front of the postcard showed two furry-hatted guards at Buckingham Palace.

  * * *

  Even though Ben was hardly touching Ahmed, just lightly holding his upper arm, he felt like he was dragging him up the stairs. They pushed into the room and dropped their book bags and Ahmed came down into his desk chair. He looked totally blank, as though he were coming out of sedation after surgery. His longer hair lay over the bare strip, but there was a disturbing lack of volume there, as though Ahmed’s head had a deep dent in it. Ben had expected the Chute to put something disgusting in Ahmed’s bed or throw mugs of ice water on him in the shower.