The Expectations Page 5

  Several students away, he saw Hutch, whose tawny head rose and fell with all the other students jumping around him. Ben started jumping up and down too.

  * * *

  Ben climbed the ladder to his lofted bed as Ahmed finished putting away toiletries. The rungs the workmen had made were narrow and they hurt Ben’s feet. He lay back on the sheets, familiar from his bed at home but new over this plasticky mattress.

  “I feel so good,” said Ahmed from his bed across the room. “The people at my table were so nice.” They had let him know that none of the dishes contained any pork.

  Ben didn’t respond.

  “You know the only thing that is missing here?” Ahmed asked.

  “Hm?”

  “There is no swimming pool.”

  “We have all the ponds.”

  “But there should be a pool. For the winter.”

  “I guess.”

  “Ben?”

  “Yeah?”

  Ahmed wanted to say that his father would be overjoyed if he knew that someone like Ben was Ahmed’s roommate. Someone so able to demonstrate the right ways to be.

  “Please remind me to tell you about Mr. Underhill.”

  “Okay.”

  “I am happy that we are roommates.”

  Soon Ahmed went still.

  The light was still on. Ben was about to call out to Ahmed, to figure out a system of who would turn out the light on any given night. But instead Ben climbed back down the ladder and went to the wall by the door.

  In the darkness Ben realized he would need a clip lamp at the end of his bunk. He kept his hands out in front of him and his steps were slow. Already he couldn’t remember what the room looked like.

  When he was back up in bed, feeling what he supposed was homesickness but also without any desire to be back in his parents’ house, he thought he saw slight phosphorescence hanging in the air above him. He couldn’t tell whether he was seeing it or whether it was leftover spots on his retina from the ceiling light. He reached up and was touching the ceiling far before he expected to.

  He stroked his fingertips along the glowing spots, and the texture was like crumbs. He realized that some earlier kid had stuck glow-in-the-dark stars up here, and some later kid had done an incomplete job scraping them down.

  He saw that first person—maybe it was a girl; this had been a girls’ dorm once—early in the semester, imagining the wonderful scene that all the stars would create. This girl lifted her hand to Ben when the upper-formers came for them later that night.

  * * *

  “The bessssssst!

  “The besssssst, the besssssst, the besssssst!” All the other upper-formers were looking at Ennis now too. Ennis stopped and went quiet but was still hunched over.

  “Newbs!” whispered Ennis, then finally straightened up. He paused again; he seemed to be dragging his tongue along behind him. “Tonight we’re going to see who is the toughest among you! All-out combat, last one standing wins.”

  Ennis walked closer and stood in front of each newb one by one and looked hard in his eyes, and each newb kept his gaze down. When it was Ben’s turn and he smelled Ennis’s breath, he lowered his eyes but tried to give a little smile in the meantime, a nod that he was on board with all of it. The fact that he was Teddy’s brother, and that he was going to dominate the squash team, of course those things were known to them.

  Ahmed seemed confused, and Ben half wished he had explained what was going to happen before they had come down here. But another part of him was happy that Ahmed would have to learn this way. Ennis approached Ahmed and stared at him, and Ahmed returned the stare but pulled his head back to keep a civilized distance away, his hair touching the wall, and after nearly half a minute he finally closed his eyes. As Ennis passed to the next kid Ahmed looked after him angrily.

  Finally Ennis reached the end of the row and hoarsely called out, “Give them their gloves.”

  The softer sixth-formers handed out pairs of synthetic-leather hockey gloves and nylon mesh lacrosse gloves. Ben received a pair of hockey gloves, which felt dense and rigid and good for landing a punch.

  Ennis went on. “You think we would just have you fucksticks maul each other? We’re better than that! We have a twist.” He held up a red bandanna that had been folded into a strip. Ben saw that it had been folded the wrong way, with the diagonal edges showing, instead of with the triangular tip folding in. Ennis walked up behind Jed Beck, the tallest and most solid newb, eventually the football team’s starting tight end, and tied the bandanna over his eyes. The movements were rough and jerky, and Jed’s head moved with them.

  Several of the sixth-formers had bandannas and each approached a different newb, and quickly almost half the group was blindfolded. Hideo Nakamura moved his blindfold down a little so that it better covered his eyes.

  But when one of the sixth-formers got to Ahmed, Ahmed pulled his head away.

  “I do not want it,” said Ahmed.

  “I don’t care.” The sixth-former went to lift the bandanna to Ahmed’s face again.

  “No,” replied Ahmed.

  Everyone without a blindfold was watching them.

  “I would prefer to leave,” Ahmed said.

  Ennis walked right up to Ahmed and again brought his face very close. “If you leave, Ahmed, life gets much, much harder for everyone else.”

  Ahmed shrugged and let his shoulders fall. “That is your choice.”

  Ahmed stepped around Ennis and padded out of the cellar in his flip-flops. Everyone looked after him and then turned back to the sixth-formers. Ben felt sorry for them.

  Ennis looked around at everyone, his eyes moving quickly from face to face.

  “Your friend Ahmed just made your lives a lot, lot harder.” His head swung around like an unlatched gate in hard wind. Ben could see him searching for a punishment. Second after second went by, and the blindfolded newbs began to pull their bandannas down.

  “Get those fucking blindfolds back on!” Ennis shouted. Ben worried the faculty would hear them. With their clumsy gloved fingers the newbs pushed the bandannas back into place.

  Ben looked toward the emergency exit door and saw several gallon jugs of Deer Park springwater along the wall. He lifted his chin and caught Ennis’s attention. Then he jutted his chin toward the water jugs, and Ennis turned and saw them, then turned back to Ben and smiled. Later Ben wondered what the jugs had been doing there. Was the school pathetically preparing for a power outage?

  And so each of the newbs was forced to drink a gallon of water, and the blindfolds went back on. The upper-formers pushed them all into the middle of the floor and they stood loosely together as though at a middle school dance. The skin of Ben’s upper arms and back came against the moving skin of the other boys, and he heard the flat sound of a glove against flesh, and the fight had started.

  Even through the blindfold and around his painful swinging belly, Ben tried to project the magnanimity of the generous conqueror. Although he would prevail now, it wasn’t anything personal, it was all in the service of greater fellowship. This was exactly the kind of thing he had never done at Sidney.

  But then padded fabric grazed his chest and something hit him in the neck, right in the widest part of his windpipe, and he wrenched his upper body away from the source of this, the impact stopping his breath. He heaved but kept it down. He crouched low. The water was so heavy in his stomach that it almost seemed to pull him forward. He thought for a second about shuffling off to the side and out of the scrum, but then a shin met the side of his head and he was taken over by anger, outrage that his unspoken attitude of generosity had been disregarded, and so with his left arm he swept back and forth, then lunged with his right every time he met anything solid. He heard the ragged breathing of all the newbs around him, the hoarse whispered shouting of the upper-formers. He smelled someone’s metallic breath for an instant, and they smelled his metallic sweat.

  In a later era, when anyone could have quietly recorded this and
posted the video, it would have been an artifact, something that wouldn’t go away, but even the start of the ordeal was now a decaying memory for all of them. A bolt of numbness under his chin, and his front teeth clacked together and he felt a floating speck of tooth with his tongue and he went hard to his knees. He reproached himself for not continuing on but he pawed his blindfold down and went on all fours back to the wall, where now about three quarters of the newbs sat. Josh Yost and Hideo had vomited into the storm drain. Ben looked around and there were three kids left, not directly facing each other, and then two of them smacked heads together by accident and leaned away and sat down. Jed was declared the winner.

  The newbs went back upstairs inside their own hoods of quiet. Ben found Ahmed sleeping in his high bed.

  Ahmed was facing out toward the room, profligate with trust, and Ben could tell he was deep down and without dreams. Ben climbed up to his bed now and wondered if he had had so much water that he might wet the bed. He ran his tongue over the small new roughness in his left front incisor.

  With his belly spreading on either side of his spine, Ben again looked up at the very slight phosphorescence. He imagined his girl again, peeling the backings off each star and moon and ringed planet. Ben lay there looking at their remains, trying to stay awake until he needed to pee again.

  3. Thermocline

  BEN WOKE UP; HIS BED WAS DRY.

  After morning Chapel, they had a day of orientation games. Ahmed loved the ha-ha game, where each person rested his or her head on the last person’s stomach and then tried not to laugh as the “ha”s came down the line, but he declined to pass oranges from neck to neck because it seemed too intimate.

  The next day was Monday and every student received a thick three-by-five card with his or her schedule printed in a grid of days and hours. The newbs racing from building to building, trying to look like they knew where they were going, upperclassmen giving them good and bad directions as the spirit moved them. Ben saw the other kids from the Hawley basement, looked at them and nodded, and they gave each other half-smiles but turned toward getting through school. Ennis and the other Hawley upper-formers stood outside the Schoolhouse, laughing conspicuously as though newb boxing had been such a success that they hardly remembered it.

  Ben sat in English, relishing the use of his new notebooks and pens. At lunch he sat with Hutch and Evan, and he was glad they had recognized him even though he knew that was stupid. The two of them laughed when Ben told them about the previous night; for them it had been Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em Newb, where the upper-formers carried them on their shoulders and they punched from there. Ben showed them his new little chipped tooth.

  Ben met briefly with his advisor, Mr. Markson, who was teaching English and philosophy. When Ben came for his appointment, Markson was at his desk wearing a beyond-insouciantly wrinkled blue blazer and a maroon knit tie with a square end. Ben couldn’t tell why anyone would ever wear that kind of tie. Markson had a ginger, armpitty beard and ginger hair long enough to pull into a ponytail but that he tucked behind his ears as he looked at Ben’s schedule. He said it seemed pretty balanced.

  He asked if they might take a walk for the rest of their meeting; he had been cooped up all day. They headed out across the playing fields. Markson was six-six at least. He had a constant bend in his posture, but the hunch didn’t convey defeat as much as a willingness to listen to shorter people without forcing them to exert themselves to be heard.

  There was strong sun and a constant breeze, the kind of day that seems almost coercively upbeat. They watched a heavy staff member go by on a riding mower.

  They walked near the tennis courts, and just to make conversation Ben said, “They’re having captain’s practice for squash already.”

  “Oh, right, you’re a squash player too,” Markson said, and Ben almost wished he hadn’t known. “I played a tiny bit in college. My roommate junior and senior year was a phenomenal player, though, an Indian guy. It’s a great game.”

  Ben suddenly understood it was Markson’s first semester as a teacher.

  “Did you go here too?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah, it’s taking a little time to adjust, actually. I’m still looking at all the teachers and wondering if they’re going to find me doing something wrong.”

  Ben wanted to tell him he was going to do fine, but instead they came back around to the Schoolhouse, where Markson said Ben would know where to find him. Ben nodded and was about to head inside when Markson held up his hand and said, “Hey, Ben, please feel free to come talk to me. Obviously I’m faculty, but it’s not hard for me to remember what it’s like here. And if you need to talk about home stuff”—Markson stalled here, smiling—“just, whatever, I’m happy to talk.”

  Ben nodded again, hoping he looked sincere, and Markson released him with another wave.

  Ahmed turned out to be in Ben’s Approaches to History section, and he seemed untouched by the night before, quietly delighted to be in class, nodding along with the cadence of the teacher’s words. Hutch and Ahmed were in bio with Ben, Evan in geometry, no one in Latin. Harry made his boys take Latin because it was a prerequisite for being a Western man.

  Ben was shocked by how much work each class immediately assigned. He pinched the total pages he was supposed to read by Wednesday for Approaches; it was as thick as the side of his hand. He had to read half of Oedipus Rex and he had a twenty-question problem set for geometry. Conceptually he had known that St. James would have classes on Saturdays, but now the reality of it bore down on him. He left his last class at three thirty and thought he was going to have to work for the rest of the day and night.

  But Hutch and Evan said they were going out to the boat docks with some guys because afternoon sports started Tuesday and everyone was going to the docks today. St. James was entirely traversed by water, and almost anywhere on campus a stretch of water reflected the surrounding buildings, trees, and sky. Even after the crew team had moved to Long Pond, a mile off campus, the school kept a dock on Sluice Pond, which extended directly away from the chapel, to give students a place to swim. From the back of the Dish you could make out the hunter-green boathouse, decommissioned now, and the plain wood dock extending down over the water.

  Ben, Hutch, and Evan saw small groups heading into the woods on a path that started opposite the chapel. The three of them didn’t speak as they stepped from the grass of the chapel lawn onto the white-pine needles carpeting the path, each with a towel over his shoulder.

  Ben felt the beauty of the forest—shifting coins of light over the rocks and tree trunks, air fragrant with pine sap and the slight cooking smell of leaf cover in the hot sun—but he was a little worried about what it would be like out on the docks, how he was going to get his work done, and something else further out, harder to name. He was having to put effort into feeling how beautiful it was. Was this beauty the way he thought it would be? Hutch and Evan did not seem to be expending this kind of effort.

  The boys kept walking for what seemed like a long time, and just as Ben wondered if they had overshot, the woods yielded up the back of the boathouse: green clapboard with crumbly yellow catkins clinging to the eaves and small windows. They could hear girl-laughter on its far side, and then the light fizz of conversation, and finally the dock itself creaking up and down with the miniature pond waves. The path passed behind the boathouse and then alongside it, allowing no view of the people sitting out there, until two stone steps led directly up onto the main platform.

  As Ben climbed the steps, he had a brief vision of catching the toe of his flip-flop on the edge of the deck and sprawling out in front of everyone, slapping his face down against the pressure-treated wood. Ben startled himself; he hadn’t expected these scenarios to play out in his mind at St. James.

  But he placed each foot surely and took his first step onto the dock, and instead of all the conversations zipping closed and every face turning toward them, a few people looked over but mostly kept talking or lazily looking down at
textbooks. Ben saw two people smoking and just made out the high burning smell. Three groups of guys sat against the front wall of the boathouse, and other groups of threes and fours had established encampments farther down the dock. It was pretty crowded, but with no threats that Ben could see right away.

  The pond was tea-black against the corrugated band of trees around it. The sun was just hot enough to make Ben’s skin tighten. Evan, Ben, and Hutch headed for an open spot on the dock right out in the sun and spread out their towels.

  Once they had settled themselves, Ben looked at a group of three girls lying facedown to their right. In the time it takes to blow out a match he took in the all-over downy fuzz, the secret moles, the ridges along the Achilles tendons, the twin dimples at the small of the back, the unbroken expanse of skin from the top of one girl’s neck all the way down to the waistband of her bikini bottoms: she had unclasped her top. He saw the crease of flesh where her breast swelled out below her shaved armpit.

  Ben remembered himself almost immediately and looked back down at the rainbow terry cloth conforming itself to the gaps between the planks of the dock. But he looked back at that little fold, desperate not to get caught looking, then away, then back again. This girl had a neck so beautiful that Ben wished English had a better word for it than “neck.”

  Hutch laughed. “Jesus, Ben, it looks like you’re trying to see through her.”

  Ben couldn’t tell if the girls had heard it; none of them moved. Slowly Ben turned toward Hutch, and when there had been no reaction from the girls’ group for long enough, he lunged over and punched Hutch as hard as he could in the middle of the thigh. Hutch fell back and hooted with laughter, and Evan pounded Hutch’s other thigh, and Hutch hooted again, and Ben was happy and worried they were making a spectacle of themselves.