The Expectations Read online

Hutch and Evan took off their shirts—Evan’s chest was almost concave—but Ben left his on for now. He didn’t want to get a farmer’s tan, but he was self-conscious about how thin he was. He hoped some imagined onlooker would understand that he had a strong body for squash: lanky but whip-supple on his right side, solid legs and hips. But who notices anyone else’s hips? Everyone would likely just see a person so thin that his somewhat-tallness couldn’t be much of an asset.

  Ben tried to look anywhere but at that fold of flesh and his eyes fell on the corner of the boathouse roof. Before he had ever seen the boat docks, he’d heard the story of Teddy doing a backflip off the boathouse roof into the water. This was almost unimaginably dangerous, Ben had been informed, not only because the water was only about two feet deep where a jumper could reasonably reach from the edge of the roof, but also because there was this big white-pine tree just to the left of the ideal flight path, and so you had to pass within a few inches of the tree if you didn’t want to go too far to the right and land on the dock itself.

  Now Ben saw that very pine tree, with its ancient sap stains running down from the holes of missing limbs. It was thinner than Ben had imagined it, and its back side was browning unevenly as though hosting a parasite. Ben realized that on his earlier trips to SJS he hadn’t seen the whole school—or even the majority of it—but he had built a complete version in his mind, and now that he was actually here everything seemed to have conspired to be slightly different. The idea of climbing up onto this roof, let alone jumping off it, would never have occurred to him—not even an inkling—if he hadn’t known Teddy had already done it.

  And then Ahmed’s face appeared over the steps and he climbed up and stepped onto the dock. Ahmed carried a caramel leather Coach satchel and wore clompy white basketball mid-tops. He had one of his dark brown, dense-as-carpet bath towels draped over his shoulders. Already once when Ben was alone in the room he had pinched one of these towels between his thumb and forefinger; it was a very serious towel.

  Ahmed was glad to see that Ben was at the boat docks; it meant that he had made the right choice to come here after hearing about it in maths. So far the beauty and pace was almost blinding. His advisor had said, “Ask for help if you need it.”

  The kids around them looked over at Ahmed. “Oh, Jesus,” said Evan softly. The three girls next to Ben turned their heads to see. Ahmed waved to Ben, but instead of coming over he headed to sit with Hideo, who was sitting by himself over toward the edge of the dock.

  Ahmed greeted Hideo, laid down his towel and straightened it carefully, then took a large Nikon SLR camera out of the satchel and began taking pictures of the dock and the trees. The auto film advance was loud across the dock. He pointed the camera straight up into the blueness of the sky and took a picture. He took a picture of Ben and then placed the camera on top of the satchel.

  Ben just lay back on his towel and closed his eyes, and the sun glowed red through his eyelids. Hutch started making conversation with the girls next to them. Ben heard they were from Paige House, and it became clear that Paige was the dorm where the good-looking girls who controlled fates lived. When Ben opened his eyes again he saw that the girl had reclasped her top and was sitting up with her arms loosely hugging her knees.

  “Weeksy, you comin in?” Hutch looked over and pulled his feet out of his flip-flops.

  “Gimme some time, I want to get really hot before I go in.”

  “You, my friend, are never going to be hot no matter how long you stay in the sun.”

  “Go drown,” Ben said, and he thought it sounded pretty cool. Ben was starting to see how he would soon feel easy with them. Hutch and Evan walked down to the end of the dock and dove in, the only ones in the water.

  Ben reclined again and closed his eyes. When he had started winning at squash he had expected that suddenly his body would change, that he would look more like a man.

  “Hold on, ‘Weeksy’? Are you Teddy Weeks’s brother?”

  Ben opened his eyes again. From the encampment to his left, another girl was looking at him.

  She had a weakish chin and brown-green eyes that were slightly too close together. She was wearing a lightweight blue sweatshirt even in the heat but wasn’t sweating, and she sat up hugging her knees like the other girl had done a few minutes before.

  “You’re Teddy Weeks’s brother?” she said again.

  “No.” Ben had been working up this line for the last few days: “He’s my brother.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Well…I just, why can’t he be my brother instead of me being his?”

  “I don’t…follow.” The other girls next to this girl were listening now, one Asian and one blond-ish, neither of them particularly good-looking.

  “Why do I have to be defined by him, I guess is what I’m saying.”

  “Oh, good, because I was going to say he was an enormous asshole, but because you’re not defined by him, I don’t have to say that,” she said. “But you two were, um, born from the same woman? Who was impregnated by the same man.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so, what’s your name, Not-Teddy?”

  “I’m Ben.”

  They reached to shake hands, and Ben saw why she was wearing a sweatshirt. As she leaned over to him and extended her hand, the fabric went taut with the weight of her breasts. It was all Ben could do not to look down at her chest.

  “Alice.” She let go and had to lean back slightly to bring her chest behind her legs again.

  “I’m Ben.”

  “Yup, you said that.”

  The breeze turned and her smell came to Ben and then went away so quickly that he wasn’t sure it was hers. He understood that if he didn’t say anything the conversation would fail.

  “Did he really jump off the boathouse roof?” Ben asked.

  “Who?”

  “Ted—”

  “—I’m not sure who you mean, this ‘Teddy’ person…”

  Ben laughed. “All right.” He looked back to the front of her sweatshirt but now it just looked like a collection of fabric. Another pair of girls came up the steps onto the dock, laughing easily. They spotted the blond girl sitting in Alice’s group and rushed over and hugged and laid their stuff down and started talking about their summers. To make room for them everyone had to move over. And then Alice was closer to Ben, almost as close as if they had chosen to sit together. Unmistakably now her scent came to Ben, of her shampoo but also of her skin. Later in the dining hall, Ben would pass Vanessa Bates and have her good smell pass over him, but Vanessa’s smell would be like a clean, empty room. Here on the dock Alice smelled, if Ben could have articulated it, slightly like fingers gummed in rosemary, slightly like freshly dried saliva, slightly like overturned sand in a few minutes of sun, slightly like clothes worn for a few days after washing. Ben was unequipped for it.

  Alice’s scent reminded Ben of Nina from home, and thinking about Nina he winced there in the sunshine. Ben had liked Nina so much, and after he had won Nationals he had tried to put his hand up Nina’s shirt even though he knew she didn’t want him to.

  Upstairs at his house, with his mother down in the kitchen, he and Nina had pretended to play pool on the miniature Brookstone pool table on the landing until finally he leaned over and kissed her, and she kissed him back. Ben didn’t necessarily need to put his hand on her chest; he was amazed just to be kissing her. But he wanted to have done it. His fingers found the seam of her button-up shirt. As soon as the back of his hand was against the skin next to her navel she, still kissing him, put her hand on his chest as though to caress it but with her elbow cleared his arm away. Pretending to take her false caress sincerely Ben brought his fingers back to the hem of her shirt. Again without ceasing to kiss him this time she pinned his hand against her abdomen with her elbow and he couldn’t pretend anymore. He had thought to himself, The girl at SJS is going to want me to do this. Ben realized now that much of his drive to put his hand up Nina’s shirt was from hearing about H
utch and Heather Reese that summer.

  Again now he caught Alice’s scent, and then he couldn’t remember what Nina’s had been like.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “You settling in okay?” Alice asked him.

  “Yeah, so far so good.”

  She laughed. “Liar.”

  Ben laughed. He quickly looked at her face again, trying to make it pretty.

  “What form are you in?” he asked.

  “Fourth.”

  “So it was tough getting used to it, like homesickness, or what?”

  “It’s a year in and I still feel like I’m trying to get used to it.”

  “Huh.”

  “Do you have a roommate?” she asked.

  Ben lowered his voice. “See Mr. Smooth over there with the orthopedic shoes and the camera and the freaking satchel? That’s my roommate.”

  Alice turned to look, then smiled to Ben without warmth, and he worried he was coming off churlish.

  Alice studied Ben as he sat there on his towel, his flat-black hair and his long, smooth, almost snakelike body.

  He was too unsure to fill out his looks, but Alice knew that soon he’d get over his self-consciousness. Soon he’d build up some ease—he’d get a few quizzes back and realize he could hang with the work, he’d see girls smile to him after Seated even if his joke wasn’t so funny, whatever team he was on would win a few games, he would wear his shoes the right way—and then he’d disappear into that ease. Alice had seen so many of them make the same change, from glowing with discomfort along the walls of a dance or drifting back from the football fields under planetary helmets, to folding into the language, draping themselves across the chairs in the Dish Common Room, hooting and shouting in the dining hall when a group dared each other to say “penis,” each louder than the last, going with the hunch that if they leaned in to kiss that girl she would likely reciprocate.

  They would launch into speaking during class, trusting that cogency would emerge along the way, letting the act of talking itself lend shape to their thoughts. She could almost feel it happening in Ben moment by moment there beside her. She wished occasionally that she could break off a piece of this confidence, sneak up on one of them and snip it off like a lock of hair.

  Alice looked again at Ahmed, then returned her eyes to Ben.

  “Did he really have two servants helping him set up his room?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Everyone knows about that.”

  Ben suddenly was convinced that Ahmed had overheard them, but when he turned to check, Ahmed was looking the other way at a few other kids who were coming up the steps.

  “Oh well. You win some, you lose some,” she said. “How’d you chip your tooth?”

  “A Hawley newb is a quiet newb,” he said.

  She didn’t laugh.

  From behind them now, three upperclassmen stood up and ran to the end of the dock waving their arms over their heads and screaming ironically. They stopped short and fell into the water like felled trees. Hutch and Evan had been hanging on to the side of the dock but now they pushed off and swam in a group with the older kids. The pack of them headed farther out diagonally from the left front corner of the dock. As they moved through the water they gave the expanse a human scale, and Ben was aware of the volume of air across the entire pond.

  The group slowed down, spread out, then seemed to move in insistent, slow zigzags. Finally one of them stopped with an abruptness that didn’t seem possible in open water and shouted something. The rest of them swam to him as he seemed buoyed up with his back toward the sky. Then, unbelievably, he straightened up until he was standing out of the surface of the water, covered only to his lower ankles.

  “Look!” said Ahmed. “Look!” Ben turned and raised his eyebrows to acknowledge that he was looking, and Ahmed lifted his camera and took several photos.

  “Well, the Jesus Rock has been discovered again for the first time,” said Alice. Now four of the kids who had been swimming were standing up in the water—not Hutch or Evan yet. The kids huddled close together, and the surface of the rock looked to be about as big as the top of a large refrigerator.

  Alice went back to talking to her friends, and several more kids stood up and dove in. Over the next twenty minutes different people exchanged places on top of the rock. They stood close and shivered even in the warm air, so near to each other with so much open skin.

  Finally Ben shifted and reached for his towel.

  “I’m jumping in.” He looked over to Alice. “Anyone else?”

  “Go ahead,” Alice said. She hadn’t changed position from leg-hugging.

  He stood up and wriggled out of his shirt, desperate to bury himself in the water so that neither Alice nor anyone else would see his pallor and his thinness; he had a passing image of himself as the ball-chain hanging down from a ceiling lamp. He wanted to run full speed but the uneven planking was too steeply sloped and here and there a nailhead jutted up, so he had to walk down to the end of the dock through the burning of his visibleness. Finally, he leaned into a short, slow dive, crunching into the water, streaming through, the flesh between his toes distinct as the liquid passed over it, then turning over to emerge on his back. He saw everyone facing him from the dock, and it looked like they were spectating his swim. For a second he wondered whether Alice would be impressed that he was swimming, and then realized how stupid that was.

  He lay back into a kind of modified backstroke. The water was just perfect, almost the same temperature as his skin, and for a moment it was hard to tell where his body ended. He looked up at the skeins of cloud set absolutely still across the sky. He felt good.

  After the upper-formers had had their fill of climbing up on the rock and jumping off, they swam back to the dock to sit in the sun again, and the rock became available to newbs. Hutch and Evan were the first, and they stood up there and presented their chests and set their fists on their hips and looked up into the brave future like mountaineers posing for a summit photograph.

  Ben looked back to the dock, and his eyes met Ahmed’s for an instant. He immediately regretted it; it was as though the impact of his gaze had lifted Ahmed to his feet. Ahmed came down to the end of the dock, still with his T-shirt and shoes on. His torso looked like a cake decorator’s icing bag. Ben realized he had been convinced Ahmed couldn’t swim. Without taking off his shoes or shirt, Ahmed leapt into the water with his arms reaching out in front of him as though bracing for a fall, and then his head came above the surface of the water and he started wriggling forward. His face had the determined look of someone cleaning something foul.

  Ben rolled over and took several hard strokes toward the rock with his eyes closed, then picked his head up and saw he was a few feet off course. He corrected his direction and took several more strokes, hoping to get out there before Ahmed could come close. Hutch and Evan were still the only ones up on the rock.

  The sun reached a place that was suddenly late afternoon, and Ben looked across the water to the library and chapel glowing their different shades of umber. He swam to the edge of the rock, looking up at the two other boys, the water turning their blond hair dark, both of them with the first long hairs starting to grow off their chests.

  They cleared a space for Ben, he set his hands on the top surface and started to twist his way up, and Evan took him by the upper arm as he came to standing. Ben steadied himself. He could just see the lighter surface of the rock below the water, and it was slick enough under his feet that he had to keep his knees bent to hold his balance. He looked around at the black plane all around him and the surrounding trees.

  And out farther, rising up from the roof of dense green foliage, was the rounded silver dome of the observatory where his uncle Russell had given the telescope. The last time they were all together, in Palm Beach, the family had been reminded more than once that although Russell could have had it named after himself, he had refrained.

  Des
pite Ben’s repelling him with his mind, Ahmed swam implacably to them. As he came closer, all three of them turned to face him. He reached the rock and set his hands on the edge. He was breathing hard but not panicked, and Ben wondered whether this was the farthest he had ever swum. Had he ever been outside a pool?

  “I love swimming,” he said, looking up to them a little too out of breath to smile. Hutch and Evan laughed, and Ahmed now smiled through his breathing but Ben could see that he knew Hutch and Evan’s laughter wasn’t kind. Ahmed pulled his chest to the side of the rock and leaned onto his hands to begin to climb up.

  “No newbs,” said Evan.

  “Sorry?” said Ahmed, looking up in the middle of his effort.

  “He said, no newbs,” Hutch said, “especially no spoiled brat newbs.”

  “You are new.”

  “Your servants going to carry you up here?” said Evan.

  “You going to buy the Jesus Rock all for yourself?” said Hutch.

  “Maybe build some condos on it, some time-shares, maybe a casino, maybe a mall?”

  Ahmed laughed a laugh with no humor, only shrugging off what they had said, and went again to climb up.

  With his foot Hutch reached out and pushed Ahmed’s right hand away from the rock. Just before Ben’s foot moved to nudge Ahmed’s other hand away, Evan had already done it. Ben could still in his imagination almost feel the softness of his skin meeting Ahmed’s, and he suddenly worried that Alice would see them being mean to him.

  Ben expected Ahmed to look up at him with supplication, but Ahmed didn’t look up at all, and instead just pushed off gently and began to wriggle back toward the dock.

  As Ben looked up, he saw the gray-blue fingernail of Alice’s sweatshirt move out of sight around the side of the boathouse.

  * * *

  The sun came to the tree line and Ben, Hutch, and Evan decided to head to the Dish. With towels around their waists their group came up to the Dish’s side entrance, and a couple other guys from Woodruff, Hutch and Evan’s dorm, approached them. Ben was already keeping an eye out for Alice, feeling a miniature rise and corresponding dip each time he saw someone who could have been and then wasn’t her in his peripheral vision.