As Fergus crossed the narrow, empty road Liam said something low to Tom and Doug. Robert tapped my side.
“He’s going to grab him.”
Coyle tensed, ready to sprint across the street to help. Fergus was almost to Liam when he held his hands up like he’d apologize.
“I was just saying you don’t own the neighborhood—”
Then two things happened quickly. Liam reached to grab Fergus’s shoulder and Fergus ducked beneath his arms and, pivoting, hit him hard in the kidney. Fergus had spent years sparring with Coyle. He knew how to box. He really nailed him. Liam jerked to the side and let out an uff sound and fell on one knee. Fergus leapt away and skipped across the street.
“I’m too fast, can’t catch me,” he called.
Liam sat down in the road and then fell, holding his side. Fergus started prancing back and forth on the other side of the road.
“Down in three! Down in three! I am the greatest!”
Robert turned to Coyle.
“I love your family,” he said.
“Idiot,” Coyle said to Fergus.
“What?” Fergus said. “I am the greatest!”
A car had stopped across the street.
“Are you ok?” the driver said to Liam, who was lying on his side.
“We better get going,” Robert said.
We hurried away and got in Robert’s car and drove back to our house and half an hour later Coyle, Robert, and I were standing in our driveway when a green Jaguar pulled up and stopped in front of the house. Liam was in the passenger seat. In the driver’s seat was a very complacent-looking guy wearing a camel-colored coat. He stepped out of the car and Robert waved to him.
“Hey, Mr. Griggs,” Robert called.
“Hello, Robert,” he said.
“Is Liam ok?”
“He will be. No thanks to you.”
Robert held his hands up.
“Not me who hit him. I come in peace, Mr. Griggs. You know that.”
“Cut it, Robert” was all he said.
The screen door creaked open and Dad appeared in the doorway. He came down the porch steps. Mr. Griggs motioned to Liam to get out of the car.
“Your son got in a fight with my son. Hit him in the kidney. Cheap shot.”
Dad turned on Coyle, who held his hands up.
“Wasn’t me,” Coyle said.
Dad looked at me.
“Not me, either. It was Fergus,” I said.
Dad’s expression changed. He glanced at Liam, who was six-foot-two and weighed at least two hundred pounds. Fergus was about a foot shorter.
“Fergus!” Dad yelled.
A moment later the door opened. Fergus came out, grinning, then saw Liam and his father at the bottom of the driveway.
“Get over here,” Dad said.
Fergus walked down the steps slowly.
Mr. Griggs saw Fergus and seemed bewildered. Robert turned away, holding laughter.
“Is this the kid?” Mr. Griggs asked Liam.
Liam kept his eyes down.
“He hit me before I could do anything,” Liam said.
“He was grabbing for me,” Fergus said. “So, yeah, I fought back.”
Liam’s father turned to Liam, who shrugged a little.
“Well, tell him you’re sorry,” Dad said. “Can’t go around hitting people.”
“Sorry,” Fergus said. “Didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Liam’s father looked like his head would explode.
“Get in the car,” Mr. Griggs said to Liam.
Mr. Griggs looked back at my dad.
“Won’t happen again,” Dad said.
Mr. Griggs nodded, and as he was getting back in the car, Dad said to Fergus, loud enough that Mr. Griggs could hear, “Next time, pick on someone your own size.”
Robert, Coyle, and I burst out laughing. Liam’s father gunned the engine.
That was the second-to-last day of the coupon book sales.
* * *
—
By the morning of the last day we calculated that we had sold more than eight hundred coupon books, which was a record. Liam’s team had sold less than six hundred, so we were pretty confident that we had won, but on the last day of the contest Robert, Coyle, and I walked over to the administrative offices to check the tallies and saw that the Gladiators were now winning.
“Impossible,” Robert said. “Must be a misprint.”
Robert went into the administrative offices, and when he came back out he told us that it wasn’t a mistake. Tom’s and Liam’s fathers had each bought two hundred and fifty coupon books that morning. That was five thousand dollars. There was no way we could make up the deficit in the time we had left. Even in the administrative offices there was some grumbling that it wasn’t exactly in the spirit of the thing to have the parents buy the victory for their kids, but it was all for charity, anyway, and an escalating competition was exactly what the Chandler Foundation wanted.
“Maybe we get everyone together and make one last push,” Robert said, but we all knew there was no way. If it was fifty or a hundred coupon books, maybe we could have sold them. But we were now behind by three hundred coupon books, and to sell three hundred books in a day would be impossible.
After school we were all out at the bike racks. Robert paced back and forth, cursing. Coyle stared off with a fixed expression. If you didn’t know him you might think he didn’t care. But it was the opposite. He cared too much.
“Doesn’t it bug you?” Robert said.
“Whatever,” Coyle said.
Coyle was sinking into himself, like he did when he was disappointed.
“Hello, boys.” It was Robert’s father, pulling up in his car. “Are you basking in your victory?”
“Nope,” Robert said. “Stewing in our defeat.”
Robert’s father got out and Robert told his father what had happened. Mr. Dainty went over the numbers carefully. I could tell he was suspicious that Robert was making an excuse for losing. He saw he wasn’t.
Just then our father walked up. He had also come to pick us up.
“Come here a minute,” Mr. Dainty said to our father. “We gotta talk.”
Mr. Dainty and my dad walked off, and when they came back Mr. Dainty said, “Al and I have decided to make a joint donation to the Chandler Foundation. We’d like to buy five hundred books, just like the Corleys and the Griggses.”
“Yes!” Robert shouted.
A shadow passed over Coyle’s face.
“You don’t have to,” he said to our father.
“We want to. It’s all for a good cause,” Mr. Dainty said quickly. “And I wouldn’t be doing it if you hadn’t already put in the work and were beaten by some underhand maneuverings. Both me and Al want to contribute.”
Coyle knew that Dad couldn’t have put in much, if anything.
“Thanks, Dad,” Robert said. “Thanks, Mr. Brennan.”
“Agh. Not a big deal,” Dad said, looking a little sheepish.
Mr. Dainty went to his car and wrote out something and then he took my dad aside and after a while they shook hands. Then Mr. Dainty walked back to us.
“I have the check right here,” Mr. Dainty said. “It’s from both of us.”
“Yes!” Robert said again.
He snatched the check and went in and registered this final sale and that was it. An hour later the contest ended, we won, and Mr. Dainty, along with our father, were made Knights of the Chandler Foundation, which we mocked for the next ten years. Our father, patron of the arts, philanthropist, Chandler Foundation Knight.
A few weeks later they had the Chandler Foundation award ceremony, and after the ceremony the parents and family members lingered. Coyle stood among the crowd, pleased with himself but trying not to show i
t. When he was younger, Coyle had always been the captain of his teams, the president of the student council, at the center table in the cafeteria. He had been cast out of these positions of esteem around the time he turned eleven. It was because we were poor and our lives were harder than the other kids and we acted differently than them. That had mattered for a while and then, slowly, it had stopped mattering. That year Coyle had been invited back into the same group he’d been cast out of years before. I saw all this clearly that day at the banquet. Coyle had rejoined the mainstream.
Robert, of course, was in his element at the banquet. He paraded back and forth. He rubbed it in in front of the Corleys and the Griggses. He basked in our triumph.
At one point Robert walked over and shook my parents’ hands and said congratulations and Mom and Dad said congratulations to him and for a moment it felt like we all belonged there in Seneca and at that fancy school. At the time I decided it was an artificial feeling brought on by the money that Mr. Dainty had spent, but I’m not sure this is true. I think now that the family probably fit in more than we realized. We didn’t have the house or the cars or the clothes that other families around us had, but we’d grown up in that world and we more or less knew what was expected of us. By the age of sixteen I knew for a fact that in the upper-class world there was shame in poverty and casual ridicule of anyone who appeared not to have money, but I also knew there were methods of defusing this snobbery, and to some extent, it had power only if you let it have power. Coyle had proved that. In my heart I would always be on the blue-collar side of things. I would always be aware of the kids who had grown up with privilege and how kids who had a lot of money immediately gravitated to other kids who did, and that bugged me. But I wasn’t completely inept socially. Almost despite myself, I had learned how to operate in that rich-kid world, and that was a valuable skill. I was a New Trier student, and I would be marked by it for the rest of my life.
The Chandler Foundation award ceremony was my last real interaction with Robert. I saw him in school afterward a few times, but we didn’t talk much and half a year later he left for college. I hardly considered his departure at the time—he wasn’t a close friend—but since then he’s grown in my memory. Robert was both a competitor and a collaborator with our family and was the closest thing I ever had to a friend on the other side of that class line. And I don’t just mean kids from families with money, because there were lots of kids with money at New Trier, but I mean that group of kids who let you know they had money, whose every action was saturated with that world of privilege. Through Robert I had begun to understand how to act around people who knew that they were privileged and expected others to know it. Even more, I began to understand that all these well-to-do kids weren’t against us, that the doors might be open if we tried them. That was a useful lesson for me and one I’m not sure I would have learned if it weren’t for Robert.
Years later, when I considered New Trier and our place in it, I thought of Robert Dainty as the epitome of the New Trier student: competent, driven, self-satisfied, crafty, and entitled. After we moved on from New Trier I didn’t know whether I resented him or felt indebted to him. I never talked to him again. I think about him all the time.
8
Departure
Any life, no matter how long and complex, is made up of a single moment; the moment when a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
—Jorge Luis Borges
All through February and March of that year when I was a junior and Coyle was a senior, I was aware of the mail. We didn’t talk about it that much, but when I came into the house my eyes always went to the newel post where the mail was put, and I scanned the letters and envelopes to see if there was anything from universities. It was college acceptance and rejection time, and Coyle was waiting.
Up until his junior year I thought Coyle would go to Harvard. But then Coyle had spiraled and gotten a few B’s. He’d ditched school a few times and had disciplinary reports. No one seemed to know what this meant for his chances, but we were pretty sure it meant he would not be getting into the very top schools. There were enough kids with perfect transcripts that if you did not have a perfect record you had to settle for something other than the best.
Coyle had applied to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Brown, Virginia, Cornell, and the University of Illinois. Coyle figured he’d at least get into U of I, but his college counselor wasn’t so sure.
“The recent grades are weighted more heavily. You did not end well,” he said.
This comment freaked my parents out. My attitude was more complicated. A part of me wanted Coyle to do well, as it was a harbinger of how I would do myself. But it was also a competition, and I knew that if Coyle got accepted everywhere it would annoy me, because there was no way I was getting into an Ivy League school or anything close to that. I’d almost flunked out my sophomore year.
So I waited along with Coyle, twisted inside, half fearing, half eager. And then one day in late March I walked in to see a letter from Harvard on the newel post. The envelope was pretty thin.
Coyle came in right after me. He picked up the envelope. Mom was in the kitchen. She pretended she didn’t know what was going on, but of course she did. She was the one who’d taken the mail and put it on the newel post.
Coyle glanced at me, annoyed that I was hovering nearby. I think he considered going to his room to open it in private, but that would have meant admitting that he cared. Coyle tore the letter open casually, glanced at it, and tossed it onto the table in the hallway.
“Rejection,” he said. He walked past me and into the kitchen, “Shot down by Harvard.”
“Oh, forget them,” Mom said. “It’s only the first. You’ll get in somewhere.”
“Sure,” he said, and went on down the stairs.
I stood holding my mouth shut tightly, trying not to smile. I realized I was relieved. It would just be too annoying if Coyle got into Harvard.
Princeton came the next day. Again I got home before Coyle. I saw the envelope on the newel post. It was another skinny letter. I was filled with a combination of vindictive glee, guilt, and uncertainty. I didn’t want Coyle to have an undiluted success, but if he didn’t get in anywhere that meant it would be hopeless for me.
An hour later Coyle walked in with his baseball glove. He saw the letter from Princeton. He opened it.
“Rejection from Princeton,” he called out.
He tossed the letter aside. Mom looked like she wanted to hug him, but he just dropped his head and walked past her and went on down to his room.
That night at dinner everyone was careful not to talk about it, but I woke in the night and saw Dad’s light was on and heard him huffing as he did push-ups and sit-ups at two-thirty in the morning. Mom made an extra-large breakfast the next morning, with bacon and coffee cake. Fergus said he wished Coyle got rejected every day. Coyle himself didn’t talk about the rejection. He pretended he didn’t care.
Later that day the four kids all had to clean out the basement of a building Dad was renovating. We worked all afternoon carrying bricks from a collapsed wall to an outside Dumpster. Later, on the way home, we stopped by the lakeshore. It was mid-March and about twenty-five degrees out and the wind was blasting off the water. Coyle had not talked about the rejections, but he had been distracted all day. Our whole upbringing was on trial. It all depended on the results of Coyle’s applications, and I knew he felt that pressure. Coyle got out of the car and without a word walked out to the bluff where we could see waves crashing and tumbling in toward shore. There was ice built up onshore and over the pier. Water frothed and churned around the pier. Waves struck the barrier rocks at the end of the pier, exploding in glittering cascades. There was a red light on a pole at the end of the pier.
“Let’s go,” Coyle said.
“Go where?” Fergus said.
“Out onto the pier,” Coyle sai
d. “We’ll make it out to the red light.”
I looked doubtfully at the crashing waves and rocking swells. The pier was not the kind that is on stilts. It was a concrete slab that went straight out into the water and was only a few feet above the level of the water. There were no railings. The largest waves broke across the surface of the pier, which was covered with a skin of ice. There were icicles hanging off the underlip of the pier.
“If a wave comes over we’ll get swept in and die,” I said.
“So, we’ll avoid the waves,” Coyle said. “Big deal.”
“Why are we doing this?” Fergus said.
“Who else is going to do it?”
Fergus was pleased by that logic.
“Do I have to go?” Maddy asked.
“No,” I said, and Coyle wheeled on me, furious.
“Willie!” he hissed. “She does have to go.”
That was all he said, but I understood that the walk on the pier was more than just a dare. It was what Coyle was doing instead of talking about colleges. He wanted us all with him. After a moment, I relented.
“We’re all doing it,” I told Maddy.
So, I gave in to Coyle, that one time, when he wanted to walk on the icy pier during the college acceptance season.
“Yes!” we all said at the same time.
Coyle started down the bluff, not even looking back to see if we were following. Fergus, Maddy, and I all looked at one another, waiting to see if anyone would resist, but none of us did. Fergus followed Coyle and then I followed him and Maddy followed me and we all walked down and reached the beach, where frigid gusts blasted off the water. Spray stung our faces. We stood together at the base of the pier, on the wet, slick, icy surface.
“Maddy will hold on to me,” Coyle said. “If I turn back, follow me. If I go forward, you keep going. If anyone falls in, swim to shore. We’ll try to help.”
I looked at the swirling, slushy, ice-filled water around the pier. Enormous ice chunks were grinding and knocking against one another in the waves. There was no way we could swim in that water if we fell in.
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