And yes, the rumors were true.
They had been sharing quarters in town for nearly twenty years, while maintaining separate residences because there was a clause in the teachers’ contracts about romantic relationships between staff members.
Potts was the head of the Computer Department and the Math Club, and Custer ran the language lab and taught first-year French. There was something so alike about these two, it seemed criminal that they should wake up in the mornings in each other’s beefy arms, and somewhat perverted that they should spend two decades hiding a secret that was obvious to even the youngest of the boys.
After their morning pollutions, as Custer called the ritual of the bath, the toilet, and the morning razor, Potts would sneak out the back door of Custer’s little ground-floor apartment, and quickly grab a Morning Post from the newsstand that Mitch Liu ran on the other side of the fire station across the street. Potts kept the pretense up even for the townies of Watch Point, and Custer would wait a decent ten minutes, and then open her front door and walk up three steps to the street level, all fresh and squeezed into a conservative smock of a suit, her briefcase by her side. She’d wave to Potts, who, across the street, would nod back to her, and then call to her and ask if she cared for coffee; she routinely said no.
It was every day, this performance they had for the uninterested townspeople; and then she would walk up the street, climbing the drive to the school; Potts would arrive several minutes later. Should they pass in the hall, one would pretend the other did not exist.
This particular morning, they rose and separated as usual, and when Custer, her hair pulled back in a French twist, stepped into the room designated as the language lab, with its tape players and headphones, and rows of tapes, records, CDs, and videos stored on shelves along the wall, she hadn’t expected to find a boy hanging by a noose from the large beam that ran the length of the room.
Custer swallowed hard, a million thoughts going through her head; taking the boy down was not one of them. Neither was calling out for help. Instead, she knew what she must do.
She stepped back out of the language lab, and closed the door, then locked it. She glanced up and down the hall. It was still morning-empty.
The students had not yet begun wandering in slowly from the field or dining hall. She walked down the corridor, trying not to picture what she had just seen—
His eyes, bulging—
Tongue, hanging out—
His face, completely blue—
And now, in her memory, was he trying to say something? Were his lips moving? But it was just in her mind. That’s all. It didn’t happen. He was just hanging there.
When she found Potts, already hunched over his gigantic computer monitor and keyboard, tap-tapping away at some program he claimed to be creating that would change the software industry forever, the first thing out of her mouth was, “Potts, I think I’m out of luck.”
Potts managed to calm her, managed to coax the keys to the language lab from her, and wobbled down the corridor ahead of her, muttering to himself. She’d catch up with him every few feet and mutter something about “boy” and “strangled” and “noose” and “dangling,” but Potts was unclear as to just what she meant. They passed Angstrom, nervously bounding down to his own office as if a bomb were about to explode, and when Potts set the key into the lock, Custer grabbed his hand.
“It’s terrible,” she muttered. “Just god-awful.” Tears began squeezing from the edges of her eyelids, and her hands were shaking just like when she’d gone too many days without coffee.
Potts opened the door, and looked around the room. “Custer? You imagining things?” He chortled a bit too much, which annoyed her when he did it, and she knew that he wouldn’t remind her that she may have had a few too many martinis the previous night and not enough food.
Custer -- unable to look in the room again, a room that did not hold a boy hanging from a rope -- began shivering.
Because the face of the boy had become clearer in her mind.
She had known him.
Chapter Eight
It started after gym class, the Baddest of Days, in the locker room, where all bad things in high school tend to originate.
The shower steam had not yet faded, and the morning light filtered through the high translucent windows like something that the chaplain called “a Jesus moment.” The quality of light, within the mist, was quite beautiful and golden, and gave a sepia tint to the half-naked boys running, slipping, pacing in what one of the teachers called “the smelliest locker room this side of the dump.” The smells were socks and jocks and Nikes and New Balance shoes that burst with teenaged boy foot stink like flowers in some horrifying springtime; and someone hadn’t flushed the toilet in stall number three in days because Skipper Fleet had sworn it was the biggest dump he had ever seen in his life and was sure the janitor had done it; and between the steam and the stink and the shouts, it was a hassle and a half to get showered, changed, dried, and ready for third period, and at least one of the seventh graders was complaining about how he was going to catch pneumonia if he didn’t get his hair dry. That Warner kid, who was really weird, had his towel all the way up to his armpits; and everybody and his brother were cracking jokes about it.
The noise was wicked loud, the shouts and calls, and then there was Bilge, whose real name was Billy G. Shea, who refused to take his gym clothes off to shower, whining that he was at Harrow for education and to prepare for college, not to get naked in front of a bunch of jocks; so Bilge and Coach Wright were shouting at each other from the glassed-in office; and Shrike Boucher tormented the seventh graders who had just begun the process of showering off from a muddy morning out on the soccer field.
Shrike had his jockstrap over his head, and began rat-tailing the first seventh grader who came running out of the shower. “It’s a ritual, worms, your first year of showers, you need a little butt-kicking!”
Jim Hook was just spinning the combination on his lock, wondering why he hadn’t prepared for the midterm, and mentally kicking himself for spending half the weekend with Lark. He almost blamed her and then he blamed himself and then he blamed that damn puppy that they had to rescue, but the truth hit him square in the face.
It didn’t matter what he had done on the weekend. He still would not have been ready for the midterm, because he had barely stayed awake in that class the entire seven weeks school had been in session. What’dju expect, Squirt? He asked himself.
One kid shouted, “Hey, what’s the difference between a bitch and a slut?”
Groans came up like another haze of steam. “Old one, Harris!”
This didn’t stop the kid named Harris. “A slut sleeps with everybody, but a bitch sleeps with everybody but you.”
“Nice!” someone called sarcastically.
“Christ that’s ancient,” another said.
“You’re a regular king among men, Harris,” someone else added.
The smell of stinky socks and sweaty underarms was all-encompassing, as much of a visible cloud as the steam; the locker room was the one place where shouting and rowdy behavior were tolerated, and the tribe of boys there took full advantage of it; although the cries and booming voice of Bilge as he and Coach went at each other seemed to rise above it all.
Jim reached for his button-down shirt, when one of the scrawny seventh graders passed through the gauntlet of torment, and began crying when he couldn’t find his locker again.
The kid could barely keep his towel up, and he looked about as scrawny as a grasshopper as he hopped around. His hair was a little too long. Not quite the Harrow regulation cut, but sometimes the new kids got away with it until Old Man Chambers came around with his tape measure and scissors, saying, “Only a half inch over the ears, young men, half inch, that’s all, otherwise, I cut.”
“Maybe it’s that one over there,” Jim said. He pointed to the one in the corner, its door open, a small knapsack sticking out of it.
“Yes,” the boy
said formally. “That’s it.”
He went to dress; Jim slipped into his briefs and khakis, buckling his belt too rapidly—too tight, so he let it out slightly. He grabbed his tie from the hook in his locker and tossed it around his neck, then twisted it around his collar. His socks were nowhere to be found, and one of his shoes was missing. This was not unusual for post-gym tragedy—the boys often stole each other’s things and hid them somewhere in the labyrinth of the lockers.
He went looking for the missing items. The seventh grader, all dressed in a flash, followed him like a puppy.
“It’s mean the way they are,” the younger boy said.
Someone on the other side of the locker shouted, “Man, who farted? Warner, you fart? You let out a boomer, Warner? Whew, something died in here, damn!”
“Mean for hiding my shoe?” Jim said. “Ah-ha, watch! I can outsmart them every single time.” He withdrew the lost oxford from atop a tall locker. “They throw them, but never too far.” He retrieved his socks, which hung from one of the overhead lights. “Here ya go. See? Nothing’s hidden very long in this place.”
As he laced up, the boy watched him carefully.
“You’re new here,” the boy said.
“Not that new,” Jim said. “I was here half of last year.”
“I guess I’m the new one, huh?” the boy giggled. “You seem new here anyway.”
“I’m not a lifer. I didn’t go to Hope or Parham before here, like most of you guys. I was in public school before. In Bronxville.” He added this last bit of background as an afterthought. He cringed; it felt like a lie. It felt like he was trying to make out that he’d gone to a good public school in a rich neighborhood. Well, he had. Until he was eleven. Then he’d just gone to a regular old public school in a regular old neighborhood.
“It’s like prison here,” the boy said. Then he thrust his hand out. “Miles.”
“Miles, good to meet you. You’re in East?”
“Hell,” Miles said.
“It’ll be over.”
“I can’t wait to get older,” Miles sighed. “I hate East. West looks so key. It really looks key.”
“It’s not all that key. It’s more like lock,” Jim laughed. “I’m Jim Hook.”
“I knew that. You don’t remember, but one time, I saw you in study hall. I have one study hall in West. You brought a note to Farquhar. About the fire drill.”
“I guess I did,” Jim agreed.
“He introduced you to everybody. I sat in the back. I always sit in the back, where no one can see me. If they can’t see me they can’t bother me.”
“You get rat-tailed by Shrike?”
“I’m fast. I ran past him.” Miles glanced back in the direction of the shower stalls.
“You got a nickname here, Miles?”
“Why?”
“ ‘Cause nearly everyone does.”
“Do you?”
Jim shrugged. “Not yet. I guess they’re unavoidable. I’ll call you Mole.”
“Mole?”
“Yep. Mole. Like the rodent.”
“Okay,” Miles grinned. “I guess I can be a rat.”
“They’re not rats,” Jim said. “You never read Wind in the Willows?”
Miles shrugged.
“Come on, every kid reads it. In like third grade?”
Miles shook his head. “I never was much for reading that sort of thing,” he said, with such a mature air that Jim had to grin. The rich kids at school always seemed preternaturally mature—it was what the moneyed background seemed to do. Jim resented it only slightly; he was hoping to join their ranks someday in the future. He had it all planned out.
“I remember every book I ever read,” Jim said. “My first one was called Goodnight, Moon. Then one of my favorites when I was your age was Huckleberry Finn.”
Jim got off the bench and grabbed his notebooks. “Well, hasta la vista, Mole.”
“Later, Hook,” Miles said.
Jim Hook glanced back at the boy, who watched him just the way Jim had watched his older brother as he went off to high school.
It was a different world, with a huge gulf between the two places: high school and middle school. But at Harrow, the schools all ran together.
“East meets West in the halls of Harrow,” old man Chambers would say.
In the hallway, Michael-the-Good practically slugged him with his blue knapsack.
“Jim, d’ju study? Your tie’s on backward. Here.” He began fiddling with the tie that dangled like a loose wire from Jim’s neck. “Cripes, I sure did, just about all night going over the damn Western Civ, like I give a flyer. Tippy, what’s that in your hair? Christ, is that jizz?”
Reginald “Tippy” Tipton had his navy blue blazer pulled tight over his chunky form. He looked like a chipmunk with greasy blond hair; he always seemed a little too high—Jim had heard that Tipton kept vodka in his locker. “It’s gel. Shut up,” Tippy said.
“Tipton came on hisself, Christ, Jim, did you see that? Tippy came on hisself.”
“No I didn’t. It’s just gel. My hair was all over the place this morning. I barely slept. And Hook here didn’t study one bit. I saw you sneak in after lights out. It musta been two a.m.”
“Whiners,” Alan Tarcher said, passing by, a blur of a boy.
“You didn’t study?” Michael-the-Good gasped. “Kelleher’s a piece of work. His midterm is notorious.”
“It’s killer.”
“He murders boys with his midterms,” Tippy snickered. “Legends. Legacies. They get booted. You flunk Kelleher, you flunk Harrow. He’s a ball-buster. He busts your balls so hard they smack back into your ass and then bounce up to your mouth and you spit ‘em out.”
“That’s gross,” Jim said, but laughed.
“Hey Mikey, why’s your pants got go all those black threads?” Tippy asked, pointing at Michael-the-Good’s crotch. “Looks like you’re sewing your dick up.”
“It’s so big I hadda sew it up,” Michael-the Good said, and laughed at his own joke.
“I’m gonna flunk Western Civ. I know it,” Jim said.
“Fug it, Jim,” Michael-the-Good whispered out of the side of his mouth; Michael-the-Good could never say anything worse than “fug” or “shid” or “clocksucker.” It almost seemed nastier that way. “Just play sick. If you have the flu, you can’t take the midterm. Cripes, you’re an SS, what the hell were you doing last night? We were all cramming till one.”
“I was doing something else,” Jim said, and glanced at his books, wondering how he’d ever get through his sophomore year.
“Ten minutes to fourth period, and you are screwed, Hook, screwed by the king himself, King Kelleher, all hail King Stinky.” Tippy’s voice echoed along the breezeway as he began running to get to class. The buzzer was going off, and that meant that Jim Hook had less than nine minutes to learn as much as he could about the Albigensian Heresy and the Cathars and perhaps even the fall of Jerusalem before the dreaded midterm from the ball-buster Kelleher.
He knew what was at stake.
“Someone stole the keys,” Old Man Chambers announced, his voice echoing through the breezeway, the boys scattering like pigeons as his voice assaulted them—asthmatic and wheezy and too much like the breath of the dead to their young ears.
“Someone stole the keys and someone will pay for it,” he added, raising his fist as if to strike down in some biblically epic way the perpetrator of this dark and nefarious crime. “Someone stole the keys to the stacks in the library, and now we need to call a locksmith, you thieves of literature! All the old books are there, all the special editions this school has amassed, and one of you or many of you are out to plunder that treasure!”
Students who hadn’t flown like birds from his voice shrugged him off as they hurried to classes or walked swiftly toward study halls or morning duties or the library to study in the last hour before some dreaded midterm exam.
And still Chambers ranted, his figure becoming more Moses-like as he ra
iled, as he pronounced the great commandment of “Thou Shalt Not Take the Keys!”
It wasn’t that unusual for the ‘Row—Chambers’ keys often went a-missing, and then some prank would be played on him, or the keys would turn up again in his raincoat’s pocket or hanging from St. George’s horse’s ear out at the fountain.
Jim tossed his books on the leather couch near the entrance to the library, and plopped down. The couch let out a big fart sound, but he ignored the snickers that emanated from down by the reading tables near the displays and magazine racks.
Scarecrow MacDrinnan came by and asked something, but Jim was too worried about Western Civ and blew him off. He opened the Ages of Civilization book, and flipped through the pages, trying to focus on some subject related to the Crusades or the Inquisition, but none of it seemed to add up to anything.
Everything was about Popes and schisms and which was the damn crusade that had the children, or one crusade that someone named Peter the Hermit began, and it all meant nothing to him even though he had sat in class for weeks, every day in Western Civ. For some reason that was the one subject that made no sense to him. And Kelleher’s lectures—it was like hearing a lullaby after being awake for three days. Snooze-ville.
For a split second, he wondered if perhaps it was the Hundred Years’ War and Joan of Arc and the Dauphin he was supposed to have been following—those were things that somehow stuck out in his mind.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 20