He had given a presentation with Michael-the-Good on the Golden Age of Athens the third week of the term, and then it seemed as if they’d gone from there right up to the Knights Templar and the Saracens, although he might’ve mixed it up too much in his head. Something about Saladin and something about Richard the Lion-Hearted and maybe even the Magna Carta was in there, although he might’ve gotten that screwed up. And the dates? Holy shit, what were the dates?
And why the hell was this the one class he never could get? He was doing fine in English and okay in Latin and semi good in Spanish, and Math was never better than a C but you can’t have everything and he never flunked that kind of stuff, but this history class for some reason was the most boring course he had ever taken, and maybe it was the teacher. Yeah, it had to be.
Either that, or you’re just stupid, he told himself. Smart kids don’t even need to study. They get through this stuff. Stephen aced everything here. Stephen had loved Kelleher, and Kelleher had apparently never forgotten Stephen Hook, because every chance he could, Kelleher reminded Jim that he was not like his brother, that Stephen was always on top of Western Civ, and if only, Kelleher had added, all students were as bright and charming as Stephen Hook had been. . . .
And for some reason, Jim could not live up to any of it in that class because there was something about Kelleher himself that made Jim tune out, that got him thinking about anything but Western Civ, that got him daydreaming or wondering about an upcoming class or making a mental list of the errands he needed to run on the weekend or how much laundry he needed to drop off at the service in town.
It was almost as if the more Kelleher talked about how Stephen had been this shining paragon of studious ability and brilliance, the more likely it was that Jim would begin to blank on anything that went on in class. And it never ended in class: the Western Civ book looked like a bunch of words and dates put together that didn’t add up to anything intelligible.
Or, you’re just stupid, Jim thought. You need to apply yourself. You need to rise to the challenge.
All that bullshit.
He glanced up at the clock above the reference shelf. He had three minutes to make up for several weeks’ worth of studies that he hadn’t quite kept up with.
I’m screwed.
“Yo Hook.”
Jim glanced up. “Yo Fricker.”
Trey Fricker the Third stood there, still sweating from cross-country practice. The sweat poured through his white shirt; his tie was slightly askew. The other kids called Fricker “Brad” for Brad Pitt, even though Fricker looked harsher and sometimes even a little handsomer than any movie star could, but sometimes Jim could tell Fricker liked being nicknamed for a handsome actor rather than the horrible things most of the kids got their names from (like Bilge, Shrike, and Shit-for-Brains Turner, who never lived that one down). “You not ready?”
“I die today,” Jim said.
“You went to see Lark?”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “She’s doing good. And today ... I fail a midterm.”
“Naw, it’s cake. Don’t worry, it’s cake. It’s the cakest test in all Christendom.” Fricker said crap like that all the time. This is the best meat-loaf in all Christendom. Man, she’s built like the briskest shit-house in all Christendom. It cracked everyone up, and it was practically his trademark.
“I hear it’s gonna be a nightmare.”
“That’s Michael-the-Good talk,” Fricker said. “Did you see the way Michael-the-Good’s pants were sewn up? Man, it looks vaginal. All these threads. It was freaky. He should just buy a new pair of pants, Kee-rist. Your pants split in the crotch, buy yourself a new pair, that’s what I say.”
Trey Fricker was the only guy in his class that Jim had known before passing all the entrance exams and getting the scholarships to Harrow— Fricker’s dad had known Jim’s dad, and Fricker’s brother had been in Stephen’s class three years earlier.
Fricker was half the reason Jim had agreed to pursue going to Harrow at all. Fricker had an easy way about him. Jim felt as if he were around some kind of celebrity with Fricker, whose dad, though divorced from his mother, played for the Baltimore Orioles and made millions. Fricker’s mom was some big publishing executive.
Fricker seemed to maneuver in and out of the social groups both in school and out of it—he knew all the girls at St. Anne’s and St. Cat’s and the Robbins School. He drove a Mercury Cougar that was nearly brand-new.
He was a nice guy, someone who seemed to see through all the bullshit and shallowness of some of the more popular guys in school. Fricker, in fact, had pretty much looked out for Jim, and Jim felt in debt to him from the word go. Fricker had what Jim thought of as “star quality,” some kind of aura of excitement and interest and basic knowledge of the working parts of life.
“Look,” Fricker said. “I’ll give you the rundown on this. First, Kelleher always tips his hand.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Fricker laughed, “he can’t help trying to show how smart he is. So what you need to do is scan the whole test first to see if he answers an early question later on. He always does.”
“What about the essay questions?”
“Bullshit. Make up some bullshit. You can do that, Hook, I’ve heard you do it enough in English.”
“Yeah, but the Crusades . . .”
“Here’s all you need to know about the Crusades,” Fricker said, and pulled him off the couch, practically dragging him down the hall to Room 23, regaling him with what Fricker called “the Six Salient Points of the Holy Crusades.”
Chapter Nine
No teacher at the high school level is without some oddity, some eccentricity, some mannerism that can be exploited and lampooned by any number of talented students.
Kelleher was a praying mantis of a man.
He was both self-satisfied and voracious. He was a dark and disturbed soul.
He was reed-thin, his hair longish, which seemed radical for the conservative school, and his clothes ill-suited for his frame—he also generally smelled, which led to his nickname: Stinky.
He could not have been more than forty, yet something about him already seemed wizened and ancient. His blackboard was scuffed with old chalk diagrams that had been erased and then layered upon by other diagrams and then erased again until it was like the dust of bones. A huge, tattered map of Western Europe covered one wall, and on another, a map of the pre-Columbian Americas. His desk was piled with papers that he had left ungraded, and whenever a student asked for one of these back, Kelleher would tell him that his was the one failing grade, but Kelleher was considering revising his opinion. Usually, the student never asked for his paper twice.
He always kept the shades drawn in his classroom, and he had a sniggering way of speaking. Kelleher was, in a word, repulsive. Particularly to boys of fifteen, all of whom would rather be anywhere but sitting there, looking up at him with his pile of little blue books.
“All books, beneath your desks,” Kelleher began. “All that should be on top of your desks are two number 2 pencils and one large eraser. The midterm will take you approximately one hour and ten minutes. That ten minutes will cut into some of your lunch periods. For others, it will cut into your study halls. I do not give a damn where your ten minutes come from. You are not to leave this room until ten minutes after the hour. Each of you will receive one of these.” He
held up a blue book. “There are fifteen pages in each one. I expect you to fill them all.”
The groan rose like a muted chorus from the fourteen students in the class.
“Every page should be filled. Within each blue book, you will find your midterm. There are approximately thirty-five true or false questions on this midterm, each worth two points. Then, there are two essay questions. Each essay question is worth fifteen points. Should you fail to attempt to answer any question, that will count double the points against you. As you know, term is up in five weeks, when the Christmas vacation begins. Should any of
you fail this exam, it would be advisable that you prepare yourself for a failing grade for the term unless you have a way of coming back on the final with a score of one hundred percent.”
“Sir?” Walter Allen asked from the back row.
“Allen?”
“What’s passing, sir?”
Kelleher sighed, rolling his eyes. “The same as for any other test, Mr. Allen. Seventy is passing, anything below seventy is failure.”
“But a sixty-eight isn’t failing. It’s a D,” Allen said.
“Mr. Allen.” Kelleher began walking over to his desk, then stopped mid-aisle. “You have just lost five points from your midterm for saying something asinine. Now, when I say pencils down, I mean pencils down. When the test is over, you will write what, Mr. Howard?” “The Pledge.”
“And tell me what that pledge is, Mr. Howard?”
“I pledge that I have not lied, cheated, or stolen with regards to this exam or any activity at Harrow Academy, and duly acknowledge this with my signature,” Ross Howard said. Then he quickly added, “And then we sign our names.” “Good, Mr. Howard. Now, are you ready to meet your dooms, boys?”
Some of the boys laughed, but Jim kept his head down. He looked at the graffiti on his desk (“Kelleher’s a dick”; “Corpses”; “Tell Laura I love her”). Then he glanced sidelong at Fricker, who sat to his right.
Fricker caught his look, nodding slowly. After the blue books and the test were passed out, Kelleher said, “Now, class, open your midterms.” Then he went back to sit behind his desk.
Jim looked down at the test before him. All right, true and false you can figure out. Remember what Fricker told you. He practically answers his own questions somewhere in here.
The first ten or so questions were pretty much common sense, and Jim remembered some things from class, and a little from some of the reading he had done a couple of weeks before. Others, he hazarded what he considered decent guesses. Something caught his eye—it was
Fricker twiddling his pencil beneath his desk.
Jim looked over to him.
Trey Fricker had pushed his blue book a little bit farther to the left. Jim could practically see all his answers. Trey nodded slightly, barely giving Jim a look. He mouthed the word: okay.
Jim looked up at the clock. Forty-five minutes left. He scanned the room. All heads were down—they were all concentrating on the exam. Kelleher leaned back in his chair, reading. Jim looked back at Fricker’s blue book. Fricker had set the exam as close to the edge of his desk as it could get without falling. He had placed a check mark beside each true or false.
Jim looked back at his paper.
He wasn’t a cheater.
If I fail, I fail.
He looked at his first few true/false answers. Then, over to Fricker’s checkmarks. Fricker, who knew this subject backward and forward, had completely opposite answers.
Jim felt his pulse race. This midterm was nothing. It was just a midterm. Sure he was SS—and being a Scholarship Student came with its own set of pressures. He had to keep his average in each subject above a 3.0, and if it looked like he was failing, he could easily lose the fourteen-thousand-a-year scholarship payment that it took to stay at Harrow.
He had already begun slipping, well before this test, and he knew that he had been sleepwalking through Western Civ for the better part of the term. He just had not been keeping up, and his mind wandered whenever Kelleher gave his digressive lectures. His class notes were gibberish and doodles—he could not keep his mind alert in this one class.
He knew what would happen if he failed. He felt a trickle of sweat along his back. Something like fingers pressing down beneath his skull.
Don’t psych yourself out. You won’t lose everything because of some dumb test. Some dumb midterm.
Why didn’t you study? Why did you let seeing Lark get in the way of it? Why are you worried now when you should’ve been worried last month when you weren’t even cracking the book? And when you did finally open the Western Civilization book, the words looked like a foreign language to you, and all you could think about was how your mom was going to feel if you did badly here, how she was depending on you. How you need to get the best education and go to the best college and get a top job so you can support her so she’ll never have to be humiliated again—not the way she was humiliated by her family and your father’s family, and the bank and the collection agency. . .
And you wanted to show these rich snobs a thing or two.
You were going to show them, weren’t you?
Weren’t you?
Not just failing a class. This would be failing both his father and his brother, both of whom could no longer “make good” as his grandmother would say about people. Jim and his mother had once been upper middle class, but that was before his father died, and with him, the means for making good money.
Jim’s mother, who was generally sad and in need of a daily dose of what Jim had come to call “emergency wine,” had trouble bringing in enough to pay for even his school ties.
So, Jim worked in the summer, and would soon begin to do afternoons in the headmaster’s office, filing papers and typing (a useful skill which he’d taught himself at the age of nine because he wanted to write stories for his brother, who had always taken pride in them). He and his mother were nearly poor, and this scholarship was the only dream his mother seemed to have left. He did not intend to lose it.
Intend being the operative word.
The road to failure, he had once heard his father say about a friend of his parents, is paved with good intentions.
And Jim was screwing it up big time.
He could feel the screw-up coming like the lightning flash of inevitability that struck him occasionally when he knew something was about to go wrong. It didn’t always go wrong. But it usually felt like it should.
His head pounded. He’d had headaches since the day his brother had died, not every day, just certain days, certain moments, when he was thinking about things too much.
And now, it came on full force.
The Queen Mother Bitch of all headaches.
For just a second, he thought he heard something. It was in his mind, he knew.
He could practically hear his grandmother’s voice:
“You’re going to go crazy like your sister,” she said, and although she had said it to his mom, it felt as if it had been said to him, too. “You’re going to start hearing things and seeing things and pretty soon, you’ll just be in that yellow room with nurses, and someone will have to pay. Someone always has to pay, don’t they, for people like you?”
Jim was sure he heard something—some wild animal—scratching at a door, not just any door, but an attic door, and it was the night of his brother’s death, and he wore his dinosaur pajamas and he felt very brave and went to the foot of the stairs to the attic and watched the door—
Something’s coming through.
It had been a dream, he was sure. But the sound was in his head now.
The scratching. The door within his mind’s eye was growing—it was moving toward him, and he was moving toward it.
Something’s coming through, Jimmy.
Here it comes.
Here it comes.
The voice of a woman whispered: Watch out for the Rat Changer.
He opened his eyes again to the classroom. His body was soaked in sweat. For just a second, he thought he saw—
But he knew his eyes were not focusing—
The map behind Kelleher’s desk shimmered like a pond that’s been disturbed by a fish—
He shot a glance at Fricker’s paper.
He changed his trues to falses and falses to trues. Fricker angled the blue book pages so he could get a better look. His Ts and Fs were huge.
Then, Jim got to the first essay question.
Christ, how am I going to copy Fricker’s essay?
But there was the question, like a big fat lump of shiny gold, staring him in the face.
&nbs
p; The question read: Name and discuss the Six Salient Points of the Holy Crusades as discussed in the text and in class.
Jim grinned and nearly sighed. He shook his head, feeling relief. God, he was going to pass this. He glanced over at Fricker’s paper for a moment.
And that’s when someone behind him—was it Carrington?—shouted, “Hey, Hook’s cheating!”
Jim looked up and saw Kelleher slowly set down the book he had been reading. Watching him.
Observing.
It was over for him.
This was death.
“How you gonna make your big bro proud?” a voice whispered in his mind.
Chapter Ten
Lying, cheating, stealing.
The three magic words at Harrow for getting the boot.
Jim had been told this when he entered. Dean Angstrom, the Disciplinary Counselor, warned, “We are most proud of our honor system, which is ironclad here at Harrow.” Jim had been sitting with his mother in the man’s office the previous winter, a midyear entry into Harrow. On the wall, a large cat-o’-nine-tails was meant as a bit of a joke, Angstrom explained, since he was in charge of discipline.
Jim’s hair had just been cut, and he felt squirmy in the blazer and tie, since, in his last school, he’d gotten away with jeans and regular shirts, sometimes even T-shirts.
“Our boys take pride in this system,” Angstrom had said. “On every paper, every test, they sign a pledge of their honor. Should a boy violate the honor code, justice is speedy. All it takes is one witness. All it takes is a reasonable suspicion. We do not brook any dishonesty here. While we are lenient in cases where a student has perhaps not understood what his dishonesty has been, we often hold a student council honor trial as soon as possible.
“Then a jury of a student’s peers determine if a violation has truly occurred.
“We ring the chapel bells six times when a student is expelled for an honor violation. It is a sad, shameful moment. I’m happy to say this has only happened four times in the past twenty-three years that I’ve been here.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 21