Elliot Allagash

by Simon Rich

  “It’s probably way over our heads,” she said.

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I just stared back at her in silence.

  “Well, we’re all rooting for you,” Lance said, tugging Jessica’s arm. “Listen, we should probably head back—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No—me too. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.”

  I shook their hands awkwardly and watched them turn the corner, hand in hand. The moment they were out of sight, my phone started to ring. I didn’t bother to check the screen: Who else could it be?

  “How was Lance’s party?” he asked. “Carefree and fun?”

  I thought, for a moment, about lying to him. But he had already started to laugh—a loud, insane cackle—and I could tell that, somehow, he already knew exactly what had happened.

  • • •

  My father’s wheelbarrow lay on its side, frozen in its pathetic final pose. A five and a six had sent him rocketing across the board, from his peaceful Water Works plant to the lobby of the Hotel Boardwalk. His bills lay in a messy, multicolored pile. There’d been no need to count them: He was ruined.

  I could picture my father cradling the dice in his palm, begging God for a pair of sixes—the breathless silence as he flung them across the board—and then my mother leaping to her feet, laughing and clapping and demanding her two thousand dollars. She’d gloat for a second or two—and then completely switch gears, kissing my father on the cheek, cursing his awful luck.

  I had outgrown Monopoly Night sometime in middle school, but my parents still played every Friday. They always left the board out until Saturday morning, just in case I wanted to see how their game had ended. I usually barreled right past it on my way home, annoyed that they thought I would care about something so childish. But in recent weeks I had caught myself studying the board, sometimes for a long time, trying to piece together what I’d missed.

  I walked through the living room and made my way down the hallway. It was a new apartment, with more rooms than the last one, and I was still getting used to all the light switches. I slapped at the walls for a while, then gave up and thrust out my arms like a blind man. Within seconds, I had fallen over some boxes of photos that my mom was in the process of hanging. I cursed, punched the wall, and crawled into my bedroom.

  By the time I found the light switch, my parents were standing in the doorway.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Good night.”

  “Sorry for barging in,” my dad said. “We just heard you…in the hall. It sounded bad.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m okay.”

  “Are you hungry?” my mom asked. “There’s brisket.”

  “I ate at Elliot’s.”

  My parents nodded.

  “You missed a pretty fun game,” my dad said. “Did you check out the board?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well…it was a good one. Mom won.”

  It dawned on me that this was the longest conversation we had had in months. It’s not that they weren’t interested in my life: They hung on my every word, like mediums at a séance. But they rarely asked me any questions. They had so many, I imagined, that they didn’t know where to begin.

  When I announced one day that I would be going with Elliot to Harvard, they were silent for almost a minute. I had applied early, without telling them, and it was the first time they’d heard me mention it. They congratulated me profusely, of course, but I could detect a hint of fear in their voice. It was as if I had announced I was actually an alien and had received orders to return to my home planet. They signed the forms I gave them and ordered me a pair of crimson sweatshirts. But they never asked to see my application.

  I started to close my door, but my father blocked it with his forearm.

  “You dropped something,” my mother said, squeezing her hand through the gap.

  I snatched the red notebook from her hand and quickly shut the door. My heart pumped wildly, as a terrifying thought occurred to me: They could have read it if they had wanted to. And then I had an even scarier thought.

  They hadn’t.

  • • •

  “Harvard is a fine place, Seymour. And I believe you’ll fit in there, better than I did at first. I know this sounds strange, but when I entered Harvard, I actually had some genuine academic interests! It’s true: I enrolled in very traditional courses—a philosophy seminar, a history elective, even a class about economics. But I had a pretty rigid drinking schedule to stick to, and I soon found out that my classes interfered with it.

  “Luckily, my club mates introduced me to a different kind of Harvard course—the kind designed to accommodate the needs of the wealthy. There were several of these courses, and with the exception of a few illiterate football players, their enrollments were made up entirely of fuel and shipping heirs. One of the classes was called Boats. Its actual title was a little longer—Atlantic Exploration, or something in that vein—I never actually found out. The course was taught by an eighty-five-year-old professor named Sherwood, whose father had donated over a dozen libraries to Harvard in the late nineteenth century. He lectured twice a week, from four until about four fifteen. He discussed different explorers and their boats, but often spiraled off into other topics, such as the history of his mansion and the ‘immigrant problem.’ He drank openly during class and occasionally smoked as well. His lectures were difficult to follow, but we enjoyed his spirited delivery, and whenever he threw his hands up in the air to signal the end of a lecture, we applauded.

  “Attendance was required, but the course’s only actual assignment was a ten-page paper, due at the end of the semester, about ‘any topic related to the class lectures.’ For most courses, graduating members of my club passed down their term papers to younger members, to retype and hand in as their own. But there were so many of us enrolled in Boats each year that we felt the need to restrain ourselves. We couldn’t all hand in old papers—even an eighty-five-year-old would catch on. So we limited ourselves to one plagiarized paper each term. It was called ‘The Fishing Habits of Henry Hudson.’ The club secretary kept the original in a glass case, and every year, on the night before the due date, we had a drinking contest to determine who got to hand it in. It was a generic essay, with a bland thesis and a forgettable conclusion. The only distinctive thing about it was the cover, which featured a crude school-boy drawing of a fish. It was an incredibly unnecessary flourish, but we always dutifully redrew it and handed it in along with the ten retyped pages. By the time I enrolled in Boats, the paper had been turned in by thirty club members, and each of them had received an A-minus.

  “I won the drinking contest handily and spent the early morning in the club library, drinking Irish coffee so I could stay awake long enough to retype the paper. I stopped short of redrawing the fish, but I managed to transcribe all the words and the footnotes, and with ten minutes till the deadline, I strolled to the yard and dropped it off.

  “Our papers arrived at the club two months later, by mail. Professor Sherwood had written lengthy, indecipherable rants in the margins of everybody’s essays that seemed unrelated to the essays themselves, and he had given everyone a passing grade. I was about to follow everyone back into the poker room when I found my exam, or at least the one that I had turned in. I checked the grade, tossed it aside—and then picked it back up again. I couldn’t believe it. The old man had given me a B-plus.

  “I flipped through the paper, looking for comments, but the margins were blank. The only words he had written were on the last page. It was a single sentence, scrawled hurriedly with a fountain pen:

  “‘Where’s the fish?’

  “So you see, Seymour, you’re sure to fit in. It’s really the only place for you!”

  • • •

  “Why did you tell everyone I was trying to cure that crazy disease?”

  “I didn’t tell everyone. I told a local newspaper.”

  “You told The New York Times.”

  “That�
�s local. Waiter?”

  A man in a waistcoat marched over, pad in hand.

  “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

  The waiter hesitated.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Allagash,” he said. “But the bartender doesn’t get here until nine.”

  Elliot rolled his eyes.

  “Wake him.”

  I took my French vocabulary book out of my backpack and Elliot immediately grabbed it.

  “What’s all this?”

  “There’s going to be a pop quiz first period,” I said. “And I need to ace it. Mr. Hendricks is getting suspicious.”

  “I find that hard to believe. The man wrote you a positively glowing recommendation.”

  “Elliot, this is serious. I got stuck in an elevator with him yesterday, and he started talking to me in French, and I had no idea what he was saying. I’m sure he could tell I was lost.”

  Elliot laughed.

  “My God, you’re helpless,” he said. “I go to Paris for four days and the dominoes begin to fall.”

  “You were in Paris? What were you doing in Paris?”

  He shrugged.

  “What am I doing in New York?”

  The waiter brought him his Bloody Mary and he ordered a second one before even tasting the first.

  “You go to school here,” I reminded him. “You’re a full-time student at a high school.”

  Elliot waved his hand dismissively.

  “Don’t remind me.”

  For the past four years, Elliot had gone to great lengths to spare himself the indignity of attending high school. In the ninth and tenth grades, he feigned a series of increasingly rare diseases, beginning with cadmium poisoning and culminating in Saint Vitus’s dance. But it required a lot of time and research to come up with new illnesses and get hold of the proper medical forgeries, and eventually, he got tired of it. By senior year he had settled on a diagnosis of plain old mono, supplemented by the occasional “overseas funeral.” Elliot attended school only thirty-six days a year—the bare minimum for graduating—and he went through them in a state of such incredible intoxication that by the following day he often had a valid reason to stay home.

  “These appearances are killing me,” he said. “Who am I? The queen in peacetime England?”

  “We should probably go soon,” I said, taking back my French book. “We’re going to be late.”

  Elliot flagged down the waiter and I sighed with relief. It was already quarter of eight, but if we left within five minutes, and traffic was light, James could probably get us to school before the first bell. I had almost finished zipping my backpack when I realized Elliot was ordering his third Bloody Mary.

  “In a tall glass this time,” he told the waiter. “And hold the garnishes.”

  He laughed.

  “Who are we kidding?” he said. “Hold the tomato juice, too.”

  I slammed down my fist and our dishes rattled softly against the tablecloth. The waiter looked up from his pad, and Elliot slowly turned toward me.

  “Please,” I mumbled. “We’re going to be late.”

  Elliot whipped out his pocket watch and grinned.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “Seymour, why didn’t you say something?”

  “Does James know we had breakfast at the St. Regis?” I said. “You’ve got to call him.”

  Elliot nodded and reached into his waistcoat, only to pull out a flask. I cursed under my breath and took out my own cell phone.

  “What’s his number?” I demanded.

  Elliot shrugged.

  “He usually just arrives,” he said. “My personal deus ex machina!”

  He stared quizzically at his flask.

  “Would you like to hear something interesting?” he said. “I stole this flask. I was in a shop in London and I stole it. There were many bystanders, but I had James distract them with a diversion. Isn’t that an incredible story?”

  He took a long swig.

  “The Scotch inside it is also stolen,” he said. “That was some afternoon.”

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “We’re taking the subway.”

  Elliot giggled.

  “The what?”

  I grabbed his knobby wrist and led him toward the entrance of the Fifty-ninth Street station. By the time we made it to the escalator, his wiry limbs were writhing with laughter.

  “You mean the underground?”

  I don’t know why it surprised me that Elliot had never been on the subway before. It would have been more surprising if he had.

  I pulled some crumpled singles out of my pocket and hastily smoothed them against the side of the MetroCard dispenser. I tried to feed them into the slot, but the machine kept spitting them back out at me.

  “Elliot, do you have any singles?”

  “Any what?”

  “Nevermind,” I said.

  I found some quarters in my backpack and bought us a couple of one-way passes. When I looked back at Elliot, he was standing on top of a nearby bench, surveying the terminal with wonder, like an explorer in a newly discovered tomb. He squinted at a framed map.

  “So it connects with the buses?” he said. “How clever!”

  He pointed at a group of men in work clothes, marching off to repair some segment of the track.

  “Look at them go!” he exclaimed. “Like a colony of mice!”

  One of the workers started to turn around, and I quickly pulled Elliot off the bench.

  “I hear a train coming,” I said. “Come on.”

  I handed Elliot his pass. He held it up to the light and examined it, as one would a piece of foreign currency. The train roared into the station.

  “Come on!” I shouted.

  I rushed through the turnstile and sprinted toward the closest car. As the doors closed, I stuck my wrists inside, and a couple of strangers grabbed hold of them. After a tense moment, the doors parted again and I was yanked into the car. The other passengers burst into applause as the train went into motion. An elderly woman patted me on the shoulder.

  “That was a close one!” she said, laughing.

  Just before the train left the station, I caught sight of Elliot, standing at the foot of the escalator. It was going the wrong way; he would have to take the stairs. He shook his head a couple times in disbelief. Then he grabbed the railing, and started off alone.

  • • •

  I ran down the hall and burst into French class, my pen already drawn.

  “Did I miss it?”

  Mr. Hendricks stared at me.

  “What do you mean, Seymour?” he asked, scrunching up his forehead. “Miss what?”

  What the hell was I doing? It was a pop quiz. I wasn’t even supposed to know about its existence.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Did I miss the lesson,” I said, emphatically.

  His eyes lit up.

  “Oh!” he said. “Oh! No, Seymour. You’re just in time!”

  I could hear my classmates groaning as I took my customary seat in the center of the front row. It was moments like these that made me question Elliot’s definition of the word popular. I’d gone from the bottom rung of his status list to the very top. But the two slots seemed to have a lot in common.

  Mr. Hendricks locked eyes with me and launched into one of his rapid-fire gibberish monologues. I smiled and nodded until he handed me my quiz. Then I filled it out, handed it in, and got out of there as fast as I could.

  I compared the incident to all the other close calls of the month; it didn’t even rank among the top five. There had been a bunch of horrible moments in math class when the teacher went out for a smoke and asked me to lead the lesson in his absence. And then there’d been that nightmare conversation in the cafeteria with the lunch lady.

  “I just want to thank you for everything you’re doing, Seymour. You know, my uncle suffers from Pasternak-Schwarzschild’s disease.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry to hear that. Is he in good spirits?”

  “He’s in a coma. I mean…obv
iously. It’s Pasternak-Schwarzschild’s disease.”

  “Right. Of course. Right.”

  I ducked into the back stairwell and slowly made my way up to the roof.

  • • •

  Students weren’t allowed on the roof, and the administration seemed serious about enforcing the rule. They’d lined the upper stairwell with security cameras, and if someone spotted you on the monitor, you faced an automatic suspension. But with the help of one of Elliot’s maps, I’d figured out an alternate route. First I took the back stairwell down to the boiler room. Then I walked through the janitor’s storage room, past the rows of retired mops. There, hidden behind a discarded bookshelf, lay the entrance to the school’s old steam tunnels. At that point, all I had to do was enter the combination—I don’t know how Elliot had gotten it—and go up a whole bunch of ladders. After about ten minutes of climbing, the tunnel would spit me out of a steam vent, which hadn’t been operational in eighty years, since the school had stopped relying on coal heat.

  The roof itself was bare, except for a water tower and some pipes. You could see both rivers and most of the park and the traffic was so remote, not even the most ghastly car crash could startle you very much. The black tar surface was always warm from the sunlight—but never hot. It took me about twenty-five minutes to get up there, and I went once a day, at least.

  When I first discovered the route, I was so proud of myself that I immediately called up Elliot to brag about my findings. But when he picked up the phone and asked me where I was, I instinctively told him that I was home, in my bedroom. It might have been the first time I’d ever lied to him.

  I was sitting in the shade of the water tower, studying for what would be my second pop quiz of the day, when I realized I wasn’t alone. I could hear footsteps behind the water tower, circling around toward me. My body performed its standard panic routine: speeding heart, constricted throat, sweaty palms.

  This is it, I thought, for the third or fourth time of the day. This is how it ends.