“We don’t have to do anything,” I said.
She smiled. “You’re literally perfect,” she said.
“Yeah. Perfect,” I said, thinking about my remedial calculus studying. “That’s me.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“That thing where you treat yourself like a piece of crap.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It does matter. Ben, you’re one of the good ones. Do you know how different you are from Cliff?” Cliff was the highly regrettable person from Natick she’d dated before me.
I shrugged.
“How fast of a runner are you?”
“Non sequitur alert. Pretty fast.”
“Good. Because if someone comes in here, I need you to jet. I can be in here, that’s not a problem. You in here with me would be the end of my academic career, I think. And as much as rebelling against Daddy sounds like a good plan, being expelled would seriously suck.”
“We don’t have to do this,” I said.
“I want to.”
“Okay. I promise. The moment we hear something, I’m gone. Do you think that’s gonna happen?”
“I don’t know. Here’s to hopefully not getting expelled for bringing my boyfriend into the theater,” she said.
I felt heat throughout my body. She’d never used that word before.
“Hear, hear,” I replied.
“And to us,” she said. “I really like us. Is that weird to say? I just feel like we fit together, somehow.”
“Yeah,” I said, and the blood went to my face. This. This was happening. I took hold of her hand and traced her palm with my index finger. “So will you be my date to the Valentine’s Day dance?”
The dance was one of two formals held during the year. The one in the fall was held at Lonna Grace, and this one was a week away, next Saturday night at Natick. I had mixed feelings about the dances, because I did love to dress up formally and see everyone in their suits and all the girls in pretty dresses, but I owned just one ratty suit, which I’d inherited from my dad in ninth grade. It was a little small for me now, and there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“Mmm,” she said. “Really?”
“What, you don’t want to go?”
She took her hand back and put it in her lap.
“I don’t want to broadcast our relationship,” she said. “As soon as I do, you know what’s going to happen? Rhonda and all her minions will figure out how to get your number, and they’ll start texting you.” Rhonda was the girl who had written, “Hannah munches rugs” on Hannah’s door.
“I don’t text,” I reminded her, and she laughed a little.
“Well, then, we should be all set.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’ll be fun. I want to slow dance with you.”
She sighed and rolled her head back. “I must really like you, because I swore I’d never give them more ammunition. Fine.”
“Good,” I said. “Excellent.”
She jumped up. “Come with me,” she said.
I stood up too. “Where are we going?”
“Backstage. I think we’re too exposed here.”
That sounded pretty good to me.
Backstage, we took our jackets off and lay them down on the cold, black floor. She sat and then reclined on her jacket, and then she patted mine. I tentatively stretched out next to her. It felt so good, feeling the heat of her body next to mine. I sighed.
“This is nice,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She turned to face me, and she rested the side of her head on her hand. “Cliff broke up with me via text message.”
“Oh, man,” I said.
“Yeah. He did it after we had sex for the first time.”
“That sucks.”
“It wasn’t great, no. I thought he was better than that. So, you know. I am trying to figure out if you’re better than that.”
I took her small hand in mine. “What do you think?”
“I think you are.”
“That’s the mystery of life. Not finding out that someone isn’t all that great, but. You get to know someone and over time you figure out that they aren’t exactly like the fantasy you’ve created in your mind about them.”
“That’s deep,” she said.
“I like this part. I like both parts, I guess. I like the fantasy, and I can’t wait to find out exactly who you are too.”
Her eyes lit up, and this time I kissed her, and she put her hands on my chest, and I put my free arm around her and pulled her into me.
“I’m ready to go further,” she said, and I moaned as my body reacted to her words.
“I don’t have protection.”
Her sweet expression, the way the skin around her eyes slightly creased when she smiled, was unforgettable to me. “I do,” she said.
Driving back to school in my car, I laughed most of the way. Joy is such an amazing feeling, like you can’t get enough oxygen in your head, or you just want more and more and more of the moment, and the car ride home, it could have taken forever because I was feeling so much joy traveling through my spent body.
Hannah. My girlfriend, Hannah. The first girlfriend I’d ever had who felt … right. I felt like I could talk to her, maybe not exactly like I could talk to Rafe or Bryce, but close. And I couldn’t wait to talk to her on the phone the next day and share this laughter with her, because somehow I knew that at that very second she was laughing too.
After Wednesday’s practice, Mendenhall caught up to me walking across the quad back to the dorms.
“You’re doing good,” he said. “Really.”
I didn’t reply.
“The only thing is this. Talk more, Carver. You eat meals with us, but you barely say anything. That’s not captain-like. You don’t have to be center of everything. You just need to—contribute, you know? I mean, you’re never gonna be the funny one or the cool one. But you could be part of things. People like you.”
“Thanks,” I said as we got to the dorm. “I’ll try.”
Mendenhall charged upstairs ahead of me, and as I climbed the stairs, I thought about what he’d said. I’d never be the funny one? No, maybe I would never be the greatest joke teller, but I definitely loved to laugh. I just had different ideas than Mendenhall about what was funny. Bryce, for example. Albie and Toby. Those guys made me laugh. The mainstream stuff that made Mendenhall cackle was usually really crude. And mean. But Bryce’s stuff could be mean too, just mean in a different way. Albie and Toby too. I’d have to figure that puzzle out someday.
I was just—quiet. I didn’t feel the need to tell people every little thing about me. Like, I’m sure if Mendenhall had been in my shoes the previous Friday night, he’d have been bragging about what happened backstage in the Lonna Grace auditorium. I hadn’t told anyone. That was just who I was, and I was fine with it.
After changing, I went to the library and raced through my other work, intent on saving the evening for calculus. I wrote an essay for history about Manifest Destiny. I wrote a dry page about Freud’s theory of displacement for psychology, ignoring the niggling fact that displacement sounded like a bunch of bullshit to me. I did some chemistry homework and my English reading, and I was done in plenty of time to devote a night to math. Joy.
Then I thought about Model Congress, and remembered that we had to go through the historical folder of arguments and refute one. The school kept copies of every Model Congress argument since the program began in 1965. I had one week before it was due, but I decided to pick an argument to refute. I got the folder from the librarian and began to page through it, year by year.
When I got to 1967, I got shivers up and down my arms when I saw Peter Pappas’s name listed on the roster.
I was going to find a Pappas argument, and I was going to refute it.
His first argument, typewritten on thin, yellowing paper, was in favor of passing the Equal Rights Amendment for w
omen. I read through it, and he did a good job of using conditions of rebuttal and making an impassioned plea for gender equality. I couldn’t imagine arguing against him there, since obviously I agreed.
His second one caught my attention.
It was a fervent diatribe against escalation in the Vietnam War.
Against.
Shivers.
In the argument, Pappas gave the data about how the number of American troops in Vietnam had escalated from 189,000 in 1965 to 385,000 in 1966, and how approximately seventeen Americans were dying there every day. Then he went into the root causes of the conflict, going all the way back to 1945, when the United States refused to do what it normally did and sympathize with revolutionaries against colonial powers—France, in this case. He argued that by backing France, and by paying heed to the idea of a domino theory by which we might lose control of Southeast Asia to communism, we started down an incorrect path.
He concluded with a humanitarian plea, writing that the human cost of this war was greater than the ideological need to fight communism. He used the example of a family in Boston that had already lost two sons, and ended by saying, “How many more families must lose their children over a struggle that has nothing to do with them? Defending democracy in our homeland would be one thing; defending it around the globe with the blood of our own soldiers is reprehensible and must be stopped.”
I put the yellowing pages down gently. The irony. A man who had died in a war, arguing against that war. The Model Congress teacher must have pulled a Mr. Sacks and had students argue against their own beliefs. But Pappas had done it so much better than I could, and again I found myself wondering if I deserved this award. There was no way I’d be able to argue so passionately against my own beliefs about a topic such as war.
I chose a random argument from the 1980s about Reaganomics. I wasn’t taking on Peter Pappas. No chance in the world.
I went to dinner and made sure to be part of the conversation. It was about the Red Sox, which I actually knew something about, so I said a few things about the team’s prospects for the upcoming year, and Mendenhall smiled at me like he was a proud father, which was weird.
Back in my room after dinner, I couldn’t stop thinking about Pappas. He clearly had it all figured out. Not only could he write amazing, impassioned arguments against his own beliefs, but he’d probably fit in with his teammates better than I ever would. I imagined him laughing with his buddies fifty years ago, at the same table we’d just sat at, and a chill went down my spine.
By the time I picked up my calculus book at around 7:30 P.M. and started to study, I was feeling pretty damned inferior. They gave this award to straight-A student-athletes who were popular. I was zero for two. And how would it feel if I had to tell my dad that they’d taken the award away from me when they figured out I wasn’t good enough?
My brain got going pretty good on that subject, and as I stared at page after page of calculus equations, my stomach felt queasy. The numbers blurred together. I began to wonder why they chose dy and dx, and why you couldn’t just get rid of the d’s, since they should cancel themselves out, and then that felt like a moronic idea.
You’re stupid. You’ll never understand this. You’ve reached your math limit. They’ll laugh at you when the award is taken away from you and given to someone more deserving.
I slammed my book shut and threw it at the wall above the other bed. It smacked the wall hard and fell onto the mattress, with the cover hyperextending open. I put my head in my hands. Shit shit shit. Then I stared out the window and tried to come up with a solution.
There was none.
I took a break and wandered down the hall until I heard some noise. It was coming from Steve and Zack’s room, and it sounded like laughter. I paused before knocking. I wanted diversion, but was this the diversion I wanted? More laughter streamed out of the room. Screw it, why not? I knocked.
“Carver!” Steve whispered when he opened the door. “Get the hell in here. We’re messing with Mendenhall.”
Mendenhall’s room was next door, so I automatically looked at the adjoining wall. Steve and Zack were hovering over a computer. “Uh-oh,” I said. “What are you doing to him?”
Steve said, “We created an imaginary girlfriend for him. Her name is Brandi Lovelace. She goes to Lonna Dyke.”
I tried to make sure my wince at the slur wasn’t visible. “Brandi Lovelace sounds made up. How long have you been doing this?”
“Like three hours,” Steve said, and I moved closer so I could see what they’d done. Some social media site was open, and the profile picture showed a pretty blond girl in a bikini. She looked a little bit like a female version of Standish, complete with a surfboard at her side.
“You guys are going to hell,” I said, laughing. “Have they met yet?”
“Mendenhall is online, and we just chatted him. We had to make sure her profile was filled out completely, and we even got her some other friends so she doesn’t look made up.”
“I admire your stick-to-it-ive-ness.”
“He answered!” Steve said, slithering into the seat in front of the computer. “He said, ‘What up?’ ”
I watched the screen. Steve typed, I’m good. Go to Lonna Grace. U Natick?
Mendenhall typed back. Yup.
Brandi: Ur cute
Tommy: U2
Brandi: What r u doing
Tommy: Studying
Brandi: U
Brandi: R
Brandi: Crazy!
Tommy: lolz
Brandi: Wanna hangout sometime
Tommy: Hells yah
“ ‘Hells yah’?” I asked. “Is that what the kids are saying these days?”
“Dude is a mess, yo,” Zack said. “Ask him if he has condoms.”
Brandi: U have protection
Tommy: Yup got it all taken care of. U know how to get here? I cn sneak u up
“No shit!” Zack said. “Boy has game.”
“Gotta up the ante,” Steve said, typing.
Brandi: Sure cutey can I cum now
“Hey now,” Zack said. I laughed.
Tommy: U got it
“You just gonna stand him up?” I asked.
Steve shrugged. “I’ll keep him on the hook all night if I gotta. Dude’s gonna be tired and pissed tomorrow.”
Brandi: Tell me where to go. Be there in 20.
Tommy: I’ll text u directions
“Shit,” Steve said. “He has all our numbers. Unless … ” He looked at me. “Mendenhall have your number?”
I shook my head. “I don’t use texting.”
Steve scowled at me. “You don’t text? What the fuck?”
I shrugged.
Zack jumped up. “I have an emergency phone,” he said. “My dad thinks I need to have a backup.”
I resisted rolling my eyes as Zack rummaged through some drawers. “I got an idea,” I said. “I need some supplies, though.”
This got Steve’s attention. “What’s the plan?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Do you trust me?”
“This better be good,” Steve said.
“Better than keeping him up all night, I promise,” I said, thinking about what Mendenhall had said to me earlier. You’re never gonna be the funny one. Hmm.
So when Zack found the phone, and while Mendenhall exchanged numbers with Brandi, I got going. I collected three pillows—one each from me, Steve, and Zack—some duct tape, and some magic markers. While Mendenhall and Brandi went back and forth with their plan, which utilized the broken bathroom window on the first floor, I worked on my art project. I taped the pillows together, convinced Steve to part with a blue pillowcase, which I fashioned into a skirt, drew a face and blond hair on the top pillow, and then added boobs for good measure.
When Steve saw what I was creating, he cracked up.
“Okay,” he said. “Not bad.”
I didn’t even have to explain what I was doing. When I finished a few minutes later, Brandi was
a pretty primitive-looking topless girl in a blue skirt with an idiotic grin on her face. We stood and admired the spooky piece of art.
“You’re twisted,” Steve said to me, and I smiled, proud of my handiwork.
When we heard Mendenhall sneak down the hallway a few minutes later, we sprung into action. I carried our pillow girl to Mendenhall’s room while Zack stood watch. His door was unlocked, thankfully. Once in his room, I tucked Brandi into Mendenhall’s bed, and I got the hell out of there.
When we were safely re-assembled in Steve’s room, Zack texted Mendenhall.
Brandi: I came and you weren’t there. I left. Sorry. Goodnight.
Tommy: I was there! Wtf?
Brandi didn’t answer. We sat quietly and waited. Finally we heard him walking back to his room down the hallway. We heard him open his door.
“What the fuck!” we heard him yell through the wall, and we collapsed onto the floor and writhed in silent hysterics.
Brandi: I WAS IN YOUR ROOM.
“Who the fuck did this?” he yelled, and Zack jumped up and turned off the light and closed the computer. Steve jumped onto his bed and hid under the covers. Zack burrowed down under the comforter on his bed, and I hid under Steve’s. We braced for Mendenhall’s entrance.
The door cracked open. Light streamed into the room. Steve fake snored, and I held my breath. The light stayed for a few moments, and then, quietly, the door closed again. We all stayed very still as we heard Mendenhall walk farther down the hall, looking for the guilty party.
“Epic,” Steve whispered. “Nice work, Carver.”
“I aim to please,” I whispered back, a huge smile on my face.
“Give me a tour of your room,” Hannah said to me via Skype on Thursday night, two days before the dance. Part of me was already plotting a way to bring her up here, even though Headmaster Taylor had made it very clear that anyone found bringing a girl into the dorms would be suspended, no questions asked.
“We’ve Skyped, like, five times,” I said.
“Yes, but I’ve never gotten the full tour.”
I slowly spun the computer. “There’s a door, there’s a closet, there’s a bed, there’s a desk, there’s another bed.”
“You’d be, like, the worst real estate agent ever. More detail. I want to experience the place.”
Honestly Ben Page 13