The Expectations

by Alexander Tilney

  “Stay there.” Ben left and came back with Jed’s hair clipper. “We have to do it all the way.”

  Ahmed saw the clipper. “No—”

  “We have to. How are you going to go around like that?”

  “It is not meaningless! In Islam there are only certain times for that. And if my father sees—”

  “He’s not going to see you. We’re going to cut this now so that it looks even, and then you’ll have months to let it grow in before you go home. It’ll be fine. And you never pray anyway.”

  “But I should!”

  “You have to cut it.”

  Ben imagined Ahmed walking into the dining hall, trying to maintain that uprightness with this dent along his head. He pulled Ahmed to his feet and walked him over to stand in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

  “Look, Ahmed.” Hairs lined Ahmed’s collar and lay trapped in the fibers of his sweater.

  Ahmed held back his hair so he could see the entire empty swath. He knew he looked just as foolish as they had wanted him to look. His forehead, cheeks, and lips grew heavier. It was painful for Ben to see.

  “Well.” Ahmed paused. “If there is a reason.”

  Ben folded back the corner of the carpet, then moved the chair to the bare floor in front of the mirror, and Ahmed sat. After a moment of thought, Ben draped one of his own towels over Ahmed’s shoulders to catch the hair. He plugged the clipper into the low outlet by the door. Ahmed’s face had set. Ben flipped the switch on the side of the clipper and it whirred warmly. Ben set the plate of the trimmer against the right side of Ahmed’s forehead, and as he pushed the blade through, the hair fell away with thrilling ease. Ahmed’s eyes were closed as the hair passed across them.

  It fell onto Ahmed’s shoulders, his lap, the slim edge of the chair behind his back, the floor. The machine was quieter when there was hair in it, and so it got momentarily loud when it passed through the empty patch.

  Ben saw that he had to shave against the grain to get the proper shortness, and he worked the edges of the clipper around Ahmed’s ears like getting the knife in the leg joint the one time his dad let him carve the turkey. He made several passes over the back corners of the skull, where the hair grew in a swirl and longer pieces kept sticking up no matter what he did. The skin was getting red where he had worked it over again and again.

  Ben finally had to accept that this was going to be Ahmed’s hair. His inability to make Ahmed look better, less haphazard, made his throat close. He pictured Ennis laughing jaggedly with Fitz and Ian.

  Ahmed looked like a tired monk wearing someone else’s beautiful sweater. Ben switched off the clipper and Ahmed touched his head gingerly, as though it might burn his fingers, then with new familiarity. He passed his hand over his scalp, back and forth, and even though his face stayed grim, Ben thought he had to partially relish the new sensation.

  “I’m sorry, Ahmed.”

  “Usually I like having my hair cut.” He kept feeling his head. “The air moves.”

  They both stayed quiet, and Ahmed turned to look at himself from the left side, then the right, then left, then right again. Already he had grown incrementally more used to it. Finally he moved his eyes from his own face to Ben’s eyes. Ben looked ashamed.

  “Have I been doing a bad job?” Ahmed asked.

  Ben tilted his head to one side.

  “A bad job of knowing how to be?”

  Ben thought about how to put it.

  “Please help me improve.”

  “You’re doing better, Ahmed.”

  “Please help me.”

  Ahmed had endured enough for one day. “You’re doing well, really.”

  Ahmed undressed to take a shower. In his towel, with his back turned to Ben and his bare shoulders covered in short hairs, Ben saw what he would look like as an older man.

  Ben got the broom from the staff closet and swept up the hair. He moved the smaller and smaller piles onto a manila folder and then into the trash. When he was done he stared into the wastebasket, and it looked like Ahmed’s proud head was down in there.

  * * *

  When the soccer vans pulled onto Turnbull’s campus later that day, Ben still had Ahmed’s hair on the cuffs of his shirt and in the eyelets of his running shoes. He was trying to get through Tartuffe but he couldn’t concentrate. The varsity team was in the van behind, and it felt strange to have JV in the lead, coming onto the campus first. Even just twenty-five minutes farther south from St. James the trees hadn’t started to turn. THE TURNBULL SCHOOL, EST. 1893 was in white letters on a broad, powder-coated orange metal sign. Ben knew that the JV soccer game didn’t matter at all, especially that day, but still his hands were sweating as they always did and the van was quiet.

  Turnbull’s lawns were so green that it looked like they had cannibalized other lawns, and the rails of the fences suspended between granite posts had been painted almost iridescently white. All the signs—for each building and intersection—were the exact same orange powder-coated metal with white typeface. Ben realized that each sign at SJS was slightly different and kind of ad hoc. They passed an enormous glass cube with a sign, ALSTEAD LIBRARY, in backlit stainless steel letters on a marble block in front.

  As they pulled up to the Turnbull gym, Ben was amazed at the twisting shape, the smooth slate-gray exterior, the three-story windows. The St. James gym was just a cinder block rectangle; this looked like a contemporary art museum. The team walked into the gym lobby and enormous banners of the Turnbull school clubs moved in the air conditioning above them, along with a suspended crew shell which had, according to a bronze plaque on the wall, won the Henley Regatta in 1966 and 1971. A helical staircase led them up to the visitors’ locker rooms, which were bright and clean and had row after row of wide lockers painted Turnbull Tiger orange.

  Both SJS teams changed into their uniforms and put their bags away. Only a few kids had remembered to bring combination locks but the idea of anyone stealing their stuff here was beyond imagining.

  Coach Johanssen gave them a talk. They went down the back stairs out to the fields, an ocean of grass marked off into discrete rectangles. They passed the Wong Swimming Pool, a dome-roofed brick building with another set of enormous windows. Wide water was divided by blue-and-white lane lines, and there was a separate diving pool with two springboards and two platforms, like the Olympics. Ben could understand Phelps’s fear, Aston’s fear. Ben kept his head turned toward the windows and saw an Asian girl step to the edge of the high concrete platform, turn her back to the empty space, and after an impossible pause, hop backward and tuck her body into a single forward flip before elongating again and slipping out of view behind the windowsill.

  Varsity lost 1–0 and the JV game was a 2–2 tie. Ben had acquitted himself with a couple good stops. Both teams walked back to the gym, and Ben showered as quickly as he could. He walked through the hallways before they had to get back on the bus. All the equipment in the weight room was the same brand, and the padding on the benches, armrests, and ankle bars of the weight machines was a consistent Turnbull-orange vinyl. They had an annex with four basketball courts and a three-lane running track around the outside. Ben passed a door with a sign on it that read FILM/VIDEO REVIEW. It was locked.

  And in a little vestibule outside a door marked DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS, on a coffee table between two very new fabric-stuffed chairs, a fan of magazines was spread just so. Second from the top was the Turnbull Annual Report, which Ben slipped into his bag before jogging back to the bus.

  * * *

  Ben again sat in the spoke-back chair in front of Phelps’s desk, now with Markson in the chair next to him, but no Dennett. There was no warmth in Phelps’s face. They would have smelled Ben’s bad breath if they had been close enough.

  “You need to be honest this time, Ben.”

  Ben wanted to be able to say he had been honest last time, but he just nodded.

  Aston had already brought Phelps into his office, and they had ta
lked over game plans if papers picked this up. Aston had tried to call Ahmed’s parents twice but had only been able to reach the sheik’s chief of staff, a Mr. Rafsanjani. Phelps knew they had very little room for error on this.

  In Hutch and Evan’s room, the two of them hadn’t been able to stop laughing about it, knowing it was mean, but still, there was no other option. The way Ahmed had been so placidly looking at the postcard just before: it was perfect. Maybe Ben had suggested something in the Chute…Something about how walking out of newb boxing was bullshit? The last thing he would ever do was take credit.

  But out of sight Ben had started to say to Ahmed, how about a pair of running shoes instead of the cordovan monk-straps? How about Hot Rocks or After the Gold Rush instead of the busy, wavery-voiced, string-and-cymbal stuff he listened to?

  “Students protect each other, Ben,” Phelps now said, “but this isn’t just putting a bucket of water over someone’s door. Force-shaving someone’s head is brutal.”

  “Whoever it was had the hood of his sweatshirt up. You couldn’t see his face.”

  Phelps sat back and looked out the windows. Markson shifted toward Ben as though to help him reconsider what he had said. Ben abruptly felt angry. Why should they make him responsible for telling on Ennis? Why was that his problem? But the freight of it, the value of what he knew; Ben understood distinctly that he needed to hold on to that advantage. The school had already gotten used to the certainty of Ahmed’s swimming pool.

  “I’m not convinced, Ben,” Phelps said. “You were close. Even with a hood up, a person’s face is partway visible. Body shape, posture, those things are clear.”

  “It was so fast, it was over before you could really—”

  “Stop a minute. Do you want to be on the side of this person? To help them do this to Ahmed?”

  “I think Ahmed’s okay, though. He gets that these things happen.”

  Phelps sighed. “I’m sure Ahmed is putting on a good face. But put yourself in his position. What would it be like if that happened to you? In front of everyone there?”

  Ben imagined all of Hawley House there watching him now, willing him to be careful, no matter what they hoped would happen to Ennis.

  Ben inhaled. “He did mention that his father is thinking about withdrawing him.”

  Phelps turned a vacuum of focus on him. His eyes seemed to come even more to the front of his face, and he went very still. Ben wasn’t ready for Phelps to need it this much.

  “That’s what I mean, Ben. This isn’t just a prank.”

  Ben tried on what it would be like if he just said, “It was Ennis. His hood was up but you could still see the point of his nose, and everyone knows that’s his sweatshirt, the dark mixed-gray one with the white border. It was the clipper that the wrestling guys use to buzz their hair. Ennis did it because of Ahmed walking out of newb boxing, and sort of because of his ostentation, and also because I kind of said that the upper-formers were letting him get out of line. Ahmed deserved it, in a lot of ways, but regardless, it was Ennis.

  “And now I’ve been of service, I’ve made a tangible difference to the financial well-being of the school, because if you kick out Ennis then the sheik won’t withdraw Ahmed, and the school will have the pool, and SJS will keep being the kind of school it wants to be. If I give you this, you will let me stay, and I’ll win squash matches for the school, and I’ll be an asset.”

  But how long would that credit last? And how would he negotiate it? Or would he just leave it unspoken, that you can’t kick out the kid who made the swimming pool possible, who kept SJS in the running?

  And how could he admit that his family needed the help, how could he be a tattle and a suck-up? Eventually, it would be known to all.

  Underneath all this, at the nub, Ben knew that if his debt could be forgiven while he stayed anonymous, then he would tell right away. He had seen Ennis and he would give him away. Yes it would also strike a blow against Ennis’s cruelty, but Ben knew he would trade that away too.

  “Ben, you have to decide to be a leader now. You have to put the good of the school first.” There was quiet.

  “You didn’t speak up after the hazing fight, and this happened. If you don’t speak up now, who else will get hurt?”

  “I wish I knew more.”

  “Okay.” Phelps sighed, and the other two could tell that the sigh was partly theatrical. Phelps would be ready to hand this job to someone else when it was time. He sighed again, more privately now.

  “Can I ask you something else?” Ben said.

  Phelps’s face rebloomed cautiously.

  “I know…I heard that my tuition hasn’t been paid.”

  Markson’s face paled and he kept very still.

  “Ah,” said Phelps, closing his eyes.

  “And so I’m wondering—I just want to know where I stand.”

  “Ah,” said Phelps. “Okay. Well—”

  Ben wanted to apologize for making them all uncomfortable. “It’s just, if I’m going to be asked to leave at some point, I want to know.”

  Phelps looked surprised. “Your parents haven’t talked to you?”

  “Well, some…”

  “Okay. Well, we typically don’t like to bring students into discussions like this.” Ben felt both encouraged and slightly disappointed that there were other students in his position. Phelps continued. “But you wouldn’t be asked to leave. The school has been trying to contact your parents about the option of having you go on financial aid.”

  “Financial aid.”

  “Right. The school has a certain amount of money set aside for this.”

  Ben rested back against the structure of the chair. His parents had had this option the whole time? They’d left him up here with his dread for no reason? Ben wished he could open his anger without these adults looking at him. Then, almost against his will, the relief that he wouldn’t have to leave St. James traveled through him.

  And then, unexpectedly, came loss—not being able to just give up the St. James struggle, not being able to surrender and go to public school.

  Public school. Wouldn’t it be easier? The work less relentless? When classes and sports ended at public school he could just retreat home instead of encountering everyone in the dorm. Instead of his teachers handing back essays with all of his almost-correct sentences marked up, he’d be able to shock public school teachers with how well he could write. Everyone would admire his taste in music; he’d put on Kind of Blue in some social setting and everyone would close their eyes and nod at his sophistication. Public school girls would imagine Ben ruining formal clothes with someone’s daughter on the beach in Nantucket; he would have lost one of his grandfather’s cuff links in the sand. Public schools didn’t have squash courts.

  But, now, he could stay? He could drop the worry that maybe today the final letter would appear in his PO box. He could call his father and bring up whatever he wanted, asking how business was shaping up without needing a certain answer.

  Ben thought of the times in the previous weeks when he had wanted to make some joke or some trailing observation but had swallowed it instead. Back home, he had been waiting to leave exactly that reserve behind by coming to St. James.

  Now he could start thinking again about college, about the inevitable course that he realized his life had recently diverged from. That course was supposed to convey him to Princeton, and then beyond into some unquestioned rightness. This had once been so axiomatic as to be beneath notice, and he had invested only lightly in the life before St. James because of his faith in this course.

  But then Ben remembered watching his father play backgammon against Russell. And Ben knew that Russell, in his role on the St. James board, saw every ledger, every asset, and every liability. He audited the Annual Report line by line. Ben didn’t know which files were closed to him, if any. It was easy to picture him looking in at the names of the students on financial aid, making sure that the amount next to each name summed to the correct total. And he
remembered from the Bath and Tennis: Russell had insisted that the piña coladas be marked down on his chit.

  For Russell to discover that Ben’s family couldn’t pay, for Russell’s smiling eyes to look at Ben’s dad with that knowledge in them: that Harry had squandered exactly the gifts that Russell had caused to thrive so verdantly, this was out of the question. He felt some small closeness with his parents as they tried to avoid this shame together. Ben came to the end of this flood of feeling with a small whipping shudder.

  “Who else knows about the tuition situation?”

  “I’m sorry?” said Phelps.

  “Does the Rector know? Does the board?”

  “So far it’s just the Bursar, Mr. Dennett, Mr. Markson”—Markson gave a subdued nod— “and me. But this isn’t the end of the world. Your dad has contributed so much to this school. Things like this happen, Ben. We can be prepared for it.”

  Couldn’t there be some middle way? Instead of the school putting him on financial aid, what if he just told about Ennis and they agreed to forget about tuition? Couldn’t they simply know that he was of value and leave it at that? Why did everything have to be so official?

  “If my family, my extended family, found out, it would—”

  “We would keep it discreet, of course.”

  “I’ll get in touch with my dad.”

  Phelps sighed once more, and Markson shifted, and Ben again wished he weren’t making them so uncomfortable.

  And then it was clear to them all that there was nothing left to say, and Markson and Ben went out into the hallway, and Markson put his hand on Ben’s shoulder, and they didn’t say anything as they walked into the stream of kids, each intent and concentrated: on the next time she would see that boy, the next time he would have a surprise quiz in chem class, the next time those upper-formers would be waiting back in his dorm, whether the next practice was the one that would move her down to JV.

  * * *