“You know.” Ben couldn’t believe he hadn’t prepared anything. He considered making up a wild lie—that he met up with a female kitchen staff worker way out in the woods to make out. The noise of the electric motor and the tires in the grit and the passing wind provided the barest cover against having nothing to say as they drove along.
They came down the path from the Dish, past the library, and in Ben’s reverie of needing to think of something cool to do, he hadn’t slowed down in preparation to take the corner toward the PO, which they had to pass to get out to the Two-Laner. They were almost past the turn when Ben realized he had to make it.
Hutch held on to the little black plastic armrest, and the back wheels lost traction and skidded through the end of the turn, then whipped back into line as they continued on their new trajectory.
“Whoaaaah,” they both said.
And so they took that turn again. Even on the second turn Ben had improved, and then again, and each time Hutch laughed with a young, thrilling laugh. Soon it was time for Ben to drive Hutch back to Woodruff to get ready for Seated. As Ben went back by himself to Hawley he couldn’t believe that Hutch hadn’t once asked to take a turn driving. Ben would have told him no.
* * *
Ben’s Chapel seat had been changed to the section just inside the main doorway so that he wouldn’t have to crutch in as far, but it meant that he couldn’t see Alice, who sat farther down. His cast had gotten wet in the shower—even though he had pulled a garbage bag over it and taped the bag to his skin—and now, as he sat there, wearing his North Face for the second day and looking up at the ceiling, the cast was starting to smell. Everyone else was coming in, chattering and settling themselves, and then Ben heard two separate whispers of “Ennis.” He turned to the girls in the row behind him.
“What happened?”
“They busted Ennis for the Ahmed thing.”
“How?”
“Apparently Dennett overheard him talking about it in the Dish hallway after Seated. Cooked.”
A kind of caul came over Ben’s vision. He imagined himself back in Phelps’s office, knowing that it would all come out anyway, being able to use what he knew to his advantage.
He sat completely still in the building’s splendor. Several kids were sleeping, their necks bent at unnatural angles, and he couldn’t understand how anyone could get used to it in here.
Ennis’s Disciplinary Committee meeting was that night, and the next morning in Chapel Aston announced his expulsion. By two p.m. that day his things were packed and he was gone.
“It’s fucking bullshit, is what it is,” said Hutch, sitting on his little stuffed chair, rocking forward and back minutely. “It’s like, they should be thanking Ennis for setting Ahmed straight, for like keeping this place the way it’s supposed to be. It’s like the little blue book, like ‘does your action benefit other kids?’ How could they not see that?”
Evan was nodding emphatically. Ben just looked up to where the far wall met the ceiling. “I can’t believe it,” he said, happy that the other two couldn’t know how much he meant it.
“You know what?” Hutch went on. “Fuck this place. Fuck their bullshit PR, their fucking pussy coddling. No one ever became great because things were easy for them.” He crossed his legs and started picking at the place on the side of his Saucony running shoe where the fabric had started to fray.
“We should transfer,” Evan said. “You know? This place sucks. My buddy Owen from home is at Milton and says it’s breezy as fuck there. They’re like half day students, so all of them have cars and you can do whatever you want.”
Hutch could now fit his finger through the hole in the side of his shoe.
“You know, Teddy would never have let this stand,” Hutch said to Ben.
“Yeah,” Ben said noncommittally.
“He never would have let this go unanswered.”
“It’s totally true,” said Evan.
“We should do something,” said Hutch, “something, like…big.”
“Yeah, like something that would make Aston think twice about being such a little bitch about shit like this.”
The next morning Hutch organized twelve third-formers to stand up and walk out of Chapel. Later that day as Ben was coming into the Dish, Hutch was there in the common room and walked up as though he had been waiting alone for Ben to arrive.
“What the hell?” he said.
“What?”
“Why didn’t you walk out?”
“Walk out? I’m on crutches.”
“So? Think of how intense it would have been if you had walked out and everyone would have been like, ‘Whoa, he even walked out on crutches.’ And to have you, like the squash guy, walk out, that would mean something.”
Ben in the warmth of this flattery didn’t answer for a second. “All right, next time.”
“No, this time,” Hutch said, looking away. “No fucking maybe.” And he turned and walked off down the arcade hallway.
In the Schoolhouse and at the Den, Ben didn’t hear anyone talking about anything else.
“If newbs can do whatever they want, they’ll never learn how to handle themselves.”
“Ennis was everything right and badass about this school.”
“Fucking administration just makes decisions for how it looks.”
“His family hired this like admissions expert to work on his college applications with him. They curated his extracurrics and the guy edited his essays like four or five times. All that and then to get kicked out.”
“They wouldn’t’ve touched Ennis if Ahmed’s dad didn’t have a kerfrillion dollars.”
A Confederate flag appeared briefly below the windows of the Chute before Dennett confiscated it.
Ahmed’s life got considerably harder, and the fact that he was still almost bald didn’t seem to win him much mercy. Twice his clean shirts went missing and ended up in the ditch along the site for the pool.
Hutch continued to organize. On the way to classes, people would draw up beside Ahmed and walk him off the path. Guys saved eggs and fish from the dining hall, left them in Tupperware containers, then opened them in the bottom of Ahmed’s gym locker when he was in the shower.
Hutch talked at lunch about pulling some bigger prank—somehow getting the Rector’s car into the chapel, putting bike locks through all the door handles of the Schoolhouse—something to bring the school to a halt, to let students get their hands around the school’s windpipe.
Whereas before, Ahmed would stand in the Dish Common Room making conversation with everyone, now a group of girls would surround him with their backs to him, talking with a corresponding ring of guys, preventing him from leaving or speaking with anyone. Ben was amazed; no one had seemed to really like Ennis all that much. Faculty intervened as much as they could, but that almost made it worse.
“What are you doing in the room?” Hutch asked Ben.
“Dude, we’ve never been friends,” Ben answered.
Ben watched Ahmed. His posture didn’t change, but he had lost that air of frictionless unconcern. After Seated one Tuesday, Ben saw him run his finger over a name on one of the wooden plaques in the High Dining Room. Ben waited and then walked over to see the name: HENRY STANHOPE UNDERHILL.
That night Ben half turned around in his desk chair and asked, “Who is that?” Ahmed was on the couch. Ben didn’t turn all the way around, as though Hutch could see him.
“Who?”
“Henry Underhill. I saw you find his name in the Dish.”
“I thought I already told you about him.”
“No.”
“I hardly know where to start,” said Ahmed. “Without him I would not be here.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, how did your parents send you here?”
“How?”
“How.”
“Um, well, my dad went here, and my uncle. Our family actually…my great-great-grandfather was in the first class.”
“Ye
s. When my father was a young man, he was a small trader, one of the first to bring cigarettes to Dubai.”
Ahmed paused. He went on, describing how his father got to know the officials who ran the small port at the mouth of the town’s river. The Emir of Dubai, Sheik Rashid bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, began planning a bigger port at the time, in the late 1970s, farther west at Jebel Ali.
Critics thought that the new port would be too big, a waste of money, but Ahmed’s father disagreed, as he had become expert in the needs of Dubai’s merchants.
Dubai hired Western architects and engineers, and among them had been a man named Henry Underhill. He was an executive for one of the engineering companies and negotiated with all of the interested parties.
As Ahmed told the story, he imagined his mother holding her hands together in her lap, patiently hearing it again.
His father said that Underhill was easy, in control of himself. He always had a joke, could understand what each side needed and what difficulties each person faced. He negotiated without weakness but did not tell lies. Ahmed told Ben that in Dubai, among Emirati people, discussions and agreements tended to change often and could make Western people frustrated, and so his father was impressed by Mr. Underhill’s simple, sustained calm.
Underhill knew about the world. He spoke French and German, not very good Arabic but far better than that of the other Americans in Dubai. His suits had been made for him in England. When the first grand piano came into the country he could play it, and he was able to obtain records, and ice, and books, and liquor, which Ahmed’s father didn’t drink but still admired.
And then even though Ahmed had never met Underhill, he described to Ben how he stood. Underhill had held himself leaning slightly forward, listening, and made it seem that you were the only one worth hearing. When he didn’t know something he just said so, and he seemed at ease while he learned about that thing.
Ahmed felt a new turn of embarrassment. He was glad that Ben couldn’t see his father’s face as he talked so admiringly about this other man. Ahmed wondered for the first time how Underhill had seen his father.
Eventually Al-Khaled asked Underhill how he had become the way he was, whether it was his family, the military, his religious training, or perhaps contending with some illness or disaster. Underhill at first denied that there was anything special about him, but after being pressed, he responded that, as much as anything else, he had been formed by his boarding school. Like Ben’s, Underhill’s family had come to St. James since the early classes.
At this time, Emirati children who went to study abroad almost always went to English universities, but this school was in America. Al-Khaled couldn’t afford tutors for his older sons, but by the time Ahmed was born, he had made money from the cigarette imports and his portion of the shipping business. Cigarettes were very discouraged in Islam, so he sold off the tobacco importing and bought several mines, a construction business, and part of an oil refinery. Now he could afford what he wanted.
Underhill had left Dubai by this time, but Al-Khaled corresponded with him and with his help hired a tutor. Ahmed remembered his father looking into the room as he was studying for the foreign-school entrance exam with the tutor, Mr. Greenspan. Ahmed began to close his book to come for evening prayer, but his father, standing slightly angled away and with a look half proud, held up his hand and said in English, “Keep working. Tomorrow is exam.” And the school for foreign students didn’t have a call to prayer.
Even though few people in the Emirates sent their children abroad before university, Ahmed’s father wasn’t interested in what other people did. He wanted to be great, and he wanted his son to be great, to become a magnificent Emirati Leader.
Ahmed’s father put it just like that, and so Ahmed relayed those words now to Ben. Ahmed wanted Ben to believe in this greatness the way his father believed in it.
Ahmed described how, because foreigners couldn’t own property in Dubai, many Emiratis made their income by collecting rent and nothing else. They desired Rolexes and expensive cars, and this disgusted his father, who saw himself and his family as a way for the Emirates to be more, to achieve more, to take its place among great nations. Learning what Underhill knew could make this so.
“My father always repeated a warning to us that the emir, Al-Maktoum, would often say. ‘My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son will drive a Mercedes, but his son may again ride a camel.’ So it is important for me to learn the right things, to behave the right way.”
Ahmed paused. This was different from how he had imagined telling Ben this story.
“But now it seems I am not liked. It seems I don’t know how to be, here. Apparently I have done very much that is not right?” He looked to Ben. Ben paused for a second and then shook his head.
“No. It’s just temporary. They give newbs a hard time all the time. It’s part of fitting in here. It’s just the process of becoming a part of the school.”
Ben paused. Ahmed looked unconvinced.
“In a year you won’t remember any of this.”
Ahmed laughed. “I will remember.”
“But it won’t feel like a big deal. Really.”
* * *
Everyone else walked out of the Dish into the long hallway toward those immense front doors, but Ben turned on his crutches and leaned back into the crossbar of the little side door. He wondered if Underhill had come out of this same doorway, maybe when the door itself was made of wood. Ben crutched through the sandy parking lot toward the cart, planning to go back to the room and do some reading, but from behind him he heard the same door open and close, and when he turned he had the Alice-pang but it was actually Alice, in wind pants, running shoes, and that same blue sweatshirt. It took her a second to see it was him, but then she waved and easily caught up to him.
“Hey, Alice.” He couldn’t control his smile.
“Mr. Weeks. I haven’t seen you since the leg. Fucking beat.”
“Could be worse,” Ben said. “What’s shakin?”
“I’m going to run on a treadmill even though I live in a woodland paradise with many running trails. Because I’m a fan of irony.”
“You’re going to the gym?”
“I’m going to the gym.”
They arrived at the golf cart.
“As you can tell, I don’t have much reason to go to the gym, so I’ll take this opportunity to drive you there.”
“You will?”
“Why exert yourself before you take your run? That’s not the American way.” Ben wondered if this was how he would be without worry.
She nodded and climbed onto the passenger seat. As she situated herself, Ben took the opportunity to glance at her chest. The seams of her sports bra stood out even under her sweatshirt.
He stood his crutches in the loop of nylon webbing where a golf bag would go, and, holding the cart’s roof struts, turned sideways and hopped behind the wheel. He found himself doing all of this with some faint added flair, as though she would be attracted to him for getting behind the wheel of the golf cart in some distinctive way. Again her smell came to him and every one of his movements became heavy with nonchalance. He turned the key and he wished that the starter made a roaring noise like a real car to break the sudden formality that he sensed she must be feeling too. He popped the parking brake off and they went whirring along. In the moving air her scent went away.
The cold passed over them and Alice hunched her shoulders together against it already in anticipation of the long coming winter. She looked at his heron wrists as he gripped the wheel.
“I’ve been chatting with your roommate,” Alice said. “It was nice of you to let him wear that hat.”
“Couldn’t let him go around bald. And he wanted to wear an SJS hat.”
“Good save.”
Ben pulled out of the long Dish parking lot and onto the Straight Road. She sighed. “I just wish I could have told him everything that was waiting for him, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s shitty of them. What did he do to get Ennis kicked out?”
“You don’t think he deserved anything?”
“Is he actually a dick to anybody about money? And fucking Ennis and Fitz and Ian?” Ben scoured her tone as she said Ian’s name. “Why should he kowtow to those shitheads?”
“That’s how it works.”
“But it shouldn’t. And Hutch?” She almost spit the name. Ben was startled that she knew it. The previous day, Ben and Hutch had come back to the room together to find Ahmed there reading and listening to soft Duran Duran on his sound system, and Hutch had slipped Fillmore ’71 into Ben’s tape deck and turned up “Not Fade Away” until Ahmed left.
“Everyone will leave him alone eventually,” she went on. “But this place needs more Ahmed. It doesn’t need Ahmed after everyone’s finished with him.”
“Aren’t there girls you don’t fuck with?”
“Ugh. I opt out of that shit.”
“Really?”
“No, not really.”
They turned the corner next to the PO.
Earlier that day Ben had come into the Middle Dining Hall and seen Ahmed sitting alone in the Marlboro Racing hat at a table toward the far glass doors. Ben had pretended not to see him, and went to sit instead with a few fourth-formers from the soccer team. He wanted to know whether Markson had asked Alice to read the Companion too, but he thought that would seem too goody two-shoes.
“It doesn’t have to be this quiet,” Alice said.
“I’m thinking of going off road to take the most direct route so we don’t have to go through the continued agony of this conversation.”
She laughed.
“You laugh, but if I got some gnarled tires on here, jacked it up on hydraulic suspension, I would terrorize this place.”
“Consider me terrorized.”
Ben paused. “I wonder if Ahmed has a crush on you,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“You never know. You might want to start preparing to be royalty. Being the future sultaness has its privileges.”
“I am not cut out to be royalty.”
“No?”
The Expectations Page 15