Anoop shook his head.
“Sure?”
Anoop nodded.
There was no leader among them, so Eben said, “All right, what are we going to write?”
“Squash sucks?” said Anoop.
“That’s lame, Anoop,” said Eben.
After a moment, Ben said, “Squash is for the weak.”
“Yeah.” Matt nodded. “Yeah, I like it.”
“Squash is for the weak,” said Eben. “Okay, fine.”
“All right,” said Ben, “Dave, Matt, and I will hit the Dragon. Anoop, you go to the other end of the courts and watch for the Land Rover, and Eben, you go behind that hedge and watch for Snake Eyes the other way. Can you guys whistle?”
Anoop nodded.
“I want to tag it, though,” said Eben.
“Fine. Dave, do you mind being lookout for Eben?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, cool. Everyone ready?”
They nodded.
Just as they were all leaning forward to start jogging out, Eben said, “Should we wait for Snake Eyes to pass once? Then we’ll know he won’t be back for a while.”
“But we have no idea how long that could be,” said Ben, even though it wasn’t a bad idea. “Dave, Anoop, get set up.” The two of them spread out.
“Where do we go if Snake Eyes comes?” asked Matt.
“The other direction,” said Eben. “Ready?” They went.
* * *
Ben crouched with one hand on the cold rusty side of the furnace. He took the cap off the white and it became immediately clear what he needed to paint. It arrived in him joyfully and entirely on its own. “Decision-Making” had nothing to say about that moment of choicelessness. Ben saw Price’s smiling eyes, and the ball bearing clacked in the can horrendously loud. Ben started making letters before he could stop himself. He outlined several large amoeba shapes on the side facing the road. His fingers started hurting in the cold and he stopped to whack them against his thigh. He filled in the shapes with back-and-forth strokes. The paint stayed wet in the cold and pulled together into rivulets down the surface.
“THE COW”
SJS SQUASH
SUCKS
Ben took two steps back, off the platform, then crouched down and sprayed a cross through the plaque on the stone block. He squeezed his jaw shut with the savor of it.
He heard Matt spraying the other side. He looked for Anoop. They made eye contact across the road—everything okay—and he looked for Dave but couldn’t see him.
“Let’s go,” Ben said hoarsely. He suddenly had the feeling that Eben had sprayed swastikas on the ends of the Dragon, but when he checked he just saw SQUASH IS FOR THE WEAK.
“Go,” Ben said to Matt and Eben, and they ran ahead of him back to the hiding place.
Ben’s index finger was white. He tried to wipe the paint off on the leaves, but white remained down in the grooves of his fingerprints. He’d need paint thinner if he wanted it out tonight, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to find paint thinner. He wanted to sand the skin itself off, or peel it off with a razor blade. Anoop came back, and finally so did Dave.
Anoop still looked terrified.
“‘The Cow,’ ” said Eben, laughing. “‘The Cow,’ man, that was nice.”
“Did you see the truck?” Ben asked Anoop.
Anoop shook his head. As soon as he caught his breath, he waved shortly and jogged away down the Dish path toward Woodruff.
Once Anoop was gone they all wanted to be gone. But far away they heard the engine of the Land Rover, and they all went flat on the leaves as the sound came nearer.
Soon it came adjacent to them, just through the low evergreen bushes, and they heard it stop. The door opened. Ben had his eyes closed and his cheek against the frost. Footfalls in the sand over the blacktop, then quieter over the dead grass. Ben had never seen Snake Eyes—almost no one ever had without getting busted—but now he imagined a man in a black Kevlar helmet bringing the pad of his thumb up to the paint on the Dragon’s side and pulling away quickly at its freshness, then looking carefully around.
Along with the others Ben tried to soak himself into the leaf-smelling ground. The engine continued to idle. Its fan came on, continued for several seconds, maybe a minute, then turned off. More footfalls against the blacktop, then the door to the Land Rover opened and thunked closed, and slowly the truck drove away.
Almost too soon there was no engine noise left. The wets lifted their heads and looked at each other, and Matt whispered, “He could be set up waiting right down the road.” They all nodded.
And so even though Hawley was just across the street, close enough to send back an echo if they shouted, Ben crept out of the little clearing with the rest of them the opposite way along the wooded Dish path. One by one each of them came to his dorm, and soon Ben was by himself, moving past the Dish, past the looming chapel, across the road to the Schoolhouse, down the hill and up again into the quad approaching Hawley from the other side.
The entire way Ben kept his head moving and eyes wide, and as he came up to Hawley, pressed against its south wall, and then around to the back entrance, he tried not to glance at the Dragon.
But in his peripheral vision he saw the crude white shapes on its side. He had to look. As soon as Alice went outside the next day, she would see it. And still, the Dragon itself seemed to take on even more dignity, like a solemn servant wearing a cone-hat at a birthday party.
Ben came closer to the back entrance and saw the pen still in place and the sliver of light along the edge of the door. He almost couldn’t believe that Snake Eyes had missed it. He was nearly safe, just ten or eleven more steps. And then he let his feet slow. He straightened up, stopped looking for the Land Rover, and let his eyes close. As he slipped through the door, he had a moment of wishing he were still out there.
Ben went upstairs and got in bed without taking his clothes off. He shut his eyes tight and burrowed down under the covers, greedy for hiddenness.
* * *
“We’re pretty sure it’s basketball, Coach.”
Coach Weber had found Simon the next day and had asked him to round up the rest of the team for an emergency meeting in the Trophy Room before their match at four against St. Mark’s. It was a Saturday and so there was no Chapel for two days, but already everybody knew about the tag. When Ben woke up, his fingerprint still defined in paint, he knew there would be a crowd of kids around the Dragon, and when he looked out the window, there they were. It was as though he had created them with his mind.
Hutch had found Ben at breakfast and hugged him and said, “Yes, exactly. This was exactly it. So fucking sweet.”
“Simon,” said Coach Weber with a smile, “you’re lying straight to my face. You are apparently laboring under the misconception that I am an idiot, and you have decided, on the basis of that misconception, to look at me, your coach, who knows you and has seen every one of your weaknesses on full display, and lie. How does it feel to lie to your coach?”
“I’m not lying, Coach. It was the basketball guys. They want to take our spot as most badass winter sport, and so they punked squash. It’s kind of bullshit, actually.”
“Simon, listen. Here’s how it’s going to go. You’re going to say you got carried away. You’re going to say that you didn’t realize the ramifications of vandalizing school property, especially the school’s most recent and very public facilities upgrade. We’re going to go together to Phelps, and then for three straight practices, the wrestling team is going to work on removing that graffiti from the boiler.”
Weber couldn’t bring himself to call it “the Dragon.”
“We would totally say if it was us, Coach,” said Simon, and all the other wrestlers nodded. “It really wasn’t us.”
Weber was quiet for a few seconds. Ben wondered if he would bring up “Decision-Making.” “They’re going to ask me,” Weber said. “The AD is going to ask me, and Phelps is going to ask me, ‘Did wrestling do it?’ If I say
no, and you’re lying to me, then I’m going to be lying too. Are you ready for me to lie on your behalf?”
Ben raised his hand and then realized how stupid that was. “We’re really not lying, Coach. It really was basketball this time.”
Simon and Weber looked at him. It was as though both of them had agreed beforehand to have the same expression of anger and surprise.
“No one fuckin asked you, Weeksy.” Simon seemed to be trying to bury Ben with his gaze. Ben looked away and Simon looked back to Weber.
“I’m going to give you until tomorrow morning to think this over,” Weber said. “Then you, Simon, are going to come to my house and we’ll decide what to do. Now let’s get our heads together for St. Mark’s.”
* * *
An hour and a half later Ben stood in the dark locker room passage, behind the wooden double doors that led out into the public hallway, leaning against the cinder block wall with his eyes closed. He had made weight, then eaten three PowerBars and drunk two Nalgenes of water. Until he stepped onto the scale, the match had seemed abstract, something that would exist always in the future. But once he weighed what he needed to weigh, then it had to happen. He had hung his clothes in his locker and pulled on the singlet, and now with a half hour to go he waited in the hallway, riding out the dread that pressed his body in long, slow squeezes. He had felt this before—for big tests and important squash matches—but nothing close to this level. He wanted the match to happen now so he could finally confront it and not have to wait like this anymore, but he also wanted to stop time so that he would never be out there on that mat, about to end up on his back humiliated in front of his team and his friends, such as they were.
Above the locker room’s unkillable scent of mildew, sweat, and bleach hung the smell of two stories of old open space. The locker room had high ceilings for no good reason that Ben could think of, and kids regularly lobbed sopping socks or half-eaten apples or wet soap across the expanse. The lockers were arranged back to back in freestanding rows with aisles in between like a supermarket.
Something about his anxiety now felt good, epic, as though finally in this fight he had something admirable to fear. And still, tenacious little worries wriggled free. As Ben walked toward the gym, he had seen a bored maintenance worker gently passing a power grinder over the side of the Dragon and another on hands and knees scrubbing at the plaque with a wire brush.
Back in the room Ahmed had been quiet with anger. “I would never imagine such disrespect.” He was wearing Marlboro Racing as he said this, and Ben could hardly look at him. “When so much is given here, to spoil it like that is just…Who would do that? Do you know who it was?”
“It’s just a prank.”
“It is not. It rejects the gifts that the school offers.”
“This school is not a gift, Ahmed. Nothing about it just arises because it’s right and good.”
Ahmed gave him a startled look.
This was the first time Ben was wearing a wrestling singlet in public: its tightness was unsettling, its lack of division between top and bottom, the straps like an undershirt, its fit at the crotch that might reveal that he didn’t have enough there, its blatant bid to be the center of attention. But being in a tight singlet did also sort of turn him on.
His headgear dangled from his hand. Anyone looking at Ben leaning on the wall would have thought he was dozing. If he got kicked out and went to public school, would he have to wrestle because there would be no squash team?
Ben lifted his head off the wall and returned. From the hallway came the sound of double doors banging open, and several rowdy voices: someone had won his match. Ben had to go back now, he knew his slot was coming up and Coach Weber was starting to worry. He stood off the wall. In his singlet he walked into the hallway and toward the arena.
Ben’s opponent had bangs that he brushed out of his eyes as he went into his crouch. The referee dropped his hand and they came together. By the end of the first thirty seconds, Ben’s throat had the same hardness and smoothness as the wood inside a sauna.
10. The K-Point
AFTER MONDAY PRACTICE AND BEFORE SEATED MEAL, AHMED came back to the room carrying a large cardboard box with many complicated postage and customs seals. He set it on the couch and went to the bathroom for his long shower. Ben stared at the package impatiently. He was still sore from the meet, a loss that everyone seemed to consider admirable. Matt had also lost, but the team overall had won. That same day squash had lost to Andover, with Ahmed winning at the JV team’s number two spot. Ben hadn’t looked at the printout of Andover’s squash lineup—he knew he had probably beaten most of them in Juniors.
Ahmed returned to the room in his robe, his hair now long enough to hang on to water from the shower, and laid two ties out across his desk—purple-and-gold stripe vs. purple-and-green paisley. Before deciding, he cut the tape on the box with the edge of his plastic ruler. He lifted out a shearling coat down to mid-thigh with white fur lining and three-inch-long horn fasteners that fit through leather thong loops.
“Absolutely not, Ahmed.”
“What?”
“There’s no way you can wear that here. You’re going to get crucified in that coat, man.”
“No, this is an excellent coat.” Ahmed opened the fold-over card that had also been in the box. “My father sent it from Spain.”
“You really can’t.”
Ahmed looked like he couldn’t bear Ben’s disapproving of it. “It is an excellent coat,” he insisted.
They took a cab to the Mountain Man in the shopping strip fifteen minutes away.
“Trust me, one like mine is going to serve you a lot better in the snow.” Ben showed Ahmed how the sleeves on the North Face were cut so that when you lifted your arms above your head, the waistline of the jacket didn’t lift up.
“But my coat is so long that when you lift your arms it comes up only a little bit.”
Ben explained how Gore-Tex worked, how it let moisture escape but didn’t allow rain or snow in.
“But this is so thin, it will not be warm,” said Ahmed, pinching the sleeve of the jacket on the hanger.
Ben explained layering, how Ahmed could get a down underlayer and a fleece underlayer for different temperatures.
“But then I would need to have three coats instead of just one.”
Ahmed could get a dozen of them and not even notice, but Ben stayed quiet. Ahmed instead bought a dozen break-open hand-warmer packets before they left.
* * *
The next night, after his bio test, Ben called home to make sure his dad was going to be able to send a check before the end of the year. His dad said things were still looking really good, but the municipality had postponed the rezoning hearing to March first. His voice sounded as variable as a young boy’s. Ben understood that this was simply outside his father’s control. So, okay, Ben thought, if the school made the call before the end of the year, somehow he would figure out school at home.
That night Ben woke up feeling close in the radiator heat. He went to the window and saw that it was snowing, snowing so heavily that he seemed to be looking through the windshield in a car wash. He pushed the window open and snowflakes came into his field of vision to assert their individuality for an instant before mixing back into the purple-gray.
Ben left the window cracked to cool down the room, and when he woke up there was a four-inch snowdrift on the windowsill. He looked out and the landscape was completely smoothed out. The squash courts looked like they were made of white Nerf. The Dragon carried a hump of snow, and its freshly shiny surface didn’t seem as naked.
Without any of its details, the school seemed momentarily a much easier place to live. The day before, Ben had passed shoulder to shoulder with Manley Price, whose gaze remained fixed a hundred yards beyond him. When he was forced to withdraw, none of it would matter.
He turned back to see Ahmed getting up with his usual closed eyes and creased face, and he was so excited that Ahmed was going to
see snow for the first time. Ahmed stood up in his crimson boxers and went for his shower caddy to go to the bathroom, the whole time having no idea what it looked like outside.
“Hey, Ahmed, come look at this.”
“Look at what?”
“Look out the window.”
Ahmed walked over. His face was even better than Ben had expected.
“It covers everything!”
They hauled on their winter gear with an exaggerated sense of adventure, and Ben didn’t even mind Ahmed’s ridiculous coat or the gigantic Russian rabbit-fur earflap hat his father had also sent. At least he had a good pair of Sorel boots with nubbly black tread on the sole.
When they walked outside, at least two dozen kids were on the quad entirely losing their minds. Ben and Ahmed tromped toward the chapel, Ahmed picking up wedges of powdery snow between his stiff-mittened hands and lofting them into the air. The road was plowed enough to let one car through, but the walking path along it still only had a couple sets of partly snowed-in leg holes. Ben hauled Ahmed forward by the arm when he foundered.
They crossed the main road and there was the chapel lawn, a pristine mini-Sahara. Ahmed charged into the snow, churning it up behind him. Ben charged along beside him, and when they got to the chapel door, they saw the best sight that could have greeted fourteen-year-old eyes, a sign on laminated Rectory stationery with two words in black permanent marker: BLIZZARD HOLIDAY.
No Latin exam. No wrestling.
“Duh, everyone knows already,” said Fitzy when they got back to Hawley to tell everyone.
And then they had to figure out what to do. Hutch and Evan had talked to Ross Callard and Rich Debrett—two very hard fifth-formers in Hutch’s dorm—who were going out to the Ski Jump with some people to go sledding. Hutch said Ben had to be ready, because it was at least a twenty-minute walk and people didn’t want newbs slowing them down.
In the Hawley common room, Leon and Hideo had Alien and Aliens on VHS.
“You should see these movies. They’re great,” Ben said to Ahmed.
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