“There will always be time for movies. Only today is my first day of snow,” said Ahmed.
“You’re sure you can make it out there?”
“Yes, I am sure.”
“But you don’t necessarily know how cold it can get.”
“Well, I will find it out.”
They met up with Hutch, Evan, Callard, and Debrett at the PO. Everyone seemed not to see Ahmed. Hutch and Evan both had Patagonia jackets, Callard had a North Face like Ben’s, and Debrett had a Marmot. Hutch and Evan each had a flying saucer, and Ben wondered when they had gotten them. They passed the chapel, entered the white woods, and tromped around the pond.
The water was half frozen in long snowy peninsulas. They walked over the Sluice Bridge and way farther out into the woods than Ben had ever been. Snow sat in impossible vertical drifts on the tree branches around them, right down to shavings held on the edge of every wire-thin twig.
The group made a right turn at a spot that seemed arbitrary to Ben, and then suddenly they were at the foot of a hill that rose at least thirty yards with a straight, landing-strip-wide track down the middle: the abandoned ski-team hill. This was something Ben had never heard about from Teddy. A whoop went up from the expedition. Ben realized he hadn’t eaten any breakfast, and he was lighter than he had been a month ago. There were about a half dozen people already there—some guys from Astor House and a couple others Ben didn’t know. People had brought out dining hall trays, either solid matte-orange plastic ones with a slight tread on the upward-facing side or gray spun plastic that was harder, glossier, and better for sledding.
At first the snow was too deep to slide over. Kids were sort of leaping out over the slope to try to get on top of the snow to build momentum, but they’d inevitably dig down into it. Everyone tramped up the side of the course, and some of the Astor kids yelled at Evan that he was too far in the middle and chopping up the snow bed. But eventually the course was flattened down enough, and four Astor kids sat on their trays at the top, scootched forward at the same time, and verged over the point of no return, two of them rotating so that they ended up sliding down the last half of the slope backward. The runs got faster and faster. Two guys showed up with a full three-person toboggan, and they ended up ten feet past the farthest mark, buried to their shoulders.
Hutch and Evan went down together, and then Ben dove with a tray under his chest, the first one to go headfirst. Halfway down, the front corner of the tray caught and lifted Ben off the course and he tried to tuck his body together so he would roll, but he landed hard on his back, the sky absolutely gray with so little depth that it could have been hanging a foot above his face. He stood up to a huge mocking cheer with an edge of sincerity, and he raised his arms above his head. When he got back up to the top he saw Ahmed letting someone else go ahead of him.
“How are you doing, Ahmed?”
“Good. I have on long underwear top and bottom.”
“You going to take a go?”
Out of the woods came a group of girls, the Paige girls, it looked like.
“Yes,” and Ahmed went to the edge of the slope like a harried shopper emerging from a department store. He sat down on Hutch’s flying saucer and paddled himself forward. He disappeared, and Ben ran up to the side of the pitch to see him, his earflap hat almost like antlers, his giant boots lifted, jacket gathered tight around his legs, going down so fast that it looked slow. He came to the bottom and lay back for several seconds as though beautifully dead.
The Paige girls hiked to the top of the slope, and Ben saw Alice’s light blue snowflake hat. She was wearing a long L.L.Bean insulated parka.
“Ladies,” said Hutch.
“Newbs,” said Hillary Lynch. Hutch laughed. “We’re working into the rotation, my friends,” she said. Two pairs of girls went, laughing hysterically, neither of them making it all the way to the bottom and putting footprints in the course on their way back up, but no one said anything. Ben didn’t want to make a big thing out of saying hi to Alice as they all stood there waiting to go, but he checked her face quickly a couple times so if she turned to him at the same moment it might look like a chance thing.
“Hello, Alice,” said Ahmed.
“That is an amazing hat, Ahmed,” Alice replied. “That is an Ahmed hat.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey, Benny boy.”
What did he have to lose? “Hi, Alice. Nice and warm, I trust?”
“I’m gonna have to trek up this hill a few times to get warm.”
Almost before he heard it, Ben knew that a comment was coming from behind him. Barely audibly, Nick Sprague said, “She’ll have plenty of padding if she goes down headfirst.”
Hutch murmured, “They’ll tear up the course. It’s not made to handle that kind of cargo.”
They both laughed quietly. Ben couldn’t tell whether Alice had heard it. Her hunch seemed the same as always.
Alice went down with Katrina Nemadova and the rotation kept going. Ben started to feel light-headed from hunger, and twice his body was taken by shivering.
Between runs people were talking about the Dragon. The maintenance staff had ground down the entire outside surface so that not only was its graffiti gone, but its metal shone with dense zigzags in the cold sun. Everyone knew it had been wrestling, but the team had refused to say anything, and so after Aston had made a statement in Chapel excoriating the vandalism, there was now just a mute standoff between the kids on the team and the administration. No one there seemed to realize that Ben was on the wrestling team, so they weren’t looking at him full of suspicion, but the rest of the kids on the squash team now refused to acknowledge him. People said that SJS might just ask Simon not to come back for Spring Term, and that when you weren’t asked back, the letter came over Christmas break. Ben had taken six runs by now and wanted to go eat something.
But then Tommy Landon, a small but funny and very hard fifth-former in Gordon House, came over to Hutch and Evan. His gaze fell on Ben and Ahmed as well. He was the kind of upper-former who loved to take up certain newbs. He said, “You boys have interest in getting baked?”
“Baked?” said Ahmed loudly, and Tommy laughed and shushed him. Tommy had tar-black hair and big, almost Slavic cheekbones, and there was always some squint in his eyes. Ben had been just about to suggest getting toast and coffee in the Dish. But you were not asked to do drugs with Tommy Landon every day. Ben thought he could see Ahmed waiting for Tommy to look at the whole array of them and then ask him specifically not to come.
Ben took another run, then hiked back up with the saucer over his shoulder. Hutch and Evan were still talking with Tommy and they looked over at him. They clearly wanted Ben to nod, so he nodded.
Ben wanted to stay and talk to Alice. He realized he hadn’t seen her with Ian in forever, and he felt a rise in his chest. He wanted to be cool and witty with her friends; to maybe sled down at the same time, and to crash at the end and be entangled with her. He wanted to walk her back to the dining hall and make himself a half-coffee-half-hot-chocolate and then make one for her and have her think it was the best thing she couldn’t believe she hadn’t tried. That might be her last impression of him.
Instead, he followed the rest of the guys along a path at the top of the jump, and then back farther into an untracked patch of snow under a stand of trees. He couldn’t believe they had brought Ahmed with them. It seemed to be enough for Hutch that Tommy had selected Ahmed. Ahmed showed no recognition that they were doing anything wrong. As a Muslim, wasn’t this way against the rules for him? But maybe that was just drinking?
The pipe was cheap rainbow-colored metal. Tommy had a little baggie and he packed the pipe, and with the flame over the bowl he sucked at the mouthpiece the way Ben pictured people trying to get venom out of a snakebite. Tommy coughed once as he tried to hold it in his lungs, and then it went to Hutch, who coughed too. Ahmed was next and he tried the lighter a few times but couldn’t get the flame to catch, and when Tommy did it for him
he gave an appreciative eyebrow raise as he took in the smoke. Ahmed didn’t cough at all as he held the smoke in, and then he let it out in a long stream.
The pipe came to Ben, and he considered holding it to his lips without inhaling, but he knew the flame wouldn’t pull down convincingly, and once he was doing it he couldn’t do it for a shorter time than the others had done. The urge to cough came up but then subsided as he exhaled the smoke smoothly. It went to Evan, then back to Tommy and eventually back around to Ben again.
And then the rush of the trees seemed to squeak in Ben’s ears. And someone said that sledding is going to be sledding. And everyone laughed, and Ben wanted to say, what do you mean it’s going to be sledding, what else would it be? But he couldn’t keep track of what that person should have said instead, and so protesting seemed stupid, and then someone asked him a question but he had been thinking about the sledding thing so he said, “What?” and Hutch laughed and asked the question again, and Ben said, “Sure,” but wasn’t sure what it was an answer to. His throat felt as dry as the wrestling match sauna. He should have known what it was an answer to.
There was Ahmed on his back now, waving his arms and legs. Someone said he was making a snow angel, and they worked around to the fact that Ahmed didn’t know it was called a snow angel, he had just been waving his arms and legs. But Tommy pulled him up and he turned around and looked down at the pattern.
“Oh! It looks like a person with wide arms and legs!” And everyone including Ben couldn’t stop laughing, but Ben felt like the outside of him was laughing and the inside was wondering how to stop laughing. Laughing the right way was supposed to be St. James.
“See?” Tommy said to someone. “I told you Ahmed would be amazing.”
They decided to go to the dining hall. Ben knew he should just follow the tracks of everyone else, but he thought that getting to the dining hall was the other way around the pond, and turning in that direction and looking out in front of him at the untracked snow, he was convinced that he was lost in the snow.
He felt a glove against his arm and it was Ahmed, passing him a hand-warmer packet. Ben broke it open and nothing happened. And then it became a lion-yellow summer against his skin.
Everyone was around Ben again, and he just put his head down and followed the boots of the kid ahead of him—he didn’t even want to know who it was—and read
Bean Boots
By L.L.Bean®
on each heel until they got to the dining hall, and he took the door that was being held for him and went inside and tried to gather his senses together to make toast, his last toast. He wished and hoped that Alice wasn’t here to see him like this. The structure of the toast broke so delightfully in his mouth; the butter and the honey were together but also separate.
When they came back to their room and it was time to sleep, Ahmed said, “I am tired in the best way.” Ben was quiet for a little while, feeling the sheets against his skin. “How much would it have rained if it had rained instead of snowed?”
* * *
They woke up the next morning, and after Ahmed came back from the shower, he said, “Maybe we could have one of your posters framed and hang it here on the wall instead of the picture of the chapel.”
This moved Ben to a degree that embarrassed him.
“I don’t think we need to, Ahmed.”
“No, really. I think that something other than these photographs would be positive change.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I insist.”
“Ahmed, you’re going to have the room to yourself soon, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not going to come back next semester.”
Ahmed looked like someone had sprayed water in his face. “I don’t understand. Are you not liking it so much? We can put up more of your things on the wall, or if you would like to have your bed on the ground again…”
“No, it’s not any of that.” He paused. “My tuition hasn’t been coming in.” This didn’t feel as hard to Ben as he’d imagined.
“But that cannot be the case.”
“It is the case, though, Ahmed. So they’re not going to ask me back next semester.”
“But I need to become poised like you. We are so behind on that.” Even as he said it, Ahmed heard that he was trying to convince himself of an old possibility. “The school can’t help you pay?”
“It’s not easy like that.”
“Oh.”
Ben knew he should just leave it here.
“You are supposed to stay.”
“Well, it’s going to go a different way.”
“I don’t want it.”
All Ben could do was shrug. He left for the Dish to get an omelet.
He walked toward the PO and found that all the paths were already shoveled and salted and the edges of the snow along the road were turning brown. He turned along Sluice Pond, and the crystals of snow puffed off the countless moving branches in the cold sun. He knew exactly what all this austere loveliness was supposed to do to him, exactly what it was supposed to have shaped him into.
That night Ahmed said he’d had an idea. His father had agreed. Ben refused, said he couldn’t accept it, and then slowly let himself be persuaded.
Ahmed said, “This is how the Companion would say to act. This is to the benefit of another person.”
But it could not be known to all. They agreed that the money should go from Ahmed’s father’s account to Ben’s checking account, then from that account to the school so that no one would know its source. The next day they spoke account and routing numbers into the phone in the basement, and then it was done.
* * *
After three days of exams they were up early, Ben for the Connecticut bus home, Ahmed for the black car idling next to Hawley that would take him to the airport.
Ahmed had everything neatly packed as Ben finished stuffing laundry into his duffel bag. Ben felt Ahmed’s eyes on him.
“Please think about coming back to squash.”
Was Ahmed already trying to pressure him with their arrangement?
“Price won’t even look at me,” Ben said.
“Please think about it.”
The days at home passed slowly. Teddy had been invited to ski in Aspen by one of his Kenyon friends, and Ben wondered how he was paying for his plane ticket and lift ticket. It occurred to him that Teddy could be dealing drugs at college.
They bought an Advent calendar. Ben had always loved to open each cardboard door.
It snowed heavily on the night of the twentieth, and the next day, in a fit of relief from cabin fever, Ben and Harry began clearing the long driveway. They had a snowblower but they left it in the garage in favor of the big shovels, and they felt the weight of the snow in their arms and backs.
After half an hour or so, they stopped in the sun. They stood their shovels straight, laid their forearms over the handles, and turned their faces into the warmth.
“I just wanted to say, I talked to them,” Ben said easily. His father kept his eyes closed for a few seconds. “They agreed to put me on temporary aid.”
Harry looked at him, not as surprised as Ben would have expected. “I just need until the spring,” he said.
“I made them promise not to keep records of it. They’re making sure not to let the board or anyone know.”
“But it’s close—”
“It’s okay, Dad. When we get there we can talk to them about transitioning off.”
They started digging again, and finished in quiet. His dad could discover his lie with a three-minute phone call.
Two careful days later, he finally called Tim’s house, relieved when Tim’s mom answered the phone and he could leave a message.
Tim left a return message that sure it would be great to meet at the HMV on Route 44—maybe they could do one o’clock the following day. When he read the message, Ben was taken over by it. With Tim he could leap out into the uncertainty of a joke and not worry
if it wasn’t quite right, and so maybe a great joke would happen. He wished he could drive so his mother wouldn’t have to be anywhere around them, but she said she was happy to take a break from dissertation stuff, to sit at the little tea place and read her novel.
Tim saw Ben first, standing up out of his mom’s car and squinting into the bright overcast sky. You could still so clearly discern the bones under the skin of Ben’s face, but he looked different, too. His matte-black hair had grown out; it followed fewer rules now. Tim wouldn’t have thought Ben could get thinner, but he was, and still more tempered; a childish softness had left him.
Before he could help it, Tim felt a shiver of aversion. Why was it so hard to bear up under being with Ben sometimes?
Ben said goodbye to his mom and she waved to him as though they had a fun shared secret. There Tim was, a new cowrie-shell necklace visible at his throat behind his unzipped fleece. His molasses-colored hair was a lot longer, and there was a much-encouraged start of a beard under his chin and over his upper lip.
They ordered what they thought was the right thing at a coffee place. Tim said he was playing in a band at Sussex, the private day school he was going to, that they had performed a couple times at dances. Ben said cool, and imagined Tim feeling a preshow anxiety like Ben had felt in the hallway before the wrestling match. He wanted to say something to establish between them the shared stage fright, the sensation of pushing yourself over the precipice into some act.
Tim said, “I got to school and the first day I saw this flyer in the hall that said, ‘Guitar player needed. Zeppelin, Stones, Bowie, Hendrix, Allmans. No Dead. No fucking Phish.’ Except the ‘u’ and ‘c’ in ‘fucking’ were a number sign and asterisk. And I was like, exactly. These guys, they’d been playing together for two years and their guitar player graduated. But I could hang, and just before Christmas we had this semester-end concert. My ears are still ringing.”
Tim asked how St. James was, and they both heard the slight unkindness in his tone.
“It’s good. There’s a ton of work, and I’m still like figuring out the whole place. But it’s amazing. I quit squash, though.”
The Expectations Page 20