Leon knocked on Ben’s door and said he had a call down in the basement.
Ben heard Teddy’s voice and had so expected his mother’s voice that it was as though he were actually hearing her voice when his brother said, “You’re quitting squash?”
“Yeah, I quit before Christmas.”
“That’s what Mom said.”
“Yeah.”
“Is Price pissed?”
“I think so, but they got this new player, this English kid who’s amazing, so I don’t think he really cares.”
“Oh,” Teddy said, and stayed quiet. Ben wondered if that was it and he had already ended the call.
“Do you miss SJS?” Ben asked.
“Miss it?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s SJS?”
Ben laughed. “Shut up.”
“I got to go,” Teddy said, and hung up.
* * *
Two days later, Ben skipped wrestling and walked to the courts; the squash team had an away match. For forty minutes he lost himself in the ease of his body.
But when he turned to leave the courts, Price was there, smiling. He looked as stiff and upright as a wooden stepladder folded together.
“See?” Price said. “It’s not up to you.”
“Aren’t you at Brooks today?”
“You even know the schedule.”
Ben didn’t say anything for a while, staying very still. Finally he said, “You said you don’t want me on the team if I don’t want to be there.”
“But you do. Look at you.”
“You’ve got the Brit now.”
“Gray can take care of himself.”
Ben felt like anything he could say would make him more vulnerable, so he stayed quiet and went to slip his racquet into his bag.
“The Dragon doesn’t matter. Vandalizing the Dragon can’t pry you away from this.” Price laughed. “The Dragon has nothing to do with squash. Even you and me, this building, none of it has anything to do, really, with squash. So you got a little rebellion out of your system. Now your tuition stuff is settled, so we’re back at the beginning. We can start again.”
“Why do you want me to do this? Why do you care?”
“I care, but not that much, not really. If you don’t play, there’ll be other kids after you. Always another year. This season is already over in a couple months. Pfft, like that. When I don’t see you, I don’t think about you. But you care. I’m here because, for you, if you don’t let this through you, it’ll run you over. Or you’ll have to cut out that part of yourself, and you’re empty.
“It’s worse to stay away and be empty than it is to come back and lose. Gray is very good. He’s better than you, but that’s not enough to keep you away.”
“I’m getting what I need from wrestling.”
“No, you’re no good at wrestling, so you can let yourself just ‘do your best.’ You can blame giving way on just not being very good. You have to play squash because in squash, you’re good enough to know exactly when you’re giving way.”
Ben’s eyes began to unfocus with tears. “Please leave me alone,” he said.
“It’s not me,” Price said softly.
And he waved in a small way and turned to leave, coughing as though armoring himself for the outside cold before pushing through the emergency exit.
* * *
That night Ben came back to the room after dinner, expecting Ahmed to be frowning at his computer screen, working on the Twombley paper. But instead he was sitting on the couch with his head all the way back on the leather headrest, his eyes open and glassy. Ben put down his bag and turned to Ahmed, who didn’t move. “Are you baked?” Ben asked.
“No.” He laughed.
“Ahmed, why are you doing this?”
He didn’t answer for several seconds. “Doing what?”
Ben wanted to say, The school expects that a boy will never use intoxicants of any kind.
“Hanging out with Tommy.”
“Who else treated me well after Ennis was expelled?”
Ben didn’t answer right away. “You’ve had other friends.”
Ahmed laughed.
“Hideo?” Ben said.
“Even since the first day, swimming to the Jesus Rock, all the Jell-Os at the Dish…”
Ben waited and was just about to speak again.
“Tommy and Graham and…They are the first to treat me like it is better for me to be around. Like an asset.”
Ben wished he could say words out loud without Ahmed’s being able to hear them—What about me?—and only after hearing them choose whether to transmit them. Would he speak more clearly if there were no money between them? “But that doesn’t mean you have to smoke.”
Ahmed sighed. “It is the only time I feel relaxed. Everyone looks at me. All the time I am supposed to be calm and prepared for everything. All the time there are more things I should be doing, more I should be trying to be. When I am nimbo I get to sit back.”
Ben had never heard the word “nimbo” before, and not knowing it rattled him.
“But, I mean…what if you get caught?”
Ahmed didn’t answer right away. “Mr. Markson, he gave you ‘Decision-Making’ to read?”
“We’ve talked about this.”
Ahmed paused for long enough that Ben wondered whether he had lost the thread of the conversation. “Well,” said Ahmed, “when I was home, in Dubai…” He paused again.
“Yeah?”
“Well…my family lives in a complex. A group of buildings with a pond in the middle. And another complex is being constructed next to ours. We were driving home, waiting behind several cars at the gate, and we were stopped near the construction zone.
“And I looked over to watch the workmen pouring concrete. I have always been fascinated by concrete, how it will not harden if it always moves, and so I watched the barrel spin on the back of the truck. There was a large spout attached to the end of the barrel, and out of the spout came concrete, a great deal of it very quickly. Two workers guided it into a narrow trench.
“I looked at their faces and clothes and hands. They were so dusty. Their skin, their pants and shirts, even their hair below their helmets was covered, so it seemed that their clothes and bodies were all dust.
“The concrete was coming very fast, and the spout seemed very heavy, and the men were trying hard to move it to a new position. And then it seemed that the whole truck moved, and the spout swayed into the chest of one of the men, and I saw him fall forward into the trench.
“Just then our car rolled forward, and I tried to keep looking back, tried to see them pull him out, but another truck was in the way. But just before the car pulled forward I could see, and the concrete did not stop coming. Maybe they pulled him out, but still they did not stop the flow. It kept coming.”
They were quiet, and then Ben said, “Ugh.”
“On the way there,” Ahmed said, “on the plane, I had been reading that book.”
“The Companion.”
“Yes.” Ahmed was quiet for several seconds. “And when this happened, I didn’t know what to do.”
“Like should you have helped him? The worker?”
“Yes, that.” His tone was almost dismissive. “Yes, I should have helped him. But also, how—” Here Ahmed trailed off again, and Ben felt a pulse of impatience.
“How…?”
“How would that book apply to him? To this workman? What would he think, reading that? Those rules seem very good for when you have the time to pause and consider what to do. But does it tell that worker how to live at all? Like Hector, and Benito, who were here to help me move in. I have no idea where they are now, how they are able to live. When that worker is waiting to be hired, when he gets hurt, when he waits for others to consider their choices about him? He doesn’t decide. He has to wait. No matter what happens, he waits.”
“Yeah.”
“And if I live in one of these complexes, no matter what I choose, that wor
kman suffers. I can decide this or that, but just my existence determines his life. Or the life of another workman like him. So I think, whether I sometimes do or do not smoke with Tommy, maybe it is not the most important thing to wonder about.”
Ben was quiet. “Yeah, hm.
“But don’t—” Ben paused. “Don’t Tommy and the rest of them like, make fun of you?”
Ahmed looked at him, amazed. “Why would they make fun of me?”
* * *
Since before Christmas Ben had been thinking about stopping by Alice’s room during intervisitation. He knew what he would write in a note for her if he had the chance.
Hey Alice, I was here. Ben.
Funny in its oversimplicity. Yes he wanted to talk with her, ask her about everything that was happening to him and to Ahmed. But part of him also just wanted to leave a note and get away. The worst possibility was that she would come back to her room halfway through his leaving it.
A note in your room: the token that someone has been in your space without you there. He has gone to your desk and pulled a Post-it pad toward himself, taken one of your pens and noticed what kind of pen it is. Some girls put whiteboards with markers on their doors, but the entire hallway sees a note on a whiteboard.
As soon as he stepped out of his dorm he could see Paige House across the snow, behind the Dragon. Who would be in the common room to see him come in? Ben walked along the path and reached the bottom of the Paige terrace and wished he could have met someone on the way over to legitimately divert him from what he was about to do.
Ben prayed for her not to be there. He wanted to perform his courageous act and not have to endure the moment when she looked in his eyes and recognized for certain what he intended and how much she could decide about his immediate future.
He wished he could stop time and just go inside and look at the inside of her room. Where would she be sitting? Would there be a delay that he had to walk around? What if her roommate—did she have a roommate?—was there too? What color would the couch be? What if she had a thousand stuffed animals, or boy-band posters—and god, as he thought about stuffed animals he thought about her sitting on her bed as they talked, and the idea of seeing her there…if that could ever possibly come to pass—all of it was too much, and before he could reach the Paige steps, he stopped and went back. He could always see her later.
Ben returned to his room that night to find a note on his desk.
Yo,
I’m taking those pictures for that independent study. Any interest in being in them?
A
* * *
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said.
Ben glowed with discomfort on a gray metal stool.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know, just be there.”
As she bent over and looked through the viewfinder of the camera, Alice wondered whether Ben was sick. His color was okay but he seemed shaky, as though he was back to his first day. Alice held a shutter-release device that looked like a syringe on a long cable, but she kept staring through the viewfinder without squeezing it.
The Art Building smelled of paint thinner and clay, and she was too far away now for him to catch her scent. Behind him on the wall of the studio was pinned a large piece of gray canvas that hung in long, shadowed arcs and reminded Ben of fashion shoots from the eighties.
Every time Alice leaned over to inspect the camera, Ben couldn’t help looking for a second at her chest covered by a loose-fitting chamois shirt, even though he knew she could see his eyes through the viewfinder. She seemed performatively fixated on the camera.
“That’s a nice camera,” Ben said.
“Yeah, Ahmed loaned it to me. He said he never uses it. ‘There are enough beautiful pictures of the school,’ he said.”
Ben didn’t know if he felt usurped by this. “Who else are you taking pictures of?”
“Bunch of people.”
“Why did you ask me?”
Just then she snapped a photo. The camera auto-wound to the next exposure.
“When I was thinking about people to photograph, I just thought that you seem pretty self-conscious a lot of the time, as though you aren’t sure”—snap—“how you come off to other people, and that difference between how you suspect you might come off”—snap—“and how you actually come off is interesting. It gives you”—snap—“a sort of vivid look, and I wondered if I could get that”—snap—“on film.” Snap.
A vivid look. Ben didn’t know what that meant. He swallowed and began speaking as she continued to take pictures. He had to concentrate hard on saying even a few words to keep his self-consciousness from entangling him, and he remembered this same feeling with Nina, who now seemed decades removed. “How do you think you come off?” he asked.
“Me?” she said.
He nodded and she took a picture.
“Well, I’m pretty self-conscious too.”
“Hm.”
“Yeah”—snap—“so I guess we’re”—snap—“like partners in self-consciousness.”
Ben almost told her everything right then, but it felt good to leave it, and he found that he was laughing with pleasure as she kept snapping photos, and she started laughing too.
“Don’t laugh, you’re ruining them,” she said.
12. Half Unfolded
JANUARY VERGED OVER INTO FEBRUARY, AND THE TEMPERATURE rose just enough for a grinding rain to start up after classes. Ben had started to skip wrestling practice, but no one called him out. The team itself seemed to be dissolving and they had lost three meets in a row.
Dark puddles formed in the footprints in the snow, and after class Ben came back to the room in soaked clothes and shoes. His Sauconys now had small tears along each toe box. He didn’t know how they were going to make it through the semester. He stripped to his boxers in the hallway and carried his clothes into the room, then pulled back the curtain to his closet and dropped everything into the white plastic hamper. Also in the hamper were all of his towels. The one he had used that morning smelled like mildew, but he wanted to take another shower now to warm himself up. He knew he shouldn’t, but he pulled back the curtain to Ahmed’s closet to find one of those spectacular towels. He would throw it in the dryer downstairs before Ahmed even knew it was gone.
He had never bought Ahmed new towels after throwing up on them in the fall, and it was too late for that now.
At the back left-hand corner of Ahmed’s closet, beneath the neat rows of suits and shirts on hangers, Ben saw the Coach satchel, empty now and compressed thin with its strap folded over the top edge. Next to that was an L.L.Bean shoe box that looked like the one Ben’s slippers had come in. Had Ahmed bought slippers without consulting him? Ben had a strange urge to turn and make sure his own slippers were in his closet.
Ben took a half step farther in, squatted, and pulled the box toward him. It was light, too light to hold shoes, but not so light that it could be empty. Ben lifted the top. The loose vacuum of the box resisted for a moment. Then the top came away, and Ben caught the smell before he saw a gallon-size Ziploc bag full of dark green pot. Ben wanted to put the top back on and open it again to see if there would be something different there the second time. He kept looking at the bag, at the buds that were each so verdant and so dense that they didn’t completely flatten against the transparent plastic. Carefully he replaced the lid and slid the box back into place.
That night Ahmed came back to the room at eleven, and Ben was reading on the couch. Ahmed began to go through his rituals of getting ready for bed. Finally Ben got himself to speak.
“Ahmed, why do you have a box of pot in your closet?”
Ahmed turned and looked at him without any surprise in his face.
“Tommy said no one would guess it was in my room,” Ahmed said. “Which is true, if you think about it.”
“In our room, Ahmed. No one would think it was in our room.”
“Which is true.”
“But
I didn’t decide to take that risk. And if they do find it here, I get caught too.”
“You will not get caught because you did not know it was here.”
“But they won’t make that distinction. You’re responsible for whatever’s in your room, and now I know it’s here.”
“But why were you looking in my closet?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What?”
“That’s not the important issue here, Ahmed.”
“I think it is the important issue. Why were you looking through my things?”
“I saw the L.L.Bean shoe box and I knew you didn’t own L.L.Bean shoes.”
“But the shoe box was not out in the middle of the room. It was down at the bottom of the closet. Why were you looking in my closet?”
“People talk. It might be safe right now to hide drugs in your room—”
“Lower your voice,” Ahmed said. Ben startled, and Ahmed continued. “And never go into my things again.”
Ben went on in a lowered voice: “It’s safe to do it now because you don’t have a reputation yet, but people talk, and soon people know that you’re the kid who keeps drugs in his room.”
“No one knows. No one will find out if you stay quiet. So stay quiet.”
“But people see you hanging out with Tommy. He smokes constantly, and people see you hanging out with him, which means that you smoke too, or you sit and watch him while he smokes, which no one does.”
Ahmed stood still, looking at Ben, and didn’t say anything.
“Please take that shit back to Tommy,” Ben said.
“No.”
“Trust me, it’s a bad idea.”
“Thank you for your advice.”
“Doesn’t it affect your squash, though? Doesn’t it make it harder to play well?”
Ahmed didn’t answer.
“Please, Ahmed, I really don’t want it in here.”
“I understand that you don’t want it in here. It will not be a part of your life in the room.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that if you stay in your parts of the room, you will have the situation that you want.”
The Expectations Page 22