“You don’t give Ahmed enough credit.”
“What?”
“You don’t see what he’s good at.”
“All right, what’s he good at?”
“You’d know if you were his friend.”
Ben was too exasperated to speak for a long second.
“Why would you even hang out with Ahmed at all? You’re cool. He’s not cool.” Ben was embarrassed to have said it this plainly. “And he got Ennis kicked out.”
Tommy laughed again. “I hated Ennis. When I was a newb, Ennis hit golf balls at me with a tennis racquet. And it wasn’t even Ahmed’s fault. Ennis would have gotten kicked out for hazing some other newb.”
“Seriously,” Ben said, “there’s no reason for you to take him up.”
Tommy shook his head. He was amazed and half impressed that Ben, this antenna of a person, had ventured into his closet. But Ben was also so owned by what the school had told him to be. “You don’t see him.”
“What?”
“Ahmed’s not ashamed of himself. Everyone else here, their worry makes every move for them, just the fear of putting a foot wrong. But like, my Chapel seat is near Ahmed’s? And he sings the hymns. He sings them loudly. No one else does that.”
With a sudden filling of his throat Ben saw Ahmed, blazing with unselfconsciousness, walking flat-footed to the bathroom in his robe, carrying his shower caddy. Hutch arrived in Ben’s mind, and he knew that it was exactly this that affronted Hutch so thoroughly: Ahmed’s original, unveneered lack of shame. But now the marks of guile had started to appear.
Then another idea came to him and was out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Is he paying for all the weed?”
“Ha!” Tommy’s eyes went wide in disbelief. “You—of all people—you’re the one coming to my room, accusing me of using Ahmed for his money? That is just amazing.”
So it was out. Of course Ahmed had betrayed him.
Ben didn’t say anything. He expected Tommy’s face to turn mocking, gleeful, for him to leave the room now and pull aside everyone he saw on the paths, telling them about Ahmed’s paying for Ben. But Tommy’s face stayed solemn, and then turned heavy, as though he were holding up some familiar weight of his own.
“Listen,” Tommy said, “no one’s going to hear it from me. Me and Ahmed got nimbo one night in here and he was telling me about this paper he got an H on, and he said he was glad you were still here. And I asked him what he meant and he told me.”
Each of them seemed to be by himself for a few moments. Ben tried to get used to this new loss of control.
“Listen, we’re his friends; we’re not going to let anything bad happen to him.”
* * *
The hookup blackout had been on for three weeks. But Henry Carter, the goalie whose abuse had caused the ban, was playing better than ever, and he wasn’t planning on apologizing until after the season was over. Everyone knew the ban was being broken here and there, but overall it had been much more effective than the school’s own no-sexual-contact policy. The Paige girls started to prowl through dorms during intervis, bursting into the rooms of known couples to try to catch them scrumping. Miraculously they had only caught one couple, but they then spilled maple syrup in the girl’s hair in the dining hall and stopped her every time they passed in the halls and measured her waist with a tailor’s tape.
And still, if years later you asked people what they remembered about that time, many would say it was the most intensely romantic period of their lives. To have another person’s body so off-limits seemed to make everything, all sense experience, almost painfully keen.
A boy and girl know a place, the Trophy Room, where the Paige girls can’t find them. So after dinner she packs notebook paper into the strike plate of the gym’s side door. They wait in the Den until an hour before check-in, ostentatiously sitting apart from each other.
Each of them gives a different reason for leaving: work for physics, friend with something to talk over in the dorm. She leaves first, and he slowly finishes the game of air hockey.
They meet up again behind the gym instead of at the side entrance, and they kiss there, sure they won’t be seen. They slip around the outside of the building toward the door, the most exposed they’ll be, each with delicious fearful impatience to get inside out of sight, each exaggerating the danger to goose that feeling.
Into the inner hallway glowing under the EXIT sign, through the double doors to the Trophy Room. Burgundy leather couches sit against three of the walls, and they choose the one farthest from the door. He sits, she kneels astride him. They have already decided, and they keep their precipice-feeling as he puts on the condom the wrong way and then laughs jaggedly and turns it over and rolls it down with fast graceless pushes.
Now both of them want to postpone it. But already he’s tying off the condom and she’s making sure she finds the wrapper, and they want to kiss goodbye, but outside in the air they can’t, and then it’s time for them to go along separate paths toward their dorms, and she clings to his arm and he pulls her into his body almost as hard as he can, both of them walking in the warm-cold trying to tell the other silently that they are still in love, even though they’re too embarrassed to look at each other and too embarrassed to say the other’s name.
* * *
After talking with Tommy, Ben went to dinner, then came back to the room and found Ahmed cleaning his ears with a Q-tip. Ahmed wore an expression of listening intently for a sound just out of range, and he spun the swab slowly between his thumb and forefinger. This person, this defenseless person cleaning his ears, was now fully enmeshed in the most hidden, tender parts of Ben’s self.
Ben looked away from Ahmed and thought about the woman who came to clean their house at home, Marisol. Whenever Ben discovered his swim trunks neatly folded on his neatly made bed, he would imagine Marisol in his bedroom alone—with her carefully dyed hair and the darknesses between her teeth—cleaning. Ben imagined her imagining him: a little boy who left his swim trunks on the floor and had been given an entire room to himself. You could imagine a person like Marisol—what she saw and what she thought of you—but you could also let that person fade away. And then when you came back to your clean room, it was the room itself that had become neater in its own course, and the trunks had appeared there folded like that because that is how swim trunks end up.
Maybe this was supposed to fade in that same way. Maybe tuitions are paid because that is how tuitions end up.
But now as Ben walked to Chapel in the fevery mornings, he couldn’t keep these thoughts out of his head. He came inside without taking his scarf off his face. He passed Aston’s seat. For the hundredth time he passed Markson, and Dennett—Price was all the way down at the other end of the nave; thankfully he didn’t have to pass Price—and the rest of the faculty, all of them looking out over the students. How long before the news spread? Again, the inevitable litany: druggie, stress case, kid with the rich expat paying for him, anorexic, smug jock, slut…How long until all the students knew? It would be so much worse than being on scholarship and having people find that out, so much more abject a disgrace if Russell knew he had had to resort to this.
* * *
That Saturday a cold front started east across the Great Lakes, and early Sunday morning Ahmed was out of the room. The temperature kept going down all day, and by sunset it had reached sixteen degrees. Coming back from the Dish, Ben was underdressed in his khakis and the North Face with just a sweater underneath, and he shuffled fast down the path toward Hawley. He lifted his head at the quiet scratching of wheels on ice, and beyond the rerusting Dragon he saw Tommy, Ahmed, and Graham getting out of a cab in the gym parking lot. They were all underdressed too, in khakis or jeans and sweaters, and Graham had a wide, heavily loaded hockey duffel over his shoulder.
Ben slowed down as the group looked both ways and crossed the Two-Laner. Ben didn’t want to be seen, and he kept moving down the path to Hawley. The three walked quickly, visibly hurting in the cold.
Then a movement caught Ben’s eye and he turned and saw the near-elderly history teacher and football coach, Mr. Turow, emerging from around the side of Paige. He was heading toward the gym. He would pass Ahmed and Tommy and Graham on the path right next to the Dragon. Turow had his hands deep in the pockets of his buckskin jacket, and he wore a red buffalo plaid hunting cap pulled down over his forehead.
Ben watched as the group of boys and Mr. Turow approached each other. He saw how it would happen. Graham would set a running shoe on a patch of ice and go down, and one of the bottles in the duffel would shatter against the blacktop, and Mr. Turow would ask to look in the bag and find not only alcohol. All of them would be busted and Ahmed would be gone and he would be gone.
Ben knew he could start walking more quickly, pretending he was going to the gym too, and intercept Turow. He could ask him a simple question about the football off-season and just start talking, and Ahmed, Tommy, and Graham would pass at a safe distance in front of them. But Ben stopped. He remained where he was. He let them all coast into each other.
But Graham didn’t slip, and he waved in cold-weather fellowship to Mr. Turow, and Turow nodded wearily in reply. With simple haste, Graham, Tommy, and Ahmed continued to walk the path to Gordon until Ben couldn’t see them anymore.
That night Ben checked in again with Mr. Tan. The temperature dropped to seven degrees, and someone poured a travel mug of dip-spit in Henry Carter’s hair as he slept. Hannah Burke forgave him the next day, the sex ban came down, and the school’s malaise was gone. Everyone left the windows open to the cold, sleeping well for the first time in weeks.
13. Wait for a Real Eclipse
AHMED NOW EXCLUSIVELY SAT WITH TOMMY AND HIS FRIENDS AT lunch and non-Seated dinners, and huddled on the padded chairs near the sixth-form couches after Seated. Eventually the last shipment would run out, and they would go and buy more, and even if they weren’t caught bringing it back on campus, some teacher would catch them smoking and then look in someone’s closet and find the sheer volume of what they had, and it would be impossible not to know they were distributing at school.
Ben and Ahmed played squash a few more times, Ben trying to keep him from being completely pulled into Tommy’s orbit, tending Ahmed’s hopes to play number 9—the last spot on varsity—for maybe one match by the end of the season.
“You should play with Gray,” Ahmed said during one of their sessions.
“The Brit?”
“Yes. He and I speak. I think he’s lonely. He’s sort of bored with killing kids from other schools. I think the two of you could play together. What we’re doing when we come to the courts, it’s okay, it’s good and I’m very glad, but we’re not together in trying.”
“Together?”
“You don’t have to wonder if you can get to the next ball when we play. You and Gray need that.”
Ben was tempted. Back in seventh grade, when everyone was still playing hardball, Ben had drawn Marcus Drew in the first round of Nationals. Everyone knew Marcus was almost definitely going to win the tournament—he had in fact gone on to win it—but instead of being intimidated, Ben had felt relief stepping on the court so overmatched. From the first few points Ben had given Marcus a run; even on the points he lost he was almost there. Ben remembered the joy of just being a little piece of steel in the gears of someone else’s machine, knowing everyone else was watching some more marquee match and so feeling that he and Marcus were away playing in some elemental wilderness. Only one of his Um Club friends had come by to watch and was amazed it had gone to four games.
“Not me,” Ben said now to Ahmed. “Come on, let’s hit a few more.”
“Maybe when the season’s over.”
“Let’s hit.”
* * *
After Seated, Hutch held a cup of coffee and just looked at Ben as he approached.
“What are you doing, man?”
“What?”
“Kyle saw you at the courts with Ahmed.” He took a slow sip of the coffee. “Why are you at the fucking squash courts with Ahmed Al-Khaled?”
“Come on.”
“You know we can’t do anything while he’s behind Tommy. But the least we can expect from our kind is to hold the line. We thought you were holding the line in your room, we thought you were with us.”
“I am with you.”
“I don’t think you really care about the kind of man the school is supposed to create. I don’t think you really worry about a day coming when everyone follows the rules, and is polite to everyone no matter what, and newbs have more rights than the hardest sixth-formers, and it’s summer camp for rich kids.”
A clamp of rage ejected the words out of Ben.
“Dude, I’m Teddy Weeks’s brother. I come from a heritage of that shit. My family fucking established the codes you’re just discovering.”
“Sorry?”
“You think I don’t know how to do that? Is that what you’re saying, that I can’t carry on that heritage?”
“I don’t—”
“Next Sunday, we’re going to Boston to buy. We’re going to get people seriously wet. Get money together from your Woodruff crew for what they want, and we’ll go.”
“All right.” Hutch had always hoped that Ben would be a conduit to the legendary. “You’ll know where to go?”
“Of course I know.”
“All right.”
* * *
Ben called home, and exhaled with relief when his mom answered. Each of them reported that everything was fine. Ben let a pause arise.
“Listen, I know money’s…”
“Ach, I know. I’m sorry.”
“But would you be able to put a hundred dollars in my account?”
She was quiet before she could stop herself from being quiet.
“Sure, of course. I know, it must be hard not to—” she began.
“I want to take a girl out to dinner.”
“Oh my gosh, little bird, that’s so exciting! Tell me about her!”
“She’s a class ahead of me.”
“Look at you! Okay, so what’s she like?”
“I mean, she’s cool.”
She laughed. “Cool how? Give me something concrete.”
“Just…You just don’t have to act around her. She’s really good at photography. She’s learning Japanese, and she’s just really cool.” Ben thought about Alice’s smell, and whether in his life he would ever try to describe someone’s smell to another person.
Helen asked what she looked like, and she could hear in Ben’s response about her hair and height that he wished she hadn’t asked, and it was as though she could see his shoulders turn from her.
Ben said, “Remind me how you and Dad met again?”
Her laugh crossed a span of so many years. “He was just out of business school. I worked typing papers for some of his business school friends.” She paused to consider whether Ben was too young. “I was actually engaged to one of his classmates. We met at a party my fiancé was throwing.”
“Really?” Ben laughed.
“I had made deviled eggs.” She remembered again all the aspects of the party she always remembered—the grooved aluminum-edged serving table, the worryingly fancy punch bowl, those quick eyes behind thin glasses that belonged to this man who introduced himself as Harry. “We talked in the kitchen, with everyone all around us.” They traded jokes so quickly. “And we were married less than a year later.”
“No! The other guy must have been so pissed!”
“He got over it like that. Grant Hart, my god. He was married before your father and I were.”
“Really?”
“Really. I think he thought I wasn’t so smart. I had just graduated from secretarial school; that seemed more practical than trying for college. And Grant, I remember him coming home in the evenings and finding me typing these papers, and he always had a smile as though I had been made for just this, and everything in the world was as it should be with me typing out other people’s tho
ughts.”
Ben didn’t know if he had ever heard her talk so much at one time, especially about herself, and he wondered whether she hadn’t been talking very much to other people recently.
“And at that party, your father…We were talking about things we had both read, right by the finished drinks, and I think he was probably just trying to make conversation, but he said, ‘What else might you want to do other than secretary work?’
“I guess I could have taken that as an insult. That he thought what I was doing was trivial. But I think that question was almost enough for me to decide to marry him. And after we were married, almost everyone else I knew stopped working to raise kids, but he asked me if I’d like to go back to college. And I said, yes, I really would like that.
“And when I told him I was thinking about getting a master’s, and a PhD…I couldn’t have even said the word ‘scholar’ with a straight face when I met him. Let alone ‘anthropology scholar.’ But, he just always seemed to think, why couldn’t I do those things.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“I haven’t thought about that in a while.”
Ben remembered again his father’s encouragement on the squash court. But also with tenderness Ben remembered the change in his father’s face as he fixed his hair in the mirror: a slight arch in the eyebrows, a compression of the lips, a set of the eyes—his unconscious act of trying to convey handsomeness. He had taken on this look when talking to another person’s fiancé!
“So what’s her name?” his mom asked.
Ben briefly considered lying. “Alice.” He paused. “Unlikely we’ll be married in a year.”
His mom laughed, and Ben closed his eyes with the pleasure of hearing that laugh.
“All right, we can put something in your account.”
“A hundred?”
“Yes, a hundred.”
* * *
Ben couldn’t believe how easy it was to get ahold of Teddy. He had thought it would take days and only happen at four in the morning.
The Expectations Page 24