“Yeah, but you can handle yourself. You know how to, like, stay yourself while you’re with him.”
“Who is Ahmed’s self, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why can’t Ahmed be figuring out what he wants to be like with them?”
“You really think that would be a good version of him?”
“Who decides ‘good’?”
Ben sighed. “Couldn’t we take some pictures outside?”
“Nah, I don’t know how to do natural light.”
“Do you ever think about leaving, Alice?”
Alice stayed hunched behind the camera, now remembering the spring before, when she had seen Joanna Alpert walking from the quad toward the Schoolhouse by herself. Alice had to do it.
“Hey, Joanna?”
They were a little too far away from each other; Alice had to raise her voice as Joanna headed down the slope toward the Den. Joanna turned around and didn’t show any recognition as Alice half jogged the distance between them. Joanna was wearing a tan shaggy Patagonia fleece, tight blue thin-wale corduroys, and dark-brown clogs, and somehow it all looked sophisticated on her.
Alice knew it was just as hard for pretty girls.
“Hey, I’m Alice.”
Joanna nodded, but Alice couldn’t tell whether Joanna already knew who she was. They turned to keep walking toward the Schoolhouse together, and Joanna didn’t ask Alice what was up or what was going on. Joanna’s hair wasn’t blond, as Alice had remembered it, but rather very light brown.
“What are you up to?” Alice asked.
“Going to yearbook.”
“Ah ha.”
They kept walking, and Alice knew she had to bring it up now so that they wouldn’t get to the Schoolhouse before they were done talking.
“So listen,” Alice said. “Your mom.”
“Yeah.”
“Um, I heard that—I’m not sure where I heard it—but, she’s a surgeon, right? Like a plastic surgeon?”
Joanna kept looking straight ahead. “Yeah, she is.”
“And so, do you know a lot about the stuff she does? Like, what her work is?”
“You know. She does stuff a plastic surgeon does.”
Alice resummoned her persistence.
“Right, but does she like specialize in, I don’t know, doing stuff for people after an accident, or like nose jobs, or whatever? Or do all plastic surgeons do everything? Sorry, I just don’t know anything about this.”
“Oh, totally.” Now it seemed that of course Alice wouldn’t be expected to know the ins and outs of it all and had gone overboard with apologizing. “Yeah, she mostly does reconstructive stuff, nose work. I think she rebuilt someone’s ear after an accident.”
They started climbing the hill, and the roof line of the Schoolhouse appeared through the trees.
“Does she ever do breast reductions?”
Joanna’s posture seemed to soften, and she kept looking forward and down at the path.
“I think so.”
“So, like,”
“…”
“Do you think I might be able to talk to her sometime? Like could I call her at her office?”
“Sure, yeah, I think she could definitely do that.”
They kept walking, and Alice’s neck felt warm with relief. But then she wondered whether Joanna knew that Alice didn’t already have her mother’s phone number.
They reached the south entrance, and Joanna swung her bag off her shoulder and set it on the low wall at the base of the stairs. She looked in, separating her textbooks and notebooks, and came out with a slim black address book. Still not looking at Alice she opened it and flipped through, then reached in again for a pen. She folded down a corner of one of the address book’s back pages, tore it off, and carefully wrote the 212 number on the scrap of paper and handed it to Alice. Her face looked clear, and Alice could see an open smile in her eyes.
Alice smiled but worried that too wide a smile would scuttle the deal. She turned it into a nod, folded the little piece of paper, and worried about where to put it so it wouldn’t get lost. She took off her own bag and slid the number into the inside sleeve of the spiral notebook she used for English and Spanish.
Joanna turned and walked into the Schoolhouse. Alice could feel the secret slip of paper in her bag as her legs propelled her back to her dorm, where she was twenty minutes late for her meeting with Ms. Corbierre.
Alice got ready for Seated that night feeling full of hope. She had a test the next day in Spanish but she was ready for it.
At Seated, though, everyone’s eyes seemed to stop on Alice for a moment longer than usual, and at the table the conversation seemed only half about itself. Alice left the Dish as soon as the table was excused, and when she got back to her room, someone had written on their whiteboard:
DON’T DO IT, ALICE!!!!
Sincerely,
The devoted males of St. James School
Alice wiped off the whiteboard, went into the room, and lay down on the bed without turning on any lights.
“Sure, I’ve thought about leaving.”
She snapped a photo of Ben.
“How come?”
“Well,” she said, “you’re not going to be surprised when I say I think a lot of people are trying to look at my chest.” Ben blushed up from his neck and laughed, but she shrugged. “And that obviously makes”—snap—“me pretty uncomfortable, and”—snap—“so I think people”—snap—“can tell how uncomfortable I am.”
Ben started nodding. She took two more photos of him.
“I mean, why do you want to be friends with me?” she asked with a sudden hardness.
Ben blushed again, harder this time, and now even twisted slightly away from her on his chair. She took another photo.
“I like talking with you,” he said. “We talk about things I can’t talk about with anyone else.”
“Really? Is that really why?”
He wanted to say, ‘Even if you were completely flat, Alice, I’d still come and see you.’ He hoped that was true. Telling her about her smell wouldn’t help. “Do you really think that I think I have a chance with you?”
She laughed. “This place is teaching you: always with the graceful thing to say.” Abruptly she seemed close to tears.
She wasn’t touching the camera now, and instead was looking down at the floor.
He got off the stool and went over to where she was standing, and through torrents of resistance put his hand lightly on her shoulder. She took in a breath and gave a ragged exhale. As they stood there, he looked past her to the table where her binder and equipment sat, and saw several prints spread out in a sloppy grid. Among several instantly identifiable faces he saw a photo of Hutch: that lion’s head was looking down and to the side, all his swagger gone. Ben remembered Hutch starting to jump up and down after Chapel the first night, how invincible he seemed then, how fully in the stream of self-assured knowingness. He looked young in the photo.
“Wow, Alice, these are really good.”
“Stop.”
“I’m not kidding. These are good.”
And there was Gray, too. Alice hadn’t been able to break through his smiling for the camera; he just looked like a boy hoping to please his parents.
Ben said, “What if I took some of you sometime?”
“I’ve already been taking self-portraits. Those you will never see. And you’re not allowed to see yours until the exhibit.”
“I can accept that.”
“Let’s take a couple more.”
He went back to sit on the stool.
* * *
And then Ahmed got caught, exactly the way Ben had expected him to get caught. Tommy’s advisor, the junior faculty member in Gordon, had come to talk to him at eight p.m. about a quiz he had failed, and Graham hadn’t been able to put the bong away fast enough. Ahmed was there on the couch, also clearly high. When the advisor asked to look in the closet, he found almost a pound of marijuana.
Ben wished something more spectacular had happened: that they had been caught by the state police, that they had run afoul of some syndicate that then sent a couple guys onto campus, that there had been a system of wiretaps. Instead it was bong water on the braided rug. Ben asked Hutch to hold on to his vodka in case the administration searched their room.
Ben felt cold when he saw Ahmed’s face as he came into the room from the meeting in Phelps’s office. Ahmed didn’t seem to notice Ben at all; he went to his desk and sat down in the chair facing the inside of his loft enclosure. Still there from the day before was Ben’s Tintin book, Prisoners of the Sun.
Ben looked at the fold of skin at the base of Ahmed’s head and wondered if it would turn into two or three as Ahmed got older.
“You okay?” Ben asked. He felt as though he were asking an empty room.
“Ahmed?”
Ahmed set his elbows on the desktop and put his forehead on the heels of his hands.
“Come on, say something,” Ben said.
“I don’t know what to say. Don’t worry, they are not going to find any in our room.”
“Turn around. Come on, what happened?”
Ahmed slid the chair back slightly and turned his body toward Ben with his arm along the back of the chair. He glanced at Ben but then lowered his eyes again. Ben saw that he had been crying earlier and was trying not to cry now. The idea that Ahmed could cry hadn’t really ever occurred to Ben.
“What happened?”
“I will go before the Disciplinary Committee.”
“Did they say anything else?” Ben imagined the committee with the Companion open, pointing at the rules that the boys had violated.
Ahmed shook his head. “My father will know. Tommy says we will be expelled.” He looked at Ben again, this time with a supplicating face.
“I told you. See? I told you,” Ben said.
Ahmed’s face closed again, and Ben felt immensely sorry he had said this.
“So when’s the DC?” Ben said finally.
“Tomorrow night.”
Then, without looking up, Ahmed said, “Will you be my advocate?”
Ben said, “What, in the DC?” but he knew immediately that Ahmed meant this. He imagined Hutch’s face.
“You have not been breaking expectations,” Ahmed said.
Ben felt proud to be asked, and to have kept his own rule-breaking discreet, and then came a twinge at his hypocrisy. But also the relief that Ahmed wouldn’t have him at such a disadvantage. Or was this actually to be Ben’s employment, to earn back what he owed?
“Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“Would you do it if there was no money?”
Ben paused, but then nodded.
“So, please.”
Ben tried to nod again.
“You’re not sure,” said Ahmed. He seemed suddenly ready to cry. “Why do we even want to be here?”
Ben constantly held this question away.
“What are we all trying to be? My father is just as a man should be, and he never came here.”
“But you can’t go back and grow up poor in the desert.”
Ahmed nodded. “So,” Ben said. “Let’s figure out what we’re going to say in the DC.”
14. And Now
IT WAS DARK WHEN BEN GOT UP, DARK WHEN HE SHOWERED, DARK when he pulled his wool hat on. He braced himself for the cold and pushed out the door. You’d get busted if you were caught out of your dorm at two a.m., but Ben wondered at what time of morning it became not against expectations to be outside—six a.m.? Five? He walked out along the main road to the chapel. The melting snow and the overcast sky formed a single field of gray that the dark buildings and trees stood against.
His footfalls scraped quietly on the grit. The bracken on the banks of the Lower Pond waterfall bobbed under the falling water, and the branches were no longer frozen into long bright arcs.
Ben passed the front of the PO and moved under the trees that lined the road, then came up to the vast chapel lawn. He stopped even though the slush was starting to soak through his cared-for Sauconys. The black chapel had the proportions of a sitting sphinx, its spired head triumphant over its paws in front.
The air that morning had just the slightest swaddling texture against his face. Ben could sense the trees gathering their strength to push new buds out into the world.
Ben kept walking to the chapel’s front entrance. The wind started to gust, and with gloveless hands Ben pulled back on the main door’s giant iron hoop and stepped inside.
The door closed behind him, and the long echoing of wood against wood gave the immense dimensions of the space. He walked without ceremony to the little door at the back of the ante-chapel, slipped the key in, and after the key wouldn’t turn, he pulled it out slightly and tried again. Still it stuck, and he endured a moment of supreme disappointment, but then he slid it in again, not as far as before, and the key turned surely. Ben pushed the door back and smelled the colder air of the chapel-tower staircase.
He stepped inside. The bottom step was so close to the threshold that he almost tripped. He climbed the first stair and pulled the door closed behind him. It was almost totally black. There was a weak glow from a slit window in the stairwell above, enough for him to barely make out the curving walls around him. The stairwell turned inside the circumference of a very large Hula-Hoop.
The inside of the chapel tower had been described to him by Marco Salatino, the varsity crew coxswain, who had bragged about catapulting water balloons off the top of the tower until one of the balloons shattered a lamppost light and twisted its metal enclosure and Marco realized what would happen if a balloon actually hit a person. Marco had loaned the keys to Hutch, who wanted to bring his girlfriend Lily up here when it got warmer. Hutch had vowed to let Marco hit his pinky toe as hard as he could with a hammer if he ever made a copy of the keys. That’s how too many people would start going to the chapel tower, and then the lock would get changed. But Ben had seen the keys go into the pencil drawer of Hutch’s desk.
To keep his balance Ben decided to climb with his hands down on the stairs in front of him, and so he started up like that, twisting around the stone spindle of the staircase with his hands in the cold dust and tiny loose pebbles.
Very quickly he lost track of his progress. He had a while before Chapel would start—two and a half hours, maybe—and so he didn’t move too fast. He got tired of crawling and lifted one arm to stroke the outside wall to try to find a railing, and for a moment it seemed that he would fall back into the twisting space behind him.
But his outstretched hand met a rope, and as he took hold he heard it lift the many iron loops that anchored it into the wall. He stood and began to climb.
He imagined the substance of the tower disappearing and his body hovering exposed in the air. He stopped briefly to recover from the dizziness of going around and around.
And then the rope railing stopped with one last iron hoop, and he came up from the floor into the carillon room, which was about the size of a two-car parking garage and lit by vertical slatted windows. The wooden apparatus of the carillon itself looked like an enormous mantis trying to conceal itself as a loom.
He walked over to the player’s seat and looked down at the keyboard of wooden dowels. In the light now he could just see his breath. The bells for the carillon and for the clock weren’t in this room, and Ben guessed they were one or two levels above.
He turned away and looked to a flat-runged ladder rising up to an arched opening high in the wall that looked like the mouth of a brick pizza oven. He set his hands on the vertical beams of the ladder and set his foot on the first rung. As he shifted his full weight onto it, the wood and metal of the tower began to move, and quickly the entire structure vibrated higher and higher toward the point of collapse. Then it was a clapper striking the first bell in the Westminster Quarters. The sound of the bells cracked around him, and he gripped the ladder until the five tolls were done.
His heart began to slow do
wn and he kept climbing. When he reached the opening at the top of the ladder he looked out along the length of the chapel roof’s interior: mammoth wooden rafters above and the dark panels of the chapel ceiling below. From the roof beam a gangway on steel cables hung down a foot above the wooden spine of the chapel ceiling.
Each sloping panel beneath the gangway had a frame around the edge, with an iron eyebolt embedded in it. A clothesline tied to the eyebolt ran up over a pulley anchored into the roof and back down, and was secured to the side of the gangway with multiple wraps around a metal cleat. To clean the chandeliers, the maintenance men opened these panels, pulled the chandeliers up by their chains hand over hand, cleaned the bulbs and wrought iron, then lowered each one down again. For the first twenty years of the chapel’s life, this had been done every day to light the candles in each chandelier.
Ben went to his hands and knees and crawled out onto the gangway. It was expanded metal lath with treaded edges and it was painful on his palms and kneecaps. He imagined himself as a Spartan warrior, for whom this pain would be nothing. He thought of Alice getting up now, sleepy, careless of the fact of her body. He crawled out only a few feet because he wanted to make sure he heard Aston’s voice, and the Rector’s podium stood at the near end of the chapel.
He unwound the rope from the first cleat to his right, and with a slow, steady pull, tried to open the panel. It resisted for a moment, then opened with such a loud crack that Ben was terrified he had broken it. But the echo subsided and the panel rose smoothly when he continued to pull on the rope. After he had raised it about two feet, enough to give him a six-inch-wide opening to look through, he wrapped the clothesline back around the cleat. Ben leaned over and could see straight down five stories to the rows of seats that seemed from here like toy railroad tracks. Looking down from this height turned his body rigid. But it was so truly beautiful; if this kind of beauty had arisen, then the force that made it couldn’t be entirely wrong. Ben could see the podium from which Aston would speak.
Now all he had to do was wait. Ben turned over and lay against the metal, already cold through his coat, bringing his hands along his sides. He could feel the tread of the gangway through his wool hat.
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