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“True.” The Colonel laughed. “Much to my chagrin, that is an incontestable fact. But she is not as big an asshole as Paul.”
“Not quite.” Takumi smirked. The Colonel laughed, and I wondered why he wouldn’t stand up for his girlfriend. I wouldn’t have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard – I’d have been grateful just to have someone to make out with.
That evening, when the Colonel dropped by Room 43 to pick up the cigarettes (he seemed to have forgotten that they were, technically, mine), I didn’t really care when he didn’t invite me out with him. In public school, I’d known plenty of people who made it a habit to hate this kind of person or that kind – the geeks hated the preps, etc – and it always seemed like a big waste of time to me. The Colonel didn’t tell me where he’d spent the afternoon, or where he was going to spend the evening, but he closed the door behind him when he left, so I guessed I wasn’t welcome.
Just as well: I spent the night surfing the web (no porn, I swear) and reading The Final Days, a book about Richard Nixon and Watergate. For dinner, I microwaved a refrigerated bufriedo the Colonel had snuck out of the cafeteria. It reminded me of nights in Florida – except with better food and no air-conditioning. Lying in bed and reading felt pleasantly familiar.
I decided to heed what I’m sure would have been my mother’s advice and get a good night’s sleep before my first day of classes. French II started at 8.10, and figuring it couldn’t take more than eight minutes to put on some clothes and walk to the classrooms, I set my alarm for 8.02. I took a shower and then lay in bed waiting for sleep to save me from the heat. Around 11.00, I realised that the tiny fan clipped to my bunk might make more of a difference if I took off my shirt, and I finally fell asleep on top of the sheets wearing just boxers.
A decision I found myself regretting some hours later when I awoke to two sweaty, meaty hands shaking the holy hell out of me. I woke up completely and instantly, sitting up straight in bed, terrified, and I couldn’t understand the voices for some reason, couldn’t understand why there were any voices at all, and what the hell time was it anyway? And finally my head cleared enough to hear, “C’mon, kid. Don’t make us kick your ass. Just get up,” and then from the top bunk, I heard, “Christ, Pudge. Just get up.” So I got up and saw for the first time three shadowy figures. Two of them grabbed me, one with a hand on each of my upper arms, and walked me out of the room. On the way out, the Colonel mumbled, “Have a good time. Go easy on him, Kevin.”
They led me, almost at a jog, behind my dorm building and then across the soccer field. The ground was grassy but gravelly too, and I wondered why no one had shown the common courtesy to tell me to put on shoes, and why was I out there in my underwear, chicken legs exposed to the world? A thousand humiliations crossed my mind: There’s the new junior, Miles Halter, handcuffed to the soccer goal wearing only his boxers. I imagined them taking me into the woods, where we now seemed headed, and beating the shit out of me so that I looked great for my first day of school. And the whole time, I just stared at my feet because I didn’t want to look at them and I didn’t want to fall, so I watched my steps, trying to avoid the bigger rocks. I felt the fight-or-flight reflex swell up in me over and over again, but I knew that neither fight nor flight had ever worked for me before. They took me a roundabout way to the fake beach, and then I knew what would happen – a good, old-fashioned dunking in the lake – and I calmed down. I could handle that.
When we reached the beach, they told me to put my arms at my side and the beefiest guy grabbed two rolls of duct tape from the sand. With my arms flat against my sides like a soldier at attention, they mummified me from my shoulder to my wrists. Then they threw me down on the ground; the sand from the fake beach cushioned the landing, but I still hit my head. Two of them pulled my legs together, while the other one – Kevin, I’d figured out – put his angular, strong-jawed face up so close to mine that the gel-soaked spikes of hair pointing out from his forehead poked at my face, and told me, “This is for the Colonel. You shouldn’t hang out with that asshole.” They taped my legs together, from ankles to thighs. I looked like a silver mummy. I said, “Please, guys, don’t,” just before they taped my mouth shut. Then they picked me up and hurled me into the water.
Sinking. Sinking, but instead of feeling panic or anything else, it occurred to me that “Please, guys, don’t” were terrible last words. But then the great miracle of the human species – our buoyancy – came through, and as I felt myself floating towards the surface, I twisted and turned as best I could so that the warm night air hit my nose first, and I breathed. I wasn’t dead and wasn’t going to die.
Well, I thought, that wasn’t so bad.
But there was still the small matter of getting to shore before the sun rose. First, to determine my position vis-à-vis the shoreline. If I tilted my head too much, I felt my whole body start to roll, and on the long list of unpleasant ways to die, “face-down in soaking-wet white boxers” is pretty high up there. So instead I rolled my eyes and craned my neck back, my eyes almost underwater, until I saw that the shore – not ten feet away – was directly behind my head. I began to swim, an armless silver mermaid, using only my hips to generate motion, until finally my ass scraped against the lake’s mucky bottom. I turned then and used my hips and waist to roll three times, until I came ashore near a ratty green towel. They’d left me a towel. How thoughtful.
The water had seeped under the duct tape and loosened the adhesive’s grip on my skin, but the tape was wrapped around me three layers deep in places, which necessitated wiggling like a fish out of water. Finally, it loosened enough for me to slip my left hand up and out against my chest and rip the tape off.
I wrapped myself in the sandy towel. I didn’t want to go back to my room and see Chip because I had no idea what Kevin had meant – maybe if I went back to the room, they’d be waiting for me and they’d get me for real; maybe I needed to show them, “OK. Got your message. He’s just my roommate, not my friend.” And anyway, I didn’t feel terribly friendly towards the Colonel. Have a good time, he’d said. Yeah, I thought. I had a ball.
So I went to Alaska’s room. I didn’t know what time it was, but I could see a faint light underneath her door. I knocked softly.
“Yeah,” she said, and I came in, wet and sandy and only wearing a towel and soaking boxers. This was not, obviously, how you want the world’s hottest girl to see you, but I figured she could explain to me what had just happened.
She put down a book and got out of bed with a sheet wrapped around her shoulders. For a moment, she looked concerned. She looked like the girl I met yesterday, the girl who said I was cute and bubbled over with energy and silliness and intelligence. And then she laughed.
“Guess you went for a swim, huh?” And she said it with such casual malice that I felt that everyone had known, and I wondered why the whole damn school agreed in advance to possibly drown Miles Halter. But Alaska liked the Colonel, and in the confusion of the moment, I just looked at her blankly, unsure even of what to ask.
“Give me a break,” she said. “Come on. You know what? There are people with real problems I’ve got real problems. Mommy ain’t here, so buck up, big guy.”
I left without saying a word to her and went to my room, slamming the door behind me, waking the Colonel and stomping into the bathroom. I got in the shower to wash the algae and the lake off me, but the ridiculous faucet of a showerhead failed spectacularly, and how could Alaska and Kevin and those other guys already dislike me? After I finished the shower, I dried off and went into the room to find some clothes.
“So,” he said. “What took you so long? Get lost on your way home?”
“They said it was because of you” I said, and my voice betrayed a hint of annoyance. “They said I shouldn’t hang out with you.”
“What? No, it happens to everybody,” the Colonel said. “It happened to me. They throw you in the lake. You swim out. You walk home.”
“I couldn’t just swim out,” I said softly, pulling on a pair of jean shorts beneath my towel. “They duct-taped me. I couldn’t even move really.”
“Wait. Wait,” he said, and hopped out of his bunk, staring at me through the darkness. “They taped you? How?” And I showed him: I stood like a mummy, with my feet together and my hands at my sides, and showed him how they’d wrapped me up. And then I plopped down on to the couch.
“Christ! You could have drowned! They’re just supposed to throw you in the water in your underwear and run!” he shouted. “What the hell were they thinking? Who was it? Kevin Richman and who else? Do you remember their faces?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” he wondered.
“Did you do something to them?” I asked.
“No, but I’m sure as shit gonna do something to ’em now. We’ll get them.”
“It wasn’t a big deal. I got out fine.”
“You could have died.”
And I could have, I suppose. But I didn’t.
“Well, maybe I should just go to the Eagle tomorrow and tell him,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” he answered. He walked over to his crumpled shorts lying on the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit two and handed one to me. I smoked the whole goddamned thing. “You’re not,” he continued, “because that’s not how shit gets dealt with here. And besides, you really don’t want to get a reputation for ratting. But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends.”
And if the Colonel thought that calling me his friend would make me stand by him, well, he was right. “Alaska was kind of mean to me tonight,” I said. I leaned over, opened an empty desk drawer and used it as a makeshift ashtray.
“Like I said, she’s moody.”
I went to bed wearing a T-shirt, shorts and socks. No matter how miserably hot it got, I resolved, I would sleep in my clothes every night at the Creek, feeling – probably for the first time in my life – the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what’s going to happen or when.
One Hundred and Twenty-six Days Before
“Well, now it’s war,” the Colonel shouted the next morning. I rolled over and looked at the clock: 7.52. My first Culver Creek class, French, started in eighteen minutes. I blinked a couple of times and looked up at the Colonel, who was standing between the couch and the COFFEE TABLE, holding his well-worn, once-white tennis shoes by the laces. For a long time, he stared at me and I stared at him. And then, almost in slow motion, a grin crept across the Colonel’s face.
“I’ve got to hand it to them,” he said finally. “That was pretty clever.”
“What?” I asked.
“Last night – before they woke you up, I guess – they pissed in my shoes.”
“Are you sure?” I said, trying not to laugh.
“Do you care to smell?” he asked, holding the shoes towards me. “Because I went ahead and smelled them, and yes, I am sure. If there’s one thing I know, it’s when I’ve just stepped in another man’s piss. It’s like my mom always says: ‘Ya think you’s a walkin’ on water, but turns out you just got piss in your shoes.’ Point those guys out to me if you see them today,” he added, “because we need to figure out why they’re so, uh, pissed at me. And then we need to go ahead and start thinking about how we’re going to ruin their miserable little lives.”
When I received the Culver Creek Handbook over the summer and noticed happily that the “Dress Code” section contained only two words, casual modesty, it never occurred to me that girls would show up for class half asleep in cotton pyjama shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops. Modest, I guess, and casual.
And there was something about girls wearing pyjamas (even if modest) which might have made French at 8.10 in the morning bearable, if I’d had any idea what Madame O’Malley was talking about. Comment dis-tu “Oh my God, I don’t know nearly enough French to pass French II” en français? My French I class back in Florida did not prepare me for Madame O’Malley, who skipped the “how was your summer” pleasantries and dived directly into something called the passé composé, which is apparently a verb tense. Alaska sat directly across from me in the circle of desks, but she didn’t look at me once the entire class, even though I could notice little but her. Maybe she could be mean … but the way she talked that first night about getting out of the labyrinth – so smart. And the way her mouth curled up on the right side all the time, like she was preparing to smirk, like she’d mastered the right half of the Mona Lisa’s inimitable smile …
From my room, the student population seemed manageable, but it overwhelmed me in the classroom area, which was a single, long building just beyond the dorm circle. The building was split into fourteen rooms facing out towards the lake. Kids crammed the narrow sidewalks in front of the classrooms, and even though finding my classes wasn’t hard (even with my poor sense of direction, I could get from French in Room 3 to precalc in Room 12), I felt unsettled all day. I didn’t know anyone and couldn’t even figure out whom I should be trying to know, and the classes were hard, even on the first day. My dad had told me I’d have to study and now I believed him. The teachers were serious and smart and a lot of them went by “Dr” and so when the time came for my last class before lunch, World Religions, I felt tremendous relief. A vestige from when Culver Creek was a Christian boys’ school, I figured the World Religions class, required of every junior and senior, might be an easy A.
It was my only class all day where the desks weren’t arranged either in a square or a circle, so, not wanting to seem eager, I sat down in the third row at 11.03. I was seven minutes early, partly because I liked to be punctual, and partly because I didn’t have anyone to chat with out in the halls. Shortly thereafter, the Colonel came in with Takumi and they sat down on opposite sides of me.
“I heard about last night,” Takumi said. “Alaska’s pissed.”
“That’s weird, since she was such a bitch last night,” I blurted out.
Takumi just shook his head. “Yeah, well, she didn’t know the whole story. And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people. You could have worse friends than—”
The Colonel cut him off. “Enough with the psychobabble, MC Dr Phil. Let’s talk counter-insurgency.” People were starting to file into class, so the Colonel leaned in towards me and whispered, “If any of ’em are in this class, let me know, OK? Just, here, just put X’s where they’re sitting,” and he ripped a sheet of paper out of his notebook and drew a square for each desk. As people filed in, I saw one of them – the tall one with immaculately spiky hair – Kevin. Kevin stared down the Colonel as he walked past, but in trying to stare, he forgot to watch his step and bumped his thigh against a desk. The Colonel laughed. One of the other guys, the one who was either a little fat or worked out too much, came in behind Kevin, sporting pleated khaki pants and a short sleeve black polo shirt. As they sat down, I crossed through the appropriate squares on the Colonel’s diagram and handed it to him. Just then, the Old Man shuffled in.
He breathed slowly and with great labour through his wide-open mouth. He took tiny steps towards the lectern, his heels not moving much past his toes. The Colonel nudged me and pointed casually to his notebook, which read, The Old Man only has one lung, and I did not doubt it. His audible, almost desperate breaths reminded me of my grandfather when he was dying of lung cancer. Barrel-chested and ancient, the Old Man, it seemed to me, might die before he ever reached the podium.
“My name,” he said, “is Dr Hyde. I have a first name, of course. So far as you are concerned, it is Doctor. Your parents pay a great deal of money so that you can attend school here, and I expect that you will offer them some return on their investment by reading what I tell you to read when I tell you to read it and consistently attending this class. And when you are here, you will listen to what I say.” Clearly not an easy A.
“This year, we’ll be studying three religious traditions: Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. We’ll tackle three more traditions next year. And in my classes, I will talk most of the time and you will listen most of the time, because you may be smart. But I’ve been smart longer. I’m sure some of you do not like lecture classes, but as you have probably noted, I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to spend my remaining breath chatting with you about the finer points of Islamic history, but our time together is short. I must talk and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: what are the rules of this game and how might we best play it?”
The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it. This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I’m in class, so teach me. And teach me he did: in those fifty minutes, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I’d never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them. And then he assigned us fifty pages of reading for the next day – from a book called Religious Studies.
That afternoon, I had two classes and two free periods. We had nine fifty-minute class periods each day, which means that most everyone had three “study periods” (except for the Colonel, who had an extra independent-study math class on account of being an Extra Special Genius). The Colonel and I had biology together, where I pointed out the other guy who’d duct-taped me the night before. In the top corner of his notebook, the Colonel wrote, Longwell Chase. Senior W-day Warrior. Friends w/Sara. Weird. It took me a minute to remember who Sara was: the Colonel’s girlfriend.
I spent my free periods in my room trying to read about religion. I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting. I also learned that after the events of the previous night, I was far too tired to care about myths or anything else, so I slept on top of the covers for most of the afternoon, until I awoke to Alaska singing, “WAKE UP, LITTLE PUHHHHHDGIE!” directly into my left ear canal. I held the religion book close up against my chest like a small paperback security blanket.
“That was terrible,” I said. “What do I need to do to ensure that never happens to me again?”
“Nothing you can do!” she said excitedly. “I’m unpredictable. God, don’t you hate Dr Hyde? Don’t you? He’s so condescending.”
I sat up and said, “I think he’s a genius,” partly because I thought it was true and partly because I just felt like disagreeing with her.
She sat down on the bed. “Do you always sleep in your clothes?”
“Yup.”
“Funny,” she said. “You weren’t wearing much last night.” I just glared at her.
“C’mon, Pudge. I’m teasing. You have to be tough here. I didn’t know how bad it was – and I’m sorry and they’ll regret it – but you have to be tough.” And then she left. That was all she had to say on the subject. She’s cute, I thought, but you don’t need to like a girl who treats you like you’re ten: you’ve already got a mom.
One Hundred and Twenty-two Days Before
After my last class of my first week at Culver Creek, I entered Room 43 to an unlikely sight: the diminutive and shirtless Colonel, hunched over an ironing board, attacking a pink button-down shirt. Sweat trickled down his forehead and chest as he ironed with great enthusiasm, his right arm pushing the iron across the length of the shirt with such vigour that his breathing nearly mirrored Dr Hyde’s.
“I have a date,” he explained. “This is an emergency.” He paused to catch his breath. “Do you know …” breath “… how to iron?”
I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn’t ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random drawers. “I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?” I said. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know we had an iron.”
“We don’t. It’s Takumi’s. But Takumi doesn’t know how to iron either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, ‘You’re not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me.’ Oh, God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke but I can’t reek when I see Sara’s parents. OK, screw it. We’re going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?”
“By the way,” he said as I followed him into the bathroom, “If you want to smoke inside during the day, just turn on the shower. The smoke follows the steam up the vents.”
Though this made no scientific sense, it seemed to work. The shower’s shortage of water pressure and low showerhead made it all but useless for showering, but it worked great as a smoke screen.
Sadly, it made a poor iron. The Colonel tried ironing the shirt once more (“I’m just gonna push really hard and see if that helps”) and finally put it on wrinkled. He matched the shirt with a blue tie decorated with horizontal lines of little pink flamingos.
“The one thing my lousy father taught me,” the Colonel said as his hands nimbly threaded the tie into a perfect knot, “was how to tie a tie. Which is odd, since I can’t imagine when he ever had to wear one.”
Just then, Sara knocked on the door. I’d seen her once or twice before, but the Colonel never introduced me to her and didn’t have a chance to that night.
“Oh. My. God. Can’t you at least press your shirt?” she asked, even though the Colonel was standing in front of the ironing board. “We’re going out with my parents.” Sara looked awfully nice in her blue summer dress. Her long, pale blonde hair was pulled up into a twist, with a strand of hair falling down each side of her face. She looked like a movie star – a bitchy one.
“Look, I did my best. We don’t all have maids to do our ironing.”
“Chip, that chip on your shoulder makes you look even shorter.”
“Christ, can’t we get out the door without fighting?”
“I’m just saying. It’s the opera. It’s a big deal to my parents. Whatever. Let’s go.” I felt like leaving, but it seemed stupid to hide in the bathroom, and Sara was standing in the doorway, one hand cocked on her hip and the other fiddling with her car keys.
“I could wear a tuxedo and your parents would still hate me!” he shouted.
“That’s not my fault! You antagonise them!” She held up the car keys in front of him. “Look, we’re going now or we’re not going.”
“Fuck it. I’m not going anywhere with you,” the Colonel said.
“Fine. Have a great night,” Sara slammed the door so hard that a sizeable biography of Leo Tolstoy (last words: “The truth is … I care a great deal … what they …”) fell off my bookshelf and landed with a thud on our chequered floor like an echo of the slamming door.
“AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!” he screamed.
“So that’s Sara,” I said.
“Yes.”
“She seems nice.”
The Colonel laughed, knelt down next to the minifridge and pulled out a gallon of milk. He opened it, took a swig, winced, half-coughed and sat down on the couch with the milk between his legs.
“Is it sour or something?”
“Oh, I should have mentioned that earlier. This isn’t milk. It’s five parts milk and one part vodka. I call it ambrosia. Drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the milk, so the Eagle can’t catch me unless he actually takes a sip. The downside is that it tastes like sour milk and rubbing alcohol, but it’s Friday night, Pudge, and my girlfriend is a bitch. Want some?”
“I think I’ll pass.” Aside from a few sips of champagne on New Year’s under the watchful eye of my parents, I’d never really drunk any alcohol, and “ambrosia” didn’t seem like the drink with which to start. Outside, I heard the payphone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders share five payphones, I was amazed how infrequently it rang. We weren’t supposed to have cell phones, but I’d noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried them surreptitiously. And most non-Warriors called their parents, as I did, on a regular basis, so parents only called when their kids forgot.
“Are you going to get that?” the Colonel asked me. I didn’t feel like being bossed around by him, but I also didn’t feel like fighting.
Through a buggy twilight, I walked to the payphone, which was drilled into the wall between Rooms 44 and 45. On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker (205.555.1584; Tommy to airport 4:20; 773.573.6521; JG – Kuffs?). Calling the payphone required a great deal of patience. I picked up on about the ninth ring.
“Can you get Chip for me?” Sara asked. It sounded like she was on a cell phone.
“Yeah, hold on.”
I turned and he was already behind me, as if he knew it would be her. I handed him the receiver and walked back to the room.
A minute later, three words made their way to our room through the thick, still air of Alabama at almost-night. “Screw you too!” the Colonel shouted.
Back in the room, he sat down with his ambrosia and told me, “She says I ratted out Paul and Marya. That’s what the Warriors are saying. That I ratted them out. Me. That’s why the piss in the shoes. That’s why the nearly killing you. ’Cause you live with me and they say I’m a rat.”
I tried to remember who Paul and Marya were. The names were familiar, but I’d heard so many names in the last week, and I couldn’t match “Paul” and “Marya” with faces. And then I remembered why: I’d never seen them. They got kicked out the year before, having committed the Trifecta.
