“You mean today?”
“I mean any day. He hasn’t been to a class in three weeks. He’s going to get in trouble.”
“He’s already in trouble,” I said.
The guy studied me for a moment. “What’s that to you? You know him, or something?”
“I know him,” I said. “And they should have given Wanda Jo Evans a scholarship too if they expected Jack to go to class.”
“Who’s she?”
“You wouldn’t know her.”
“I know some girls.”
“But you wouldn’t know her. Anyway where’s this TV Jack might be watching?”
“Downstairs. Only I don’t know if he’s even there. I’m not his keeper.”
“I’ll go see if I can find him,” I said.
I went back downstairs.
After looking around for a few minutes I found Jack in one of the rooms next to the dormitory lounge. The door was shut. He was the only person in the room and he was lying on a sofa in his blue jeans and gray tee shirt. He was watching a game show on the black-and-white television and his feet were sticking out over the end of the sofa. When I sat down near him he looked over at me and then turned back to the TV.
“Jack,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“I can’t complain.”
“That’s good,” I said. “But what do you think will happen?”
“About what?”
“About this radio you took.”
“How’d you hear about that? You been talking to somebody?”
“It was in the student paper this morning. I came over to see what you’re going to do about it.”
“What the hell is there to do about it?”
“Well. The paper said somebody named Curtis Harris filed charges against you. That you stole his radio.”
“That’s a lie. Hell, he wasn’t using it so I just borrowed it for a while. And then I didn’t give it back to him yet.”
“Are you going to?”
“Not now.”
“How come?”
“Because. I don’t have it no more. The police have it. They took it for evidence.”
“All right, then. But what do you think’s going to happen?”
“I already told you: I don’t know. Besides, what difference does it make?”
“They might kick you out of school. That’s one thing.”
“I’m sick of school.”
“How do you know that? I mean, Jesus, you haven’t even been to classes yet.”
“I’ve been to enough. It’s just talk.”
I continued to look at him. There were dark bruises on his arms from practicing football and there was a scab on his nose between his eyes. Looking at him, he seemed exactly like a kid who’d fallen off a bicycle, like a great big kid who was now consoling himself by watching television from the living room couch.
“But listen,” I said. “Think about it for a minute. Isn’t there something we can do about this?”
He stopped watching TV, briefly. He looked at me. “Yeah,” he said. “You can loan me some money. I missed breakfast. You can do something about that if you want to.”