Feren got up to replenish her drink. “I don’t know, Liv. They probably have great drugs in reform school. Like they do in prison.”
“Better than at Taft?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine a place where drugs were more available or more intrinsic to the culture. In Grosse Pointe some kids I knew were starting to use coke, but at Taft you’d have to hide under your bed to avoid being implicated in drug use, and you’d probably find someone’s stash while you were under there.
The irony was, my parents had sent me away at least in part to protect me from drugs. As it turned out, getting high was just such a key part of life at Taft—an essential step toward becoming an adult, an instant form of self-reinvention, and certainly a step away from a childhood that was best left behind. I talked with my parents once a week on the pay phone in the hall, but with all the kids gone from the house except Whitney, I imagined the scene at home was rough. My mother’s persistent cheerfulness in the face of my father’s emotional decline was enough to keep me in New York for half of all my vacations, either with friends or at my grandmother’s house in New Jersey. I hoped Whitney would survive until he could go away to school, too.
Our “dorm mothers” were too detached to snoop—at least until sophomore year, when I roomed with Sasha. We’d chosen the room because no teachers resided on that hall, and the set of purple psychedelic curtains framing the window at the end of the hall, just outside our door, was a main attraction. We loved those curtains, with their absurdly bold swirling patterns, so retro 1960s, so symbolic of the ironies of Taft. Once Sasha took them down and donned them as a cloak she wore to sit-down dinner.
Pamela, a tall, skinny blonde from South Bend, Indiana, usually came down to do bongs with me. We used a “hit towel”—a regular white towel, dampened and rolled up for maximum absorption, into which we blew the smoke to avoid stinking up the room—and we sprayed Ozium in the air, as an added precaution.
But then Jan Coleruso, a newly hatched teacher from Yale, started knocking on our door during study hall, asking for aspirin and tampons, inhaling our room’s aroma as she stood in the doorway, her running shorts sprouting thick, muscular legs.
“Why is she stalking us?” I complained to Sasha as soon as she’d left.
“Um, because you’re a pothead?” Sasha would say wryly, grinning as she went back to her book. This was the routine.
Being practical, Pamela and I changed our schedule: we brushed our teeth, smeared Clearasil on our faces, and did bongs every night before bed, avoiding smoking during study hall hours.
Then one Saturday night my luck ran out. I’d been playing Quarters at an off-campus party, and my friend David, a day student, dropped me back on campus past the midnight curfew. The doors to the dorms had already been locked, and everyone’s lights were out except Coleruso’s. I knocked loudly and waited. I heard footsteps on the cement stairs, doors creaking open, and then my heartbeat pounding in my ears when I saw her through the porthole, turning the key in the lock, a gaseous cloud of beer and cigarettes wafting into the vestibule when I stepped in. I knew I smelled like a frat bar.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said.
Coleruso just stood there staring at me. Twenty-two and new to Taft, she had no idea how to carry out a bust. Having shadowed me for months now, she was freezing.
I signed in on the roster and swiftly retreated to my room before she could figure out what to say. Three days later, she turned me in to the dean. I was suspended for two weeks. My parents took the news in stride. A little beer wasn’t a big deal to them, although it was clear they hoped I would clean up my act after my suspension, which I spent in Grosse Pointe with Whitney and Ollie while my parents vacationed in the Bahamas.
Two weeks in Michigan was a long time, particularly in February. I couldn’t call any of my friends in Grosse Pointe, because my parents didn’t want anyone to know I’d been sus pended. Confined to the house, I spent the mornings keeping up with my schoolwork and the afternoons watching HBO with Whitney.
I missed getting stoned with my friends at school and would make do smoking a bowl myself in my room at the end of the day. I’d sit in my window seat watching the flurries blowing around outside, the house dead silent, Ollie downstairs roasting a chicken the way she used to do for us. Whitney would be in his room doing homework. I wondered if I appeared to him the way Charlie had once appeared to me—pasty skinned and preoccupied. Whitney had been alone for a year and a half, and this was our chance to reconnect; instead, we were both holed up in our separate quarters. I’d given him a couple of Neil Young cassettes, and I could hear “After the Gold Rush” floating down the hall from his room.