I took another hit, holding the lighter in the bowl until it burned my thumb, and exhaled. I cracked the window. A few flurries of snow blew in, melting instantly.
True to form, Ollie never mentioned the daily cloud of pungent smoke to my parents when they called to check on us, or let on about much of anything. She’d always been on our side, throughout everything that had happened, and I loved her for that.
We stood under the bleachers at a lacrosse game—Taft versus Hotchkiss—while the crowd above us roared.
“My brother was busted by the Fed for dealing coke,” I told my friend Trey. My head felt light with the beer we were sharing.
“No shit, really?” He took the last drink from the can, then tossed it on the ground. “The fuckin Fed?”
“But don’t tell anyone.” I tucked my hands into my jeans pockets. “My parents made me swear I’d never say a word about this.”
“I swear,” said Trey. “But that’s, like, crazy.”
We’d been hanging out lately, getting stoned in the woods, smoking cigarettes and kissing behind the science building after vespers and dinner. I’d hung out with him one night in the fields while he tripped hard on mushrooms, laughing aloud at the stars. He had a high school band—Space Antelope—that played twangy Grateful Dead–inspired tunes.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told out loud,” I said. “I guess I needed to tell someone.”
Trey looked at me and grinned. “Cool. So now you’re lighter, right? Now you don’t have to worry anymore—you’re free.” His auburn hair caught a splinter of sun, turning it gold. His lashes were blond, almost invisible.
I leaned against the rough edge of the bleachers. The crowd stood up and cheered, a riot of stomping feet and shouts.
“Now I’m free,” I repeated.
I wondered if this could be true. I never felt free for very long, only for a few days or weeks before the heaviness came back. Whenever I had that feeling of lightness, I knew it wouldn’t last. Which meant I had to do something, drum up some new excitement, to keep ahead of that terrible weight.
For ten hours I pretended to be asleep in the back of the car with my trunk. My father drove silently, stopping only for gas and food. I knew he must be too angry or too heartbroken to speak, and his silence was, in fact, a relief to me.
Taft was throwing me out. I had only one documented offense, even counting the bottle of vodka found in my room that I swore I’d never seen before, but the school, reserving the right to change the rules, had decided I shouldn’t come back for junior year; they saw me as a ringleader of sorts, my influence spreading to innocent freshmen like Pamela, and so I was being excised, like a cancer.
I remembered my mother telling me about when Bobby was expelled from Kent, how he and my father had cried together at the airport. Charlie’s expulsion from South Kent had followed, then his college expulsion, and now this. Would I end up in the Marines?
The car came to another stop. I heard my father pumping gas. A few minutes later, he came back with what smelled like McDonald’s burgers and fries. I heard him trying to hand a bag to me in the back but even now I didn’t open my eyes.
Tears washed over my cheeks, perhaps at the kindness in my father’s gesture, what seemed almost like forgiveness. I was losing everything—my friends, my room, my independence—but . . . at least my father was with me there, silently, on my side.
He had driven from Michigan to talk the school out of expelling me, but the meeting apparently had not gone well. This was why I was “asleep” in the back of the car, and why I would have to spend the next two years back in Grosse Pointe until I could go away to college.
Ever since the bottle of vodka had been found, I had cleaned up, avoided all the spring parties out in the fields, the smoking sessions in the day-student locker room, but the headmaster had told my father, “Sorry—too little, too late.”