Laughter ran around the table and then fell silent as the boys glanced at me. I was being tested, I knew, all of them waiting to see how the new teacher would react. Laughing with them would make me either a pushover or a buddy, both of which were fatal. Or I could frown and be the joyless martinet. Instead, I ignored the comment and asked Hal, “Do you play basketball?”
Stephen Watterson spoke up before Hal could say anything. “He’s our starting center for varsity. We call him Rebound.”
“Shut up, Watterson,” Hal said shyly, looking in his lap.
“It’s true! You ought to see him rip the ball off the backboard.”
“Well, this guy ought to try out for football,” Hal said, jerking his head at Stephen. “He can outrun anybody.” Stephen received this praise with a silent glow of appreciation.
“No kidding?” I said. “Maybe you’d try out for track in the winter.”
Stephen laughed. “No way. Too boring. Who wants to run around in circles all day?”
I smiled. “That’s what I might help coach,” I said good-naturedly, reaching for the iced tea. Stephen lapsed into an embarrassed silence. “Hey, no big deal, Stephen,” I said. “No offense.” Stephen smiled, relieved, and then started talking with Hal about this year’s football team.
I had not realized how isolating it could be to sit at the head of a table of ten boys. Teachers had always seemed to float above such considerations. Now I found myself feeling like a new boy struggling for acceptance. This is absurd, I thought. They’re fourth formers, for God’s sake. I don’t need a bunch of fifteen-year-old friends. I turned to the boy on my left, who had not said a word since quietly taking his seat several minutes ago. In fact, I hadn’t noticed him at all until just before the prayer. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Mr. Glass. What’s your name?”
“Paul,” the boy murmured. He had mousy-brown hair and a pale complexion. Dark shadows sat under his eyes like newsprint that had been smudged there.
“Right,” I said brightly, glancing at my list. “Paul . . . Simmons, right?”
He nodded faintly.
“No relation to our headmaster, are you?” I said, trying to get a smile out of him.
“I’m his son,” he said. Stephen Watterson looked up. A couple of the other boys did, too.
“Well, that’s great,” I said lamely. “Your father is . . . a heck of a man.”
“Yes,” Paul said, picking up a fork and turning it over in his hands.
Thankfully our waiter arrived then, sweating with apologies and bringing enough food to halt conversation for the rest of dinner.
CHAPTER FOUR
At the beginning of my fourth form year, when Fritz and I started rooming together, I met his twin sister, Abby. She was fifteen then, a girl in the process of growing into a young woman. Her hair was long and glossy black, her eyes a clear blue above a straight nose and a wide, generous mouth. Fritz and I were moving into Rhoads Hall, unloading our cars in the gravel parking lot in the back. Our parents had greeted one another, and Fritz’s mom, a kind but preoccupied woman who always seemed to have to move on to the next thing, had absently introduced Abby to me. Abby smiled and said hello, and then added that her brother had told her a lot about me and that she went to Saint Margaret’s and would start school the following week. I mumbled something in response, afraid to look at her, and was rescued by my father, who needed help with a trunk.
Fritz, of course, had noticed my discomfort. “My folks are coming next weekend,” he said casually a few weeks later, and I grunted as I pretended to read my World History textbook. Fritz waited, letting me twist in agony as he scanned a copy of Sports Illustrated, and then said, still looking at his magazine, “Abby might be coming.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Really?” I said before retreating behind a look of indifference. “I mean, that’s cool.”
“Told me to tell you hi.”
“Who did?”
“My sister.”
“That was it?”
“What?”
“That’s what she said? ‘Hi’?”
Fritz considered this. “No, that wasn’t all.”
“Well, what else did she say?”
And Fritz looked at me, his eyes big and round and smiling, and said, “She wanted me to tell you that she dreams about you every night, that she wants you to rescue her from the prison nuns at Saint Margaret’s”—he ducked as I threw my book at him—“and she can’t wait until the two of you make the beast with two backs.” He said this last bit while laughing out loud and running out of the room. I gave chase, swearing to beat the shit out of him if he didn’t stop.
But nothing happened. Abby didn’t come that weekend. In fact, we didn’t see each other again until the end of the year when Fritz and I were moving out of our dorm room, by which time I was sort of seeing a girl from Oldfields. Vague plans to get together with Fritz over the summer never materialized—I had a job as a lifeguard at a local pool, and Fritz went backpacking in Europe—but the Oldfields girl, who lived in Tennessee, managed to visit Asheville with her parents, and I joined them for a tour of the Biltmore House. The girl, Dana, and I ended up making out behind a greenhouse while her parents were in one of the gift shops. We damn near had sex right there in a bed of tulips, except that I didn’t have any condoms and didn’t know what the hell I was doing anyway, not to mention that her parents were only twenty yards away. This was the equivalent of love, or so I thought, and Dana became the object of my romantic obsession for much of my fifth form year.
Twice that year, on separate weekends, I visited Fritz’s home, a beautiful brick Colonial outside of Fairfax, Virginia. The lawn always looked as if a team of gardeners had tended to each blade of grass that morning. There was a swimming pool and a stone patio out back, and a home theater and foosball table in the basement, and Fritz and I enjoyed playing foosball and watching movies and lounging by the pool, gloriously wasting time. All of this was tempered some by Abby’s not being present either weekend.