I figured a frontal assault was most appropriate. “Robert says you plan to scare him tonight with some sort of satanic worship. That true?”
Ben assumed a pious expression. “Mr. Glass, I don’t worship the devil. And why would I want to scare Robert?”
“He says you plan to—to bring the devil into your room.” I felt ridiculous under his placid gaze.
Ben smiled as if confused. “Mr. Glass, do I look like the type of person who would be able to conjure the devil?”
I told him to leave Robert alone and went back to my room to continue grading papers on Oedipus as a tragic hero. Early on, I had realized that assigning papers was one thing, but grading them another. What looked like a great assignment idea was complicated by the fact that it resulted in a stack of sixty-odd papers appearing on my desk, all needing to be graded. My fourth formers’ first paper, a short essay on their summer reading assignment, had nearly killed me. I’d spent around twenty minutes on each paper, writing detailed comments in blue ink about organization, textual evidence, even basic grammar, and had worked several nights past eleven o’clock trying to get them graded. When I had returned them, almost every student had flipped casually past my comments to find the grade, and then shoved his paper into the purgatory of his backpack. Now I was spending five minutes at most on each paper and would require all of them to submit a revision. My former English teacher, Mr. Conkle, who had retired to Florida two years ago, had written concise and trenchant comments that looped across the backs of my essays, and I wondered how he had done it year after year.
Bitching about student papers is probably standard for English teachers, but there were compensations. Paul Simmons’s paper showed signs of serious thought, although he had carelessly slapped the words onto the page and turned in what was clearly a first draft. It must have been difficult for him to attend the same school that his father ran, but I wished he had put in a bit more effort. By contrast, Stephen Watterson had again earned an A. The boy had a talent with words—his prose could be a bit flowery, perhaps, but it was always insightful and often clever. I wondered if Mr. Conkle had felt the same reading my papers. I shook my head at my own self-indulgence and bent back over Stephen’s essay, pen in hand.
Suddenly a shriek rang through the dormitory. Screams, cries, yells were all part of the daily repertoire on Lawson-Parker, but this was a howl of fear. My scalp actually crawled. What the hell? I stood up and stepped out into the hall. The scream came again, from upstairs. I saw heads poke out from behind doors as I ran down the hall to the stairs, which I took three at a time.
When I came out of the stairwell, Robert Cummings was running down the third-floor hallway, his face contorted in horror. “He’s here!” he screamed, and then threw himself at my feet. “He’s here! He’s in my room!”
A few students were milling uncomfortably in the hall. Rusty Scarwood came over and tried to calm Robert down. I walked down the hall to Robert’s room and went in.
Ben Sipple and Terence Jarrar, another of my sophomore English students, were giggling uncontrollably on Ben’s bed under a circle of weak yellow light from Ben’s lamp. A large black leather-bound book sat on the floor, its pages open to a picture of a pentangle. The boys fell silent when they noticed me.
“Evening, gentlemen,” I said. “Any success with the demon conjuring?”
Ben’s face hung in the dim light. Terence looked at the floor.
“Terence, you’re in your room for the rest of the night. Mr. Middleton will inform you about any other punishment he sees fit to give you. Go.” Terence went, leaving me alone with Ben.
I stood over Ben, who sat motionless on his bed. “Why’d you do it, Ben?” I asked.
“It was just a joke,” he said.
“Some joke. You freaked out the entire dorm by scaring your roommate.” I sighed. “My guess is, Robert will ask to move out. I’ll recommend that he do so. And I’ll suggest to Mr. Middleton that you do work details for a week and be placed on probation. One more stunt like this and you’ll be packing to go home.”
Ben snickered. “Which home, Mr. Glass? My mom’s in Miami? Or my dad’s in Boston with his new girlfriend?”
Taken aback by his brazenness, I said, “Look, this is a good school. You’ve got . . . opportunities here.” Even as I spoke, I knew how clichéd that sounded.
Now Ben laughed aloud, an ugly, derisive sound. “Is this where you tell me all the things I have to learn here, Mr. Glass? How it’ll change my life? How I wasn’t dumped here by my parents like a bag of laundry?” He paused to let this sink in. “All the teachers here hate me,” he said coolly. “Did you know that? And now you do, too.”
Most counselors, I guess, would tell you that a kid who said these things was seeking attention and that the kid was hurting in a bad way. And they would be right, probably. But all Ben’s accusation did was make me mad. He had terrified Robert Cummings as a joke, and his justification was that his own life was too painful for him to bother to act like a decent human being toward his classmates.
“Don’t try to guilt me, Ben,” I said. “Your life sucks? Join the club. If you can’t change what makes your life suck, then figure out what you need to do to deal with it. If you need help, I’m here. Other teachers are here. So don’t give me any of that victim crap.” I stopped, shocked by my own words. Ben was, too, apparently; he stared at me, slack-jawed.
I turned. “Go to bed, now,” I said, and left. Only later did I realize that I was angry in part because my own advice to Ben was exactly what I could have said to myself.
CHAPTER SIX
By dinnertime, almost an hour after Fritz had lost me in the trees, I still hadn’t seen him. I sat in a corner of the dining hall and picked at my plate of food while the few classmates who had joined me caught my mood and left me alone, talking among themselves about an upcoming mixer with Saint Catherine’s. I ignored them, afraid of what I would say if they asked me how I was doing. I’m great, thanks. I cheated on a physics test and lied to my roommate.