My general irritation with Fletcher flared at this, but then Kevin spoke. “Interesting choice of words, Fletcher,” he said coolly, “considering how you jerk off every night in the upstairs bathroom in Rhoads.”
The blood drained from Fletcher’s face so quickly that I thought he might faint, and then it came rushing back so his entire head flushed brick red. “How do . . . what . . . the fuck is that?” he managed to say. I have to admit that a tiny part of me danced at seeing Fletcher Dupree reduced to choking, enraged impotence. Then Fletcher was standing and walking toward Kevin, his fists balled. He’s going to hit him, I thought with a kind of wonder, but I couldn’t seem to make my body move.
Fritz stood up, his chair squalling across the tiled floor, and then he was standing in front of Fletcher, arms out and palms raised like an umpire who had just called a runner safe at home. “Don’t, Fletcher,” Fritz said. “He’s not worth it.”
“Get out of my way,” Fletcher sputtered, trying to step around Fritz.
“Yeah, Fritz, let him take a swing at me,” Kevin said.
Fritz, his arms held wide to keep Fletcher at bay, looked over his shoulder at Kevin. “I’m not doing it for you,” he said. “You might even like it, for all I know.”
Kevin actually leered at Fritz. “Nazi,” he crooned.
A hot, red rage flooded me. Insults were a time-honored art form at Blackburne, and while the line between cleverly one-upping a classmate and denigrating him beyond what was admissible could be hard to find, it existed, and calling someone a Nazi wasn’t clever but offensive and stupid. Kevin Kelly had just stepped over the line, unzipped his fly, and pissed all over it. But before I could do anything, Diamond was standing in front of Kevin, seizing his upper arms and lifting him bodily off the counter. “Hey,” Kevin managed, his glasses askew on his astonished face.
Diamond leaned his face close to Kevin’s. “Leave it, douche bag,” he growled, and with those words, it was as if a spell had broken. Fletcher gave a short bark of laughter, and Fritz grinned. I felt like laughing myself, especially at the sight of Diamond holding Kevin in the air as if he were a naughty child.
“Leave my friends alone,” Diamond said.
“Fuck you,” Kevin said, his voice quavering only a little.
“Boys!” Dr. Booth appeared, a Burberry scarf around his neck, and he stood in front of Diamond and Kevin, his eyes flashing. “What in God’s name are you doing?”
“Having a little disagreement, sir,” Diamond said, his eyes still on Kevin, who looked positively murderous.
“Put him down now, Mr. Cooper,” Dr. Booth said. Diamond promptly let go of Kevin, who dropped to the floor and staggered but did not fall. Dr. Booth chastised both boys roundly and dragged them off to see Mr. Manning, then the assistant headmaster and disciplinarian, who would put both boys in detention for the next three weeks. But as Diamond left the Brickhouse, he glanced at me and winked. That single gesture was enough to bridge the gap that had yawned between us. And from that moment on, our classmates referred to Fritz and me as the Huns almost triumphantly, as if bestowing a hard-won title upon us.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The afternoon after I taught the Anna Akhmatova poem to my fourth formers, I walked to the gym to check out a minibus from the athletic director’s office. Blackburne masters have various extracurricular activities they must chaperone, especially on the weekends. My weekend duty was coming up, and I had to drive students to a mixer at Saint Margaret’s School that Saturday. I wasn’t excited about driving a dozen or so boys halfway across the state to watch them bump and grind in the dark while I drank watery Sprite out of a paper cup, but I shrugged off my discontent and headed to the gym, the memory of Fritz and Diamond and Kevin Kelly still fresh in my mind.
Coach Gristina wasn’t in his office, but his secretary, Mrs. Wrenn, a lady with her white hair in a bun who had been at Blackburne since the mastodons, let me sign out a minibus and gave me a set of keys, admonishing me to return it with a full tank of gas. Then, having nothing to do until dinner, I decided to walk around the gym and revisit a few other memories.
Farquhar Gym had the same red brick and white columns as the other buildings on the Hill, but it was bigger, with broad concrete steps down from the portico on the front and enormous vertical windows on both sides, allowing sunlight to shine through and onto the varnished basketball court within. A first-class wrestling arena was buried in the bowels of the gym, along with squash courts, a weight room, a trainer’s room that was almost a well-stocked medical clinic, and the requisite locker rooms and showers.
It was also where Pelham Greer lived, although I hadn’t known that. Or, more accurately, I had forgotten it. Everyone had known that Greer lived in the gym, but that Greer actually lived and slept somewhere on campus had seemed odd when I was a student—he was just there, like the oak trees on the Lawn and the spire rising above Saint Matthew’s, a permanent and unchangeable part of the campus.
After walking across the basketball court, the sunlight pouring through the windows like honey onto the floor, I headed down a flight of stairs and walked past the locker rooms with their miasma of sweat and steam. I stopped to glance at the caged-off room where students had received their gym clothes and towels from the Slater brothers, Ned and Ted, two more Blackburne institutions. Ned, who had grizzled gray hair, was folding shirts at a table behind the counter and gave me a bored nod. I wondered how many Blackburne graduates wandered past him every week, finding him in the same position, folding yet another gray gym shirt.
After poking my head into the trainer’s room—and seeing, with a slight tug of sadness, that the old hydrotherapy whirlpools had been replaced with brand-new stainless steel tubs—I headed back past the locker rooms to the stairwell, intending to return upstairs. Just then, I noticed a door tucked in the space back behind the stairs. I had never really noticed that door before, probably because it had always been closed. It was now ajar, with a weak light spilling out of the doorway, along with a strange sound—a breathless, inarticulate grunt, like the sound you make when lifting something heavy. This was accompanied by an almost indecipherable noise, a shifting of leather, perhaps, or the kind of release a chair makes when you stand up out of it. The sounds repeated themselves, and then again.