Carlos did, in fact, start reading Against Youth that very evening, and as the weeks passed he took pains to assure the rest of them that the book was great! really well written! And say how cool was it that Eli had grown up without television and computers and internet and all that kind of thing, and was still so engaged with everything, their generation and its preoccupations, weaknesses, failings, discarded potential! I mean, Eli came from, like, a shack. On a mountain. And never went to school!
Eli’s “juvenilia” wasn’t particularly long, nor was Carlos a slow reader, but he continued to hold on to the volume, even announcing that he was now rereading certain essays, and he began to say, at some point, that he’d begun organizing his thoughts for what he was calling his “critique.” Harrison had a pretty good idea of how little this critique was wished for by the author of Against Youth, but he himself was so eager to hear Eli talk about his book, and perhaps be forced into the very conversation he had once attempted, and which had been so promptly deflected. Now, if he sat still and didn’t disturb the universe, this classmate might just force open that door and haul the recalcitrant Eli Absalom Stone out into the open, and Carlos would ask all of Harrison’s own questions, and perhaps even the one about the no-photo-on-the-book-jacket thing, which was obviously related to the race thing. So he kept quiet and waited, but that much anticipated critique never did take place, and in fact Harrison would remain unenlightened regarding the full magnitude of Eli Absalom Stone’s actual thoughts on the race thing for many years to come, by which time it would be far, far too late to unmake certain decisions of his own, and untake certain positions of his own, many of them lamentably public.
One night in early March, as the students and resident faculty gathered again in the backhouse lounge, Eli Absalom Stone accused his classmate, Carlos Flores, of plagiarizing some insights into Titus Andronicus, which he himself had composed and left in a notebook on his bed, and which had appeared, without attribution, in an essay Carlos had presented to their Shakespeare seminar.
There was silence. Utter, excruciating silence. Professor Alcock said: “Eli, that’s a very serious allegation.”
“And I’m making it very seriously,” Eli said. “I’ve struggled with this.”
“Wait,” Carlos said. He was catching up. “What?”
“Your paper. It was based on my notes.”
“It most certainly was not!” Carlos yelled. He was looking around wildly. “Why would you say that?”
“For the only possible reason,” Eli said. “Because it’s true. And it gives me no pleasure, I promise you. As I said, I’ve struggled.”
Harrison was staring, he realized. Also, his mouth was open—that was easy to fix. Eli himself had not moved. He sat in one of the squishy armchairs down at the end of the lounge, near the kitchen doors, his arms on its shredded armrests. Across the room, somebody emitted a high and nervous laugh.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carlos said. He happened to be sitting right next to Harrison, but Harrison didn’t turn his head. “I never saw any notes. And I’m not in the habit of looking through other people’s things.”
“I don’t know whether it’s your habit,” Eli said mildly. “I only know that you did it once, because my work was in that paper you submitted. I recognized the material about Roman sources. Seneca’s Thyestes and Ovid’s Philomela. My insights. My notes.”
Carlos was on his feet. He stepped into the center of the room and began to turn, but he couldn’t seem to settle on whom he should be addressing. Eli? Or Professor Alcock, who like everyone else still seemed to be in shock? “I absolutely deny this … outrageous…”
“May I see the notebook?” Professor Alcock said.
“Wait, is there a protocol for this?” said John-Peter. “Some kind of due process?”
“Due process!” Carlos yelled. “I haven’t done anything!”
“Well, that’s why there’d be due process,” said one of the Justins.
“But if Eli’s wrong, shouldn’t he be compelled to withdraw the accusation?”
“I’m not wrong,” Eli said mildly. “So I won’t need to apologize. But obviously I defer to the wishes of the community.” This he said with the tonal equivalent of a deep, groveling bow. “Please don’t think for a moment that I find any of this easy. I was very troubled when I read Carlos’s paper. I took a few days to think it over. I don’t feel that I can … honorably … do anything other than what I’ve done.”
“But it’s … not … true…” Carlos’s voice was now unmistakably shaking, and Harrison suddenly recalled that this particular classmate had been a national debate champion. “I wouldn’t dream of stealing somebody else’s work. I never have and I never would. I can’t imagine why,” he turned toward his accuser, but Eli continued to glare at some spot on the rug, “Eli, why you would say this.”
Professor Alcock cleared his throat. “Eli? Can I see the notebook, please?”
With great solemnity, Eli Absalom Stone rose and left the room. They all watched him go, silent as if by agreement. Eli, unlike the rest of them, had acquired no physical traits of the outdoorsman while at Roarke, likely because his nonacademic assignments had pretty much kept him away from animals and out of the fields. Of course, he was no more interested in the workings of the farm than Harrison himself was; he was interested in things like the Roman sources for Titus Andronicus. Harrison felt a little chill. He liked Carlos. He liked all of them. Especially Carlos, or was this just occurring to him now, under these rather extreme circumstances? Did he like Eli? It was not the pertinent question. What he really wanted, what he had wanted from the very first moment in that New Hampshire parking lot, what he had likely wanted from the day he sat down with Against Youth, eighteen months earlier, was for Eli to like him. He had no idea whether Eli liked him.
Eli came back to the lounge carrying a simple marble-cover notebook, and everyone stared at it as if they’d never seen such an object, though this was the type commonly used by Roarke students, not to mention by primary and secondary school students all over the country, and so commonplace that office supply stores and drug stores and even supermarkets stocked them in bulk each August for Back-to-School. Eli himself was likely in charge of ordering a supply of these notebooks for the Roarke community, where students tended to write a lot and no one had a personal computer. Harrison, for example, carried six of these notebooks, one for each of his five seminars and a sixth for egg production records.
Eli handed over the notebook. In Alcock’s hands, it fell open easily to a place where pages—possibly many pages—had been roughly ripped out, leaving Eli’s distinctive thick and spiky handwriting on either side. “What am I looking at?” he said.
“About ten pages missing,” said Eli. “Mainly Philomela. But at least a couple of pages on the Seneca sources, too.”
“It’s absolutely untrue,” Carlos said, but his voice was now pleading. “I haven’t touched that notebook. I’ve never even seen it before.”
“It was on my bed about six days ago, then I couldn’t find it. I just figured I’d misplaced it somewhere. I’d moved on to another paper topic anyway, so I just kind of let it go. When I read Carlos’s paper I thought, well, that’s a coincidence. But then I found the notebook up in the Stearns Room.”
He stopped here. He must have known how this would land. The Stearns Room was one of several study areas around the small campus, outfitted like the rest with tables and chairs and a couple of couches, but it wasn’t as popular as the library or the backhouse lounge, both of which had fireplaces. Only a small, regular group opted for the Stearns, leaving their work out on the tables and bringing up mugs of tea from the kitchen directly underneath. This group had always included Carlos.
“Where?” Professor Alcock asked.
“Down the back of the sofa. The pages on Seneca and Philomela were missing. Like I said, I just kind of sat with it. I guess I was trying to persuade myself that it wasn’t, you know, that.”