Kicked Out Chapter 1
Hi, I'm Michael (michael.wapshot@gmail.com). Thanks for reading. Fair warning: this story is a slow burn.
KICKED OUT
I: The Kickoff
My junior year kicked off normally. It was a beautiful autumn. I was on the varsity track and cross country teams and held leadership positions in chess club and lit mag. I'd taken the PSAT and felt very optimistic about the results, and on Election Day I turned eighteen and cast my first vote. (Never mind that only D.C. and my home state of Massachusetts voted my way.) I was starting to feel reasonably grown-up, but I was still safely cushioned against any kind of real responsibility.
I was content.
Then one Sunday, a few days after my birthday, our big man on campus approached me--when I'd previously never seemed even a blip on his radar.
Well, actually, he wound up crying in front of me. Which was, for those playing along at home, a big honking deal. I think even now it would be, but this was back in the antediluvian early '70s, and the only times a high school guy could tear up were in the showers after screwing up terribly in the big game, and...well, that was about it. Barring extreme, "riven by wild beasts" levels of pain, or an immediate family member dying or something like that, you didn't cry. Once you got older, you were also allowed to cry under certain circumstances if you were military. But that was that. At least for so-called normal guys, in front of other normal guys. Behind closed doors, though, maybe everyone broke the rules once in a while. I'd done it before. Although I didn't exactly end up what you'd call normal.
But at the time, I certainly aspired to be as normal as a guy with a nigh-flawless GPA was allowed to be. Inside the prep school machine, that was generally what was required. If you stuck your toes out of line, you had to be prepared to lose the toes. So I tried to project a demeanor befitting normalcy. It may have been yellow-bellied, but it mostly worked. I wasn't in the social discard pile of nerds. Nor was I listed in the aberration file like my best friend, who floated along in his own orbit, and attracted negative attention for it.
People had a neutral take on me, and honestly, I was fine with that. I didn't get beaten up or targeted for cruel pranks. I didn't have any nemeses to watch out for. So what if I wasn't popular? As long as the people I really loved liked me, all was well. And so I tried to be as normal as my basic model allowed for. I was happy to stay in my little niche, hiding from the social big leagues while also resisting the temptation to devolve completely into the pretentious introvert that I was at heart.
After that strange Sunday morning, though, everything started to change for me at high velocity. Like going zero to Mach 1 before you even realize you're in the plane.
*
I'd planned to spend that Sunday hitting the books. We had a history test on that coming Tuesday, a whopper of a test. Beastly test. Leviathan. Dr. Dryden had set it because pretty much nobody had been doing the reading lately. Dryden would cold call on someone and the victim would just sit there blinking, or stammer out some roundabout bullshit about Hamilton or Whigs or Jackson. So we got daily quizzes. But we didn't do so hot on those either. Then we wasted a whole class session getting chewed out for disrespecting America by failing to get to know her grand history. You want to take this broad home, strip her down, and put your mouth on the teat of opportunity without even finding out her last name? (Inexact quote.) We were unpatriotic, we ought to be ashamed, we were not living up to the responsibilities of citizenship, et cetera. None of it was very convincing.
Dryden always seemed to forget the world had kept turning outside the grounds of Napier Academy over the three decades he'd been teaching there. It was 1972. This wasn't A Separate Peace, and we weren't resigned to being instruments of institution. We students thought of ourselves as people. And we had, as the disciplinary dean told us last year at a Very Serious Lecture about our year's disproportionate share of detentions and demerits, the bad manners to match.
Anyway, Hepburn, our resident radical*, was in my same class period. (*Meaning one of those silver spoon babies who reads Alinsky, spits out his spoon in shock, and never misses another opportunity to turn an algebra problem into a forum on class inequality. I actually liked Hepburn, but yeah.) And Hepburn interrupted Dryden's bitch session to jump up and say such-and-such about Vietnam and slave-owning Founding Fathers, and then some other emboldened guys took advantage of the het up atmosphere and yelled something rah-rah and completely irrelevant about Napier athletics, and the result was Dryden setting the entire year a hellish three-unit exam. Not to mention we all got detention. The bad manners of the junior class had struck again.
Dryden didn't get it. He didn't get students who thought teachers owed them anything more than a cold hard textbook education, or who wanted respect that went both ways.
He also didn't get that we were mostly all distracted for a pretty good reason: school sports. You'd think Dryden would approve, because of team-building and a physically fit citizenry and what have you. Instead he acted like sports were a faddish distraction that, with any luck, might just die out one day. Go the way of compulsory hat-wearing, or something.
Never. Sports were a treasure, something to live for inside this pre-college corral in Nowheresville, New Hampshire. It didn't matter that our teams were pretty snug at the bottom of various prep school leagues. Winning wasn't the point.
Except winning also definitely was the point, and for the first time in recent memory, our sports teams had been winning. I mean winning a lot. The junior class may have had disciplinary problems, but we also had a great athletic roster. And all that was of a lot more interest to us than having to learn battle dates of the War of 1812 for the most unimaginatively taught of Napier's core classes. The evening before Dryden flipped out, there had been a soccer game on campus against Berkshire. We did not win, but we came extraordinarily close and ended it in a tie--which was an excellent result for the team, as they had not won a game at all during the '69-'70 and '70-'71 school years, and had only won a single game over the previous school year. And Berkshire was a soccer powerhouse, so that made a tie against them that much more exciting. Consequently, many of us had spent the rest of the evening celebrating and replaying the events of the game instead of doing our homework. Hence Dryden's wigging out, hence the beastly test.
So there I was in the library, paging mindlessly through another chapter as I pretended that I had my mind on antebellum economic trends. But I was still riding high off cross country's bitchin' performance at last week's invitational (yes, bitchin'--living in chilly New England, of course we idolized surfer culture), and I was in the reading room in the library annex with all the windows. The big, distracting windows. It was an unusually bright and warm day for November, and as I gazed out at the yellow glow of autumn foliage, I could only think of bolting outside to run some more victory laps under beams of beech and sun.
And then--
"Hey, Spaulding," Ender said.
(I'm sorry to say that my name is Spaulding Stockwell. And no, we aren't old money--I mean, that's why my parents gave me such a try-hard name.)
George Endicott, better known as Ender, was drumming his fingers on one of the folders I had strewn across the reading table.
"What's up?" I said.
"Walk with me," he said, and breezed away toward the door. His turn to check that I was following was perfunctory, because of course I was following. I'd jammed my study materials back into my satchel, bidding sayonara to the 19th century. Sure, I had studying to do. But--
a. If Ender Endicott said jump, you jumped high without another word.
b. It wasn't like I was getting much done anyway.
c. I was one of the few people who had kept up with the history reading. I was one of the few who liked history at all. I could take the test on the spot and do pretty well. It was said Dryden didn't give As. Well--not to be a braggart, but I can tell you I happened to know that wasn't true.
d. If Ender Endicott said jump, you jumped.
e. If Ender Endicott...you get the idea.
I trotted behind Ender out the library and down the slope toward the athletic fields. He had yet to say another word to me, and I was itching with curiosity. As well as some fear. Ender was a big man on campus. Technically not the big man, since he was a junior and only seniors were allowed to be that cool. But Ender was damn cool, and in practice, he was absolutely our campus superstar. Charismatic, funny. Natural leader, but a good team player, too. He was nice, easy-going. But he wasn't only nice. You know? Kevin Foyle, for instance, was nice to everyone, and everyone liked Kevin. But Kevin wasn't cool. Ender was. He had It, whatever It is.
And of course, he was a star athlete and the best damn swimmer I've ever seen. He was the main reason our varsity swim team, which he vice-captained, had been on fire for the past few years. But he wasn't just a lap swimmer, he was also the captain of our water polo team, which looked poised to take the championship for the first time ever. This was a big deal because until a few months ago, it'd been years since we'd won any team sports championships at all.
But then last June, Napier lacrosse made the surprise leap to win the league championship. And who but Ender was the player behind that victory? He ended up being named the MVP--of the whole league. Not to mention he was also the hockey team's excellent left winger. Plus he always, even though he didn't train with them, stepped onto the roster to row for our crew team every season. I mean, why not, with those arms?
This athletic resume would be very impressive even now, but back then, it was off the charts. Few people had the kind of athletic versatility that would allow them to play more than one sport per season. And even if a guy was capable of it, he might be out of luck, because a lot of coaches and schools strictly banned it. It was said to be too stressful on body and mind; it held too much possibility for schedule conflicts; it resulted in too much missed class time.
But Ender was exceptional, and Napier wasn't about to stand in his way. He'd even been forcibly recruited as a substitute player for our dreadful football team a few times. Those few times, we still lost, but thanks to Ender's crazy wide receiver action--he was known for nabbing shitty passes that many players, even on good teams, would have fumbled--we did not totally humiliate ourselves.
Obviously, his body was magnificent. He stood at 5'11" and had the shoulders of a lion, with biceps to match. He didn't have an inelegant dryland gait, like a lot of swimmers do. He had decently long legs, actually, good for running, and his calves were enough to make you believe in God as a sculptor. And his glutes--
Hastily redirecting my gaze skyward, I discovered a fascinating crow to stare at. What a moment Ender had picked to turn around, although I was pretty sure he hadn't seen me checking out his ass. Which I wasn't, by the way--my eyes just rested in the wrong place on their tour of the major muscle groups. As a fellow athlete, I was allowed to extend a gaze of professional curiosity.
"Boy, do you walk slow," Ender said, but not as an insult. He was smiling a little. He had this incredible magnetism, this intangible quality that glowed all over him in a million pinpricks when you encountered him in person. God, you always wanted so much to be near him. I did, anyway. A lot of people did.
Oh, and because life is blazingly unfair, he was good-looking to boot. A tad bland, those good looks, like he'd stepped out of a department store catalogue: blond and all-American, very standard-issue blue eyes...but that was just me. In any event, it was certainly no hardship to look like you ought to be modeling outdoor fashions for the Memorial Day blowout sale.
And I did, despite my quibbles, consider him very handsome.
After his complaint that I was walking slowly, I'd switched to a more natural pace, and now we had fallen into step. Earlier I had been too nervous to walk alongside him. I mean, we hardly ever talked, Ender and I. Yeah, I attended all his home turf hockey and lacrosse games (but, admittedly, not the swim meets and water polo matches, as I did not care for pool events), but so did the vast majority of the junior class. And much of the rest of the school. I mean, it was such a beauty to watch this guy play, you can't imagine. But outside post-game congratulations and incidental classroom exchanges, Ender had little reason to interact with me. I was nobody, I thought, particularly special. I wasn't cool. I didn't have a family name that meant anything. (Ender did, because of course he did.) And even though I tried like hell to downplay and damper it, even though I tried to make myself seem like I was fit for public consumption, I was very noticeably book-smart--beginning to suspect I'd wind up as salutatorian or valedictorian, even. And being book-smart was not exactly great for my reputation around school. I wasn't purposefully sticking a toe out of line, but a force at my back was inching me closer to the precipice against my will, closer to the gnashing teeth of whatever cog or stamper in the Napier machine wanted to chomp off my pretty little digits.
So when Ender approached me in the library, I had no idea what to expect. On the exciting end of possibility: an offer to sell me booze. Everyone knew Ender had a fake ID. On the horrifying end: he was really mad at me about some unknown thing and was about to dress me the hell down and render me persona non grata for the rest of high school. He had that kind of power, if he cared to wield it. And that was why even though I had no real reason to believe that something terrible was about to happen, I still felt intimidated.
Not to mention I was afraid that no matter what he wanted, I'd screw up and act weird and make him think I was a lamebrain.
I'd have thought we were going to one of the smaller fields, the dormant baseball diamond or something. But instead Ender veered left toward the track area. All the fields were empty right now, or they were supposed to be, since we had this campus ban on playing sports on Sundays--for a day of rest so that we could stay inside studying, or some bullshit. Well, Ender couldn't be selling me beer, I supposed, if we were headed to the broad, exposed bleachers around the track. Hmm.
Ender hopped up onto the bleacher stairs from the side, his shoulders barely clearing the railing, and extended a hand to help me up. Of course he'd have a hand that was perfectly warm and dry, not like my sweaty, gross palms, and I think I might have held onto him a moment too long thinking about that. Which made my face hot with horror, but at least, with me safely behind him again, Ender couldn't see that I was all flushed.
He led me up to the second-highest row. And there we sat and stared across at the lonely track.
"Spaulding, I had to talk to you," he said.
"Yeah, I figured," I said, trying to be a little jokey. But I looked over to see that Ender was still staring into space, and my stomach pinged with alarm. Usually unflappable, he looked downright ill.
"Ender, what's wrong?"
"I'm in trouble," he told his shoes.
"What kind?"
He hesitated, then said, "I think I'm gonna get kicked out of school."
"What?!" I said, aghast. "Why?"
"You know I'm on probation?" he said.
No, of course not. Why would I know about that? We weren't friends.
When I didn't say anything, he glanced at me without making eye contact and said, "I wasn't really asking. Nobody knows. Nobody but you."
I would have felt honored, albeit confused, that I was Ender's chosen confidant, but mostly I was still alarmed by his strange manner.
"What happened?" I said.
"I'm doing bad in my classes."
"How badly?" I said, hoping he would hear my correction.
"Really bad, Spaulding. Really, really...just terrible."
He'd taken out a lighter from somewhere and started playing with it.
"Are you failing anything?"
His laugh was empty.
"Better ask if I'm passing anything. I'm not. Well, I was passing history, if you can believe that, but after Tuesday, forget it. I'm screwed."
"But, Ender," I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose, thrown for a goddamn loop by all this. I was trying to reason this shit out. "Napier can't just kick you out. Can they? Aren't they doing anything to help you? You're half the reason this stupid school filled a trophy shelf last year."
"Look at you, barracks lawyer," Ender said, with a tepid smile. My face got warm, but I could tell he was only teasing me, not complaining. Now he grunted and shook his head and said, "Anyway, Napier did try to help me out. Remember Brenner? They recruited him to tutor me last year when my grades were starting to go. 'Course those grades practically look good compared to now."
Ralph Brenner had been in the year above us. I'd always liked him; we ran track together and he often came to chess club. But he'd left school last April. His parents up and pulled him out. We'd never gotten a straight story.
"So, what, they left you to flounder after he transferred, or whatever?"
"Yeah," Ender said. He hesitated, then said, "Look, he didn't transfer. They expelled him on the spot, pretty much. I almost got kicked out, too."
"What the hell happened?" I said.
"Oh, drugs and stuff," said Ender, and ran his hand through his hair, looking up at the pure blue of the clear November sky. "I don't really wanna talk about it. My dad said he'd sue if Napier expelled me, really went for their throats. 'Course, my parents still think it was all Brenner's idea."
"Because you told them it was all Brenner's idea?"
Ender smiled sheepishly and looked me straight in the eye for the first time.
"What happened to him, anyway?" I said.
"He's at Loomis, I guess," Ender said. "We're not supposed to contact each other, but that's what I heard. He oughta be all right for UPenn. I'd rather be in his shoes, man, believe me. Napier let me stay, but with all that on top of shitty grades, they put me on probation and told me I had this fall to shape up or ship out."
I pondered this for a moment, and then said, "Really? Even though your dad is...your dad?"
It was common knowledge that being the son of an alumnus could buy you a lot of leniency at Napier. And Ender's family had been going to Napier for generations, at this point. His two older brothers had gone. His father had gone. His grandfather had gone. And on top of it, his father donated handsomely to the school. So yeah, Ender was a Napieran's Napieran. His blood ran white and purple.
"My dad stopped donating after he got into it with Dickert," Ender said. "And now it's like Napier wants me to wash out."
(Our headmaster's name started with a P, not a D, but you'd never know that listening to the student body.)
I chewed on all this for a moment and then said, "Have you told your parents about your grades?"
Ender dropped his face to his knees and said, "No. And they can't find out. I swore to my dad I'd do better. I acted like I was having a goddamn conversion, man. I swore I'd knock it off with the drinking and smoking and all, and I'd focus and work and stuff--but I've been goofing off instead. Like fuckin' always. My dad will fucking kill me if he finds out. I'm already an embarrassment and I'm blowing my last stupid chance."
He was rolling his forehead slowly, miserably back and forth across his knees.
"I'm not school-smart. And I like having fun. I guess I'm lazy, I dunno, I just can't make myself try any harder, man. I don't know how to study, I can't write, chem is like Chinese to me. I don't know what to do anymore. If I fail even one class I can't play sports anymore, either, and sports are everything, they're my life...I don't know what the hell I'd do without them."
He lifted his head a little but kept his face buried in his palms. His whole back was vibrating, and a snuffly baby animal sound slipped out through his hands.
Holy shit. I mean, holy fucking SHIT. I didn't know what the hell to do.
Ender was the manliest guy around. He hadn't cried in seventh grade when he was in a bad hockey accident and there was bone jutting way out of his damn arm. (Red Houghton, the goalie, cried just from seeing that arm, and no one even made fun of him for it.) And then when Ender's brother Whit--something of a beloved Napier icon himself, although he attended before our time--died a couple years back, Ender had been acting so normal, if subdued, that most of us had had no idea. Not until he disappeared for a week for the funeral and memorials, at which point the teachers told us what was going on so that we wouldn't accidentally say anything moronic when he got back. Ender did not cry.
Until today. In front of me, of all people. Jesus, what was I supposed to do? Pretend it wasn't happening, say something, do something?
I ended up putting a hand between his shoulder blades and giving him what I hoped was a reassuring backrub.
"It's O.K.," I said mindlessly. "Uh, hey, listen. There's still a chance to work this out, isn't there? It's six weeks until final grades."
"Please help me, Spaulding," he choked out.
"Anything," I said, wanting to cringe at how fawning I sounded. But Ender was an athletic god, a school hero. Helping him was like some kind of patriotic duty.
Then Ender said, "Hey, so, you're friends with the senior track guys, right?," and I stopped rubbing his back out of bafflement. I'd thought he was going to ask me to tutor him.
"Don't stop, that was making me feel better," Ender said, head still craned down.
"Oh, uh, right..." I started rubbing his back again, and cleared my throat. "The uh, the senior track guys? Yeah, I know them. Why?"
"Brenner told me before he left that they have a cribbing ring," Ender said.
I didn't like where this was going.
"Don't tell anyone I said so. But yeah, they do."
He peeked up at me and said, "Are you in on it?"
"Hell no. It's only for seniors," I said, although this was not strictly true and was not the reason that I didn't participate in the cribbing ring.
"Brenner said they took him earlier, and they were going to let you in early, too."
I sighed and said, "I mean, they asked me to join last year, to help out, you know...with writing the crib sheets. But I said no."
"Spaulding," Ender whispered. "Could you get in on it? For me? For the swim team, for water polo?"
I just took my hand away from his back, and stared at my shoes.
Damn it. If Ender Endicott said jump, you jumped. But this? It was the one jump I'd sworn never to take. I was no cheater. Like, philosophically. I didn't give a shit that it made a fair few of my peers think I was completely lame. It seemed to me that to survive an institution as bizarre and all too often inhumane as a boarding school, you needed to have at least one bar. One standard to hold yourself to. Without some belief in something, whatever it was, you'd be lost.
Cheating was my bar, and I couldn't clear that kind of high jump. I was about to fail Ender. There was truly nothing lamer.
"I can't," I said.
"Please!"
"I'm sorry, Ender. But I can't."
At this, he abandoned all dignity and burst into real tears.
Sweet Jesus. My stomach flopped over in a dire fashion. Hell, the whole world flipped on its axis. This wasn't how things were supposed to be--Ender wasn't supposed to cry. These tears he was shedding could not be real. Yet they were real.
"Hey! Hey, don't," I rushed to say, unable to take it for a second longer. I touched his shoulder. "Don't, shhh. Ender, listen. You don't have to cheat to fix this."
"Yeah, I do," he said thickly. "You have no clue how behind I am. This was my last gasp, man, asking you. I can't ask the track seniors directly, they all think I got Brenner expelled or something, they won't talk to me anymore."
Well, this was juicy. Generally speaking, no one dared defy Ender or express dislike for him. And I had heard not a peep of this from the seniors--but then, the guys who ran track tended to be tight-lipped, leave-everyone-to-his-own-business types. I could certainly see why they might be angry, though. Ralph had been our one shot put and discus guy, and his absence had hobbled us in field events for the remainder of the season last spring.
"Now what?" Ender was babbling. "Now what do I do? He drew a ragged breath. "I'm such a fucking idiot, and now I'm dead in the water, I'm so goddamn dead. It's fucking hopeless! Fuck!"
"No it isn't!" I said, and grabbed him by the shoulders. "Jesus, Ender, keep your head on. I'll help you. I mean, I can tutor you. I've done it before, I know how to get results. I'm the only reason Graham Dorsey passed enough math to graduate." (I winced at sharing this proof of what a nerd I was, but Ender had opened up to me, so why shouldn't I be straight with him?) "That's what I thought you were going to ask me about in the first place--why are you shaking your head."
"I don't have any money for a tutor," he said. "I might be broke for the rest of term, depending...just, depending."
"What do you mean, you're broke?"
"I spent my whole fall allowance already. I can't ask my dad for more."
"Whatever on?" I said.
"Good times," Ender said flatly, and sighed. "I'm a mess, huh, Stockwell? My dad'll make me get a G.E.D. and join the Navy. Man. I hate boats."
I couldn't tell if that last bit was meant to be funny or if he really was that jejune, but never mind.
"No way, Ender," I said. "Listen. I'll tutor you for free. Every day if we have to. I don't care, you can make it up to me someday. You're Napier's great blond hope, right?"
Ender blinked at me.
"You're not kidding me?" he said. "You'd do that?"
"Yes, I would," I said, and smiled as he locked me into the warmth of his gaze. "Oof!"
He'd thrown his arms around my ribcage, purposefully too hard, I thought. Reasserting himself some.
"Thank you thank you thank you, Spaulding!" He gave me an exaggerated, puppyish kiss on the neck. "If you pull me up to all Ds, I'll put my goddamn tongue in your mouth!"
"Don't you threaten me, Endicott," I said, and we laughed, and suddenly I was so happy. Ender Endicott and I were laughing together! He liked me. Napier's biggest star, and he thought I was--not cool, I'm sure, but nice, trustworthy, a good dude. You have to appreciate how much everyone on campus loved this guy. Getting hugged by Ender was like having JFK kiss your baby. Sure, JFK was nearly a decade in the ground, but for this to happen to me of all people was about as surprising as Jack rising from the dead, I thought. I felt warm all over.
Ender gave me a last friendly squeeze, and it was in the grip of his arms that it happened to me.
I felt it move. Down there. You know what I'm talking about.
It very unmistakably stirred.
Ender pulled back and was saying something about his practice times and team schedules, and I was nodding and uh-huhing, and I must have been taking it in on some level, because I grokked that we'd arranged to meet for a marathon history session later in the evening in his room. He went on thanking me as we trotted back down the bleachers, and then waved at me as he turned to jog away for a Key Club meeting.
"See you at seven thirty!" he yelled, and I waved back. But all this was a blur, as was much of the walk back to my room in Wyeth Hall. My mind was consumed by a single thought: Ender Endicott made my dick twitch.
I was alone, but my face was radiating heat.
What the hell--seriously, what the hell. Look, I was a normal guy. Sure, single-sex boarding schools have been known to stunt preferences, perhaps especially those that were as isolated as Napier. But I wasn't that desperate. No, that'd never so much as crossed my mind.
In fact, I'd always thought myself lucky not to suffer from the rabid sex thirst that a lot of my classmates talked about. Certainly I wished I was getting some action, but I was stuck at Napier for the time being, and it was as if my brain had given my crotch a shot of lidocaine to hold me back until I was in a situation that was anything but hopeless. I thought about sex--with women, to be clear--all day, but I wasn't agitated enough to do anything stupid in real life. No, I had no interest in doing anything stupid or weird, for sure. Not worth it.
Oh man. Oh man, though. Ender had got me hot. I was hot for Ender. Just a little. But what the hell was that supposed to mean? Damn it. Why did I have to let him hug me? I could have gone on living without a doubt in my mind about my sexual interests. But I had let Ender hug me, and now I had this thing with my, y'know, thing--now I had this incident to worry me.
It was prickling me the way a burr does when it's stuck in your shoe, grinding right into the tenderest part of your footsole. The pain was less relevant than the deep, overriding sense of discomfort.
...And then things got even weirder. Because when it rains, apparently it pours. My junior year might have been called the year of coincidence, really. And if it were, then this day, the twelfth of November, would be its commemorative feast day.
Still ruminating, I'd slouched my way down the grotty carpet in the hall of my dormitory and, knowing that my roommate Nat would be out at debate practice, produced my key and unlocked the door on swift autopilot.
But Nat was inside, and he wasn't alone. And the pair of them (clothed, thank God) were tangled in an amorous, homo embrace: body stacked on body, mouth on mouth, hands everywhere.
(What?)
And it was my bed they were on top of.
(What?!)
"What the hell!" I barked.
"Shit!"
Nat had already shoved the other guy off the side of the bed in a flash, thuddump!, as if planning to pretend he was alone. Now he sprang up from my comforter, misbuttoning his open collar and panting, "Man, there's not even a spare second to jerk off around here."
Ah. Nat was indeed, absurdly, trying to pretend he'd been alone. I could only stand there stupidly for a second, but even I, master of discretion and feigned ignorance--a born WASP, me--couldn't go along with this game. Certainly not when my own property was involved. And not when Lawrence Nagelschmidt, who was supposed to be my best friend, was breathing dust bunnies under my bed and hoping I'd just leave. Because despite Nat's efforts, I'd seen the face of his partner in crime.
"Uh. Why the hell were you using my bed?" I said, latching on to the most mundane aspect of a bizarre tableau that was now burned into my brain. I could barely think, I was so stunned. Two guys--two guys kissing, of all things--Nat--Lawrence--
"Sorry, man, can't remember why I sat down on it," Nat said. "But then I just got caught up in--myself."
"Lawrence," I said, raising my voice, "I know you're down there, so you might as well get up."
"No he's not," Nat said lamely, but the guy under the bed had already stood up. His neck was bent with embarrassment, but he was still plainly Lawrence. Long arms under a now-schmutzy tweed sport coat. His dark hair all disheveled. He fumbled round the foot of my bed, shoes in hand, wincing as he bumped his shins. Brushing lint and dust off his lapels, he mumbled, "Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry," as, with a pained attempt at a smile, he breezed past me out the door. He had not once looked me in the eye.
I watched him go, wondering if I should follow, but then let the door shut behind him, crossed my arms, and gave Nat a Look. The Look was some combination of, "Use your own bed, asshole," and "You? Sucking face with another guy?!" and "You and Lawrence sucking face?!?"
Nat sank down into his desk chair, shirt still misbuttoned, and offered me a very nervous smile that did not extend to his fearful eyes, which were small and marble cold.
"Sorry," he said. "Thought you'd be in the library a lot longer than that."
"I got distracted," I said. "So, what, it's fine for you to make it on my bed so long as I don't see?"
"No way, man, you know I'm sorry. It's just, your bed doesn't squeak--"
"Jesus H. Christ," I said, taken aback by this gory detail.
"It'll never happen again, all right? We got caught up--we should never have done that." Nat looked down and set about fixing his buttons, probably glad to have something to do.
I took a seat in my chair, too. Our desks sat next to each other, and I noted with a pang of annoyance that Nat had moved my stapler back into his workspace. What exactly, I wondered, would never happen again? The use of my bed, or the thing the bed was being used for?
"Weren't you supposed to be at debate?" I said.
Nat shrugged and said, "Winant has the flu, and when he's not there to take attendance most of us skip."
We sat in awkward silence for a bit until I decided to go for it.
"So...you and him..."
"What?" Nat snapped, crossing his arms. He gave me this look like, I dare you, Stockwell. I just double dog dare you to say something.
I said something. "I mean, what's up with that?"
He made a godawful face.
"I'm not a queer, Stockwell, got it?"
"Relax, no one said anything about that," I said, and took off my big horn-rimmed glasses to rub them clean, willing myself to sound extremely normal. "Listen, stuff happens, I get it--I mean, I don't get it, ha-ha, but I'm not gonna be an asshole about it. I'm not gonna judge you. But it was Lawrence, so, I guess I wanted to know what the deal was."
"God, he's the Jew but you're the nosy one," said Nat.
"Oh, hardy har har."
He saw that I still expected an answer and said, "Why don't you just ask Nagelschmidt."
"Nagelschmidt and I..." I hesitated, pretending I needed to take off my glasses again to resituate them. Man. That was the first time I'd ever called Lawrence by his last name. First time ever. I didn't even know what the problem between us was, anyway, just that we weren't talking so much anymore. But Nat didn't need to know any of that, and I shook my head fiercely.
"Look, I'm not asking for the goddamned play-by-play, I was only saying I didn't even know you guys talked to each other! Damn!"
"O.K., O.K., hothead. Simmer down," Nat said, and faced me with a shrug. "We started hanging out some this year. He came around looking for you one day, and somehow we ended up talking for hours. He's not so bad, when you get to know him. I always thought he was just another boring grind."
"Like me?" I said drily, although if anybody was a boring nothing, it was Nat, who was good at memorizing things but not thinking, at refereeing but not playing, and at laughing but not telling the jokes. He was just another boy standing on the moving walkway from Greenwich (or wherever) to Napier to the Ivy League to Wharton to Someone Someone & Someone. All right, as roommates went he was pretty decent, but he wasn't my friend. And he wasn't Lawrence. Who certainly wasn't a grind, by the way, and anyone who wasn't as unobservant as Nat would know that. Lawrence was intellectual, but he followed his own star. He was content not to get the best grades he could in exchange for freedom of choice--if he felt learning something or doing a certain assignment was pointless (e.g., sentence diagramming: "This isn't language, it's a dissection. An autopsy!"), he opted out and shruggingly accepted the consequences.
"Nah, you're not some lame nerd, man," said Nat. "I signed the room contract because I knew you were all right. Sure, you're always hitting the books, but you've got a funny bone and you're not all weird or anything. Anyway, I dunno, he and I just kinda get along--nothing in common, but we do. You know he has this nutty homemade Chinese checkers set?" I always liked that game. And I always hated all that Tolkien crap, but he gets so into it that it starts seeming interesting, and you know, I think it's grown on me."
Of course I knew about the nutty homemade checkers set. I'd even helped him with it. Extensively. Until now, I'd thought was the only other person to know about it.
"So you hang out and play Chinese checkers," I said.
"Are you jealll-ous?" Nat said with a grin, joshing me. Only yes, I was jealous. I hadn't seen Lawrence much this term; he'd been claiming he was just "so busy." Then he gets some spare time and he goes and spends it with my nonentity of a roommate--the one that, I'll note, he stuck me with, after he ditched our housing contract? What the hell.
"Only saying," I said, suicidally stirring the hornet's nest, "that was not a board game just then."
"Man, you know what, shut the fuck up."
"Look, man," I said. "I'm not going to give you a hard time about it. I'm not going to tease you. I'm not going to tell anyone. I swear to God as my witness. O.K.? I really don't want it to be weird between us just because of what I saw."
Nat stared at his hands for a long moment, but then looked at me directly, and gave me a curt nod.
I didn't expect Nat to say anything else, but then he looked away again and said, "I mean it when I say I'm not a homo."
"I know you do," I said, and I really did.
"It's just--I don't--I can't explain it. I still don't know how that stuff got started, but it's not queer. It's just, y'know, practice. I know that's messed up--"
"You don't have to explain yourself," I said, even though I actually did very much want to hear his explanation.
"Neither of us are fags," Nat said, plowing forward, perhaps just wanting to expel all the pus from the wound while it was still fresh. "And I never thought I'd resort to--I dunno. But I guess there's just something about him."
"There's something about Lawrence?" I said skeptically.
Nat gave me this very odd helpless smile, and shrugged. I was taken aback by the frankness of his facial expression.
"I don't know," Nat said. "He's not some ugly...guy-seeming guy. He's good-looking. For a guy. Not that I'm homo for him or anything, only saying. Doesn't hurt. For practice."
Was Lawrence good-looking? The notion had never occurred to me before.
Nat added, probably in total seriousness, "Breathe a word about this to anyone, ever, Stockwell, and I'll deck your ass straight into the goddamned emergency room. Or into a grave. Got it?"
"I would never," I said, and crossed my heart. "Do I seem like a rat to you?"
"Nah," Nat said. "You're all right, I know that."
We sat in some more awkward silence, stewing over all that had gone on. Our relationship as roommates had been altered forever. I suspected that Nat--whom I'd never known to speak or act so frankly--would no longer affect an attitude of superiority toward me, as a senior rooming with a junior. He'd been knocked down a peg. Quite a few pegs, really.
Perhaps as a test of my new rights, I decided to bring up the painful subject again: "So what I walked in on, that wasn't a one-off?"
"No," Nat admitted.
Then suddenly he ducked his head with this private, smirking sort of smile, as if struck by a pleasant memory.
"What?" I said.
"Oh, nothing," Nat said.
"Bullshit," I said.
"Buzz off," Nat said. "None of this is any of your beeswax to begin with."
"Au contraire," I said. "Once you did it on my bed you did sort of make it my beeswax. What do you keep smiling for?"
Nat's smile only got bigger and a little wickeder, and he said, "Spaulding, you don't want it to be your business, all right? So leave me alone, I can't help what my face does."
I really did not like that smirk of his, and suddenly a preposterous but horrifying possibility came to mind out of nowhere, and so for some reason I burst out with, "Oh God, are you sleeping with him? On my bed?!"
(I could hear how moronic it sounded even as I said it, and I didn't even know what I meant by the suggestion, really, just had a vague thought of two bodies naked and in the same bed. My bed!)
Nat just sniggered. "Why?" he said. "So you can tell your diary about it, Suzy?" He rolled his eyes and hauled out his physics textbook. " `Sleeping with him'--man, you sound like my mom gossiping with her girl-friends."
I knew it was none of my business, I knew it was a patently ridiculous suggestion. But for some reason, now that I'd asked my dumb question, I had to know. Urgently.
"Nat. Are you?"
"No effing way! Jesus, I thought you were ribbing me," Nat said. He looked aghast. "Don't be disgusting, man. I told you, we're not queers. Not to mention I'm never gonna so much as touch your precious bed again, O.K.?" He raised his hand as a sort of swear. But then, all this said, he relaxed again, and his smile came back and he said, "Nah, don't worry, Spaulding, I won't steal your boyfriend. His ass cherry is still allll yours."
I knew from schoolboy experience that I was best off ignoring him, and took out my history book with an eyeroll.
"It's funny, though," said Nat breezily. "You'd think, how much better could a handjob actually be than jerking it on your own? But it really does feel so much better when it's someone else's hand."
"Whoa, jeez, thanks for the image!"
"Oh boo hoo, you asked."
I said nothing and tried to focus on reading about the precipitating events of 1860. But I was still marveling that the satisfaction of getting any action at all apparently outweighed a great deal of Nat's shame at doing something with another guy, outweighed it enough to smile a little and even kind of brag. Another thing that struck me as odd was that the make-out session I'd interrupted didn't really seem integral to a simple you-whack-mine-and-I'll-whack-yours exchange. Kissing was a massive taboo. Homo anything was of course very much looked down upon, but it was one thing to let another guy make you come, and quite another to let him kiss you. In theory, I mean--it's not like I had any experience, direct or indirect, with homo sex. But somehow people knew the tacit rules of engagement when it came to the English vice.
Also, with regard to what I'd witnessed, some perverse part of my mind was interested in the fact that Lawrence had been the one on top. That was instinctively strange to me. Lawrence was something of an eccentric introvert, and had always struck me as sort of undersexed. Nat was just another preppy, conventional guy's guy--not at all whom you'd ever expect to see on his back with his ankle slung over the calf of the class oddball. Oh God I hadn't needed to see that, any of it. But now it was stuck in my head like an unwanted musical phrase. The visual equivalent of something as grating as "Yummy Yummy Yummy" going on mental repeat.
It was no use; I was reading the same line over and over again. This whole day had been too fucking weird. When I woke up, I was perfectly hetero, and so was, as far as I'd known, Nat. And Lawrence. That was some kind of crazy synchronicity. Just what spooky energy was a-crackle in the air today, huh? God, and then there was the fact that it always seems like significant things happen in triplets, so this stupid part of me kept wondering what the third thing would be.
The afternoon passed in a haze of unproductivity, and finally I decided to go shower, hoping I could reset my thoughts in there before I headed over to try and hammer the 19th century through Ender's brain. The humid air, the warm monsoon downpour, the blasting white noise...it always sweetly spaced me right out.
But not today. I mean, why would it? Nothing else was going right.
No, I was still rolling around this Nat-Lawrence thing in my head. Lawrence hadn't said a thing about it, hadn't even told me they were friendly. It was embarrassing, I got that, but he and I used to be the kind of friends who didn't have to hide anything from each other. Somehow, in fact, embarrassing ourselves in front of each other had only ever seemed to make us closer. But then Lawrence up and told me he didn't think we should room together anymore. My roommate from seventh grade onward, my best friend in the world, and he suddenly announces that we'd be better off apart.
"I've just been thinking. You're my best friend. But...I dunno, have you ever thought maybe it's not great for us to be together all time?" he'd said, looking away from me. "Rooming together, and everything?"
"Yeah, yeah, you're a crack-up," I said, without looking up from my magazine.
"No, really. In the way that sometimes it's hard for twins to feel like different people. Have you ever thought that maybe we're--too dependent on each other?"
I looked up from my magazine and said, "Uhh, no."
"Oh," Lawrence said.
"Are you mad at me?" I said, and racked my brains for anything I might have done to piss him off. Bupkis. Because I'd never be an ass to him on purpose, and if I ever unintentionally slighted him I knew when to apologize, because I was good at reading his moods. But he hadn't seemed ticked at me at all lately. Actually I hadn't been able to stop thinking, these past few weeks, that man, somehow all we ever did was get closer.
"It's not like that," Lawrence said. "Spaulding--don't take this the wrong way. But I was just thinking maybe we could take a break from being roommates." He cleared his throat. "Just to try something new. Like an adventure. It--it might even be fun."
Yeah, I was pretty sure that's how they sold the military, too. What bullshit. I just sat there staring at him because I couldn't believe what was coming out of his mouth. We belonged together. The room we shared was our precious port in the Napier tempest. We were each other's companions, guardians...we were each other's chosen family. You didn't mess with that stuff. If you found a true friend in the cold halls of a boys' boarding school, you did not cut him loose. I mean, if you found a true friend anywhere you did not do that, but you especially didn't do it here at Napier, or like, on the battlefield, or some other crappy place like that.
Lawrence took in that I wasn't saying anything, and swallowed, and then said, "I just don't ever want us to crowd each other. I mean, have you ever wondered if it's true?" He slipped into the faraway voice he sometimes used when thinking hard, but that at other times was a contrivance to deflect attention from himself. "You know, distance making the heart grow fonder? It's an interesting--"
"What the hell, man," I said.
"What?" Lawrence said, dropping the thinking voice and looking nervously at me.
"Don't bullshit me," I said, "Seriously, man, could you do me the courtesy of not bullshitting me?"
"I'm not--"
"Yeah. You are. And you know it. Listen, I thought you knew you could tell me straight-up if I'm grating on you. So you're sick of being around me all the time: fine. I'd rather know that than wonder why you're bullshitting me."
He huffed and shrugged. "No one's sick of anyone. I only mean--"
"Be straight with me, can't you?" I said, gruffer than I'd intended.
This was edging toward becoming one of the few fights we'd ever had. Lawrence just shook his head, frowned intensely to himself, and said, "Uh, well, I thought I'd let you know, I asked around, and Nat Geddes--you know, in the year above us--is looking for a roommate. He's not so bad, from what I hear, and he said he'd sign with you if you want. I'll put myself in the lottery."
"Seriously?"
"Change can be good, Spud, you'll see."
He tried to smile, but I grimly said, "Well, put me down as a reactionary," and his face faltered.
We were sort of back to normal by that evening, despite me wondering what the hell he was on about and if what he was really saying was that he didn't want to be friends anymore. Lawrence could be opaque that way. (A guy with a last name like Nagelschmidt is not gonna be caught being very WASPy, but that trait was probably the WASPiest thing about him.) I was very afraid, actually, of what seemed to be happening. But I was hiding it well, and Lawrence was also hiding his feelings, whatever they were, and we were acting more or less normal. He did, however, tell me he he'd indeed entered the rooming pool. And so I had no choice but to sign a contract with Nat, unless I wanted to take my chances with being assigned to someone I might not know at all.
Over the summer Lawrence and I called and wrote as much as ever, so I'd figured we were all good, and that Lawrence's severing of our housing contract was not actually code for the severing of our friendship. I was still pretty damn annoyed about our roommate breakup, but otherwise, things had seemed normal.
But then when school started up again it seemed like he was ducking me, and it was as if some strange block had come down between us. We weren't our unguarded selves with each other anymore. He'd put up curtains, and if the house across the street puts up curtains, you do it too, you know? A privacy arms race. No one wants to be the lit window that the people ensconced behind drapes can peer into.
I didn't know what had even gone awry, or how to talk about it, or if anything even was awry and maybe I was just nuts or I was the one ruining things or....I dunno. It sucked. It absolutely sucked. I don't give a crap about how girly or lame this all might sound. If you've ever had a friendship like the one I had with Lawrence, you get it. It's worth everything in the world to you.
And now something new that really hurt was that it seemed like Lawrence had stopped answering when I came to his door or waved through his curtained window, but then he'd gone and given Nathanael Geddes of all people the key to some weird back garden of his. The garden of awkward homo groping, or whatever. Probably where you'd plant cucumbers and the lewder varieties of mushroom. It wasn't a garden of his I would ever want to visit, but the point was why was he letting Nat anywhere onto his private property, while I was left standing gormless in the street?
Damn it, I missed my buddy. No buddy quite so true. Miss your voice, the touch of your hand, ya du da da...I'd always loved that song, but it had never seemed quite so relevant as at this moment. If I weren't in the shower I'd drop the needle on that song, go and get myself maximally fuckin' dejected. Perfect consolation cherry for such a screwed-up Sunday.
I was getting pruney, rumination was getting me nowhere, and the time was getting toward when I said I'd be at Ender's. But I'd gotten myself feeling pretty low, and with the best endorphin fix right at hand...I wasn't going anywhere for a few minutes yet.
I had a pretty great cock, I liked to think. It was cut, of course. Personally, even back then when everyone was cut, I did not care about cut dicks one way or the other, for the men in my father's family had all born at home and were uncircumcised, a fact I'd had occasion to observe in the flesh on whiz breaks. I was therefore familiar with the natural penis and was not wigged out by its appearance--I thought they looked kinda neat, really. But being cut was certainly valuable in that it ensured you were not mocked in the locker room. It also just so happened that my circumcision proudly showed off some of the nicer attributes of my cock: the smoothly tapered head, the clean lines, the intact frenulum. It was nicely proportional, and a sort of classically ideal shape. It was not one of those lumpy, kinda homespun-looking units, in other words. I considered it very handsome.
In terms of length, my dick was a little over six inches at full mast, and I was very proud of it. That's six real inches, mind you, not the bullshit measurements people come up with when relating their sexual adventures or writing erotic fiction. (If you're looking for some story about a guy packing an "average" eight inches, my narrative about the last couple years I spent in high school probably isn't something you want to hear.) As for girth, it was thicker than average, and I was proud of that, too.
Anyway, I was hung with a prick that suited me, and I was damn fond of it. Although yeah, it was big, and yeah, that definitely helps a guy love his dick. My cock's proportional aesthetics and good looks helped me love it, too. But even if it were an ugly, malproportioned runt, I suspected I'd still like it a hell of a lot. I mean, come on--mm--it was always there when I needed--hh--a big hit of dopamine, I mean who needs--hah--drugs when--ff--you could be fucking--mnnn--even just your own haaaaAAA........
...nd.
I came really hard, which on the one hand felt great, but on the other...well, as I took a final rinse-off I tried my best to convince myself that I'd totally been thinking about one of my old reliables. I'd been in lust with Jane Fonda ever since Barbarella. And she was what I'd started out on. But if I was brutally self-honest, that image had been spliced with Ender, and it was right about when I gave up and let his form take over my mindscreen that I went over the edge. Went over it really, stupidly hard.
Well, fuck. I shut off the water, dried myself in a dampened mood, and then headed to my room to grab my stuff and go see the guy I was supposed to tutor. The guy I'd just inexplicably jacked off to. Christ frigging Almighty.
I did not have high hopes for the tail end of this very long, very strange, very dumb day.
"It's open!" Ender hollered when I knocked at his door, which was plastered with sports posters, good luck notes, and Go Napier Newts signs. (I never said we had a great mascot.) The door swung right open when I pushed, hinges obviously well-oiled. Ender lived in Mulford Hall, which cost hundreds of dollars more than where I lived. Not worth it, in my opinion; he still had a roommate. And anyway, who wanted to buy their own rugs, or else walk around on the cold hardwood floors? Those poorly insulated old glass windows made it even colder. Historical quaintness, my ass. I mean, back in days of old the students could just stoke a fire to stave off the New Hampshire winters, but the fireplaces in these rooms had long since been boarded up and converted into safe, sensible bookshelves.
Ender's roommate was sitting cross-legged on his bed, giving me a hard stare. I nodded at him. We did not really know each other, but I recognized him as a fellow junior.
"Greg was just leaving," said Ender from the rug, where he was leaning against, not sitting in, a red Sacco-style bean bag chair. There were a number of other red objects in the room, which made me think it was his favorite color. Much of what was not red, though, was purple. This was unsurprising; Napier's colors were white and what our brochures called palatinate purple, and Ender the athlete was naturally a loyalist. A lot of guys thought our colors sucked, though. Me, I liked the purple, I didn't think it was girly. And neither did Ender, I supposed.
My eyes slid over Ender's wall. The sports pictures went without saying. Polaroids of Ender with "the guys." A couple photos of dogs, or maybe the same dog, which looked like a retriever of some kind. Then a rank of Ivy League pennants. Posters for The French Connection and The Italian Job. Nixon buttons on the bulletin board. None of it surprising. Although it did jolt me slightly to see my own bumper sticker, which I'd come up with for a contest sponsored by the New Hampshire Business and Industry Association. It read "Free Enterprise Isn't a Free Ride!," and you saw them around campus because the Association had given out free stickers to the entire student body after I won. My own sat in a drawer, because I vehemently disagreed with the sentiment. I'd just wanted the cash prize. Lawrence couldn't make sense of this pragmatism (and Hepburn kept making accusatory slit-eyes at me the day I won), but he also couldn't complain when I used the money to pay for a big day out in Manhattan over spring break.
Greg the roommate certainly did not look happy to be leaving, but he was grabbing his things to head out anyway. I had to wonder how often he got casually booted from their room. When Ender Endicott said jump...
When Greg slammed the door behind him I said, "He could've stayed, maybe he'd like to review as well."
"Oh, Downing's a pill," said Ender happily. "O.K. roommate, can't complain, but life's better without his sourpuss hanging around, believe me. Sit with me, take the beanbag chair. That's it."
I slid my hand over the seam on the material as I settled in.
"Real leather?"
"Nice, right?"
"Very," I said to the back of Ender's head. He was still leaning against the side of the chair, and this was probably the nearest I'd ever been to him, not counting this morning. Some kind of faint, warm, end-of-the-day sweat smell was coming off his neck and hair. One of my uncles worked at a racetrack, and Ender's hair color had always reminded me of the haylage that they fed the horses. And right now his hair smelled something like it, too, warm and sweet and earthy. I can't explain why his sweat would smell so damn good to me, when most people's sweat made me want to shove them away from me straight into a shower stall. But his sweat just smelled so--something. Manly? Whatever it was it smelled incredible.
God. What the hell was even happening to me?
I wanted to be him, that was it, that was all. I wished I could be a star like him--
Oh, who was I kidding.
I'd never wanted to be anybody but myself, and I knew it. That had always been the thing about me--I was happy in my skin, pretty much content to be who I was. And what I was was not an athletic hero or a torch of charisma or a toned muscle guy. No, I was not drawn to Ender because I wished I were him. That was not it. And I knew it.
I pulled out a bunch of revision materials and tried not to consider what it meant that I wanted to reach over, rake my fingers through Ender's hair, and then drag my face down the back of his head, breathing in deep, until I came to a rest at the root of his smooth neck.
"O.K.," I said, trying to snap out of it, "I thought we could start with making sure you have the presidents straight for the whole span of these chapters--I know it seems basic, but--"
Ender chuckled, turning around so that we were facing the same direction, and drummed his fingers on his knees.
"Rule of thumb," he said, "If it's basic, chances are I don't know it."
"Right..."
We spent half an hour running presidents, tariffs, lists of slave states versus free states. Ender acquitted himself well, and I tried to encourage him.
"You see? So much of this is memorization. Memorize enough information, enough lists, and you start realizing how the pieces fit together--that's the hard part, understanding context."
Ender just stared at me. I understood he was skeptical, but this strategy of mine tended to work decently. It wasn't how I learned history, but I was lucky enough to understand it instinctively. For my tutoring, I'd developed this technique for the sort of person who wasn't great at critical thinking but who was willing to commit a bunch of stuff to memory. It amounted to victory by sheer numbers. Memorize enough lists of enough things and you'd start seeing the causal links almost by accident.
This is how I explained it to Ender, but by the end of it he shook his head and said, "Well what if I'm not a memorization guy, either?"
"You've got to be kidding me, Ender, you're completely decent at it. You just did it for half an hour, and did it well."
"Yeah, but it was so, so, so boring."
"Memorization is like that, yes."
"I barely made it," Ender said. "I was dying by the end. Dy-ing."
"But you didn't die," I said, and looked around for one of my study sheets. "You have to get into the habit of studying. It'll get easier."
"Hrghhh," Ender moaned to the ceiling. "Can we please take a break?"
"It's your call," I said. "I'm working for you."
He grinned.
"Let's take a break."
So Ender offered me a Coke, then casually asked if I wanted rum with it.
"Uh...no, not while I'm studying," I said. "You keep rum in your room?"
"Where else am I gonna keep it?" Ender said, seemingly bemused by my question. "Those two bottom drawers down there, they're all booze. If you ever want some, just ask."
I tried to reorient myself. I was not in the cool crowd that had solid access to alcohol, and I had been drunk only twice. This conversation was like culture shock. Culture shock that didn't get better when Ender up and took two shots of vodka, then went and retrieved a small wooden chest that looked suspiciously like what a teenager would think was a cool stash box.
He sat back down next to me and flashed me the most beautiful smile.
"Not while we're studying," I said. These were the most painful four words I'd ever uttered. To shoot down Ender's suggestion, and turn up my nose at something I'd been wanting to try for years, in one blow? Arghhh. It hurt.
He opened the box. Took out a joint. Ran it meditatively along his lower lip, back and forth.
"Ever tried it?" he said.
"I run track," I said, although that was not the reason. This was the first time I'd actually been offered grass (discounting a shady offer in a city park that I'd nervously declined with a blunt headshake and quickened stride). Remember what I said about not being in the cool crowd? The coolest people I ran with--literally, I supposed--were the track team, but most of them really did eschew smoking of any kind on pulmonary health grounds.
"Aren't you curious?" Ender said.
My breath caught in my throat and I swallowed hard upon realizing that I'd been staring intently at the lip that Ender was still touching with the end of the joint. I looked away.
"Not while we're studying," I said again, driving another martyr's sword into my side.
"O.K.," Ender said, and put the box aside without another word. We started reviewing again, and got through maybe twenty minutes before Ender stood up, moaned that he couldn't take it, and started wandering around his room, toying with random objects. I really wasn't sure what role I was supposed to play here--nanny, martinet, cool dude?
"Ender, I don't think you should stop right now, but do you want to stop?"
He shrugged miserably, fiddling with a medal that was draped around one of his sports trophies.
"I just hate this," he said. "Thanks for putting up with me, man. I know I'm a shitty student."
"No way," I said, and tried to give him an encouraging smile.
"Hey, you're old for our grade, too, right?" he said.
"Yep, I'm eighteen."
"Same. Got held back twice. Stupid Lycée Français, it only made me end up kinda bad at both languages." Ender bounced a spare Super Ball on the floor, and it flew nearly to the ceiling. "I left when I was ten, but that bastard school'd already made me repeat the first grade--"
"How is it possible to claim someone's not passing the first grade?" I said, offended on Ender's behalf. Back in the '60s first grade was barely even school.
He shrugged and set down the ball next to what looked like a carnivorous pitcher plant on his desk.
"The French, man, ils font ce qu'ils font." (He did have a native's accent. I'd never known.) "Anyway, then when I went to regular school I was behind and shit, got held back again...still, at least I only had to take two years of language here, 'cause I tested straight into French III. Silver lining." He leaned against his desk and slapped his palm absentmindedly with a ruler. "How about you? They never could've held you back--?"
"No, I went in late," I said, and paused before continuing. Explaining this history always made me nervous. I always felt like I wouldn't be believed, would get some loudmouth lecturing me on child development as if I didn't know my case was highly irregular.
I took a breath and then said, "I basically never talked until I was four, and they thought there was something wrong with me, that I was retarded or something. Well, not retarded, exactly--aside from the muteness I was perfectly on track. But the doctors my parents saw thought I must've had some kind of serious language disorder."
"You couldn't talk?" Ender said. "That's nuts."
"Yeah," I said. And I explained that I'd been utterly mute until one day when I just...started talking. When I did start talking it was in full sentences, complex ones, and it quickly became obvious that I was in fact advanced for my age, and had not been mute because I was verbally stupid or something. But my parents held off putting me in school, on someone doctor or expert recommendation. I was a little socially stunted, and I mean, muteness is very uncommon, at least for people who turn out normal; I'm not sure anyone knew what to do with me, or what might happen.
"And what did happen?" Ender said.
"Nothing. I was right as rain from then on out. For a while I was in some developmental study at Harvard, though. So maybe I made an appearance in a thesis about language acquisition or something."
"You're from Boston."
"Well, Newton."
Ender came back to sit down next to me again, hand on chin, looking thoughtful.
"Man, so, what's it like? Not talking. Do you remember?"
When was the last time I'd seen Ender this engaged with something that didn't involve goalposts or a starting whistle? And it was me he wanted to know about. I suddenly felt very self-conscious.
"I remember, sure. My memory goes back to being two and three, and you don't start forming long-term memories until you have enough language to describe things. Developmentally, I mean--pretty neat stuff. So I had language in some way, I just wasn't using it. I don't know why. It didn't bother me, not until close to the end. Maybe that's how I figured out how to start talking, ha-ha--I got fed up. But even now, you know, sometimes I just can't come up with words. Guess it doesn't help that I don't think in them."
"You don't think in words?" said Ender. He considered this a moment. "No way, man. That's impossible. What are you even talking about?"
"For me a thought is like a balloon blowing up in your brain," I said. "It isn't in words, it's a shape, an entity or something. You understand it by seeing it and feeling it, but the only way for anyone else to understand it is for you to type words over the balloon surface, the way a soup can lists its ingredients maybe. Or like a calligramme or something. Once you type some words over the balloon's body, other people can see them floating there, and get a sense of your balloon's shape and what's inside it. But of course, typing on a balloon isn't easy. Literally or figuratively. And words in a balloon shape can never be the real balloon."
I'd gone off on a tangent before I could stop myself, and Ender was staring at me. Not goggling like you would at a freak, at least, more just blankly mystified, but I still felt like a moron.
"Man, I didn't get that at all," Ender said. "You're really smart."
I laughed nervously and told him I didn't get it either, then rushed to turn a page in the textbook and try to get him back on track, or at least away from focusing on me.
But as I launched into what I knew was a dull ramble about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Ender started flicking the sole of my bare foot. I chose to ignore this, and went on, getting duller and ramblier by the second. Ender flicked my ankle, right on the fibula.
"And, uh, the Compromise of 1850...uh, yeah, the Compromise of 1850..."
Ender put his whole hand around my ankle.
"Because, uh, both the Whigs and the Democrats, uh..."
Ender moved his hand up my ankle until he was pushing up my pant cuff.
"Uh, what are you doing?"
Ender snickered and said, "Waiting for you to ask that question." He left his hand where it was, around the base of my calf.
"Man, you've got hairy legs, feels like," he said. "Like fur. Weird!"
"How in the hell is that weird?" I said snippily, suddenly self-conscious. "What, just because you swimmers shave it off like a bunch of girls--"
"Aha," said Ender with a grin. "Stockwell's got a fiery side."
"I dunno," I mumbled, and looked away, even though I undoubtedly did have a fiery side. I used to have an awful temper, although I'd managed to cool it down quite a bit over the past few years.
Ender was still rubbing the bottom part of my calf. This was making my face feel warm, and to my abject horror, it was also making my prick perk up, for reasons that I could not--that I refused to--fathom. I knew that if I had any hope of making my member go down again, I was best off simply trying to ignore it, so I just brought the textbook closer to my face and said, "We should really go through the debates, I guarantee you that's one of the essay topics."
"If it's all memorizing, why don't you tell me what to memorize," Ender said low, "So we can quit working and do something more fun. And then I'll get to it tomorrow, whenever I have a spare minute."
He put his hand on my knee and squeezed it just below the cap.
I almost stopped breathing, but I lowered the textbook, looked down at his hand on my knee, and managed to say, "Ender, no you won't."
"You're right," he said, "I won't." And then, suddenly withdrawing his hand and reverting to a chipper, normal tone of voice, he said, "Do you want to go back to studying?"
"Yes," I said, a sweat of relief pricking my hairline.
"No, you don't," he said--and with zero warning planted his hand on my crotch. "Oh, yeah, you've got something else on your mind for sure!"
"What the hell!" I said, and tried to pull away, dropping the textbook in my haste--but Ender's hand followed me as I tried to lean desperately away. "Stop that--"
But even with horror and embarrassment crashing over me, I managed to go from semi to very hard simply because he was touching me.
"Fine," Ender said, and took his hand away, but he crossed his legs and sat back down right in front of me, face-to-face, grinning triumphantly. I somewhat shakily clambered back into my original position on the chair, and swallowed hard, looking back at him. He was just staring at me.
From out of nowhere I got the guts to say, "What?"
"You like to look at me, Spaulding," he said, dropping his voice again.
"I do not," I said, as my face burned.
"Yes you do. I've seen you."
"No."
"It's O.K.," he said. "I like to look at you too."
The world seemed to drag into slow motion and then stop altogether.
"At me," I said in a strange voice. "Why?"
I wasn't notably attractive, I didn't think. I mean, I wasn't bad-looking. My face was at least distinct enough to look something more interesting than plain "average." Well, O.K., no, it was definitely "above average." Late puberty had been shaking out in my favor. My face was in fact inarguably good-looking, in a pale and serious way--but it hadn't always been that way, and I was used to having low self-esteem about its appearance. And beyond the face...my frame was slim; I lacked muscle outside my legs; at 5 feet and 9 and a half inches I was barely taller than the norm; I was physically incapable of tanning; and I had who-cares brown eyes and brown hair. Not to mention I wore glasses. My body didn't strike me as something that could hold much visual interest, of any kind, for anyone.
But Ender looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Because I do. And because I had a feeling about you."
"What feeling," I mumbled.
He picked up one of my bare feet, started massaging the sole. I looked at the ceiling and tried to keep my cool.
"That you like to look at me."
He was staring at me unapologetically.
"I'm not a homo," I said.
"Didn't say you were. Said you liked to look at me."
Ender kissed the sole of my foot and I sucked in a sudden breath. He laughed.
"It's so much fun, getting a cucumber to lose its cool," he said.
"A cucumber?"
"You never knew you were kind of a cold fish?" he said before sticking one of my toes in his mouth. I gasped again. He pulled off the toe with a grin.
"Not that you sound like one right now," he said, although the irony was that with the gasping I really was sounding sort of piscine. "Mm. I love making you make that noise."
And then he promptly began suckling my big toe. This time I made some kind of strangled yelping sound and he laughed harder than ever.
"Who'd've thought you were a screamer?" he said. "But I guess you did say you don't like using your words."
"Stop messing with me!" I said, feeling sick with confusion.
"O.K.," Ender said, and then firmly placed my foot over the warmth of his growing hard-on, leaned back on his palms, and gazed calmly across at me. We sat like that for a while. I stopped feeling sick, and instead started feeling very well indeed. Meanwhile, my heart couldn't seem to quit pounding. And my foot seemed like it was a million miles away--out in the pastures of heaven.
Ender reached for his box, retrieved the joint, and lit up, never taking his eyes off me. I watched the smoke snake around his face like dragon breath and thought again and again, This cannot be real life.
"You want?" he said.
I shook my head. I was too scared I'd find out grass didn't agree with me and would ruin this perfection of feeling.
Ender took a third hit and then put it out.
"Spaulding," he said, "Do me a favor and move your foot up and down."
I complied, feeling a bit stupid that he'd had to tell me to do it, but I also knew I'd never have dared try anything without his approval. Hell, I was still half-convinced he was going to jump up at any second and laugh at me for being such a faggot. I mean, who was this guy in front of me? He wasn't any Ender I'd ever known.
He was better.
Ender closed his eyes and smiled, and once more I thought, Jesus H. Christ, this cannot be real life.
Right then someone hammered on the door. I froze and Ender's eyes flew open. He moved my foot off him and onto the floor, muttering, "Greg." As he got the door, I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes vigorously, trying to snap myself back into the real world.
"I need to get to bed on time, seriously," Downing was complaining. "Why can't you study in the library?"
"It's fine, we've done all we're gonna do," said Ender.
"Yeah, smells like you were studying really hard."
"Get bent," said Ender, with a sort of affection.
I started gathering my things in a daze.
"Spaulding?" Ender was saying.
"Huh?"
"I said we're meeting again tomorrow, right?"
"Uh...yeah, whatever you want."
"I do want," he said, with the slightest trace of that dangerous low voice he'd been using when we were alone.
"Good night," I said.
It wasn't a parting wish so much as an affirmation.
I got back to my room feeling practically delirious, and slipped straight into bed even though Nat still had all the lights on. I knew that my sleep was full of dreams, although come morning I couldn't remember their contents.
But I did know that everywhere I'd wandered that night, my nostrils had been filled with the smell of Ender's neck--and my toes had felt warm and wet.