He waited, and the younger boys looked at one another. Then Paul said, “From nowhere. They just don’t charge us.”
George shook his head. “Every time these white kids pay their tuition, they pay a little bit of yours and mine, too. And don’t think they don’t know it, either.”
Hector cried out, “That’s fucked up, bro! I don’t want them paying for me, I can pay it myself.”
“No, you can’t,” Paul said. “So don’t front. Just accept that cash and use it to your advantage.” Hector thought for a second and nodded, then the two of them slapped hands.
Anthony wasn’t swayed. “No such thing as a free lunch, though.” He looked up at George. “So what do they want from us?”
“League championship,” Paul interrupted, and shot an imaginary jumper. “Maybe two or three.” Hector reached up and grabbed the invisible rebound while George glared joylessly at the two of them.
“You’re a smart dude, Ant,” George said, watching them play. “Twenty-five-twenty always expects something. Remember that.”
Anthony nodded. “What’s twenty-five-twenty?”
George grinned. “Think about the alphabet,” he said. “Put the twenty-fifth letter with the twentieth. What you got?”
“Y and T,” Anthony said, not seeing it at first. “Y. T. Why tea . . . ? Whitey?”
George smiled. “I knew you were smart. Twenty-five-twenty is a bitch up here, son. And like I said, they didn’t bring you up here for free.”
Anthony looked at the other two boys. Even without a ball, their game was competitive. “I don’t play basketball. You know that.”
“Don’t matter, you will. What else you gonna do when winter comes, anyway? Join the ski team? Just remember what I said before, okay? Belton changes people.”
“Yeah, for the better, right?” George didn’t answer. Paul took another jump shot, and Hector swatted it away.
“Get that weak mess outta here!”
“Be real, son,” Paul said. “Everybody know y’all Ricans can’t jump.”
Anthony laughed with them to hide his worry. He would have to play basketball, George was right about that. Belton freshmen were required to play at least two team sports, and since Anthony was already skipping the fall, he had to either ski or shoot hoops in the winter. The problem was that he was terrible. When the season started, he would be the only kid of color without a varsity uniform.
He looked at George. “Can you teach me?”
“Swear to God, Ant,” George said, smiling in disbelief. “You need to clean out your ears. What you think I’m doing right now?”
Later that day in health class, the teacher showed a documentary about cigarettes, narrated by a woman who talked through a hole in her throat. Anthony watched from a seat on the floor, next to a girl who smoked and always smelled like it.
“You know what that looks like, right?” a boy whispered from behind them. “A butthole. You know, like a hole for her butts?”
“She doesn’t smoke through it, jerk,” the girl said, and then shifted uncomfortably. “Starting today, I’m quitting. . . . Today or however long it takes to finish my carton.”
The period ended and Anthony went on to the next class, thinking of the movie, the girl who’d sat next to him, and mixed messages. The handbook stated that Belton was a smoke-free school. But dorm parents handed out flashlights to smokers at night and directed them to off-campus spots near the roadway, where they could stand in the darkness and puff. The same was true for how the school handled hazing and sex. In a way, the whole place was a farce. On weekdays it was a lot like the catalog: smiling kids and happy faculty interacting in classrooms; crowds cheering the teams on the fields. But weekends at Belton were a lot like full moons, and most of the students were werewolves.
That night, Anthony sat at dinner with Brody and Nate, half listening to them insult each other, feeling a bit more settled in at the school but still nowhere close to contented. He missed home but didn’t always think about it, which usually brought on rounds of guilty phone calls. He had already burned through two months of laundry quarters in just a little over four weeks.
George walked into the dining hall then, slapped hands with some of the kitchen staff, and stopped briefly to talk with the headmaster. Then he went and sat alone at a table but didn’t keep his solitude for long. A steady trickle of kids, from athletes to burnouts, came to sit with him or offer high fives.
“Earth to Tony?” It was Brody, and he was waving his chicken.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. What about you, Nate? Wanna go to North Conway tomorrow? My dad said I could bring a friend.”
“I dunno,” Nate said haltingly, “your dad seems kinda weird. . . .”
“Forget it.”
“. . . He kinda has that look.”
“I said forget it. Jesus Christ, dude, you just go on and on. Maybe you’re the weird one. Ever think about that?”
Anthony turned to watch King George, surrounded by his court of twenty-five-twenty, calmly eating his food. A blond girl rushed over with a slice of apple pie, put it down, and sat on his lap. For all of his warnings about the nature of white people, George seemed to have a lot of them as friends.
“. . . Tony?” It was Brody again, and it was clear that he was getting annoyed.
“I told you to stop calling me that.”
“Sorry, Anthony. So you’ll go, right?”
He thought about the day he met Brody’s parents, the way they’d made a joke of his last name, how Mr. Lavallee had seemed to take pleasure in almost breaking his hand. Anthony didn’t want to see them again any more than he suspected they wanted to see him. “Naw, man,” he said, deliberately not looking at his roommate. “You can count me out.”
Across the room, George got up and left, the blond girl draped over him. They walked past the headmaster’s table, where a few of the men sitting there either looked away from the couple or grinned.
Nate made an obscene gesture. “Where do you think they’re going?”
“Anywhere they want,” Anthony said in quiet awe.
The dining hall slowly emptied. Kids left in pairs and in threes and in groups, some determined to screw or kill brain cells. And the teachers, jacked up from cups of dinner coffee, went out to try and stop them from succeeding.
Anthony soon found himself at the pay phone on his floor, waiting for the operator. On the wall, someone had drawn a smiling penis with running legs, not far from Nate’s name, scrawled in the same color. Someone else had drawn a pair of cartoon bears, dancing in a field of mushrooms. And there was something in a language that Anthony didn’t recognize, next to a phone number with too many digits.
“Go ahead, sir,” the operator said, coming back. “And thank you for using AT&T.”
The phone clicked, and then Anthony’s mother said, “Hello?”
“Hey, Ma. What’s up?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” she said happily. “You forget our number?”
“I know. Sorry. They keep us pretty busy, and like I told you last time, this is the only phone on the floor.”
“Well, we gon’ have to see about getting you a cell phone, ’cause we need to stay in touch.”
He agreed but didn’t say anything about reception in the valley. “So what’s going on with you?” he asked. “How’s life in Cleve-burg?”
“I’m pretty fair, baby, just going to work every day, like always. You know don’t nothing change around here but the weather. What I wanna know about is those grades.”
He closed his eyes and thought about all the Cs he’d earned so far, except for algebra, which had dipped down into the D range. He still had time to turn things around before report cards went out, but he would have to work like his life depended on it. “Everything’s fine, Ma,” he said. “No failures and no fights.”
“And your roommate, what’s his name, Brodney? How are you two getting along?”
“Better,” Anthony said, and t
hen thought about it. The morning Kleenex had finally disappeared, and since Brody’s grades had been pretty bad, too, he was spending more time in the library. “Yeah, I guess it’s been a lot better between us,” he continued. “I still spend most of my time with the other black kids, though.”
He couldn’t see it, but Anthony could hear the frown in her voice. “You got black friends back here,” his mother snapped. “Don’t be wasting time up there with people who cain’t do nuthin’ for you. How many times I gotta tell you that?”
“Okay.”
“For all you know, that Brodney boy could be the key to you getting a job or going to college . . .”
“You’re right, Ma. Okay.”
“. . . Shoot, wish I had me that kinda chance. You best believe I wouldn’t blow it.”
Anthony picked up a discarded marker from the floor. “I won’t blow it, Ma,” he said. “I promise.” He tested the felt on his fingertip, and it left a black dot. “Anybody else home?” He scribbled aimlessly on the wall.
“Darnell was here a few minutes ago,” she said. “You just missed him.”
“Oh . . .” He stopped his circles and put the marker down. One of the dancing bears had been disfigured.
“What’s wrong, baby?”
“Huh? Nothing.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m fine, Ma.” There was a twang in her voice. Not quite southern fried but still country, just the same. He supposed it had been there all the time, only he hadn’t noticed it before.
“Don’t worry, baby,” she said. “Thanksgiving’s coming. When was the last time you had some yams and some cornbread? Some black-eyed peas and collard greens?”
“I really couldn’t tell you, Ma. They don’t even have grits up here.”
She laughed and said, “Poor baby. You must be ’bout as skinny as a stick. Well, we gon’ have to really do it up for you next month.”
“That long? I wanna come home right now.” He listened to the doors around him opening and closing, watched the passing kids who’d come in for the night. “I miss everybody.”
“We miss you, too, but don’t go getting all soft. Stay strong and do what you gotta do.”
“I will.”
He hung up just as Brody stomped past him, soaking wet. “What happened to you?”
Brody didn’t answer but kept walking. Anthony followed him to their room and closed the door. “Seriously, man. What happened?”
“Guess?” Brody emptied his backpack, dumped the soggy papers into the garbage can, and put his open books facedown on the radiator. He peeled off his clothes and threw them into the corner. Stink rose from the pile like swamp gas. “I fucking hate this place, dude.” He put on dry clothes and sat at his desk, staring straight ahead.
“How’d they get you?”
“On my way from the library. I walked into it like an idiot.”
“Was that big kid with the ponytail there? Seth McCarthy?”
“Oh, yeah,” Brody said hatefully. “Zach, too. They carried us past Mr. Voght and the old bastard made a joke about it.” He went to the mirror and parted his hair. “Hit my head on a rock or something.”
Anthony looked at him. “You just said us. Did they get somebody else, too?”
Brody nodded and sat down again. “Khalik. And he was screaming like a baby.”
Anthony took off. Seconds later he was down the hall and in front of Mr. Hawley’s apartment, pressing the buzzer. The door opened and the man stuck out his head. “Can I help you?”
“We gotta talk,” Anthony said. “Right now.”
Mr. Hawley stepped aside, and Anthony stormed past him, slapped the kitchen table hard, and paced the room. “Somebody better do something.”
Looking stunned, Mr. Hawley shut the door and leaned against it. “What’s going on?”
“Freshman Brook. That’s what’s going on. You better stop these people before I do.” He told Hawley what had happened, making sure to mention his roommate’s head and the fact that a few kids had been thrown in twice.
“Twice?” Hawley seemed more surprised than upset. A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.
“You think it’s funny, huh?” Anthony said. “It figures.”
“Not funny, Tony, but come on. Nobody got hurt, right?”
“What about Brody’s head? That’s not hurt enough for you?”
Hawley pressed his lips together. “Okay, you’re right. But come on, Tony. You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. And stop calling me Tony. That’s not my damn name!”
Mr. Hawley’s mouth snapped shut, and all the fun left his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Anthony, okay? But if you ever speak to me that way again, I’ll have to take disciplinary action.”
“Why? ’Cause it’s in the handbook, right? Just like this is supposed to be a smoke-free campus, but then you tell people where they can have cigarettes. Why don’t you take some ‘disciplinary action’ with those fools doing the hazing, instead of threatening me?”
“I’m not threatening you.”
“And you ain’t threatening McCarthy, either,” Anthony said. “That’s okay, let one of them put his hands on me.”
Hawley sighed and pinched his temples. “You can’t fight here, Anthony. We take that very seriously.”
“No, you don’t, ’cause if you did there wouldn’t be people getting thrown in brooks and getting their heads dunked in toilets.”
Hawley smiled again, but it faded quickly. “That’s not fighting, Anthony, that’s hazing. You know, just older kids giving the young ones a little grief. . . . Look, I know it sucks, but Freshman Brook is a tradition. Hell, I got thrown in when I went to school here. I was pissed for a while, too. But the next three years, I more than made up for what happened to me. You’ll get your turn.”
“So you’re not gonna do anything? And that fat punk of a proctor, you’re not gonna do anything about him, either?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. Jesus, Anthony, relax!” He tried to put a hand on Anthony’s shoulder, but the boy shrugged it off.
“Don’t they have something about hazing in the handbook? Didn’t you make us fill out a form?”
Hawley stared back at him but didn’t say anything.
“Just what I thought. Tell you what, Mr. Hawley, and God is my witness: If any of those dudes puts their hands on me, whatever happens is your fault, not mine.”
Hawley bunched his hair in both hands and groaned. Anthony waited, but the man didn’t say anything. From the hallway outside came the sound of Zach barking orders.
“Fine,” Anthony said, walking to the door. “Just don’t be surprised if you have to get another proctor, then. The one you got now might not make it.”
CHAPTER SIX
Anthony woke up the next morning and took a shower, working the plan in his mind while he washed behind his ears. His mother had been proud the day he’d washed his ears without her asking, and she clapped the first time he rode a bike without training wheels. He wondered what she’d do if she knew what he was setting up. Would she be happy or tell him to pack his bags?
In the room, he looked at himself in the mirror. There was fuzz coming in above his lip, but it was hard to see against his skin. Kids at home used to tease him about his complexion, said they couldn’t find him in the dark unless he was smiling. He had expected to hear the same jokes at Belton, but so far no one had seemed to care.
Someone knocked on the door and told Anthony that he had a call. He got dressed and went to the pay phone cubby. “Hello?”
“Hello to you too, nigga. W’sup?”
“Floyd?” Anthony sat down and grinned. “About time you called me for a change,” he said. “I was fi’n to write you off.”
Floyd laughed. “It ain’t like that. Every time I try to call, the line be busy. . . . So what’s poppin’, playa? What’s the word?”
“Same as the last time I talked to you, man. Nothing. Go to breakfast, go to cl
ass, go to study hall, go to sleep.”
“Damn, nigga. Sound like you in the joint.”
“Might as well be.” Anthony told him about visual check-ins with the weekend duty crew, the work-study jobs and room inspections. “Plus, we got night security that be walking around campus . . . couldn’t get away with nothing if I tried.”
“What I tell you, man?” Floyd said smugly. “That’s exactly why I ain’t up there with you.”
Anthony looked at the artwork on the walls around him. Someone had scribbled out the running penis and written UNCOOL! underneath it. “We got girls here,” he continued. “That’s a plus.”
“Yeah, man, all them snowflakes. I need me a fat booty, not a flat one.”
“Same here,” Anthony said. “We got this girl from New York who look like Beyoncé. I’m trying to holler at her.”
“That’s what’s up, playa. Get yours. Had a couple fiends over at Shane’s crib yesterday. Told them hoes to kiss each other and they did! Just like some shit off the internet.”
Anthony laughed. “Be careful, man. You too young to be somebody’s daddy.”
“Don’t worry about me, playa. I come wrapped or I don’t come at all. The last thing I want is some baby or the HIV.” Floyd paused, and when he spoke again his voice had lost its sparkle. “Seem like everybody and they momma got the bug, man, even these two girls in my homeroom. . . . Niggas ’round here always be dropping like flies, from one thing or another.”
Anthony thought about home and all the things that could go wrong there, thought about Mookie and all the gunshots at night. Just like a lot of other things in East Cleveland, even sex was killing its teenagers. “That’s some scary shit,” he said absently. “I cain’t even imagine.”
Floyd laughed, but Anthony could tell by the tone that his best friend wasn’t amused. “You cain’t imagine?” Floyd said. “Nigga, you grew up here. Being scared of E.C. is like being scared of yourself.”
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