by Green, John
When I received the Culver Creek Handbook over the summer and noticed happily that the “Dress Code” section contained only two words, casual modesty, it never occurred to me that girls would show up for class half asleep in cotton pajama shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Modest, I guess, and casual.
And there was something about girls wearing pajamas (even if modest), which might have made French at 8:10 in the morning bearable, if I’d had any idea what Madame O’Malley was talking about. Comment dis-tu “Oh my God, I don’t know nearly enough French to pass French II” en français? My French I class back in Florida did not prepare me for Madame O’Malley, who skipped the “how was your summer” pleasantries and dove directly into something called the passé composé, which is apparently a verb tense. Alaska sat directly across from me in the circle of desks, but she didn’t look at me once the entire class, even though I could notice little but her. Maybe she could be mean . . . but the way she talked that first night about getting out of the labyrinth—so smart. And the way her mouth curled up on the right side all the time, like she was preparing to smirk, like she’d mastered the right half of the Mona Lisa’s inimitable smile . . .
From my room, the student population seemed manageable, but it overwhelmed me in the classroom area, which was a single, long building just beyond the dorm circle. The building was split into fourteen rooms facing out toward the lake. Kids crammed the narrow sidewalks in front of the classrooms, and even though finding my classes wasn’t hard (even with my poor sense of direction, I could get from French in Room 3 to precalc in Room 12), I felt unsettled all day. I didn’t know anyone and couldn’t even figure out whom I should be trying to know, and the classes were hard, even on the first day. My dad had told me I’d have to study, and now I believed him. The teachers were serious and smart and a lot of them went by “Dr.,” and so when the time came for my last class before lunch, World Religions, I felt tremendous relief. A vestige from when Culver Creek was a Christian boys’ school, I figured the World Religions class, required of every junior and senior, might be an easy A.
It was my only class all day where the desks weren’t arranged either in a square or a circle, so, not wanting to seem eager, I sat down in the third row at 11:03. I was seven minutes early, partly because I liked to be punctual, and partly because I didn’t have anyone to chat with out in the halls. Shortly thereafter, the Colonel came in with Takumi, and they sat down on opposite sides of me.
“I heard about last night,” Takumi said. “Alaska’s pissed.”
“That’s weird, since she was such a bitch last night,” I blurted out.
Takumi just shook his head. “Yeah, well, she didn’t know the whole story. And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people. You could have worse friends than—”
The Colonel cut him off. “Enough with the psychobabble, MC Dr. Phil. Let’s talk counterinsurgency.” People were starting to file into class, so the Colonel leaned in toward me and whispered, “If any of ’em are in this class, let me know, okay? Just, here, just put X’s where they’re sitting,” and he ripped a sheet of paper out of his notebook and drew a square for each desk. As people filed in, I saw one of them—the tall one with immaculately spiky hair—Kevin. Kevin stared down the Colonel as he walked past, but in trying to stare, he forgot to watch his step and bumped his thigh against a desk. The Colonel laughed. One of the other guys, the one who was either a little fat or worked out too much, came in behind Kevin, sporting pleated khaki pants and a short-sleeve black polo shirt. As they sat down, I crossed through the appropriate squares on the Colonel’s diagram and handed it to him. Just then, the Old Man shuffled in.
He breathed slowly and with great labor through his wide-open mouth. He took tiny steps toward the lectern, his heels not moving much past his toes. The Colonel nudged me and pointed casually to his notebook, which read, The Old Man only has one lung, and I did not doubt it. His audible, almost desperate breaths reminded me of my grandfather when he was dying of lung cancer. Barrelchested and ancient, the Old Man, it seemed to me, might die before he ever reached the podium.
“My name,” he said, “is Dr. Hyde. I have a first name, of course. So far as you are concerned, it is Doctor. Your parents pay a great deal of money so that you can attend school here, and I expect that you will offer them some return on their investment by reading what I tell you to read when I tell you to read it and consistently attending this class. And when you are here, you will listen to what I say.” Clearly not an easy A.
“This year, we’ll be studying three religious traditions: Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. We’ll tackle three more traditions next year. And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer. I’m sure some of you do not like lecture classes, but as you have probably noted, I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to spend my remaining breath chatting with you about the finer points of Islamic history, but our time together is short. I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?”
The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it. This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I’m in class, so teach me. And teach me he did: In those fifty minutes, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I’d never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them. And then he assigned us fifty pages of reading for the next day—from a book called Religious Studies.
That afternoon, I had two classes and two free periods. We had nine fifty-minute class periods each day, which means that most everyone had three “study periods” (except for the Colonel, who had an extra independent-study math class on account of being an Extra Special Genius). The Colonel and I had biology together, where I pointed out the other guy who’d duct-taped me the night before. In the top corner of his notebook, the Colonel wrote, Longwell Chase. Senior W-day Warrior. Friends w/Sara. Weird. It took me a minute to remember who Sara was: the Colonel’s girlfriend.
I spent my free periods in my room trying to read about religion. I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting. I also learned that after the events of the previous night, I was far too tired to care about myths or anything else, so I slept on top of the covers for most of the afternoon, until I awoke to Alaska singing, “WAKE UP, LITTLE PUHHHHHDGIE!” directly into my left ear canal. I held the religion book close up against my chest like a small paperback security blanket.
“That was terrible,” I said. “What do I need to do to ensure that never happens to me again?”
“Nothing you can do!” she said excitedly. “I’m unpredictable. God, don’t you hate Dr. Hyde? Don’t you? He’s so condescending.”
I sat up and said, “I think he’s a genius,” partly because I thought it was true and partly because I just felt like disagreeing with her.
She sat down on the bed. “Do you always sleep in your clothes?”
“Yup.”
“Funny,” she said. “You weren’t wearing much last night.” I just glared at her.
“C’mon, Pudge. I’m teasing. You have to be tough here. I didn’t know how bad it was—and I’m sorry, and they’ll regret it—but you have to be tough.” And then she left. That was all she had t
o say on the subject. She’s cute, I thought, but you don’t need to like a girl who treats you like you’re ten: You’ve already got a mom.
one hundred twenty-two days before
AFTER MY LAST CLASS of my first week at Culver Creek, I entered Room 43 to an unlikely sight: the diminutive and shirtless Colonel, hunched over an ironing board, attacking a pink button-down shirt. Sweat trickled down his forehead and chest as he ironed with great enthusiasm, his right arm pushing the iron across the length of the shirt with such vigor that his breathing nearly duplicated Dr. Hyde’s.
“I have a date,” he explained. “This is an emergency.” He paused to catch his breath. “Do you know”—breath—“how to iron?”
I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who’d spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn’t ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. “I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?” I said. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know we had an iron.”
“We don’t. It’s Takumi’s. But Takumi doesn’t know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, ‘You’re not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me.’ Oh, God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can’t reek when I see Sara’s parents. Okay, screw it. We’re going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?
“By the way,” he said as I followed him into the bathroom, “if you want to smoke inside during the day, just turn on the shower. The smoke follows the steam up the vents.”
Though this made no scientific sense, it seemed to work. The shower’s shortage of water pressure and low showerhead made it all but useless for showering, but it worked great as a smoke screen.
Sadly, it made a poor iron. The Colonel tried ironing the shirt once more (“I’m just gonna push really hard and see if that helps”) and finally put it on wrinkled. He matched the shirt with a blue tie decorated with horizontal lines of little pink flamingos.
“The one thing my lousy father taught me,” the Colonel said as his hands nimbly threaded the tie into a perfect knot, “was how to tie a tie. Which is odd, since I can’t imagine when he ever had to wear one.”
Just then, Sara knocked on the door. I’d seen her once or twice before, but the Colonel never introduced me to her and didn’t have a chance to that night.
“Oh. My God. Can’t you at least press your shirt?” she asked, even though the Colonel was standing in front of the ironing board. “We’re going out with my parents.” Sara looked awfully nice in her blue summer dress. Her long, pale blond hair was pulled up into a twist, with a strand of hair falling down each side of her face. She looked like a movie star—a bitchy one.
“Look, I did my best. We don’t all have maids to do our ironing.”
“Chip, that chip on your shoulder makes you look even shorter.”
“Christ, can’t we get out the door without fighting?”
“I’m just saying. It’s the opera. It’s a big deal to my parents. Whatever. Let’s go.” I felt like leaving, but it seemed stupid to hide in the bathroom, and Sara was standing in the doorway, one hand cocked on her hip and the other fiddling with her car keys as if to say, Let’s go.
“I could wear a tuxedo and your parents would still hate me!” he shouted.
“That’s not my fault! You antagonize them!” She held up the car keys in front of him. “Look, we’re going now or we’re not going.”
“Fuck it. I’m not going anywhere with you,” the Colonel said.
“Fine. Have a great night.” Sara slammed the door so hard that a sizable biography of Leo Tolstoy (last words: “The truth is . . . I care a great deal . . . what they . . . ”) fell off my bookshelf and landed with a thud on our checkered floor like an echo of the slamming door.
“AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!” he screamed.
“So that’s Sara,” I said.
“Yes.”
“She seems nice.”
The Colonel laughed, knelt down next to the minifridge, and pulled out a gallon of milk. He opened it, took a swig, winced, half coughed, and sat down on the couch with the milk between his legs.
“Is it sour or something?”
“Oh, I should have mentioned that earlier. This isn’t milk. It’s five parts milk and one part vodka. I call it ambrosia. Drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the milk, so the Eagle can’t catch me unless he actually takes a sip. The downside is that it tastes like sour milk and rubbing alcohol, but it’s Friday night, Pudge, and my girlfriend is a bitch. Want some?”
“I think I’ll pass.” Aside from a few sips of champagne on New Year’s under the watchful eye of my parents, I’d never really drunk any alcohol, and “ambrosia” didn’t seem like the drink with which to start. Outside, I heard the pay phone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders shared five pay phones, I was amazed at how infrequently it rang. We weren’t supposed to have cell phones, but I’d noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried them surreptitiously. And most non-Warriors called their parents, as I did, on a regular basis, so parents only called when their kids forgot.
“Are you going to get that?” the Colonel asked me. I didn’t feel like being bossed around by him, but I also didn’t feel like fighting.
Through a buggy twilight, I walked to the pay phone, which was drilled into the wall between Rooms 44 and 45. On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker (205.555.1584; Tommy to airport 4:20; 773.573.6521; JG—Kuffs?). Calling the pay phone required a great deal of patience. I picked up on about the ninth ring.
“Can you get Chip for me?” Sara asked. It sounded like she was on a cell phone.
“Yeah, hold on.”
I turned, and he was already behind me, as if he knew it would be her. I handed him the receiver and walked back to the room.
A minute later, three words made their way to our room through the thick, still air of Alabama at almost-night. “Screw you too!” the Colonel shouted.
Back in the room, he sat down with his ambrosia and told me, “She says I ratted out Paul and Marya. That’s what the Warriors are saying. That I ratted them out. Me. That’s why the piss in the shoes. That’s why the nearly killing you. ’Cause you live with me, and they say I’m a rat.”
I tried to remember who Paul and Marya were. The names were familiar, but I had heard so many names in the last week, and I couldn’t match “Paul” and “Marya” with faces. And then I remembered why: I’d never seen them. They got kicked out the year before, having committed the Trifecta.
“How long have you been dating her?” I asked.
“Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn’t even briefly like her. Like, my mom and my dad—my dad would get pissed, and then he would beat the shit out of my mom. And then my dad would be all nice, and they’d have like a honeymoon period. But with Sara, there’s never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a rat? I know, I know: Why don’t we break up?” He ran a hand through his hair, clutching a fistful of it atop his head, and said, “I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.”
“But—”
“I can’t believe they think that,” he said as he walked to the bookshelf and pulled down the almanac. He took a long pull off his ambrosia. “Goddamn Weekday Warriors. It was probably one of them that ratted out Paul and Marya and then blamed me to cover their tracks. Anyway, it’s a good night for staying in. Staying in with Pudge and ambrosia.”
“I still—” I said, wanting to say that I didn’t understand how you could kiss someone who believed you were a rat if being a rat was the worst thing in the world, but the Colonel cut me off.
“Not another word about it. You know what the capital of Sierra Leone is?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” he said, “but I intend to
find out.” And with that, he stuck his nose in the almanac, and the conversation was over.
one hundred ten days before
KEEPING UP WITH MY CLASSES proved easier than I’d expected. My general predisposition to spending a lot of time inside reading gave me a distinct advantage over the average Culver Creek student. By the third week of classes, plenty of kids had been sunburned to a bufriedo-like golden brown from days spent chatting outside in the shadeless dorm circle during free periods. But I was barely pink: I studied.
And I listened in class, too, but on that Wednesday morning, when Dr. Hyde started talking about how Buddhists believe that all things are interconnected, I found myself staring out the window. I was looking at the wooded, slow-sloping hill beyond the lake. And from Hyde’s classroom, things did seem connected: The trees seemed to clothe the hill, and just as I would never think to notice a particular cotton thread in the magnificently tight orange tank top Alaska wore that day, I couldn’t see the trees for the forest—everything so intricately woven together that it made no sense to think of one tree as independent from that hill. And then I heard my name, and I knew I was in trouble.
“Mr. Halter,” the Old Man said. “Here I am, straining my lungs for your edification. And yet something out there seems to have caught your fancy in a way that I’ve been unable to do. Pray tell: What have you discovered out there?”
Now I felt my own breath shorten, the whole class watching me, thanking God they weren’t me. Dr. Hyde had already done this three times, kicking kids out of class for not paying attention or writing notes to one another.
