Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  “Yep,” John said.

  Miles scratched his cheek. “Okay,” he said, somewhat doubtfully.

  John gave a little smile. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

  “Harsh,” murmured Roger Bloom.

  “Yes,” John said. “But it’s the only way an honor code can work. Really work.” He looked at us. “Imagine that you’re taking a test and you see your neighbor cheat. Could you turn him in?” Silence. “Could you, Matthias?” he said, turning to me, and heat rose in my face and the back of my neck as everyone stared.

  “I—I don’t know,” I managed.

  John seemed to consider this, while I had the distinct impression that I had failed some sort of test. John didn’t change his expression, though, so I couldn’t be sure.

  “Centuries ago, in Japan,” John said, “the samurai followed a code of conduct known as Bushido. It means ‘the way of the warrior.’ One of the most important tenets of Bushido was a sense of honor. The samurai valued honor above life. If a samurai felt he had failed in his duty, he would commit seppuku, ritual suicide.” He paused, lifting an eyebrow. “Now that’s harsh,” he said. Several people chuckled.

  I glanced at Daryl, making a face like Can you believe this guy, but Daryl was staring at John, a bit wary but obviously engaged. Quickly I looked back over at John, too.

  “The honor code seems cruel, I know,” John said. “I thought the same thing at first. But it makes this place what it is. There are no locks on the doors to our dorm rooms. You can forget your backpack in the library and come back the next day and it will still be there. Your word takes on real meaning. Someone tells you something and you know it’s the truth. There aren’t many places on Earth where that happens. This is one of them.”

  Over the next few days, the guys on my floor would whisper “Bushido” to one another and we’d crack up, but we did it secretly, out of earshot of John Cole. And although we didn’t want to admit it, his earnest speech about the honor code, instead of sounding corny, had struck home with most of us. We were now a part of this century-old tradition.

  However, the most immediate impact John Cole made on us was telling Daryl to take his diamond stud out of his ear or he’d give him detention. Daryl did it grudgingly, and the next morning, John woke us up for breakfast by knocking loudly on the door, throwing it open, and proclaiming, “Morning, Matthias! Morning, Diamond! Rise and shine, boys!”

  “Don’t know what Diamond that motherfucker be talking about,” Daryl muttered, but the nickname stuck, and pretty soon he was Diamond to everybody.

  Being fourteen and hopelessly naive about most things, including myself, I was captivated by Diamond. I had known hardly any black kids at my predominantly white junior high. His forceful personality, his easy use of profanity out of earshot of teachers and prefects, and his casual acceptance of me as his roommate bowled me over. Combine that with a keen intelligence and the physique of a Greek statue, not to mention that he seemed destined to be a starting varsity running back, and Diamond was like a demigod who allowed me, a pitiful mortal, to enter his sphere. Within a week, I was infatuated with the guy.

  That my infatuation could be considered in any way homosexual was my secret fear. To be labeled gay at an all-male school was the worst, most devastating blow that could be leveled at a student. Being called a pussy just made you weak, and cocksucker was just another, harsher word for asshole, but being called a faggot was to be cast into the outer darkness.

  To say categorically that I was not and am not homosexual, and that I did not harbor any such inclinations toward Diamond or any other student at my school, must come across as me protesting a bit too much. I can only say that it’s true. I didn’t lust after Diamond—I lusted after his attributes. I wanted to be like him so I could shut down any potential bullies with an angry stare, and conquer girls with all the rough ease of a 007. As I was nothing like Diamond, I could only gaze at him and hope that somehow some of his Diamond-ness would rub off on me, transforming me overnight from an awkward, metal-mouthed beanpole into a cocksure Casanova.

  This did not happen. Diamond, as I’ve said, was cut like ancient statuary, whereas I had a concave chest and arms like rubber bands. In the bathroom, where we showered four at a time, I’d glance surreptitiously between his legs, wondering if what I’d heard about black males being well endowed was true, but the truth was that Diamond seemed, like everyone else I showered with, pretty much adequate, while I would peer in disgust at the wilted carrot between my own legs. (Jay “Beef” Organ, whose massive organ swiftly became legend, was the exception. “Boy’s hung like a cable car” was Diamond’s own assessment.) Even the tight cornrows sweeping across Diamond’s scalp seemed to mock my own limp brown hair.

  Ever hopeful, I continued hanging out with Diamond. I tried to listen to his music, a funky mix of Tupac Shakur and Wu-Tang Clan and Digital Underground, but I secretly preferred my old classic rock CDs, putting on my headphones and surrounding myself in a sonic fume of Led Zeppelin, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones. Diamond’s quick wit proved even harder to copy, and I usually just resorted to profanity whenever a clever response was called for. “Yeah, well, fuck that” became my stock phrase until one day Diamond told me that I was going to be tagged Fuckhead for the rest of my life unless I pulled my head out of my ass and got my motherfucking shit together, dig?

  All of this took place in a whirlwind of classes and study halls and sports—I was on the “Cub” soccer team for third formers—so that we were often too busy for any real introspection. What free time we had, we spent trying to improve our position on the social ladder, or sleeping. So I didn’t realize that my clinging to Diamond, eating with him at every meal, or trying to copy his every move, could be viewed as annoying, or that he might find my constant questions and assumptions about him offensive.

  I remember asking him once about girls and making some inane comment about how I’m sure his dance moves would “floor the bitches,” with an intended sexual pun on floor. He looked up at me from his desk. “What, I can dance ’cause I’m black?” he asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “You heard me,” he said. “It’s a black thing, right? I can dance, I can ‘floor the bitches’ because I’ve got a higher level of melanin than you do?”

  I stared at him from my upper bunk. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.

  He pointed at me. “See, that’s another thing,” he said. “You got to cut out this cussing shit all the time. ’Cause it’s old, and all it does is make you look desperate. I cuss ’cause it’s who I am. You do it ’cause you think it’ll make you look tougher. Which it doesn’t.”

  I was stunned. No one had ever so openly laid bare my insecurities. So I went on the offensive. “I want to go back to the part where you called me a racist,” I said.

  Diamond’s eyebrows went up. “Nobody called you a racist.”

  “Yes, you did,” I said indignantly. “You said—”

  “What I said”—Diamond leaned forward in his chair, stabbing his finger in the air for emphasis, as if he were impaling his words—“was that you were suggesting I can dance well because I’m black, which I was trying to point out is a racial stereotype. So happens I can dance well, but that don’t make the stereotype less bad, is all I’m saying.”

  “So I try to give you a fucking compliment and now I’m, what, some kind of bigot?”

  “Man, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Uh-oh, better watch your mouth, Diamond,” I said. “Somebody’ll think you’re just trying to look big.”

  We went on for a bit, insulting each other and becoming loud enough that John Cole came down the hall—it was a few minutes before lights-out—and told us to knock it off or we’d get stuck with demerits. We went to bed, still pissed at each other. The next morning, Diamond got up early and went to the weight room. Then he came back and showered and went to breakfast, all without saying a word to me.

  After he left, I sat in our
room and realized with horror that I had made precious few friends other than him. There was Trip Alexander, a tall, reserved boy from Dallas who played Cub soccer and was in my English class, but we didn’t socialize much outside of class or the soccer field. Miles Camak was in my biology class and liked the same music I did, and we’d swapped a couple of CDs. Everyone else in our class was either a brief acquaintance, a stranger, an undesirable, or someone who was friends with Diamond and simply tolerant of me as Diamond’s roommate. I determined to start making some new friends and marched to breakfast as if on a mission. I sat with Trip Alexander and spoke with some other kids in our class, and was surprised to find how easy it was.

  Later that evening, Diamond apologized to me. “Didn’t mean to come off so strong, man,” he said. “It’s just that the work’s harder than I thought and football’s kicking my ass. I mean, I’m kicking it right back,” he added, with a grin, “but it’s worn me down a little, got me frazzled. We cool?”

  I nodded. “Sure,” I said, “I’m sorry, too,” and gave Diamond a fist bump. But deep down I was still angry at Diamond for how much influence he had on me. Looking back, I realize I was mad at the wrong person.

  I became closer friends with Trip and Miles, playing Ping-Pong with one or the other of them in the attic of Raleigh, going with them on weekend afternoons to watch one of the thousand or so movies in the school’s old A/V center on the top floor of the library. Diamond and I still hung out and ate together most of the time, but I was pulling away from him a little. And then I fucked up.

  Fletcher Dupree was a kid in our class who was both popular and annoying as hell. Today he’d be diagnosed with ADHD and slapped on Adderall, but back then, he was probably described by adults as just “high-spirited.” He had a knack for figuring out your most vulnerable area and then exploiting it publicly for laughs. At a packed lunch table, Fletcher had asked Roger Bloom, an oversized football center, why he liked listening to George Michael, and then looked on with disbelief and mock disgust as Roger, who obviously did like George Michael and was embarrassed at this public outing, tried to stammer a response while everyone else roared with laughter. One Saturday night when it was hotter than a boiler room in Hades—Raleigh Hall did not have air-conditioning, and so we all had floor fans blasting away constantly—I stripped down to my underwear under my single bedsheet, trying to fall asleep. Soon after I did, Fletcher snuck into our room and yanked the sheet off me. Then he burst out laughing and ran down the hall. Next morning at breakfast, I had to hear from Fletcher all about how I wore tighty-whities. Never mind the guy who was creeping around the dorm and pulling bedsheets off people—apparently I was the pervert for wearing only jockey shorts in bed when it was ninety-seven degrees. But Diamond had laughed at Fletcher’s comments, too, which only fanned the coals of resentment I had stoked.

  One night after study hall, as a bunch of us headed back to dorm, Fletcher’s voice rose out of the dark. He was complaining about his roommate, Max Goren, who snored “like a goddamn elephant seal,” which made a few of us chuckle. Then Fletcher asked, casually, “Hey, Matthias, what’s it like rooming with Diamond?”

  My first instinct was to say it was fine, that he was a good guy, which was true. I knew, however, that this would probably result in some sort of ridicule from Fletcher about how much I worshipped my roommate, which would crack everyone up. So, sensing an opportunity to dig safely at my roommate, I said, “Oh, he’s cool. But, man, does he stink when he comes back from football practice. It’s like a fucking water buffalo or something.”

  To my horror, from out of the dark I heard Diamond say, “Fuck you, Glass!” Fletcher brayed with laughter, as did everyone else. In vain I tried to apologize to Diamond, who just muttered, “Whatever,” and then ignored me while everyone laughed at how Fletcher had set me up and how spectacularly I’d fallen for it.

  All that evening before lights-out, I apologized to Diamond, begged him to forgive me, told him I was stupid and insensitive. I even told him I was scared of Fletcher and thought if I made him laugh, maybe he’d think I was all right and not tease me. “That just shows how fucking stupid you are,” Diamond said, heading for the bathroom with his toothbrush. I stayed in my bunk, staring at the ceiling until Diamond came back in, hit the lights, and got into his bunk, causing the entire bed frame to shiver.

  The next day at breakfast, Diamond carried his tray to the far side of the cafeteria, away from the area where we always sat. After a moment of standing indecisively with my tray, I slowly headed for our usual table. Fletcher Dupree was already there, along with a few other classmates, and my heart sank, but he didn’t seem to notice me, so I sat down at the table as far away from him as possible. Then Fletcher seemed about to sneeze and held up his hand as if in warning, and when everyone had stopped eating to look at him, his eyes shut, nose crinkled, mouth open in a grimace, he threw his head forward in a fake sneeze and uttered “Water buffalo,” throwing the table into an uproar. After a few seconds, I calmly picked up my tray and, ignoring the catcalls and pleas to return, went to sit alone at a window table, staring out at the brightening day. Trip Alexander and Miles Camak came over to sit with me, and we ate mostly in silence, but their gesture meant a lot.

  It was a brief respite. By the time I got back to my room, I found Diamond staring at a sheet of paper tacked to our door. It was a list of all the varsity football players and their jersey numbers, with a note stating that we needed to have these numbers memorized by the end of study hall tonight, or else. “Motherfucking don’t believe this shit,” Diamond said, scowling. “I got a Latin test and a bio lab today.”

  “What does ‘or else’ mean?” I asked.

  Diamond shot a sideways glance at me, and then looked back at the sheet. “It’s Third Form Night tonight,” he said.

  Third Form Night was a time-honored ritual at Blackburne. Immediately after study hall, the varsity football players would corral the third formers in the auditorium in the Montbach Fine Arts Center and lead us through a program of school spirit. Unofficially, it was a hazing, but no one knew what that meant. Did we have to do push-ups? Run laps? Eat onions? Fourth formers rolled their eyes and laughed when we asked about it. All we knew was that some of us would be chosen at random and told to identify the jersey number of a given varsity player. If we failed to correctly identify the player’s number . . . Well, it was understood that we needed to correctly identify the number. Period. Not knowing what would happen was worse than having the fatal knowledge.

  Diamond ripped the sheet off our door and handed it to me. “You better start reading,” he said. “I already got one from Coach last week. Motherfucking bullshit.” Before I had the chance to do more than stammer a quick thanks, he retrieved his backpack from our room and headed to class.

  All anyone could talk about at lunch was Third Form Night. “They make you eat a stick of butter if you screw up,” Roger Bloom said in a low voice. “With Tabasco sauce.”

  “I heard they make you run around the Hill until you pass out,” Miles said.

  Trip protested this. “You can’t run until you pass out,” he said. “You’d have to run, like, a marathon. That’s like torture.”

  “Think they care?” Miles said.

  “Glad I’ve had a week to look at the list,” Roger said.

  “A week?” Miles was incredulous. “That’s not fair!”

  “Who’s gonna run with you while you run around the Hill?” Trip insisted, still arguing against the run-until-you-pass-out theory. “What, they’ve got golf carts or something? It’s a crock.”

  “Why’d you get an extra week?”

  “I play JV football. They gave it to all of us. But if we screw it up, we’re dead meat. Worse than you guys.”

  Classes passed in a blur, all of us sitting at our desks like men awaiting the long march to the gallows, praying for a reprieve. At soccer practice, we played with a frantic energy that impressed our coaches, who didn’t realize we were scared half out of our wit
s. We trudged reluctantly up the Hill after practice, not wanting to turn our backs on the fading day. Dinner was miserable, and even though Trip still swore they couldn’t really hurt us because the teachers wouldn’t allow it, his was a lone voice. A trio of sixth formers walked past our table and slowed, grinning at us like cats surveying a rack of mice.

  For the first six weeks of school, all third formers had to go to the large lecture hall in Stadler for the evening study period. We shuffled in, all of us carrying our rosters to hopefully memorize over the next two hours. Mr. Downing, an old bulldog of a Latin teacher who had taught at Blackburne for thirty years, sat behind a desk on a dais at the back of the room where he could oversee us. He barked at us to get seated, and we obeyed. When the bell rang for the start of study hall, I got out my English grammar book to complete an exercise on fragments and run-on sentences. I couldn’t look at the football roster. I was too nervous, and so I reasoned that homework would calm me down. After about half an hour, I did feel a bit calmer, and spent the rest of the first study period looking over the roster of fifty-odd names.

  When the bell rang for break, everybody got up to stretch and go to the bathroom. I put my head down on my desk to take a brief nap, but startled cries brought me and everyone else out of the room and into the hallway. Posted on every door to every classroom was a photocopy of a stylized, roaring lion’s head drawn in black, red, and gold. They had not been on the doors when we had gone into Stadler. Even Trip Alexander was quiet now.

  The second study period was essentially useless. No matter how hard I looked at the roster, names and jersey numbers slipped out of my mind like water through a clenched fist. I looked at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand slowly sweep its way around. How many times had I willed that clock to go faster! Now I wanted it to stop, or start winding backward, maybe all the way back to the day my parents had first uttered the word Blackburne so I could say no and end this nightmare.