Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  I stepped into the classroom and flipped the heavy black light switches, which, with an audible chunk and hum, caused the overheads to flare on, washing the room with a hard fluorescent light. A table and two dozen chairs with desktops sprang into view. Two whiteboards, a bookshelf half-filled with old paperback classics, and an enormous, ragged poster of Ernest Hemingway in profile, seated at his typewriter, completed the room.

  I had just put my briefcase down on the desk at the front of the room and realized I didn’t have a whiteboard eraser, when there was a knock on the door and Sam Hodges looked in. He was dressed to the nines: blue shirt with cuff links, paisley tie knotted to perfection, blue blazer, and dress khakis.

  “Hail, fellow, well met,” he said, a slight smile at the corners of his mouth.

  I raised a hand in welcome. “Ave! Morituri te salutamus,” I said, quoting the ancient greeting of gladiators about to enter the arena. Hail! Those of us who are about to die salute you. As soon as I spoke the words, I regretted them. Not because of the content, but because Latin had been Fritz’s specialty. I thought of the photos in the hall upstairs, all the dead young men, and a great sadness fisted me just below the heart.

  Sam laughed, unaware of my discomfort. “Aut disce aut discede,” he replied.

  I smiled, feebly. “I used up most of my Latin with the first one.”

  “Means ‘Either learn or leave.’ ”

  “Fitting. You always up this early?”

  “I get up around six every morning to grade and do paperwork.”

  “Sounds fun.” I picked up a pen and tapped it on the surface of the table. “You ready for today?”

  Sam crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame. “You know, I’ve been doing this for thirty years, and I still get a little nervous on the first day.”

  “That’s reassuring. I’m still trying to figure out what to say to them.”

  “Well, you could be original and say, ‘Welcome to English Ten. I’m Mr. Glass.’ ”

  I shook my head. “Too boring. Ought to be a bit more dramatic.”

  “Says the novelist.”

  I grinned. “Can you tell me where I can find an eraser?”

  “I’ll bring one down after breakfast.” He started to step out the door and then looked back. “Break a leg,” he said, and gave me a thumbs-up sign before leaving.

  I sat in my swivel chair and propped my feet up on my desk, surveying the rows of empty chairs. “Don’t screw this up,” I said to the empty room.

  MY FIRST-PERIOD CLASS CONSISTED of fifteen fourth formers who sat in a sort of numb acceptance, as if they were on Novocain. Although it was early, their blank looks were largely an act. Before they unmasked themselves, they wanted to see whether I was going to be easy or hard, pleasant or difficult, forgiving or demanding. They were going to have to wait, because I hadn’t figured out what I was going to be yet.

  “Welcome to English, gentlemen,” I said. All fifteen pairs of eyes turned dutifully toward me. I saw my advisee, Stephen Watterson, sitting at the back of the room. He grinned at me, and I smiled back. “Good to see you all. Hope you had a good summer. My name is Matthias Glass. I graduated from Blackburne in 2001 and went to the University of Virginia and then to NYU for grad school. I figured you might want to know the new guy’s credentials before he tried to teach you something.”

  “He wrote a book, too,” Stephen said approvingly. “A novel. My mom read it. It was about this reporter who gets kidnapped by a bunch of South American terrorists.”

  “Cool,” said another student, a gangly kid with a halo of curly blond hair. “Was it like a fictional novel?”

  “That would be the definition of a novel,” I said. “A long, fictitious prose narrative. Let that be the first literary term we learn.” I was bemused when most of the students dutifully opened their notebooks and began writing down the definition. Then I noticed Paul Simmons, the headmaster’s son, sitting in the back and looking dully at his desk. His notebook wasn’t open.

  “Are we going to read your novel?” another student asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “What’s it called?” asked the kid with curly blond hair, whose name, according to my roster, was Russell Andrew Scarwood, but he went by Rusty.

  “The Unforgiving,” I said.

  Now a small assemblage of students spoke up.

  “Are you famous?”

  “Was it like a best seller?”

  “Can we be in your next book?”

  “Gentlemen,” I said, raising my hands. “Here’s the deal. I wrote a novel, yes. It sold fairly well. I am not famous. I’m your English teacher, and I’m looking forward to this year, so let’s get down to it, okay?”

  They settled down as I passed out the course syllabus. A not-insignificant weight seemed to roll off my shoulders. I’d wondered, perhaps with some self-importance, how this issue of my novel would go. At some level, I had been hoping it wouldn’t even come up. At another, more hidden level, I was thrilled that they were interested, which in turn made me feel slightly disgusted. In any event, now I could move on to the business of teaching.

  LIVING IN A DORM of sixty boys, all fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, became a constant exercise in self-control. The pranks, crude jokes, profanity, water fights, phone use after lights-out, shouts echoing in the stairwells, running showers, wrestling matches, drumming feet in the halls, and loud music were enough to try the patience of a nun. Mild-mannered Gray Smith, the dorm master on the Lawson side, swore he would kill someone before Christmas. Small episodes of dormitory insanity occurred throughout a very busy fall. A urinal on the third floor exploded for unknown reasons at six thirty one morning, flooding the bathroom for nearly two hours before the housekeeping staff showed up. Hal Starr got a half-full Coke and a bag of Doritos accidentally mixed up with his laundry, and the spilled Coke shorted out the dryer before blowing the entire circuit and plunging the Hill into darkness for an hour one Saturday evening. I made my way through the darkened dormitory and found Hal in his room, red faced and embarrassed in the beam of my flashlight as he shook soggy Doritos out of his half-dry laundry, most of which had been stained by the Coke. The following week, Brian Schue sucked his bedsheets into the hall vacuum cleaner “to see what it would do.” David Barnes ate soap on a dare and threw up on Jim Powell as they were walking to chapel, ruining Jim’s brand-new blazer.

  But it was Ben Sipple, a blond-haired fourth former, who seemed destined to be my dormitory nemesis. He possessed the pale, amused face of a Flemish angel and the cunning of a demon from the ninth circle of hell. The analogy was not, in my opinion, all that extreme: Ben’s roommate, Robert Cummings, came to my apartment one evening and accused Ben of satanic worship.

  “Ben says he’s going to call the devil into our room tonight, Mr. Glass. He’s got this old black leather book that’s huge—he calls it a demonomicon or something—and he says he’s going to conjure up the devil with it.” Robert was a starter on varsity soccer and generally implacable, but his face was pale and he was obviously shaken.

  I went upstairs to Ben’s room. Ben was sitting at his desk, working out an algebra problem.

  “Hello, Mr. Glass,” he said pleasantly.

  I figured a frontal assault was most appropriate. “Robert says you plan to scare him tonight with some sort of satanic worship. That true?”

  Ben assumed a pious expression. “Mr. Glass, I don’t worship the devil. And why would I want to scare Robert?”

  “He says you plan to—to bring the devil into your room.” I felt ridiculous under his placid gaze.

  Ben smiled as if confused. “Mr. Glass, do I look like the type of person who would be able to conjure the devil?”

  I told him to leave Robert alone and went back to my room to continue grading papers on Oedipus as a tragic hero. Early on, I had realized that assigning papers was one thing, but grading them another. What looked like a great assignment idea was complicated by the fact that it resulted in a stack of s
ixty-odd papers appearing on my desk, all needing to be graded. My fourth formers’ first paper, a short essay on their summer reading assignment, had nearly killed me. I’d spent around twenty minutes on each paper, writing detailed comments in blue ink about organization, textual evidence, even basic grammar, and had worked several nights past eleven o’clock trying to get them graded. When I had returned them, almost every student had flipped casually past my comments to find the grade, and then shoved his paper into the purgatory of his backpack. Now I was spending five minutes at most on each paper and would require all of them to submit a revision. My former English teacher, Mr. Conkle, who had retired to Florida two years ago, had written concise and trenchant comments that looped across the backs of my essays, and I wondered how he had done it year after year.

  Bitching about student papers is probably standard for English teachers, but there were compensations. Paul Simmons’s paper showed signs of serious thought, although he had carelessly slapped the words onto the page and turned in what was clearly a first draft. It must have been difficult for him to attend the same school that his father ran, but I wished he had put in a bit more effort. By contrast, Stephen Watterson had again earned an A. The boy had a talent with words—his prose could be a bit flowery, perhaps, but it was always insightful and often clever. I wondered if Mr. Conkle had felt the same reading my papers. I shook my head at my own self-indulgence and bent back over Stephen’s essay, pen in hand.

  Suddenly a shriek rang through the dormitory. Screams, cries, yells were all part of the daily repertoire on Lawson-Parker, but this was a howl of fear. My scalp actually crawled. What the hell? I stood up and stepped out into the hall. The scream came again, from upstairs. I saw heads poke out from behind doors as I ran down the hall to the stairs, which I took three at a time.

  When I came out of the stairwell, Robert Cummings was running down the third-floor hallway, his face contorted in horror. “He’s here!” he screamed, and then threw himself at my feet. “He’s here! He’s in my room!”

  A few students were milling uncomfortably in the hall. Rusty Scarwood came over and tried to calm Robert down. I walked down the hall to Robert’s room and went in.

  Ben Sipple and Terence Jarrar, another of my sophomore English students, were giggling uncontrollably on Ben’s bed under a circle of weak yellow light from Ben’s lamp. A large black leather-bound book sat on the floor, its pages open to a picture of a pentangle. The boys fell silent when they noticed me.

  “Evening, gentlemen,” I said. “Any success with the demon conjuring?”

  Ben’s face hung in the dim light. Terence looked at the floor.

  “Terence, you’re in your room for the rest of the night. Mr. Middleton will inform you about any other punishment he sees fit to give you. Go.” Terence went, leaving me alone with Ben.

  I stood over Ben, who sat motionless on his bed. “Why’d you do it, Ben?” I asked.

  “It was just a joke,” he said.

  “Some joke. You freaked out the entire dorm by scaring your roommate.” I sighed. “My guess is, Robert will ask to move out. I’ll recommend that he do so. And I’ll suggest to Mr. Middleton that you do work details for a week and be placed on probation. One more stunt like this and you’ll be packing to go home.”

  Ben snickered. “Which home, Mr. Glass? My mom’s in Miami? Or my dad’s in Boston with his new girlfriend?”

  Taken aback by his brazenness, I said, “Look, this is a good school. You’ve got . . . opportunities here.” Even as I spoke, I knew how clichéd that sounded.

  Now Ben laughed aloud, an ugly, derisive sound. “Is this where you tell me all the things I have to learn here, Mr. Glass? How it’ll change my life? How I wasn’t dumped here by my parents like a bag of laundry?” He paused to let this sink in. “All the teachers here hate me,” he said coolly. “Did you know that? And now you do, too.”

  Most counselors, I guess, would tell you that a kid who said these things was seeking attention and that the kid was hurting in a bad way. And they would be right, probably. But all Ben’s accusation did was make me mad. He had terrified Robert Cummings as a joke, and his justification was that his own life was too painful for him to bother to act like a decent human being toward his classmates.

  “Don’t try to guilt me, Ben,” I said. “Your life sucks? Join the club. If you can’t change what makes your life suck, then figure out what you need to do to deal with it. If you need help, I’m here. Other teachers are here. So don’t give me any of that victim crap.” I stopped, shocked by my own words. Ben was, too, apparently; he stared at me, slack-jawed.

  I turned. “Go to bed, now,” I said, and left. Only later did I realize that I was angry in part because my own advice to Ben was exactly what I could have said to myself.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By dinnertime, almost an hour after Fritz had lost me in the trees, I still hadn’t seen him. I sat in a corner of the dining hall and picked at my plate of food while the few classmates who had joined me caught my mood and left me alone, talking among themselves about an upcoming mixer with Saint Catherine’s. I ignored them, afraid of what I would say if they asked me how I was doing. I’m great, thanks. I cheated on a physics test and lied to my roommate.

  No one, other than the prefects on the J-Board and their faculty sponsor, Dr. Booth, had seen me go into or out of my hearing earlier that day. My teacher, Mr. Summerfield, was the one who had reported me for a possible honor code violation. He had wondered why I hadn’t just turned in the test when he had called for them, why it had taken me so long to write out the pledge. In my hearing, the J-Board asked me if I had cheated. The question assumed that, if I were guilty, I would feel ashamed and confess. Instead, facing ten of my classmates, including Fritz and his half smile, I had felt something cold brush my heart, and I had told them no, I hadn’t cheated. Two minutes later, I left my hearing, knowing I would be found innocent, and the guilt I had managed to keep locked down earlier seeped into every cell of my body until I found myself at the lions, as if waiting for Fritz to arrive so I could ruin our friendship.

  I got up from the table and put my tray of uneaten food on the conveyor belt to the dishwashers and headed back to my room. Outside in the gloaming, third formers hurried across campus to the study halls in the basement of Stadler Hall. I got to our room in Walker with five minutes to spare before the start of study period. No Fritz. This was odd—Fritz was rarely late for anything. And we weren’t typically allowed to study off dorm two nights in a row, so he probably wasn’t in the library. He must really be pissed, I thought. I made sure he wasn’t in the bathroom down the hall, and then sat at my desk, disheartened, as the bell rang.

  Half an hour later, I was worried. One of the masters in charge—the teachers who had the weekly duty of running study hall for the third formers and making sure the rest of us were working in our rooms—could come by any minute and see that Fritz wasn’t in the room. If Fritz didn’t have a very good excuse, he’d get detention, which took place on Saturday nights. He’d probably miss the mixer with Saint Catherine’s. But beyond that, a selfish thought began crawling out of a dark recess in my mind. Fritz could be in Stilwell telling someone, maybe Mr. Hodges, that I had cheated. He wouldn’t do that, I thought, chewing my thumbnail. But if he did? Various scenarios played out in my head: Mr. Summerfield scowling, and then assuring me all was well; Dr. Simmons gazing coldly at me from behind his desk; my classmates rallying to my defense, and then turning away in rejection; my parents coming to pick me up in shame, my mother bawling.

  Finally the bell rang, ending the first study period. I had fifteen minutes before the next one. I ran out of Walker into the night and down the lighted brick path to the library. I could see dim, shadowy figures crossing the Lawn, some disappearing, others hanging around the lit porches of the dorms, like spies skulking in alleyways in a Cold War novel. The air was frosty, giving the illusion that everyone outside was exhaling smoke. I got to the library, entered the main doors,
and, off the main hall, I found Trip Alexander in one of the study rooms reserved for sixth formers. He was drinking a can of orange juice at a table covered with math textbooks and various papers. I tapped on the glass door, and Trip looked up from the desk, brushing back the straight blond hair that was constantly falling into his eyes. I opened the door and stepped inside the study room, which was little more than a glorified closet with dark wainscoting and a table and two chairs. “I hate Kimball,” Trip said to me by way of greeting, referring to the calculus teacher. “The man will be the death of me. Three tests in three weeks. Total bullshit.”

  “Have you seen Fritz anywhere?” I asked.

  Trip raised an eyebrow. “No, not since breakfast. Why?”

  I hesitated. “Well, I figured you guys were studying for calc again, like last night, and I need to talk to Fritz.”

  Trip shook his head. “No, I’ve been studying with Diamond. He really needs to pass this test, but he said he’d had enough. He’s heading back to his room.” Trip frowned. “What did you say about last night?”

  “I was . . . Nothing. I mean, just that you and Fritz were studying last night . . .” While I was cheating on my physics test.

  Trip sat back in his chair. “Fritz and I weren’t studying together last night.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Fritz and I didn’t study together last night. Did he tell you we did?”

  I looked at Trip, who looked back evenly. The honor system, straightforward and unequivocal as it was, did not bend. But there was a whole gray category of behavior that the honor system tended to ignore, such as telling white lies in order to maintain your privacy or spare someone’s feelings. I understood that Trip was trying to figure out if this was that kind of gray area, if Fritz had allowed me to believe he’d been studying with Trip without actually telling me a lie, or if Fritz’s behavior was something else. This was tricky ground, for both of us.