“I couldn’t just swim out,” I said softly, pulling on a pair of jean shorts beneath my towel. “They duct-taped me. I couldn’t even move really.”
“Wait. Wait,” he said, and hopped out of his bunk, staring at me through the darkness. “They taped you? How?” And I showed him: I stood like a mummy, with my feet together and my hands at my sides, and showed him how they’d wrapped me up. And then I plopped down on to the couch.
“Christ! You could have drowned! They’re just supposed to throw you in the water in your underwear and run!” he shouted. “What the hell were they thinking? Who was it? Kevin Richman and who else? Do you remember their faces?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” he wondered.
“Did you do something to them?” I asked.
“No, but I’m sure as shit gonna do something to ’em now. We’ll get them.”
“It wasn’t a big deal. I got out fine.”
“You could have died.”
And I could have, I suppose. But I didn’t.
“Well, maybe I should just go to the Eagle tomorrow and tell him,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” he answered. He walked over to his crumpled shorts lying on the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit two and handed one to me. I smoked the whole goddamned thing. “You’re not,” he continued, “because that’s not how shit gets dealt with here. And besides, you really don’t want to get a reputation for ratting. But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends.”
And if the Colonel thought that calling me his friend would make me stand by him, well, he was right. “Alaska was kind of mean to me tonight,” I said. I leaned over, opened an empty desk drawer and used it as a makeshift ashtray.
“Like I said, she’s moody.”
I went to bed wearing a T-shirt, shorts and socks. No matter how miserably hot it got, I resolved, I would sleep in my clothes every night at the Creek, feeling – probably for the first time in my life – the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what’s going to happen or when.
One Hundred and Twenty-six Days Before
“Well, now it’s war,” the Colonel shouted the next morning. I rolled over and looked at the clock: 7.52. My first Culver Creek class, French, started in eighteen minutes. I blinked a couple of times and looked up at the Colonel, who was standing between the couch and the COFFEE TABLE, holding his well-worn, once-white tennis shoes by the laces. For a long time, he stared at me and I stared at him. And then, almost in slow motion, a grin crept across the Colonel’s face.
“I’ve got to hand it to them,” he said finally. “That was pretty clever.”
“What?” I asked.
“Last night – before they woke you up, I guess – they pissed in my shoes.”
“Are you sure?” I said, trying not to laugh.
“Do you care to smell?” he asked, holding the shoes towards me. “Because I went ahead and smelled them, and yes, I am sure. If there’s one thing I know, it’s when I’ve just stepped in another man’s piss. It’s like my mom always says: ‘Ya think you’s a walkin’ on water, but turns out you just got piss in your shoes.’ Point those guys out to me if you see them today,” he added, “because we need to figure out why they’re so, uh, pissed at me. And then we need to go ahead and start thinking about how we’re going to ruin their miserable little lives.”
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 pyjama shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops. Modest, I guess, and casual.
And there was something about girls wearing pyjamas (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 dived 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 towards 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 counter-insurgency.” People were starting to file into class, so the Colonel leaned in towards me and whispered, “If any of ’em are in this class, let me know, OK? 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 labour through his wide-open mouth. He took tiny steps towards 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. Barrel-chested 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