at Richard’s face, he saw that it was true. His friend looked worried, tender, four-square.
Jack began his story.
5
Around the two boys the life of Nelson House went on, both
calm and boisterous in the manner of boarding schools, punctuated with shouts and roars and laughter. Footsteps padded past the door but did not stop. From the room above came
regular thumps and an occasional drift of music Jack finally recognized as a record by Blue Oyster Cult. He began by
telling Richard about the Daydreams. From the Daydreams he
went to Speedy Parker. He described the voice speaking to
him from the whirling funnel in the sand. And then he told
Richard of how he had taken Speedy’s “magic juice” and first flipped into the Territories.
“But I think it was just cheap wine, wino wine,” Jack said.
“Later, after it was all gone, I found out that I didn’t need it to flip. I could just do it by myself.”
“Okay,” Richard said noncommittally.
He tried to truly represent the Territories to Richard: the cart-track, the sight of the summer palace, the timelessness and specificity of it. Captain Farren; the dying Queen, which brought him to Twinners; Osmond. The scene at All-Hands’
Village; the Outpost Road which was the Western Road. He
showed Richard his little collection of sacred objects, the guitar-pick and marble and coin. Richard merely turned these over in his fingers and gave them back without comment.
Then Jack relived his wretched time in Oatley. Richard lis-
tened to Jack’s tales of Oatley silent but wide-eyed.
Jack carefully omitted Morgan Sloat and Morgan of Orris
from his account of the scene at the Lewisburg rest area on I-70 in western Ohio.
Then Jack had to describe Wolf as he had first seen him,
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that beaming giant in Oshkosh B’Gosh bib overalls, and he
felt his tears building again behind his eyes. He did actually startle Richard by weeping while he told about trying to get Wolf into cars, and confessed his impatience with his companion, fighting not to weep again, and was fine for a long time—he managed to get through the story of Wolf ’s first
Change without tears or a constricted throat. Then he struck trouble again. His rage kept him talking freely until he got to Ferd Janklow, and then his eyes grew hot again.
Richard said nothing for a long time. Then he stood up and
fetched a clean handkerchief from a bureau drawer. Jack noisily, wetly blew his nose.
“That’s what happened,” Jack said. “Most of it, anyhow.”
“What have you been reading? What movies have you
been seeing?”
“Fuck you,” Jack said. He stood up and walked across the
room to get his pack, but Richard reached out and put his
hand around Jack’s wrist. “I don’t think you made it all up. I don’t think you made any of it up.”
“Don’t you?”
“No. I don’t know what I do think, actually, but I’m sure
you’re not telling me deliberate lies.” He dropped his hand. “I believe you were in the Sunlight Home, I believe that, all
right. And I believe that you had a friend named Wolf, who
died there. I’m sorry, but I cannot take the Territories seriously, and I cannot accept that your friend was a werewolf.”
“So you think I’m nuts,” Jack said.
“I think you’re in trouble. But I’m not going to call my father, and I’m not going to make you leave now. You’ll have to sleep in the bed here tonight. If we hear Mr. Haywood coming around to do bed checks, you’ll be able to hide under the
bed.”
Richard had taken on a faintly executive air, and he put his hands on his hips and glanced critically around his room.
“You have to get some rest. I’m sure that’s part of the problem. They worked you half to death in that horrible place, and your mind got twisted, and now you need to rest.”
“I do,” Jack admitted.
Richard rolled his eyes upward. “I have to go to intramural basketball pretty soon, but you can hide in here, and I’ll bring
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some more food back from the dining room later on. The im-
portant thing is, you need rest and you need to get back
home.”
Jack said, “New Hampshire isn’t home.”
30
Thayer Gets Weird
1
Through the window Jack could see boys in coats, hunched
against the cold, crossing to and fro between the library and the rest of the school. Etheridge, the senior who had spoken to Jack that morning, bustled by, his scarf flying out behind him.
Richard took a tweed sport jacket from the narrow closet
beside the bed. “Nothing is going to make me think that you should do anything but go back to New Hampshire. I have to
go to basketball now, because if I don’t Coach Frazer’ll make me do ten punishment laps as soon as he comes back. Some
other coach is taking our practice today, and Frazer said he’d run us into the ground if we cut out. Do you want to borrow some clean clothes? I at least have a shirt that’ll fit you—my father sent it to me from New York, and Brooks Brothers got the size wrong.”
“Let’s see it,” Jack said. His clothes had become definitely disreputable, so stiff with filth that whenever he noticed it Jack felt like Pigpen, the “Peanuts” character who lived in a mist of dirt and disapproval. Richard gave him a white button-down still in its plastic bag. “Great, thanks,” Jack said. He took it out of the bag and began removing the pins. It would almost fit.
“There’s a jacket you might try on, too,” Richard said.
“The blazer hanging at the end of the closet. Try it on, okay?
And you might as well use one of my ties, too. Just in case anyone comes in. Say you’re from Saint Louis Country Day,
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and you’re on a Newspaper Exchange. We do two or three of
those a year—kids from here go there, kids from there come
here, to work on the other school’s paper.” He went toward the door. “I’ll come back before dinner and see how you are.”
Two ballpoints were clipped to a plastic insert in his jacket pocket, Jack noticed, and all the buttons of the jacket were buttoned.
Nelson House grew perfectly quiet within minutes. From
Richard’s window Jack saw boys seated at desks in the big library windows. Nobody moved on the paths or over the crisp
brown grass. An insistent bell rang, marking the beginning of fourth period. Jack stretched his arms out and yawned. A feeling of security returned to him—a school around him, with
all those familiar rituals of bells and classes and basketball practices. Maybe he would be able to stay another day; maybe he would even be able to call his mother from one of the Nelson House phones. He would certainly be able to catch up on his sleep.
Jack went to the closet and found the blazer hanging where
Richard had said it would be. A tag still hung from one of the sleeves: Sloat had sent it from New York, but Richard had
never worn it. Like the shirt, the blazer was one size too small for Jack and clung too tightly to his shoulders, but the cut was roomy and the sleeves allowed the white shirt cuffs to peek out half an inch.
Jack lifted a necktie from the hook just inside the closet—
red, with a pattern of blue anchors. Jack slipped the tie around his neck and laboriously knotted it. Then he examined himself in the mirror and laughed out loud. Jack saw that he had made it at last. He looked at the beautiful new blazer, the club tie, his snowy shirt, his rumpled jeans. He was there. He was a preppy.
2
Richard had become, Jack saw, an admirer of John McPhee
and Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould. He picked The
Panda’s Thumb from the row of books on Richard’s shelves because he liked the title and returned to the bed.
Richard did not return from his basketball practice for
what seemed an impossibly long time. Jack paced back and
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forth in the little room. He could not imagine what would
keep Richard from returning to his room, but his imagination gave him one calamity after another.
After the fifth or sixth time Jack checked his watch, he noticed that he could see no students on the grounds.
Whatever had happened to Richard had happened to the
entire school.
The afternoon died. Richard too, he thought, was dead.
Perhaps all Thayer School was dead—and he was a plague-