Inside the locker room bright fluorescent ceiling lights shone on carpet the color of ripe watermelon and on dark green benches. One row of lockers ran along the walls, and another group was clustered in an island in the center of the room. The lockers were not actually lockers, but wooden cubicles, also painted green. Thomas’s was just to the right of the door. A white adhesive tape strip saying BOATWRIGHT ran across the top of Thomas’s locker. He was proud of it. On the shelf at eye level was a rolled-up towel containing all his practice clothes.
Ralph Musgrove was already in the locker room and getting dressed for practice.
“Hey, Tom.”
“Hey, Ralph.”
Ralph was the starting center, five inches taller than Thomas, 6'5" as opposed to 6'0", and he was stockier, stronger, and quicker. He had a great shot too, and he could zip passes through all kinds of traffic. His only weakness was that he couldn’t dribble with his left hand. Thomas was the second-string point guard, but he would soon be third-string if his shooting did not improve.
Robert Staines entered the locker room while Thomas was getting undressed. Staines was a starter at wing.
“Hey, Musgrove. Hey, Boatwright.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Staines was the kind of person who seemed like the greatest guy in the world for the first thirty seconds of seeing him. He looked just like one of those surfers in the Pepsi ads on TV. He had blond hair that flopped just above his ears and perfect teeth, which he was always showing you in a big grin. He was a couple of inches shorter than Thomas, but much stockier. He probably weighed twenty pounds more, and he looked older, broader-shouldered, thicker in the chest.
“You have a good holiday, Ralph?” asked Staines as he stripped off his clothes. Staines was the fastest dresser you ever saw.
“Pretty good.”
“I got laid so many times I lost count.”
Ralph said it wasn’t too hard to count to zero.
“How about you, Boatwright? You get your paddle wet?”
“Not really.” Same old conversation.
“You’re not aggressive enough,” said Staines. “You got to know what you want, and go after it.”
Thomas had roomed with Staines during their freshman year and had hated his guts most days of the week. Staines was never, ever serious about anything except sports. Not that Thomas was some big study fish or anything, but Staines was a ridiculous goof-off. For the first month of school they were always getting demerits from Mr. Delaney, the house master over on Kean House, where most of the third-formers lived, and a couple of times they got called into Mr. Grayson’s office for playing their stereo during study hours. Mr. Delaney, who was also the varsity basketball coach, liked Staines because Staines was a good athlete; but Delaney was also fair, and finally, after about a million times of his walking into their room and finding Thomas lying in bed with a history book open and Staines lip-synching in the middle of the room to his Springsteen album, Delaney realized that maybe these guys weren’t equally responsible for the noise. So Staines started going to the disciplinarian’s office alone, and then, when his fall trimester grades came out, he started going to required supervised study hall during the evenings in the big lecture hall in the basement of Fleming.
The problem with Staines was that he would never shut up. Study hours ran from 7:30 to 9:30 every night, Sunday through Friday, and about the only time the room was quiet for Thomas was the time that Staines was required to be in supervised study hall. As soon as the bell rang at 9:30, Thomas would leave his room and go next door to visit with his friend Richard Blackburn, who’d gotten stuck rooming with the geek of all geeks, Landon Hopkins. Since most of the freshmen didn’t know anybody else coming to the school, it was a waste of time for them to request roommates, so they just got matched up by Dean Kaufman. Dean Kaufman was a dork.
He had been able to escape Staines until 10:00, when all the freshmen were required to be on dorm and in their rooms. They had to have their lights out at 10:30, which had given Staines thirty minutes to talk Thomas’s buns off. He would talk about two subjects—sports and sex.
“Are you a virgin?” Staines had asked him once early in the year in one of his rare non-rhetorical questions.
Thomas had said, yeah, sure, of course he was, he was only fourteen years old.
“Hell, I lost it in the eighth grade,” Staines had said. “My girlfriend used to come watch my football practice. . . .”And he had been off and running down the field of his story.
He was always claiming to be unable to keep track of his own exploits.
“I got laid so many times over Christmas I lost count,” he’d say, or “Did you have a good spring break? I got laid so many times I lost count.”
Finally Richard Blackburn had suggested that he get a pocket calculator, to which Staines had replied by punching Richard on the upper arm, for
