But that was all last year. They were old boys now. Staines tied his white Converse basketball shoes with double knots and headed for the bathroom.
“You know what your problem with girls is, Boatwright?” he called from the urinals. His voice echoed off the tiles. “No offense?”
Thomas knew that whatever followed was going to be highly offensive. People like Staines thought they could say any damn thing they wanted to, as long as they prefaced it with some disclaimer.
Staines did not wait for a reply. “It’s probably some unconscious hormone they smell,” he said. “I noticed a certain odor in your dorm room last night.”
Thomas said he hadn’t noticed any smell.
“It’s nigger,” Staines said. “You probably can’t smell it. You live with them, you start to smell like them, too.”
That can’t be true, Thomas thought. I lived with you all last year, and I never smelled like an asshole. He felt like saying he was tired of Staines’s bigotry and boorishness and didn’t want to hear the guy’s voice again.
But, as usual, what he said instead was nothing.
SCENE 6
Practice was terrible, partly because Thomas Boatwright had not worked enough on basketball over the holidays, and partly because he was so distracted by Robert Staines. The guy had called his roommate a nigger. What a jerk. And Thomas had said nothing about it. What a bigger jerk.
Many times Thomas had practiced the speech he was going to make to Staines one day, the speech in which he would tell the guy just what a cheese-brained, smelly-footed, hormonally imbalanced, white-supremacist ball of kitty litter he really was. Thomas polished that speech constantly. One day he would have the nerve to deliver it.
Staines was intimidating. He seemed so socially sophisticated, so well coordinated, so comfortable with what he wanted out of life. He was a great athlete, and most of his friends were upperclassmen. Thomas regarded Staines with equal measures of envy and scorn. The problem was that Thomas did not want to receive the scorn of Staines in return. So he kept his mouth shut and told himself that Greg wasn’t worth the hassle anyway.
The whole day was turning out to be a pain in the posterior.
It was nearly 6:00 in the evening and had been dark for over half an hour. Thomas was freezing as he walked from the gym across the Quad to Bradley Hall, where he’d promised Farnham that he’d come by about an audition for Othello. His head was still wet from the shower, and the wind was blowing so hard that he thought his hair might freeze. Out of the pocket of his trench coat he pulled a blue knit stocking cap and tugged it all the way down over his ears. There were too many damn things going on around this place at the same time. Farnham wanted him in the play; McPhee knew that practice was supposed to be out at 5:30 but kept everyone back shooting free throws for an extra fifteen minutes; Hesta was counting on him to call her sometime today; and he still had all that Shakespeare to read.
Bradley Hall was one of a row of buildings behind and parallel to the buildings lining the eastern edge of the Quad. It was built in the 1960s, with glass doors and lots of floor-to-ceiling windows in the entrance hall. All the lights were still burning in the plaster-and-marble lobby.
When he was still fifty yards away, Thomas saw someone emerge from the building through the big glass doors, lurch, stagger, and then limp on off into the darkness, heading north, toward the dorms. It was a figure so bundled up against the cold that he could not tell who it was, or even how old. It looked like the person was drunk.
“Richard?” Thomas called. The person did not answer, but hurried off into the darkness.
Richard had signed up to be on the technical crew for the play on the grounds that it would be the easiest, warmest, most convenient way to spend the winter. That would be just great, thought Thomas, if Richard got himself thrown out of school for partying down at the theater. Dr. Lane, the headmaster, was so strict about enforcing the rules banning drugs and alcohol from the campus that hardly anybody took the risk. It was easy enough to get away for the weekend, where school rules didn’t apply. Whoever was at Bradley had been heading off toward the dorms on the eastern Quad, one of which was Stratford House, which was Richard’s dorm. Don’t be stupid, Richard, thought Thomas as he entered the warm brightness of Bradley.
The foyer was a large room with a couple of sofas and an Oriental rug and portraits of famous alumni on the walls. Straight ahead were the doors to the bathrooms. To the left was the hallway leading to the rooms for studio art and music and the backstage area. To the right was the entrance to the auditorium itself. Thomas heard noises to the left and headed down the hallway for the backstage area. He could hear a regular thwacking sound, as if someone were trying to open a crate by throwing it regularly onto the floor.
Hardly any lights were on in the hall, just every other ceiling spot shining out through the white acoustical tile. The door to his left led to the gigantic art studio, which was now dark. There were two doors to his right. The nearer door led backstage, which was also dark. Thomas did not see anyone in the building, but he assumed somebody was here.
