It was quiet next door, too. Carella must have stopped there on the way over.
As usual he seemed to be like a truck idling, slightly bouncing with all that potential energy. He was short and broad and muscular, with a head one size too big and black hair that curled down over his ears. He was barefooted and had his tie halfway on.
“I have some bad news for you, gentlemen,” said Mr. Carella.
Staines interrupted him. “No demerits,” he said. “Not with the mixer this weekend.”
“No demerits this time,” said Carella. “Schoolwork. I have posted a change in the biology syllabus on the bulletin board downstairs. Your lab reports are due tomorrow instead of Wednesday.”
“Because of a loud stereo?” said Staines.
“Of course not. This assignment is for the whole class,” said Carella. He was a new teacher who wasn’t very well organized.
They both protested.
“I know, I know, things are rough all over,” said Carella. “Spread the word to the others. I’ll make an announcement at dinner tonight. Lab reports due tomorrow.”
He slapped Thomas on the shoulder as if he had just delivered a baby and then left. Thomas was shell-shocked: quadruple damn it to hell’s shit supply; that was all he needed, more schoolwork to do.
“Have you started your lab report yet?” said Staines.
“Hell no.”
“You want to work together on it?”
“I don’t know,” said Thomas. “I’ve got so much to do tonight.” He knew that working with Staines meant that Thomas would do the work and Staines would try to copy it. You just couldn’t trust him. Montpelier operated on an honor system, and Staines was always pushing it to the limit. At basketball practice he would call you for stepping out of bounds when you didn’t, or call you for a foul when you hadn’t touched him. There was talk on the dorm last year when Staines came into a good bit of cash at the same time that Landon Hopkins missed the money he’d gotten for his birthday. And once, in October, Thomas had surprised Staines going through Greg’s dresser.
“You’ve got to do the lab, too, don’t you?” said Staines.
“Maybe I’ll do it in the morning.”
It wasn’t ever quite enough to call in the honor council, but it was enough to make you want to move off his dorm, which is exactly what Thomas tried to do at the end of last year. And now here was Staines as his closest neighbor. Maybe he should just live in the damn gym like McPhee and Farnham. Dean Kaufman could move Farnham onto the dorm to work with Greg on the play, and Thomas could take over his apartment.
“I need to work on that lab with somebody,” said Staines.
“Ask Greg,” said Thomas. “He’s in the class.”
“Boys like Greg are for cleaning up labs, not writing reports on them,” said Staines.
It was enough to drive Thomas back to his own room.
SCENE 8
Thomas’s problems with Greg went back a long way.
Montpelier School for Boys was over a hundred years old, but it had been racially integrated for only about twenty years. They still had a hard time recruiting African-Americans. This year, for instance, there were only five black guys in the whole school.
One of them was Thomas’s roommate.
Dean Kaufman had called Thomas in last spring at the end of his newboy year to ask him if he’d be willing to room with a new black student.
“He’s very interested in theater,” the dean had said. “And considering your background, I thought . . .”
Finish your sentence, Dean Kaufman, Thomas had thought. That was a running joke around the school, the way the dean never finished his sentences. Kaufman the Clueless, everybody called him.
“I was going to room with Richard Blackburn,” Thomas had said. He hadn’t wanted a black roommate. Not that he was prejudiced. He’d gone to school at Cathedral Academy with black kids before he’d come to Montpelier and believed in affirmative action and equal opportunity and civil rights. Still, there was something unsettling about rooming with a black guy, a total stranger and all.
“You and Richard could still be very good friends,” Dean Kaufman had said.
“Could we be on the same dorm?”
“Sure, sure,” Dean Kaufman had said. “Of course you could. And I think you’d really enjoy Greg. He’ll be a fourth-former, like you, and he’s from Baltimore, so maybe during vacations, I don’t know, since you’re from Washington, maybe you could, you know . . .”
“Get together.”
“Exactly.”
Dean Kaufman was such a loser. Everybody called him Bozo because of his thick black glasses frames and his frizzy brown hair he combed straight back off his high forehead.
What else could Thomas have said except sure, he’d be glad to? When he’d told his parents, they’d been very happy—good opportunity, high tribute to you, son, and all that other stuff. So he’d written Greg Lipscomb a letter over the summer, and Greg’d written back in that really tidy block print he always wrote in, and in August Greg’s mom had driven him down to Washington in their new Honda Civic, and they’d spent the weekend messing around in Washington just to get to know each other before the fall.
Greg had really been fun that weekend, cracking hilarious jokes and eager to do anything anybody’d suggested. Thomas had been looking forward to rooming with him. And in September, when they’d moved into their room on Middle Stringfellow, things had been nearly perfect at first. Thomas had been mad that Richard Blackburn wasn’t living on Stringfellow at all, that Richard and Ralph Musgrove, his roommate, had been put in a room all the way over on Stratford House. It was so typical of Dean Kaufman to screw everything up. That was still okay, though, because Thomas went over to Stratford House a lot anyway to see his advisor, Mr. Warden, who lived there in one of the apartments. And it turned out that Thomas and Richard were in a bunch of classes together anyway, and they were both third-string on the JV football team.
At
