Then something had changed. It was gradual, though, for Thomas couldn’t pin it down to a particular day or incident. Maybe it was when they’d found out that Greg was going to audition for the fall play instead of go out for a sport. Everybody at Montpelier had to participate in athletics all year long—football, basketball, and baseball; or cross-country, wrestling, and track; or soccer, swimming, and tennis; or some other combination—but you could get out of sports for a season if you were involved in a play. They said the play was equivalent to the athletic commitment. That was true enough as far as the time went; those guys spent hours over at Bradley getting ready for the performances. The students were wary, however, about drama. You had to be careful about which play you were in. It was okay to be in the spring play, because a bunch of seniors usually went out for parts just to say they’d done it before they graduated. It was even okay most of the time to be in the winter play, as long as some cool people were in it. But you never, never went out for the fall play. Fall was football season, and football was king of the sports; you were considered a geek if you did drama in the fall.
Especially if you were a good athlete, like Greg. He was big, around six feet tall and 170 pounds, and he was only fifteen years old. They’d shot some basketball on the tiny little court Thomas’s dad had put into their backyard at the townhouse in Georgetown, and Greg had eaten Thomas up. He’d killed him. He could catch a football, too, as they’d seen within a day or so of his arrival at school, when a pass from a pickup game on the Quad had gone wild and from the sidewalk Greg had just snared it with one hand—with one single hand—and had flipped it back about forty yards to the players. He was an awesome athlete. Thomas just couldn’t understand it when he said he wasn’t going out for football. “I didn’t come here to play football,” Greg had said. “I could have played football at home.”
“Yeah, but you could probably make varsity. You could still go out for a play in the spring.”
“I’m playing tennis in the spring,” Greg had said.
Thomas had warned him that nobody would think he was cool.
“I didn’t come here to be cool,” Greg had said.
Thomas had said he didn’t understand why a person would deliberately sabotage his chance to fit in.
So Greg had done a dinky little one-act play in the fall, and then damned if he hadn’t gone out for the winter play as well. He’d even asked Farnham to do Othello so he could be the star.
Thomas had begged him to go out for basketball. “We need you,” he’d said. “We don’t have a single black guy on our team.”
Greg had just shaken his head in that irritatingly stubborn way of his.
After that day, they hadn’t done much talking. Greg spent most of his time reading or studying by himself. Sometimes an entire evening in the room would pass without either one saying a word to the other.
And just before Thanksgiving, Thomas had arranged to room with Richard Blackburn for the next academic year.
SCENE 9
A tumor.
Cynthia and Benjamin Warden sat side by side on the sofa in their living room. It was 7:15 P.M., and the dormitory around them was noisy in the last-minute rush before study hours began at 7:30. It had been their decision, though, to live in such turmoil. When they were married, Eldridge Lane, the headmaster, had offered them a quiet, private house outside the perimeter of the central campus, but Cynthia had objected on the grounds that she would not have been as active in the life of the school. In typical fashion, she had demanded to participate. So they had taken Stratford House on the Quad.
Tonight was the first time Warden had regretted their choice of housing. Cynthia, trying to rest, had her eyes closed and her head back on the corduroy slipcover.
“It’s the oddest sensation,” she said. “Like falling but never hitting the bottom. I’m falling to the left.”
Degenerative nerve disease.
Warden told her that she should be in bed.
“I could just go to sleep right here.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“Because we have to talk about Christmas.”
Warden thought it was crazy for them to be sitting here having such an ordinary conversation under such extraordinary circumstances. Cynthia had come home at 3:00 in the afternoon exhausted from tests and doctors. She was to check into the hospital for more tests tomorrow.
“Shouldn’t we wait to find out what’s making you sick?”
“Maybe we should,” she said, “but Margaret deserves a reply to her letter.”
Margaret was Warden’s sister-in-law, married to his brother Lawrence. They lived in Atlanta with their son, Joshua, who had drawn the decoration for the refrigerator door, and they had invited the Wardens to stay with them for Christmas. Harold Cunningham, Cynthia’s father, had also issued an invitation for them to spend Christmas with him on his farm in Warrenton.
A stroke.
Dr. Manning had sent her from his office to that of a neurologist. The specialist had told her that he wasn’t sure of what she might have; it could be anything from a freak viral infection that would pass from her system to something more serious: a growth, a stroke, cancer.
Cancer.
Warden was trying to sensitize himself to the word, the ugly, hard, cutting
