Thomas wished he had just stayed on his own dorm and risked a phone call to Hesta. Now he was going to have to cross the campus during study hours, and he was sure to get caught.
“Who is the DM anyway?” asked Thomas.
“McPhee,” said Richard.
“Great,” said Thomas. Just what he needed, to get into trouble with his basketball coach. Next to Mr. Warden and his dad, Coach McPhee was the adult Thomas admired most in the whole world. Unlike Coach Delaney, who stalked the sidelines and ranted and kicked the bleachers once and supposedly got called into Dr. Lane’s office for doing so, Coach McPhee never lost his temper. You would have expected an Irishman from Boston to rage, but even when somebody royally screwed up, McPhee would never yell. You could tell he was mad, of course, by what he said and by the flush of his face, but he had a knack for never making you feel worthless or stupid. He just made you want to do better.
“You better go,” said Ralph.
“Yeah,” said Thomas. Why was it that the more he had to do, the less he wanted to get started? He stood up slowly and put on his coat.
“Don’t let Farnham get you with a stick,” said Richard.
“Don’t let McPhee stick you,” said Ralph. That was a joke. “To stick” at Montpelier meant to issue demerits.
“Don’t let your roommate talk you deaf,” said Richard.
“How can I walk back if I’m laughing this hard?” said Thomas. “You guys are the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life.”
Back in the cold, he walked south on the sidewalk bordering the Quad. It was only 100 yards or so to Stringfellow, but he was sure that McPhee would catch him off dorm during study hours. Or if not McPhee, some other duty master. The faculty here was unbelievable. Some of them were completely out of it, like Heilman; when he was on duty, you could practically light up a joint in the dining hall and he wouldn’t notice. But most of them seemed to have radar.
He went up the back stairs of Stringfellow. Damn, it was cold outside and very warm in here. The building was shaped like a U, and Thomas had just entered the left-hand prong. He was in the administrative wing, but that was okay, since nobody would be in the offices at night. He still had to make it around to the lobby in the base of the U and then up the stairs to his dorm. But he was lucky. Although frequently masters on duty sat in the lobby, nobody was there tonight. Thomas was feeling uneasy. If the Stringfellow duty masters weren’t in the lobby, that meant they were probably circulating around the dorms, so he was just as likely to get nabbed in the hallway. And there was always the slight threat of the omnipresent day master, in today’s case McPhee, who wandered all over the campus and checked not only on the students, but on the faculty members who were supposed to be checking on the students. If Thomas got caught for being off dorm, he’d get stuck for five demerits, which would be enough to put him in Saturday night demerit hall from 7:30 to 9:30. That would be very uncool, since this Saturday night Montpelier was having a mixer for eight girls’ schools, and Hesta was coming down. He could imagine himself sitting in D-hall while Hesta was at the mixer without him, with all those other horny guys around asking her to dance and talking to her. What if somebody like Robert Staines tried to move in on her? Thomas crossed the lobby and headed up the stairs praying for luck. He just couldn’t get caught, not tonight.
There was nobody in the hallway on Middle Stringfellow. The gray carpeting muffled his footsteps, though the bright overhead fluorescent lamps made him visible from probably 200 miles away. Why the hell did Montpelier have to be so rich? The building was practically older than Beowulf, but they remodeled the place eight years ago and put in new bathrooms and new closets and stuff and these damn big lights. Of course, they also carpeted it, which was working to his advantage. Everything was absolutely quiet. In the spaces under the brown wooden doors of the rooms he was passing, he could see lights on. Every-the-hell-body on campus was studying now, and he would be, too, in just a few more minutes.
First, though, he was going to let his roommate have it. Nobody had the right to be as rude as Greg had been this afternoon. You don’t ignore people because you happen to be reading.
He turned a corner, and there it was, his room, just a few yards away. I’m going to make it, he thought. Boatwright, you lucky bastard, you prime-cut devil you, you did it. He turned the knob on the dark wooden door and fled into the lighted interior as if he were being pursued by Nazis.
The first person he saw was Greg, sitting with his back to the door at his own desk with the study lamp on. The second person was Mr. McPhee, the DM, sitting at Thomas’s desk next to Greg.
Mr. McPhee was looking straight at him.
SCENE 11
“Where have you been?” said Coach McPhee.
Thomas told him. There wasn’t any choice under the honor system, but Thomas would have told him anyway. Coach McPhee listened with his long legs stretched out and his ankles crossed and his hands locked behind his head, his elbows sticking out like Dumbo’s ears. He dressed like an adult version of a Montpelier boy: lace-up leather moccasins from Bean’s, khaki pants, a white shirt with loosened tie and collar, and a Carolina-blue sweater. The difference was that he still had his coach’s whistle on a cord around his neck.
