“Sorry,” said Boatwright. “I just had something on my mind.”
Terrific. It always transpired this way; when he was most pressed for time, the most interruptions occurred. Warden did not want to be a counselor this morning. He did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to flee: to exit the office, jump into his car, drive to Charlottesville, or perhaps elsewhere.
“Wait outside,” said Warden.
“That’s all right, Thomas,” said Farnham. “I can leave.”
“Why should you leave?” said Warden. “Let him wait.”
“I ought to be inspecting the dormitories anyway,” said Farnham. “We’ve covered enough for you to wing it.”
He noted the boy’s failure to meet Farnham’s eyes as the man passed him in the doorway. Obviously there was something troubling young Boatwright. Cynthia had said he looked anxious at dinner Monday night, and Warden had never followed up. He felt vaguely ashamed and selfish.
“Sit down, Thomas,” said Warden. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.” Boatwright was a nice boy, a little undisciplined academically, perhaps, but a right-minded person. Amazing how he had developed physically since last year: still slender, but more muscular, broader in the shoulders, taller—at least six feet tall now. He still had the freckles and the bright brown eyes; the black bangs still stopped well short of his eyebrows; the upturned nose was still a shade too large, but his face would surely grow around it; he still probably shaved only twice a week.
It was as though Warden had not looked at him for several months. Boatwright had grown into a very nice-looking boy.
Warden caught himself. His mind had wandered enough this morning.
SCENE 8
Thomas sat in the chair and looked at his advisor and wondered how to begin. Last night he hadn’t slept, hadn’t been able to concentrate, hadn’t been able to function. Every time he had seen Nathan Somerville on the dorm, he had felt his heart pound and his bladder fill. But nothing had happened. No councilman had come knocking on his door. Staines had passed by him in the hall and had acted as if he didn’t even know Thomas’s name, hadn’t even looked at him. At dorm check-in, Mr. Carella had acted normal enough. The only problem was that Thomas’s conscience was torturing him. He couldn’t stand it. He had to tell his advisor.
All night he had rehearsed what he was going to say, how he was going to come in and ask Mr. Warden about a completely imaginary, totally hypothetical case of one student’s finding another student sniffing aerosol spray and then getting confronted by a teacher. But now that he was here, he could not get started. It didn’t feel right. Mr. Warden was tense, probably worried about his wife, and Thomas would only present another irritation to him.
Mr. Warden spoke first. “What’s on your mind?” he asked. “Your grades?”
That was a big joke between them. Mr. Warden was always kidding him about how Thomas worried over everything but academics. He made Bs and Cs and could do better if he studied the way Landon Hopkins did.
“My grades are the same.”
“A mother lode of mediocrity,” said Mr. Warden. Other times he had said “a cornucopia of the commonplace” or “a masterpiece of moderation.”
They often bantered at the beginning of a conversation. “I’ll try to bring them up before you run out of alliterations,” said Thomas.
Mr. Warden said any fourth-former who could speak intelligently about alliteration should be on the high honor roll. He broke off a piece of paper clip and let it drop to the desk. “So what’s the trouble?” he asked.
Hell, now what? Conversations between advisors and advisees were supposed to be strictly confidential. Advisors, however, were still adults and still members of the faculty. Now that they were actually face-to-face, Thomas could not bring himself to tell Mr. Warden about last night’s episode on the dorm with Robert Staines. He knew already what the teacher would say: turn himself in to the honor council. But if he turned himself in, he might get dismissed from school. If he turned Staines in, then Thomas might get Staines kicked out of school. He would hate to be responsible for another student’s expulsion. And if he turned Staines in and Staines somehow beat the rap and remained here, then that might be the worst of all. It was so easy last night to tell Mr. Warden when Mr. Warden wasn’t really there. Today he had initiated the conversation, he had told him there was a problem, and Mr. Warden was waiting to hear what the problem was.
“I’ve been thinking about going out for the winter play,” said Thomas. It was a legitimate concern, he supposed. “I’d like to be in a production with Nathan Somerville and Mrs. Warden, but I’m not sure I can handle it and still keep up with basketball.”
Mr. Warden said he thought being in the play was a wonderful idea. “You aren’t going to study in your free time anyway,” he said. “Not unless you undergo a radical personality change.”
If they were pursuing this subject, Thomas might as well speak all his worries. “The thing is,” he said, “I’m not sure I want to work with Mr. Farnham.”
“Why not?” Mr. Warden perked up a bit.
“It’s his temper,” said Thomas. “You never know when he’s going to spaz.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Mr. Warden knew the expression but insisted that his students use standard English.
“I never know when he might erupt,” said Thomas. “Last Monday night I was down in the theater and saw him really go berserk.” He told Warden about Farnham’s furious pounding of the floor of the scene shop with a board. “Of course, to be fair, I guess I could understand that one.”
Warden asked him how so.
“Because your wife had just been down there,” said Thomas. “He was probably mad because she was going to miss rehearsals.”
“What do mean, my wife had been down there?” asked Warden. He was perturbed. Had she been out on Monday afternoon before they went to the dining hall?
