“I’ll hang it up,” he said, and he took the parka from her, turned his back, and walked to the coatrack by the door. He knew it looked awkward just to leave her in the middle of the room like that, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to be in motion. He felt the crazy urge to go shoot some baskets in the gym with her, or to read her his part from the play, or to show her how much he could bench-press.
She waited for him in the center of the room.
“I’m sorry we were late,” she said.
“It’s only 7:30. The bands haven’t even started.”
They paused, both of them grinning at each other. Thomas was glad that nobody else was in the common room.
“You want something to eat?” Thomas asked.
Hesta said they’d stopped at a McDonald’s on the way.
“Susie’s around here somewhere,” said Thomas.
“I see her all the time,” said Hesta. “Let’s just sit here and catch up.”
So they sat on the couch and talked until 8:30, when it was time to go to Bradley Hall for the mixer. People came and went from the common room, but Thomas noticed only vague motion from the corner of his eye. He was with Hesta, and the entire universe had rolled into a ball that encompassed just the two of them.
And yet, even in the perfection of it all, even in the wonder of being with her and touching her fingers and laughing with her, in the back of his mind, like the hiss of a snake, Thomas heard the words of Robert Staines. “She wants it,” said the voice. “They always act like they don’t, but they do.”
And Thomas’s heart throbbed a beat quicker.
SCENE 21
Cynthia put on a dry Montpelier School sweatshirt over her blouse. She had changed skirts and knee socks and had found some boots. She patted her hair dry with a towel and reentered Ben’s study. He crossed an entire line out and tapped the paper with his pen.
“It’s 7:30,” she said. “I’m going over to the mixer.”
Ben said nothing. He had not heard her.
She approached his desk.
“Ben,” she said, as she touched him on the shoulder.
“Yes,” he said without looking up.
“Have you seen Kevin’s pass key to the gym?”
Then he did look up.
“What?” he said.
“The key. Have you seen it?”
He shuffled some papers on the desktop. “It was here,” he said. “I wonder what I did with it.”
“What did you do with your trash from dinner?”
“Trash?”
“The Coke can and the lasagna plate,” Cynthia said. “The silverware?”
Warden looked around the room, then into the wastebasket half filled with balls of paper.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Cynthia found the Styrofoam plate and the empty Coke can in his bottom drawer. Their silverware was in the wastebasket.
The key, apparently, had disappeared.
SCENE 22
Greg Lipscomb was the only student in Hathaway Library. He was also the only male and the only black person. He was, he teased himself, the only person, unless you wanted to count Mrs. Shepherd, the librarian, who was an old white bag (she was at least forty-five years old), who talked on the phone, laughed a lot, and was always asking you what you were reading.
He’d checked out the buses when they arrived. There had been only two black chicks in the whole load, both of them with boyfriends here. The white folks’ schools were trying, he supposed, but that didn’t make it any easier if you were one of the trailblazers.
To hell with them. He’d come over to the library to browse around in the Archives Room, which Mrs. Shepherd was delighted to open for him after she’d gone through the usual jive about his social life.
“Why aren’t you at the mixer tonight?” she had said. “You might be able to meet a girl.”
He hated the way she emphasized her key words. Why is the library even open tonight, he’d wanted to say to her, but instead he’d said something about going over to the dance later on. That was so typical of the way these adults operated. They open up the library, but then they act surprised and start messing with you when you go there. It was 8:30. He’d been here for half an hour, and he had ninety minutes to go until Mrs. Shepherd finished moving magazines from one stack to another and closed the place down.
He was sitting at a rectangular, plastic-wood-covered table with a large folder the size of an artist’s portfolio open in front of him. Beside him in a chair he had dumped his hunting cap and his damp green ski jacket, which his parents had given him at Thanksgiving as an early Christmas present. He had on a white button-down shirt and a good pair of jeans; he was dressed for the mixer anyway. But for now he was looking through old blueprints. The one Mr. Delaney had given him for art class had dated from the 1920s. Greg wanted to find one from an earlier era.
The diagrams weren’t just of Stringfellow Hall. He’d already run into some interesting floor plans for Hathaway Library, from before the time they’d added the periodicals wing and the audiovisual center, and for Stratford House, which apparently was exactly the same since they’d built it in the 1940s—thirteen rooms for twenty-six boys and a faculty apartment tacked onto each side.
Somebody had stuck in with the plans an old clipping from The Washington Post. It had a big
