Contrast these with the zees, short for buzzards, boys who listened to acid rock, played hockey, and kept wads of chewing tobacco deep in their bottom lips so that they could punctuate their episodic bursts of sardonic conversation with a comet of hot spit aimed at a sawed-off Coke can beside their chair.
Also frelks, a coed set who were just weirdos of a particularly energetic sort (a frelking incident looked like a friendly possession); and tools, who tried too hard; and exchange students, who smiled a lot; and black students, who had more sense than to engage in any of this shit. Also local kids from Concord, a few Latino and Latina students, several Chinese-American children of Hong Kong–based traders who went home once a year. Plenty of bog-standard Wasps, freckled boys and horsey girls. A few precious show-ponies, like my New York and D.C. friends, overindulged and perennially jetlagged. Among them all, there were some really nice kids. I’d met several, but for whatever reason, I hadn’t tried hard enough to talk to them and meet up with them again.
Leighton Huhne turned as our black car passed, and held up a giant paw of a hand in hello. He couldn’t have seen who was inside. It didn’t matter. I’d gotten my answer.
“Leighton Huhne!” I called out, in the slowing car.
“Cool,” said Gaby. “That’s a good one. You’re going to have a chill term.”
This was by far the nicest thing I ever heard her say.
Other Paulie slang that might prove useful: as I’ve noted, the physical exertions between two students were called scrumping. This was the general term, and it functioned exactly like, say, snacking, in that it implied no specificity beyond satisfying a moderate desire. Guys who hooked up with a girl scored, or occasionally (going all the way) railed or (with particular vigor) boned. If they succeeded in doing this, they might think to use a domer to prevent pregnancy. When the subject was a male, the verb was active and transitive: Henry boned Alexa. When the subject was a female, the verb was passive: Alexa was scored or got railed or got boned. I heard bone as an active verb in the female context only once: at the end of our fourth-form year, when my friend Brooke was given the choice between two fifth formers who wanted to date her. Her older brother, a graduating sixth former, had talked with them both. One of them, Trevor, was handsomer, but he had asked Brooke’s brother, evaluating her, “Does she bone?” We repeated this question among ourselves after Brooke reported it, jarring not least for the intransitive form of bone. As in, does that chicken lay?
Indeed, Brooke did bone, but not, she decided, with him.
If a girl had scrumped, etc., with a boy who was not held in high regard by other boys, she might well be tainted by the liaison. In that case, she was referred to as sloppy seconds, and other boys might not be interested in the sloppy seconds of certain classmates.
This taint was not known to work the other way around. No boy was some girl’s sloppy seconds. Only girls, therefore, could be socially contaminated by their partners. They were both target and vector.
Boys did not scrump with or rail or score or bone other boys. Nor girls with other girls. It just didn’t come up. If two male athletes, for example, pushed their beds together and hung out in just their boxer shorts in the dark after check-in, they must have had something else in mind.
All third and fourth formers were required to participate in three sports a year. (“This is to wear you all out so they can keep you in line,” observed my mother.) I’d played soccer in the fall, and after I recovered from my initial disappointment at failing to make the varsity squad, I’d discovered that the skills I’d learned at my father’s insistence all the years he had coached my rec team earned me a starting spot on JV defense, right where I liked to be. The wind in the grass was familiar. Shin guards and shivering were familiar. If I blocked out the hilly horizon and the varsity football crowd over on the prime field, I could pretend I was back at home in Illinois. I almost expected the train to come through. I imagined Dad on the sidelines so clearly I stopped missing home. What a gift he’d given me, with soccer. I knew this game, I knew my team, and if the ball came my way, I’d know what to do.
In the winter months, my choice was not as clear. Tennis was my strongest sport—another reason I couldn’t wait for spring—and I didn’t want to try squash because kids swore it was hell on your tennis game. I couldn’t get a basketball as high as the net nor a volleyball over one. In those years, St. Paul’s had no pool. This left ice hockey.
And ice hockey was gospel.
As I’ve said, and as they told us regularly, the first proto-hockey had been played on the Lower School Pond, at the heart of our two thousand acres, in 1856. St. Paul’s had turned out stars for a hundred years afterward—even in my time students in every year saw paths to the NHL. I wouldn’t have dared to claim my part of such self-satisfied glory, but when I was at St. Paul’s, girls’ ice hockey was still young in the world. Women did not yet have an Olympic team, though one of my classmates, Sarah Devens, was a prodigy who spent summers training with the group that would form the
