The Note and the Dawn Run
At that same hour, Peter was forcing a textbook open when the door took a beating.
Bang. Bang!
Someone was hammering on it, hard.
"...?"
He was too startled to answer, and the pounding came again, impatient.
Bang. Bang!
What else was there to do? Peter edged toward the door. Seniors, almost certainly. They didn't come because of what I told Jack, did they? Damn it. Hiding isn't going to fix this. He swallowed dry and closed his hand around the knob. If a fist came through, he was screaming first and thinking later.
He squeezed his eyes shut and opened the door.
"You're Peter, right?"
He had hoped he was wrong. It really was a second-year.
"W-why are you...?"
"The disciplinary committee will be meeting soon."
"The disciplinary... committee?"
"When it does, you testify exactly as you saw it."
The words were mild enough. The face behind them was not. It said, plain as a fist, that if Peter told the truth he would be taken apart for it. The senior finished speaking and held out a small slip of paper.
"What's this?"
"Read it and you'll know."
That was the end of the conversation.
Slam!
The door shut hard enough to rattle the frame.
What... what was that? Peter's legs gave out. He dropped onto the bed as if he had been shoved and, with shaking hands, unfolded the note at once.
For all the menace in the air, there was nothing much on it. Just a tight column of names: Oxford students who had come up from the Royal School. The face had been a threat, no question. So why this?
Don't tell me...
Say the wrong thing and it wouldn't stop at the Royal School. University would twist out from under him too. Was that it? Peter stared down at the crumpled slip. So many seniors already planted at Oxford that even if he got in, a normal life would be out of the question. That was the message?
Ha!
A threat worthy of an aristocratic school, if nothing else. He supposed he ought to be grateful they had treated an Oxford place as a foregone conclusion.
"..."
The gratitude refused to land. Oxford? Someone like me? The way his family stood, he couldn't even look at a university that didn't come with a full scholarship. Oxford and Cambridge were beyond wishing for, almost shameful to want. As things were, the University of London, Edinburgh, even King's College London would have been more than he dared hope for. And these people had come to threaten him with an uncomfortable life at Oxford? Did the thought of someone who couldn't pay tuition simply not exist in their heads?
Unbelievable.
They even wrote it packed tight.
Peter looked at the note again and smiled, bitter for no good reason.
"You're back?"
When I returned to the room, Peter was bent over something with a face gone deadly serious. He was drawing on a large sheet of paper, and when I looked closer it was a kind of relationship chart. You know the sort. The whiteboard detectives fill before a briefing, every name pinned in place and lines running between them.
"I'm almost done. Want a look?"
"...?"
"The ones who called you out. I did a little digging into what they are."
How? He must have read the question on my face, because the explanation came at once.
"We're flat broke now, sure, but my family used to be nobility. That's all I'm saying."
"..."
"So I've still got a few connections lying around."
"And?"
"I asked a second-year what the mood was like. He let a few things slip."
That wasn't what I wanted to know. I wanted to know why he had built the thing. He answered that too, without missing a beat.
"I may look harmless, but step on me and I squirm. Properly."
He started with why the seniors had summoned me in the first place. A tradition, apparently: call up the finest specimen in the first year and put him in his place. They had found Tennessee Grosvenor too heavy to lift, so they had turned the tradition my way. That was the shape of it. Then Peter laid out the second-years worth watching.
"The second-year student-council president is not an ordinary human being."
He tapped the top of the paper and went on.
"Name's Carl Bernstein. His father runs the most famous law firm in London. Word is, nobody beats them in a courtroom."
"..."
"Notable extra: he's captain of the second-year rugby side. First first-year ever to start in a national tournament, so the athletic talent isn't a rumor."
Hm. I was grateful he'd gone to the trouble, but he wasn't planning to brief me on every name on that sheet, was he?
"Two names under him. One's from a family famous in property. The other's from a house that matters in Germany. Both play rugby. Maybe it's the money. They won't do the studying they're supposed to do, just rugby, rugby, rugby. I swear..."
He wasn't wrong. The longer I listened, the more it sounded like an orientation for the second-year rugby club. If the popular kids in America lose their minds over football, British aristocrats, it seemed, lose theirs over rugby to a man.
"Mind you, if I'd had the body for it, I'd have thrown myself into rugby too... ahem."
Peter was still wearing that sheepish look when I nudged the subject sideways.
"Anyway. You memorized all of this?"
"All of what?"
"You said you just heard it from a senior. How are you rattling it off like that?"
"It's barely more than ten people."
"So you memorized the whole thing the moment you heard it."
True enough, his face said, and what of it?
I huffed a laugh. I had met this kind of person before. Martin, valedictorian at MIT, had been exactly the same. The thought finished arriving, and the second-year chart, which I hadn't cared about to begin with, stopped registering at all.
Right, then. How about a conversation that might actually make money?
"Peter, sorry to keep saying the same thing, but..."
"...?"
Dawn the next day. I knotted my running shoes tight and headed out of the dormitory. A morning run: the one healthy habit boxing had left me with. Is it the cold? Nearly six, and the sky was still black. Stretching first, then.
I was loosening my ankles when footsteps came up behind me. Steady. Unhurried. I turned, and there was Jack in a short-sleeved shirt.
"You not cold?"
"I am."
"Want to borrow a layer?"
"You warm up once you run."
He had barely finished the sentence before he was gone, exploding into a dead sprint from the very first stride. He hadn't even loosened up. And yet, watching him, a laugh slipped out of me. The Jack who had come running to help me had looked just like that. Yesterday rose up with the thought. Fine. The body can warm up on the move. I tore off after him.
We ran until my legs were shaking.
"Hah... hahh..."
Jack and I were propped against a tree, dragging in air, when the light began to come up and other people gathered to train. Quite a few of them.
"..."
Every face was a stranger. Not first-years, then. Their pace was serious and their breathing settled, which meant this wasn't a hobby picked up yesterday. I had assumed an aristocratic school would be nothing but young masters. That form is actually excellent.
One of them stood out. A man with long blond hair spilling from under a cap pulled low, and every stride seemed to throw his body farther forward than it had any right to go. The speed was one thing. The spring in him was another. Jack had been watching the same spot.
"Those shoes are ridiculously clean."
"What?"
"Those. The white ones."
"You were looking at his shoes in the middle of that?"
"Mine are due for a change."
Jack's really did look ready to split at the next step. The man's white New Balances, by contrast, flashed past looking almost new. Beside him, the sheer size of another runner snagged the eye. Six foot five, maybe, with a body that looked good for a eleven-hundred-pound powerlifting total and still moved fast. He tired sooner than the others, that was the catch, but when he decided to run he looked faster than anyone. Jack's gaze had landed in the same place as mine again.
"I like that shirt."
"Now what?"
"The long sleeves."
A gray Champion sweatshirt.
"It's famous."
"Is it? First time I've seen one."
Jeans were Levi's. Boots were Red Wing. Sweatshirts were Champion. I knew that much!
"Pretty, anyway. That one."
Jack only laughed, easy and unbothered.
"If you're going to stare, go shopping this weekend."
"Why?"
Why did he think? So I could see what people were wearing these days, and buy him shoes and a T-shirt while I was at it.
"If you're done running, let's eat."
Jack nodded as if he had been waiting for the word. We went to a French restaurant.
"Why not the dining hall?"
Maybe it was all those years on a cafeteria line. The student dining hall left me uneasy. The food was good, and I knew the place felt nothing like where I had worked in my previous life. Even so.
"..."
The feeling was simply bad. So I reached for the nearest excuse.
"This place suits me better."
"The food's fine. The price is the problem..."
"Not much of a problem for me."
"Wow!"
I hammed it up. Jack answered in kind. Then the coffee arrived.
"Your coffee."
Jack had an espresso con panna. I had an iced americano. I had been a little surprised when he ordered espresso, and now he was staring down into the small cup, plainly lost.
"What is this?"
"What?"
"No, I mean... you got a full cup. Why did I get..."
"You ordered a con panna."
"What's a con panna?"
"You placed the order. Should you really be asking me?"
"I just liked the name..."
For crying out loud.
"Order another."
"No. This looks good too. What even is it. Is that... cream on top?"
"One more iced americano, please."
I finished ordering and drew the coffee up through the straw until my head went bright with the cold. Yes. That was the taste. Jack, who had claimed the con panna would do, took one look at the americano and drank it down cup and all, gulp after gulp. I laughed under my breath.
Soup and croissants arrived after that. I looked at him.
"I hear the disciplinary committee is meeting."
"Yeah?"
Anyone watching would have thought it was somebody else's problem.
"I'll cover the medical bills and the settlement. You just say you're sorry..."
"Why would you pay that?"
"Then you'll pay it?"
He shook his head.
"Their fancy parents will sort it out."
If I had been the one throwing the punches, I would have worn exactly that attitude. But Jack had been dragged into this because of me, more or less. I wanted it to end quietly. Jack, to my surprise, would not bend.
"We give a proper account. That's enough."
"What?"
"Seven of them came at you to scare you. That's a fact, isn't it?"
"..."
"Senior, junior, whatever. If you do something that earns a beating, you take the beating. Right?"
Talking wasn't going to move him. If a punishment comes down, they said we can appeal. Fine. If it truly came to that, I would step in then.
We finished the meal and were waiting on dessert when I called the server over.
"Could I get a lobster sandwich and an iced coffee to go?"
Jack's eyes went round.
"You're overeating?"
"I'm not eating it."
"Then who?"
"Peter."
"Oh. Your roommate?"
The same roommate who had dug all the way down to a second-year family tree because he wanted to help me. A sandwich is small enough thanks.