“Basketball?” Anthony thought about his brother’s warning and shook his head. Didn’t they see how short he was? “I ain’t no good.”
“Maybe not yet,” Mr. Kraft said with a wink. “But give it time.” The men shook Anthony’s hand again and went off to talk together. Anthony returned across campus to his waiting bags and took them inside the dorm.
A boy named Zach greeted him and grabbed a suitcase. He was older and said he was a proctor. “So,” he said, walking quickly. “Where you from?”
“Cleveland.”
“Oh,” the beefy boy said, and raised his eyebrows. “Figured you were from New York, like Big George and everybody else.”
“Big who?”
Zach laughed. “George Fuller. You’ll meet him. He pretty much owns this place.” They came to a door at the end of the hall and stopped. “Here it is,” Zach said. “Number four.” Three people were already inside, a white man and woman, plus a boy in beat-up jeans. Zach cleared his throat loudly, but the family was already gawking. “Meet Anthony Jones,” Zach said, and put the bag on the floor. “He’ll be bunking here, with Brody.”
The boy in jeans put down a box and came over. The name on his faded bowling shirt said GUS, even though Zach had just called him Brody. “So you’re Tony Jones?” the boy asked, and glanced at his parents, who watched coolly from the far end of the room.
“Anthony,” he corrected. “Or you can just call me Ant.”
“Sweet!” the boy said, and shook Anthony’s hand. “Brody Lavallee. Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
The boy waved a hand between his parents and Anthony. “This is my mom and dad. Mom and Dad, Tony Jones.” Mrs. Lavallee said hello from her spot near the wall, while her husband came off of it and shook Anthony’s hand.
“That’s Jones, right?” the grinning man asked suspiciously. “Not Jones Al-Salami?” The adults laughed. Brody jerked his head and glared at them.
Anthony stammered. Had they just called him a terrorist?
“He’s just joking,” Mrs. Lavallee said. “He’s not very funny, but I think we’ll keep him anyway.”
Across the room, there was a guitar case leaning against a wall. Brody picked it up and brought it over. “You play?”
“Me?” Anthony said looking at it. “Naw, man. Not even close.”
“Don’t speak so soon, dude.” Brody looked at his parents, who were unpacking things and speaking softly to each other. “Besides, I might have more in here to play with than just a guitar.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together, took an invisible puff, and sang, “Inspirational inhalations . . . for my musical occupation.”
Brody laughed, but Anthony shook his head. It was the worst voice he had ever heard.
There was a brief meeting that night in the auditorium, where the headmaster, Dr. Dirk, explained way too many rules. All of the Belton freshmen were there, along with a handful of teachers. Anthony checked out their faces. Aside from a few Asians and one kid who looked Indian, he was adrift in a Caucasian sea.
And then he heard it. Someone laughed from the corner of the room. It sounded familiar to Anthony, like school assemblies at MLK. When his eyes adjusted and he saw the two black kids, he felt like yelling out. On stage, the headmaster reminded them of the freshman camping trip. Then he dismissed them to their dorms.
Anthony found the two boys. The tall one was Paul and the chubby one was Khalik. Both of them were from Brooklyn, but they had only met that morning. Paul seemed cool, but Anthony wasn’t so sure about Khalik. He talked too fast and never looked Anthony in the eye.
Inside the dorm, there was another meeting, this time with Mr. Hawley, an English teacher who was in charge of their floor. The man smiled a lot but also laid down the law, sometimes reading directly from the student handbook. The boys had cleaning jobs that rotated every Sunday. Plus they had morning room inspections and supervised study hall every weeknight. There were rules about bedtime and when to be awake; girls weren’t allowed to visit their rooms, except for supervised occasions; and no one could leave campus before signing out with Mr. Hawley or another adult first. So much for all the prep school freedom Anthony had imagined. The regulations made him miss his mother’s grocery lists.
An hour later he was lying in the dark and staring at the ceiling while his roommate slept soundly in the bunk underneath. Anthony suspected that the other boys on the floor were sleeping, too, but he couldn’t keep his eyes closed. How far had he traveled in just one day?
Someone had put BELTON SUCKS in glow-in-the-dark letters on the ceiling, along with a bunch of little stick-on stars that formed an obscene constellation. It was supposed to be funny, but the cosmic blow job only made Anthony uncomfortable. He peered outside, but everything was pitch black. There weren’t any streetlights, and no passing cars. He had never felt so out of place.
The next morning, Anthony and the rest of the freshmen left school for three days of camping. They brought equipment and canoes to a town called Rangeley, where there was a huge lake with islands. Anthony stood at the shore and watched the wide water, the sharp rocks beneath the surface, and the dented boats knocking together. He had never been camping or canoeing before and was starting to have second thoughts. He looked at Brody, who stood next to him, along with a short kid named Nate. “I don’t know about this, man,” Anthony said as the first few kids paddled off.
“Relax,” Brody whispered. “These things are like impossible to sink.”
“Unless you do it on purpose,” Nate added, and laughed. He had already put shaving cream on everyone’s doorknobs that morning, and the night before, he had run up and down the hallway, flapping his arms and squawking.
Anthony tapped the shorter boy’s shoulder and whispered, “Do some dumb shit, if you want to. Hear?”
Nate stiffened and then turned around. “I was just joking.”
In front of them, Brody took off his shoes and walked the canoe into the water. “Both you dudes need to chillax,” he said. “The day is young, the sun is bright, and so are we. . . . Now get in the boat.”
By the time they were a hundred feet from the shore, Anthony loosened his grip on the sides. He was in the middle seat, surrounded by gear and doing nothing, while the other two boys rowed easily. There was laughter and shouting from the rest of the boats. Some of the girls had stripped down to bikini tops, and a few of the boys were shirtless. Most of the canoes moved along in straight lines, but some of them hopelessly zigzagged. Anthony glanced at the third oar lying flat at his feet, picked it up, and dipped it into the lake.
“Way to go, dude!” Brody shouted. “Now let’s blow the rest of these boats away!”
“That’s what’s up.”
They dug in and Anthony rowed hard, leaving deep swirls in the water. They reached the first island before everyone else, and Brody pulled something from his pocket. “A little herbal blessing before lunch?”
Anthony looked at the pipe in his roommate’s hand, at the blobs on the lake that were his teachers and classmates, approaching but still far off. He could get high and no one else would know it. Then again, he could get paranoid, fall out of the boat, and drown. There was no telling what kind of weed Brody was smoking. “Go on,” Anthony said, still watching the other canoes. “I’ll keep a lookout.”