Freshman year of high school, there were quite a few people who didn’t want to be there.
I didn’t want to be there after about a month. I was tired of the place; I’d gone there to get away from the kind of thing I’d been used to in grade school and I’d hoped that a 500-mile move might provide a different look at life, so to speak.
Bill had been told by his parents a few weeks before school started that he’d be moving from Chicago to Portsmouth, RI for the next year or so. He’d had about two weeks to get used to the idea (no debate or anything, just “You’re going to New England for high school”) and about a week to pack. He was not especially pleased.
Jack had been shipped here by his parents because his sister had enjoyed the place so much. His experiences were not the same, but then his sister hadn’t gotten to school with the kind of attitude that breeds dislike.
Eddie especially didn’t want to be here. He’d applied mainly because his father had applied more than twenty years ago and had been rejected. When Eddie got in, his father wanted more than anything for his son to go to school there just so he could. I gather this school had considerably more esteem in Eddie’s father’s mind than it did with Eddie, because he didn’t make quite as much a secret of this as he might; this was not his first choice, and it wasn’t the best school he’d applied to. But then that was the case with most of us; sometimes the best school for a person has nothing to do with numbers.
This was more the case for Eddie than for just about anyone else I’d ever met.
The first month came and went, and the grace period I usually got somewhere, when there was no evil treatment from anyone, nothing to indicate that people were purposefully making my life worse, lasted about two weeks. For those two weeks I was popular, not especially picked on (inasmuch as a weakling freshman couldn't be picked on), and, from what I gathered, there was the crush or two on me.
Jack had managed not to get in trouble with anyone and was mainly making sure people knew not to call him Richard (Jack was his middle name). It seemed like every other time we had English class (Jack and I were in the same class) this guy named Kevin would try to get the teacher's permission to call Jack "Little Richard", for obvious and somewhat immature reasons.
Bill was steadfastly thinking the entire thing was amusing, in part because he still could not grasp how his parents could transplant him out of their lives and think they were rid of him. He'd call them to complain, and it wouldn't just be the normal "Mom, this place sucks!" It would be reasonable, rational discourses on why parts of the place were irreparably messed up, or why a certain person had no earthly reason for being there. But they just didn't listen to him.
Complaining about the place was what most of us did. How could you not? You were required, as a male person, to wear a jacket and tie (not to mention no sneakers) to class. You were required to go to class, and if you got caught not going you had to do icky things like cleaning dishes and washing tables. You had to go to church on Sunday, for crying out loud! The ONE day out of the week you should have been able to sleep in, and you had to be dressed nice for church, which was in a cold stone building and which consisted largely of a bunch of old white men in black robes singing about this guy you really didn't like because of the lot in life he'd given you.
The food bit. Hard. Unless, of course, it was either pasta or vegetables, in which case it was normally mushy, if it carried any particular shape. Cooking for 400 people isn't easy, I'll grant you that without a second word. But somehow this place managed to mess up pasta.
If you have any semblance of what you're supposed to do (and these people did), you really can't mess up pasta unless you forget about it. But how you forget about a 40-gallon tub of boiling water full of formerly-dry pasta is beyond me.
You barely had any free time. When you weren't up at 7:30 for school at 8:15, you had 20 minutes to change into casual (but not street) clothes for sports. Or, if you played football, you had slightly over half an hour to get changed into your pads and be down at the field.
This was not one of the easier aspects of life. In my senior year, in fact, I'd abandon this notion largely and just wear the same thing to football practice (under my pads). Smelled to high heaven, but when I covered the stuff with about 20 pounds of pads, nobody really cared.
Every few nights I'd walk past one of the two phones in our dorm (both pay, but they could receive incoming calls) and I'd see Eddie on the phone with *someone*. I never figured out who until after Thanksgiving, when I guess it was easier for him to talk about it.
He'd told us about most of his family, and apparently he had a bit of money, as his father was a doctor. He had an older sister who was in her 20s, and when his family came from Massachusetts to visit him one weekend we saw her. Good God. She was a sight for very sore eyes, and I think she probably got most of the good genes her parents had to offer. But she was a brief sight for the entire dorm, as she disappeared from our eyes as fast as she'd appeared.
That was in October, when we had parents' weekend, and all the boarding students' (Eddie, me, Jack and Bill, to name a few) families, or some representative, or something, came to school for the weekend. From then until Thanksgiving none of those of us who lived far enough away, or who had especially busy families, would see much of them until we got home. And that was the case with Jack, with Bill, with Eddie and with me.
Thanksgiving break could not have come soon enough. I was out of there, out of there, out of there! On a train. A damned train. It was the way my father had gone back home when he'd gone to this school back in the mid 70s. And evidently my parents didn't conceive of the notion that there might just be an airport in Providence, RI.
The train was seven hours if you were lucky. The one I was taking left around 3 PM or so, and was scheduled to arrive at Union Station in Washington, DC around 10 PM.
Jack had the New York bus, which delivered roughly 40 students to some intersection in New York that I guess had a bus station or something. Bill had a plane ticket home. Eddie had his parents coming to take him home for the week.
During that vacation I don't remember seeing or talking to anyone from school, which made sense as there wasn't anyone from the school who lived within about an hour or two's drive from me. And I sure as hell wasn't going to interrupt a perfectly decent vacation to get right back to the stuff I got when I was there; that was only going to start up again once I had gotten back to school, so why should I give it an early ticket back?
I was therefore highly surprised when I got back to school and there was someone missing.
Evidently Eddie's father had been battling cancer for a year or so. And evidently it was mostly untreatable. But Eddie had been going to school in a different state because his father had wanted him to take advantage of the education opportunity he'd never had.
Somehow I doubted it mattered, as Eddie's father was now a doctor and as such had a better education than this school could offer, but I digress.
So Eddie had been going to school here and all the time he was here mainly in body; his mind was obviously back home with his father, where he wished to be. And when he went home his father had taken a turn for the worse, from what I hear. He'd died the day Eddie was supposed to go back.
The whole dorm (or at least the boarding students) heard about this at about ten at night, maybe an hour before we were to be in bed. Bill, who happened to be Eddie's roommate, thus had the entire room to himself for the next week, as Eddie had been allowed to stay home for a time to get used to things, help out his mother and older sister with funeral arrangements and such, and generally find his way back from his father's death.
Eddie came back a week later. I was back in the dorm for about an hour; I had a free period and a bit after that to rest, so I was essentially relaxing in the dorm and decided, just for kicks, to walk down the hall where Eddie and Bill's room was.
I walked past their door and found Eddie sitting on his bed playing on his Gameboy. We had a brief conversation about the game and such (apparently it was Jurassic Park, and I'd played the game on Sega), completely not talking about his father because I thought if he'd wanted to talk about it he would have said something.
Some weeks later one of the kids in the dorm made a somewhat unkind remark to Eddie, or Eddie heard it though it wasn't directed at him, and for the next half hour or so (part of which included the every-night dorm meeting) Eddie was all tears. When one of the resident seniors called roll, he just looked up at Eddie crying there and went on. We all knew he was there; there was no need to draw any attention to him. I think most of us just wanted to let him do whatever he needed to so he'd feel better.
The year went on and Eddie and I talked occasionally. We weren't close friends, but we weren't entirely antagonistic. Around May most of us got confirmation on what had been an almost-obvious notion: Eddie wouldn't be back for the next year. He just didn't like the place, so he was going to a school much closer to home.
Evidently the ... respect, but not deep friendship, that we'd had for each other was mutual. I found this out quite late in freshman year, during our physics class (we had two classes together, physics and Christian Doctrine), when Eddie turned to me and said, "Kilmer (part of my last name), don't ever change." I smiled and typed up on my calculator (I could talk, this just was less interruptive) a response that had stood the brief test of time, but isn't really important. Let's just say that change isn't happening without surgery.
Since our freshman year, I?ve seen Eddie a grand total of twice. He joined the cross-country team at his school, and ours twice hosted the regional championship for the sport while I was there, so he came during our sophomore year and said hello to a few people. The other visit sticks out quite clearly in my mind. He was there again for his cross-country team, and was hanging out with some of the friends he'd had as a freshman. I was walking back from eating lunch that Saturday, and some kid I didn't exactly recognize yelled hello to me. I gave him a weirded-out thumbs up and walked on.
When he was almost inside the cafeteria I turned around (I'd been walking the other way) and yelled "Eddie!", as by then I'd finally figured out who he was. So I came to say hello and asked him why the hell he was there, since he?d made no secret, three years ago, of his intense distaste for the school. Turned out that, yet again, he was on the cross-country team and he figured "Let's see, I could sleep in, or I could go see people I know." And they were all laughing along with him, because this was the first time we'd seen him in two years.
Since then (November of 1999) I haven't seen or heard a whit from him. So this goes out to him, and maybe he'll see it and maybe not. Happy Thanksgiving, Eddie:)