Abruptly, I felt myself sink into another mood. I didn’t retrieve the ball but just stood there, with the base of my stick propped against my right hip-not the right way, not even the right side, to hold it, I later learned-and stared at the manufacturer’s logo painted over the aluminum.
“You seem thoughtful,” Conchita said. “And I don’t see how any thoughtful person couldn’t have some problems with this school.”
I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will-that is the part that’s almost unbearable.
“Maybe we’re alike,” Conchita said.
I looked up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to make this leap.
“I’ve always thought, I bet I could be friends with her,” Conchita said. “You know how you just get that feeling? But if I’m wrong, you can tell me.”
I thought of the day she’d worn the beret, its bright purple woolly fabric; if I had noticed it, surely other people had. Then I thought of how my life at Ault was a series of interactions and avoidance of interactions in which I pretended not to mind that I was almost always by myself. I could not last for long this way, certainly not for the next three years; I’d been at Ault only seven months, and already, my loneliness felt physically exhausting.
But then the whistle blew-Ms. Barrett was summoning us-and in the shifting activity, I managed not to give Conchita an answer.
Gates was running roll call alone the next morning, but near the end, Henry Thorpe came and stood on the platform. Gates moved aside, and Henry stepped in front of the desk, and even though he hadn’t said a thing, people started laughing-he seemed to be imitating himself running roll call on another day. A lot of times students performed skits as announcements, and occasionally, if the senior class had a big test, they’d filibuster by performing lots and lots of skits, or making joke announcements; once, nearly twenty members of the senior class came up, one by one, to wish Dean Fletcher a happy birthday.
“So I guess that’s it for today,” Henry said. “I’ll just ring the bell now.” With exaggerated gestures, practically in slow motion, he reached to the left side of the desk where the button for the schoolwide bell was, but before he pressed it, a figure stepped forward from the fireplace near the front of the hall. The person was wearing a black robe with a black hood and carrying an oversized water gun, and when he aimed the gun at Henry, an arc of water shot over the heads of all the students sitting at the desks between the fireplace and the platform. The water hit Henry near the heart, soaking his shirt.
“Ach!” he cried. “I’m down! I’m down! They got me.” He grabbed his chest and staggered around the platform-I looked at Gates, who was standing behind Henry smiling at him like an indulgent older sister-and then Henry stepped forward and fell face-first onto the desk, his arms hanging limply in front of him.
Students cheered wildly. Not so much around me, because I sat in front with the other freshmen, and most of my classmates didn’t seem to know any better than I did what was going on. But the farther back you got in the room, the more loudly people were yelling and clapping. The person in the cloak pulled back his hood-it was Adam Rabinovitz, a senior-then threw his fists in the air. He said, or this was what I thought he said, though it was hard to hear, “Victory is mine.”
I knew three things about Adam Rabinovitz, all of which intrigued me without inspiring any desire ever to speak to him. The first was a bit of lore from two years before I’d gotten to Ault. Often at roll call people made announcements about missing notebooks or lost articles of clothing-I left a green fleece jacket in the library on Monday afternoon–and as a sophomore Adam had come up to the platform one morning, said in a completely normal voice, “Last night, Jimmy Galloway lost his virginity in the music wing, so if you find it, please return it to him,” and then stepped off the platform, while Mr. Byden glowered and students turned to each other in shock and delight. Jimmy was Adam’s roommate, a good-looking blond guy, and I wondered, though this bit of information never got included when the story was told, who the girl had been.
The second thing I knew about Adam also had, in a way, to do with sex. In the fall, a plaster-of-Paris display had gone up in the art wing, a joint project by two senior girls who both wore sheer scarves around their necks and silver hoop earrings and lots of black and who probably smoked, or would start when they got to college. They were serious about their art, and that must have been why they were allowed to include in the display a variety of plaster body parts, including a breast and a penis; the breast was never identified, but after great speculation, the dominant theory on campus was that the penis belonged to Adam Rabinovitz. The third thing I knew about him, and this made the other two all the more interesting, was that supposedly he had the highest GPA in his class; at any rate, he was headed to Yale.
On the platform, Henry came back to life, and Adam joined him. “Okay, here’s the deal,” Adam said. “Assassin is starting again, and this is how we’re doing it this year. If you’re a student, we’re assuming you want to play, so if you don’t, cross your name off the class lists in the mail room by noon today. If you’re faculty, we’re assuming you don’t want to play”-here, Dean Fletcher made his own whooping cheer, eliciting laughter-“That means you do want to play, right, Fletchy?” Adam said. “Whoever gets Fletchy, remember: He’s really psyched for the game.”
People laughed more, and Adam continued. “So for you freshmen and freshwomen, I’ll give a rundown. The object of the game is, you kill all your classmates.” Again, there was laughter, laughter that makes this day and this game seem longer ago than it was; at the time, certain teachers and students expressed disapproval of Assassin, but they were viewed as the humorless minority.
“How you kill them is pretty simple,” Adam said. “The game starts at one p.m. tomorrow. Check your mailbox by twelve o’clock, and you’ll find a piece of paper with a name on it and a bunch of orange stickers. The name you get is your target, and that person won’t know that you have them. You have to kill them by putting a sticker on them without anyone seeing. If there’s a witness, you have to wait twenty-four hours before making another attempt. Once your target is dead, you take over their target, and you need to get their stickers. And don’t forget that someone else is targeting you. Any questions?”
“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” a girl yelled.
“It depends on your tongue,” Adam said. “Is that the best you can do?”
“What’s the meaning of life?” someone else shouted.
Mr. Byden, who was standing next to Gates, tapped Henry on the shoulder, and Henry leaned in and whispered something to Adam.
Adam nodded. “I’m receiving word from on high that we need to wrap up. So, basically, watch your back and trust no one. And if you have any questions, find me, Galloway, or Thorpe.” He stepped off the platform, and Henry followed him.
“You should have told them whoever wins gets the title grand master assassin,” I heard Henry say as they passed my desk. The next announcement had begun, but I was still watching the two of them.
“Or they get to blow you,” Adam said. “Whichever they choose.” They both snickered, and I smiled, as if the joke had been meant for me, too.
At that point, listening to them, I wasn’t thinking much about Assassin. What the announcement left me with mostly-I couldn’t have articulated it then, and I might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it-was the sense that I wanted to be Adam Rabinovitz. The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn’t romantic, but I wasn’t sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people’s time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.