But it was a student slum now. The thudding bass of someone’s stereo served as a heartbeat to the whole block. Couches sat on the porches and on the lawns. Bikes appeared tossed into piles, leaning into each other, locked up to wrought-iron fences. There were hitching posts for horses at the ends of the driveways, most of them painted the school’s colors: crimson and gold. Two shirtless guys standing several lawns apart threw a football between them with what seemed like malicious force, while a girl in a bikini on a lawn chair watched it fly back and forth in front of her. Against the sky that football looked like the pit of some piece of bright blue fruit.
“It’s this one.”
Craig’s father slowed down in front of the house, which had once been painted white but had weathered to gray. There were ten mailboxes beside the front door—the number of apartments—and there was Perry.
Good old Perry.
How long had he been standing there, waiting?
Eagle Scout. Altar boy. Best friend.
The realization of that fact filled the back of Craig’s throat with something that tasted like tears. He swallowed. He lifted his hand to wave.
Perry was wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates cap, a clean T-shirt, and khaki shorts. New tennis shoes? Had his mother ironed that perfect crease in the shorts?
Perry saluted—sadly, ironically, the perfect gesture—and Craig’s father’s chuckle sounded vaguely like a sob. “There’s your pal,” he said, and pulled up to the curb, and Perry strode solemnly over to the car, yanked open the passenger door, and called in, “Hey, asshole, welcome back,” and then bent down and looked past Craig to his father. “How are you, Mr. Clements?”
Dependable, presentable, sociable Perry. Just profane enough. Just polite enough.
“Great, Perry,” Craig’s father said in a voice full of gratitude and relief. “It’s really good to see you.”
Craig and Perry’s apartment was on the third floor. Perry had picked it out for them back in July. “It’s not the Ritz,” he said as they climbed the stairs behind him. “But it has indoor plumbing.”
Craig’s father carried a box of books and a tangled mass of USB cords. Perry had Craig’s duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a trash bag full of sheets and pillowcases over the other. Craig carried his laptop, towels, and another trash bag—boots and shoes and his down jacket—up a narrow staircase carpeted in dust and dirt, to the left, past the closed doors of two other apartments. One of the doors had a whiteboard nailed to it and I went to Good Time Charlie’s! meet us! written in purple Magic Marker on it, a big smiley face for the o in to.
“This is us,” Perry said, nodding at number seven. He pushed open the door with his sneaker.
“Great!” Craig’s father said again, stepping in behind Perry, exclaiming it so loudly that his voice echoed off the bare floors and walls, sounding even more falsely bright the second time.
The apartment was, of course, immaculate. Perry had moved in a few weeks before, having worked as an orientation guide for new students over the summer, and he’d obviously done his thing—swept, dusted, arranged a collection of books in alphabetical order on the narrow bookshelf next to the couch. Craig carried his things through the dark little kitchen with its freshly scoured sink, past Perry’s bedroom, to his own, and stood in the middle of it.
A bright whiteness. The windows looked freshly washed—something Craig felt pretty sure their slumlord hadn’t done—and the bed was made in crisp-looking blue sheets, a plaid bedspread.
“My mom did that,” Perry said, nodding at the bed, “and that,” he added, nodding at a bouquet of daisies in a clear vase on a scratched-up plywood dresser. “I like you, man, but not enough to buy you flowers. Yet.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows in the way that only Perry could, and Craig felt what might have been a chuckle start in his chest, but he suppressed it, just in case it might turn into something else.
“Well,” Craig’s father said, clapping both guys on the back at once. “This looks great!”
The year before, his freshman year, Craig’s whole family had rolled onto campus together to bring him to Godwin Honors Hall. Craig’s father had been laying on the horn the whole way through town, startling pedestrians and causing the drivers of the other vehicles to swivel their shocked faces at the Subaru. “Don’t they teach people how to drive in the Midwest?” he had growled.
Craig’s mother had just stared out the window, taking it in. Her silence made her dissatisfaction with the place palpable—a kind of thick green mist filling up the car. “It’s pretty,” she’d said, tapping her finger in the direction of the library’s ridiculous faux-classical columns, as if it weren’t the most damning praise she was capable of giving. Beside Craig in the backseat, Scar maniacally twiddled at the Game Boy in his hands, breathing heavily through his mouth as if he were alone at the control panel of a spaceship that was about to spin out of control.
Finally Craig’s father pulled the car up to the curb right under a sign that read, NO PARKING HERE TO CORNER, and asked, “This it?” as if it might not be, despite the name chiseled into the stone above the entrance, GODWIN, and the crimson-and-gold sign posted near the gate, GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the banner strung between two trees in the courtyard, WELCOME TO GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the student standing outside with a poster board sign that read, GODWIN HONORS HALL.
“I think so,” Craig said.
Godwin Honors Hall was the oldest building on campus, and looked it. It was the campus’s only “Living Learning” facility, a dorm in which selected students slept, ate, and attended classes all in one building. On a campus that covered two hundred and fifty acres, if you were allowed into the Godwin Honors Hall program, it was implied by the brochure materials, the farthest you would ever have to walk was to the library, and you would never have to take a class or share a meal with any non-honors student for your entire four years at the university.
The whole thing had started as an experiment in 1965—a way, mainly, for some hippie activists to keep the decrepit building from being torn down, Craig would learn later—the proposal being to create a private little liberal honors college (Oberlin? Antioch?) right there at the dead-center of one of the country’s biggest public universities. It would appeal, they’d implied, to students who didn’t want to get lost among the unwashed hordes.
Or who’d applied to Oberlin and not gotten in.
To Craig, it had sounded claustrophobic, a rat-in-a-maze kind of experiment that should have failed by 1966 due to rat insanity, but his father had insisted that the prestige of getting into the program would confer some sort of magical properties on Craig’s future. And once Craig got his acceptance letter, which had shocked them all, the subject was closed for discussion.
The windows of Godwin Honors Hall were of the tiny diamond-paned variety, one or two of them cracked, glittering in the sun. The heavy wooden doors—gouged and shellacked, gouged and shellacked—shone with the sad decay of having been abused by thousands of students for a century and a half. The tiles of the entranceway were blood red and cracked, chipped, ice-picked away in places and sloppily replaced in others. Inside, there was the smell of mildew and disinfectant. A guy leaned against a wall of mailboxes, wearing a baseball cap on backward and a football jersey. He might have taken a long soaking bath in stale beer that morning. Someone had spray-painted, misspelled, the great philosophical advice “KNOW THYSEFL.” Scar tapped Craig on the shoulder and mouthed the now-familiar and maddeningly annoying joke: “It’s not Dartmouth.”