“but—”
“Because—boarding school.” He folded his hands and leaned back in his chair and regarded me. “Almost certainly the best thing for you in the long term but quite frankly, given the situation, I believe I could telephone my friend Sam Ungerer at Buckfield and we could get you up there right now. Something could be arranged. It’s an excellent school. And I think it would be possible to arrange for you to stay in the home of the headmaster or one of the teachers rather than the dormitory, so you could be in more of a family setting, if you thought that would be something you’d like.”
He and Hobie were both looking at me, encouragingly as I thought. I stared at my shoes, not wanting to seem ungrateful but wishing that this line of suggestion would go away.
“Well.” Mr. Bracegirdle and Hobie exchanged a glance—was I wrong to see a hint of resignation and/or disappointment in Hobie’s expression? “As long as this is what you want, and Mr. Hobart’s amenable, I see nothing wrong with this arrangement for the time being. But I do urge you to think about where you’d like to be, Theodore, so we can go ahead and work out something for the next school term or maybe even summer school, if you’d like.”
vii.
TEMPORARY GUARDIANSHIP. IN THE next weeks, I did my best to buckle down and not think too much about what temporary might mean. I’d applied to an early-college program in the city—my reasoning being that it would keep me from being shipped out to the sticks if for some reason things at Hobie’s didn’t work. All day in my room, under a weak lamp, as Popchik snoozed on the carpet by my feet, I spent hunched over test preparation booklets, memorizing dates, proofs, theorems, Latin vocabulary words, so many irregular verbs in Spanish that even in my dreams I looked down the lines of long tables and despaired of keeping them straight.
It was as if I was trying to punish myself—maybe even make things up to my mother—by setting my sights so high. I’d fallen out of the habit of doing schoolwork; it wasn’t exactly as if I’d kept up my studies in Vegas and the sheer amount of material to memorize gave me a feeling of torture, lights turned in the face, not knowing the correct answer, catastrophe if I failed. Rubbing my eyes, trying to keep myself awake with cold showers and iced coffee, I goaded myself on by reminding myself what a good thing I was doing, though my endless cramming felt a lot more like self destruction than any glue-sniffing I’d ever done; and at some bleary point, the work itself became a kind of drug that left me so drained that I could hardly take in my surroundings.
And yet I was grateful for the work because it kept me too mentally bludgeoned to think. The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong—only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.
Part of it had to do with the painting. I knew nothing good would come of keeping it, and yet I also knew I’d kept it too long to speak up. Confiding in Mr. Bracegirdle was foolhardy. My position was too precarious; he was already champing at the bit to send me to boarding school. And when I thought, as I often did, of confiding in Hobie, I found myself drifting into various theoretical scenarios none of which seemed any more or less probable than the others.
I would give the painting to Hobie and he would say, ‘oh, no big deal’ and somehow (I had problems with this part, the logistics of it) he would take care of it, or phone some people he knew, or have a great idea about what to do, or something, and not care, or be mad, and somehow it would all be fine?
Or: I would give the painting to Hobie and he would call the police.
Or: I would give the painting to Hobie and he would take the painting for himself and then say, ‘what, are you crazy? Painting? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Or: I would give the painting to Hobie and he would nod and look sympathetic and tell me I’d done the right thing but then