The White Devil Read Free Page A

anarchy awaited inside: a steamy, low-ceilinged room of brown brick, ababble with hundreds of boys’ voices. Two food lines stretched back from the kitchens. To amuse themselves, two huge boys had started pushing at the end of the lines, putting their shoulders to their companions and knocking them forward, like flexible dominoes. Oi , went up the aggrieved shout. Faces crinkled in annoyance. Monitors appeared—nervous in their roles as rising Sixth Formers, exercising their authority for the first time—and strained to hold the boys back like Security at a rock concert. Andrew eventually received a white plate with two fried eggs and a ladleful of beans. He was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t gruel. He followed Theo across the room—weaving through boys in bluers and past an enormous toast station, heaped with grainy bread and lined with a half-dozen toasters and bowls of red jelly; these boys would live on toast, Andrew was to discover—toward a long, heavy wood table against the window. This was the Lot’s Sixth Form table. The lower forms ate at their own tables, perpendicular to this one.
    Theo introduced him.
    “Oi, everyone: Andrew, from America. Say hello like human beings.”
    “Go fuck yourself, Ryder.”
    “Yeah, go fuck yourself.”
    “Fuck you too, Yank.”
    “Yeah, piss off.”
    There was sniggering at this.
    “Eat shit, assholes,” snarled Andrew.
    The crew looked up, somewhat startled that Andrew had not taken their remarks in fun.
    “Charming.”
    “That how they say hello in America?”
    “Is that how you say hello in England?” Andrew snapped back.
    “It’s English humor, man,” piped up one stocky boy with tight brown curls. “Americans don’t understand English humor.”
    “Let’s try this again,” said Theo wearily. “Andrew is a new student. He’s here on his gap year.”
    “You’re spending your gap year . . . here ?”
    “You must be insane to come to this place.”
    “What’s a gap year?” asked Andrew.
    “What’s a gap year?” sputtered the stocky boy again. “Were you born yesterday?”
    “Year for travel, before university,” Theo explained, then gestured to the stocky boy. “May I introduce Roddy Slough.”
    “Total freak,” added the freckled boy next to Roddy, as if this were Roddy’s subtitle.
    “Fucking loser,” added another farther down the table, who threw a bunched-up napkin at Roddy.
    “You’ll have to excuse them. I seem to be the only one with any manners around here.” Roddy stood and shook Andrew’s hand.
    Roddy was the house oddball, Theo later confided; the others referred to him as nouveau , as in nouveau riche, because his father owned a chain of fast-food restaurants in London; Roddy was addicted to comics and spent most of his time in his room. He was a lightning rod for abuse, Theo explained, shaking his head.
    “Oh sit down, you git,” barked the napkin thrower in disgust.
    That, Theo told Andrew, in an aside, was St. John Tooley. Wild-eyed, jittery, St. John was hunched, with a greasy forelock and freckles. His father, Theo whispered, was one of the hundred richest men in England. Tooley, as in, Tooley, Inc., the global temp placement firm. As in Sir Howard Tooley.
    A boy named Hugh was introduced: he had thick eyelashes and a fey manner. He was greeted with a volley of insinuating cat sounds, a kind of Mrrrowww . Hugh’s eyes went dark. This, Andrew realized, must be the term of abuse for suspected homosexuals. Real subtle.
    And so it went. Andrew had the sensation of having crashed someone else’s family vacation—all the squabbles and petty hatreds of prolonged cohabitation were here in evidence. Epithets, embarrassing anecdotes; alliances and animosities. In succession each of them spilled bits and pieces to Andrew. He quickly realized this group had started together as Shells, and were desperate for someone new to tell their stories to.
    “So what’s the deal with the ghost?” he ventured, during a lull.
    Shhhh