The White Devil Read Free Page B

, he was told.
    “Newboys,” someone stage-whispered. “We’ll tell one of them tonight.”
    “Tell them what?”
    “We pick someone,” explained a boy named Rhys, who, it turned out, was head of house; a stocky, genial guy with straw-blond hair from Wales who was studying agriculture. “And tell him his room is haunted.”
    “ Someone died in that very room ,” offered someone in a spooky tone.
    “Then later we come in and completely abuse him.”
    “Soak him.”
    “Scream.”
    “Remember the year they dumped Pat out of bed?”
    “The poor bastard thinks it’s the ghost and loses it,” explained Rhys. “It’s totally wet.”
    “Fuck it is, it’s funny.”
    “It’s a Lot tradition.”
    “How’d you get hold of that, on your first day?” someone asked him.
    “I thought I felt a chill in the basement.”
    A questioning glance was passed around the table.
    “Matron mentioned it,” he explained to fill the awkward silence.
    “So why are you here?” asked a large, muscular boy next to St. John. This, Theo explained, was Vaz: short for Vasily. White Russian. Family fled the 1918 revolution. Vaz was a thickset boy of enormous size; arms, legs, body all rounded and heavy as slabs of meat. ( He’s our hooker for the First Fifteens , Theo whispered. Andrew had no idea what that meant but guessed it was an important position; and Fifteens, looking at Vaz, had to be rugby.) His face spread wide and flat across a football-shaped skull, with slitted, squinting eyes and light brown hair gelled into twists. He looked like a menacing and steroidal version of Ernie from Sesame Street . Vaz seemed to speak rarely, except to add to a communal joke, but when he did, the others paused to listen. St. John’s every jerky movement seemed designed to amuse Vaz.
    “Don’t ask him that,” protested Theo. “It’s his business.”
    “Why not? You never see newboys in Sixth Form. There must be a reason.”
    “Yeah, why are you here, Yank?” demanded St. John.
    The table went quiet. Andrew hesitated.
    “Uh-oh, he’s going to tell us to eat shit again.”
    General laughter.
    “My father thought it would be a good idea to take a year abroad,” said Andrew, carefully.
    “ Mrrrowww , dad-dy,” came the catcalls.
    “Your dad? Why?”
    “What do you mean, why?” Andrew parried, stalling for time. “To get my grades up. And reapply to colleges. Universities.”
    “Are you taking A-Levels?” persisted Vaz.
    Andrew paused. “What are A-Levels?”
    Pandemonium ensued. Roddy especially could barely stay in his seat. You don’t know what A-Levels are? Are you mentally retarded? Do you even have schools in America? And so forth. It turned out A-Levels were big exams at the year’s end; everything in the whole school year led up to them. Whoops. Exploded by Andrew’s outrageous lack of knowledge, the conversation took different turns, and Andrew was out of the hot seat. But he caught Vaz eyeing him. No one who’d crossed the ocean to better his grades would not know what A-Levels were, and Vaz knew it. So what was Andrew the American hiding?
    A BRIEF HOUSE meeting followed, where the boys crowded onto benches in a long common room. Andrew stared at the framed photographs lining the walls: house photos. Rows of boys lined up in the garden in tailcoats. First in color, then, as the dates stretched back to the 1960s, in black-and-white. For one of the years the picture had bleached out. In place of faces was a white-hot, radioactive glow. Andrew was forced to stop looking when the boys on one end of his bench tried shoving the last guy off the other end.
    Then came a scramble, and smirks: the housemaster had arrived, late. Fawkes , they whispered. Piers Fawkes swept in in his black beak’s robes, a slim, slightly stooped forty-five, his light brown hair boyish and uncombed, and his large eyes bulging slightly, giving him the placid, somewhat clownish expression of someone who’d been caught napping at his own