Fall Read Online Free Page B

mayor of Sutton.
    “No,” I said.
    I was waiting for him to say “Why not?”; maybe I was expecting him to invite me. I had my excuses lined up.
    He didn’t say anything more about it.
    I hopped down from the bed because it was 8:29. Julius asked me if I was going to Chapel. I made a noise to suggest I had no choice in the matter. Julius said, “Let’s go,” and it was the first time we went down to Chapel together.
 
    Susan
    Harper
    Jess
    Mathilda
    Julie
    Sarah
    Fall
     
    Those were the girls who were in the mind of the entire wanting world. The bathrooms and beds were humming with them.
    Some of them had boyfriends when the year first started, but every new year was full of hope for change.
    For boarders there wasn’t much opportunity for seeing someone who didn’t go to St. Ebury. The day-boys had other chances with their evenings and weekends free. They had neighbours’ daughters, friends of family, girls from other schools.
    Even seeing someone from school was hard enough if you lived there. Most of the girls weren’t boarders. The greatest luck you could have as a boarder was to have somewhere to sign out to on the weekend—a relative’s place or some willing guardian’s. There were a few boarders like Julius whose parents lived somewhere in the city. The luckiest were those who could sign out to a place where the guardian didn’t actually know or care what you were doing. Julius’s dad cared but he was often out of town. Ant’s aunt lived in Paris most of the year. As long as the school had a phone number, they rarely checked to see if you were actually being looked after.
    If you could sign out on the weekend, you might at least have a chance to see day-girls outside of school. Boarders could leave grounds on the weekend during the day, but they had to be back early and in bed by ten or eleven o’clock. The most a date could be was an afternoon movie and a coffee. The day-students would get together on weekends for parties almost every week and girls from other schools would often go. Only a handful of boarders would ever get to be there.
     
    The Flats got so quiet so soon. By five o’clock on a Friday even the boarders who hadn’t signed out would be away somewhere until curfew, desperately breathing in the freedom of being off school grounds. The younger grades usually went to the Centrepiece Mall, where kids from downtown schools went—and there was always a story about someone from St. Ebury who had forgotten to change out of his uniform and was beaten up for being a private-school fag. There were a few arcades, one music venue that let you in as long as you were over sixteen; and otherwise there was just the opportunity to hang out and look at other people. I got the sleeves ripped off my jacket once at the Centrepiece Mall but I was able to find a tailor in the mall who could fix it right away.
    I stayed at school most Fridays. Sometimes I liked the change and the quiet. When I was younger I helped my parents at cocktail parties, passing around hors d’oeuvres, asking people what they would like to drink. Sometimes the parties were huge and I got lost inthem, overwhelmed—one question after another, a roomful of eyes, tiny false stars, staring at me with phony curiosity as the son of the Consul General. I liked standing in the same room after the parties, thinking that a disease was cured, or poison purged, and the house was healthy again. On Friday nights at St. Ebury I sometimes felt the same way, a comfort in knowing that week after week I could rely on time to kill everything that disturbed me.
    In that hallway just outside my room at 3:45 p.m. there were three kids bouncing a tennis ball against the far wall. Two were waiting for a cab to take them downtown and one was waiting for his mother to take him away for the weekend. There was a window in the middle of the wall, and the kids were aiming the ball at the plaster below it. Every few throws the ball would hit the window and the