Flat Water Tuesday Read Online Free

they’d been put through a cheese grater. Like all predators, he had a nose for weakness and wounds.
    “What did you do to your hands?” he asked, glancing down quickly and then away, as if I was already embarrassing him.
    “I was out sculling today.”
    “Let’s see.”
    I held them up and he grabbed the side of my right hand, studied it as if he were thinking of bidding on it. The pressure of his bony fingers made my eyes water. “I’m Connor Payne, by the way.” He turned his attention back to the wreckage of my palms. “And you’re Rob Carrey,” he continued, “from Niccalsetti. I voted to have you brought here. It was you or some rower from Philadelphia who’d been caught stealing cars last spring.” He continued to examine the red, sticky ridges of my hands methodically. “These hands are no problem. Bad, surely, but you’re going to be fine.” He let go and checked the watch inside his delicate wrist, a stainless Rolex on a leather band held together with a strip of pink electrical tape.
    The sun caught him full in the face. His skin was impossibly pale. In profile his nose was almost a perfect triangle. He was perhaps an inch taller than me but I must have had him by ten pounds. He had long, sinewy limbs, a shock of blond hair—coarse hair, like an animal’s—and his eyes were dark gray, animated only for a second as he looked around furtively, a fellow rule breaker. “Come to the Rowing Cottage and I’ll fix you up.”
    I felt ambushed.
    “Your high erg scores were the reason I voted for you, by the way. No one else’s came close.” He glanced at me. “Did you fake them? You did, right? I mean, obviously.”
    “I didn’t even send them in. Back home, they make about six coaches sign the scores.”
    “It doesn’t matter now. You’re here. You’ll have to pull them again for Channing, though. I don’t care if you and your coach lied to us. What’s a few seconds on an application if it gets you out of a place like Niccalsetti? I’d understand your lying to us. I’d respect it. I would.” He nodded encouragingly.
    “Want me to pull those scores right now?”
    He shook his head, grinned. He had a salesman’s smile. It made you like him even if you knew it would cost you.
    My hunger momentarily forgotten, I followed him away from the waking school, across the grass that was wet enough that we made two trails as we went along. He didn’t look at me as he ambled toward the small cottage, a cottage I’d passed every day, sculling. He pulled off his blazer and swung it over his shoulder. He was wearing four-hundred-dollar handmade shoes from England and they were getting covered in tiny grass clippings and stained with dew as he went. He surveyed the river and the buildings and the road into town and even the mountains beyond the school, inspecting it all as if he owned it. He moved with an easy, sleepy slouch you can’t fake or copy. He was enjoying being at boarding school, enjoying every day of being a champion rower who was well known even in Niccalsetti, New York. Connor would be the first millionaire’s kid I’d ever befriend, and probably the richest person I’d ever know. And the most gifted.
    For almost everyone else at Fenton, things were different. After two weeks of confined dorm life you started to think about revolt and mutiny. The school was laid out like a little prison for privileged teenagers, and I don’t think the parents who put up the tuition—a year’s pay on my dad’s work crew if you scored a bonus—knew it. I’d visited the Scadondawa Prison with my father to pick up workers who’d called him when they were paroled because they had nobody else to spend the fifty cents on. He had pointed out its design; even if the whole place burnt you could lock it down and come in on the ground and over the top with riot gear, soften the convicts up for the screws in their white helmets and face masks who would charge in, ready to bust skulls. You could seal us up