The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

Helene had invented it. The facts, in her abridged version, were right. It was just that a few important details had been omitted, details he’d never discussed with Helene but that, like all unspoken things, contained the real truth—namely, that he wasn’t actually a scholarship kid, at least not in the way she’d implied, and also that he’d known who she was from the moment he’d arrived on campus.
    He first saw her perched on a high stool and wearing a name tag that was filled from edge to edge with bright block letters. As the Info Girl, her primary job was to greet visitors, most of whom had just made the unpleasant trek up to coastal Maine in the off-season, and hand them brochures with glossy collages of lobster boats and seminar rooms and the quad at the height of autumn. She smiled at just about every single person on campus, including an endless stream of lonely men—fellow students, yes, but also kitchen staff, grounds crew, assistant coaches of most major sports—who hung around the info desk with a regularity even Anders noticed, trying, it seemed, to exhaust her unusually deep wells of patience. She was polite to them and she was beautiful, elevated on her stool in the middle of the middle of campus, all of which meant Anders, who had found himself staring at her in the mayhem of registration and had told his roommate that she was “sirenic,” went well out of his way to avoid her.
    He had chosen Bowdoin, a speck of a college on the scribble of the Maine coast, because they had given him full work-study regardless of the fact that his father, a judge in Fayetteville, North Carolina, could have bought his way onto the trustees’ table during the school’s annual lobster bake. Instead, Anders had saved for even his bus ticket and had shown up on campus that first August astounded by the tall evergreens and the ancient chapel and the peninsulas that ran for miles into the Atlantic on nothing but pine needles.
    They’d placed him on a floor of hockey players, guys from Nashua, New Hampshire, and Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and Digby, Nova Scotia; guys like his roommate, who kept a tin of dip in the pocket of his shirt and whose accent was thick as a fish-stick commercial and who worked summers tarring cracks on the state highways—guys who generally seemed more in need of aid than a southern kid who’d slept on sheets that’d been ironed by a domestic employee. But he’d submitted his financial aid as an independent, no mention of parents, and his name miraculously had been on the list at the work-study meeting, so he was able to pass, on the dish line or the grounds crew, as another kid working his way through school.
    Because the truth was, he did need the money. His father, Judge Portis Hill, was a stern man who, after his first two sons had so disappointed him by becoming physicians, would tolerate only one kind of life for his youngest, what he referred to as “a calling to the law,” which was a fancy way of saying a life exactly like his. By the time he was thirteen, Anders was so tired of hearing about the importance of American jurisprudence that he intentionally flunked the entrance exams of every major prep school in the South—one of them so spectacularly that the headmaster had called Judge Hill with concerns that his boy was retarded.
    These stunts, as his father called them, soon became the stuff of legend in Fayetteville, where the clerks in every store knew Anders’s full name, a development that forced Judge Hill to respond in the only way he knew how—by making more rules. If Anders was going to smile to his face and then turn around and humiliate his family by pretending to be a retard, then there would be no imperfect grades, no athletics, no movies, no dances, no long walks home, no locked bathroom doors, no unclean plates, no blue jeans or comic books or music of any kind. It was all an attempt, of course, to force Anders back to whatever prep school would still take him,