The Headmaster's Wife(23)

After the dinosaurs came, he could never remember what was in the books. He read them and read them, but they didn’t make any sense. Part of his mind was always somewhere else, waiting for them to get out, waiting for the swinging door to the kitchen to glide forward and let one of them into the dining room, where they would move in and around the tables and chairs there. He was convinced he was going to die. He was even more convinced that he was not going to die, but that both his parents were, and he would be left on his own in this house with nothing but the dinosaurs for company.

Now he was in the little back hall of Hayes House, which had been a mansion once before it had become a dorm. It really was a large house, unlike the house in Barnes, which had only seemed large because he himself had been so small. He looked at the phone on one wall and the light coming from the crack under the door to Sheldon LeRouve’s apartment. Sheldon LeRouve was yet another teacher he didn’t get along with, although he had the good luck not to have him for a class. Maybe it didn’t matter. He didn’t seem to get along with anybody, except a few of the kids, and even then he was odd man out most of the time, an interesting figure on the sidelines, not the kind of person anybody thought of first. He felt a little dizzy. He was definitely very tired. He tried to remember what had finally rid the house in Barnes of its dinosaurs, but he couldn’t. They were there, and then one day they were not there. He wasn’t afraid of the kitchen anymore. He could read when he wanted to read and watch television when he wanted to watch television, and his mother would let him. He could go into the kitchen by himself and get chocolate biscuits out of the cannister in the cabinet next to the refrigerator. He didn’t think he had done anything, or that anybody had done anything, to make them go away.

Biscuits, he thought now. That was a blast from the past. They called them “cookies” here. He’d been back long enough so that he nearly always remembered that. He thought of his first day at Rumsey Hall, where he had gone to school in Connecticut after his father had fallen ill and his parents had moved back to America to get his father’s cancer treated. He had been in the second grade, and he had truly loved the look of the place, wide open on green lawns, lots of space, lots of low, white buildings. The problem was that they had spent the first part of the day singing, and he hadn’t known any of the songs: “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” He had grown more and more frustrated over the course of a long hour. He wasn’t used to being out of things. He wasn’t used to not knowing all the answers to all the questions either. He was growing desperate to do at least one thing that would prove to everybody that he was just as smart as everybody else, if not more so, and suddenly he had heard a strain of music that was completely familiar. That was when he had stepped forward and started singing, as confident as he had ever been in his life that he was about to get something right. Mrs. Seldenader set the pitch on her harmonica and started in on the piano, and instead of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” he’d come out with, “God save our gracious Queen. Long live our noble Queen. God save the Queen.”

It was, he thought now, a metaphor for something, a prophecy of this year. There were dinosaurs in the kitchen again, and nothing he did was right. Except that it was worse, really. That first day at Rumsey Hall, his teachers had liked him and considered him bright. He just hadn’t known enough about how America worked to fit right in. In this place he knew that most of his teachers had no use for him at all. They thought he was stupid. They thought he was a slacker. They thought he was a liar. He sometimes felt as if he’d wandered into a dystopian Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter’s tea party took place in the Spanish Inquisition’s best dungeon and the White Rabbit had fangs.

He went out into the main hall and across it into the large, high-ceilinged living room. There was a small clutch of Korean students watching something on television, maybe a DVD or a tape. He looked up the long flight of stairs and thought that it was just too much, right this second, to climb it. He didn’t understand why he was so tired all the time or why he couldn’t eat. He thought he must have lost twenty pounds since he first came to Windsor, but he was getting almost no exercise at all. He didn’t like exercise all that much. He wasn’t a sports person. He just didn’t usually feel right unless he was moving around a little, and this year he moved less and less. It felt more and more difficult to move. He wished, suddenly, that he could be back in Connecticut. He had been chafing at that routine by the time it was over. Now it seemed to him like a haven of sanity, a time when he had been somebody else, when he had been himself.