A Separate Peace: Chapters 4-7

You want to be head of the class, valedictorian, so you can make a speech on Graduation Day — in Latin or something boring like that probably — and be the boy wonder of the school.

The thought was, You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity.

It was hard to remember when one summer day after another broke with a cool effulgence over us, and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air — something hard to describe — an oxygen intoxicant, a shining northern paganism, some odor, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it.

The door was slightly ajar, and I pushed it back and stood transfixed on the threshold.

There was a hard block of silence, and then I said quietly, as though my words might detonate the room, “Do you remember what made you fall?”

It was forced on me as I sat chilled through the chapel service, that this probably vindicated the rules of Devon after all, wintery Devon. If you broke the rules, then they broke you.

The Devon’s course was determined by some familiar hills a little inland; it rose among highland farms and forests which we knew, passed at the end of its course through the school grounds, and then threw itself with little spectacle over a small waterfall beside the diving dam, and into the turbid Naguamsett.

With that blank filled, I took up my duties as assistant senior crew manager. There is no such position officially, but it sometimes came into existence through necessity, and was the opposite of a sinecure. It was all work and no advantages.

The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker’s salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks.

I was going to say that while he had a roommate it was frightened Brownie Perkins, who would never impinge on Brinker’s comfort in any way, and that they had two rooms, the front one with a fireplace.

Everyone at Devon had many public faces; in class we looked, if not exactly scholarly, at least respectably alert; on the playing fields we looked like innocent extroverts; and in the Butt Room we looked, very strongly, like criminals.

It was a mistake; the radio had suddenly gone quiet, and my voice ringing in the abrupt, releasing hush galvanized them all.

“Yes, huh, yes there was a small, a lit­tle contretemps at the tree.”

“How many rails did you sabotage today, Quackenbush?”

He was seated in my chair at the desk, bending down to adjust the gross encumbrance of his leg, so that only the familiar ears set close against his head were visible, and his short-cut brown hair.