A Separate Peace: Chapters 11-13

I turned incredulously. “You saw Leper?”

We started to laugh again, with a half-guilty exchange of glances, in the way that two people who had gone on a gigantic binge when they were last together would laugh when they met again at the parson’s tea.

Brinker and three cohorts came with much commotion into our room at 10:05 PM that night.

He’s enjoying this, I thought bitterly, he’s imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales.

“Well of course,” Finny said with an exasperated chuckle, “of course I was in the tree — oh you mean Gene? — he wasn’t in — is that what you mean, or—”

To myself, however, I made a number of swift, automatic calculations: that Leper was no threat, no one would ever believe Leper; Leper was deranged, he was not of sound mind and if people couldn’t make out their own wills when not in sound mind certainly they couldn’t testify in something like this.

Someone made a long speech listing every infraction of the rules we were committing that night.

“Up there where?” said Brinker brusquely.

I don’t intend to implicate myself. I’m no fool, you know. I’m not going to tell you everything and then have it used against me later.

The corridor happened to be empty, and I walked along it in the grip of a kind of fatal exhilaration.

The tone of his words fell dead center, without a trace of friendliness or unfriendliness, not interested and not bored, not energetic and not languid.

I stood precariously in the middle of the room, trying to find somewhere to look and something to say, wanting desperately to leave and powerless to do so.

He alluded to last night only by asking how Phineas was; I said he seemed to be in good spirits.

During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

I had no qualms at all; in fact I could feel now the gathering, glowing sense of sureness in the face of it.