So Shelly (5 page)

Having heard homophobic horror stories of life in an all-boys prep school dormitory, “Wild Man,” as Gordon had baptized him, turned around with his fists balled and ready to pummel, but there was something unsettling about Gordon’s cocksure stare that set off warning bells in Wild Man’s head and emasculated his violent intentions.

After a pause, Wild Man marched from the room toward his new digs in the nether lands of Harrow Hall. Carrying a box of trophies from home, he muttered something about a “faggot for a roommate” and about returning for the rest of his stuff later.

It was then that Gordon spotted a thin, delicate waif of a boy standing timidly in the corner behind the bunk beds. The boy was, apparently, a portion of Gordon’s booty of conquest. His name was William Harness.

When Willie emerged from his niche, he did so with a limping gait.

Gordon’s eyes opened wide, and Willie intuited the question. “I have a bad leg. I was born with a club—”

“—foot,” Gordon finished, and a friendship was born. “What’s your name?” he asked, and extended his hand.

“William. I’m new here.”

“I’ll tell you what, William I’m-new-here. I’ll just call you Willie, and if anyone here bullies you, tell me and I’ll take care of it.”

Despite his personal shame, Gordon’s relative wealth, fame, athleticism, and good looks would always be more than enough “cool” currency to compensate for the derision that might have otherwise been directed toward him because of his clubfoot. Willie, however, with his diminutive stature, introverted nature, and tendency toward all things geek, possessed no such bankroll.

Turned out that, like Gordon, Willie was a bit of an artistic prodigy. He had already held gallery showings of his more conservative paintings: still lifes, seascapes, and portraits. For a short time, he had secretly operated his own fantasy art website—filled with rendition after rendition of chiseled heroes, often naked, always male, in throes of various combats with mythical monsters—until his parents discovered his little side project. Appalled by the homoeroticism, but without a sniff of irony, they enrolled William at the Rood. Willie had the Web page up and running under a new URL address and domain name within an hour.

Over the single academic year that Gordon would spend at the Rood, he would discover that a disproportionate number of the boys had been sent there because of parental revulsion for their offspring, not because the boys had been called to an education in “Sacrifice, Virtue, and Knowledge.” In his freshman class alone were any number of a
variety of deviants, ranging from the simply neurotic to the violent to the perverted, and some who were a little bit of all three.

Gordon had never even seen a game of lacrosse prior to his arrival at the Rood, but he took to the sport as if he had been born with a stick in his hand. Like a stutterer who sings with perfect precision, Gordon lost his limp in the adrenaline rush of athletic competition. He reveled in the fact that Shelly’s beloved Ottawa were some of the earliest Native American players of the sport christened “lacrosse” by French missionaries. By midseason near the end of September, Gordon was promoted from the junior varsity, replaced a senior at one of the attackman positions, and quickly became the team’s most prolific scorer. By tournament season in late October, the Knights of the Holy Rood were playing with synergistic energy. Inspired play, a good deal of luck, and consistent underestimation by their opponents combined to allow the Knights to blow through both the district and regional tournaments and to qualify for the first time in school history for the state tournament held in Columbus on the turf at the Ohio State University. The Brothers were beside themselves with pride and joy.

Gordon, sensing that the magic had been exhausted, turned his own attention from lacrosse to having as much fun as possible in the state’s capitol city. Namely, he was determined to get laid. He had been celibate since Annesley, and other than one exhaustively chaperoned Saturday-afternoon
dance with the girls of Ursuline Academy, he hadn’t so much as sniffed a girl in more than two months.

In Columbus, Gordon’s libido was about to make Holy Rood history.

After a brief “walk-through” practice on the game turf, the Knights’ contingent checked into a high-rise Holiday Inn smack-dab in the middle of campus. With hands and faces pressed against the windows of the bus, the boys nearly broke their necks en route as they ogled the smorgasbord of college girls offered up on the campus of the Ohio State University. A literal buffet of dinner entrees had been arranged for them in a hotel conference room, to which they immediately reported after squaring themselves away in their rooms on the seventh floor.

Coach Abbott and Brother Lombardy, team chaplain, conducted a bed check at ten. At eleven, the doorman, after pocketing a twenty-dollar tip/hush money combination, hailed Gordon a taxi. Gordon was dressed in his school uniform, minus the patch, which he had carefully detached with nail clippers thread by thread, sans the tie, and with his white shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. The cabbie drove to a nearby ATM, where Gordon emptied the account of the entire two-hundred-dollar allowance his mother sacrificed to deposit each month for his expenses.

“Where now?” the cabbie asked.

“Strip club.”

After a protracted dubious look in the rearview mirror, the cabbie asked, “Which one, Sherlock?”

“The best one,” Gordon answered without hesitation.

“That would be Xanadu.”

*    *    *

The blond behemoth of a bouncer/ID checker with a buzz cut and biceps the size of Gordon’s thighs wasn’t stupid. He’d watched Gordon exit the taxi and attempt to lose himself inside a just-arriving group of preppy college-aged fools. But it was a Thursday night; business was slow. The kid was by himself and clearly not looking for trouble, just ass. Bouncer guy admired the kid’s moxie and pretended not to notice as the boy slipped past him to the cashier, where Gordon forked over a twenty-dollar cover charge. Including the twenty-dollar cab ride with a five-dollar tip, and now the cover, Gordon’s wad had taken some serious hits, and he had yet to see a single pair of tits.

After he stepped through a set of red velvet curtains, it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and the garish motley-colored lighting lining the stage, which was shaped like a giant phallus—a long thrust stage with a mushroom top and two semicircular stages at the bottom. One girl worked the runway while two others performed circus feats on brass poles, inside cages, on top of the base stages.

Gordon stood statue-like, stiffened to paralysis and overwhelmed by his good fortune.

“Can I get you something?” The voice came from the darkness, barely rising above the thumping dance music and the DJ’s imploring, “Let’s give a Xanadu welcome to Brittany, now performing on the main stage.”

Slowly, he realized that he was the target of the inquiry rising from the murky depths beneath him.

“Can I get you something?” a pixie of a girl repeated
patiently, if not slightly exasperatedly. She was holding a cocktail tray and was dressed in a version of a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, with a white button-down blouse tied in a halter over an impossibly small plaid skirt and white kneesocks.

“Do you go to Ursuline?” Gordon asked.

The uniform was an exact match.

“What? No. What are you talking about?”

“The uniform.”

“No, stupid. Look around.”

Scanning the club, Gordon saw a bevy of Ursuline girls. Some carrying drinks, some bent over, whispering in men’s ears, some actually sitting on laps. All smoking hot.

“But Xanadu is an oriental fantasy,” he said, explaining his confusion. “I expected harem girls, belly dancers, genies, that sort of thing.”

“What?”

He wasn’t sure if she was befuddled by his observation or sincerely unable to hear him.

Gordon raised his voice to a low shout, “You know, Coleridge. The poet. ‘Kubla Khan.’ ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree …’ ”

“Look,” she said, made unhappy by the delay but also mildly intrigued by the poetry-spouting kid, “I’m no English major, and the owner is a moron. Tonight is Catholic Schoolgirl Night.” She actually made air quotes with the fingers of her free hand.

“What
are
you studying, then?”

“How do you know I’m studying anything?”

“Well, you said, ‘I’m no English major.’ The implication is that you must have some other major.”

She hesitated, uncertain how much she should reveal beyond what the ridiculously tiny uniform already advertised.

By boss’s orders and economic necessity, she insincerely smiled and teased and flirted with her customers; although, in the three months that she’d been waitressing at the club, she’d grown secretly to loathe the men whose tips were making her attendance at the university possible. But there was something different, really attractive, about this guy. He wasn’t exactly sweet, but he was interesting, and impossibly good-looking. She knew better, and she hated herself for liking him.

“Marketing,” she finally answered.

Gordon studied her through the thick miasmic mix of light and sound and shadow. She was in a completely different category of girl from Annesley, who was red-haired, fair-skinned, nearly six feet tall, and big-boned. This girl was dark, tiny, and taut. His appetite was whetted.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

Before she could stop herself, she answered, “Caroline.” It was the first time she’d used her real name with a customer. She usually ran down the roster of Pussycat Dolls: Monday, Nicole; Tuesday, Ashley; Wednesday, Kimberly; Thursday, Melody; Friday, Jessica; Saturday, Carmit; off Sundays.

“What time you get off, Caroline?”

“We close at two.”

“How about coffee?”

Caroline hesitated. “Coffee?”

“Yeah, coffee. I like you, and I haven’t been with a girl in a very long time.”

“And why’s that?”

“Business,” Gordon answered without hesitation.

“Business? What kind of business?”

“Mine,” he said almost too brusquely, “but I’ll tell you all about it over a cup of coffee.”

“Exactly how old are you?” Caroline asked.

“You want the truth?”

“Sure.”

“Nineteen.” Gordon knew she’d seen enough underage guys con their way into the club so that she was most likely suspicious, but he also knew that his actual fourteen and three quarters years would cause an immediate rejection from Caroline and an ejection from the club.

“Me too,” she said. “Look. Sit here in my section. I’ll take care of your drinks and keep the managers away. If you’re still here at two and able to walk out, I’ll take you up on that cup of coffee. If not, I’ll call you a cab.”

“Deal,” he answered, and sat down at a square-topped table, a safe distance from the cash vacuums writhing about onstage.

For two hours Gordon threw back mixed drinks at an alarming rate, but they were weak, and he and Augusta had been helping themselves to their father’s well-stocked liquor cabinet since Gordon was ten years old, building the alcoholic tolerance of veteran barflies. To his great disappointment, he quickly grew bored with the equally anesthetized strippers onstage and turned his full attention to admiring Caroline as she worked the floor and the pathetic losers populating it.

*    *    *

Caroline’s “You win. Let’s go” pulled him from the fog of fatigue and slight inebriation that had settled around him.

Gordon followed her out through the front entrance, earning a disbelieving yet congratulatory gaze from the bouncer, who had seen most of the girls exit with customers at one time or another, but those men were almost always dressed in tailored suits and expensive jewelry, and they tipped him and the valets generously, obnoxious in their blasé disregard for their money, and they almost always sped away in foreign sports cars. This kid’s apparent conquest of Caroline, the Ice Queen, was an upset of historic dimensions: 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team proportions.

Her hair was down now, flowing freely past her shoulders, with occasional wisps falling over her blue-gray eyes. She had wiped away her makeup and had changed into an oversized red hoodie and a pair of tight-fitting gray fleece sweatpants with “Buckeyes” emblazoned in an arch across her ass. The sway of her breasts and the pistonlike pumping of her butt cheeks against the fabric betrayed that she wore nothing underneath. Despite all the flesh he had just seen paraded, Caroline was, by far, at that moment, the sexiest girl Gordon had ever laid eyes on.

“Everything all right, Melody?” the bouncer asked. He knew her naming system.

“Fine, Tim. He’s an old friend from high school. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

Walking awkwardly, and battling the dragon suddenly roused inside his pants, Gordon followed Caroline across the
paved parking lot to the farthest corner, where the employees parked.

Caroline threw her bag into the back of a girlish pastel purple Geo Tracker, one of those half-ass two-door minijeeps that only a chick could drive with even a modicum of dignity.

An Indian summer day had given way to an early autumn night that was clear and crisply cold. Gordon’s breaths rose in puffs of expiration until they were taken away as she sped south toward campus through the northern suburban streets of Columbus. Whatever residual buzz he had left the club with was blown away by the fast-flowing and bracing air, which somehow seemed to leave Caroline completely unfazed.

Without a heads-up of any kind, she whipped the Tracker left into an open-all-night Denny’s, then right into a vacant parking space, before pressing purposely too heavily on the brake, abruptly engaging Gordon’s seat belt, which pressed hard into his collarbone. He was shaken, stirred, and sufficiently warned that she was not to be fucked with, but she had no idea of the depth of Gordon’s own mad, bad, and dangerous personality or that she was actually the lamb leading itself to slaughter.

Coffee became a full meal once the laminated menus appeared in front of them. Neither read a word. For the waitress, they simply pointed at the photographs of the stack of pancakes, the waffles covered with strawberries and whipped cream, dip-worthy sunny-side eggs, grease-smeared bacon and sausage, and piles of home fries. They weren’t a bit
disappointed when the actual items failed to live up to the promise of the photographs. Despite her no more than one hundred and five pounds, Caroline ate like a long-haul trucker. Their sparse conversation never strayed from the goodness of the food until Gordon swiped the bill off the table.