A Separate Peace by John Knowles Page B

“If I need to study, then so do you.”
    â€œMe?” He smiled faintly. “Listen, I could study forever and I’d never break C. But it’s different for you, you’re good. You really are. If I had a brain like that, I’d—I’d have my head cut open so people could look at it.”
    â€œNow wait a second . . .”
    He put his hands on the back of a chair and leaned toward me. “I know. We kid around a lot and everything, but you have to be serious sometime, about something. If you’re really good at something, I mean if there’s nobody, or hardly anybody, who’s as good as you are, then you’ve got to be serious about that. Don’t mess around, for God’s sake.” He frowned disapprovingly at me. “Why didn’t you say you had to study before? Don’t move from that desk. It’s going to be all A’s for you.”
    â€œWait a minute,” I said, without any reason.
    â€œIt’s okay. I’ll oversee old Leper. I know he’s not going to do it.” He was at the door.
    â€œWait a minute,” I said more sharply. “Wait just a minute. I’m coming.”
    â€œNo you aren’t, pal, you’re going to study.”
    â€œNever mind my studying.”
    â€œYou think you’ve done enough already?”
    â€œYes.” I let this drop curtly to bar him from telling me what to do about my work. He let it go at that, and went out the door ahead of me, whistling off key.
    We followed our gigantic shadows across the campus, and Phineas began talking in wild French, to give me a little extra practice. I said nothing, my mind exploring the new dimensions of isolation around me. Any fear I had ever had of the tree was nothing beside this. It wasn’t my neck, but my understanding which was menaced. He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.
    I couldn’t stand this. We reached the others loitering around the base of the tree, and Phineas began exuberantly to throw off his clothes, delighted by the fading glow of the day, the challenge of the tree, the competitive tension of all of us. He lived and flourished in such moments. “Let’s go, you and me,” he called. A new idea struck him. “We’ll go together, a double jump! Neat, eh?”
    None of this mattered now; I would have listlessly agreed to anything. He started up the wooden rungs and I began climbing behind, up to the limb high over the bank. Phineas ventured a little way along it, holding a thin nearby branch for support. “Come out a little way,” he said, “and then we’ll jump side by side.” The countryside was striking from here, a deep green sweep of playing fields and bordering shrubbery, with the school stadium white and miniature-looking across the river. From behind us the last long rays of light played across the campus, accenting every slight undulation of the land, emphasizing the separateness of each bush.
    Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him,and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud. It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear of this forgotten.

5

    N one of us was allowed near the infirmary during the next days, but I heard all the rumors that came out of it. Eventually a fact emerged; it was one of his legs, which had been “shattered.” I couldn’t figure out exactly what this word meant, whether it meant broken in one or several places, cleanly or badly, and I didn’t ask. I learned no