Down the Shore by Stan Parish Page B

other here.
    â€œWell, it’s not a school night for Mrs. Alison,” Eric said, winking at her. “He’s a big boy. You don’t need to tuck him in, right?”
    For a second I was afraid that she would stick around, and I would have to go home by myself and lie awake waiting to hear her car in the driveway like I was five years old again. Instead, my mother stiffened, and blinked as if she had just remembered something.
    â€œYou know what?” she said to me. “Let’s get out of here. I’m wrecked.”
    â€œHey, I’ll call you this week,” Eric said.
    She gave him a tight smile, and dropped one of Roger’s crisp hundred-dollar bills on the bar.
    â€œThat’s for them,” she said, pointing to Todd’s table as she shouldered her purse.
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    My ears were still ringing from the band at Roger’s when we got back to our empty house. My mother disappeared into her room and turned off her light without saying goodnight to me, which was strange because she always said goodnight, even if it meant waking me where I had fallen asleep reading by a night-light to save on electricity, which I was about to do. I was nodding off midsentence when my door swung open.
    â€œCan I ask you something?”
    I sat up, squinting in the light.
    â€œWhere would you go?” she said. “Let’s say you could go anywhere.”
    â€œFiji.”
    â€œReally?”
    I nodded and waited for her to ask me why.
    â€œI wouldn’t go anywhere,” she said. “I was thinking about that tonight when I was watching you. I was wondering where you were in your head. I used to think about all the places I’d go, but I just don’t anymore.”
    â€œMaybe it’s an age thing.”
    â€œAre you saying I’m old?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “You’re not old.”
    â€œRight,” she said, “of course I’m not.”
    She shut my door.
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    Smacking the steering wheel to stay awake at red lights on my way to school. My short Saturday schedule meant English and then econ before I could go home and back to sleep. I cut through the glassy modernist dining hall to get a cup of coffee before giving my Modernist Literature reading one more shot. The cover on my copy of
The Waste Land
was badly creased where I had rolled on it after losing consciousness halfway through a section titled “What the Thunder Said.” I had no idea what the thunder said, and I needed caffeine and Advil and a place to read in the twenty-five minutes before an hour of small-group discussion. Lawrenceville used the Harkness teaching method, in which twelve students and one teacher sit around an oval oak table to talk about the Ottoman Empire or the impact of privatization on capital market growth. It aims to foster engaged and egalitarian discussion, which makes it hard to sleep in class. I took my coffee for the road.
    The sprawling campus was deserted except for a few distant figures speed walking awkwardly under the weight of their books. I shouldered through the door of Memorial Hall and moved down the cool hallway of the old building as quickly as my coffee would allow. The stairs were solid blocks of stone, each bearing an indentation deep enough to hold water thanks to two centuries of climbing and descending students. I was headed for the second-story teachers’ lounge, which was usually empty on weekends. The door was closed, and when I opened it, the head of the English Department looked up from an interview with a woman in a navy business suit. Mr. McCarthy had been on the disciplinary board convened to hear my case, and while he had voted against expulsion, it was clear that I had used up whatever currency or empathy I had with him. Most of the faculty I had been close to kept their distance now, there being no time for redemption between my arrest and the end of