Читать книгу Nirvana Is Here - Aaron Hamburger - Страница 21

HOW ARE YOU LIKING IT?

“SO, HOW ARE YOU LIKING IT?” Dad wanted to know when he picked me up for karate class, at the end of my first week at Dalton.

I’d practiced my answer to this question. “Oh, you know.” I unbuttoned my collar and loosened my tie. “Fine.” Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to stare at here.

In school, I kept my Dalton tie neatly knotted, my shoes and socks regulation black, and my hair cut several inches above the collar of my starched white dress shirt. I ate cheeseburgers and ham sandwiches without thinking twice. I pledged my undying support for the Dalton Eagles at pep rallies and attempted to live by the guiding principles in the Headmaster’s Message of the Day. I learned how to move between the library, the “new” gym, and the Dining Hall without passing the Commons Room, where the burliest, angriest football players rammed into each other for fun, or the photo lab, where burnouts and bohemian types played with X-Acto knives and toxic chemicals.

Before driving out of the Dalton parking lot, Dad looked at me for a few seconds, then patted my seat belt. “All strapped in?”

Mark’s father used to pick him up from Stern every afternoon, kissing him noisily on both cheeks, like a dog slurping up a fallen ice cream cone off the sidewalk. I used to watch the whole process, mesmerized by every gruesome detail. My father wasn’t a kisser. Sometimes I wished that he were, but never in his actual presence, thank God.