The Slap, Act Two: Hazing

The cheating fiasco was the beginning of the end.

I let Ed Delavane copy my algebra test. The substitute teacher, Mr. Filber, Mr. Fulber, I don’t remember- anyway, he was totally oblivious. But Sippy noticed. Sippy didn’t miss much. He was still pissed off about the story, and he had hated Ed Delavane from the moment the big football player tripped him up in the dining hall. Ed was no genius but like some dumb shrewd politicians, he had a natural gift for the mean spirited nickname. The one he coined for Sippy was “fish face” and it stuck. There was a natural pucker about Jimmy Bascombe’s mouth. His flattened nose and eyes set too wide apart completed the picture. All it needed was a caption. Ed was happy to provide it.

It came out later Sippy thought I was sucking up to the bully when I let him copy my answers, trying to worm my way into the cool group like our friend Haden Krakauer. 

No way. I was just scared.

Anyway, like I said, Ed was shrewd. He had, as David Trezize put it in his Veritas article the following spring, “the animal cunning that all successful stupid people share”. Ed’s survival instincts were well honed -- he only copied some of my test. He didn’t want an “A” or even a “B”. All he needed to pass was a “D” and he took just enough of my answers to get it. Saying that Sippy’s “whistle blowing” backfired would be a perverse understatement. The gun blew up in his hand, hurting everyone but the target. Ed got away with a shrug, I got a warning, since even Ed’s few correct answers were suspect. And my friendship with Sippy was damaged. 

“That’ll teach you. Don’t give aid and comfort to the enemy, Frakes. That’s called treason.”

But the worst part was, Ed saw me going into the superintendent’s office the day after the test, and didn’t know why. In fact, I was being questioned about Sippy’s allegations, and I denied everything. That should have made me an ideal con-conspirator, an impeccably loyal omerta-bound criminal foot soldier. But Ed didn’t see it that way.

His version was simple: I had gone into that office to squeal on him. Ed had outsmarted me, but that didn’t matter. Intention was everything. The crime had been committed. I had turned on him. And I had to pay.

Ed gave me a choice. Hobson’s Choice: no choice at all. Take a beating or take a shower – in the girl’s locker room. He timed it out so that I’d be caught when the Field Hockey team finished practice. But a fight broke out, they had to run extra laps and I was done and dressed when they finally arrived. I hid in the janitor’s closet, but they found me. They assumed I was a peeping tom though I had crouched there with my eyes jammed shut determined to see nothing that I shouldn’t have.

I got a two day suspension and a new reputation. Suddenly I was some kind of  daring sexual adventurer. I had started get to get respect from the troglodytes I despised. They fantasized about that kind of daring voyeurism -- and puny little Todd Fraker had actually done it. The fact that I hadn’t really done anything but avoid a beating and cower next to a mop handle didn’t seem to penetrate their pea brains,  but that was fine with me.

I was in. Somehow, I was in. I got invited to my first party – a big bash at the Delavane house in Tuckernuck. Mark Toland, the coolest kid in school, caught me in the parking lot and gave me the time and date. “You can ride out in Ed’s Boston Whaler.” I could not have been more excited if I’d been invited to a Foo Fighters concert and offered a ride to the venue in Dave Grohl’s limousine.

That’s how pathetic I was.

Sippy begged me not to attend the party. But things seemed to have changed so much, it was like trying to convince a kid to stay inside after a week of rain because the hot summer sun might give him skin cancer someday. The door I’d been banging on for months had suddenly swung open. Ed seemed to admire my quick thinking during the prank and the way I took my punishment “like a man”. It seemed like the incident in the girls’ locker room had been an initiation rite – a hazing. 

And who survived the hazing without joining the fraternity? That was just stupid.

“Maybe,” Sippy had said. “But I don’t trust the guy.”

And what did I say to that? “Wait till he wants to be your friend, see what you say then.”

At first, it seemed like I’d made the right decision. I had schemed and suffered and triumphed. No one like me entered the inner circles of high school society easily. The rich, the good looking, the athletic, the Mark Tolands and Ed Delavanes, they were given the golden ticket at birth. People like me and Sippy had to struggle for it. This was my reward. I was going to take it.

That was what I told myself, and the trip out to Tuckernuck seemed to bear me out. We shared a pint of Johnnie Walker Red between us to stave off the Atlantic wind. I shuddered as the whiskey burned its way down my throat and the little motorboat reared up over a low swell and I realized I was happy. Finally, I was included. I was accepted. Was that really all it took? Was I that simple, that much of a dog? Scratch him behind the ears, and he’s yours for life? Well, Maybe. What was wrong with that? I loved dogs. Dogs were good. I was proud to be a dog. But even a dog would have had a better idea of what was going than I did. dogs can sense trouble.

They know when they’re in danger.