I checked Twitter, and there didn’t seem to be much new, but then I checked the Starlet Fever account, and someone had posted Jasmine’s video under every one of the past twenty or so tweets. I wouldn’t be able to ignore this much longer. I texted Lance and told him I’d explain later.
My stomach was a mess. It was time to get to class, time to talk to these kids like I had any idea how the world worked.
23
Since I’m relating what happened those two weeks at Granby pretty much in order, I’m going to tell you something now that I didn’t learn till much later. That morning—as close as I can tell, right around the time I was dropping my plate in the coffee shop’s dish bin—Omar Evans, fifty miles away at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, was stabbed in the side by a fellow inmate with a four-inch shard of broken glass. It was most likely a case of mistaken identity; Omar didn’t know the man who did it.
The glass entered below his right ribs, and as I walked back up the hill to campus worrying about myself and Jerome and griping about the cold, Omar was taken by prison ambulance—meaning two inmates dispatched with a gurney—to the infirmary.
Around the time I opened the doors to Quincy and felt the blast of the radiator heat, they were examining him visually, probing the wound with instruments. They did no scan to check for organ laceration, no X-ray to check for remaining glass. They cleaned out the cut, sutured him, gave him a tetanus shot and a topical antibiotic and not enough gauze. They told him he’d be allowed 600 milligrams of ibuprofen every eight hours.
Sometime late that morning, as we sat in class discussing him like a character in a movie, he tried to sit up in his infirmary bed and passed out from the pain.
24
In class that day, purple-haired Lola announced, “My uncle says he knows you.”
“Yeah?”
“He was your year. His name is Mike Stiles.”
“Your uncle is Mike Stiles?”
I wondered if Lola had looked through the 1995 yearbook, found the hottest guy there, and was messing with me.
“He’s my mom’s little brother.”
They didn’t appear to be joking. I said, “No way.”
“He said you were cool but scary.”
“Scary! I mean—I wore a lot of black, I guess.”
“Anyways, he says hi.”
I wondered what was happening to my face. It felt hot.
“What’s he up to now?” I asked, although I already knew from the internet—the same google spree that had led me to your Providence school that first time—that he was a professor at the University of Connecticut, specializing in US foreign relations, and that he hadn’t even had the courtesy to grow a dad bod.
Mike hadn’t stood out academically at Granby; either he’d been hiding it, or something clicked in college. Until he joined Camelot, we’d all assumed his brain was made of snow.
He came back from senior Thanksgiving in a full-leg cast, femur shattered in a bike accident, and chose to do the winter musical rather than endure the indignity of PE. It turned out he could sing and act; he beat out the regular theater boys for King Arthur. And he came in humble and sweet, not mugging from the stage, like most jocks did, so everyone knew this was a joke.
His cast came off a week before opening night, and backstage he showed us the pale, hairless skin of his left leg, dared people to touch it.
But by that point, my official crush on Mike Stiles was already over. It had come to an abrupt halt one night the previous spring on an Open Dorm night in Lambeth when Fran and I passed his room （door open the regulation ninety degrees）。 He sprawled on his bed, long legs toward the door, feet bare. Above him, posters of Kate Moss and Winona Ryder. Waifish girls with hollowed cheeks and plumped lips, girls whose elbows were the widest part of their arms. He wanted a girl he could carry on one shoulder. I understood I was no longer allowed to like Mike Stiles. I was too fat, too messy, too chipmunk-cheeked to like Mike Stiles.
I wasn’t about to tell my students any of this, but for the rest of class I kept looking for any resemblance between Lola’s soft, full face and Mike Stiles’s chiseled one.
Mike Stiles had been prominent on the Dick List, the document Carlotta and Sakina John had started junior year. Carlotta had drawn a remarkable likeness of his face next to the entry about his dick.
I recognize my hypocrisy. I still seethe when I think of Thalia Bingo, but I laugh unguiltily when I remember this document that detailed everything we knew about any guy’s junk. It didn’t matter if the boys went to Granby; if any of us （me, Carlotta, Sakina, Fran, Sakina’s friend Jade, Carlotta’s roommate Dani, who’d pierced her own nose） had any intel, it went on the grid. There were boxes for length, girth, curve, balls.
I contributed details about Brian Wynn, the boy I’d quasi slept with in Indiana that summer, and his rodent-like penis, which lay on his stomach half-hard and pulsing. Carlotta messed around with a few Granby boys but was always still dating one or two from home. Sakina—to the distaste of her father, the first Black Granby alum on the Board of Trustees—spent all four years attached to Marco Washington, who was always in trouble. Marco filled her in on the dick of every boy in Lambeth, since the boys in the dorms saw each other not only in the shower but also, apparently, on not infrequent occasion, fully erect—a joke, a performance, a threat. So Marco shared that Kellan TenEyck was hung like a Coke can and Blake Oxford, who had it bad enough already, was tiny and uncut. Pinky finger, Sakina wrote on the list, and drew a picture of what she imagined. Under Mike Stiles’s name, Sakina wrote, Even Marco is jealous.
I wasn’t particularly friends with Sakina, who played Morgan le Fay in Camelot and Chiffon in Little Shop and Rizzo in Grease and seemed destined for Broadway fame—though in reality she wound up an ob-gyn—but when Carlotta started a band and got Sakina involved, they ended up close, and she would join us in the Singer-Baird common for My So-Called Life. I was always worried she was judging me, and she probably was, yet later she ended up one of the people I kept in closest contact with—at first because we were both in New York, and then because our oldest kids were born the same day.
The list lived in Carlotta’s dresser. No one else was supposed to know （not even Marco; he told Sakina about everyone’s dick just for fun）， but senior year, on our morning walk to the mattresses, I filled Geoff in. Geoff seemed only amused, especially once I assured him he wasn’t on it. He said, “You need to add me. Please. Can you make me nine inches long with the balls of a god?” For weeks, he’d mouth it to me in the hall or the dinner line: balls of a god. Is it wrong if that still cracks me up? Unlike the bingo sheet, our list didn’t put anyone in danger, didn’t turn anyone into a ring to be grabbed.
Plus, dicks were in our faces, figuratively or literally, whether we wanted them there or not. I never sought out a dick, hoping to see it, until college. But here they were. Even nervous Brian Wynn, that summer, had been the one to undo his belt, push my head down with his sweaty hand. Dorian Culler exposed himself to me three times. Once was in the back hallway of the gym. He’d passed where I sat on the floor studying, then returned with a couple of friends, already laughing. He said, “Bodie, when you snuck into my room last night you left a bite mark on my cock.” He pulled it out the top of his gym shorts and managed a confused, wounded look. Instinctively, I held my hand up to block my view—he was only a few feet away—and he said, “God, Bodie, look at you reaching for me again. You’re insatiable. And when I’m wounded! I need medical attention.” I chastised myself for doing the wrong thing. What would the right thing have been? They left, but I had a feeling they’d be back so I scooped up my books and found another floor to sit on.