The Books of Fell by M.E. Kerr Page B

turned up and my aqua sweater wrapped around her neck like a scarf.
    For once, I wasn’t at all cold.
    “I don’t want to meet your family, or get to know your friends. I don’t want ties. I don’t want us to be a couple.”
    “What are we then?” I wasn’t whining around as I used to with Keats. I was asking her to see what she’d come up with, after what had just happened between us.
    “We’re what we are, Fell.” She smiled. She looked sleepy. “We don’t have to define it or label it … and I want our memories to be just of the two of us.”
    I kept trying to keep myself from making some kind of wisecrack, or doing a Bogie imitation, or all the other jazz. She’d taught me that.
    She took my hand. “I like what we are,” she said. “It’s good enough, isn’t it?”
    “It’s better than that,” I said.
    We left the beach, and I dropped her off at the Stileses’.
    When I got home, I called Woodrow Pingree and told him I’d decided to do it.
    “You won’t be sorry, Fell,” he said.

fell
part II
ARIZONA DARKNESS

chapter 14
    The first thing I found out was that no one going to Gardner School ever called it that. They called it The Hill. The school sat on a hill in the middle of farm country. That was all I saw, once I got off the train at Trenton, New Jersey, and into the school bus. Ten of us new boys were bound for the little town of Cottersville, Pennsylvania.
    There we were met by a dozen fellows in light-blue blazers and navy-blue pants. All the blazers had gold 7’s over the blue-and-white Gardner insignias. The group formed a seven around us and sang the Gardner song.
    Others will fill our places,
    Dressed in the old light blue.
    We’ll recollect our races.
    We’ll to the flag be true.
    And youth will still be in our faces
    When we cheer for a Gardner crew …
    And youth will still be in our faces
    When we cheer for a Gardner crew!
    A fellow behind me said, “Now we have to plant trees.”
    “We have to what?”
    “We each have to plant a tree. It’s the first thing you do when you get here, even before you get your room assigned. You get a little evergreen handed to you. You have to give it a name.”
    “What kind of a name?”
    “Any name. A name. By the way, I’m Sidney Dibble. Dib.”
    “I’m Thompson Pingree. Tom.”
    He was the basketball player type, all legs and arms, skinny, so tall I had to look way up at him. He was blond like me. He had on a tan suit with a beige T-shirt and Reeboks.
    I’d worn the only suit that had been mine in my other life: the dark-blue one. I felt like Georgette after her real family had come to claim her. Pingree had driven me into New York City one August afternoon and taken me to Brooks Brothers. I had a whole trunkful of new stuff.
    I asked Dib if he was sure about this tree thing. That was one detail Pingree’d left out. Dib said he was positive. His brother’d just graduated from Gardner. Dib said he was the world’s foremost authority on Gardner — ”Except when it comes to Sevens,” he added.
    The words weren’t even out of his mouth a half second before a member of Sevens began barking orders at us. He was a tall skinhead, with vintage thrift-shop zoot-suit pants, and two earrings in his left ear. He had on a pair of black Converse sneakers.
    “My name is Creery! Leave your luggage on the ground! It will be in your room when you get there! We will now walk back to Gardner Woods for the tree-planting ceremony! Think of a name for your tree on the way. Whatever you wish to call it. After you have planted your tree, you will line up to receive your room assignments in The Tower!”
    “Who’s the punk rocker?” I asked Dib. “I thought Sevens was this exclusive club?”
    “He just told you. His name is Cyril Creery.”
    “And
he’s
a Sevens?”
    “There’s no predicting who’ll make Sevens. But he’s easy. It’s a guy named Lasher you don’t want on your case … unless
you
make Sevens. Then he can’t touch you.