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n 1994, when I was fourteen years old, I was a new freshman, one of four hundred young men attending the Upper School at Rockcastle, a sprawling single-story building raised as a temporary structure in the 1930s that had, for some reason, remained permanent. Several short wings had been added over the years, including a science lab on the southern edge, its windows looking down into the small forest that secluded our campus from the outside world. The entire building was always drafty and cold, and seated in class on windy days, I could hear a low whistle trill through the hallways. Yet when I pictured Rockcastle, I imagined it the way you would see it from the street: a pristine, elegant private day school stretching in all directions, guarded by massive red oaks, the surrounding gardens immaculate, and the tall windows of the Upper School shining triumphantly in the morning light. This is where I met Carson Bly. It’s been years since I’ve seen Carson Bly, whom I once considered my best and only friend, and I believe my eyes


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are better trained to see it now, but even then I recognized that he was a pure basketball player. Athletic grace like he had is breathtaking. When he shot the ball, he leapt straight up, and his feet came down in the exact same spot. If we had been on a beach and he had been shooting for an hour, there would still be only one set of footprints. He raised the ball above his right shoulder, his elbow angled directly beneath his hand, and at the top of his jump he snapped his wrist, arm extended like a salute, and the ball spun perfectly through the air until—without touching the rim—it fell into the net with a whisper. It was October and raining heavily, the steady waves of rain hammering loud on the roof of the small gym. The dilapidated gym that linked the Fieldhouse to the Upper School did not have a name—it was simply known as “the small gym.” The scuffed wood floor was in regular need of cleaning, and the sidelines stopped right at the walls, whose wood ran in vertical strips and smelled like the pages of old and rarely opened books. Everything about the gym—from the floors to the walls to the rusty cables that suspended the old backboards off the walls—looked damp and exhausted. I stripped off my blazer, turned it inside out, and neatly folded it on the small bench on the sidelines, then took off my tie, rolling it into a coil so it wouldn’t wrinkle. I folded my sleeves up, yanked my shirt out from my pants, and lofted short jumpers. My heels raised out of my brown loafers no matter how careful I was. I don’t know how long Carson was watching before I saw him. But when I did, he was standing with his arms crossed in the archway of the entrance to the Upper School. “Owen Webb,” he yelled. “You need to spread your fingers more.” I appreciated again, as if for the first time, that he was striking, perhaps handsome. He was six feet tall and had


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fair skin, eyes of such blue they were almost gray, and dark hair thick as a lion’s mane. I was proud and surprised that he knew my name. He glided toward me, shucking his blazer as he moved, which he tossed in a pile over by my neatly folded clothes. There wasn’t a single imperfection on his high cheekbones. “You’re snapping your wrist,” he said, “but you aren’t getting enough rotation. You need to spread your fingers.” “Thanks for the advice.” “Don’t be a dick, I’m just trying to help. Go ahead, try it.” He walked under the basket and flipped his palm upward. Stretching out my fingers made the ball unsteady in my hands, but when I took the shot, the ball rotated rapidly, clanked off the backboard, and swished through the net. Carson snatched the ball and threw me a bounce pass. “Don’t watch the ball,” he said. “I’ll watch it for you. You just look at the rim.” I breathed deeply, trying to shake the fact that I was talking to Carson Bly. I had seen him in the halls, and had heard about the Bly family: one of the richest at Rockcastle, Carson a fifth- generation student. Yet I had always thought of him as aloof. During the last two months, when the weather was warm and autumnal, students sat outdoors between the Upper and Middle Schools. There was a large field of immaculate green, long enough for an impromptu game of touch football, Frisbee, or hacky sack, yet small and contained enough that every boy’s face could be seen clearly through the windows, allowing teachers to, when necessary, stop any misbehavior. Carson always sat alone, frowning down into a book on existentialism or gun rights, the author’s photo displayed on the back cover, always a white man’s face, always a face turned into the same angry glare that Carson wore as he furiously scribbled notes into


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the margin. Yet in the halls, his face was relaxed and open and smiling, a transformation I thought couldn’t possibly be real. I frowned at the basketball in my hand. With both hands, I pounded the ball twice, knees bent and head down, pulling the ball over my shoulder as if I were slinging on a backpack. Who was he to tell me how to shoot? I suppressed the urge to tell him to fuck off, and continued taking shots. Some rattled in, some went through perfectly, some missed. Carson rebounded each one without comment; I tried passing the ball back to him so he could shoot, and he fired the ball back without speaking. After a few minutes, I worked up a decent sweat and hit several shots in a row, the ball snapping from my hand with accuracy and precision. “Not bad, Webb,” he said. “My turn.” Carson dribbled out to the three-point line, then held the ball to his hip with his left hand and used his right to tuck his tie into his shirt. Tie out of the way, he dribbled once and released his first shot. The ball swished through the net and bounced twice before I picked it up. When I raised my eyes, his knees were crouched, hands up by his chest, palms out, waiting for the pass. He hit eleven shots in a row before he missed, yelling out “Short!” before the ball caught the inside of the front of the rim, skipped off the backboard, and ricocheted out. I rebounded and fired the ball back to Carson, who was shaking his head at the miscalculation; he proceeded to knock down ten straight. When the last one settled through the net, Carson nodded to himself and raised a hand to indicate he was done. He then walked to the bench and sat down next to his blazer. “Sixth bell is almost over,” he said.



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Every Rockcastle student received “free bell.” It was exactly what it sounded like: one class period designated to allow the student to do whatever he wished. Seniors based their schedule around free bell, which they always placed before or after lunch period so they could leave campus. There was no clock in the gym, and Carson didn’t wear a watch—I wondered how he sensed the time. Dribbling the ball between my legs as I walked, I went over and sat down next to him. He didn’t appear to be out of breath. He hadn’t even taken off his tie. “You’re a good shooter,” he said. “You playing this year?” I nodded. “We need you. Our starting point is this senior—Jamie Osher, do you know him?—and that guy can’t do anything right. Total fucking asshole. If you chew him up this month, you can start on varsity.” “Really?” “You shoot better than he does. I haven’t seen you play, but you look like you get it. How’s your left?” “Nonexistent.” “Work on that. Jamie’s a lefty. He absolutely cannot go right. Work on going both ways with your dribble. If you can finish at the rim with your left hand, you’re set. Do you do anything else here? Debate team or something?” “No.” “You should. Sports won’t be enough.” His eyes were focused across the room on the scratched wall, peering at it intently as if it were a threat to him. “You’re a bit inscrutable, aren’t you?” I didn’t know what that word, inscrutable, meant. All the boys at Rockcastle used words I had never heard before, and I had developed the habit of scrawling words into the margins of my textbooks—s-o-teric? air-u-dite?—in the


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hope that at home with a dictionary I could puzzle out the correct spelling and meaning. Carson tilted his chin upward, his skull scraping against the wall, and looked at the ceiling. “Do you see those missing panels?” Above, between the rafters and the circular light fixtures, the ceiling had several black holes, like missing teeth. “Every now and then,” Carson said, “for no good reason, people throw stuff up there. Basketballs, soccer balls, softballs, erasers, soda cans, a mouthy first-year’s shoes, whatever. All the students know about it, but I don’t think anyone goes up there to clean it out. Sometimes you walk through here and there is a stray ball or scrap of something on the gym floor. A raccoon or something must push it out. Or the wind, I guess.” I pictured the inside of the roof, all the dust and dirt and filth up there; all the years of items, artifacts of all the boys who had been here before me; all the years that had passed. “No one goes up there?” I asked. “Not even the janitors. Strange, isn’t it?” “I like it.” Carson lowered his chin and looked at me. His eyes seemed delighted. “So do I. Why is that?” “I don’t know.” I held the basketball, my fingers tapping the leather. “Because it shouldn’t be that way.” “They’ve been planning to tear this gym down. I mean, they’ve been talking about it for decades, so I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but they talk about it.” “Tear it down for what?” “I don’t know. More classrooms. A teacher’s lounge. Because some wealthy fuck gave us money and we have to build something new with his name on it. My father went



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to school here, and he said that until recently, it hadn’t changed much. He said most of the buildings were old and drafty. But they just built the new junior high, the new primary school, redid the track, even the kindergarten playground. Everything but the Upper School.” Rockcastle did have a polish to it, a veneer hidden behind all the ivy covering the brick, a place that was reinventing itself—one building, one donor, at a time—until it was the kind of private day school it believed it should be. I couldn’t articulate that feeling at age fourteen, but I certainly felt that my world was being reimagined, and that Carson was absolutely right. “The Fieldhouse is pretty sweet.” A look of contempt crossed Carson’s face, but just as quickly it passed, and he nodded to himself and said, “Yeah, they did give us that. You and me, Webb, you and me.” He took the ball from my hands and stood up. “You and me, what?” I asked. “Varsity basketball. Conference title.” He dribbled twice, then palmed the ball, leaned back, and fired it up into the ceiling through one of the gaps. There was a distant thud, then a softer one, and I listened intently to hear the ball come to a stop. For a moment, I feared retribution for losing gym equipment, then realized that no one had seen me take the ball. Still, for reasons I didn’t quite understand, I wanted it to bounce back, fall through the gap, drop to the floor, and roll to rest at my feet. “Be here tomorrow, same time,” Carson said over his shoulder. “We’ll work on your game. And bring basketball shoes, something to sweat in.” He strode back to the Upper School, clutching his blazer in his right hand. Even after he disappeared through the double doors, I stood watching them for what felt like a long time.


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No one entered the small gym, and there were no sounds at all, as if the entire world was frozen over and the slightest noise would send fissures through the surface and plummet me down into icy waters. Then the bell rang, cracking the silence and signaling the end of sixth period, and the distant sounds of opened doors and heavy footsteps filled the air. Four upperclassmen entered the gym, laughing and shaking their heads, taking no notice of me. I followed them into the Upper School, dazed as if in a trance, and only when I collapsed into my assigned seat in English did I notice that my undershirt was soaked with sweat. When the last bell of the day rang, I walked over to the cafeteria to buy a soda, then got my books from my locker and returned to the classroom. I pushed a desk in the back row up against the windows, which looked out onto the front drive. Every day after school, I sat here for two hours, started my homework, and waited for my mother to get off work and pull into the circular driveway. The school faced west, and the setting sun turned the sky dark; it was peaceful and beautiful to watch whenever I glanced up from working my way through biology, algebra, and Western civilization. Last winter, fed up with my low grades and frequent cutting of school to wander from College Hill down to Clifton to read magazines in drugstores and play arcade games like Bad Dudes or Operation: Wolf in bowling alleys, my mother spent three hundred dollars for me to take Rockcastle’s placement exam. She insisted, with a ferocity and seriousness that the public-school vice principals found amusing, that I was a bright, friendly kid who was bored by an unchallenging curriculum, and that despite my delinquent behavior, I was capable of academic excellence. No one was more surprised than me when I placed in the ninety-sixth percentile on Rockcastle’s notoriously



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difficult entry exam. After a series of meetings in which my mother confidently pleaded for my acceptance, certain that the conformity and rigorousness of Rockcastle’s curriculum was exactly what a troubled boy like me needed, I was accepted for admission. Along the walls of Rockcastle’s main entranceway were photographs of students in poses from around the world: arms raised in triumph atop a snowy mountain; camp counselors and their campers beaming despite their sunburns and unwashed hair; award ceremonies in New York and San Francisco with the winners holding their medals and trophies. There were also framed articles from the Cincinnati Enquirer, U.S. News & World Report, Time, The Guardian, and other periodicals about both Rockcastle on the whole and our individual teachers, scholars who shunned universities to work with a younger, less jaded generation. Gazing up at all the accomplishments of decades of Rockcastle men, their lives on display in oak frames and behind clean, unbroken glass, I remembered how uncomfortable I was just wearing my school clothes. My first day at Rockcastle, walking the hallways and clutching a computer printout of my classes and their room numbers, I felt every smirk from the upperclassmen. How could I hide the fact that I was a freshman when I didn’t know where I was going? But by the end of the second day, catching on quick to where my classes were and how to get there, I figured out that the smirks weren’t about my course schedule or the fact that I said “freshman” rather than “first year.” The derision was about my clothes. The only students who wore insignia blazers were kids on scholarship. Scholarship kids like me were easy to identify. I only had two ties, and they were all wrong: my knot askew and the fabric thick as a tablecloth. My blazers were a little too


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bulky, the sleeves too long, and my shirts, whether they were blue or white, were overstarched, lacking in texture and breathability. Even in the nineties, when pleats were acceptable, the drape of my pants was wrong, the fabric too heavy. And my mouth revealed all: I had brilliantly white teeth from brushing, but the lack of braces meant my teeth were gapped and uneven. I only spoke in class when called on, keeping both my uncertain answers and less than perfect teeth hidden. Even in their similarities, Rockcastle boys seemed otherworldly: their skin maintained a healthy glow, even in the winter. Shaggy hair was common in 1994—among soccer players, Latin scholars, hippies—an unkempt mess that hid eyes and ears as those who possessed them slouched smugly in their seats when called on to answer a question they hadn’t even heard. Every Rockcastle boy wore a tie, but some had mastered their father’s Windsor knot while others got away with an ironic bow tie or a food-stained Looney Tunes tie. Braided belts were common, the long end dangling off the hip like a holster. They wore scuffed oxfords or Birkenstocks, both acceptable under the school dress code as long as they were brown and sandaled toes were hidden by socks. Outside the walls of Rockcastle, we all dressed the same: flannel shirts, Starter jackets, collared shirts in loud colors, oversized T-shirts and basketball jerseys, everything loose and baggy. The hallways were wide, not just to allow students to walk three deep in each direction, but also because all the doors to the classrooms opened outward, and we needed room to pass without taking a suddenly opened door in the shoulder. In all directions, boys exchanged ironic handshakes, playfully slammed each other into lockers, which reverberated the length of the hallway, bringing out our teachers, who scolded us to knock it



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off as we feigned innocence at any inquiries as to who started what. Yet there was a small group of boys who were different from all of us. Boys like Carson Bly. Years later, in college, I stumbled across the term blue blood for the first time and instantly thought of my classmates at Rockcastle who fit this description. Much the way the eye gravitates unbidden toward symmetry and beauty, I wasn’t consciously aware of the allure of these boys—the ones who everyone liked but nobody knew, the ones from mysteriously wealthy families, the ones who were brilliantly smart and amazingly athletic but refused to give maximum effort in either their studies or sports. They walked with their shoulders back. Their haircuts were perfect, teeth immaculate, ties dimpled, blazers bespoke to the exact measurements of their wide shoulders and lean arms, their strides confident and relaxed, as if the whole world already belonged to them. In some way, I suppose, it did. •

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I looked up from my homework. Outside, scattered leaves lay under the red-oak trees. There were very few of them, enough to suggest that autumn was here, and the remaining leaves, withered and golden, clutching to the branches above, would soon fall. Sitting by the windowsill all alone, I saw the trek of upperclassmen heading to their cars in the lot across the street: how beautiful it all seemed that afternoon—the sky spotless, the light shimmering through the oak leaves, and the sense of the future as belonging strictly to us. This was the beauty I expected at Rockcastle, what I had hoped for from a new school. What I remember of my first days. I spread my hands out on my notebook, my blue-ink notes from world history disappearing beneath my palms.


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The paper curled, sticking to my fingertips, and I imagined palming a basketball, picturing it until I felt not paper beneath my hands but the textured leather of the ball, the grooves of rubber spinning in my hands. Point guard. Starting varsity. The vision seized my mind, and I spent the next two hours dreaming of game-winning jump shots, behind-the-back passes, fast breaks, and a group of friends I did not have jumping up and down on the sidelines as I brought excitement and victory to Rockcastle. And from where I am now, I remember that such beauty was wrapped in ribbons of loneliness, an angry solitude from which I have never completely escaped. Despite all that has happened, despite everything I have done, I remain the lonely boy by the window, a child with no purpose but to observe the happiness of others. There is something wrong with continuing to see myself locked away from the world, and yet I can imagine nothing else.