Read Online Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik - Free Book Online Page A

with fidgety hands, a red bow tie. He closes the door behind him, but not all the way, hurries over to Mrs. Waugh, the office secretary, whispers something in her ear. She shakes her head disapprovingly, either at what he just told her or at him. With an anxious backward glance, he exits. I reimmerse myself in the Handbook, wait for Mrs. Waugh’s fingers to start tapping on the computer keyboard again. When they do, I close the Handbook, stand, begin walking toward the door like I’m in search of better light. Then, casually, I prop myself against the wall opposite.
    The crack in the door is narrow. I can’t see much through it, and what I can see tells me what I already know: that the room is an office, and that the angry-voiced person is indeed male and young. He’s pacing back and forth, his gait lurching, wobbly. It takes me a second to put together that he’s drunk, and I wonder if when Mr. Flynn scurried off, it was to get campus security. A slice of his body isvisible, but none of his head. I’m starting to think I’ll never get a good look at him when he pauses to bend over, peel the thick fabric of his jeans from the backs of his knees. And for a brief moment, I have an unobstructed view of his face. Damon Cruz.
    Damon Cruz is a day student—at least, was. He graduated in June, same as me. The term “day student” at Chandler is a tricky one to get a handle on because it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, i.e. a student who spends his days at Chandler, his nights elsewhere. Not only, anyway. It also means a student who is on scholarship. When Reverend Chandler was writing the school’s constitution, he included a clause stating that ten percent of the student body “must come from the community’s deserving poor.” At Chandler’s inception, “the community’s deserving poor” were, for the most part, the Polish immigrants or the children of the Polish immigrants who settled in droves in Sheldon/Charter Oak in the late nineteenth century to take jobs at the local factories, manufacturers of firearms and horseshoe nails principally. But demographics have shifted radically in the last couple of decades. Hartford is now a predominantly black city with the second-fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the nation. Another thing it comes second in: poverty. The area’s gone from working class—those factories shut their doors a long time ago—to under the underclass. So what was once a gap between the day students and the boarders is a gap no longer, it’s a chasm.
    There are day students, however, who manage to cross it. These students usually fit a certain profile—male, excel at a sport, come off as dangerous but not outright scary. Sex appeal doesn’t hurt either. Damon could have been a crossover if he wanted. He was a star baseball player, a little standoffish, known to have a temper. His sophomore year, he punched a rival player in the face during a game, earning himself the nickname Demon and a two-week suspension from the team. (The incident received a fair amount of coverage, not just in the school paper but in the Hartford Courant as well. The suspension was originally for the rest of the season, then got dropped down, andthere were people who felt the reduction was sending a bad message, was practically condoning hooliganism, according to one editorial.) He was good at school, too, which I knew because we were in AP calculus together for a week before a scheduling conflict forced me to switch to another section.
    Apparently Damon didn’t want to cross over, though. Any time I saw him on campus he was hanging out with other day students or with guys on the baseball team, a team pretty much entirely composed of day students. I remember he was going to college, UConn, the Honors Program, a popular option with smart day students since it offered a first-rate education on the comparative cheap. Was