Read Online The Game Player by Rafael Yglesias - Free Book Online Page B

time, since we had won thirty-one of them, and it had become boring even for the winners.
    Brian once told me that Danny’s best team was the first I had played against. He spent an hour comparing the statistics of the players Danny had that year against when they played for Brian in later years. They had played better for Brian.
    We were older when he told me this and I remember how it irritated me even then, though I should have grown used to it, that such a terrifying competitor, hell-bent on personal triumph, could make such good use of people.

4
    It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.
    â€”John Locke
    M Y INTENSE STUDY of Brian ended once school began. There was too much going on independent of him for me to continue perceiving him as an authority, a god whose whimsical displeasure might ruin me. My attitude that summer was an oddity, because I regarded him the way I was accustomed to feeling about my father or my teachers in school.
    He was still the most important boy in our junior high. He was captain of both our baseball and basketball teams as well as being a straight-A student in every subject except art. He only got a B in that and I think it was looked on by others as a further mark of his genius. Only drips got an A in art, unless, of course, you were a pretty girl.
    I liked that school a lot. I got along very well with the girls because their sexuality hadn’t deepened into adolescence, when I could feel the swing in interest from boys like me to boys like Brian. My marks were good: A’s in English, history, and—yes—art; B’s in science and math, except for the year we took biology. I hated dissection and loathed the teacher, a Dostoevsky character whose ill-fitting jacket exposed his reddish wrists and hands. But I loved one of my English teachers, Mr. Lindon, whom all the students thought eccentric because of his outbursts about the misuse of language. He introduced me to the Oxford English Dictionary, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and the twenty-ninth sonnet of Shakespeare, which he demanded we memorize. I had the best of both worlds: the friendship of girls because of my early realization that being tough was regarded by them as childishness; and the respect of both intellectuals (meaning good English students) and jocks, because of my friendship with Brian.
    I have discovered that almost everyone else hated those three years. They begin with the shock of puberty and end with the beginnings of the first throes of adolescence. Indeed, the last few months of ninth were scary. There was the complicated and frightening problem of choosing high schools. During the last month of junior high, Brian told me his father wanted him to go to Staunton, an exclusive private boarding school. Brian had taken the test and done the interview—and, of course, they wanted him.
    I was sitting at my desk when he told me. In front of me was a copy of Macbeth, the subject of our test tomorrow. I looked at the drawing of Shakespeare on the cover and felt my stomach give into the nervousness of not having Brian, that great ocean liner in whose tow I had been sweetly cradled through the aggressiveness of male competition, to usher me through the next four years of what I already knew would be an agony of sexual pursuit. I heard a slight tremble in my voice when I asked where it was and other details, as if I were resigned to his going. He answered them without any hint as to his attitude. His voice, as always, had that hard, precise tone, absolutely neutral about its intentions.
    â€œIt sounds like a great school,” I said after hearing a description of its graduates’ accomplishments.
    â€œYeah, but if you’re a top student at Hills,” Brian said, referring to the fairly elegant public school of our area, “you can get into any university.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œSure.”
    I was pleased at this news.