Read Online The Starboard Sea: A Novel by Amber Dermont - Free Book Online

bugged me even more that I cared. I’d known Taze for almost as long as I’d known Cal. The three of us had been friends. Even if Tazewell was nothing more than a stoner prick, a high-class jerk, an asshole, I’d taken it for granted that we were loyal members of the same tribe of assholes.
Near the end of August, I was relieved, grateful even to return to my room, after a late evening nap in the library only to find Taze stretched out on my bed, a six-pack of Heineken sweating beside him.
“You shanked, my friend.” Tazewell kicked his sneakers over my comforter, shedding a line of sandy dust. Dressed entirely in black with a knit hat covering his blond hair, he looked like a restless eel waiting for his skin to recharge.
“Shanked how?” I asked.
“You get cut and vanish, just like that.” He took out a key chain, clicked a church key over the bottle cap, and handed me a beer.
The bottle felt cold and soothing in my hand. I worried that I was being set up for something. Hiding my fear, I took a long pull off the beer then brushed the dirt from my comforter.
“As I was never actually on the team, I couldn’t, technically, be cut.”
“I’m just capping on you, that’s all.” Taze cracked open his own beer. “Thought you might like to venture out this evening.”
“It’s twenty minutes until lights-out.” We were both being overly casual, drinking cheap imported beer, but I wasn’t sure about breaking curfew.
“What are you? A narc?” Tazewell swung his shoes off my bed. “I own this dorm. Wear something black.”
If Tazewell was setting me up for a final round of hazing, I could either take my licks or confront him. I decided to play along and see where the night took us.
“You going to brief me at least?”
“I’ve lined up a Suzy Nightlife for you,” Taze smiled.
“A what?”
“Some action. I figured it was about time you broke out of your shell.” Tazewell rummaged through my closet and took out a charcoal pullover. “Put this on and let’s jam.” He took his beer and left my room without waiting to see if I’d follow.
I threw on the sweater and opened my window, ensuring that I’d be able to sneak back inside.
It hadn’t taken me long to realize that curfew at Bellingham was more of a suggestion then a hard-and-fast rule. The school failed to employ any nighttime campus patrol and students signed in not with their house parents but with other students. On my hallway, the proctor was a senior named Yazid Yazid, an international student whose family owned the largest tractor corporation in Saudi Arabia. Yazid had a killer British accent, a closet full of bespoke Savile Row suits and a well-heeled cannabis habit. He wore his thick brown hair in a frizzy high-top, twisting his Afro into curly springs that shot out from his head like exclamation points. “I’m so nice,” Yazid Yazid would say, “they named me twice.”
Yazid had been forced out of his luxe London boarding school for smoking hash. If I’d had to guess, I’d have imagined that Yazid was probably the wealthiest kid at Bellingham. His family had purchased a giant parcel of land two towns over, converting a fallow field into an actual airport all for the convenience of flying their son home to Riyadh. Yazid held private hookah parties in his room and lectured extensively on what he termed the “hashish system of value”—his ranking of countries based on the quality of their cannabis crop. “Pakistan,” Yazid told me. “Pakistan is the shit.”
I had some interest in working out a friendship with Yazid, not just for his drugs but mostly because he seemed cool and untouchable. Like he didn’t have a care in the world. I cared too much about everything. Maybe I wanted to study Yazid and learn how to care a little less.
The one thing Yazid resented was being given the active responsibility of hall proctor. To avoid any real work, Yazid kept a fresh sheet of paper tacked to his door. We could initial the check-in list at