Chapter 4
The next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the
ocean I had expected, but as a strange gray thing, like sunshine seen through burlap. I looked
over to see if Phineas was awake. He was still asleep, although in this drained light he looked
more dead than asleep. The ocean looked dead too, dead gray waves hissing mordantly along the
beach, which was gray and dead-looking itself.
I turned over and tried to sleep again but couldn’t, and so lay on my back looking at this gray
burlap sky. Very gradually, like one instrument after another being tentatively rehearsed,
beacons of color began to pierce the sky. The ocean perked up a little from the reflection of these
colored slivers in the sky. Bright high lights shone on the tips of waves, and beneath its gray
surface I could see lurking a deep midnight green. The beach shed its deadness and became a
spectral gray-white, then more white than gray, and finally it was totally white and stainless, as
pure as the shores of Eden. Phineas, still asleep on his dune, made me think of Lazarus, brought
back to life by the touch of God.
I didn’t contemplate this transformation for long. Inside my head, for as long as I could
remember, there had always been a sense of time ticking steadily. I looked at the sky and the
ocean and knew that it was around six-thirty. The ride back to Devon would take three hours at
least. My important test, trigonometry, was going to be held at ten o’clock.
Phineas woke up talking. “That was one of the best night’s sleep I ever had.”
“When did you ever have a bad one?”
“The time I broke my ankle in football. I like the way this beach looks now. Shall we have a
morning swim?”
“Are you crazy? It’s too late for that.”
“What time is it anyway?” Finny knew I was a walking clock.
“It’s going on seven o’clock.”
“There’s time for just a short swim,” and before I could say anything he was trotting down the
beach, shedding clothes as he went, and into the ocean. I waited for him where I was. He came
back after a while full of chilly glow and energy and talk. I didn’t have much to say. “Do you
have the money?” I asked once, suddenly suspecting that he had lost our joint seventy-five cents
during the night. There was a search, a hopeless one, in the sand, and so we set off on the long
ride back without any breakfast, and got to Devon just in time for my test. I flunked it; I knew I
was going to as soon as I looked at the test problems. It was the first test I had ever flunked.
But Finny gave me little time to worry about that. Eight after lunch there was a game of blitzball
which took most of the afternoon, and right after dinner there was the meeting of the Super
Suicide Society of the Summer Session.