“You wouldn’t—” I wasn’t sure I had the control to put this question—”mind if I wound up head
of the class, would you?”
“Mind?” Two clear green-blue eyes looked at me. “Fat chance you’ve got, anyway, with Chet
Douglass around.”
“But you wouldn’t mind, would you?” I repeated in a lower and more distinct voice.
He gave me that half-smile of his, which had won him a thousand conflicts. “I’d kill myself out
of jealous envy.”
I believed him. The joking manner was a screen; I believed him. In front of my eyes the
trigonometry textbook blurred into a jumble. I couldn’t see. My brain exploded. He minded,
despised the possibility that I might be the head of the school. There was a swift chain of
explosions in my brain, one certainty after another blasted—up like a detonation went the idea of
any best friend, up went affection and partnership and sticking by someone and relying on
someone absolutely in the jungle of a boys’ school, up went the hope that there was anyone in
this school—in this world—whom I could trust. “Chet Douglass,” I said uncertainly, “is a sure
thing for it.”
My misery was too deep to speak any more. I scanned the page; I was having trouble breathing,
as though the oxygen were leaving the room. Amid its devastation my mind flashed from thought
to thought, despairingly in search of something left which it could rely on. Not rely on
absolutely, that was obliterated as a possibility, just rely on a little, some solace, something
surviving in the ruins.
I found it. I found a single sustaining thought. The thought was, You and Phineas are even
already. You are even in enmity. You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone. You
did hate him for breaking that school swimming record, but so what? He hated you for getting an
A in every course but one last term. You would have had an A in that one except for him. Except
for him.
Then a second realization broke as clearly and bleakly as dawn at the beach. Finny had
deliberately set out to wreck my studies. That explained blitzball, that explained the nightly
meetings of the Super Suicide Society, that explained his insistence that I share all his diversions.
The way I believed that you’re-my-best-friend blabber! The shadow falling across his face if I
didn’t want to do something with him! His instinct for sharing everything with me? Sure, he
wanted to share everything with me, especially his procession of D’s in every subject. That way
he, the great athlete, would be way ahead of me. It was all cold trickery, it was all calculated, it
was all enmity.
I felt better. Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away; I felt better. We
were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all.
I became quite a student after that. I had always been a good one, although I wasn’t really
interested and excited by learning itself, the way Chet Douglass was. Now I became not just