Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [23]
At Deerfield I made my first close American friends: George “Gig” Faux, from outside Boston; Chip Smith, a preppy New Englander; and Perry Vella, who had come on a scholarship from Queens, New York. My classmates knew my background, but they did not stand on ceremony. To them, I was just Abdullah or, as they more often called me, “Ab.” Deerfield allowed me to have a normal childhood and gave me the tools to turn into the man I needed to become. To this day, some of my closest friends are my old Deerfield classmates.
Since Jordan was too far to go for anything but the longer holidays, I spent many vacations with Gig and his family. Halfway around the world from home, I valued the chance to spend time in a family atmosphere. Back then you had to schedule an international phone call days in advance, so I managed to speak to my father only once or twice a semester.
My security guards lived close by, in a house on the edge of campus. They gave me an early taste for “covert action”: I used to delight in finding new and innovative ways to escape from the dorm at night without being observed. Although we did not often succeed, it provided great training for Gig and me when in our senior year we became dorm proctors. By that point we knew most of the tricks, sometimes the hard way. Gig’s father was an air force fighter pilot, and Gig had somehow managed to get his hands on a military distress flare. Curious to see how it worked, one night we snuck out of our dorms along with two other friends and set the thing off. The flare soared through the New England night, illuminating the campus with a bright red glow, and headed toward the white-pillared entrance to the Old Gym, a magnificent, sturdy building that housed the squash courts and wrestling facilities. Panicked that it would burn down the gym and maybe hit the neighboring dining hall, we sprinted toward the building as fast as we could. I can still remember my relief when we figured out that the flare had shot over the roof of the gym and landed in the playing field.
Although my guards had not been terribly useful in protecting me from the other students at Eaglebrook, they did have one overwhelming virtue: their own car. Gig and I would ask them to take us to his parents’ house whenever we had a long weekend. The first time we visited, Gig’s parents were a little nervous to see us pull up in a car accompanied by armed bodyguards. Thankfully, Gig’s younger brother Chris broke the tension as I got out of the car—by shooting me with a BB gun. After that, we all laughed and relaxed into the chaotic family atmosphere of the Faux home. Gig’s mother, Mary, an Italian American, had cooked a delicious lasagna that I would come to know well. After each visit, she would give us a large tray to take back with us to Deerfield, and to this day I cannot eat anyone else’s lasagna.
One of my favorite teachers was Dan Hodermarsky, the exuberant, white-bearded head of the art department. He was a warm, gregarious character and beloved by many of the students. Like so many of the Deerfield teachers, “Hodo” looked after us as if we were his own, often delighting in our antics but reeling us in with gentle admonitions.
When it came time for him to go to high school, Feisal, not wanting to forever be known as “Abdullah’s younger brother,” decided not to follow me to Deerfield. When we were children he was determined to do everything the opposite of me. If I wore a T-shirt and jeans, he would wear a suit. Very academic and gifted at math, he went to high school at St. Albans in Washington, D.C., before studying electrical engineering at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After Brown, he forever differentiated himself from me by attending the Royal Air Force College in Cranwell, England,