The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [86]
Almost didn’t recognize. Tellman Rose. 1 yr ahead of me. Pella Affenlight.
Affenlight, Affenlight?
Rick confirmed this relation with a nod. WILD, he wrote. Also crazy.
Meaning what? Been there?
Not me.
Shocking, Starblind wrote.
Rick ignored the insult. Ran off with dude who came to lecture on Greek architecture. He went back and inserted old bearded before dude.
Heard she had a bunch of kids.
Starblind glanced across the room, nodded thoughtfully. Could explain the tits.
Henry was mostly ignoring this exchange, which had spilled over its original scrap of paper to cover a full page of his five-subject notebook. Mostly he was looking out the window, wondering whether it would rain. He could feel some part of himself willing it to rain. He’d never quite discarded the childhood belief that he could alter the course of distant or natural events with his mind. Westish Field was already early-April soggy; fifteen minutes of steady rain would probably suffice to postpone the game. The sky was growing darker by the second. A grainy electric grayness accumulated in the room, matching in tone the scratch and crackle of the old cassette player. When T. S. Eliot began to read the part about what the thunder said, Henry, who’d skimmed his homework and knew the thunder was coming, nonetheless assumed it to be a sign of his own unconscious influence. Da da da shantih shantih shantih and soon the sky would crack open and rain would whip the field and he wouldn’t have to go out there and try to throw the ball today. But instead the room’s light brightened half a shade as Eliot’s voice crackled into quietness, and Professor Eglantine dismissed the class. He and Rick and Starblind shouldered their backpacks and headed for the exit.
“Henry?” said a female voice—quiet, cautious, inquisitive, but no less startling for that. Henry froze in the doorway. Doomful scenarios skipped through his brain. It was Professor Eglantine, addressing him directly for the first time all semester: he should at least have read his Iliad paper after Schwartzy rewrote it. Schwartz had a tendency to show off, to throw in old foreign words with letters Henry couldn’t even find in Microsoft Word. Cheating would get him kicked off the team and maybe out of Westish. It couldn’t prevent him from being drafted, only continuing to play like crap could accomplish that, but teams did take into account what they called “character”—all week he’d been staying late after practice to take weird multiple-choice personality exams administered by scouts from different teams.
If one of your teammates told you he had raped someone, what would you do?
What’s your favorite thing about money?
If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?
It was sheer laziness not to have reread the paper and rephrased the parts that sounded like Schwartzy; he was usually much more careful about that kind of thing.
“Henry?” said the voice again, nearer now, even more tentative, and Henry realized it wasn’t Professor Eglantine at all but rather Pella Affenlight, standing there bookless. “Are you Henry Skrimshander?”
Henry nodded dumbly.
She told him her name. “I figured you had to be Henry. Mike’s told me a lot about you.”
“Oh.” Henry felt a touch disappointed. He’d been ready to believe this exotic stranger just happened to know who he was; he’d been in the local news a lot lately. “You know