Knowing that nothing cheered up the Colonel like acknowledging his brilliance, I asked, “So how’d you hack the
network?”
“I climbed in the window of Dr. Kabir’s office, booted up his computer, and I typed in his password,” he said,
smiling.
“You guessed it?”
“No. On Tuesday I went into his office and asked him to print me a copy of the recommended reading list. And
then I watched him type the password: J3ckylnhyd3.”
“Well, shit,” Tanu said. “I could have done that.”
“Sure, but then you wouldn’t have gotten to wear that sexy hat,” the Colonel said, laughing. Tanu took the
headband off and put it in his bag.
“Karan is going to be pissed about his hair,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I’m really pissed about my waterlogged library. Karan is a blowup doll,” Rosy said. “Prick us, we
bleed. Prick him, he pops.”
“It’s true,” said Tanu. “The guy is a dick. He kind of tried to kill you, after all.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I acknowledged.
“There are a lot of people here like that,” Rosy went on, still fuming. “You know? Fucking blowup-doll rich kids.”
But even though Karan had sort of tried to kill me and all, he really didn’t seem worth hating. Hating the cool kids takes an awful lot of energy, and I’d given up on it a long time ago. For me, the prank was just a response to a previous prank, just a golden opportunity to, as the Colonel said, wreak a little havoc. But to Rosy, it seemed to be something else, something more.
I wanted to ask her about it, but she lay back down behind the piles of hay, invisible again. Rosy was done talking, and when she was done talking, that was it. We didn’t coax her out for two hours, until the Colonel unscrewed a bottle of wine. We passed around the bottle till I could feel it in my stomach, sour and warm.
I wanted to like booze more than I actually did (which is more or less the precise opposite of how I felt about Rosy). But that night, the booze felt great, as the warmth of the wine in my stomach spread through my body. I didn’t like feeling stupid or out of control, but I liked the way it made everything (laughing, crying, peeing in front of your friends) easier. Why did we drink? For me, it was just fun, particularly since we were risking expulsion.
The nice thing about the constant threat of expulsion at Arya is that it lends excitement to every moment of illicit pleasure. The bad thing, of course, is that there is always the possibility of actual expulsion.
two days before
I woke up earlythe next morning, my lips dry and my breath visible in the crisp air. Tanu had brought a camp stove in his backpack, and the Colonel was huddled over it, heating instant coffee. The sun shone bright but could not combat the cold, and I sat with the Colonel and sipped the coffee (“The thing about instant coffee is that it smells pretty good but tastes like stomach bile,” the Colonel said), and then one by one, Tanu and Kiara and Rosy woke up, and we spent the day hiding out, but loudly. Hiding out loud. At the barn that afternoon, Tanu decided we needed to have a freestyle contest. “You start, Pudge,” Tanu said. “Colonel Catastrophe, you’re our beat box.” “Dude, I can’t rap,” I pled.
“That’s okay. The Colonel can’t drop beats, either. Just try and rhyme a little and then send it over to me.”
With his hand cupped over his mouth, the Colonel started to make absurd noises that sounded more like farting than bass beats, and I, uh, rapped.
“Um, we’re sittin’ in the barn and the sun’s goin’ down / when I was a kid at Burger King I wore a crown / dude, I can’t rhyme for shit / so I’ll let my boy Tanu rip it.”