Black Ice Read Online Free PDF Page B

round cheeks, glasses, and a big, fluffy Afro the color of old honey. “I hope you had a good trip.” She’d already taken in the knee socks, I could see that, and was now processing my “classic” getup in all its devoutly-wished-for understatement.
    “This is Alma’s first year,” said Mr. Price. “She came here from Memphis, Tennessee, and she’s in the Fourth Form.” He looked down at her.
    “Oh, you must miss home,” my mother said.
    “Yes, ma’am, I do.”
    “And it’s a lot colder than you must be used to,” Mama said. “Is that all you wear?”
    Like the other students, Alma sported a jacket. We, of course, were swaddled in everything but buffalo hide.
    “Yes, ma’am. They told me it was going to be cold up here, but nobody told me it would be
this
cold!”
    I could see that Alma was a little feisty for my mother’s taste in teenagers, but Mama couldn’t help but go for that “ma’am” stuff. Mr. Price tried to steer Alma back to a proper discussion. “Now, Alma, aside from climate considerations, are you enjoying your first year here? Your classes, sports, activities?”
    Alma giggled and rolled her eyes. Nope, she did not dig this place. She’d signified it, OK, and now I waited to hear the words that would disavow her look.
    “Well, naw, not really, Mr. Price.” She burst into quick laughter, but she stuck to her story. “I mean, this is an
excellent
education. The best. But ‘like it’? I don’t know if those would be my exact words.”
    I watched her leave, jealous of the cool disdain with which she looked up at Mr. Price and the way she bounded over the ice when she left, careless and confident as a cat.
    We waved gingerly in Alma’s direction. Then we turned, arms still locked, to begin our ascent. By the time we made it safely into the building, I had begun to sweat into my layers of wool.
    We walked through a cold, bright cloister. On black iron hooks along the windows, jackets were hung to chill while their owners ate. We folded our coats—these were our good coats we were wearing—and laid them on benches by a wall that was covered with oak panels carved, like the panels in the Schoolhouse, with the names of graduates. Heaps of textbooks and paperbacks lay scattered on benches and the floor. Like toppling cairns they led us to the dining room.
    The lunch line snaked through the Upper Common Room, past the formal dining hall with its dark, high-backed chairs and forbidding portraits, and into the kitchen. We collected trays and battered silver-plate utensils. In our turn we stepped up to be served. Behind a long steam table stood the poorest-looking white people I’d ever seen. These were residents of a state training school for the mentally retarded, Mr. Price explained. During the school terms they worked with the food-service staff and boarded in rooms above the kitchen. Students, for some reason, referred to them as wombats.
    “But aside from that rather predictable teenage cruelty,” said Mr. Price, “the kids, on the whole, treat the staff with at least a modicum of respect.”
    “Nice hot soup,” said one of the women. Her teeth were rotten, and she showed them when she smiled.
    It seemed wrong for these people to stand there, separated from us by chrome and glass and crusted-over sheet pans. It seemed wrong for them to remain stunted in the presence of growing, budding, blooming talent, able only to feed the young aristocrats who would go away and forget them. I took the bowl from the woman with the medieval mouth. There seemed nothing else I could do. Soup, thick with cornstarch, sloshed onto my thumb, and the woman apologized fast, like a child who has been beaten.
    “Lost your appetite, eh?” Lee Bouton sat across from me at the lunch table. She was a year or two older than I, long and lean and unhurried. Her beige face was framed with nearly black hair, thick and wiry, pulled back into a big, Africanized bun. I would never have guessed—almost no one