The Raising Read Online Free PDF Page A

Rice Auditorium, the leafy Commons with its marble benches. What could Dartmouth have that this school didn’t?
    “It’s selective ,” Craig had said. “It’s private. Not a jock-ocracy,” waving his hand around at the walls of their room.
    But for Perry, this was like a dream of being in college. The heavy books with their translucently thin pages. The gregarious professors and the unsmiling ones. The fat columns of the library, and the crammed stacks of books inside it.
    The smell between those narrow walls of books was, Perry felt, the smell of rumination itself. Decades of reason and reflection. He checked out books that had nothing to do with the classes he was taking, just to be able to bring the heft and the scent of them back to the dorm with him. A Handbook of Classical Physics. A History of the Anglo-Saxons.
    “Huh?” Craig asked. “How’d you get like this, man—all romantic about it all?”
    “I don’t know, man ,” Perry said, dragging out the man in imitation of that East Coast accent. “How’d you get so fucking cynical?”
    “Native intelligence. Born with it,” Craig said without missing a beat. He never missed a beat. He had a whole encyclopedia of comebacks on the tip of his tongue at all times.
    “Is it a burden,” Perry asked, “being so much better than everyone else? Or is it pleasing?”
    “I’m so used to it by now,” Craig said, “I really couldn’t say.”
    Perry sat down on his own bed and unzipped his backpack. You could have drawn a line straight down the center of the room. Every time some piece of Craig’s laundry or a magazine or a discarded protein bar wrapper inched over onto Perry’s side, he carefully pushed it back over to Craig’s side with his foot.
    “Your mom called,” Craig said. “I told her you were out trying to score some heroin, but you’d be back in an hour or so.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Here,” Craig said. “You can call her from my cell in the lounge if you want some privacy.” He tossed the phone, slightly larger than a matchbook and just as thin, to Perry. It had been a source of endless surprise to Craig Clements-Rabbitt that Perry didn’t own a cell phone and was dependent on the antique mounted to the wall of their room. Craig did not, himself, even know their phone number, and had only touched the telephone in the room to take calls for Perry.
    “Thanks,” Perry said. He took the phone, stood, and closed the door behind him.
    “M om?”
    There was no one else in the second-floor lounge, so Perry lay back on the blue couch, careful to keep his shoes from touching the cushions.
    He and his mother talked about his classes, his grandfather, his father’s business—a lawn mower shop, the best one in town—and about the weather, which had been beautiful. The leaves in Bad Axe had changed dramatically already, she said, and were starting to fall, and she joked that she supposed she was going to have to do the raking now, with Perry at college.
    “I can come home for a weekend,” he said, “if I can get a ride.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother said. “We can handle the leaves. You just get good grades.”
    Perry was an only child—except that there’d been another, a sister before him, who’d died at birth, a baby his mother had never once spoken of to him. The only reason Perry knew about her was because his grandmother, when he was nine, had decided Perry needed to know.
    Since he’d been a toddler, Perry’d had an imaginary sister whose name was Mary.
    He was getting too old for imaginary playmates, his grandmother told him one day, and God knows what it must be doing to his parents, listening to him in his room, talking for hours to that imaginary girl. Unlike the other adults in Perry’s life, Grandma Edwards pulled no punches just because he was a child. She was the one who’d told him that his grandfather had been an alcoholic, and that his Uncle Benny took after him, a slobbering drunk, and that’s why he