The Starboard Sea: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

Squire to watch Platoon . My clothes still needed to be put away, and I had to throw some sheets on my bed if I didn’t want to sleep on a plastic mattress. Classes were beginning the next day, and I wanted to check over my schedule.
As I crossed campus, I looked up and tried to find Orion. Celestial navigation was never my strong suit, and as I stood on the lawn in front of my new dorm, a sudden loneliness hit me. Cal was dead and I was at a new school, running around, wearing shoes without socks, and picking stars out of the sky. I stood there for some time, with my face up, not really searching for anything.

TWO
    My dorm room was a large single. No roommate. I suspected my father probably had his hand in this, but as I slid across the hardwood floor, past a row of bay windows that looked out onto the harbor, I almost didn’t mind Dad throwing his weight around. Best of all, I had access to a fire escape. My own balcony. At Kensington, Cal and I had chosen to live together in the same room for three years. A white oak stood outside our window, and at night we climbed down the trunk and sneaked into town. We went to an all-night truck stop, the Starry Diner, and loaded up on cheeseburgers and french fries with white gravy. We complimented the waitresses, no matter what they looked like, and they gave us large pieces of warm sugar cream pie. Other times, if we had something to drink, we would just hang out in the tree, passing Cal’s pewter hip flask back and forth and swinging our legs beneath us. We picked out thin branches and dared each other to climb up on them. No one ever caught us, but one spring we came back from holiday and discovered that the tree had been trimmed back. The main branch that ran by our window was stumped in half. Cal took this measure as a personal affront. He demanded that we take action. The next afternoon, we jacked up one of the athletic vans, took two tires, brought them to a garage to have them removed from their wheels, and borrowed rope from the gymnasium. We suspended a pair of tree swings. One for each of us.
    Pleased with my new room, I went to work hanging clothes on wooden hangers and fitting sheets onto my bed. I tacked up a poster of the Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey . The poster had been on display over Cal’s headboard and was a constant source of tension. I thought the movie was unwatchable. Cal thought the movie was about him. He was the ape discovering tools, he was the computer who knew what was best, he was the mysterious monolith, he was the abandoned astronaut. The poster was the only wall hanging I’d taken from Kensington.
    I tossed a shaving kit filled with miniature bottles of whiskey into the top drawer of my dresser. The whiskey probably wasn’t enough to get me kicked out of Bellingham but, even so, I hid the black mesh case under a mound of socks. Then I pushed the bureau and mirror next to my closet. I’d almost left behind a Polaroid of Cal I’d snapped after a long day of sailing. When I took the photo, Cal was standing at the end of a pier with his wet suit unrolled to his hips. In the picture that developed, the white border cropped Cal’s body at the waist. With no evidence of the pier beneath him or the clothes he wore, Cal appeared to hover above the water completely nude. I kept the picture hidden from my friend and used it as a bookmark. Now, as I stood in front of my dresser, I tucked the snapshot of Cal into the corner of the mirror, then I stretched out on my new bed, kicked off my shoes, and made a conscious decision to fall asleep, wearing my clothes and with the light still on.
    I woke up to a man standing over me. A short guy, but solid and fit. His hair and eyebrows were the type of light blond that looked ridiculous on anyone other than a small child.
    “I didn’t realize you were sleeping. I’m Mr. Tripp, your house fellow.” The man had his dinner jacket on but had removed his tie. His feet were bare. He smelled as though