The Expectations by Alexander Tilney

Author:Alexander Tilney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

“Ahmed insisted on ordering for us,” Hideo said. “He read that the bluefin tuna at this restaurant was ‘world-class,’ and so he would not let us get anything but that.”

Ben didn’t say anything for a while. “Was it good, though?”

Hideo didn’t answer right away. “It was so good.”

The next day, the campus was newly empty.

* * *

On a beautiful day, JV soccer was beating St. George’s 2–0, and Ben tried clumsily to take the ball from a clumsy forward with scalded red cheeks. Together they fractured what Ben would later learn was his fibula, the non-weight-bearing bone of his lower leg. Ben lay on his back looking up at the bright, placid sky, and the St. George’s kid stood nearby with his hands on his hips as though trying to figure out how to start an uncooperative machine. The turf was cold through the back of Ben’s jersey. He wasn’t feeling much pain but knew he couldn’t get up.

Mr. Falwell, the trainer, trundled onto the field with his orange plastic toolbox, and Ben looked at the common direction of all the hairs in his orange mustache and smelled his halitosis. He heard the chips of voices from the other fields and didn’t resent those kids for continuing despite his emergency. He wondered what Alice was doing.

Ben hopped off the field with his arms over Mr. Falwell’s and Greg Shelby’s necks. Both teams and the small crowd applauded, and it felt good to be admired for bearing up well under pain.

Mr. Falwell wrapped Ben’s leg in an air cast, and the team came up and patted him on the shoulder or neck and said he’d played tough. Ben stood on new crutches in the good-game-good-game line, and eventually the kid with the flushed cheeks came to him.

“Get well soon, all right?”

“Fuck you,” Ben said quietly enough so that only the two of them could hear it.

Mr. Falwell drove Ben to the hospital, and after a two-hour wait they put him in a hard cast and discharged him. On the way back to campus, Mr. Falwell smiled.

“Well, at least you get the cart.”

“The cart?”

“The golf cart.”

“There’s a golf cart?”

“Really? Sometimes I think kids get injured on purpose just to get the golf cart. A girl’s father bought it a few years ago when she tore her ACL.”

They drove to a shed behind the hockey rink. Mr. Falwell squinted at a tambourine-size ring of keys in the dark and tried three before he got the right one. Surrounded by shovels, extension cords, and a snowblower sat the golf cart, facing away from them as though in a bad mood. The key was in the ignition. Mr. Falwell sat, turned it on, and deftly backed it out of the shed as though he had spent a lot of time practicing by himself. Ben stood leaning on the crutches with his leg tucked up slightly, his hip flexor already starting to get tired. The cart was an ordinary little two-seater, just like the one his dad had let him drive the two times they had played golf with his squash buddies.

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