Before Finny, in my first semesters at Devon, I'd encountered no real happiness; and by the same token, no particular unhappiness either. There had been work and organized play and weekly organized religion. I hadn't minded any of these and if I wasn't satisfied (or unsatisfied), being so hardly seemed to matter. I hadn't been sent to school for happiness.
Encountering Finny began my shift out of this docile limbo, showing a glimpse of the fresh, unorganized atmosphere in which he lived. I was ambivalent about it; it wasn't for me, but I liked the sight of him in it.
For a long while in the glamorous school days of Gene Forrester, Finny remained a bit player. He was seen, most days. It was nice to know him by name and to have an occasional hand-wave returned and that was about it. Our paths didn't cross in any serious way. He was not in the chess club; he was not in the math club. Our lives and interests failed to overlap. He was an acquaintance; by report a brainless athlete whose interests outside of play were short-lived and shallow-rooted.
Hearing this assessment, despite not really knowing him, I hadn't particularly accepted it. To my interested eye, he was an anomaly, an anomaly who possessed so much of what I lacked.
While drawn off balance by his appeal, by his crazy irresistible pull, that eye took in something else: what he lacked, I had.
His allure was strong but not yet one that would necessarily lead me anywhere. I would probably outgrow him and move on and away. He simply wasn't that much in my life; I didn't even know which dorm he slept in.
There was as yet no link forged, much less broken.
That changed suddenly. God moving in mysterious ways - or was it merely the perverse humor of a housemaster? - paired us in a dorm room new to us both.
Once roommates, his otherness was intimately in my face. His using my hair brush wasn't terrible, but mixing up toothbrushes accidentally (or not) was too close to a kiss - well, that's the way I looked at it. I sensed him wanting me to reciprocate. Eventually I halfheartedly caved and tepidly slipped one of his belts around my waist. On one occasion his school tie found its way around my neck. Since, naturally, I owned one too, it was undetectably not mine. I liked having it around my neck, but kept back from wearing it twice.
His odd presence became less odd. Or maybe I was becoming more - odd. Hearing his voice first thing in the morning, and last at night, occupying the same space so much of the time, left me, well, not exactly wanting to be rid of him.
I was conscious of having wandered into a mild, stable sort of happiness. This being a new and foreign sort of place for me, I thought it just was part of my growing up (which, truly, in part it was) but there was more to it than that. There was now another person in my life. He wasn't only a roommate - which was okay, I told myself. There was nothing illicit, forbidden about him, us. We were pure in intent. Meanwhile he was like a useful drug, almost addictive. Gradually (or had it been like that from the start?) he turned into someone I wanted, wanted as a … what? A friend? Wasn't he that already?
This unresolved confusion was painless enough. Things proceeded along these lines until the summer, when with most of the class gone home, our mutual focus increased, and on my side things fell all out of balance, and the tide of him rose in me, panicked me, then loosed all the hell I had in me, loosed it, then killed it.
Imagination never being my strong point, it never occurred to me that knowing him would lead toward knowing what made me tick and why.