It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

The next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the ocean I had expected, but as a strange gray thing, like sunshine seen through burlap. I looked over to see if Phineas was awake. He was still asleep, although in this drained light he looked more dead than asleep. The ocean looked dead too, dead gray waves hissing mordantly along the beach, which was gray and dead-looking itself.

I turned over and tried to sleep again but couldn’t, and so lay on my back looking at this gray burlap sky. Very gradually, like one instrument after another being tentatively rehearsed, beacons of color began to pierce the sky. The ocean perked up a little from the reflection of these colored slivers in the sky. Bright high lights shone on the tips of waves, and beneath its gray surface I could see lurking a deep midnight green. The beach shed its deadness and became a spectral gray-white, then more white than gray, and finally it was totally white and stainless, as pure as the shores of Eden. Phineas, still asleep on his dune, made me think of Lazarus, brought back to life by the touch of God.

I didn’t contemplate this transformation for long. Inside my head, for as long as I could remember, there had always been a sense of time ticking steadily. I looked at the sky and the ocean and knew that it was around six-thirty. The ride back to Devon would take three hours at least. My important test, trigonometry, was going to be held at ten o’clock.

Phineas woke up talking. “That was one of the best night’s sleep I ever had.”

“When did you ever have a bad one?”

“The time I broke my ankle in football. I like the way this beach looks now. Shall we have a morning swim?”

“Are you crazy? It’s too late for that.”

“What time is it anyway?” Finny knew I was a walking clock.

“It’s going on seven o’clock.”

“There’s time for just a short swim,” and before I could say anything he was trotting down the beach, shedding clothes as he went, and into the ocean. I waited for him where I was. He came back after a while full of chilly glow and energy and talk. I didn’t have much to say. “Do you have the money?” I asked once, suddenly suspecting that he had lost our joint seventy-five cents during the night. There was a search, a hopeless one, in the sand, and so we set off on the long ride back without any breakfast, and got to Devon just in time for my test. I flunked it; I knew I was going to as soon as I looked at the test problems. It was the first test I had ever flunked.

But Finny gave me little time to worry about that. Eight after lunch there was a game of blitzball which took most of the afternoon, and right after dinner there was the meeting of the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session.

That night in our room, even though I was worn out from all the exercise, I tried to catch up to what had been happening in trigonometry.

“You work too hard,” Finny said, sitting opposite me at the table where we read. The study lamp cast a round yellow pool between us. “You know all about History and English and French and everything else. What good will Trigonometry do you?”

“I’ll have to pass it to graduate, for one thing.”

“Don’t give me that line. Nobody at Devon has ever been surer of graduating than you are. You aren’t working for that. You want to be head of the class, valedictorian, so you can make a speech on Graduation Day—in Latin or something boring like that probably—and be the boy wonder of the school. I know you.”

“Don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t waste my time on anything like that.”

“You never waste your time. That’s why I have to do it for you.”

“Anyway,” I grudgingly added, “somebody’s got to be the head of the class.”

“You see, I knew that’s what you were aiming at,” he concluded quietly.

“Fooey.”

What if I was. It was a pretty good goal to have, it seemed to me. After all, he should talk. He had won and been proud to win the Galbraith Football Trophy and the Contact Sport Award, and there were two or three other athletic prizes he was sure to get this year or next. If I was head of the class on Graduation Day and made a speech and won the Ne Plus Ultra Scholastic Achievement Citation, then we would both have come out on top, we would be even, that was all. We would be even….

Was that it! My eyes snapped from the textbook toward him. Did he notice this sudden glance shot across the pool of light? He didn’t seem to; he went on writing down his strange curlicue notes about Thomas Hardy in Phineas Shorthand. Was that it! With his head bent over in the lamplight I could discern a slight mound in his brow above the eyebrows, the faint bulge which is usually believed to indicate mental power. Phineas would be the first to disclaim any great mental power in himself. But what did go on in his mind? If I was the head of the class and won that prize, then we would be even….

His head started to come up, and mine snapped down. I glared at the textbook. “Relax,” he said. “Your brain’ll explode if you keep this up.”

“You don’t need to worry about me, Finny.”

“I’m not worried.”

“You wouldn’t—” I wasn’t sure I had the control to put this question—”mind if I wound up head of the class, would you?”

“Mind?” Two clear green-blue eyes looked at me. “Fat chance you’ve got, anyway, with Chet Douglass around.”

“But you wouldn’t mind, would you?” I repeated in a lower and more distinct voice.

He gave me that half-smile of his, which had won him a thousand conflicts. “I’d kill myself out of jealous envy.”

I believed him. The joking manner was a screen; I believed him. In front of my eyes the trigonometry textbook blurred into a jumble. I couldn’t see. My brain exploded. He minded, despised the possibility that I might be the head of the school. There was a swift chain of explosions in my brain, one certainty after another blasted—up like a detonation went the idea of any best friend, up went affection and partnership and sticking by someone and relying on someone absolutely in the jungle of a boys’ school, up went the hope that there was anyone in this school—in this world—whom I could trust. “Chet Douglass,” I said uncertainly, “is a sure thing for it.”

My misery was too deep to speak any more. I scanned the page; I was having trouble breathing, as though the oxygen were leaving the room. Amid its devastation my mind flashed from thought to thought, despairingly in search of something left which it could rely on. Not rely on absolutely, that was obliterated as a possibility, just rely on a little, some solace, something surviving in the ruins.

I found it. I found a single sustaining thought. The thought was, You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity. You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone. You did hate him for breaking that school swimming record, but so what? He hated you for getting an A in every course but one last term. You would have had an A in that one except for him. Except for him.

Then a second realization broke as clearly and bleakly as dawn at the beach. Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies. That explained blitzball, that explained the nightly meetings of the Super Suicide Society, that explained his insistence that I share all his diversions. The way I believed that you’re-my-best-friend blabber! The shadow falling across his face if I didn’t want to do something with him! His instinct for sharing everything with me? Sure, he wanted to share everything with me, especially his procession of D’s in every subject. That way he, the great athlete, would be way ahead of me. It was all cold trickery, it was all calculated, it was all enmity.