Chapter 9

Nolan Pierce

Monday was the first day of actual classes, and by extension the first day I would spend a lot of time with people not on my floor. I was a little nervous when I woke up, but the combined shower/masturbation session with the guys on the hall calmed me down. If you had told me that a week earlier, I would have said you were nuts.

We had, of course, all compared schedules to see who had classes together. By a stroke of luck, a bunch of us had the same history class, but first I would have to make it through Geology with Finn and Jas.

Fortunately, Jas sat at the opposite end of the lecture hall from Finn and I. Finn was obviously more outgoing than me, so I relied on him to make introductions. I was particularly taken by a boy with an earring and an eyebrow piercing, who turned out to be named Tomas Rivera and from Denver. He had an extremely laid-back accent, the kind you associate with surfers, although his sport of choice turned out to be snowboarding.

The classroom fell silent as the teacher, Dr. Ellery, entered and stood at the front of the room. He gave a brief personal introduction of how he had fallen in love with geology, clambering over glacial erratics as a child in Maine, and then went around the room asking everyone to give their name and tell where they were from. As we went, he took notes on what we said, and when we’d all given our answers, he handed out syllabi. I looked mine over. We’d be assigned to lab groups via email, and our first assignment was to write a ten-page research paper on a geological feature in our hometowns – due the next Friday.

I also noticed that there would be several field trips over the course of the year, starting with a ‘field trip’ on campus the next week, and including a trip to a local abandoned quarry, a hunt for fossils at a nearby river, a visit to the Peabody Museum at Yale, and a weekend beach trip in the spring.

When Dr. Ellery finally dismissed the class, Finn and I hurried across campus to history, where Owen had saved me a seat within a larger block of guys from Beattie. After that class I went with Owen to Geometry, then German, then it was time for PE. It was the class I had been dreading most when I came to Wilson, but now I wasn’t worried about the showers at all.

The locker room itself was an older facility in the basement of Roosevelt, with well-worn wooden benches and a hissing radiator. I recognized Tomas and picked a locker next to him. The coach, a gruff ex-soccer player whose last name was Kavanagh but insisted on being called “Coach K” (I decided it was best not to mention that I was a die-hard Tar Heel) gave us a lecture about safety rules and then had us do warmups and run around the track. I hated running, but I did my best so as not to get scolded by Coach K.