The Sixth Form

by Tom Dolby

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When seventeen-year-old Ethan Whitley leaves his home in California for Berkley Academy, a prestigious Massachusetts prep school, he's a blank slate, a shy follower of rules in search of himself. Ethan is given the chance to start over when he is hand-picked by his wealthy, disaffected classmate, Todd Eldon, and a seductive, enigmatic teacher, Hannah McClellan, a free spirit for whom rules were meant to be broken.

Life with Todd and Hannah is a revelation, an invitation to a world of privilege and desire. But looming over these heady evenings is the disturbing mystery of Hannah's fragmented past, one that Ethan longs desperately to understand.

As secrets are revealed, Ethan is pulled deep into the undertow of Hannah's history and Todd's longings. Soon, he learns that every deceit has a price, every lie is an ugly truth, and that those he has come to trust are people he doesn't know at all.

"In the tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, with just the right hint of Tom Brown's Schooldays, Dolby gives us a glimpse into the rarefied world of elite New England boarding schools and manages at the same time to say something new about adolescence, sexuality, and the way art can give us what we need to survive. --Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

"Dolby puts his own prep school experience to fine use in his second novel. . .beautifully observed." --Publishers Weekly

"A tender and funny novel." --David Ebershoff

Release date: December 30, 2008

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Before he met Todd, in those first few weeks at Berkley Academy, Ethan Whitley sought refuge in the cool calm of the art studios, amidst the smells of dried paint and eraser shavings. The heat had surprised him; Massachusetts in September was balmy, sweltering, mosquitoes buzzing around brackish pools, verdant lawns that spread for acres beyond the brick facades of Berkley’s Colonial campus. The advanced studios of the Stevenson Art Center were air-conditioned, a rare luxury for a school that prided itself on its Spartan, character-building accommodations. When he was working alone in these rooms, Ethan imagined that they protected him from all that lay waiting outside.

As he worked, he would think ahead to the next hour or two, safely tucking his portrait in his cubby, shuffling across the linoleum floor, walking upstairs, past the library, its fifty thousand volumes tempting him, across the inlaid marble of the school’s foyer, through its atrium of white columns and vaulted ceilings, out the French doors of the main building. His fellow classmates—he didn’t know their names; they were as anonymous as strangers in Grand Central Terminal—would lay sprawled on the grass under a cluster of birch trees like a clothing advertisement, a triple-page spread, their chlorinated blond locks falling lazily over their eyes, tanned legs, scratched in the right places (sports injuries, not clumsiness), skin free of blemishes. They lived in a world where people made witty remarks to each other, and no one worried too much about things like money or popularity or sex.

He was shocked then to find himself one evening, three weeks into the school year, sitting in a taxicab, a rattling old station wagon, barreling into town with Todd Eldon, a boy who lived on the floor above him. Five days earlier, Todd had burst into Ethan’s room with the force of a raid—Hands up! We know you have no friends, and we’re going to do something about it!—and asked him to summarize the week’s English reading, the first section of Jane Eyre. Since that evening, the friendship had progressed so effortlessly that Ethan had nearly forgotten those horrible weeks prior, the sitting alone in his room after check-in, staring at the Jackson Pollock poster he had tacked to the wall above his bed, dreading the mealtime ritual of finding people to sit with, making conversation, smiling politely even when everyone who was done got up to study or goof off in the dorms.

Now Todd rifled around in his messenger bag and pulled out a nearly empty pack of cigarettes, its crumbs of tobacco littering the backseat. “Need to get more on the way back,” he muttered.

Ethan felt his brow furrowing in disapproval, and he forced his visage to soften. He didn’t smoke and had always suspected that people who did were not to be trusted. The cab pulled into the gravel driveway of Wilton’s tearoom, one of a handful of places where students could eat in town, and Ethan reached for his wallet. Todd waved him away, signing the charge slip with a scribble.

The boys entered the tearoom and Todd greeted a young woman who was wiping down several of the tables, introducing her to Ethan as Laura. The room felt cozy, with yellow walls, ancient red tea canisters on high shelves, antique tables and chairs of varying sizes, a potted palm next to a fireplace. A group of girls from school, Fourth Formers, were chattering at the front table, occasionally giving the boys flirtatious glances; a local woman and her two children sat in the far corner. A sideboard held an assortment of desserts—fruit cobblers, pies, bread pudding, chocolate, pound, and carrot cakes. Ethan breathed in the deep warm aroma of vanilla and cardamom.

Madame Beauchamp, the old French lady who owned the tearoom, led them to a table near the window looking out on the back garden. They followed her, the wake of her old lady perfume trailing behind.

Laura came over and handed them menus. On the back were all the varieties of tea; on the front were the food selections. Ethan read the menu—soups, salads, sandwiches, scones—and then looked hungrily over at the cakes and pies on the sideboard.

The little that Ethan knew of Todd already made him feel inadequate. Todd had an older brother who had gone to Berkley, had apparently had numerous girlfriends (surely he had already had sex), played sports, and had grown up in New York City. Being from California, Ethan was embarrassed to admit that he had only been there once.

The door of the tearoom opened, bringing with it a burst of cool air, and in stepped a woman with flowing blond hair and light freckles on her cheeks. She wore a white dress and was carrying four boxes, the type used to carry baked goods. She was older than a student, but she didn’t quite look like a teacher, either.

“Just in time!” She brushed past the boys and placed the four boxes down on the counter of the open kitchen, smiling at Madame Beauchamp. “Carrot, cheesecake, blueberry cobbler, and a strawberry rhubarb. All fresh from the oven.”

Madame Beauchamp took the desserts and placed them on the island in the small kitchen, opening up the top box and examining its contents. “Délicieux,” she said.

The woman with the blond hair turned toward the boys and smiled.

“You guys look like you’ll be wanting dessert.”

Todd and Ethan stared at her. Ethan wondered why this woman, this exotic creature, was speaking to them.

“You’re—hold on—Todd, right?”

Todd nodded.

“I’ve seen you here before. And who’s your friend?”

Ethan felt a blush blooming in his cheeks as he looked up (he had noticed her dress, its neckline, the pale skin on her breastbone; his eyes darted away from this area, as though he had touched a hot teakettle and been burned). “Ethan Whitley,” he said.

“Well, hello, Ethan Whitley,” the woman said. “I’m Hannah. Ms. McClellan. You can call me Hannah.”

Ethan was confused; he thought he had seen her around. “Are you a teacher?”

“That’s what they tell me. I make some of the desserts here, too. Sort of a hobby I do on the side. Gets me out of my head.”

Ethan wondered why she was inviting them to use her first name. Perhaps the younger Berkley teachers, the ones right out of college, might do this in private, but no one on the Berkley faculty who was Hannah’s age—she had to be at least thirty—would ever allow this.

She sat down on a chair at the counter, facing the boys. “Ethan Whitley…you’re new, right? Did I read some of your short stories last year that came in with your admissions packet?”

Ethan’s blush deepened. “It’s possible. I submitted a few.”

“I loved them. They were really gorgeous. The one about the mother. I hope you keep writing.”

“Thanks,” Ethan croaked.

“Anyway, have some dessert. It’s on me.” She winked at Madame Beauchamp. “What do you guys want?”

“I usually get the carrot cake,” Todd said.

“Um, blueberry cobbler?” Ethan said.

“Give them extra big pieces,” Hannah said to Laura. “They’re growing boys.” She smiled again. “I haven’t made as much of the blueberry cobbler lately. It’s hard to find good local blueberries this time of year.”

“It’s my favorite,” Ethan said. His mother used to bake it for him and his father when he was growing up. But not recently—recently she hadn’t been doing much cooking at all.

“I’d better get going,” Hannah said. “Laura, if they want it, give them seconds.”

 

Looking back, Todd would sometimes think it had all happened by accident. He was behind in the reading—he was always behind in the reading—and Ethan was the closest guy in the dorm who was also in Ms. Davis’s English class. Taking him to the tearoom a few days later had been partly a tactical move: Todd had discovered several weeks ago from his friend Izzy that Laura, the waitress, was selling the best weed in western Massachusetts. There were only so many times he could go to the tearoom alone; Ethan would be the perfect cover. Laura had taken some convincing, but once he assured her that he was a city kid, that he wasn’t going to get her in trouble, she agreed to sell to him. It wasn’t practical, after all, to go home each time he needed to replenish his stash, and the student he had bought from in previous years, an Upper East Side brat-turned-drug-dealer, had graduated.

Todd knew he shouldn’t be smoking—not as a member of the cross-country team, and not with college applications looming in the coming months. But he hated running. Sometimes during practice, he would will his lungs to collapse on him, pushing himself harder and harder, savoring the sharp pain his breathing cavities exerted on his body, knives cutting him inside, blades steeped in nicotine and sinsemilla. Afterward, there was no camaraderie. His fellow runners weren’t like the football players, who would shower together in the field house after practice, exchanging taunts and laughing all the way to the dining hall. His teammates were lonely creatures, climbing up the hill toward the dorms each evening, retreating to their rooms, one by one, in preparation for dinner. If he had to be alone, he wanted to be high; that was one of the few things he could do without anyone else. The weed helped him shut out the silence, the drudgery: of classes, of college applications, of feeling so alone.

The plan had gone flawlessly that evening, as Todd went inside again while they waited for their cab, saying he had forgotten something. He slipped Laura five twenties, and she handed him a small package, just out of Ethan and Madame Beauchamp’s sight.

 

After arriving back on campus, Ethan and Todd headed to the snack bar. Now that he was with Todd, Ethan felt confident about entering the gossipy haven that was dominated by Sixth Formers each evening from seven until ten. He hoped they would stay awhile, hang out, talk with some girls.

“I need to find Alex,” Todd said, looking around for his girlfriend, Alexandra Roth. He was suddenly in a panic, as if his future livelihood at the school depended on it. Todd could not be seen entering the snack bar with Ethan Whitley (the puzzling Ethan Whitley, a blank slate, a cipher, for some; for others, one who was suspect—a bit too well read, a bit too smug: California, after all? Who came from California?). Ethan felt a glum sensation as Todd ignored him. He imagined himself being demoted back to his place in the social strata, as if he had been given a glimpse of what it would be like to be popular, to be granted the attentions of someone like Todd Eldon, and was now being informed that actually there had been an error, that he was not meant to have been at the tearoom at all, that he had been mistaken for someone more popular, someone better-looking. He looked around the snack bar: all the usual suspects. Athletes in one corner, stoners in another, the African-American and Asian cliques at their own tables, the artsy crowd (they hadn’t embraced him, either—even the outcasts weren’t taking new admissions, though he was an artist himself) scattered in the middle. Books and papers everywhere. Empty bottles of soda and paper plates littered with the remnants of hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches. Todd located his friends across the room and motioned for Ethan to follow him.

He bought two Cokes at the counter and brought them to a table where Todd was sitting with Izzy Jacobsen, Miles Nolan, and Kevin Bradshaw; they were part of what Ethan had heard referred to as the “banker boys,” guys whose fathers had made their money in investments. Todd introduced Ethan to everyone and pulled out a chair for him. After he sat down, Alex appeared behind Todd and wrapped her arms around him. He squirmed uncomfortably, releasing himself from her grip.

Alex smiled at Ethan. “Hi.” Her cheeks glowed from the brisk night, a warm peach color. Ethan had noticed her before, in the hallways, near the mailboxes. The girl with the brown pageboy cut and the large eyes, the one who wore Doc Martens with Laura Ashley dresses. He felt a green pang of jealousy. Todd was that guy, the type who existed in books or movies or his imagination, who had everything a teenager wanted (everything, in fact, that Ethan wanted): friends, a girlfriend, as much money as he needed. There was so much he could learn from Todd, but what did Todd want from him?

Alex turned to Todd. “Should we go?”

Todd shrugged and got up, grabbing his fleece pullover.

Ethan felt his gut flip: nervousness, then annoyance. He wanted what Todd had, not only emotionally, but physically, in the deepest, most visceral part of him. He imagined what they would do together: a romantic walk back to the dorm, perhaps a visit to the studio to show Todd what she had been working on (now Ethan remembered her name from one of the paintings in the main hallway’s exhibition of student work). They would hold hands, and then in some dark corner, he would kiss her, pressing his body to hers, pushing his erection against her pelvis.

“I’ll catch you guys later,” Todd said to everyone, and the two left the snack bar.

“Lucky bastard,” Izzy Jacobsen said, as he scratched his crotch. “That guy gets laid more often than I jerk off.”

 

The following evening, Todd made a call from the pay phone on the fourth floor of Slater Dormitory. Though this arrangement afforded Berkley’s students little freedom, it was one of the few options they had to make contact with the outside world. Cell phones had been banned years ago after several students’ phones went off during class, the chimes of Beethoven’s Fifth sending them directly to the deans’ wing. The only permitted alternatives for communication were pay phones or e-mail. In this case, Todd needed to talk to his father directly.

He was about to hang up when Don Eldon picked up on the fourth ring. They hadn’t spoken in several months, and Todd hadn’t seen him in over a year. From a practical standpoint, it didn’t matter. His mother, Jackie, had plenty of money to take care of him and his brother, and their father was busy keeping his development ventures in Florida afloat (Todd had to admit that he never understood exactly what it was that his dad did each day). Jackie had never been clear with Todd or his older brother, Brian, about whether it was raising two children, her flourishing literary success in the field of romantic suspense, or a combination of the two, that had driven him away. Miraculously, she had been able to crank out a bloodcurdling best-seller every year while supervising the changing of diapers and the scheduling of play dates. She had become a publishing sensation, and her husband was still a failed real estate broker with a drinking problem. When Todd was five, Don Eldon did what Todd figured most men would do: he left. Jackie had filed for divorce, instructing her lawyers to make sure the man didn’t get a penny of her hard-earned book advances.

“Yeah?” Todd’s father said, over the din of a baseball game playing on the television.

“It’s Todd.”

There was a pause as he turned down the game. The pauses: Todd had forgotten about them. They took forever, were like that peculiar feeling of being on a family car trip and never knowing when you would arrive.

“Hey, kiddo. What can I do for you?” his father finally said.

“I wanted to talk to you about my college applications.”

Todd heard his father sigh. “Todd, you know I can’t contribute to that. Your mom’s got plenty of money set aside for you and your brother.”

“It’s not about paying, Dad.”

“What’s it about then?”

“There’s a statement that’s supposed to be written by your parents—you can do it separately, if they’re divorced—but it’s supposed to be about what your parents think of you, why they think you should go to that college, stuff like that.” Todd nervously scratched away at a Harvard sticker that had been plastered on the wall next to the phone.

“Todd, your mother is the writer in the family. I think she would be much better handling that sort of thing.”

“Okay,” Todd said. “I just thought I’d ask.”

“No problem, kid. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Todd hung up without saying good-bye. His hands were shaking. Was it too much to ask his father to write a five-hundred-word recollection of his younger son? Todd thought he had written a statement for Brian. Or had his mother simply mailed in one on both their behalf? It would be like Jackie not to want to admit to an admissions officer that Don Eldon played no role in his sons’ lives.

It didn’t matter anyway. What Todd needed to focus on were his grades; his college adviser had assured him of that. He wanted to get into a good school (Brown was his top choice), not simply for himself, but to show his parents he could do it without them. He feared that they saw him as a failure; he had never had the marks or gotten the recognition Brian had when he was at the school. His brother had been the model Berkley Boy: photo editor of the yearbook, head proctor, starting player on the lacrosse team, winner of the school spirit award in his Fifth and Sixth Form years. Not that his father would have noticed; he hadn’t even shown up for Brian’s graduation, only sending a card and fifty dollars in his absence.

As a replacement, Jackie had pathetically brought along as a date her best friend and literary agent, Nick. He was nice enough—Todd had known him since childhood—but he was the most effeminate man Todd had ever met, and he knew that wouldn’t fly on the Berkley campus.

When he recalled Nick’s visit, the cream suit he had worn, complete with lavender pocket square (he sent out a silent prayer: please, don’t let her bring him again), Todd was reminded of a story from the 1940s that was often told to the younger students. Theodore Bainbridge had been a fey Fifth Former who liked to read poetry; Whitman was his favorite. He would recite it in the halls, carry it with him to the dining hall, quote from it in class. His dorm mates, who were more excited by athletics and females, decided they would teach him a lesson one afternoon; poetry, after all, was far too precious an affectation for a Berkley Boy (it was fine, perhaps, to attract the opposite sex, but that was the extent of its usefulness). A trio of hockey players hanged Theodore by his silk necktie one afternoon as a prank before heading out to practice, suspending him in front of his doorway. He screamed and shouted for them to let him down, but they ignored his cries, laughing all the way to the rink. Theodore, they assumed, would get himself down easily. Someone would see him; the point would have been made. When they returned three hours later, his body was limp, his face the violent purple of an eggplant, the door scratched and battered where he had tried to kick his way free with his hard-soled lace-up shoes. The boys were never apprehended, as it wasn’t discovered until fifty years later that what had been ruled a suicide was in fact not so.

Why boarding school? Why now? Ethan had prepared numerous answers to these questions, expecting that he would be asked to explain himself the moment he arrived at Berkley as a transfer student to the senior class, known as the Sixth Form. The hubris, he now realized, of assuming anyone would care! His fellow classmates were burdened with the minutiae of high school life: athletic uniforms that were unflattering (everything was always too baggy, or too tight), unusual growth spurts (Evan Douglas had gained four inches over the summer), absurd rumors (a Fourth Form girl had become a kleptomaniac and was said to have hundreds of tins of lip gloss in her bedroom—if she liked you, she would share), haircuts (Robbie de Sola had clipped off his beautiful dark locks), students who hadn’t returned after summer break (where were they?), summer flings (Tina Palmer had done it in her parents’ Southampton bedroom with a townie).

Ethan knew people arrived at the school at various junctures for different reasons: They needed an extra year of credits before college and would help beef up the hockey or football team (or occasionally, the music or drama program). They had been kicked out of another, equally prestigious institution (there weren’t really any better schools than Berkley—it had always been ranked in the top five, according to those who knew about such things), and had been admitted as a last-minute favor, usually with the help of a letter from a member of the board of trustees. They had been dissatisfied at home.

Though Berkley was generally not the type of school where young people in trouble enrolled—those institutions were further down the ladder, more akin to military academies and the like—a fair number of young people in trouble still ended up there. Or perhaps, Ethan would wonder, as he heard stories of his fellow classmates sharing cigarettes in the shower at 2:00 a.m., or stumbling drunk down the hallway in the middle of the afternoon, still in school uniform (coats and ties, always, for the boys), the trouble found them after they arrived.

But nothing so thrilling as having been expelled had happened to Ethan. He wasn’t a rebel, or a slacker, or a drug addict—he could only faintly recall the last time he had broken a school rule. (It would have been in the sixth grade when, unable to catch, he had been so afraid of playing touch football that he hid in the school library during PE for an entire semester. It had garnered him an F on his report card, the only one he had ever received. An F! His parents laughed it off: he, a professor of engineering and she of literature, were not the type to care about such quotidian matters as grade point averages. They were of the rare breed who only cared if their child was learning.)

His parents’ house in Palo Alto was ten minutes away from campus and it had been too easy to fall into the same patterns he had followed since grade school: walking home directly after classes, not socializing with his peers, spending hours in his bedroom reading, finding himself alone on a Saturday night. His social life had improved, certainly, in his first three years of high school; he shuddered to think about what he had been like as a freshman (geeky glasses, pimples, faint mustache—why hadn’t his father noticed it was time to teach him to shave?). He had been on a few dates with girls; he had friends whom he would see occasionally, though he suspected they felt the same sort of ambivalence toward him that he felt for them. He could have managed his last year of high school at home, but he and his parents knew he needed to move on.

The other element was his mother’s illness that had enveloped their little house. The official word was that she was in remission, though there was always the danger of the cancer metastasizing. Ethan suspected that she and his father hadn’t been telling him everything in recent months. He wanted to be there for her, but he also longed to escape the reality of it. It had been discovered seven years ago, the epithelial carcinoma on the outer surface of one of her ovaries. He knew these details by heart, from his mother reciting her condition, early on, at the dinner table after each appointment with her oncologist. At first, Judith treated it distantly, as if it were a work of literature they were discussing, or a trip they would be taking to a foreign country: the different methods of treatment, the chances for survival (A doxorubicin liposome injection? How fascinating!). Lately, though, she had become bored, and she appeared to want to shield her son from the details as much as possible. She would go to her chemotherapy, lying in the infusion center for hours with a needle in her arm; the doctors would cut away at her organs (every time she was hopeful, though her optimism gave way to pragmatism, as each operation was not wholly successful). She didn’t give up: there had been radiation, clinical trials, experimental therapies. Judith Whitley, an internationally recognized expert on feminist literature—her critical study of Simone de Beauvoir was considered a classic—was wasting the last years of her life being shuttled from appointment to appointment. Ethan couldn’t believe that this was what it meant to be in remission.

While he was afraid his mother’s condition might further deteriorate, his parents had felt it was more important to get him out of the house. And so he was cast out, armed with promises of regular phone calls and the understanding was that were anything, God forbid, to happen, he would be notified immediately, and could fly home. From the mountain of catalogs, Ethan had picked Berkley, the school with the enormous arts wing, the place where the director of admissions had assured him that he would fit in. He remembered a conversation he had had with his mother about it, as he readied himself to file his late applica. . .