Chapter 12

Someone had rushed to get Dr. Stanpole, and others rushed to get Phil, the wrestling coach who knew first aid. The foyer and staircase were crowded quickly. Everyone seemed very calm, even Finny. The doctor said it was his leg, but a much cleaner break. They rushed him in his car over to the infirmary. I snuck over to see what was going on. All I could hear were monotonous voices that were going to, “bore Finny to death”(173). I started to think of some funny things while I listened to them talk. Once the doctor left, I snuck in through the window. “I thought at first he was going to get out of bed and help me through the window” (176). He was struggling to unleash his hate against me. I had felt alone and not part of anything. I went and got breakfast, and when I went back to the dorm there was a note telling me to get Finny’s things and bring them to him. When I got there he was different, “I noticed that as he tried to slide a hairbrush out from under a flap holding it in the case his hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t get it out. Seeing that released me on the spot” (181). Then Finny told me something I didn’t know. He desperately wanted to be in the war He had been mailing everyone to see if he was use, but no one accepted him. I told him how he wouldn’t be good in the war, and he told me that he could believe that the tree incident wasn’t anything personal. After classes I went to the infirmary, and Dr, Stanpole wasn’t patrolling the halls like he usually does. About ten minutes later, he came out and said, “This is something I think boys of your generation are going to see a lot of. Your friend is dead” (185). I was shaking, I didn’t understand. He said the bone marrow must have gone to his heart and stopped it. I did not cry when I heard this, not even at the funeral. You don’t cry when it’s your own funeral.

Chapter 11

When I got back from Devon, Finny and the boys were in the far fields having a snowball fight. I started to walk away because I didn't want to talk about Leper, but Finny hit me and came running over. Before I could answer him, the other boy moved the fight to us. Once we got back to the room Brinker said, "I'll bet he cracked up, didn't he?... Some morning they don't get out of bed with everybody else. They just lie there crying" (149). He had no idea how right he was. There was little left at Devon, there were V-12's, V-5's, and other military choices. One morning after chapel, Brinker held me aside and said, "Yes, pity him. And if you don't watch out he's going to start pitying himself" (152). Brinker had said the reason I wasn't enlisting was to stay back with Finny. The next day when I came back from chapel, I saw Finny making people who walked up the staircase sing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God". He loved and appreciated music so much. We went back to the room and I helped hit with Caesar, which he had to pass Latin to graduate. Finny then says that he saw Leper. "I saw Leper hiding in the shrubbery next to the chapel... He looked at me like I was a gorilla or something" (155). The war was finally real for Finny. At 10:05 p.m, Brinker and others came into our room and we slyly went into the Assembly room. Brinker said, "Let us pray", and we did. Brinker made Finny get up, and then do his investigation. Finny did not think someone was in the tree with him, so I went along. To get the facts, they got Leper, who told the story. Almost at the end, Leper said that he wasnt a fool, and stopped telling. Finny left the building saying, "I don’t care"(168). He left crying. We then heard his body clumsily fall down the stairs.

Chapter 10

I took trains and buses to get to Leper's house in Vermont. Once I got there I could tell that no one was going to drive me over to his house. Once I got there, he let me in and started talking about which rooms were useful, and the rooms "Where people can't figure out what to do with themselves" (133). We started talking and I asked him what he had escaped from. He seemed more weird, had had no manners left at all. He told me how the army put him in the Section Eight discharge, which meant he was psycho. He started yelling at me and saying how I was a "savage underneath" (137). I noticed that Leper never looked at his mother, but he was an ideal son. After lunch we went out for a walk, and things were much less harsh. He then said, "Snow White with Brinkers face on her. There's a picture", and then bursted into sobs. After gathering himself, he said that ideas like that are what made him psycho. He said the army had turned everything inside out. He started telling me his crazy moments, with every gory detail. I told him to shut up, but he kept going. I yelled at him, "I don't give a damn! Do you understand that? This has nothing to do with me (143)! I ran in the opposite direction of his house, towards the middle of town.

Chapter 9

Leper had enlisted in the war, yet it still didn't seem real to me. Early in January, a recruiter had came and shown us some pictures. Everything looked nice and it was the cleanest war images I had ever seen. This was a turning point in Lepers life. He said, "It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry" (116). Within the next week he was gone. We matched all the newspaper stories with Leper. We made jokes that torpedoed and bombed countries. Finny didn’t take part of these jokes in the butt room, and soon took me away from them too. “How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire” (119)? From then it was just Finny and I, training to the Olympics. Finny decided to have a Winter Carnival, which brought out the peace again for a while. At the end Brownie Perkins had brought me out a telegram. It said, “I have escaped and need help… My safety depends on you coming at once” (129). It was from Leper, and he needed my help.

Chapter 8

Phineas was very happy to be back. He was very sarcastic and made fun of my clothing first off. Then he started complaining about how there were no maids. That night that Phineas came back I started saying prayers again. He wouldn't stop talking the whole night, and when we woke up we complained again about there being no maids. Every morning I'm sure he looked down to see if his leg had recovered yet. After he saw that it wasn't he would say, "Hand me my crutches, will you (98)? The next morning Brinker busted in saying, "You read to en-Finny" (98)! Finny was very curious, and didn't want me to enlist at all. We started to make a joke out of it, but Brinker was still serious. He got the nickname "Yellow Peril", and he hated when we just called him yellow. Finny wanted to walk to the gym, which was surprising because there was ice and snow on the ground. When we got there he was sweating and out of breathe. Surprisingly he walked right past the Trophy room, and into the locker room. Again he jokingly complained about the maids, and he started looking around. When I said, I don't know, sports don't seem so important with the war on" (106), Finny asked me if I really believed there was a war going on. When we started talking more about the war, I asked Finny why he was the only one who got America's plan, and he responded, "Because I’ve suffered" (108). I didn't know what to say, so I started doing the pull-ups he had told me to do before the conversation. We both never spoke of his bitterness again, and he told me that I was training to be in the 1944 Olympics. Mr. Ludsbury stopped us as we were going in, and when we told him about the Olympics, he left out a chuckle.

Chapter 7

After I took a shower, Brinker Hadley came in to visit. He said, "I can see you have a real influence around here. This big room all to yourself. I wish I knew how to manage things like you" (79), as he sat down. It did seem right for him to be congratulating me, but I like Brinker, almost everyone did. Then he said, "I bet you knew all the time Finny wouldn't be back this fall. That's why you picked him for a roommate, right" (79)? I quickly turned around and faced him. I said, "No, of course not. How could I do a thing like that in advance" (79)? He then said that I had fixed it. I turned around and started moving books pointlessly and my voice sounded too strained every time I spoke. He was accusing me, and then I told him the truth will out. I got up and suggested we went down to the Butt Room, which wasn't the best of ideas. Brinker made a joke to all the other boys that I "did away with my roommate". He was making me mad, but I decided to go along to make it look like all it was was a joke. After leaving, I head a boy say, "Funny, he came all the way down here and didn't even have a smoke" (83). After that no one seemed to track me, or do anything at all. Brinker started to write a few short poems about the war going on outside Devon. The snow had fallen early this winter, and the trains needed to be shoveled out. We would get paid just like on the farms, so everyone volunteered, but Leper. On my shortcut over to the train I saw Leper skiing, and he talked about how skiing is supposed to be admiring the forest and land around you. Shoveling has hard work, and war became a little more real to us when a train of soldiers came by. They were not much older than us and gave the impressing of being more elite. This inspired Brinker to enlist. When I opened my dorm door, there was Finny, and everything that happened that day had faded away. 

Chapter 6

The first sermon at Devon was to show that if you broke the rules, then they broke you. All the classrooms were crowded. I had the same dorm that Finny and I shared in over the summer session, but this time Leper Lepellier wasn't across the hall. Brinker Hadley now lived there and when I went to visit to him I stopped. I didn't want to see the tray of snails that Leper collected replaced Brinker's flies. I realized I was late for my afternoon appointment; I never used to be late. I was supposed to be at the Crew house. On my way over I stopped on the footbridge and thought of Finny. Instead of thinking of the tree or pain, I thought of his favorite tricks. When I got to the Crew House, Quackenbush, the crew manager, said, "Late, Forrester" (68). He then told me to, "Get some towels" (69). A job like this was usually for boys with physical disabilities. He had a built body, and talked in a mature voice. He was systematically disliked throughout the school, and was very ignorant to who I was. "You, Quackenbush, don't know anything about who I am. Or anything else" (71). This really sparked him, and he called me a maimed son-of-a-bitch, so I hit him hard across the face. We fell into the water, and his rage was extinguished. I then said slowly, "The next time you all anybody maimed, you better make sure they are first" (71). I fought that battle for Finny. I never pictured myself being Finny defender, and in some way I felt like I did that for myself. On my way back to the dorm, I came across Mr. Ludsbury. I told him that I had slipped into the river, and he said, "Yes I think you have slipped in any number of ways since last year" (73). If only I had. He then said I had a call in his study, and it was Finny wishing me a happy first day. All I could hear was friendliness and affection in his voice. He said I was crazy at his house, and just wanted to make sure I was okay and didn't let anyone else room with me. I told him I was going out for assistant crew manager, and he was left dumbfounded. Finny said it had nothing to do with sports, and he was right, I wanted nothing to do with sports. Then he said, "Listen, pal, if I can't play sports, you're going to play them for me." (77). And that’s when I lost part of myself to Finny.