He had his hour-boys spread rat poison throughout the buildings at both the Boys and Girls Schools. One day I found one of the mice lying in the hallway, completely gassed. Wasn’t dead but he wasn’t too alive either. Later I found two more lying on my bedroom floor and another under a radiator in the bathroom. I couldn’t tell how long they’d hang on, but I wasn’t about to pull out a stopwatch either. While everyone was at dinner, I grabbed a hockey stick out of my neighbor’s closet, stickhandled the mice out into the hall, and quickly clobbered the shit out of them. The following week I wasted at least ten more. Funderburk was pissed off. He wanted to know who’d messed up the hallway.

I decided to get even. On the last day I was working off hours, I snuck into the dorm. No one was around. I held a lighter under Fundy’s doorknob for a good five minutes, all the time looking out the window at the end of the hall, waiting for him to come by on his rounds. When the metal doorknob was practically glowing and I could barely hold onto the lighter, along came Fundy. I stood back from the window so he couldn’t see me, and yelled, “Fire in Funderburk’s room!” Then I slipped down a rear stairwell and got back to work. Fundy ran to his apartment, seared his hand on the doorknob, and panicking, dashed from the dorm pulling every fire alarm in sight. By the time the fire department arrived, the doorknob was as cool as a cucumber and Fundy looked like a little fruitcake. That perked me up for a few days.

Occasionally I hung out with a kid from Greenwich, Connecticut, named Jonathan Wheeler. Wheeler got along better with girls than with guys. Mousy had warned me that kids like that are either queers or back stabbers. In any case, he was very popular up at the Girls School. I doubt he would’ve been, though, if the girls knew that he referred to them as “cracks.” (A girlfriend was a “main crack,” his grandmother was his “grandcrack,” and so on.)

Wheeler started chasing a flashy Scarsdale debutante named S.D. (Sydney Deavenworth) Stuart. She was his “dream crack.” One day he showed up in my room with big plans. The following Sunday, he said, S.D., himself, me, and another girl were to have lunch in town at a fancy restaurant that had the “chunkiest bleu cheese dressing in Connecticut.” (The kid wasn’t stupid; he knew I wouldn’t be able to afford anything but the salad bar.)

“Who’s the other girl?” I asked.

“Good friend of S.D.’s.”

“What does she look like?”

“Let me put it this way, Dunphy: She’s the face that launched a thousand lunches.” Wheeler broke up.

“Hideous?”

“Fair to partly hideous. And somewhat huge.”