Bozeman was small then. Its dusty main street held eight buildings, counting the farrier and the feed store. Recently, a vacant hardware store had been repurposed as a Patagonia outlet. Within, Peter saw signature fabrics in saffron or violet, and loose fitting but purposeful canvas clothing. So this, he thought, was the California where he was soon to be a student.
Peter was a young fourteen. His father, an instructor at the local college, and his mother, a potter of regional repute, both wanted the best for him. They knew that high school academics in an agricultural and sparsely populated community was a world too small and could see that Peter’s inquiring mind hadn’t been engaged. This accomplished but unchallenged student had done well enough on the PSAT that he was offered scholarship to the West’s most selective prep school.
That Fall, Bozeman’s ace striker, still just a boy, was to be off to prep school in California.
During the summer’s final weeks, Peter’s outlook was riven. The endless azure sky, and the undulating and untrammeled prairie grasses represented uninhibited freedom. Too, he looked back at his final soccer match in which a deft pass provided Peter an angled strike so clean that he thought it should count for more than one point.
Yet, paradoxically, his mind was singularly attracted to the minute, the small, the detailed, such that his Shangri-la was a summer morning on the Yellowstone, with a drifted dry fly dancing on a slick above a narrowing riffle. Sometimes, he would ask himself if these quiet moments were his way of barricading intrusion. Would he find this space at prep school?
Peter grew into the pressures and demands of his new school, while staying clear of most adolescent temptation. His soccer skills earned this fourth form student a place as the varsity striker. And he had developed a few trusting friendships.
In the fall of his second year, he was elected fifth form class president. He, Tony, and Cameron had become inseparable. Months later, in the Spring, came Parents’ Weekend and Awards’ Ceremony. Cameron’s father arrived in a sculpted Alfa Romeo Giulia with his wife Chloe, Cameron’s stepmother, actually his second stepmother. She was lithe, blonde, and young enough to fuel the other boys’ fantasies. At awards, Cameron, another fifth former, won the Alastair Math Prize. The administration announced Peter as the Senior Prefect. Tony’s accomplishments had been derailed by a war he couldn’t endorse, and, thus, this boy with the searching intelligence, received neither awards nor academic acknowledgement.
“I’m so sorry and not a little surprised, Tony” commiserated Peter. “Most of us see you as the cleverest boy in our class.”
“Thanks, Peter,” he said. “This has been a difficult year for me. As you may have heard, my older brother was drafted and will soon leave for Asia. For me, college is uncertain, which would leave me a 1A. And it has been hard to disguise my state of mind, for which I fault myself, but I take some comfort in thinking that there is no model for authenticity. I’m learning that authenticity also has a price. And in a tight knit community like ours, there is really no place to hide. Sometimes, in our little world, it seems that we’re reading Cicero while Asia burns.”
The three sat through the ceremony with only one thing on their minds: the next three days and a road trip to San Francisco.
Cameron’s father gave them the keys to the Alfa.
Darkness fell as Cameron drove southbound through Marin County. Peter navigated while Tony dozed in the back seat.
“Peter, do you see those shafts of light up ahead?” Cameron asked.
“Those are Klieg arc lamps, set up for tonight’s concert. Follow those and we’ll be at the Fillmore in half an hour,” Peter replied.
They stood at the entry to the ballroom. The search lights’ beacons were powered by grinding diesel generators actuating the high voltage carbon arcs, from which wafted ozone’s acrid scent.
Once inside the theater, patchouli’s sweetness overcame the ozone. Dim chandeliers glowed from the ceiling, while strips of safety lights outlined the aisles, and amber lamps denoted the stage’s edge. Standing on either side of the crimson curtain with its golden tassels, was a ceiling high column of matte black speakers, adjusted at angles to fill the auditorium. Next to each, sat a mammoth amplifier with vacuum tubes glowing red orange, like a coal furnace.
The curtain swayed and gradually rose, pulsating with the palpable bass and strident three note chords, meandering guitar riffs, alternating instrumental solos, staccato snares and rhythmic strobes. The instrumentals began to fade, and the amplifiers’ glow dimmed, heralding Gracie Slick’s incendiary vocal taunt, swathing the listeners with a new reality. The boys and the two girls next to them swayed in agreement. The Jefferson Airplane was airborne as the White Rabbit burrowed into their consciousness.
As the concert wrapped up, the stage lights dimmed, the gilded curtain descended, and the music faded. The evening had been earthshaking, impacting body and mind.
Peter sat quite motionless, his eyes downcast.
“Are you okay?” asked Samantha, sitting on his left.
“I not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
“I think I’m confused,” Peter said.
“I’m sorry. You do look upset,” Samantha said. “Is this your first Fillmore concert?”
“Yes, it is. We didn’t have these in Montana.”
“They’re really intense. Give yourself some time and space to understand your thoughts,” she urged.
“Emilia and I are here to celebrate, and I bet you are too. Today is the first day of our Spring break. And Emilia has just received early acceptance at Mills College over in Oakland, and I got an AP placement at Berkeley. We’re both thrilled.”
“Congratulations to each of you. Were you both at private school, too?” asked Peter.
“No. We’re both products of the Bay Area public schools. I’m a rising senior at Lowell, and Emilia is at Mission San Jose in Fremont,” said Samantha.
The five rose as the ballroom emptied.
“Would you both like to come with us?” asked Cameron.
“Where?” asked Emilia
“We’re all three fugitives from boarding school, and we have to get back,” volunteered Tony.
“I’m thinking that this should give me pause,” said Samantha. “But, you know, we have all week, and you three seem nice. So sure, let’s go. Sounds like fun.”
The penetrating lyrics had left each of the boys with gnawing doubts about where they might fit into the flux of the moment. Yet, the two girls’ unadorned freshness and lack of pretense guided them towards equipoise.
Peter drove the crowded Alfa north into the night. Cameron, his navigator, nodded on and off, while, snuggled in the back seat, Tony, Samantha, and Emilia drifted in and out of quiet conversation. Peter’s driving was buffeted by memory of the concert, but they arrived safely at the campus gate as the sun was rising. He left the Alfa there so Cameron’s father could easily find it, and sleepily stumbled to his dorm, as Cameron and Tony walked with the two girls to theirs.
Peter slept late on this holiday Sunday and woke to the news that Cameron and Tony had been expelled, their rooms cleared, leaving no trace of them, Samantha, or Emilia.
Peter was devastated for them, but also because both legs of his triangular relationship were gone. Although he recognized that the issues were obvious enough, he yearned for clarification as much as explanation. And the two girls, both lovely and smart, deserved better, not only from Tony and Cameron, but probably also from the school.
“What sort of nineteenth century justice is being served?” he asked himself. “Where is due process? Where is the headmaster to address the returning student body? How is this to be represented to the parents?”
Peter never received answers.
The school year came to a quiet close. Tony and Cameron, and the matter itself, had become ghosts.
Peter spent his final year of high school in Bozeman, leaving behind his soccer team, the class presidency, and his honorary appointments.
His friendship with the brilliant Cameron and the iconoclastic Tony had opened his eyes, and the White Rabbit had shown him the way to a broader horizon.
He enrolled at Stanford the following September.
