Green Tea

As promised, here is my story, Part I. Don't ask me about the title--Kevin named it.

St. Osmund’s College was most attractive entered from the West. A broad walk lined with oak trees led up to the imposing front of gray stone. This building housed the offices of the professors, and the sundry managerial people that keep universities running. On passing through this building one entered a large paved courtyard. In the center, engraved in the gray stone, was the name of the college and the symbol of the moon with these words: “Ex luna, scientia et sapientia.” Dormitories were to the left, and the buildings of the separate colleges stretched out to the right and center. The whole, including some spreading lawns, was surrounded by a wall of noble height and breadth which joined the building most prominent on the west side. What the purpose was of such a fortification no one was sure. Nobody but old women and new students ever bothered to walk along it to find an actual gate, but rather climbed it like any sensible, athletic person should. Some popular crossing spots had begun to take on the appearance of ladders set into the stone, so often were they used. Chester Oliver named the northwest corner spot the Pranksters’ Passage, conveniently situated as it was between the students’ quarters and the teachers’ offices.

The College was generally upon the top of a wide, flat hill, with the town of Lenton surrounding it on three sides and a wide-ish forest on the fourth. A solitary spot, almost like to its own city, was the College; but whether an oasis of sanity or madness I cannot say.

Chester Oliver was a sophomore, and he went by CJ. “J” wasn’t in his name anywhere, but he hated the name Chester, and CO just sounded dumb, or worse, like he was named after carbon monoxide. As a wise older student, CJ felt it was his duty to explain to all new students the workings of the school. And since he was popular and good-looking, most people tolerated him, and some liked him, and some hated him.

There had always been a rumor that a ghost walked the halls of Henderson Library. CJ believed it. He went out of his way to insure that everyone else did too. On the first Tuesday of term he sidled up to Richard Snofbury, a freshman with an unattractive comb-over.

“So did you hear about the library?”

Richard Snofbury shoved his thick-rimmed glasses up on his nose and stared at the arm CJ had draped over his shoulders. “I suppose it will have books in it,” he said.

What a dull fellow, thought CJ. He smiled chummily, “There are rumors about that library.”

“What sort of rumors?”

“The very best sort,” said CJ. He leaned closer to Richard Snofbury and whispered in his ear, “They say that when it gets late, they turn off all the lights on the third floor. It gets real quiet—so quiet that you can hear the floorboards creaking if so much as a mouse walks on them. But even so, you never hear Him coming.” A dramatic roll of the eyes and a mock shudder served to turn Richard Snofbury’s look of dumb suspense into a look of even dumber horror. A cloud passing in front of the sun at that moment completed the effect.

“H-him?”

“The Ghost. He paces the length of the library three times, and if he sees anyone near, well, I wouldn’t want to be there.” CJ stood up straight and removed his arm from Richard Snofbury’s shoulders. “It’s okay though, because he only walks during the full moon. Any other time you’ll be fine.”

“Full m-moon is tomorrow.” And CJ walked away jauntily leaving pale, cow-like Richard Snofbury with a head full of the hauntings of Henderson Library.

There was more to the library myth, of course, than what CJ knew. Myths don’t grow from nothing. They start somewhere, and rarely end up in the same place. In this case, it started with a group of twelve people that swore to having seen an apparition twelve successive full moons. None of them knew the others well until their stories came to light. But that was so long ago that no one remembered their names anymore, or anything else they said. St. Osmund’s was a very old college.

The forest on the college’s east side hadn’t been there long enough for any myths to be born about it, but that didn’t really matter to CJ. Fact and fiction were essentially the same to him, and he would believe one as soon as the other. People that knew him well knew this, and if they liked him, like Maryanne did, they ignored the trifling reality that fact and fiction are quite different animals.

On the first Wednesday of term, CJ and Maryanne were walking from the dorms to their separate classes—CJ to English Lit. and Maryanne to her third semester of Calculus.

“I heard that they’re cutting down part of the forest this year to build a new dorm. I don’t know why, but I’m kind of sad. I like the forest just the way it is.”

“You do know what they say about that forest, right?” CJ raised his eyebrows.

“No, not really,” said Maryanne. “Is it about haunting by any chance?” Maryanne was one of the only people who consistently laughed at CJ’s stories and all of his seriousness. Well, she laughed at just about everything, but the point is that they got on together fabulously.

“It actually isn’t, so there. It happens to be a funny story, if you don’t mind a little death. But if you don’t want to hear it—” CJ trailed off in a mock pout.

“Of course I want to hear it. I’m always ready for a funny story about people dying,” she said, eyes attentive and mouth blankly straight.
CJ narrowed his eyes, but decided to go on anyway. “There’s a story that there used to be a bear that lived in that forest. And he was a pretty nice bear if you stayed away from him. Not really of the teddy variety, but decent enough for a bear. But once, a student decided to go find him. The bear was so angry at being bothered that he attacked the kid. And they say that the bear was so old that he didn’t have any teeth left, and so he gummed him to death.”

“He was drowned in bear saliva, you might say,” joked Maryanne.

“Or turned into a squeaky toy for the grandkids.”

“Now that’s awful,” she laughed. “Where do you come up with these things?”

“Oh, here and there,” said CJ airily.

“Whatever, I’ve got better things to do.” She took off running across the courtyard and threw a smiling “See you later!” over her shoulder at him before she disappeared.

CJ continued walking down toward his classroom. He didn’t exactly want to go to English Lit. He’d rather be going to Calculus, but he’d already taken it. Reading was a fine thing to him; he enjoyed it, loved it even. But he couldn’t stand being lectured to about it. Give him Chesterton or Dickens and a quiet room and he would be satisfied for hours, but ask him to analyze what he had read and you might as well ask him to run a marathon. Even people that don’t sweat over a couple of miles dread the very idea of a marathon. But there was nothing for it. CJ stepped out of the sunshine into the cool gray stone building that said “English” next to the symbol of the moon.

Later that afternoon, CJ, Maryanne and Jennie were in the library.

“I can’t believe that they gave us homework on the second day of class. It’s exceedingly lame, especially when the weather is so nice, to have to sit here and integrate ridiculously complicated functions. And they said the first week was all review, huh,” muttered Maryanne.

A few minutes later, it was Jennie that exploded, “I can’t figure it out!! How on earth do they expect you to integrate that?”

CJ glanced up from Hemmingway for a moment and said, “Try trig substitution; it’s probably an inverse function.”

“You didn’t even look at the problem.”

“But am I right?” He paused as she looked up the inverse trig integrals.

“Well, yes, but—that’s really not fair,” she said, and glared for a moment before completing the problem. It is a frustrating situation when a friend, no matter how dear, displays his intellectual superiority with no effort at all.

Richard Snofbury sat down at the table with the three friends. CJ had absolutely no use for him. He was exactly like his older brother, a boy who CJ had tricked the last year into putting cockroaches into Professor Harding’s office while Professor Harding was still in the building. George Snofbury had been caught climbing over the Pranksters’ Passage with an empty jar, and had been rather severely punished. CJ had been a bit sorry after he saw how badly poor George was punished, but a prank was a prank and of course it would have consequences. It wasn’t as if George were lastingly hurt or anything, and it had been awfully funny to see him holding his jar of cockroaches at arms’ length because he was so frightened of them himself. And Richard Snofbury was so like George that it didn’t seem worth his while to CJ to even bother playing a practical joke on him. Maybe something small, like short-sheeting his bed, but nothing interesting, because CJ knew exactly how Richard Snofbury would react. A perplexed look would slowly creep into his dumb, cow-like eyes, and after a few half-hearted attempts to find out the perpetrator of the crime, he would give it up, and go back to studying biology. It just wasn’t worth the trouble.

“So what’re you guys doing?” sniffed Richard Snofbury, blinking awkwardly.

When CJ made no reply, no acknowledgement really, Maryanne replied, “Calculus problems for me and Jennie, and they’re going awfully. What about you?”

“Umm, not much. I wish I could help you, but I’ve never been very good at math myself, and even though I took some Calculus in high school I don’t think I could help anyway, because you’re probably way ahead of what we did then. I really prefer biology to math because all you have to do is memorize things and there’s not so much work to do to figure out answers and stuff. I had a really good biology teacher in high school and I think he did a lot of good for me, but my math teacher was boring.”

As boring as you are, perhaps, though CJ. I wonder if he ever says anything interesting, even by accident. He stood up abruptly. “Well, it’s been fun, guys, but I’ve got to run, literally.” He snapped his book shut and jogged to his dorm where he changed clothes and started off running into town. A couple of miles a day kept him in pretty good shape, and he did it because he hated the thought that some day he could become a couch potato whose only physical activity was flipping channels on the TV.

Old Mrs. Lewis was sitting at the corner café with Mrs. Roberts, and they saw CJ running by, like he did every day.

“That boy sure does look nice when he runs,” said Mrs. Lewis in her old motherly voice. “Somehow, watching him run makes me think of being young and healthy and strong again, and I’m almost ready to jump up and join him.”

“It’s all well and good, but I hear some mighty queer stories about him coming from the college, so I do,” said Mrs. Roberts.

“Oh, he may be a little odd, and I don’t deny it. But all the same, he’s a nice kid,” smiled Mrs. Lewis.