Free Apologize, Apologize! by Elizabeth Kelly

emphasizing each letter.
    “Chumley,” I answered.
    “Finally, I have it, the proof you’re a snob. That’s something only a snob knows. And you fell for it. Collie Flanagan, the so-called brain box, isn’t so clever after all.”
    “You knew about it . . . so what does that make you?”
    “It makes me a Renaissance man.”
    “Let me speak to Pop. Is he there?”
    “Charlie!” Tom hollered into the receiver. “It’s your long-lost son.”
    “Collie?” Pop said into the receiver. “It’s grand to hear from you. Will you be coming to see us?”
    “Sure I will, Pop. I’ve been busy with school, I’m sorry.”
    “No need for apology. Everything is understood. But listen, Collie, hear me out. Slow down, don’t work so hard, and learn to take it easy. What do I always tell you? School would wear a mighty sour puss if it weren’t for recess.”
    I hung up and sat for a while, staring and tossing a tennis ball into the air, and then I went back to gathering pollen to make honey for the hive.
    When I was in my final year, the Falcon hand-delivered Bingo, freshly ejected from St. Paul’s School in Concorde, to the admissions office, where he enrolled him in the tenth grade—a random choice, since he hadn’t achieved a legitimate promotion since kindergarten. Holding him at arm’s length, the oval tips of his long fingers hovering in the air just above Bing’s shoulders, he was as squeamish as if he were scraping gum off the sole of his shoe.
    Bingo cut into my bespoke existence at Andover like a serrated edge through fabric. I didn’t want him there, and he knew it. I resented him for insinuating himself into what felt like my secret life. There I was, all laid out like a pair of gray flannel pants, and in he came—a set of shears ready to rip me apart at the seams.
    “Just stay far away from me. Don’t even look at me,” I warned him, knowing it was an exercise in futility. The more I threatened, the more he glistened like early morning grass, his eyes taking on a familiar green gleam. I might as well have thrown popcorn at an advancing tank.
    I knew he was going to start it up. Bingo always insisted on going right to the seditious heart of things. In no time, the school was churning with him.
    He smuggled a girl into his room, and when he was found out, he claimed she was our sister. The first week of school and already he was threatened with expulsion. The only thing that saved him was the Falcon and the universal terror he inspired. For punishment, he was supposed to clean the windows in the downstairs floor of his residence. Later that night, he and twelve apostles removed all the glass from the windows and in the morning offered up the air for inspection.
    “They’re so clean they’re invisible,” Bingo said as the headmaster did a double take.
    Bing insisted that he didn’t have anything to do with the missing window glass but reluctantly confessed that he knew who did, describing where they could find the proof right underneath my bed.
    “Don’t worry. I wasn’t born yesterday, Mr. Flanagan,” the headmaster said as I sputtered inelegantly about my innocence.
    A few days later, Bingo rigged up a dummy to look like a student and then waited until nighttime, when he and the boys laid their jerry-rig corpse in a pool of ketchup in the middle of the road leading into the school and lingered in the bushes for their hapless victims to arrive on the scene.
    It took a pile of the Falcon’s dough to save him from that one. Mr. Fadras, the biology teacher, called Fat-Ass by just about everyone, including his colleagues, swerved into a ditch at first sight of a bloody corpse in his headlights and damaged the front end of his car.
    When a cheating scandal erupted in the early fall—someone stole the answers to the second-year math midterm—Bingo was a natural suspect and spent hours undergoing the third degree.
    “Let me get this straight,” I confronted him in my room, where he was