Free The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell

stop him. With his hat in one hand and in the other his brief case containing samples of insulating material,Mr. Latham would be quite beyond the reach of his family. Spud pushed his chair back and went and stood in the bedroom door.
    His father and mother’s bedroom was a place that he seldom wandered into, and never at this time in the morning. Mr. Latham was in front of the window with one foot on the low sill, polishing his right shoe with a flannel rag. He switched to the other shoe and Spud went in and sat down on the edge of the unmade bed. It occurred to him, as his father passed between him and the light, that in all probability, since the disease took some time to show itself (ten days or two weeks, the man said) his mother and Helen were already contaminated by him.
    Mr. Latham stuffed the flannel rag in a little brown bag which hung on the inside of the closet door. Then he turned to Spud and said, “Do you need some money?”
    In a despair so complete that it blurred his vision, Spud shook his head and saw his father go out into the hall. A moment later the front door closed with a click. After a while Spud got up, went back to his own room, and gathered up the books he had brought home the afternoon before. I’ll have to get through this day somehow, he decided. I’ll have to go to school so they won’t suspect anything, and come home, and eat supper the same as usual. When the lights are out and they’re in bed and asleep, I can figure out some way to kill myself.
    It was ten minutes of eight when Spud reached the schoolyard. The snow had melted in places, leaving patches of gravel exposed. Spud saw Lymie Peters coming up the walk behind him. He walked faster but Lymie hurried too and caught up with him as he started up the wide cement steps. They went into the building together. Neither of them mentioned the initiationbut as they passed the door of the boys’ lavatory on the first floor, Lymie said, “Did you pee green this morning?” and deprived Spud of the last hope, the one comfort left to him.
    The disease showed.
    If it had been any of the others, Spud would have swung on him. He couldn’t hit Lymie. Lymie wasn’t big enough. Besides, he remembered what he saw the night before when he ripped his blindfold off: Lymie, his thin naked body marked with circles and crosses and the letters I EAT SHIT, trying to get to his feet, without help from anyone. The scene had stayed in his mind intact. Also the curious feel of Lymie’s shoulder under his hand. Instead of lying, which he would have done if it had been any of the others, he still had enough trust in Lymie to be able to say “Yeah,” in a weak voice. “Yeah, I did.”
    “So did I,” Lymie said. “I thought it might be—you know. So I asked my father. He said it must be that pill they gave us.”
    The sickness receded, leaving Spud without any strength in his knees.
    “That was probably it. They figured they’d scare us,” he said, with no outward sign that he had, in that instant, gone completely crazy. He wanted to laugh out loud and prance and dance and kick something (there was nothing to kick in the corridor) and hit somebody (but not Lymie) and throw his head back and screech like a hoot owl. He managed to walk along beside Lymie and to climb the stairs in the center of the building, one step at a time.
    The door of Room 211 stood open, and high-pitched voices were swarming out of it. Spud and Lymie walked in together and down separate aisles. In spite of the babel and the steady tramping outside in the corridor, each of them heard the other’s footsteps; heard them as distinctly as if the sound were made by a man walking late at night in an empty street.

14
    T he fraternity house which was referred to with such a carefully casual air in LeClerc’s was a one-room basement apartment that Bud Griesenauer got for five dollars a month through an uncle in the real estate business.
    They took possession on Ground-Hog Day and spent