Read Whipping Boy for Free Online

reaction was disbelief. I put the pillow back down and counted to five with my eyes shut tight. I was breathing heavily when I removed the pillow and opened my eyes. The watch was still missing.
    I searched under the bed. Nothing. I tore the sheets and blanket off my mattress. Nothing. I looked around the room, hoping someprankster had moved the watch from its usual resting place. It was nowhere to be found.
    Even now I find it difficult to describe the queasiness that came over me as the consequences of the theft began to sink in. I begged my roommates to return the watch or at least help me identify the thief. Each one disavowed any role in or knowledge of the crime. That seemed extremely unlikely. I had no evidence of a conspiracy, but the more upset I became, the more Paul giggled and looked at Cesar.
    The pair knew something. I was sure of it. I pleaded and pleaded until Cesar smiled and traced the curve of his nose with index finger and thumb. “Don’t be so nosy, Nosey.”
    A few days later, Paul admitted that he had hurled Dad’s watch from a balcony. When asked why, he explained he had been dared— duped is probably a better word—after being told this grade-school riddle:
    Question: Why did the man throw his watch out the window?
    Answer: He wanted to see time fly.
    The identity of the riddler never surfaced. But rightly or wrongly, I felt in my bones Cesar had had a hand in the crime.
    Knee-deep snow covered the ground, but that didn’t stop me from combing the area where the watch might have fallen. I lasted outside about an hour before the cold forced me to suspend the search.
    Two weeks after the crime, Mom drove up for a visit. “Where’s Dad’s watch?” she asked as we were sitting down for lunch at a local café. I tried changing the subject. She persisted. I told her that I’d forgotten the watch in my room. She knew I was lying and pressed further. “I dropped it out the window,” I improvised. My powers of deception were no better than Paul’s, and by the time dessert arrived, I had spilled the beans.
    Over my protests, Mom did the unthinkable. She told. Group Captain Watts immediately commanded the Belvedere housemaster to undertake a search. The housemaster passed the order along to thehouse captain. The house captain responded by telling a prefect, and he in turn ordered a couple of subalterns to poke about in the snow with ski poles.
    The watch never resurfaced. The loss left me bereft—more than bereft. I felt annihilated. I would have done anything—gulped down an entire bottle of Cesar’s hot sauce or submitted to “The Thirty-Nine Lashes” thirty-nine times—if I’d thought it would return the watch to my wrist. (I still would.)
    Yet oddly enough—there’s no other way to put this—time began to fly soon after the Omega was launched from the tower. There were two reasons for this. First, Paul left the school. The watch incident, plus lapses in judgment that didn’t implicate me, compelled Groupie to inform Paul’s parents, the heiress and the huntsman, that their child required a degree of oversight Aiglon could not provide. (Paul eventually found his way to a Connecticut boarding school with a one-to-one student/teacher ratio.)
    The second reason things improved was even more extraordinary: Cesar disappeared. From one day to the next— poof! —he just vanished.
    He didn’t get expelled. I was sure of that. His poster collection and knives remained in the room. At the time, I didn’t initiate a full-scale investigation into his whereabouts—that would only come much later—but I did ask around. No one could explain his absence. Among the lower-school boys (at least the smaller ones) news of Cesar’s departure provoked palpable relief.
    For me, probably more than for anyone else, the payoff was immediate and wide-ranging. My mood improved dramatically, and so did my schoolwork. At one mark reading, I even managed to get the top grades in my class (of ten students), a