“WHAT?” My chin almost hit the mattress. “He did not! Wait! Who put that--”

“Josh!” Alex was struggling to speak through his laughter, or at least to keep his voice down. He wrapped his arms around his middle and shook. He wiped the tears out of his eyes, “Josh stole Ollie’s textbook out of his bag during lab this morning and he glued all kinds of nasty bits inside. I went up to the desk when Professor Lucas was chasing Ollie down the hall and I had a look at the thing. Filth’s on every page, you can’t even see the original text! I mean, it’s really disgusting stuff, Silvia! Pornographic pictures, dirty literature, ads for sex toys, male prostitutes, old ladies, he-she’s, sheep…you name it. Josh had to be collecting these bits for weeks! He gave the book back to Ollie just before class. He says, ‘Here, Mate, you left this in Chemistry’ and Ollie just took it and said thanks. He didn’t even think about it! Never saw it coming! Clever bastard that Josh! I didn’t know he had it in him! That’s the best one he’s done yet! I‘m so proud of him! He‘s like a son to me now!”

I couldn’t stop laughing. I thought back on all the pranks Oliver had pulled on Josh just in the time I’d known him, everything from the exploding Eppenndorf vials to super gluing the poor boy’s daps to the floor of his gym locker. Josh had fired back with putting Vaseline in Oliver‘s shorts and cutting the toes out of his socks, but nothing like he‘d just done. “Oh, he got him good! Good for Joshua!”

“Lucas freaked out, of course. She went white then pink and started screaming. Couldn’t understand a word she was saying, mind. She was just squawking like a chicken, then she hit Oliver like ten times with her lesson planner and chased him out of the room, beating him with it the whole way down the hall. He was like…fending her off,” Alexander imitated his brother by bending his arms and holding them as if to block blows, “We were all watching by the doorway. It was brilliant! By the time she got back we were passing the book around and the whole room was rolling,” He leaned back in his chair, satisfied that he’d gotten the story out, “Joshua looked so smug, the little bugger. Anyway, Ollie knows the drill. He went straight to see Pennyweather. He’s been there for over an hour. I don’t know if he’ll be coming to see you tonight or not. He might really be in trouble.”

“Oh, they have to know he didn’t do this himself!”

“Ollie won’t rat Josh out and he won’t pin it on anybody else, either. He might have to take the knock for it himself if Professor Lucas wants blood.”

“True. Poor Oliver. But it is hysterical.”

“Aye,” Alex nodded, “It is that. I just hope they don’t tell our parents. Dad will have a stroke!”

Oliver ended up going without being punished as Professor Lucas and Madame Pennyweather both agreed they believed he had been the victim of a distasteful prank. Oliver never did turn Josh in for his crime, either. He simply said that there was a lot of teasing going on amongst the boys on that floor and it really could have been anybody. However, I noticed shortly after that he, Alex, Lance and Merlyn were suddenly collecting newspapers of all sorts and that when they’d get passes to go into town they’d each come back with rolls of duct tape. I knew that they’d been having some of the girls in our form nick bags of flour from the kitchen during cooking classes. They went about this for about two months and never told me what they were up to, but in the end I heard that somebody had made a paper mache wall so thick it took an electric saw and a sledge hammer to break through it.

The story that was whispered throughout the halls was that in the middle of a dark Friday night, this person, or persons, as it may have been, sneaked out of quarters and placed this object, which was just slightly larger than the door frame, over the entrance to Josh McGuigan’s room. They then used some sort of sealant to cement it into place against the wall. This left Josh and his unfortunate dorm mate unable to open their door the next morning no matter how hard they pushed and slammed themselves against it. Nobody bothered to notify staff right away, as I suppose it was more entertaining to watch them struggle to escape their paper mache prison. When a prefect finally happened by and saw the monstrosity over the door and heard the boys pounding against it from the other side, help was finally hailed. It took another hour to get one of the groundskeepers, as it was then Saturday, to come to finally free the boys. It was said, too, that later, after swearing to Madame Pennyweather he had no idea who’d sealed him in, Josh McGuigan walked over to Oliver Dickinson’s room, knocked on the door, and shook his hand.

But long before that happened, I got over my ailment and was returned to the student population. It became appallingly obvious that I had fallen behind in my studies. I couldn’t deal with that. I was used to being the know-it-all at the head of almost every subject and the idea that I didn’t know every detail of every topic that had been covered made me wonky. Oliver and I only shared one class together, which was Physics. It was quite ironic because I needed to study up on what I had missed and poor Oliver was not getting the class through his head in the slightest. We had special permission from the professor one Thursday night to stay in the common room after curfew to work together on an essay. “Help each other out,” She had said. So there we were sitting in the common room alone on a couch in front of the fireplace with our books and papers laid out on a table before us and if you think we were actually working on that essay you are out of you bloody mind.

“Two days until Spring break,” Oliver grinned at me. The firelight caught in his eyes. He really did have beautiful eyes, so dark they were nearly black in that light, but still bright at the same time, as if they were able to absorb every bit of light around him and send it back.

“I know! I’m so excited! But what if your parents hate me?”

“Oh, they won’t hate you, take my word. My dad’s a bit of a nag. He’ll ask you a ton of questions and make you feel like you’re on trial, but he’s more or less harmless. He just thinks he has to know everything. Oh, and he’ll yell at Alexander and me as soon as he gets through the door. ‘Get down here and put away your daps!’ He’ll shout, but it’s OK. It makes him feel like he’s done something important for Mum.” He paused, as if considering this, “Plus, he likes yelling at us, so sometimes we do things to give him a reason. You can just ignore him. And as far as Mum, she’s got a sense of humour. You can get her going with a good joke, but she’s a high strung sort, so don’t mention any catastrophic bits of news, do not discuss politics and leave religion as far from the conversation as possible. She loves to serve tea, so have tea with her and make sure you eat whatever she puts on your plate. Keep telling her everything she cooks is wonderful, which it generally is, and you’ll be fine. Alexander and I have talked about you. I know she’ll love you to bits.”

I leaned forward and kissed him quickly, “Thank you for putting in the kind word. You know I’m scared to death, don’t you?”

Oliver looked at me thoughtfully and took my hand into his own. “Don’t be scared, Sil. Not of my parents. They're all right. There’s not a thing about you that they wouldn’t like and even if they did find something, I wouldn’t care. I would never change my mind about you.”

He kissed me again. We sat for a long moment with our foreheads together and our fingers intertwined. “We should probably work on the essay,” I finally said. “What will we tell the professor if we come in tomorrow and have nothing done?”

He sighed, “Aye, we maybe should.”

But of course we didn’t. We were too distracted by each other to even turn a page and by the time we got serious enough to try our time was up and Professor Wilson swept us out of the common room and in opposite directions to our dormitories.