Self by Yann Martel Page B

Croydon, not John. The intimate first name disappeared, was reserved for only the best, closest friends. To others one became an impersonal last name, like a brand name, a turtle with a word painted on its shell, a wall with a single window too high to look into.
    As I was sitting on my bed, reading the information in the envelope, two boys came in carrying a trunk.
    “Are you Croydon?” I asked the first, a smile on my face. He had a sharply featured face and sandy hair.
    “No, he is,” he said with a smirk, jerking his head towards the other, who laughed. They dropped the trunk and left.
    A minute later, the first boy, the one I had spoken to, returned. He opened the trunk and started unpacking it. He didn’t say a word or even throw me a glance.
    He was Croydon.
    He didn’t want a roommate. He had asked for one of the few single rooms in Baxter House. He didn’t get it. He got a double room and me.
    One day we were in our room, each at our desk, back to back, studying for a math test. From the corridor, not loud but coming through, we could hear Kleinhenz and another boy arguing. I suppose Kleinhenz was a little pompous and disdainful. The argument was not acrimonious or even personal — I found out later that it was about the merits of different systems of education, and that Kleinhenz was quite satisfied about the excellence of his native German Gymnasiums — but it was enough for Croydon to grab the garbage can, walk out, throw the garbage can at Kleinhenz’s head and start punching him in the face. Thus would Croydon make him pay for his accent, with the personality it suggested! Kleinhenz put up as good a fight as he could — he brought up his fists in the classical stance of boxers and danced about — but though he was taller and had a greater reach, he was fifteen years old to Croydon’s seventeen, and even if things had been otherwise equal he lacked Croydon’s hard edge of nastiness. With every punch that met its target, my roommate took increasing pleasure in the contest. It ended when Kleinhenz unexpectedly turned and fled down the corridor. My image of him will always be of the multicoloured mask of abuse he wore for days afterwards: the greenish-blue rings around his eyes, the red welts on his cheekbones, the purple cuts on his lips.
    Like the other boys, including the one with whom Kleinhenz had been having the argument, I did nothing but watch the fight, mesmerized by its violence. Not the first time, andcertainly not the last, that I would display moral deadness at Mount Athos.
    That was Croydon. Not a rogue element at Mount Athos, but a rogue in his element.
    (2) I remember McAlister. There were three classes of boys at Mount Athos. There were the elites: the top athletes, the best students, those with a certain charisma, those with famous last names — these could do no wrong. The institution coddled them, humoured them. Beneath these elites floated a slightly oppressed but complacently content middle class, the average element in contrast to which the elites could shine, the spectators who did the clapping and cheering. Lastly, there was a class that was lower and marginal (though it paid exactly the same astronomical tuition fees). These were the “zeros”, the nobodies of Mount Athos, those who were unable to fit in for whatever reason — a curious physical appearance, a social awkwardness, an ineptness of one sort or another.
    I was a zero. My acne and messy hair advertised it, my petulance confirmed it, my French name sealed it. Only my good marks and the cachet of Madam Ambassador My Mother placed me in its upper echelons.
    But McAlister of the stupid face and the cheap blue suit — he was the zero of zeros. He suffered unremittingly. His ego must have been shattered so many times that I can’t imagine he ever managed to put it back together again, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men with Humpty Dumpty. That’s how I see McAlister: a boy with broken eggshells in