CHAPTER 1
Strike One ... Strike Two ...
Fall 1972, on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. Upperclassman John Sidoli was studying in his third-floor room in Langdell Hall when in jumped his friend Jeff Giancola with a plastic bag full of white powder. Jeff looked around frantically, his eyes coming to rest on Sidoli's closet. He blurted, "John, let me stash this in there. Just for a little while. If Larry finds it he'll kill me!" Before Sidoli had a chance to sacrifice good judgment to fellowship, Giancola stashed the bag in his closet and fled.
Sidoli listened to the footsteps retreat down the corridor. Setting aside his book, he stood and walked to his window in time to see Giancola fly out the front door and sprint into the Commons. Behind the girls' dorm across the way the sky had the warm glow of dusk. Shadow covered half of the green between the tall redbrick Georgian dormitories. Two broad white elms in full autumn display were enclosed in this space. Sidoli had lived in the same corner of Langdell for more than a year, across the hall from Giancola and Larry Lavin. Sidoli was closer to Giancola, who had confided several weeks ago that he was involved in a drug deal with Lavin, which came as no surprise. Even though Sidoli had known and liked Lavin since the middle of their year as "Lowers," as sophomores at Exeter are called, he had never really felt close to him. There was something outrageous about Larry, something that made Sidoli believe Giancola's story. Of all the hundreds of students he knew at Exeter, Larry Lavin was the one most likely to get involved in something like that.
Giancola had said that Larry was working a heroin deal with the Boston Mafia. He said that whenever the drug connection called at Langdell Hall, a message was left for Larry to call his mother. Sidoli knew there were messages on the board nearly every day for Lavin to call his mother. Ever since, whenever he saw the note on the board, "Lavin, call Mom," it lent credence to the tale.
Looking down now through the magnificent elms, he saw Giancola stop midway across the Commons. Just inside the shadow stood a tall, thin figure Sidoli recognized as Lavin and some big guy with a hat and overcoat. The two strode up to Giancola, who appeared to be pleading. They knocked him down. Giancola jumped up swinging, and was knocked down again. He was kicked by the man in the overcoat. Then he was pulled to his feet and dragged toward the front door.
Sidoli panicked. He ran from his room and down the hall to the lavatory, where he opened one of the toilet stalls and closed the door behind him.
All was silent for long minutes. Then he heard Giancola call for him in the hall. He didn't answer. The calls got closer until Giancola burst into the bathroom and discovered him hiding in the stall. Jeff looked desperate. He begged Sidoli to cover for him. Somehow, he said, Lavin suspected that the bag of white powder was stashed in Sidoli's room. Jeff needed his friend to swear that it wasn't.
Reluctantly, Sidoli agreed, but as they entered the room, Lavin was already holding the plastic bag in his hand.
"You were holding out on us," he sneered. "You stole an ounce. We'll show you what we do to people who steal from us."
And the big man lunged at Giancola with a Coke bottle, shattering it against the side of the door. Sidoli leapt back horrified as Lavin and the other man wrestled Giancola to the floor. Straddling Jeff, Lavin opened the baggie and held the white powder over Giancola's face.
"Kill him," said the big man. "Shove the whole ounce down his throat."
Just then, Sidoli's voice interrupted, quavering, shouting a plea he would be embarrassed about for the next twenty years. "No, don't! Don't kill him here! Please, kill him somewhere else!"
Then Lavin and Giancola and the other fellow were on the floor, laughing. Sidoli suddenly recognized the big man as a football player who lived two floors down. It was a joke! It was all a joke! Larry, laughing so hard he could barely speak, showed Sidoli the baggie, and sputtered, "Confectioners' sugar!"
Larry laughed and laughed, and, after a while, Sidoli laughed, too.
Larry Lavin had entered Phillips Exeter Academy in January of 1971 as an awkward "townie," a tall, skinny fifteen-year-old with a ludicrous retainer on his teeth. He had an especially hard time pronouncing the letter L, which was unfortunate, because every time he introduced himself it came out, "Hi, I'm 'arry 'avin," with the Ls coming out as slippery Ws. But Larry didn't seem to mind. He talked and talked and talked. Even without the retainer his Haverhill accent was so bad that his classmates found him hard to understand. Still, people liked Lavin. He had charm. He was black Irish and full of the devil. His pale green eyes would fix you with a gaze like a dare. His black hair was thick and long, framing his head like a helmet and falling down across his forehead to the eyebrows — which was a thing that preppies didn't do. He affected gaudy plaid pants and pastel polo shirts and had a closet full of three-piece suits. Larry's mom had worried about her son fitting in with his upper-class schoolmates, so she had spent months shopping in secondhand stores to find bargains on conservative suits and altering them to fit her youngest son's gangly, uneven frame. Like his father, everything about Larry was long — a long thin face and nose, long torso, long arms and legs. His left leg was longer than his right, which set his left shoulder slightly higher, which made him always seem off-balance, thrown together loosely, an impression enhanced by the way his thick mop of black hair made his head seem to teeter atop such a pole of a neck.
His mother's efforts to help her son fit in with his wealthy classmates had precisely the opposite effect. At Exeter the despised coat-and-tie rule was mocked. Students wore the rattiest sport coats and most ridiculous ties they could find to top their rumpled, faded jeans. Tennis shoes were not permitted, so students wore battered penny loafers held together with electrical tape. These were the Vietnam years, when the normal conflict between administration and students bordered on war. On most college campuses students had plenty of avenues to vent their outrage against the war and act out their fashionable disdain for social convention, but Exeter was just a high school, with curfews, a dress code, and other strict regulations against nonconformity. The same generation gap that troubled so many American homes during the sixties and early seventies was magnified a hundred times on a campus like Exeter's. There were dozens of expulsions every year. Hardly a weekend went by that someone was not caught in violation of one or more of the school's cardinal rules. This tension had left many in the student body with open contempt for the prep school's proud...
