Faulkner On An Alum Dicking Assembly

Perhaps memory believes before knowing remembers, but rumor disperses in insidious fashion, sowing belief in what memory never knew, and sowing remembrance in what memory ought never to have believed. So I should have hated and feared the words, words that conveyed a fanciful tale of a time long past, a time before I had come to the school, unknowing of the whispers pervading through the halls, whispers that stirred disbelief yet rang true. So I should have hated and feared the words, words that fell upon ears not prompting but not unlistening, possessing the curiosity of one not yet jaded by the evermurmuring nature of the school, and that heard a not quite believable yet known true in some fashion tale of the blond proctor with whom I shared an alcove. A tale of before he had seized the STUCO presidential office, the captainship of his teams, the acceptance to a prestigious university in Palo Alto, and become the progenitor of his own narrative. 

So I should have hated and feared the words, yet I listened to the tale regaling the dicking (Dicking meaning the ritual all but the most law-abiding, or perhaps the least independent, among us partake in, the brashest of all on a bi-weekly basis. It is a respite from the unending journey that some call the seeking of knowledge and others yet call the creation of madness and sorrow, and is unilaterally known as not allowed. It is called wrong to miss a scheduled appointment, yet the wrongness only adds to the appeal, to the adrenalinejoy of spinning the chamber and cocking the hammer of whose collective abodes would be called for check-in and whose sins would be punished by the administration.) and the chase. The dicking by a boy yet to become a man and yet to become a president and yet to become a captain but who possessed the spirit of one who sought all of those things even while not consciously knowing so himself. For then, he thought of footsteps, footsteps of purpose that struck hard and measured blows upon the pavement. Footsteps that he himself was the owner of and footsteps that brought him ever closer to Wentworthhaven, the bubble that granted a sense of immunity to those brazenindependent students known as the Bulls that reveled in the ritual dicking. 

His footsteps struck the pavement, first hard and fast, for Northside was enemy territory, the most dangerous grounds of capture by teacher for those brazenindependent students fancying respite above lecture or seeking the adrenalinejoy of playing the outlaw for a brief time before continuing in their crusade of learning. They slowed as his footsteps found him on Southside passing the house of red brick and large windows commonly seen on the campuses of those schools heralded as elite in the Northeast, the house they called Dunbar even as the spelling upon its front named itself DVNBAR. But this was a mistake as the man called by students Cos in spite of his family name claiming the designation Cosgrove caught the shock of the boy’s blond hair standing out from the bleak graywintercampus of the school, and so he called to the boy for he immediately divined his outlaw intentions. 

So the footsteps were once again fast, faster yet with every calling, and when the dean named Cos began to run in pursuit of his quarry, they took the pace of an antelope fleeing for fear of life and pursuit of freedom while all the while suffering the pursuit of an inescapable cheetah. So with the cheetahdean not far behind the antelopeboy leaped through the bubble, knowing it was not a haven as usual but a temporary gap between himself and capture, and ran to his room, hitting the wooden door before passing through its doorway, hurriedly slamming it and locking it as if it would offer an insurmountable barrier that would forever delay the inevitable dickey. As the knocks landed, heavy and measured, raining not quickly yet not slowly, the boy lay under his bed, shaking with the fear of having been caught and the jubilation of having achieved some type of escape even as capture stood not but feet away. Yet above this fear and jubilation reigned pride, pride for having completed a sacred ritual of the Bulls in legendary fashion. For where some might have turned back and others might have relied upon silver-laden tongues to escape punitive measures, the boy had remained brazenindependent, not fleeing from oppression but rather running towards freedom.