The Prince of Infinite Space

By Giano Cromley

It is 1990 and, while the country stands on the brink of war with Iraq, Kirby Russo is finally at peace with the world. At seventeen years old, he's figured out some important lessons: how to stay out of trouble with the authorities; how to write muck-raking articles that expose the hypocrisy of said authorities; and, most importantly, how to avoid obsessing about his long lost girlfriend Izzy (who has run away and may be in trouble in Chicago). But when a rich classmate snags the editorship of the school newspaper out from under him, Kirby knows his brief career as a conformist is over. An opportunity to reestablish his hell-raising bona fides arises when his long-lost father shows up with a shady past and a half-baked scheme. Together, they embark on a cross-country road trip to connect with a family he never knew, and maybe even track down Izzy. Kirby soon realizes, however, that life's biggest lessons – the ones that really matter – never happen according to plan.

THE PRINCE OF INFINITE SPACE is a thoughtful story with wry, bright touches of humor, that will appeal to young adults and all readers who appreciate a well-crafted plot, unique characters, and an ending with a twist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Propertius Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005335311

Book preview

Chapter 1

The peace was uneasy, but the treaty between my demons and me held. It has held.

The Haverford Military Institute Cadet Squad is doing drills on the lacrosse field off in the distance. Fake wooden rifles spin like fan blades. At the apex of each revolution, something shiny on the rifles is catching the light, flashing a metallic strobe directly into my eyes. Which, in turn, is making them water.

This is Debbie’s last goodbye before she heads back to Billings. And the fact that I appear to be crying is, I think, artificially inflating her numbers on the Maternal Success Index. For once, I’m okay with not initiating a market correction, even though a seventeen-year-old crying before the first day of military school is pretty much begging to get his ass kicked.

Since getting shipped off to Haverford nearly two years ago, I’ve managed to purchase for myself a new, more sustainable, outlook on life. I call this period the Time of Abiding, and it’s allowed me to ditch the emotional freight that had been the cause of some of my more deviant behaviors. Of course, that’s the chief reason a place like Haverford exists in the first place, to bring about the kind of turnaround they like to take credit for, and obliquely refer to in their promotional materials. But I’d like to think I came upon and entered the Time of Abiding in a more organic, self-directed fashion.

Haverford’s school year runs long in the spring and starts up the second week in August, so I only got a month and some change at home before having to trundle back here for senior year. Not that I’m unhappy about that, mind you. There wasn’t a hell of a lot for me to do in Billings. I’m still forbidden to hang out with Julian (his parents’ wishes), and all efforts to get a hold of my former sort-of girlfriend, Izzy, met with abject failure. Which means I have zero friends in Billings. So I basically spent all my time at home.

Debbie’s boyfriend, Harley Doherty, still technically lives there, but he was hardly ever around, always giving vague, work-related excuses for his absences. (For those keeping score, Harley is Debbie’s ninth boyfriend, including Bradley Kellogg, whom she was married to for a while and who was the closest thing I ever had to an actual, legitimate father figure.) On the days Debbie didn’t have work, she’d watch videotaped episodes of The Golden Girls nonstop. I sat through so many of those goddamn things I feel like I know Dorothy Zbornak better than Debbie at this point. I think the dissolution of her relationship with Harley might have finally eroded her last stronghold of hope. She’s realized her fate: to love and lose, to never hold.

The leader of the Cadet Squad barks out an order and the rifles snap to a halt. Their red berets are all tilted at the same twenty-degree angle. They look so serious I can’t decide if it’s admirable or terrifying. The irony is that all those flashy maneuvers aren’t even standard military practice. It’s purely for show, something they like parents to see when they drop their kids off because it’s what they imagine military schools should look like. Right now, the Cadet Squad’s working on the routine they’ll do when they march in Bismarck’s Harvest Days Parade. But anyone who knows anything about it knows it’s a complete load of horseshit.

I’m so proud of the way you’ve adapted, Kirby. Debbie sniffles once and touches her nose with a wad of kleenex. You’ve grown so much. She’s let her hair get long, but it doesn’t look like she’s doing anything with it.

The Cadet Squad is standing at silent attention, like those monuments on Easter Island. Haverford’s campus is situated at the top of a rounded hill just south of Bismarck, North Dakota. It’s the only appreciable elevation for miles around, which, in the pool-table-flat Midwest, means this knoll constitutes a legitimate alpine experience. Personally, I don’t much like living up here. It always leaves me feeling strangely exposed, like the sky might devour us whole at any moment. Which, for the record, is exactly the kind of thing you want to avoid telling your therapist when you’re trying to convince him that your days of aberrant behavior are behind you. I mentioned it to Dr. Byrne this past summer, and he nearly put me on a regimen of Thorazine without a word more. Sanity, I’ve learned, is simply a matter of learning which thoughts you can tell to whom.

So what do you think? Debbie asks, and I realize I haven’t been listening to her.

It’s quite possible, I say, because it’s a good catch-all response.

Okay, then, she says, as if an important matter has just been settled. Then she puts her hands on my shoulders to signify a topic shift. This is it, kiddo. Your senior year.

I don’t think the smart money had me making it this far, I say.

Debbie winces but lets it go. Just keep working hard, and I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, yes?

About that, I say. "Once I’m named editor of the Bugle, I’ll probably have to stay here over Turkey Day. To make sure we get the December Issue to press on time."

Debbie’s eyes go dull. She’s also stopped wearing makeup, another sign that things with Harley are likely kaput.

I told you this already, didn’t I? I did. But Debbie’s been so zoned-out this summer it’s hard to know what’s gotten through.

I don’t think so, she says, and looks off to the east, where the Missouri River slowly wends past the base of this hill on its way, eventually, to the Gulf of Mexico.

Behind Debbie, a single file of lacrosse players rounds the administration building at a jog, wearing full pads and helmets, sticks held at their sides like lances. They’re snaking their way to the lacrosse field, where they’ll soon displace the Cadet Squad, since lacrosse ranks a couple links higher on the Haverford food chain.

December’s the most important issue we do, I say. It’s the one we enter into competitions, so…

She turns her tired face towards me again. Her hands feel like cinder blocks weighing down on my shoulders. Then her eyes brighten. Of course, I could come here. It’s not like I have anything keeping me in Billings.

It sounds so sad when she says it, I don’t even try to shoot it down.

Now listen, she says, adopting a more business-like tone, which tells me she’s about to deliver her annual academic psyche-up speech. Let’s build on this progress. Let’s keep the momentum going. I have a feeling great things are in store for Kirby Russo this year.

Tally-ho, I say with enough enthusiasm that she buys it.

The lacrosse team is winding its way past us, panting and grunting, pungent sweat wafting.

Now, Debbie says, I’m going to get into that car and drive off, and I’m going to be strong and not cry until I’m out of sight.

It’s a deal, I tell her.

But first, you know what I need, mister.

She wants her first-day-of-school kiss. On principle and by tradition, I’m committed to resisting this entreaty. Plus, the lacrosse team is right there. But since this is the last first day of school she’s going to see me off to, and because the lacrosse team, to a man, would already love nothing more than to send me down the nearby Missouri in my own personal Viking funeral barge with nary a flaxen-haired maiden to shed a tear, I give in and place an unembarrassed, heartfelt kiss on Debbie’s cheek. Her skin is rough, but warm, and I realize she smells like me—not because we spent the last six hours in the car together, but because, at our cores, we share some similar chemical essence, and our triumphs and our failures will likely always be entwined.

A murmur of jeers rises up amongst the passing lacrosse players, but Debbie is oblivious to it, probably because she’s flummoxed by the fact that I didn’t put up my usual fight.

Oh, she says, touching her cheek.

Give my best to Harley. Tell him I’m still glad Bush beat Dukakis.

I will, she says unenthusiastically.

Then she climbs into her Subaru, which still has the crooked bumper from when I tried to mow down our paperboy—which, if you want to draw a map, was one of those crossroad events that brought my life to this exact circumstance. When she pulls out of the space in front of the barracks, I do a full-arm, side-to-side wave until she’s out of sight.

The lacrosse team has chased the Cadet Squad off the field in a bloodless coup. They’re whipping hard rubber balls between the baskets of their sticks with such speed and precision it seems like magic. No one in Billings has ever even heard of lacrosse.

Now that I’m alone on campus, my ear tips go tingly and a prickly sweat breaks out on my neck.

Three deep breaths, two knuckle-cracks, four tooth taps. (It’s a little ritual Dr. Byrne taught me to help calm myself down if situations threaten to get too big.)

I didn’t mention to Debbie when she delivered her pep talk that this is the first year I’ve actually believed what she said. I am on the verge of greatness. Only one problem though: The more things start to go my way, the more I worry about what’ll happen when they inevitably don’t.

Chapter 2

Something I’ve figured out here at Haverford, which is central to embracing the Time of Abiding: You can get used to anything.

This is not a moral statement. And it’s not meant as some hang-in-there-champ chestnut. It’s simply a fact. Ask the frog as the water in his pot warms and his skin blisters and he’ll tell you everything is absolutely A-Okay. Yessirree, all fine and dandy!

The fact is, there’s a subtle seductiveness to all the rules and regulations they have around here. Making your bed with crisp hospital corners each morning guarantees you’ve at least accomplished one thing by the time you walk out your door. Having to wear a uniform eliminates the need to worry about whether or not your clothes match. Knowing you have to be in bed with lights out for taps check each night (eleven o’clock on weeknights, twelve on the weekends) becomes a natural habit that you even start to look forward to. This kind of consistency wasn’t part of my life back in Billings, where Debbie let me do pretty much what I wanted, as long as it didn’t impede her life. Rules, for her, were suggestions. And I think I’ve found out that I don’t do well with suggestions.

But to get a real sense of what the last year and a half of my life has been like, you have to understand a little bit about the place I’ve called home during that time.

Haverford Military Institute is in the midst of an identity crisis. When it was founded in the late forties, the nation was still tumescent from its World War II conquests, and was embarking on a prolonged martial dick-swinging phase. For places like Haverford, there was a certain prestige in being known as a military academy. Who wouldn’t want their son educated in the same manner we trained the fighting force that saved the world from Nazis? Fast forward a couple decades, past the stalemate of Korea and the quagmire of Vietnam, military academies began to see a drop-off in enrollment. Schools closed down. The few that remained, like Haverford, became known as places where you send your hardest cases, legally challenged last-chancers (like myself).

Over the past few years, however, a group of reformers has been trying to reinvent Haverford as an elite prep school. Little Exeter on the Prairie is the tagline someone in marketing came up with. In order to shed the old image, they jettisoned some of the harsher freshman hazing traditions like full-body eagle mounts and camel runs. But that was low-hanging fruit, reform-wise. Lately, they’ve set their sights on dismantling the military nomenclature. Students are no longer referred to as cadets. The barracks is now Lovett Residential Hall. We’re still required to wear military uniforms, but you have to think those are high up on the reformers’ hit list. There’s even a rumor they’re going to drop Military from the name altogether and go with Haverford Academy.

Like any institutional upheaval, this one is not happening without howls of protest. A group of wealthy alums is pushing back on what it perceives as the pussification of its beloved institution. (Which is utter horseshit, because no one here beloves Haverford, and only the shimmery veils of nostalgia could convince anyone to look back on their time here as something to cherish.) As a way to combat this zag toward political correctness, they’ve taken to gifting their donations with the caveat that they be used solely to fund the Cadet Squad, which they see as their last best hope for maintaining the old world order. The Cadet Squad, in turn, pretty much has free run of the campus.

On a day-to-day basis, however, this schism in Haverford’s personality is most visible among the faculty, half of whom (the older half) actively served in the military and continue to be loud boosters of it. The younger half, on the other hand, view those military trappings as vestigial relics that should be openly rebelled against. Mr. Pectine, my twenty-something-year-old civics teacher, rather than assigning papers on why Truman was morally obligated to nuke Japan, chose to have us write our first essays on who we thought our spirit animal was.

It was into this existential maelstrom that I was tossed halfway through my sophomore year. I, myself, am agnostic on the Military v. Prep School issue. None of the pro-military faculty think very much of me since I’m generally viewed as too weak to be good soldier material. Yet my natural tendencies toward gadfly-ism won’t let me fully embrace the hippie-dippy moon-beamery of the younger faculty. My paper for Mr. Pectine argued vehemently that my spirit animal was a banana slug.

Between 8:00 and 3:00, life here isn’t that different from a normal day at good old Roosevelt High. Sure, we have to wear these uniforms, and there’s a lot more flag-waving and moral certainty, but that’s just background noise. Really, it’s the lawless outside-of-class milieu where the differences between my old school and Haverford come into sharp relief.

Unlike Roosevelt, all Haverford students are required to take part in at least one after-school activity, which posed a problem for someone as uniquely unskilled at activities as myself. Sports were out of the question, since I lacked any sort of parental athletic tradition. (It’s true the Original Biological Contributor played minor league baseball, but I’ve never met the man, nor communicated with him beyond one dispiriting postcard he sent me when I was four, so he was never there to drill into my head why it might be useful to know how to hit a moving ball with a rounded stick.)

One of the few non-sports-based options was to work on the staff of the Haverford Bugle, our monthly school newspaper. The Bugle is as old as the institution itself, and it has served mainly as a mouthpiece for the administration, a twelve-page rag that chirped institutional praises by spotlighting faculty and staff, and re-capping victories on the sporting fields. It was inconsequential, read by no one; its only purpose for existing was to give people like me something to do in the afternoons.

From the moment I walked into the Bugle newsroom, however, I realized journalism might be a decent way for me to make the most of some of my more problematic character traits. Back at Roosevelt High, my goal had always been to remain as anonymous as possible in the hope that whatever shit was going to be dealt would just, for lack of an easy target, pass me by. But when we read Lord of the Flies in sophomore English, I realized the ones who suffer the most in the world are the Littluns, the ones whose names you never know. Journalism, I decided, would be my path out of anonymity, so I embraced it.

Spring before last, I got a tip about a cheating racket in Mr. Winston’s AP Math class. After doing some digging and a brief stint undercover, I wrote a story that exposed the whole operation.

Before we went to press, Mr. Lombardi, the journalism teacher, said that the Haverford Bugle had never run a piece like mine before. I could tell he was hesitant to publish it. But I appealed to his journalistic instincts, and he eventually gave it a green light.

Almost overnight, the Bugle went from being a campus backwater for the athletically ungifted, to a major force driving the academic conversation. They even changed the protocol for photocopying exams on campus. Not everyone was pleased with the piece though. I know Mr. Lombardi got called into some meetings with the dean and provost and some other pooh-bahs, but he assured me everything would be all right.

During a brainstorming session later that semester I came up with an idea for a recurring column called Myth Breakers. Each issue, we investigate some rumor that’s been floating around campus. The first one we did was whether or not there was a secret tunnel connecting the headmaster’s residence and Lovett Residential Hall. (Conclusion: True, but they’re only steam tunnels and can’t be used for the kinds of hijinks and shenanigans we all had imagined.) I’ve proposed doing a Myth Breaker column on whether Mitchell Haverford, our school’s founder, had secret ties to Nazi Germany, but so far Mr. Lombardi has maintained a firm veto on that one.

By far my biggest journalistic triumph, however, came last winter. A routine audit of the school’s cafeteria budget turned up irregularities that implicated the lacrosse team and its long-time coach, Mr. Dillard. Turns out the lacrosse players were getting two, sometimes three, times the allotted rations for lunch and dinner.

Mr. Lombardi took a lot of heat when we published that article. He got called into meetings for three days straight. Afterwards, I ran into him smoking a cigarette behind Medford Hall when he didn’t think anyone was around.

I didn’t know you smoked, I said, likely catching him by surprise.

I don’t. Not for a while. He exhaled. But after this week.

That article really shook things up.

This isn’t the type of place that looks very kindly on the truth, Kirby.

That’s what we’re trying to change.

They fired Coach Dillard.

I didn’t say anything.

He’s worked here for twenty-two years.

Isn’t that what good journalists do? I asked. Expose the truth, no matter what the cost?

You’ve got a damn big chip on your shoulder. Mr. Lombardi dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with his heel. All good journalists have one.

I took it as a compliment. I’ve also since taken it as a sign that he’s grooming me to assume the role of Executive Editor when classes start this fall.

All this muckraking hasn’t exactly made me the most popular kid on campus. But at least they know who I am. They also know I’m the kind of guy who’s not afraid to name names, which means they’re a little bit afraid of me. And being feared is infinitely more intoxicating than being liked.

+++++

I push open the door to Lovett Residental Hall and head down the corridor to Room 116. A hint of sweet-smelling incense wafting from within tips me off to who’s awaiting.

Rajesh Padmanabham is stretched out on his bed playing his Gameboy. The bleeps and bloops of Super Mario Land punctuate my entrance. Like me, Rajesh is wearing his civvies, since school hasn’t officially started yet, and we’ll have to be in uniform for the next four months once it does. A tiny elephant-dude statue—a god named Ganesh, I’m told—sits on the windowsill with a stick of incense smoking at its base.

Rajesh grants me a murmured What’s up? without taking his eyes off the screen.

I set about hanging all three of my khaki service uniforms in the closet in the hope that they’ll de-wrinkle sufficiently overnight. RJ and I were randomly assigned to this room at the beginning of our junior years. Since then, neither one of us has lifted a finger to make the place seem more hospitable.

RJ carries himself with a flinty New Jersey pugnacity, even though, like me, he’s probably never thrown dukes in his life. He’s the kind of guy who could tell you the individual personalities of each mutated ninja turtle, and—with little to no prompting—enumerate all the ways the recent live-action film defiled the original comic. He and I have almost nothing in common except that we’re both outsiders here, and we both have a knack for survival. Which turned out to be just enough scrap material for us to construct a rickety friendship with.

RJ’s after-school activity is Computer Club. He’s also the founder of the Committee to Institute Cricket as a Legitimate Campus Sport. The entire CICLCS consists of Rajesh, one milquetoast British guy, and me. I joined out of solidarity, even though I can’t get my head wrapped around the rules of cricket, which seem more like a math assignment than a sport.

The Gameboy emits some notes that indicate mortality, and Rajesh tosses it at his pillow.

Cutting it pretty close, he says. Classes start tomorrow, bro.

Debbie needed to get her car worked on before she drove me. It was that or take a bus.

RJ eyes the Gameboy, then looks back at me. Have you been following the news?

"If it doesn’t involve The Golden Girls, then probably not."

You haven’t heard about Iraq? Sending troops to take back Kuwait?

I actually had heard about this and didn’t know what to make of it. I’d assumed if Bush thought it was a good idea then it probably was. Though I don’t trust him the way I trusted old man Reagan.

"If you’re talking about stories for the Haverford Bugle, I mean, maybe we’ll do something if we can find a local angle."

I’m not pitching a story, dipwad. His eyes are wide and