On the day that a doctor tells you that you have one year to live and you are only 16, this is what you do: You have your mother drive you back to your dormitory at prep school because as screwed up as it is, it's not as weird as home; you go to the smoking room in the basement of the dorm where you tell the burnouts who hang out there to give you a cigarette because what the hell, you might as well smoke since you've already got cancer anyway. You bum a cigarette off Fast Freddy, a speed freak from the Cape, who claims that his father is Ted Kennedy's doctor, and that Senator Ted once made drug charges disappear without mess or fuss after the Centerville Police busted Freddy with a pound of pot and a scale on the table. You light the cigarette, smell the sulfur of the match, and inhale until your lungs ache. This is how the cancer will kill you, the doctor said; it will spread up your arm, into your chest, lodge in your lungs. Unless, of course, he cuts off your arm, the right one, including the collarbone. Or they could try chemo; of course you'll vomit copiously and your hair will fall out and still the chances are seven in 10 that the cancer will kill you anyway. So the doctor recommends the amputation. But you know before you even leave the office that there's no way you'll let the doctors cut off your arm.

He was done with doctors. They had already chopped off his right thumb, the thumb on his glove hand, and still they had missed the cancer spreading up his arm, toward his lungs.

"Give me another one of them cancer sticks," he tells Freddy. k to the house for a camera.

Freddy taps a cigarette out of the hard pack.

Terry lights it, inhales. "Hell with it, might as well smoke," he says. "Already got cancer."

"I'll tell ya," Freddy says. "There are times in this world when there is just nothing better than a cigarette. It's like—it's like the perfect moment."

Right now Terry Bevelacqua can't see perfection in a cigarette, but he is willing to try.

Mr. Tinkham, the dorm parent, walks into the Butt Club at a quarter-to-five to clear out the smoker. "Douse 'em guys," he says. "It's time for supper." Tinkham's also the religion teacher, and he's got a big-time apostle complex; he wears this blonde beard like you see on the guys in the Last Supper; he's supposed to be a non denominational chaplain but all he teaches is the King James Bible. Terry doesn't like Tinkham; the Tink's not the kind of guy you want to go to and say, "Mr. Tinkham, I've got one year to live, what should I do?" because the response would be so predictable.

Supper is meat pie tonight, and though everyone makes fun of it, Terry notices that no one leaves any on his plate. It's actually pretty good, ground beef in a flakey crust, topped with a salty mushroom gravy. It's always good, but tonight it's never tasted better. If he were on death row and they offered him one last meal, Terry would ask for the meat pie they serve at Gorton Academy.

After supper, Terry gets one of the day students to drive off campus and buy him a pint of Rum 151, because what you do when you are 16 and learn that you have one year to live is that you get blind drunk. Jonesy comes back with the rum and the Coke and Terry gives him a couple of bucks extra for the buyer, the 18-year-old townie who got the rum. Terry smuggles his bottle over to Room C, a tarpaper shack on the marsh. The marsh is forbidden territory, for to get to it you have to dash across Route 1. Out here in the country, Route 1 is not a busy road, but crossing it is forbidden nonetheless.

Room C is hidden in a copse of trees on the marsh. Some genius once stole a plaque from the door of Room C in Hazleton Hall, and nailed it to the shack. The shack's not tall enough to stand up in, but it's comfortably appointed with three couches and tapestry bought by preppies with money and taste. It's lit with an oil lamp that casts a small ring of light. Teachers have doubtlessly heard rumors about Room C's existence if not its precise location, but the place has never been busted. It is a secure place to party. Terry can smell the sweet scent of pot as he approaches the shack. He calls out, "It's cool!" so he won't surprise the people inside.

There is a thrill in the air in Room C tonight, because everyone knows about Terry's cancer. This is True Life Drama man, no melodramatic chick shit. The dude's got cancer man, for real. Terry ducks into the smoky lamplight and it's like he's a celebrity among the three people there.

Troll says, "Terry how you doin' man?" He sounds like he really means it; Terry finds this unsettling.

"Not good enough," Terry says. "But I'm about to get a whole lot better." He clunks his bottle of rum onto the table, an old cable spool.

Julie, one of the Appleton twins, takes a toke off the bong. She is freckled and blond with eyes like green grapes, and she's crazy about Elroy. Terry knows that Elroy is getting it from her, but he just can't get his mind around that fact. It is too awesome an experience to imagine, kind of like going to the moon. The day Terry got the cast cut off his rebuilt hand, Julie wrinkled her nose at the way the index finger was pushed over to where the thumb used to be. "Yech," she had said. "What if it falls off?"

Julie passes Terry the bong. Terry waves it off. Sometimes pot hits him funny, makes him feel paranoid and estranged; he can not afford to melt into a miasma of self-pity. He doesn't want anything to taint the hard clarity of his rum.

The rum goes down easy with Coke.

"It's a bummer your cancer came back," Elroy says.

Terry can hear the wick sucking oil in the silence. They want to hear the story. He's not sure he can tell it without crying. He takes a gulp of warm rum and Coke.

"Yeah," he says. "It sucks man."

Elroy takes a deep toke of the bong, holds his breath. He exhales. "Hey," he says. "Tinkham's wife is preggers."

"Who told you that?" Julie says.

"No one," Elroy says. "I can just tell." Elroy has changed the subject; Terry is grateful.

The conversation gallops along for a while until Troll says, "Shhh!" They fall quiet. There's definitely some rustling in the woods. The crack of branches sounds closer and closer; the four partiers in Room C sit like baby animals in a den. There is a knock on the door.

"Hey," says a sotto voice from outside. "It's me. Miller."

Elroy unlatches the door. "Dickhead," he says. "Call out when you're coming, man. You caused some serious consternation in here."

"Sorry," Miller says. He's got a head of curly hair punctuated with a sharp nose. "Babs and Bobby are right behind me."

Terry can hear more thrashing in the woods. He scoots over to make room. Babs and Bobby are sophomores who seem to be queer on each other. They duck into Room C, settle into the cushions. Babs' nose is bloody.

"Babs, what's up?" Elroy says.

"Nothing," he says. "I'm OK."

"Bull," Miller says. "Idiot ate a whole bottle of aspirin. Fifty pills."

"What?" Julie is concerned; Babs is the younger brother of her best friend, Liz. Julie dabs at Babs' nose with Kleenex. "Babs," she says. "Why?"

Babs begins to cry; tears and a thin line of blood trickle down his pale face. Terry feels rage. Maybe it's the rum, but he can't contain it. He stands as tall as he can in the cramped shack. He casts a hunched shadow on the tapestries. "You wanna kill yourself? You wanna die? I'll help ya." If it weren't so tight in there he'd start swinging. "I'll trade places with you moron. I'll trade places." Terry snatches his rum and his Coke; he has to leave before he cries.

It's cold on the marsh. It looks like an early frost has settled on the marsh grass, bleaching it white, though it might be a trick of the moon. He can smell the tide and the sweetness of salt hay. Nobody has followed him out of Room C to see if he's OK. Terry tips his pint and drinks the rum straight, watching the bubbles gurgle in the bottle through the white moonlight. He exhales, his breath visible in the cold. How many more? he wonders. How many more good, clean breaths? He inhales deeply, holds it; exhales, luxuriates in the working of his lungs. He remembers what his grandmother said on her deathbed, dying from lung cancer: "It's like breathing through a straw." He drinks again. Easy, he thinks. Be cool. Ain't no use getting all bummed out now. You gotta enjoy what you got while you've got it. He hides the bottle in his waistband, picks up the thread of a trail winding through the brush. He approaches the shoulder of Route 1, sees headlights sweeping down this long, straight stretch of dark road. He thinks about rushing out there, sticking out his thumbless hand to bum a ride, seeing where it takes him. Knowing how way leads on to way, it would be fun to tap into that, just go where the rides and roads take him. Instead he hunkers down into the brush, hiding in case it's a teacher. He resolves right there to finish high school because he has never pictured himself as a dropout; dropouts are quitters and he will not be a quitter. He waits until the road is dark and he dashes across to his dorm.

His room is narrow with a bed, a desk, and a chair. He pulls off his boots, falls onto the faux fur blanket, stares at the ceiling. He can see his "Building a Rainbow Poster" stuck to the wall with gobs of putty since tacks are illegal in the dorms. It seems like everything is illegal in the dorms. Even friggin' door locks are illegal in the dorms so you never know when some dork like Trudge Weisner is going to poke his pimply head through the door and catch you jacking off. He couldn't believe he would go to his grave without ever making love. But who would have him now? Fiona Farnsworth gives him doe-eyed stares during study hall, and from the choir pit where she sings robed in white; but Fiona is a pariah, a spooky girl into the occult. He finds her sexy, that black hair framing blue eyes, but socially she is taboo.

Terry had planned to cry in his room, but he can't; the whole scene is so surreal that he can't muster tears over it. He thinks, someone ought to make a movie of this, or a book. He'd like to write a novel about this place, all the angst seething beneath the veneer of a preppy playland. Terry Bevelacqua didn't come from money; it was his mother's remarriage to her own friggin' psychiatrist that launched him into this weird world of money and madness.

A novel seems like a good idea. He'll have to propose that to Mr. Mitchum as an independent study plan. Mitch is a nice guy, the youngest of the teachers. He's got a droopy red mustache, wears a cowboy hat, and has a foxy wife who's probably just half a dozen years older than the seniors. Once in a while the school will let some genius blow off all his classes and work with a teacher on an independent study. The kid usually has to be near the top of the class and all, while Terry is at the bottom. He would be failing everything without the aid of sympathy Cs and Ds that a couple of teachers gave him. But Mitch is a good guy. Maybe he'd vouch for him, agree to push him along on his novel. Terry will call it Characters All.

He sits at his desk, opens his notebook, scrawls the title on the page. He keeps his pen pressed to the page. He doesn't know where to begin. Maybe he'll begin with today and work backwards, mix up the chronology a little. He thinks about the ride home from Boston with his mother driving, her herky-jerky touch on the accelerator always bad, exaggerated in times of crisis. He thought he'd get whiplash the way she drove. They got stuck in traffic on the Mystic River Bridge and while they jockeyed for position his mother said, "I only wish it could be me instead of you." He swallowed the impulse to say, "So do I." He'd pictured himself opening the car door, walking out onto the swaying deck of the bridge and jumping, though he knew that it was too early for that.

He doesn't much feel like writing. He empties the bottle of rum and a splash of Coke into a tall plastic cup. As long as no one sniffs it, the drink could pass muster as a tall cup of Coke. This strikes him as a revelation; he'll have to tell everyone in the Butt Club about this discovery. If they're cool about it they can sit there and get shitfaced right under the Tink's nose. He decides it will be cool to take his drink over to the snack bar, see who's hanging around on a Friday night. He sticks his right foot into his left boot, smiles at the mistake. Screw boots, y'know? Lacing them up and all is too much hassle. He'll walk to the snack bar in his stocking feet.

The snack bar is a warm, bright place with 12-over-12 windows so you can see who's in there from outside. He can see Tad and Todd and O.B. sitting around a circular table by the vending machines, talking over textbooks. Idiots are studying on a Friday night. They are all right; when he first came to this school, Terry actually hung with them for a while. But in the two years since sophomore year they have grown stronger and smarter while his surgeries have left him thinner, wiser too, but not in a bookish way. It's hard to do homework when you're sprouting tumors in your arm.

Terry smells hamburgers frying in the snack bar when he comes padding in. O.B. looks up; he's got strong forearms from playing lacrosse. "Terry," he says. "How are you doing?"

Again that unsettling tone, as if he really wants to know.

"Great," Terry says.

"Good," says O.B. "Glad to hear that."

"Guys," Terry says. "Put away the books, it's freakin' Friday night for God's sake."

"Can't," says Todd, the first guy Terry's ever known who looks good in glasses. "I've got to ace this semester to have a prayer at early acceptance to Dartmouth."

Terry takes a swallow from his cup. Early acceptance to anywhere is just so far from his mind.

"Hey Ter," says O.B. "What have you got in that cup there?"

"Coke."

"Coke and what, rubbing alcohol?"

"Just Coke and a little 151, for medicinal purposes." It's dead in the snack bar. Terry decides to buy something to take back to the dorm. He feels around his pockets for change, finds it, studies the coins for a moment trying to discern whether they're quarters or nickels. He feeds the vending machine, selects a packet of mini powdered donuts.

"See you guys later," Terry says.

"Take it easy," says O.B.

"Don't take it easy," Terry says, "have a good time.

The snack bar fronts on the quad, which is white with moonlight and frost. Terry can see Mitch's black Labrador retriever, Doctor Sax, silhouetted against the grass. Doctor Sax is a cool name for a dog. Mitch says the dog's named after a Jack Kerouac character, Doctor Sax, who is the embodiment of childhood fear, the hand beneath the bed that grasps ankles, the grotesque face in the nighttime window. Now here he is in the flesh, nothing but a friendly old dog in the moonlight.

"Hey Sax," Terry calls. "Doctor Sax."

The sound of cellophane rustling as it's torn from the donuts gets the dog's attention. "Six Sats," Terry says. "Sit."

Sax squats on his haunches, snaps at a donut. Powdered sugar falls onto his black chest; Terry gently pats his head, spotting it with white fingerprints.

"You're a good dog Sax," Terry says. "Goddamned good dog." He shares the donuts with Sax, three apiece. Sax is liberally sprinkled with sugar. Terry thinks the dog looks like a photographic negative of a Dalmatian, black with white spots. "Sax," he says. "You look like a reverse Dalmatian." He's amused by this thought, decides that he has to share it with Mitch. He'll see Sax home, knock on Mitch's door, make a mock apology for turning his dog into a reverse Dalmatian. It's not usual to go to a faculty member's apartment, but this isn't a usual night. Still, he feels nervous about calling on Mitch. He steels himself with one last gulp from his cup, and carefully sets the cup on the grass.

C'mon Sax," he says; with the promise of food, the dog will go with him anywhere. Together they pad up the stairs, Sax happily leading the way. Terry knocks, shouts, "Hey Mitch, I got your dog."

The door opens. It's Mrs. Mitch, dark hair pulled into a ponytail. "Terry," she says. "Everything all right?"

"Sorry I turned Sax into a reverse Dalmatian," he says. "That dog can eat though. You really ought to feed him more."

"Oh he gets plenty," she says.

"He's got powdered sugar all over him. He looks like a reverse Dalmatian."

Mitch comes into the kitchen. He's also in his stockings. "Terry," he says. "What's up?"

"I was just showing Sax the way home."

"Thank you," Mitch says. "You're a Samaritan and a scholar."

"He's got powdered sugar all over him though. He looks like a reverse Dalmatian."

"Ahh, I see, I see. Why don't you come on in, have a cup of tea?"

Terry follows Mitch into his study. There's a braided oval rug on the floor, a couple of overstuffed chairs, each with a footstool so that neither chair makes a claim for the superiority of its user. They sit side by side like colleagues, facing a fireplace set into the wainscot.

"Terry," Mitch says. "Where are your shoes?"

"I left them over in the dorm."

"I see," Mitch says. "So what's up, tell me: how's life been treating you?"

"Not so good," Terry says. "I found out today my cancer's back, you know?"

"I heard, I heard. So tell me now, no bullshit, how are you feeling about all this? You all right with it?"

"Well, I tell ya—I was hoping that my life would be a novel. Now it looks like it's going to be a short story."

"That's a good way to put it Terry. Very perceptive."

"Thanks. You know, I been thinking about writing a novel about this place. I'd call it Characters All."

"A novel?"

"Yeah."

"Good idea, good idea. Or why not a memoir, Terry. "You know, a day-by-day account of a real-life teenager at a real-life prep school dealing with a real-life problem. Could be good."

Terry thinks it over. He's got the whirlies, feels sick to his stomach. "Then I'd have to name names man."

"This is true Ter, this is true."

Mitch often says that: This is true. People on campus have unconsciously picked up on it to the point where it usually sounds bogus. But when Mitch says it, it sounds as friendly as a pat on the back.

"No," Terry says. "I don't think I can write it that way. At least I'd have to change the names to protect the innocent."

"You could do that," Mitch says. "You can write it any way you like Ter, it's your story."

"Yeah," he says. "I can even make up a happy ending."

"This is true," Mitch says. "This is true." ~

The Winner
"Characters All," the winner of UNH Magazine's first fiction contest, is a roman à clef by Gerald M. Carbone '82. National Book award winner Alice McDermott '78G, who served as judge, praises the story for its "complexity of voice, sure narrative control and wonderful sense of place as well as character." Carbone received the first-place prize of $1,000.

An English major at UNH, Carbone left his job as a writer at the Providence Journal-Bulletin in 2007 to write books full time. His books include Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American Revolution and Washington: Lessons in Leadership. He has also been anthologized in Best Newspaper Writing and How I Wrote the Story. Carbone has won the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford. He lives in Warwick, R.I.

Second Place Winner
"When the Pears Are Ripe" seeks to say "something profound and complex about life, aging, grief and joy," says McDermott, "and I admire it most of all for being so ambitious." The story, one day in the life of a middle-aged woman, was written by Rosalie Davis '79, a freelance copy editor. A former editor and writer at Horticulture magazine, Davis has also written for The Old Farmer's Almanac Gardener's Companion, the UU World Magazine, Gardens Illustrated and The Wall Street Journal, among others. She and her husband, Scott Payette, and sons Pierre and Jack '09 live in Jamaica Plain, Mass. This is her first short story.

Third Place Winner
In "The Big Light" by Nathan J. Fink '11G, the reader learns what happened to the narrator's shell-shocked medic wife. McDermott liked its "wonderfully assured voice and a fine sense of the visual." She adds that it "succeeds very well in—to paraphrase Conrad—making us see. Conrad also comes to mind in its depiction of this journey into a kind of Heart of Darkness." Fink is earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) at UNH. He earned a bachelor's in English from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He has been published in the Wisconsin Review, Eklectica and Black Bird Magazine. He lives in Rye, N.H.

Read the stories by Davis and Fink online at http://unhmagazine.unh.edu/sp10/

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