A_Separate_Peace_-_Full_Text

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"You can try it again and break it again. Tomorrow. We'll get the coach in here, and all the
official timekeepers and I'll call up The Devonian to send a reporter and a photographer—"
He climbed out of the pool. "I'm not going to do it again," he said quietly.
"Of course you are!"
"No, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I know. But I don't want to do it in public."
Some other swimmers drifted in through the door. Finny glanced sharply at them. "By the
way," he said in an even more subdued voice, "we aren't going to talk about this. It's just
between you and me. Don't say anything about it, to . . . anyone."
"Not say anything about it! When you broke the school record!"
"Sh-h-h-h-h!" He shot a blazing, agitated glance at me.
I stopped and looked at him up and down. He didn't look directly back at me. "You're too
good to be true," I said after a while.
He glanced at me, and then said, "Thanks a lot" in a somewhat expressionless voice.
Was he trying to impress me or something? Not tell anybody? When he had broken a school
record without a day of practice? I knew he was serious about it, so I didn't tell anybody.
Perhaps for that reason his accomplishment took root in my mind and grew rapidly in the
darkness where I was forced to hide it. The Devon School record books contained a mistake, a
lie, and nobody knew it but Finny and me. A. Hopkins Parker was living in a fool's paradise,
wherever he was. His defeated name remained in bronze on the school record plaque, while
Finny deliberately evaded an athletic honor. It was true that he had many already—the
Winslow Galbraith Memorial Football Trophy for having brought the most Christian
sportsmanship to the game during the 1941-1942 season, the Margaret Duke Bonaventura
ribbon and prize for the student who conducted himself at hockey most like the way her son
had done, the Devon School Contact Sport Award, Presented Each Year to That Student Who in
the Opinion of the Athletic Advisors Excels His Fellows in the Sportsmanlike Performance of
Any Game Involving Bodily Contact. But these were in the past, and they were prizes, not
school records. The sports Finny played officially—football, hockey, baseball, lacrosse—didn't
have school records. To switch to a new sport suddenly, just for a day, and immediately break a
record in it—that was about as neat a trick, as dazzling a reversal as I could, to be perfectly
honest, possibly imagine. There was something inebriating in the suppleness of this feat. When
I thought about it my head felt a little dizzy and my stomach began to tingle. It had, in one
word, glamour, absolute schoolboy glamour. When I looked down at that stop watch and
realized a split second before I permitted my face to show it or my voice to announce it that
Finny had broken a school record, I had experienced a feeling that also can be described in one
word—shock.
To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny
seem too unusual for—not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there were few
relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry.