Following Holden’s Departure from Pencey Prep

End of Chapter 7

Excerpt: When I was all set to go, when I had my bags and all, I stood for a while next to the stairs and took a last look down the goddam corridor. I was sort of crying. I don’t know why. I put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it, and then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, “Sleep tight, ya morons!” I’ll bet I woke up every bastard on the whole floor. Then I got the hell out. Some stupid guy had thrown peanut shells all over the stairs, and I damn near broke my crazy neck.

                It was too late to call up for a cab, so I walked the whole way to the station. It wasn’t too far or anything, but it was cold as hell out, and the snow made it hard to walk.

When I finally got to the station, I made way straight for the bathroom. I was still bloody and all from the dispute with Stradlater and it was beginning to dry up in places. I got in the bathroom and ran a sink full of cold war to wipe the blood down with. My nose was still throbbing like hell from the blow but I didn’t mind that I’d had a fight with him, cause he looked pretty sad about doing it. He really did. I mean, you take a moron like Stradlater and piss him off enough and he’s bound to fly off from time to time. I finished up in the bathroom and headed to the ticket window to pick up my ticket. There was some kid with red hair sitting behind the desk with a wool hat pulled down over his face, snoring like a madman. I tapped the window a couple times till he finally woke up and pulled the hat up from over his eyes. He didn’t look too much older than I was, and I wondered how he ended up working a ticket window at a train station.

                “Yeah, whatdya need kid?” he said. He spoke in one of those phony New York detective voices. The kind you see in those annoying PI movies. I mean it’s not bad enough half of the city is looked at like a group of weirdos with some silly accent without some kid mucking it up at a public train station.

“Come on kid, I gots things I could be doing.” Just perfect. You take some kid and give him a ticket booth and suddenly he thinks he deserves the right to talk you down.

“One-way ticket to Penn Station,” I said, “the sooner the better.”

The last thing I wanted to do was chat with this kid any more than I wanted to, and he seemed like the type to make a fuss about lots of small things. Boy, don’t I have an eye for these things. He made this whole thing about being interrupted when he could be sleeping, as if that were his job instead of selling tickets, and pulled the wool hat back over his face. He was asleep within minutes, and I had to put up with his snoring for about fifteen minutes before the train finally arrived.