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- 495
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-27T17:13:25.099Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 446
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- 427 I'd want to call up, that's all. I'd rather call old Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye.
428 Anyway, I put on my new hat and sat down and started reading that book Out of
429 Africa. I'd read it already, but I wanted to read certain parts over again. I'd only read
430 about three pages, though, when I heard somebody coming through the shower curtains.
431 Even without looking up, I knew right away who it was. It was Robert Ackley, this guy
432 that roomed right next to me. There was a shower right between every two rooms in our
433 wing, and about eighty-five times a day old Ackley barged in on me. He was probably the
434 only guy in the whole dorm, besides me, that wasn't down at the game. He hardly ever
435 went anywhere. He was a very peculiar guy. He was a senior, and he'd been at Pencey the
436 whole four years and all, but nobody ever called him anything except "Ackley." Not even
437 Herb Gale, his own roommate, ever called him "Bob" or even "Ack." If he ever gets
438 married, his own wife'll probably call him "Ackley." He was one of these very, very tall,
439 round-shouldered guys--he was about six four--with lousy teeth. The whole time he
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440 roomed next to me, I never even once saw him brush his teeth. They always looked
441 mossy and awful, and he damn near made you sick if you saw him in the dining room
442 with his mouth full of mashed potatoes and peas or something. Besides that, he had a lot
443 of pimples. Not just on his forehead or his chin, like most guys, but all over his whole
444 face. And not only that, he had a terrible personality. He was also sort of a nasty guy. I
445 wasn't too crazy about him, to tell you the truth.
446 I could feel him standing on the shower ledge, right behind my chair, taking a
447 look to see if Stradlater was around. He hated Stradlater's guts and he never came in the
448 room if Stradlater was around. He hated everybody's guts, damn near.
449 He came down off the shower ledge and came in the room. "Hi," he said. He
450 always said it like he was terrifically bored or terrifically tired. He didn't want you to
451 think he was visiting you or anything. He wanted you to think he'd come in by mistake,
452 for God's sake.
453 "Hi," I said, but I didn't look up from my book. With a guy like Ackley, if you
454 looked up from your book you were a goner. You were a goner anyway, but not as quick
455 if you didn't look up right away.
456 He started walking around the room, very slow and all, the way he always did,
457 picking up your personal stuff off your desk and chiffonier. He always picked up your
458 personal stuff and looked at it. Boy, could he get on your nerves sometimes. "How was
459 the fencing?" he said. He just wanted me to quit reading and enjoying myself. He didn't
460 give a damn about the fencing. "We win, or what?" he said.
461 "Nobody won," I said. Without looking up, though.
462 "What?" he said. He always made you say everything twice.
463 "Nobody won," I said. I sneaked a look to see what he was fiddling around with
464 on my chiffonier. He was looking at this picture of this girl I used to go around with in
465 New York, Sally Hayes. He must've picked up that goddam picture and looked at it at
466 least five thousand times since I got it. He always put it back in the wrong place, too,
467 when he was finished. He did it on purpose. You could tell.
468 "Nobody won," he said. "How come?"
469 "I left the goddam foils and stuff on the subway." I still didn't look up at him.
470 "On the subway, for Chrissake! Ya lost them, ya mean?"
471 "We got on the wrong subway. I had to keep getting up to look at a goddam map
472 on the wall."
473 He came over and stood right in my light. "Hey," I said. "I've read this same
474 sentence about twenty times since you came in."
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