Tadwell was expelled from the party because Marta told her friends that he tried to grab her breasts, when really, he was pointing to a button on her flaring lapels that said, "free hugs."
It was raining outside, and he smirked to himself as he turned away from the party, feeling the weight of the umbrella in his hand. He pressed the button, and the plastic dome jerked away from him. He smirked because what Marta didn't know was that he had made out with Sandy in Marta's closet, pawing the warm patch between her hips as his tongue traced the contours of her teeth.
He entered Mansfield Park and walked purposefully among the skeleton crew of its trees, watching the waves of water pelting the asphalt, the puddles, the waves inside of waves inside of waves.
He saw the red bench as if it were an oasis in a long march across the Gobi Desert. His legs were tired, from walking, from standing tense and excited against Sandy's warm soft body, from the walk up to his father's apartment on the 29th floor because the elevators were temporarily out of service.
He sat on the top of the red bench and remembered "The Red Wheelbarrow" poem he studied in his introductory lit course. "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens, in the rain."
Those chickens appeared in his head now, headless and gushing blood, and this chain of thoughts led him to the tumour growing in his father's brain, filling his father's head with paranoid thoughts and hallucinations. On Wednesday, he had nearly clawed Tadwell's eyes out, thinking he had poisoned his father's apple juice.
