Excerpt from El Paso by Winston Groom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was the end of the first term, and so far Arthur had made good marks in all of his studies. But when he was called on and stood to read a class paper on the history of the Ostrogoths, he discovered his hands were black after he reached into his satchel. Someone had poured ink into it, ruining the work. Arthur turned red; his breath caught in his throat. He thought he was going to choke. Tears welled in his eyes as his classmates smirked at one another and the instructor stood waiting impatiently. Finally Arthur burst out, "I hate all of you! You're wicked bastards! You're . . . you're . . ."

People began laughing. the instructor marched to Arthur and snatched his wrist and led him from the room to the dean's office for punishment. Arthur could hear the scathing laughter from the classroom all the way down the stairs and out of the building. Back in his room, he stared out of the window until it was dark and even afterward. He envied the birds he saw wheeling in the air and wished he could be like them. When he got back to Boston for the holidays two days later, Arthur informed his father that he would not be returning to Groton.

"You cannot quit, Arthur! It's the worst thing you can do. All boys get hazed at boarding school." they were sitting in the study, the Colonel behind his desk, distressed, Arthur in his chair.

Arthur merely looked at him. the Colonel knew that when Arthur made up his mind it was hard to change it, and tried a different tack.

"Look, son, why don't you think about it over the holidays? Just think about going back for the last term. It might be bad, but then, next year, you'll be an upperclassman. It will let up, I promise you."

Arthur said nothing. He could not begin to explain the indignities he felt had been heaped on him at Groton. He had told his father only that the other boys were rude to him, but could not bear to go into details.

"All right, Arthur," the Colonel said at last. "Just promise me you will think about it—is that fair? It's your decision to make." Even though the Colonel knew Arthur well enough to believe that the situation was bad, he did not like this business of quitting. It could be habit-forming.

Arthur nodded, appreciating this concession by his father. He'd always felt he was treading on thin ice in the Shaughnessy home. To make matters worse, Alexa made him feel like a leper at every opportunity. She declined to introduce him to friends she brought over to the house and, recently, when the Colonel had asked Arthur if he might want to get a dog, she loudly complained that fur made her sneeze.

Beatie and the Colonel, however, were warm, obliging, and kind: the Colonel told him that what he did mattered; Beatie complimented him on his curiosity, and told him that he had a destiny to fulfill, though she had not ventured what it was.

Still, Arthur felt a little knot of anxiety deep down inside him. He'd developed a hunger for a place of his own in the world, and ever since the first day at the Shaughnessys' there was that little lurking fear that it could all be taken away just as fast as it had come. Even though there wasn't a whit of evidence that such a thing might happen, Arthur seemed incapable of severing relations with the harshness of his past, a past weighted with his childhood loneliness.

Next afternoon he went to the Laura Bostwick Home to see Mick Martin. Mick had quit school and at the age of sixteen looked almost like a grown man, tall and muscular, with a handsome rugged face set off by a chiseled nose and a short mustache. Now he ran a lathe in a shoe factory and on the side he had a rather murky job that he didn't much talk about. But from what Arthur guessed, it had to do with one of the gangs that controlled the gambling, shakedowns, and prostitution in Southie.

they took a walk around the old neighborhood. Mick told Arthur he was going to move out of the orphanage pretty soon and find a place of his own. Soon as he got up enough money. He told him he had a girlfriend, too, who worked in the shoe factory. After a while, Arthur told him his own story.

Excerpted from El Paso by Winston Groom. Copyright © 2016 by Winston Groom. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.