Hrvoje Dundovic

Hrvoje Dundovic is introduced as a tall, pale, awkward-looking Croatian teenager who arrives at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School for Boys in the fall of 1995, alone and displaced by the economic malaise that followed the Balkan conflict of 1992. He had grown up in Pula, Croatia, a suburban seaside enclave in a nearly all-white country, and now lived with a host family in East Orange through the school’s alumni network. The move placed him in an environment almost entirely alien to him. He rarely went outside at night or on weekends, and even after three months at school he had not heard anyone, teachers included, pronounce his name correctly. His difference was visible, but the narrative makes clear that isolation was not simply a matter of personality: he had entered an already established class, a racially and culturally unfamiliar city, and a school whose students had formed their social bonds long before his arrival.

Arrival and Adaptation

Hrvoje’s first durable foothold at St. Benedict’s was water polo. He had grown up playing the sport, and that experience was one reason he had been admitted to the school. At a place where the boys’ identities were organized through teams, color groups, songs, and relentless shared activity, athletic competence offered him a practical route into collective life. The school’s methods were intentionally immersive: students attended full academic days, practiced sports, ate, studied, and even brushed their teeth in assigned groups. The faculty, led by Friar Edwin Leahy and the Benedictine monks, used this highly controlled schedule to prevent fights, theft, drug use, emotional abuse, and dropping out by keeping students busy and binding them to school pride. Hrvoje therefore entered not merely a classroom but an institution designed to manufacture belonging through repetition, discipline, and shared labor.

His musical habits initially marked him as still attached to home. He listened constantly to his Walkman, retreating into the songs he had heard in his bedroom in Pula as a defense against homesickness. When Rob asked what he was listening to, Hrvoje answered that it was The Misfits. Rob borrowed the headphones, reacted with immediate distaste to Glenn Danzig’s voice and the abrasive guitar and drums, and dismissed the music as awful. Hrvoje assumed that the exchange had ended their acquaintance. Instead, Rob returned the next day, this time to hear Black Flag. He had looked up prog rock in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and memorized its dates, important figures, and intellectual premises. The gesture was characteristically Rob: mockery became research, and research became an effort to meet another person on unfamiliar cultural ground.

Friendship with Rob Peace

The friendship developed through reciprocal instruction. Rob tried to cultivate an appreciation for punk rock, even if he did not acquire a genuine taste for it, while coaching Hrvoje through the lyrics of DMX, Nas, and Tupac. Their relationship did not erase their differences; it made those differences playable. On bus rides, Hrvoje brought the sounds of Pula and his private adolescence, while Rob supplied a vocabulary of American rap and the social knowledge surrounding it. The remembered image of Hrvoje standing in the aisle, hands folded into hang-ten signs, singing Tupac’s “Hail Mary” in his Croat accent captures the friendship’s method: embarrassment was converted into performance, and performance into acceptance.

Hrvoje also became part of Rob’s closest St. Benedict’s circle, the Burger Boyz, alongside Tavarus, Drew, Flowy, and Curtis. The group took its name from the Burger King near the school, where the boys gathered between class and practice. Hrvoje’s membership placed him within a group otherwise formed around shared Newark and East Orange experience, but his presence did not make him disappear into it. On the water polo team he remained visibly distinct, described as a pale, skeletal figure among muscular, dark-skinned inner-city teammates. Yet that contrast became part of the team’s collective identity rather than a reason for exclusion. The boys’ rough, fiercely competitive style, their talk, and their willingness to intimidate privileged opponents formed a communal performance in which Hrvoje participated as a teammate and friend.

The team’s success intensified those bonds. It won its first tournament at Lawrenceville, finished second at Wesleyan University, and came within two victories of the Mid-Atlantic championship. During tournament trips, the players drank, smoked, listened to music, and played spades late into the night, then competed the next day. During the week they practiced until after six, watched game film at Coach Ridley’s house until eight, studied at Curtis’s house until ten, and were driven home by Mrs. Gamble. Hrvoje’s inclusion in this demanding rhythm mattered because it gave him more than a social invitation: it placed him inside an embodied routine of trust, competition, and mutual dependence.

Continuity Across Adulthood

The friendship endured beyond high school. Hrvoje and Rob encountered one another again at a water polo tournament during their sophomore year of college. Hrvoje was playing for the University of Vermont when he heard Rob’s familiar voice. Rob called him “Herve,” a shortened form of his name that referred to the long-running joke about teachers and students who could never pronounce it correctly. The joke had changed meaning by then. What had once signaled Hrvoje’s foreignness had become a private marker of recognition between two old friends.

Years later, they continued to speak every few weeks and played together in an informal pickup water polo league at Rutgers University, north of Trenton. The games offered both men a temporary return to a shared past, a way to step away from adult obligations for a few hours. Hrvoje preferred to carpool for the forty-five-minute drive each way, but Rob never did because he stopped at Trenton State Prison before every game to visit Skeet Douglas. That contrast reveals the limits as well as the strength of their friendship. Hrvoje remained a reliable companion in the present, while Rob’s schedule was governed by the continuing demands of his father’s imprisonment and by his campaign to free him.

Their reunion in the pool also restores an older physical vocabulary. Hrvoje scanned the water for Rob’s unmistakable grin and bared teeth, passed him the ball, and watched him drive toward the goal before placing a soft lob into the upper-left corner. The play recalls the high-school athlete who had once occupied the center of St. Benedict’s water polo offense, but it occurs after college, after Rio, and amid Rob’s adult uncertainty. Water polo becomes a recurring structure of recognition: wherever their lives have taken them, the sight of Rob in the water allows Hrvoje to find the earlier version of him without pretending that the intervening years have not happened.

Hopes, Distance, and Significance

Hrvoje’s own future remains partly outside the main narrative, but his aspirations help illuminate the possibilities Rob repeatedly imagined and failed to stabilize. During their games, Hrvoje spoke wistfully about returning to Pula, Croatia. Rob, meanwhile, talked about traveling to South Korea, visiting relatives in Ohio, Florida, and Georgia, living part-time in Rio de Janeiro, and perhaps teaching at the Federal University. Hrvoje therefore functions as both friend and horizon: his desire to return home gives concrete shape to the transnational life Rob imagined for himself. Their conversations preserve a world of movement and reinvention even as Rob becomes increasingly trapped by obligations, money, danger, and the unresolved question of what to do with his education.

Hrvoje’s importance lies in the fact that he is neither a symbolic outsider who remains permanently outside nor a character absorbed completely into Rob’s world. He adapts through sport, music, humor, and repeated companionship. Rob, in turn, responds to difference not by ignoring it but by studying it, testing it, and trying to participate in it. Their friendship crosses Pula, East Orange, St. Benedict’s, college water polo, and the roads to Trenton without becoming a simple story of assimilation. Hrvoje carries his accent, his music, and his memory of Croatia; Rob carries the pressures of Newark, his family’s history, and the obligations imposed by Skeet’s imprisonment. Their continued contact demonstrates that friendship can preserve a shared language even when the lives speaking it have moved into different social and moral environments.

For Rob, Hrvoje is one of the relationships that remains available across changes in status. Rob can move from St. Benedict’s student to Yale molecular biophysics and biochemistry major, from teacher to airport baggage handler, and from water polo player to drug trafficker without losing the recognition embedded in Hrvoje’s voice. That continuity is poignant rather than wholly reassuring. Their games provide escape, but Rob still leaves the pool to visit Trenton State; their conversations suggest travel, but Rob remains tied to debts and dangers close to home. Hrvoje thus helps define the distance between Rob’s capacity for connection and his inability to secure a stable future. He is the friend who remembers the boy beneath the successive roles, and whose continued presence makes the persistence of Rob’s divided life impossible to overlook.