A week after the pop and candy machines were shut off, the associated student body complained that they were losing the revenue from these machines and made it plain to Hammermeister that this revenue was the lifeblood that bought band uniforms, sports equipment, and other essentials. Hammermeister was shocked when he learned the figures. The students at Du Bois consumed enough fluid ounces of Coke, assorted beverages, and refreshments to half fill the swimming pool in a week. The Hammer didn’t allow anything sweeter than fresh fruit back at the juvenile facility in Canada, and what a difference. There weren’t any sugared-out junior gangsters like here, and the behavioral considerations, repercussions etc. were extremely…interesting. Well, it would all be in the thesis. Soon the wide world would know.

In less than a week there was heavy pressure to turn the candy machines back on. Hammermeister lost his cool and exchanged heated words over the matter with senior vice-principal Rider. He came back later and made a cringing apology, explaining that he wasn’t used to making so many compromises, having come from a detentional facility where his word had been “law”; that he was grinding out his thesis and so on and when he reflected over the apology, it occurred to him how weak and desperate he had sounded—effete and obsequious. A wipe-out migraine could do that to him, turn him white. The pop machines went back on, and the school instantly became a pit.

Waiting for a pair of codeine #4s to kick in, Hammermeister dropped a succulent white grub into Lulu’s cage and watched the spider attack it with such speed and ferocity that Hammermeister jerked back in his leatherette executive chair. He thought, “What if I were that worm? Lulu would show no mercy. And I wouldn’t expect any.”

The pace of the activities at Du Bois began to pick up. Hammermeister was getting hit with building requests from the science people—brainy types in Kmart jogging shoes, who wore pen packs and watches with calculators on them and who, generally speaking, displayed the whole range of absentminded-professor types of behavior. They were exasperating when you were trying to get from line “a” to line “b” within a certain time frame and didn’t want to screw around with their spacey weirdness.