As I was leaving, Irving called out, “I’m not going to lie for you if there’s a bed check!”

After weaving around the bushes, hiding in the grid shadows of catwalks, and ducking between parked cars, I finally reached the phone room and slid into a graffiti-scarred booth. The cold air made me more composed, articulate. I called home collect.

“Tim Dunphy?” the old man asked the operator.

“Yeah,” I said, checking the phone room entrance.

There was a moment of silence.

“Come on, Dildo, what the fuck. It’s 11:30, you know I got work tomorrow.”

“Please just get—”

“Do you accept the call?” interrupted the operator.

“No,” he said. “Not at this hour.”

On the way back I was spotted by a teacher and stung three hours for being out of my room after lights. When I tried to explain I got two more for insubordination, and when I asked the guy why he was being such a prick I was looking at a total of ten hours. That meant five straight afternoons working after class.

The next day I reported to the hour board at 3:15. Irving Waltham was working off hours, too. Fundy had us shovel snow and chip ice off the walks. “Fundy” was the head of the Hour Department. His real name was Bernard Funderburk, and he also taught history and political science. He was around twenty-five years old with a baby face and an erratically balding lid. He fought it though, pulling his overgrown left sideburn all the way over his head. Fundy took his job seriously. “You work two hours a day,” he said, “and if I catch you resting once, they don’t count.”

As soon as Fundy left to go check up on another crew of hour-boys, a few kids started getting on Irving’s case. You see, Irving Waltham was a jellyfish. He was shy and unassuming, with Coke-bottle-glasses taped up in the corners with Band-Aids. A couple of inches of pale shin showed between his pants and his socks. His hair was cemented back with something shiny, and he wore a fluorescent-orange hunter’s cap. It wasn’t like he was real soft or anything—he was actually kind of scrappy-looking—but what a pussy.

“Look pissed,” I said. “It’ll scare them off.”

A snowball exploded off the back of his head, but he kept shoveling. “It doesn’t work. That’s just giving them what they want.”

“What do they want?”

“They want me to get mad.”

“Then why aren’t they throwing at me? I’d get very mad.”

Irving didn’t answer. A snowball whizzed past his head.

“Just give them a dirty look or something,” I said.

“Leave me alone.”