That evening someone handed me a typed letter from S.D. It was only folded in half. Calling me, believe it or not, a “boorish churl,” she asked that I “henceforth desist from acknowledging” her. Everything was precise and orderly. Like a form letter. By the weekend she would be going steady with Jonathan Wheeler.

The next day Courtney stung me eight hours: three for “insubordination” and five for “profanity.” Worse, she had every bounty-hunter Top Ten member on my case. Failing to button my top button at breakfast, playing pocket pool with myself during chapel—they’d sting me for anything. A senior named Grant Bowzer even stung me an hour for walking past an M&M’s wrapper that was tumbleweeding across one of the paths that dissect the campus.

I went to my Norman Vincent Peale-ish advisor, Mr. Cole, for advice. Definitely the wrong guy to lean on. Cole was tall and skinny, had an Adam’s apple the size of a three-wood, and was a born-again marshmallow. With Cole it was never sudden death, it was sudden victory. His glass was always half full, and he was thirty-seven years young. On the day I saw him it was partly sunny out. (I heard later that Cole had twice tried to do himself in.) Naturally, his advice was to “just forget it.”

“What do you mean, ‘forget it’?” I asked as he expertly led me to the door.

“Don’t worry about a thing, big fella, you’re going to be all right.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, and he closed the door in my face with a satisfied smile.

Just when I’d come to accept my fate, one of the outfielders on the baseball team got thrown out of school, and, since I’d been doing pretty well on the J.V. team (when I wasn’t working hours), I got brought up to the big club. I hated the chickenshit hypocrisy of riding the pines for the varsity when I could’ve been playing regularly for the J.V.’s, but somehow this earned me respect and the Grant Bowzers of the world started thinking twice before stinging me. Which is human nature.

The next weeks passed uneventfully, and before I knew it I was taking my final exams. Didn’t do very well on them, pulling a C/D average. I couldn’t complain; it would’ve been a solid D if not for my physics teacher cutting me some slack.