“I’ve been informed by several excellent sources—Mr. Funderburk included—that you are the three rogues who have been perpetrating this recent rash of ghastly hoaxes.”

“That’s a crock,” I said.

“Hold it now,” Mort said, pointing at me and Creature. “I know that you two may not be directly responsible but I’m also quite certain that you’ve been abetting Wheeler here”—he had a nervous tic when he said that name—“every step of the way. So I’ve news for you, Dunphy. You’re guilty of complicity. I’ve also received information that Mr. Wheeler here is responsible for the school’s rash of racial terror.” Mort wore a look of satisfaction, as if he was telling us something the rest of the world didn’t already know. “So tell me, Wheeler, how does it feel to be an accused racist?”

Jonathan Wheeler stared at Mort without showing any sign of remorse. He even yawned. He did a fairly good job of concealing it, but the bloodless, flaring nostrils gave him away.

“Am I boring you?” Mort asked.

“No sir,” he said. “Not in the least.”

We were each put on probation and stung twelve hours. Furthermore, our parents and advisors were to be notified in writing of our offenses, and these offenses would be added to our “permanent files.”

The next day Jane and I hitched back to the Connecticut Yankee. We pretended not to listen as the owner Joan called her son Billy a “snivelling bloodsucker.”

“What really bugs me about this whole thing,” I said, “besides being innocent and all, is the fact that somebody went out of his way to go to Mort with this info. There’s no loyalty at this fucking place. Everybody’s a backstabber.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“How can you stand it?”

“Not much I can do about it,” she said.

“That’s what bugs me more. There’s a bunch of assholes around here.”

“You know, Dunph, if you clip a baby duck’s wings before it has any feathers, the duck’ll never be able to fly. I don’t know the exact aerodynamics of it, but the wings just never grow the way they’re supposed to. But if you wait until a duck’s already grown and then clip its wings, the duck’s only temporarily grounded. In a couple months his wings grow back, and he can fly off to bigger and better ponds.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “You had an opportunity to grow before you came to Cornwall and got your wings sheared off. Most of those other guys went to pre-prep schools and joints like that before they came here. They had their feathers snipped before they’d even had a chance to fly. Those guys’ll never be able to enjoy life the way you will because they’ll always be grounded by their own narrow-mindedness.”