Frohmeyer shifts in his seat, rolling between his fingers a golf ball he has magically produced from his desk. I get the sense that he hates feelings. He starts tapping the ball on the desk, ratatatatat. Clearly, he’d rather speak for her than wait this out. “Which means you’re all he has,” he says, not clowning me this time.

He nods my way. “What’s your name, son?”

“Luis …” I reach across the desk to shake his hand, playing along, then over-answer. “Luis Silverthorn.”

This lands awkwardly. Duh. In using my teacher’s last name, I have just made her sister an unwed mother, not a great detail in a school that’s still so religious. A gently raised eyebrow on her part tells me she can’t believe I said it.

Somehow my error does the trick. “Sounds like a hard road,” he mumbles, by which he means “brown-skinned fatherless son of a woman too ill to care for him.” How could he turn me away? But he can’t be too soft, either, or it’ll ruin his reputation.

“Luis, we have rules here. A lot of ’em. Ask your aunt.” He makes the word rhyme with “haunt,” which is the whitest thing ever. (And in real life, I only have tías.) “You’re expected to abide by them. So read the handbook.” He slides a heavy blue spiral-bound notebook across the desk.

“Anisha, you need to get me his records. He’s not graduating without a transcript, and he still has to pass our classes.” This must be his default principal mask: tough love face.

“Of course, Carl.” Their use of first names makes them sound like a team and leaves me on the outside for a moment, a feeling which gets worse when she asks him, “Do you have a room for him?”

Wait. She’s making me live in the dorm?

Bruce Hall is—was—famously dumpy. It looks like someone threw an enormous cement block at the hillside, and it got stuck there. The “first” floor is at ground level, but a steep slope makes that same floor the second story on the opposite side. It may be thirty years younger now than when it was razed the summer after my freshman year (replaced with a different ugly building that has better ventilation and a pool), but still.

“Can’t I just be off campus?”

They both look at me like I have lost my mind. His expression reads ungrateful brat. Hers says are you kidding me?

“Do you live in this town?”

“Uh … no …”

“Are you planning to camp?”

“I meant—”

“Your aunt is an unmarried woman, so it’s not like she can have some teenage boy living in her house.” (Where does he think I spent last night?)