He stood his crutches in the loop of nylon webbing where a golf bag would go, and, holding the cart’s roof struts, turned sideways and hopped behind the wheel. He found himself doing all of this with some faint added flair, as though she would be attracted to him for getting behind the wheel of the golf cart in some distinctive way. Again her smell came to him and every one of his movements became heavy with nonchalance. He turned the key and he wished that the starter made a roaring noise like a real car to break the sudden formality that he sensed she must be feeling too. He popped the parking brake off and they went whirring along. In the moving air her scent went away.

The cold passed over them and Alice hunched her shoulders together against it already in anticipation of the long coming winter. She looked at his heron wrists as he gripped the wheel.

“I’ve been chatting with your roommate,” Alice said. “It was nice of you to let him wear that hat.”

“Couldn’t let him go around bald. And he wanted to wear an SJS hat.”

“Good save.”

Ben pulled out of the long Dish parking lot and onto the Straight Road. She sighed. “I just wish I could have told him everything that was waiting for him, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s shitty of them. What did he do to get Ennis kicked out?”

“You don’t think he deserved anything?”

“Is he actually a dick to anybody about money? And fucking Ennis and Fitz and Ian?” Ben scoured her tone as she said Ian’s name. “Why should he kowtow to those shitheads?”

“That’s how it works.”

“But it shouldn’t. And Hutch?” She almost spit the name. Ben was startled that she knew it. The previous day, Ben and Hutch had come back to the room together to find Ahmed there reading and listening to soft Duran Duran on his sound system, and Hutch had slipped Fillmore ’71 into Ben’s tape deck and turned up “Not Fade Away” until Ahmed left.

“Everyone will leave him alone eventually,” she went on. “But this place needs more Ahmed. It doesn’t need Ahmed after everyone’s finished with him.”

“Aren’t there girls you don’t fuck with?”

“Ugh. I opt out of that shit.”

“Really?”

“No, not really.”

They turned the corner next to the PO.

Earlier that day Ben had come into the Middle Dining Hall and seen Ahmed sitting alone in the Marlboro Racing hat at a table toward the far glass doors. Ben had pretended not to see him, and went to sit instead with a few fourth-formers from the soccer team. He wanted to know whether Markson had asked Alice to read the Companion too, but he thought that would seem too goody two-shoes.

“It doesn’t have to be this quiet,” Alice said.