All the Hawley third-form boys—ninth graders in the outside world—waited in the common room to walk over together to the Dish for Seated Meal, and no one talked. The Head of House, Mr. Dennett, stood near the entryway in a boxy blue blazer and thick-soled shoes. Dennett tried to hang jokes on the students closest to him, but they just laughed politely.

As far as Ben could tell, almost everyone in the dorm was there and Ahmed was still missing.

“Hey, are you Teddy Weeks’s brother?” This was whispered to him by a tall blond kid whose collar left a half-inch gap all the way around his neck.

“Yeah?” Ben whispered this, too, but the kids close to them could obviously hear, and Ben thought that if they could just speak in normal voices then other people in the room would start talking and everyone would have more privacy amid the general noise.

“He graduated last spring, right?”

“Yeah?”

“So he’s your brother?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard he wrote like a five-hundred-page novel in two weeks and then had to be institutionalized.”

“No, that’s not true.”

The blond kid frowned at Ben as though he were in no position to disprove stories about his brother. Having Teddy as a brother was an asset; Ben should have felt like Teddy was an asset. All of the kids around them were listening now.

Another blond boy leaned in from where he stood next to the faux-wood-sided television. “I heard he got two girls pregnant in two weeks and the school had to pay for secret abortions.” The boy was slight enough to look like a grade schooler. “Is that true?” he asked Ben.

“I don’t know. I never heard that.”

The first blond again: “I heard Teddy unscrewed his Lava lamp and poured the wax blob in some newb’s plant, and when the kid asked what it was, Teddy told him the Head of House’s daughter had given herself an abortion in the bathroom and stashed the deformed fetus in the plant.”

“No shit?” said the smaller blond, laughing, and by now Mr. Dennett was looking over at them. Dennett’s face was now either blank or edging into a scowl. Was he upset that they were talking? Or did he hear “Head of House” and think the kids were talking about him? Or was he looking at Ben just because he was potentially as big a personality as Teddy? Ben wished he could just make it known that he was number one Under-15.

“Who’s missing?” asked Dennett, and he counted the boys in pairs. He looked down at his clipboard and then up at Ben.

“Hey, Ben, looks like Ahmed is the last one. Can you go bring him down? We gotta go in exactly”—he looked at his Ironman digital watch—“one minute if we’re not gonna be late.”

“He said he was going to be right—”