When he was back up in bed, feeling what he supposed was homesickness but also without any desire to be back in his parents’ house, he thought he saw slight phosphorescence hanging in the air above him. He couldn’t tell whether he was seeing it or whether it was leftover spots on his retina from the ceiling light. He reached up and was touching the ceiling far before he expected to.

He stroked his fingertips along the glowing spots, and the texture was like crumbs. He realized that some earlier kid had stuck glow-in-the-dark stars up here, and some later kid had done an incomplete job scraping them down.

He saw that first person—maybe it was a girl; this had been a girls’ dorm once—early in the semester, imagining the wonderful scene that all the stars would create. This girl lifted her hand to Ben when the upper-formers came for them later that night.

*  *  *

“The bessssssst!

“The besssssst, the besssssst, the besssssst!” All the other upper-formers were looking at Ennis now too. Ennis stopped and went quiet but was still hunched over.

“Newbs!” whispered Ennis, then finally straightened up. He paused again; he seemed to be dragging his tongue along behind him. “Tonight we’re going to see who is the toughest among you! All-out combat, last one standing wins.”

Ennis walked closer and stood in front of each newb one by one and looked hard in his eyes, and each newb kept his gaze down. When it was Ben’s turn and he smelled Ennis’s breath, he lowered his eyes but tried to give a little smile in the meantime, a nod that he was on board with all of it. The fact that he was Teddy’s brother, and that he was going to dominate the squash team, of course those things were known to them.

Ahmed seemed confused, and Ben half wished he had explained what was going to happen before they had come down here. But another part of him was happy that Ahmed would have to learn this way. Ennis approached Ahmed and stared at him, and Ahmed returned the stare but pulled his head back to keep a civilized distance away, his hair touching the wall, and after nearly half a minute he finally closed his eyes. As Ennis passed to the next kid Ahmed looked after him angrily.

Finally Ennis reached the end of the row and hoarsely called out, “Give them their gloves.”

The softer sixth-formers handed out pairs of synthetic-leather hockey gloves and nylon mesh lacrosse gloves. Ben received a pair of hockey gloves, which felt dense and rigid and good for landing a punch.