“We know it happened, Ben, so we just need more information. No one’s going to get in trouble, so just help us understand more about it.” Phelps had stopped smiling.

Ben paused. Phelps’s face didn’t look angry, but rather sincerely anxious, and Ben felt some thrill of power over these adults.

Ben cleared his throat. “I would definitely help you, but I think there must be bad information out there. Someone said the newbs were fighting each other?”

Phelps continued not to smile. This was only Phelps’s second year as Dean of Students after thirteen years as chemistry teacher and hockey coach. As a scholarship boy (Class of ’49) and as a new enlistee, Phelps had known what it was like to be at the mercy of other young men, and he had no nostalgia for it. The administration had implemented the hazing talk in dorms the previous year, but Phelps had known it wouldn’t change anything. He understood why hazing endured.

Phelps looked at Ben, so transparently filled to the top with the knowledge of what had happened in the basement, so full of admiration for himself for not telling. Ben brought to mind the knee joint of a young horse. Phelps had seen boys built just this way pressing themselves into shelterless hillsides.

Phelps knew a great deal about Ben: his family, his brother, Manley Price’s hopes for him. As Phelps laid out the hazing question, he thought about the conversations he couldn’t have with Ben. Like most St. James students, Ben didn’t appreciate how much effort it took to secure his well-being.

Phelps prayed with sincere intention in Chapel, in the middle of all the student and faculty daydreams, and he often asked God for the forbearance to treat well those who thought he was stupid, including now the new Rector. Aston was trying to make his mark, showing that he rejected the laissez-faire attitude of the previous administration, and so he badly wanted Phelps to just deal with this hazing issue correctly and have it pass away. Phelps needed enough detail to bring in the Hawley sixth-formers and make them think he knew everything, to play the role of the drill sergeant that everyone wanted him to play, and then they would be back on the beam. The Board of Directors wouldn’t find out. Neither would other schools, the Doverton Sentinel, the Boston Globe.

Phelps and the other two adults in the room also had two specific events in mind related to this hazing, history that Ben had heard about but didn’t think to apply to this moment.