As he went down the slope toward the little bridge to the quad, he saw Hutch and another kid from Woodruff, Kyle, coming up toward him.

“Weeksy!” said Hutch, and Ben couldn’t resist blooming.

“Fellas,” he said, and clasped hands first with Hutch and then with Kyle, which was awkward as he and Kyle had only barely nodded to each other before now.

“We were just talking about your fucking roommate.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Did he really walk out of newb boxing, too?” This from Kyle, who Ben could see was sort of playacting his outrage.

“A Hawley newb is a quiet newb,” Ben said, smiling, and the other two laughed, and Ben was almost frightened by how gratifying their laughter was. He didn’t mention the pool.

“Dude,” Hutch said, “come to our room tonight before Seated for crank time.”

Ben knew it would seem cool to have another thing to do that could prevent him from agreeing to this.

“Sure, definitely.”

“And tell your roommate to go fuck himself in the meantime,” Kyle said.

Ben came around the corner to Hawley’s back entrance, catching sight of the Dragon up the rise. He walked up the stairs, desperate for a few minutes of sleep, but when he came onto the hallway, he saw a chrome wheeled clothes rack next to number 24. Ahmed’s shirts, back from Thomas & Ridgelow Cleaners, were draped in thin plastic and hung on wide-shouldered wooden hangers. The hangers filled up the shirts as though there were a patient torso in each one.

Ben went into the room, sat at his desk, beyond sleep’s reach. He knew he needed to work.

Instead he opened the wide shallow drawer and almost to his surprise found the book there, the St. James Companion, just as it had been. He looked at its leatherette covering and the dry red of the page edges, then flipped through it. He had a craving for objects like this: small, talismanic things that seemed to collect wisdom regardless of what was printed in them. He wished his father wore a watch so that it could be passed down to him. He wished his family had a vellum book from the Middle Ages in the collection of some archive somewhere. These stout gold letters on the cover had never experienced a moment of self-questioning.

He opened to the ant insignia over Vade ad Formicam on the flyleaf, then to the motto on the next page: “To serve man and to glorify God.” He read the next section, entitled “Expectations.”

The school expects that a boy will never present the work of others as his own.

The school expects that a boy will never take the possessions of other boys, nor those things belonging to the school.

The school expects that a boy will never use intoxicants of any kind, nor bring intoxicants onto campus for any reason.

The school expects that a boy will…