If the Chute had him up to drink, then maybe that would spark something, and then maybe he could start wearing the Marlboro hat, and then maybe it would take off from there even if he couldn’t afford to do certain things. Other than Rory and a couple other guys on the team, no one seemed to care about him and squash, really. Maybe even at St. James squash was kind of a niche sport, or maybe he would only get credit for it once the season started and he started winning. He hoped that his becoming cooler would somehow mean that the school would be less likely to ask him to leave. He was also slightly bruised that Ennis and Fitzy hadn’t yet invited him to drink. The fact that he was Teddy’s brother alone should have been enough, so maybe he had already started acting like a kid who couldn’t pay.

He sat down into his desk chair and set his elbows on his knees. The kids that Ennis and Fitzy had chosen to bring up to the Chute were an odd assortment. They hadn’t had Jed up, but they’d invited Jeremy Cohen, who was right on the edge of being pretty lame.

He wondered whether Ahmed was back from town yet. He imagined what the common room downstairs would be like right now. Slowly, kids would be coming in from the outside air that had started to cut in earnest, and one by one they would sit back into the stiff fabric couches with something like an old man’s sigh.

Tomorrow was Sunday, the empty day, when everything you did was a decision not to do work for Monday classes. The kids down in the common room were enduring a temporary reprieve, aching for time to move slower. Here was their gap of a few hours after the end of Saturday classes and games but before school loomed again, the few hours when nothing was expected of them. Even deciding what to do—to go up to someone’s room and talk, to play video games on the illicit Nintendo, to maybe just go to sleep early—any of those definite actions would mean the end of possibility and the death of their reprieve. So they delayed, and just sat in the common room doing nothing.