Ian opened the door to the Chute without knocking, and the twin guitars approached their apex. The lighting was dim. Boston was actually a pretty lame band, unless the Chute was listening to it ironically, which was hard to tell. Directly in front of them stood a bookcase that hid what was going on in the rest of the room; furniture used for this purpose was called a delay. The bookcase had been pushed against the left wall and its top corner sawed off to conform to the eave. Ben and Ian stepped around the delay into the main part of the room, and Ben took in at a glance the people there: Ennis, Fitzy, and Jed. Ben remembered how they all had looked during newb boxing, the fully dressed older kids divided so sharply from the newbs in their underwear, but now Jed seemed piled alongside the others, not quite comfortable, but a member of the same species. Even though he had been in Jed’s room just a few minutes before, it felt like Ben hadn’t seen him in a day.

They were sitting on parallel couches along each wall. A single standing halogen lamp pointed directly into one of the eaves, and a red lava lamp sat on an overturned milk crate next to the arm of one of the couches. Posters clung to the eaves in a slight catenary, but the angled light cast glare across them and Ben couldn’t see what they were of.

“Weeksy!” said Ennis with a wide-open grin. “Take a seat, man.”

Ben sat next to Fitz, who was blond and round, always slightly breathless and with his khaki pants almost falling off his hips. His roundness reminded Ben of Ahmed. Ian pulled up one of the desk chairs, turned it around and sat in it backwards, and looked moodily at Ennis, and all at once he knew: among sixth-formers, these guys weren’t considered very cool. Hawley House in general was considered kind of lame. Ben wondered whether Teddy had made these guys’ lives hell. He felt a tiny, slightly disappointing power over everyone in the room, and he smiled. “What’s happening, guys?”

“Not a lot, man,” said Fitzy, whose eyes seemed unable to open more than halfway. “What’s up with you?”

“Not a lot.”

“You up to wet a little?”

“Um, yeah, definitely.”

Everyone laughed, and Ben laughed too.

“Set him up,” said Ennis. Fitz leaned over the far arm of the couch and did something down out of sight. Ennis smiled at Ben. “What’s goin on?”

“Not much, just, you know, work and stuff.” This felt lame to him, and now he worried that they would want him to pay for the liquor, but then he told himself that this was ridiculous.

“How’s Teddy?”

“Ah, pretty good, I think. He’s liking Kenyon. I actually haven’t talked to him in a while.”

“He was a fucking legend.”

“Legendary,” said Ian.