“It’s true,” Ennis said. “Just cause he’s a foreign kid, just cause he’s so clueless, doesn’t mean he gets to do whatever. And now his dad donating a fucking pool? It’s like, be here more than five minutes. And acting like you own the school, deciding whether or not you newb-box. We’d never let them”—Ennis pointed his chin at the two younger boys—“we’d never let them get away with it.”

“Yeah, that’s all I’m saying,” said Ben, and then committed to shutting up for good now.

“It’s true,” Ennis said again. “It’s total fucking bullshit. As though we can’t run a group of fucking newbs.”

The Hendrix album ended and the changer moved again and Ray Charles started singing “Georgia on My Mind,” which no one wanted to hear, and Ennis told Fitzy to pour him another one while he found something good to play.

Ben had another shot, and then another. He wondered vaguely what time it might be, whether his father was sleeping or awake. The digital clock on one of the desks said it was 6:07 p.m., which he knew it wasn’t. The rotation went around again. When he looked at the Snapple bottle, there was just a rind on the bottom, and Ennis went to fill it up again from the closet. They finished that one too. Ben took another shot, he should have been counting, and stood up to let someone else go, and when he dropped into the couch, his head flopped back and met the wall. It sounded like an apple against the kitchen floor, and incandescent amoebas floated in front of him for a second. Everyone said “Ohhh!” and pain clapped into him and he laughed in pain and tried to make his vision go back to one copy of everything.

And then he was on the stairs with Ennis under his arm on one side and Ian under the other, and his legs felt like long heavy socks. And then he was in his bed and he saw Ennis’s silhouette in the doorway against the fluorescent light of the hall, and Ennis was saying something to Ahmed, whose voice sounded very clear for someone who, Ben thought, must have just been woken up.

And then Ben picked his face up from something sticky and the smell made his body flex again, and his head felt like there was another head inside it, a head relentlessly expanding. He looked down and saw that one of Ahmed’s thick brown towels lay over his pillow. He let his head rest against it.