Rawlins then went to the room of Jason’s best friend, Brett Tamor, who had apparently been lying on his couch listening to “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers loud enough that TJ Adkins across the hall had almost gone over to turn it down.

Rawlins picked up a red plastic cup by the couch, smelled it, then looked in Brett’s closet, where he found two plastic half-gallon bottles of S.S. Pierce vodka. Both boys went before the Disciplinary Committee the following Tuesday evening, and while Jason was given six months’ probation, five sessions with a substance abuse counselor, and three days of work duty, Brett, whose closet had actually contained the vodka, was expelled. Everyone was shocked. When Aston read the announcements in Chapel, he described the beginning of a new policy. “If a student is known to have abused alcohol or drugs, that student will get help. But if a student purchases drugs or alcohol, brings them onto campus for themselves or others, he or she has knowingly damaged the fabric of the school, and has forfeited his or her place here.”

In the secondary school market, it was clear that St. James now wanted to appeal to parents looking for a stricter atmosphere. Students were quiet but resentful. The new sixth-formers had waited their turn to be able to get away with the things sixth-formers had always gotten away with. Several girls cried when Brett’s parents picked him up and drove away.

Meanwhile, Jason didn’t go to classes for three days, and instead served work duty with the school’s grounds crew. The general resentment toward the administration mixed with an envy of Jason.

When you showed up for work duty, you were issued a pair of gloves: white leather palms and finger grips, red fabric backs and reinforced cuffs. Each glove had your last name written in Sharpie on the cuff. The grounds crew guys were Dennis and Terry instead of Walker and Ian. Most boys reporting for work duty suddenly appeared in double-kneed Carhartt pants.

When kids on work duty came into the dining hall at the end of the day, still holding the paper coffee cups they had been given at the 10:15 a.m. break, still smelling of woodsmoke and the cold afternoon, they folded the cuffs of the gloves and slipped them in their back pockets, the empty fingers sticking up. They moved more slowly than the other kids. They had put in their hours and had something to show for it—the stones from a collapsed border wall regathered, a lawn leaf-free, a baseball infield raked—and now they owed no one any further effort.

They would feel nostalgia for that work-duty time, not only when they returned to the constant anxiety of being a student, but also when they graduated from college and went into their working lives, always with the option of working more, but with the connection between work and reward never sharply defined.