… That afternoon in the dining hall at Boston Latin, when Drew was in fifth grade, Nathaniel in eighth. Already burdened with a reputation as a brain and teacher’s pet, Drew was sitting by himself, his nose buried in a book, as usual. One of Nathaniel’s classmates looked at him with a nasty grin—“This is the lunchroom, not the library, you’re supposed to be eating, not reading.” Drew did not say anything or raise his eyes from the book. The boy pelted him with an orange peel—“Eat that!” Drew kept reading. Another boy threw a peel, and a third said, “Ah, he doesn’t want oranges, he wants apples ’cause he’s a bookworm and worms like apples and he’s an apple polisher, besides,” then winged an apple core like a baseball, narrowly missing. Drew did nothing to protect himself except to guard the sides of his head with his hands, his passivity raising the flame of the older boys’ cruelty, as an underdog’s cowering only excites the fury of the pack attacking it. Finally, under an ever harder rain of rinds and cores and harsh laughter, Drew ran out in tears. Nathaniel had not joined in the torment, but he wound up with his three classmates in the headmaster’s office, their backsides bared to receive a paddling. His friends got three whacks each, and he got one extra for his failure to display the protectiveness expected of a big brother. “What kind of a coward are you?” said the headmaster. “To allow that kind of thing to go on without even trying to stop it?” It wasn’t cowardice—Nathaniel was taller and heavier than any of the boys, and a better fighter. He could have taken them all at once, if he had to. No, it wasn’t cowardice, but something darker and more odious and he didn’t have a name for it.

“See, Drew’s got sand, more sand than you or the old man ever give him credit for, and now you want to take that away from him,” Eliot was saying.

“I’m not trying to take anything away from him,” Nathaniel protested.

“Sure you are. You don’t want to give him credit, because if you do, you won’t be able to bully him when he gets seasick or doesn’t set a sail to your liking.”