Copyright 2026 by James Breitbart, all rights reserved
[8,242 words]
* * * * *Chapter 6
Jamie Calloway
I
had recruited one member from each of the secret societies to attend
the common room party. Marina Ellis from the Ebony Quill, Cassie Voss
from the Black Lantern Society, Fiona McAllister from the Sable Order,
Caleb Thornton from the Silver Serpents, and Ellie. The party was a
chance for them to scout out potential taps and for the potential taps
to learn more about the secret societies and get used to socializing
naked.
While we were out running, the society members had put
on some music and set out a cooler full of beer, a bong, and some
snacks and waters. Most of the guys went straight for the beer. Pierce
and Montgomery, who were both a bit winded from the run, quickly
chugged waters. Callahan was the first to do a hit from the bong, but
it made its way around the room and most of us did hits – including
myself and the club representatives.
I noticed that Pierce
avoided the marijuana and nursed his beer slowly after he’d finished
the water. Without realizing it, he had passed the second test. The
party was intended to catch two kinds of people the secret societies
didn’t want – bogarts who took more than their fair share of the weed
or beverages and teetotalers who made a show of not drinking or
smoking. Pierce didn’t want to smoke, but he wasn’t being awkward about
it. I nudged Ellie to make sure she noticed. She nodded to indicate
that she did.
“You want to start?”
“You bet.”
I sat down on the couch and watched Ellie do her thing. “Who wants a blow job?”
The freshmen looked at her, astonished. “Wait, seriously?” Alvarez asked.
“Seriously.” Ellie was known for giving the best head of any girl at
Wilson, which was a major reason why she had been elected student body
president. I loved to watch almost as much as I loved getting it myself.
The boys lined up, except for Fitzgerald and Pierce. Ellie knelt down
in front of the line and began with Marcus Flynn. When it was Dylan
Reed’s turn, she swallowed all eight inches of his dick.
“Did she get the whole thing?” Callahan asked.
“Yeaaaaaaah…” Reed groaned.
“Holy shit!”
Ellie sucked off every boy in line. By the time she got to the end her
face was glazed with cum and she had probably swallowed twice as much.
She stood up and went over to Fitzgerald.
“Your turn!”
Fitzgerald smiled. “I’ll pass.”
She turned to Pierce, who now had a choice to make. He was still hard
from the run, and Ellie was good enough that she could give him an
orgasm even if he wasn’t really attracted to her. He could stay in the
closet and maybe even uncover a previously hidden sliver of
bisexuality. But he chose the braver option.
“I’ll pass too.”
That was another point in his favor. He and Fitzgerald sat down next to
me on the couch while Ellie sucked off Caleb. Callahan went back to his
room and returned a minute later with a lighter and a pack of smokes.
“Anybody want one?”
Sinclair and all the athletes shook their
heads, but Ashton Cole and Eli Turner took him up on the offer and went
outside on the balcony. “I might smoke later,” Fitzgerald said. He
turned to Pierce. “You know, we don’t have to let them have all the
fun.”
“I’ve never actually done anything with a guy before,” Pierce admitted.
“I’ve got some lotion in my room, so we can jerk off.”
“Here or there?”
“Here. We don’t have anything to hide.” Fitzgerald walked back to his
room and returned with a bottle of hand lotion. He squirted some on his
hand and then on Pierce’s, and they began jerking each other off.
Pierce was hesitant at first but quickly got into the spirit. As he got
more into it, he began rubbing his bare foot over Fitzgerald’s.
Fitzgerald got the message and they began playing footsie while they
masturbated. Ellie and I watched them cum, and then Ellie finally gave
me my blow job, the first I’d had from her in three long months.
We went back to our bedroom and I ate her out, then we fell asleep. We
were awoken the next morning by someone pounding on the door. My first
thought was that one of the kids on the hall was sick or had gotten in
some sort of trouble. When I opened the door, I found Ms. Hodes staring
at me.
“Mr. Calloway, can you come to my apartment, there’s something we need to discuss.”
“Yeah, just give me minute to…”
“Immediately. There’s no need to get dressed.”
I followed Ms. Hodes downstairs. All the dorm supervisors got a
three-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of their building, provided
gratis during the term of their service. As the Wilson School is
located in one of the higher cost of living areas of Connecticut, the
arrangement was a strong incentive for teachers to serve as dorm
supervisors. When I came to Wilson as a freshman, Ms. Hodes had been
Mrs. Ferris, wife of Mr. Ferris, the government teacher and mother of
two young daughters, Haley and Allie. She had caught me smoking pot in
my first week at Wilson and blackmailed me into having sex with her. I
told the Crimson Circle about the relationship during my initiation,
and they told me to keep it up because it was useful to have influence
over her. I used my influence to throw parties in my dorm room without
worrying about getting caught, until the day Mr. Ferris walked in on me
eating her out. The rumor on campus was that he had demanded a massive
severance payment not to go public. The affair had inspired my father’s
most recent novel, which finally won him the Pulitzer.
Now,
Ms. Hodes was 45, divorced, and still chasing after high school boys.
Her oldest daughter Haley was a junior at the local public school,
having embarrassingly failed to gain admission to Wilson despite the
generous preference given to children of faculty members. Her youngest
daughter Allie, although currently in fifth grade, was rumored to be
heading in the same direction. Ms. Hodes led me into the drawing room
of her apartment, and I sat down on an armchair while she took the sofa.
“There has been a report of an illicit party in the third floor common room.”
“We agreed you were going to ignore that, remember?”
“Oh, I remember,” she smiled recollecting the orgasm I’d given her the
day I moved in, in exchange for pretending not to notice the Freshman
500. “But the agreement was only that I would pretend not to
see or hear anything. A student came downstairs this morning at 6:00
a.m. and told me that you encouraged the boys on his hall to
participate in the Freshman 500 and hold a raucous party afterwards. He
says his roommate didn’t come in until after midnight, drunk and
possibly high.”
“Then you spoke to me, the trustworthy
prefect, and I confirmed that everyone was in their rooms at 10:30. I
made my rounds at 11:00 just like I’m supposed to and didn’t see
anything suspicious.”
Ms. Hodes shook her head. “My dear boy,
I’m afraid that’s not going to work this time. The student who reported
it was Jasper Whitfield, if he tells his father…” his father would be
ashamed of him, but Ms. Hodes couldn’t know that. The Crimson Circle
was part of the Illuminati, a network of secret societies and fraternal
organizations that basically run the world behind the scenes, which
depends on their activities being kept secret. If I told Ms. Hodes that
Rick Whitfield was supportive of the activities of the secret
societies, I would be breaking the oath of secrecy I had taken, an oath
which was taken very seriously. “…that the school covered
this up, it could create a scandal. I’d lose my job, you’d lose your
position as prefect and possibly get kicked out of school. Your
father’s name would be in the papers, all that nasty business with your
mother would get brought back up.”
The ‘nasty business’ she
was referring to had been the story of my parents’ relationship. My
mother had been a 24-year-old editorial assistant at Random House. My
father had been 33, the darling of the New York literary establishment,
and married to a model he promised to divorce for my mother. When he
broke the promise, she turned up pregnant on his doorstep and got
slapped by the model. There was a highly public divorce, Dad’s novel
about the incident flopped, and Mom ran away to Los Angeles and got a
job as a receptionist at an advertising agency, where she met my
stepdad Judah, who she married when I was seven and had my brother Alex
with just before I turned eight. Dad was trying to get his latest book,
the one about Ms. Hodes, adapted into a screenplay, so he didn’t need
all that getting brought up in the news, but I knew that it wouldn’t be
as long as I avoiding pissing off Rick Whitfield, which was going to be
a tall order.
“What are you proposing?”
“Whitfield gave me a list of names.”
“You’re not really going to refer them to the disciplinary committee are you?”
“I’m going to make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
“Who are they?”
“Theo Alvarez, Asher Montgomery, and Nolan Pierce.” I was astonished.
That motherfucker had ratted out his own roommate. “He says he didn’t
witness the party, but he overheard them talking about the Freshman 500
in the common room. Of course, I’m sure other students were involved,
but we’ll start with those three.”
“Can we agree to no touching?”
“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me touching them, do you?”
Hodes was defensive about her pederastic desires, and would turn
vicious toward anyone who suggested that they were less than healthy
for the boys involved.
“Pierce is gay, I don’t think he’d enjoy it as much as I do.”
“Alright, but you owe me. Now go get dressed and assemble all the boys in the common room.”
Deeply chagrined, I walked back upstairs and began knocking on doors,
telling the boys, most of whom were still naked, to get dressed and
assemble in the common room, explaining that we had been caught last
night and Hodes was planning to deliver a lecture and disciplinary
consequences. It made me feel like shit to see the disappointment in
their eyes – I had promised they wouldn’t get in trouble and now I was
letting them down – but at least it wouldn’t come as a surprise.
Ellie was waiting for me in my room. “What’s going on?”
“Whitfield ratted us out and Hodes is using it as an opportunity to get off. Can you talk to the conduct committee.”
“On it.”
She left and I got dressed, staying barefoot. If Nolan was going to be
totally fucked, I might as well give him something nice to look at.
The boys assembled in the common room, most dressed in shorts and
t-shirts, all looking miserable except for Whitfield, who couldn’t
quite suppress a smirk. At least he had showered, probably while the
rest of us were out running the Freshman 500.
Hodes couldn’t
quite suppress a smirk either as she began her speech. “It has been
brought to my attention that a number of students on this floor
participated in an illicit event which has been expressly forbidden by
the faculty, the Freshman 500.” I knew she was getting off on the
strict-teacher act, dominating the helpless boys under her authority,
“which involves public exposure of the genitals and is considered
sexual harassment by the faculty, followed by a party which involved
drinking and illegal drug taking. Let me assure you that the Wilson
School takes violating the drug and sexual harassment policies extremely seriously.
These offenses are referred to the Dean of Discipline, not the student
conduct council. I am going to call out three names, and I want those
students to follow me immediately to my apartment. Asher Montgomery,
Theodore Alvarez, and Nolan Pierce.”
Chapter 7
Nolan Pierce
I
followed Ms. Hodes downstairs, my stomach doing flip-flops and my hands
shaking. I had almost never been in trouble in elementary or middle
school, and the few times I was I had cried. I couldn’t cry now. It
would humiliate me, even though I would probably never see these guys
again. Ms. Hodes would call the Dean of Discipline, who would call my
parents to come pick me up before classes had even started. And my
parents…
Her apartment was furnished as a slightly
old-fashioned living room, and she gestured for the three of us to sit
on a couch. She sat on an armchair across from us.
“As I have
said, these are very serious offenses, but I am willing to give you a
choice. If you provide the names of other students who participated, I
will recommend leniency to the Dean of Discipline.”
That was
no choice at all. If I ratted the other guys out my life might not be
ruined, but I would live with the shame of betrayal for the rest of my
life.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am.”
“Very well, anybody else?” Asher and Theo shook their heads.
“I must say that I’m disappointed in you. Your decision to protect your
friends instead of yourselves was very foolish, and if you continue
down that path, you are sure to come to a bad end. Nevertheless, I
think you deserve a chance to turn things around, but you must be held
accountable for your actions. I will impose a punishment of my own
devising and refer you to the disciplinary committee for violating the
dress code and being out of bed after hours. You are aware that
students are expected to clean their dormitories every Saturday?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“For the remainder of the semester, you will do the same for my
apartment, and you will do it in the same state that you participated
in this event, i.e., nude. We will begin today. Get your clothes off
and I’ll show you where the cleaning supplies are.”
We stood
up, somewhat in shock, and removed our clothes, standing naked in Ms.
Hodes’ living room. She showed us to the closet where we kept cleaning
supplies, and she and her two daughters supervised us as we cleaned the
apartment to their exacting specifications. We had to vacuum the
carpet, dust thoroughly, sweep and mop the floors, wash the windows,
and get down on our hands and knees to clean the baseboards. Asher and
I got picked to clean Ms. Hodes and her daughters’ bathrooms, while
Theo got stuck picking up the younger daughter’s toys – she really
enjoyed watching him bend over. It was humiliating, but I realized that
it was much better than being kicked out of school. Finally, Ms. Hodes
decided that we had completed the task to her satisfaction and sent us
upstairs – without giving us a chance to get dressed.
“It was
Whitfield!” Theo exclaimed, “remember he overheard us talking about the
500 and made a crack at us. God, I’m going to fucking kill him!”
“We shouldn’t do anything now,” I counseled, “talk to Jamie and see what we can do.”
“Jamie didn’t do shit for us!”
“Maybe not, but we went through all that to avoid getting kicked out of
school. If you haul off and punch Jas, you’ll get kicked out anyway.”
“Fuck, you’re right.”
We reached the landing for our floor, where we met Jamie. “Can I talk
to the three of you in my room?” We followed him to his room, where he
closed the door. “I’m very sorry about all this. I had an agreement
with Hodes that she would pretend not to hear anything, but…”
“Whitfield ratted us out!” Theo snapped.
“Good detective work.”
“You’re lucky Nolan talked me out of putting the little shit in a
suplex.” Theo was on the wrestling team. Actually, I think he had a
scholarship for it.
“I’m going to have to ask you to continue
to forbear going after him,” Jamie said, “his father is a very
influential alumnus. If you hurt him, I can’t protect you.”
“Can I at least switch roommates?”
“I’m working on it. I’m also in contact with the Conduct Council.”
“What are they going to do to us?”
“For a variety of reasons, it would be difficult to exonerate you
completely. You’ll probably get Saturday evening detention, and I’ll
work my contacts on the Conduct Council to make it as pleasant as
possible. Also, I’ve told the other guys that we’re moving up the
voting on hall rules to 10:30, so get dressed if you want and go ahead
out to the common room.”
I definitely wanted to get dressed
after all I’d been through. When I’d finished dressing, I walked out to
the common room. The other guys slowly trickled in and sat down on the
furniture or the radiator, with the stragglers standing against the
wall. I noticed that Jas got plenty of dirty looks. We must not have
been the only ones who realized that he was the rat.
Jamie
stepped to the front of the room, and after briefly apologizing for the
morning’s unpleasantness, started explaining the rules we were voting
on. There was a list of items we had to agree on as a floor: visitors,
quiet hours, control of the TV, etc. Surprisingly, the control of the
TV was the most contentious, and we ended up deciding that whoever got
to the common room first got to pick what to watch. I saw a lot of MTV
and sports in my future. We agreed unanimously to move lights out back
to midnight – the latest time the school would allow, and then Jamie
got to the last of the rules – dress code in the common areas.
Finn raised his hand. “I move we go clothing optional.”
“Any objections?”
Jas raised his hands, to groans from some of the guys. “Finn’s proposal is immodest and unnecessary. No one needs to walk around naked and given the presence of known homosexuals…” he looked at Owen, who flipped him the bird.
Jamie cut him off. “Do you have an alternative dress code to propose?”
“I propose we require pants, shirt, and shoes, and forbid clothing which is lewd or obscene or encourages illegal activity.”
“Oh, come on!” Someone yelled.
“Let’s keep to the rules of order,” Jamie insisted, “does anyone have a
third proposal? No? Then we’ll vote. Everyone who supports Callahan’s
proposal rais your hands.” 29 hands went up – even kids like Samir and
Jamal Preston, who avoided being naked themselves, voted against. Jamie
made a tally of the hands; I suppose to ensure that there was a record
of the decision. “Now, everyone in favor of Whitfield’s proposal.”
Whitfield raised his hand, which Jamie duly noted. It’s decided. This
hall is now clothing optional.”
Finn cheered and stripped off
right there in the common room, and Jamie assigned tasks for our first
work detail. Owen and I got tasked with taking the garbage out to the
dumpsters.
“So how much shit are you in?” Owen asked.
“I have to clean Hodes’ apartment naked every Saturday and I’m going to
get detention, but at least they won’t tell my parents.”
“You have to clean her apartment naked?”
“It’s an off-books punishment, in exchange for not telling my parents. I think her daughters get off on it.”
“That’s really weird.”
“I know.”
“So, how mad do you think your parents would be if they found out?”
“I don’t know, they’re pretty liberal for Sissipahaw, but I’ve never been in any kind of trouble before.”
“How liberal is liberal for Sissipahaw?”
“Not very.” I told Owen all about my hometown as we walked back from
the dumpsters. He was easy to talk to, and I realized that I had
developed a crush on him since last night. I took the fact that he was
so interested as a sign that he might return my interest, and we had
already surpassed the biggest hurdle – coming out.
When we got
back to the dorm, I realized with some embarrassment that I hadn’t
showered yet. When I told Owen, he offered to shower with me. Once all
the cleaning had been finished, we grabbed our shower caddies and were
the first ones in the newly cleaned shower.
We stripped off,
by this point I was getting used to it, but now Owen and I had the
whole shower to ourselves. He walked over to me and hugged me, letting
his hands rest on my buttocks.
“I really like you.”
“I like you, too.”
I looked up at him, and he planted his lips on mine. We began kissing.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I let Owen guide me. As his
tongue explored my mouth, his soaped-up hands explored my body,
eventually finding my penis. I followed his lead, and we jerked one
another off for the second time in 24 hours.
The second part
of my day was certainly going better than the first had. I decided that
with Owen and the other friends I’d made in my corner, I would get
through whatever the rest of the year had in store.
Chapter 8
Ellie Whitman
I got dressed and hurried back to my room, waking up my roommate Maya in the process.
“What’s the matter?” Maya asked.
“Hodes has gone off the reservation again.”
“She still molesting your boyfriend?”
“This time it’s the new freshmen. Jasper Whitfield ratted out the Freshman 500.”
“Am I supposed to know who Jasper Whitfield is?”
“Rick Whitfield’s son.”
“Ew.”
“Apparently Daddy never explained to him that he’s not supposed to
actually believe all that crap about family values and morality. Either
that or he’s doing it just to be a piece of shit.”
I fired off
an email to Nell Van Allen explaining the situation. She was the
hearing officer for the Conduct Council, which meant that she assigned
cases to panels of five council members as they came in.
It
was not exactly the greatest time to be coming to her with an issue.
Campus politics at Wilson were dominated by a split between the secret
societies, who coordinated the election of interested members to
positions in student government and the Conduct Council, and a loosely
organized faction of non-society students (who we referred to privately
as plebs) who sometimes resented our influence but, thanks to the
structure of the voting system, rarely defeated us. Each class elected
two senators each semester and five members of the Conduct Council each
year. Senators ran for single positions, which meant that the societies
could agree on a member to run who would be guaranteed all 75 votes
from society members in the class. The rest of the votes were usually
split among multiple candidates, guaranteeing us a win. The student
body President, Vice-President, Treasurer, and Secretary were elected
school-wide using the same process, which again usually guaranteed us a
win. The Conduct Council was run as a single election at the end of the
fall semester, and instead of running for individual positions, the
five candidates with the most votes got in. Traditionally, each of the
five secret societies nominated one candidate, and members all voted
for their candidate, but this left each of our candidates with only 15
guaranteed votes instead of 75 and made it much easier for reformist
candidates to get in.
To make matters worse, last year’s
elections had gone unusually poorly for us. They coincided with a
presidential election year in which secret societies had become
something of a campaign issue because both candidates were part of
Skull and Bones at Yale, which made anti-society rhetoric more
appealing to students who had previously ignored campus politics and a
barely suppressed scandal involving the Sable Order and a supposed SAT
answer sheet. On top of that, the reform faction had gotten better at
coordinating their campaigns, creating more head-to-head races, and
made an intentional effort to appeal to Wilson’s small but tight-knit
population of religiously observant students. Between now and the next
elections, at which the incoming freshmen would elect their first
members and half the upperclassmen on the student council and all the
upperclassmen on the Conduct Council would be up for reelection, both
bodies were very nearly evenly split. Nell was going to have some work
to do to assign a panel that was guaranteed to vote the way we wanted
it to, but it would have to be done.
My next email was to Nate
Brooks, the alumni liaison. It would be better if Rick Whitfield
learned about what his son had done through official channels.
I received responses to both my emails when I came back from lunch.
Nell had gotten the official referral from Ms. Hodes and assigned a
panel with two plebs and three members, one of whom was Nell herself.
Nell was assigning cases so that plebs usually made up a majority of
panels on cases not involving society members while we dominated the
panels for cases that we took an interest in. If you didn’t know
exactly who was and wasn’t in a society, it still looked random.
Nate wanted Jamie and I both to meet him that evening in the Catacomb.
We went over after dinner, stripped off in the robing chamber and
walked through the main meeting chamber and the dining hall to the
conference room at the very back of the building. Nate was there
waiting for us, and to our surprise so was Rick Whitfield. Both, of
course, were naked, and Mr. Whitfield was in a bad mood.
“You’re sure it was my kid?”
“It had to be,” Jamie answered, “Hodes said it was him. That’s the
reason for this whole clusterfuck. She thought that if she didn’t do
something to make him think we weren’t taking this seriously he’d go
running to you and Wilson would end up on your A-block. Besides,
there’s no one else with motive. There were only three kids on the
floor who didn’t do the run, and neither of the other two would tattle
to a teacher on anything. Jas is…is your family religious, Mr.
Whitfield?”
“We attend a Presbyterian church in the city. The
pastor is very influential and it’s a little more refined than those
holy roller churches.”
“I understand, but Jas seems to have
taken some of the church’s teachings a little too much to heart. He’s
openly homophobic and he refuses to shower in front of other boys.”
“The showers were never my favorite part of Wilson.”
“Yes, but you did take showers, didn’t you?” Jamie retorted, “Jas
didn’t bathe the whole first week, you can see how that would make kids
not like him.”
“Well, he’s just having a hard time adjusting.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Whitfield, Jas can come across as arrogant
and pompous.” Jamie was being diplomatic. From everything I’d seen, Jas
was arrogant and pompous. “I think some of the other boys find him annoying and he overreacted to that.”
“He’s an only child; his mother would just be beside herself if
anything happened to him. You have to keep those other boys from
hurting him.”
“I’m having him switch rooms, and I’m telling
him that Alvarez requested it because Alvarez thinks he was the one who
told on him. I won’t tell him that I know he did it. He’ll be in a room
with Jordan Klopfer, who was one of the other two boys who didn’t
participate in the Freshman 500. That’s my duty to the school as a
prefect. I don’t have any duties to him as a member of the Crimson
Circle, and frankly I think a little light bullying would be salutary.”
“If you keep him safe, I can offer the two of you an internship.”
I spoke up for the first time. “We’re both Democrats.”
“But we’re starting a fundraising campaign for Whitney Park.” Whitney
Park was an old lodge in the Adirondacks that had been deeded to the
Crimson Circle to serve as a private vacation club for members. With
more and more alumni owning their own vacation homes, it was little
used except for the annual summer reunion and had fallen down the
club’s list of financial priorities. According to the last contractor’s
estimate, a full remodel would cost around $12 million.
“How much do you want?”
“$1.2 million will get us ten percent to our goal.”
“Do you think I’m made of money?”
“Your salary was reported in Variety.” Jamie pointed out.
“Fine. You get the money at the end of the year if Jas doesn’t say anything about being bullied to me.”
“Deal.” Jamie and Mr. Whitfield shook hands, and then Mr. Whitfield left the three of us alone.
“Since we’re already naked,” I said suggestively.
Jamie got the hint and knelt down to eat me out. Once I was ready to
go, I got up and lay back on the table with my legs spread. Nate fucked
me first while Jamie watched, and then Jamie made me cum.
It was good to be back at school.
Chapter 9
Nolan Pierce
Monday
was the first day of actual classes, and by extension the first day I
would spend a lot of time with people not on my floor. I was a little
nervous when I woke up, but the combined shower/masturbation session
with the guys on the hall calmed me down. If you had told me that a
week earlier, I would have said you were nuts.
We had, of
course, all compared schedules to see who had classes together. By a
stroke of luck, a bunch of us had the same history class, but first I
would have to make it through Geology with Finn and Jas.
Fortunately, Jas sat at the opposite end of the lecture hall from Finn
and I. Finn was obviously more outgoing than me, so I relied on him to
make introductions. I was particularly taken by a boy with an earring
and an eyebrow piercing, who turned out to be named Tomas Rivera and
from Denver. He had an extremely laid-back accent, the kind you
associate with surfers, although his sport of choice turned out to be
snowboarding.
The classroom fell silent as the teacher, Dr.
Ellery, entered and stood at the front of the room. He gave a brief
personal introduction of how he had fallen in love with geology,
clambering over glacial erratics as a child in Maine, and then went
around the room asking everyone to give their name and tell where they
were from. As we went, he took notes on what we said, and when we’d all
given our answers, he handed out syllabi. I looked mine over. We’d be
assigned to lab groups via email, and our first assignment was to write
a ten-page research paper on a geological feature in our hometowns –
due the next Friday.
I also noticed that there would be
several field trips over the course of the year, starting with a ‘field
trip’ on campus the next week, and including a trip to a local
abandoned quarry, a hunt for fossils at a nearby river, a visit to the
Peabody Museum at Yale, and a weekend beach trip in the spring.
When Dr. Ellery finally dismissed the class, Finn and I hurried across
campus to history, where Owen had saved me a seat within a larger block
of guys from Beattie. After that class I went with Owen to Geometry,
then German, then it was time for PE. It was the class I had been
dreading most when I came to Wilson, but now I wasn’t worried about the
showers at all.
The locker room itself was an older facility
in the basement of Roosevelt, with well-worn wooden benches and a
hissing radiator. I recognized Tomas and picked a locker next to him.
The coach, a gruff ex-soccer player whose last name was Kavanagh but
insisted on being called “Coach K” (I decided it was best not to
mention that I was a die-hard Tar Heel) gave us a lecture about safety
rules and then had us do warmups and run around the track. I hated
running, but I did my best so as not to get scolded by Coach K.
When the class finally ended, Coach K ordered us into the showers, and
he made sure we actually went. One kid, Lennox Graff, who appeared to
be even clumsier than I, tried to just change without showering first,
but Coach K spotted him and forced him into the shower. When a kid
named Dawlish from New Jersey made a crack at Graff’s expense, Coach K
ordered him to ‘drop and give me ten’ right there in the shower. I
concluded that he was one of those teachers who just likes punishing
kids and resolved to do my best not to attract attention, and that
included not being overtly gay in the showers. I looked down, showered
quickly, got dressed, and went to lunch with Tomas, where I introduced
him to Noah and Owen.
I had picked Drama for my elective,
along with Owen and Ashton. The three of us came in together, but the
teacher, Mr. Duvall, assigned us to random partners for improv. I got
paired with a girl named Lindsey Odom, and we found ourselves getting
along surprisingly well, and she asked if I wanted to hang out that
weekend.
“I don’t know what my schedule looks like,” I
admitted sheepishly, “I have a Conduct Council hearing and they’re
probably going to give me detention.”
“Shit, what’d you do?”
“The Freshman 500.”
“You got caught?”
“I got ratted out, but my prefect’s going to swing it so I don’t get anything worse than detention.”
“That’s good at least. Man, the Freshman 500 was the funnest thing ever. I want to go streaking again sometime.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool, I thought I was going to hate it until I actually got out there.”
We agreed that we’d see each other in class and separated to go to my
last class of the day, English. After class, I went back to my dorm
room to check my email. I had one from Dr. Ellery telling me my
assigned partners for geology – a boy named Wyatt from Nashville and a
girl named Jocelyn from somewhere on Long Island. I really needed to
start my research paper, but I was distracted by the other email, which
told me that my Conduct Council hearing was scheduled for 5:00, and it
was already a quarter to five.
I hurried out of the room, catching up with Asher and Theo in the hallway. “Did you get an email from the Conduct Council?”
“Yeah, I think they’re trying us together.”
“Great.” I had no idea if that was a good thing or a bad thing. All of
us were a little nervous, and we didn’t say much as we walked to the
room where we were supposed to meet – Norcott Hall, Room 314. The door
opened on a little waiting room manned by a girl named Nell, who took
our names and told us to wait. After a few more minutes of nervousness,
she told us to step inside the hearing room.
The hearing room
was designed to look a little like an actual courtroom, albeit without
space for spectators. There was a table with three chairs in front of
it, across from a raised dais on which sat the five members of the
panel hearing our case. The other difference between the conduct
council and a real court room was that we didn’t get a representative
or the opportunity to confront our accuser, as the chair, whose
nameplate said Van Kemper, made it clear.
“We have received a
report from your dormitory’s faculty supervisor that another student
overheard you discussing being naked for an illicit activity and
participating in an unauthorized after-hours party. The student in
question has confirmed her account, saying that he overheard you
discussing the so-called ‘Freshman 500”.’ Do you have any evidence to
contradict this story?”
We all shook our heads.
“Let
the records show that the defendants have not indicated any intent to
present evidence in their favor, so we can move on to…”
“Point of order,” One of the boys on the panel, whose name plate said Viteri, asked, “You’re saying these boys were naked.”
“I believe that is the case.”
“Then why is it only being charged as violating the dress code?”
“I believe the dress code technically requires you to wear clothes unless your hall votes to be clothing optional.”
“But why isn’t it sexual harassment. If some poor kid had looked out their window at the wrong moment…”
“They would have just seen a naked body. The rules clearly state that
conduct is only considered sexual harassment if a reasonable person
would consider it offensive or lewd.”
“Well, I consider myself a reasonable person, and I think waving your private parts around in public is offensive.”
“Point of order,” a boy named Callowfield said. He wore a backwards
ballcap and a Wilson lacrosse t-shirt, so I thought he might be among
the more sympathetic members. “If we’re going to decide if they were
offensive, we need to be able to see for ourselves.”
“See for ourselves?”
“We need them to strip so we can see if we’re offended by looking at their naked bodies.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Viteri shouted, “you’re making a mockery of these proceedings.”
“Order!” Van Allen banged her gavel. “We’ll take a vote, all in favor
of having the boys strip raise your hands.” Three hands went up – Van
Allen, Callowfield, and Han. “The motion passes. Defendants are ordered
to remove their clothing and present themselves for visual inspection.”
I assumed this was another version of the punishment Ms. Hodes had
implemented, so I stood up and took off my shirt, then shoes and socks,
then pants and underwear. I stepped in front of the table to present
myself to the panel.
“I don’t see anything offensive,” Callowfield announced.
“Point of order,” Han asked, “Has the defendants’ floor voted on a dress code?”
“I have spoken with the prefect who informs me that the hall has opted to be clothing optional,” Van Allen answered.
“Then I move to strike the dress code violation, as we have no proof the defendants actually left the building while nude.”
The motion passed with the same three hands.
“That leaves one charge,” Van Allen announced, “holding an after-hours
party, which traditionally carries a penalty of one Saturday evening
detention. Is anyone aware of any detention opportunities?”
“The swim team is hosting an unofficial practice for freshman
prospects,” Callowfield said, “they need guys to do the stopwatches.”
“All in favor?” The same three hands went up, and Van Allen pronounced
our sentence. “At 9:00 this Saturday evening you are to report to the
natatorium and perform all tasks assigned to you by Swim Team Captain
Julian Vance.” She gaveled the hearing to a close, and the panel left
by a side entrance while the three of us got dressed. I was sure that I
was going to end up naked again, but I thought I was getting off pretty
easy.
We left by the main entrance, and were surprised to find
Van Allen, Han, and Callowfield waiting for us. Van Allen extended her
hand for me to shake. “I’m Nell. Jamie’s told me a lot about you three.
Why don’t you join us for dinner?”
Chapter 10
Julia Mendel
One
of the persistent challenges faced by the Wilson Chronicle was its
attractiveness to rabble-rousing plebs. They tended to think that they
could use the paper as a vehicle to expose the societies and break our
grip on campus, like some sort of high-school Woodward and Bernstein.
We handled them by giving them the most boring possible stories to
report on until they got tired of it and quit or graduated, and by
making sure the exec board was always composed exclusively of society
members. However, that meant that we needed a continuous influx of
freshmen who wanted to join societies to keep the system working, and
the kind of freshman who wanted to join a society was typically more
interested in sports or theater than the newspaper. We had gotten some
interest from Nolan Pierce, one of the boys on the hall Jamie Calloway
proctored, who Jamie was angling to tap for the Crimson Circle.
To Carrie’s delight, Nolan showed up with two other boys from his hall
– Asher Montgomery and Theo Alvarez. For the first time in years, we
ended up with more potential taps than plebs, although the drawback was
that they all ranked sports as their top preferred beat. The way the
paper worked is that freshmen were classified as ‘interns’ and assigned
to shadow a beat reporter or editor until they made it through the fall
semester without fucking anything up, at which point they were promoted
to ‘staff reporter.’ Nolan got assigned to shadow me on the student
government beat, beating out a girl named Midge who talked too fast and
mentioned on the interest form that her parents were investigative
reporters and she had a strong belief in transparency.
After
getting our assignments, we were dismissed to meet with our interns. I
explained the basics of student government to Nolan – what the
positions were, how the elections worked, what the student government
could actually do (more than most student governments, although less
than naïve freshmen sometimes thought), and what I was allowed to say
about the political rivalries within the senate.
“There’s a
faction of students who believe that the student council is controlled
by the secret societies and keep proposing initiatives they think will
undermine them. Naturally, this annoys the students who just want to
keep things running smoothly, and the meetings can get a little bit
heated. We’re very conscious that everyone is in high school, just like
us, and still learning to express their opinions in a civil manner, so
we strive to report accurately without repeating statements that
wouldn’t look good to a college admissions officer, if you catch my
drift.”
“Got it,” Nolan answered with a twinkle in his eye, “so, do the societies really run the student government?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny.”
I met up with Nolan outside the auditorium in Rockefeller where the
student senate met and told him that I wanted to take notes on the
meeting and then take a first stab at writing up the article. I would
also be taking notes, and if his draft turned out to be dogshit, I
could rework it into something acceptable for publication.
We
took our seats in the back of the auditorium as the senators filed in,
arranging themselves by class, with the executives sitting up front.
Grace O’Malley, the student body president and a Crimson Circle member,
read out a brief welcome before the first proposal. It was a proposal
for three new senate committees focused on ‘wellness,’ environmental
sustainability,’ and ‘diversity and inclusion.’ The wellness committee
sounded harmless, the sustainability committee sounded annoying, and
the diversity committee sounded like a great way for the rabble rousers
to frame their plans to screw over the societies as some sort of equity
initiative. It was all very left-of-center, and I was hoping that Owen
Delvecchio, who seemed to be the face of the initiative and was no
one’s idea of subtle, had gotten out over his skis and alienated the
right-wingers in the pleb faction, but it quickly became apparent that
they had coordinated in advance, because after Devecchio finally sat
down Josh Whitcomb stood up and said he thought it was “only fair that
we let minority students have their own committee.”
Mercedes
Peale jumped in with some procedural questions, more to stall for time
than for anything else, and things got kind of heated between her and
Delvecchio. Nolan kept typing throughout, and I wondered if he was
going to ignore what I’d said about not publishing arguments that would
be embarrassing for senators.
There were more fireworks when
Tristan Hawthorne pointed out that the proposed committees were
redundant to the existing campus life and community outreach
committees, and Delvecchio shouted out of turn that those committees
“weren’t doing crap.” Grace gaveled him back to order and used it as a
chance to ask for any proposed amendments. Mercedes moved to split the
bill into three separate bills, one for each committee, and kick each
bill back to the governance committee until next week. There followed a
long and overblown debate over whether this represented proper
legislative drafting or pointless stalling.
Finally, Rafe
Ling stood up. He was Asian, so his opinion on issues of diversity
carried more weight than the other members’. “The policy manual clearly
states that each proposed bill must address only one topic, and these
committees are separate topics no matter how closely related their
functions are.”
He managed to pull two votes from the other side, and the bill was duly split into three.
I went back to my dorm and woke up the next morning to an email from
Nolan with his attached draft. It was perfect. Not a single line of it
was technically untrue, but he pulled out the blandest possible quotes,
omitting all the potshots that had been taken against the existing
Senate committees and some of the more snide remarks about mental
health.
I met him in the newspaper office to debrief, praising
him for a good first effort without being overly effusive and asking
him questions about the meeting, ostensibly to test his journalistic
instincts but really to assess his suitability for the Crimson Circle.
“What was your sense of the lay of the land?”
“It seems like the – let’s call them the reform faction – is a mix of
socially conservative prudes, hippie activist types, and scholarship
kids who I guess feel like they don’t fit in and resent the societies
for it.”
“You’re on scholarship, aren’t you?” Jamie had
mentioned that. The scholarship covered tuition, room and board, and
textbooks but still left a gap for incidentals which Nolan’s parents, a
mechanic and a nurse, were a little pinched to fill. Jamie had
suggested that Nolan submit some of his short stories to actual
literary magazines instead of Wilson’s monthly literary review to fill
the gap – quietly, the publicity that would attach to a child prodigy
writer wouldn’t be good for the Circle’s long-term plans for Nolan.
“Yes, but I’m getting along with the kids on my floor pretty well so far, most of them anyway.”
“So, where do you see the council going from here?”
“The vote was 50-50 until Ling stepped in. I think unless one side
manages to peel off votes from the others the Vice President’s going to
be breaking a lot of ties, but Delvecchio’s a bit of a loose cannon. He
could accidentally alienate some of his allies, or someone could trick
him into doing it.”
“And how do you think Alvarez will vote?”
“It’s hard to tell. He’s Hispanic and probably here on an athletic
scholarship, which would indicate reformist sympathies if you were
going on demographics alone. But he’s the captain of the basketball
team, so he might be amenable to influence from his teammates.” In
fact, Nolan was underestimating Miguel Alvarez’s society associations.
He had been tapped for the Sable Order and enthusiastically accepted,
as evidenced by the black ring he wore on his finger. He had initially
taken no interest in student politics, but was dating Grace O’Malley,
who convinced him to run for the open Vice President position after he
powered the Wilson Hawks to the league finals for the first time in a
decade. His popularity enabled him to trounce a pleb candidate in a
head-to-head match, and he brought badly needed diversity to the
student government. Nolan didn’t know any of this, but his guess was
still decently perceptive. The main thing was that he was thinking
through the implications of Miguel’s social connections, rather than
making snap judgements based on appearances.
“If you had been on the senate, what would you have done differently?”
“I’d have suggested that they start a club instead of committees on the
senate. That way you could channel their energies away from student
government. Give the kids who want to pad their resume a club they can
be president of; and the kids who really care about the environment can
keep themselves occupied picking up trash.”
It was actually a
good idea, and I forwarded it to the Crimson Circle leadership along
with my glowing report on Nolan. The reports on Alvarez and Montgomery
were less glowing, and Montgomery had gotten caught plagiarizing his
writing assignment. It meant he would be asked not to come back the
next week and ruled out of consideration for the Crimson Circle but
probably made him go up a few notches for the Silver Serpents. Overall,
things were looking up.