Chapter 2

Jamie Calloway

At 3:00 precisely, I called all 30 of my new freshmen into the common room for introductions and an explanation of the orientation schedule. Officially, it was a chance for them to get to know each other and me to lay down preliminary basic rules (lights out at 10:30, no loud music before we voted on the official rules. Unofficially, it was a chance for me to scout them out. I had been given a dossier on each boy and told to keep a particular eye on two. Jas Whitfield’s father was the host of a right-wing cable news talk show, and Finn Callahan’s was the Governor of Washington. Both were members of the Crimson Circle, which had a strong tradition of admitting legacies.

Each of the 30 boys gave their name, where they were from, and a ‘fun fact’ about them. Whitfield’s fun fact was that he had been to a state dinner at the White House. Callahan’s was a somewhat more self-deprecating story about nearly getting caught skinny-dipping by the park rangers on a family camping trip.

There was one other boy who I hadn’t been told to keep an eye on but whose dossier had jumped out at me, particularly the writing samples. Nolan Pierce was a talented fiction writer. I’d run one of his pieces by my father and he said that it could probably get published in The New Yorker without editing. His background was totally obscure – father a computer programmer, mother an occasional substitute teacher, from a small town in North Carolina, probably a repressed homosexual. If he had stayed in that small town for high school, he would have probably gone to the University of North Carolina and become a teacher or journalist or something, sending out short stories to regional magazines and trying to snatch enough free time to draft a novel or screenplay until he gave up and sank into undeserved obscurity or the deep end of a whisky bottle. But Wilson, and the Crimson Circle, could give him the connections he needed to supplement his raw talent – that is if the Ebony Quill didn’t get to him first and if he didn’t flunk out of the initiation process.

The Ebony Quill was an issue for the selection committee; the initiation process was my problem. He seemed shy, and the fun fact he gave was honestly lackluster (he was on his middle school’s quiz bowl team). He startled briefly when Owen Fitzgerald (New York native, skateboarder with an alternative bent, did the musical all three years of middle school, academically brilliant but had a rebellious streak and didn’t leave his teachers sad to see him go) announced as his fun fact that he was gay.

Whitfield made a face like he had smelled something funny, and Pierce quickly assumed a neutral expression, but he couldn’t stop himself from glancing over at Fitzgerald, who had come to the meeting barefoot, wearing a hemp ankle bracelet and with the last few traces of black nail polish on his toes. Pierce’s stories had mentioned characters going barefoot enough that I had already wondered if it was a fetish. Maybe Fitzgerald would be the right kid to bring him out of his shell.

After the common room meeting, I led my charges to the outdoor amphitheater for the pep rally that was supposed to kick off the school year. We were intentionally early to give them an opportunity to eavesdrop on their small talk. Whitfield latched on to Pierce on the walk over.