Pages 281–283
Evening of 6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: the warm bus carrying E.T.A.'s 18-and-under squads home from the Port Washington meet you've just been inside (pp. 258–281), rolling from Long Island back to Enfield past midnight. No new faces to worry about — this is the whole travelling squad in one shot, the narration drifting seat to seat with no single center. It opens in fast jr.-tennis shorthand (a results roundup), then settles into the ride itself: two and a half pages, and the lightest stretch the book has offered in a long while.
Terms, in order of appearance
- bearing their shields rather than upon them (p. 281) — the Spartan send-off: come back carrying your shield (victorious) or carried on it (dead). They won.
- distaff (p. 281) — old word for the female side; here the girls' B teams.
- nystagmic (p. 281) — real medical term: the eye jerking rhythmically, involuntarily. Troeltsch's left one.
- Flatland (p. 281) — E. A. Abbott's real 1884 novella of life in two dimensions; assigned reading E.T.A. students can't escape.
- Oblomov (p. 282) — Goncharov's real 1859 Russian novel; its hero famously takes a hundred-odd pages to get out of bed.
- tincture of benzoin (p. 282) — real training-room liquid: aromatic resin painted on skin before taping; half of the bus's spiced smell.
- Xing (p. 282) — E.T.A. slang for having sex; the Adidas blanket context is the whole gloss.
- Pierre Trudeau (p. 282) — real Canadian Prime Minister, 1968–84; the joke is that only the bus driver is old enough to get the impersonation.
- Empire Waste (p. 283) — Empire Waste Displacement, the block-long waste-catapult operation from p. 241; here just the landmark beside the Denny's.
After you read: three things
1. Nobody says who dosed Pemulis's opponent. The scene just lines facts up (p. 281): Pemulis drops the first set in a tie-break; his opponent then turns lethargic, delays play claiming the tennis balls were too pretty to hit, and ends the night propositioning the Headmaster's wife — while Pemulis whistles at the pre-fab ceiling. You've met Pemulis the urine vendor (pp. 151–53) and his hatful of hallucinogens (p. 211). The narration never connects anything; the only ones doing the same math you're doing are Hal and Axford, noting that Pemulis isn't strutting.
2. Staff "remark on" Schacht's non-upset — you already know the inside of it. Schacht, incredibly, lost, and wasn't upset enough for staff's liking (p. 281). Pages 266–67 showed you why: since the Crohn's Disease and the knee, he "really doesn't care all that much whether he wins anymore," and his game got fuller for it. Here you get the outside view — at E.T.A., equanimity registers as a symptom worth noting.
3. "Everybody was tired in a good way" (p. 282). Five flat words are the scene's real event: liniment-and-benzoin air, Mario and Coyle's patternless rock-paper-scissors, reading lights, a three-bus Denny's Mega-breakfast at 0030. The one cruel note — the Gothic-fonted leaflet about Freer and Bernadette Longley — gets answered not by staff but by Longley's doubles partner marching back to shame the senders (endnote 92 names her; it's one line). Take the warmth at face value; the book hasn't handed out much of it.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.