Pages 627–638

E.T.A., Ennet House, and the A.F.R., cross-cut · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Back up the hill and back a few hours: the E.T.A. dining hall at 6:10 p.m., same 11 November — so this supper happens before the Ennet House night you've already read (pp. 589–619). The Boys' 18's hold the best table: Stice, Pemulis, Troeltsch, Schacht, Struck, Freer, Wayne, Axford, Coyle, and a very quiet Hal. At the prorectors' table sits the "enormous peasant-skirted Moment soft-profiler" — you know who that is. The buzz working the room: Stice took Hal to 7–5 in the third in an exhibition this afternoon that you haven't seen; the news reaches you the way it reaches the younger tables, secondhand.

Terms, in order of appearance

R.H.I.P. (p. 627) — military idiom: Rank Hath Its Privileges.
Seldane (p. 630) — real 1990s antihistamine; Troeltsch's cold is a running dispute.
endnote 260 (p. 631) — who at E.T.A. owns blue ink; a one-line flip that names the "fairly obvious person."
saltire (p. 632) — real heraldic term: an X-shaped cross; how the squeegees were hung.
tektitic (p. 632) — from tektite, glassy debris flung from meteor impacts: as if fallen from nowhere.
the fantods (p. 632) — the creeps; house word since pp. 42–49.
lab-ready Visine bottles (p. 637) — Pemulis's clean-urine dispensers, in commerce since pp. 151–156.
Polycleitos (p. 636) — real Greek sculptor of ideally proportioned athletes; Stice's body, not his face.
drenched spitter (p. 637) — baseball: a loaded spitball's anomalous late break.
olla / tsimmes (pp. 637–38) — real dishes: a Spanish stew; a sweet Jewish vegetable-fruit stew.

After you read: three things

1. The list buried in the milk rant. Troeltsch's powdered-milk conspiracy is comedy until it isn't: mid-sentence he inventories dinette sets in tunnels, a lawnmower in the dawn kitchen, a ball machine in the Females' Sauna, squeegees hung in a saltire on a wall with "no visible means of attachment," Stice's moving bed (pp. 631–33). The narration steps in to confirm it all — "tektitic and sinister... they're not funny" — and notes the whole campus is "studiously not talked about" it. The book files this between jokes. Don't.

2. Read Hal's plate as data. He builds a food fortification he doesn't eat, swallows constantly, and knows he should have lost: "It's now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide," 29 days from handing his urine over "with a wide smile" (pp. 634–35). Only Pemulis and Axford know. Everyone else at the table is running Decision Trees on him with the wrong model — and you get to watch them do it.

3. Stice versus the cherry tomato. He spends the scene trying to will a tomato down the side of his bowl, "trying to respect this object with all his might" (p. 636), because this afternoon mishit balls curved "like a drenched spitter" against the wind, favoring him alone (p. 637). The scene sets his private explanation directly alongside the campus-wide moving objects of thing 1 and never connects them out loud. The placing is yours.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.