the trust-math locker room (pp. 1069–1070)

The same affair circulates the other way too — not as private blackmail but as public samizdat. Pemulis's Olde-English-fonted leaflet, posted to the boards and the communal e-board, advertises a "joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation" on "how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times" — the liaison rendered as a filthy math joke and broadcast across the Academy, the age-gap and the act both leered at in a single equation. The mother's secret is not secret at all; it is a campus-wide open joke the students pass around, dangerous only because Wayne "might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis's hand" in it. The family's most guarded information lives, degraded into a punchline, on the very bulletin boards Avril administers.