The P.M. locker room
Hal’s face’s reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical twang in the next tile. That post-shower community feeling is dissipating. Even Evan Ingersoll looks quickly at his watch and clears his throat. Wayne and Shaw have dressed and left; Freer, a major Pledge-devotee, is at his hair in the mirror, Pemulis also rising now to get away from Freer’s feet and legs.
Context
The catalog's thin entry here ("mirrors," p. 104), resolved by a full-text search: the p. 104 mirror material is this one passage, which carries two reflecting instruments side by side. First Hal's — not a mirror at all but the glazed wall-tiles, his face distending and reassembling "with an optical twang" tile to tile, the raw reaching for an explicitly optical word for a funhouse distortion Hal is idly performing on himself. Then Freer's, the locker room's actual mirror, which he uses the way he always does: just past the [p. 105] marker he addresses the whole room through it ("'I'm thinking it's Tavis,' Freer says to them all in the mirror") and blows "some tiny grooming-remnant off the big mirror's glass" — follow-ups noted here, not given entries. Cross-refs: Freer at the locker-room mirror is the same figure/behavior behind the catalog's scene-159 "best mirror in the Academy" sighting (raw n324) and scene 055's catalogued Freer watching himself walk toward it.