The Tunnel Club and the fridge (p. 666)
small U.S. boys seem to have this fetish for getting down in the enclosed fundaments underneath things—tunnels, caves, ventilator-shafts, the horrific areas beneath wooden porches—rather the way older U.S. boys like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge swaths of territory, this latter fetish accounting for why E.T.A.’s hilltop site is one of its trump-cards in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Eastern-seaboard academies.
Context
The sub-14 Eschatonites are 26 meters under the Show Court on a post-Eschaton punishment detail, and the narrator pauses to explain why they don't mind. The book's two ways of relating to ground: the older boys want the surveyor's overlook — territory spread out beneath them like a map — while the little kids want to be down inside the territory itself, under everything, where no view is possible. That the hilltop map-view is literally E.T.A.'s recruiting trump-card gives the geography a price tag.