Mario's walk: the Clipperton Suite, sealed and shrined
The Clipperton Suite in East House had had a bright-yellow strip of B.P.D. plastic for over a month, he remembers. [...] The Clipperton Suite had a glued picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton’s ring at the net.
Context
The academy's memorial to the body that reached #1 by the wrong door. Clipperton — the boy who won every match by threatening to shoot himself if he lost, then finally did — has left a suite still cordoned in "bright-yellow strip[s] of B.P.D. plastic" a month on, with "a glued picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton's ring at the net." The suite is a crime scene turned reliquary, the institution's standing exhibit of what happens when ranking is taken without the developmental process. The place that shapes bodies toward #1 keeps a sealed room to remember the one who got there and it killed him.