Tunnel Club

The E.T.A. sub-14 boys' society of the campus tunnels: "the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel Club’s unifying raison d’être is kind of vague" (p. 667). Activities run to hanging out in the better-lit main tunnels, "catching each other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A.," and recapitulating recent Eschatons, while "the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert’s Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club. A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club’s least vague raison d’être has to do with exclusion. The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only ironclad part of the Tunnel Club’s charter." (p. 668) — hence perennially blackballed applicant Kent Blott. Its habitat maps early: the crawl-tunnel between Physical Plant and the Pump Room is "essentially unknown to staff and Administration, popular only with the Academy’s smaller kids’ Tunnel Club" (p. 52); its founder "as a very little boy" was Heath Pearson (p. 898). The post-Eschaton punitive tunnel cleanup becomes "a defacto Tunnel Club operation" (endnote 272, p. 1052), the boys doubling it as a hunt for Blott's rumored "Concavitated feral hamster" (p. 668).