The disciplinary summons: the Headmaster's waiting room, in a dress, predicting Pukers

pivotal · 10 Nov YDAU

• When: 10 Nov YDAU — the summons the text notes hasn't come for almost 48 hours
• What: Kittenplan is summoned with Hal, Pemulis, and Axford to Charles Tavis's outer office to await "administrative fallout from Sunday's horrendous Eschaton fiasco" — the only girl and the only non-Big-Buddy summoned. She is the exception twice over: next door, Avril is holding the interviews with "pretty much every E.T.A. female under thirteen except Ann Kittenplan," while the twelve-year-old sits with the accused upperclassmen instead; and she is the one person in the waiting room not keenly aware of which casualties are which Big Buddies' charges. Her "tattooed knuckles are bruised" and she looks to Hal's eye "somehow cross-dressed in a dress and (nonblue) barrette"; she coolly appraises, then chews, her wash-off knuckle tattoos; she had greeted the summons with "You're all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction," and she aims murderous looks and tubercular throat-clearings at Pemulis's chair-squeaking, which at one point "made one half of Kittenplan's face spasm." Unlike the boys — whose defense is scripted, Pemulis to do all the talking — she has nothing to strategize; and at the end she "wears an expression of almost regal calm" and precedes them through the inner door "like someone stepping down off a dais."