The Adidas-blanket discovery on the bus to the East Coast Clays

pivotal · Sept YDAU (reported)

• When: September YDAU, on the squad bus to Providence; reported retrospectively in the 6-7 Nov bus scene.
• What: The event that made her campus-famous against her will: "Freer had been discovered by prorector Mary Esther Thode more or less Xing poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket in the very back seat on the bus trip to the East Coast Clays in Providence in September, and it had been a nasty scene" — "because there were some basic Academy-license rules that it was just unacceptable to flout under the nose of staff." The institutional fallout attached itself to every girl at the Academy: from September on, all the females had to sit in the front half of the bus. The narration's own epithet — "poor Bernadette Longley" — quietly assigns the sympathy.