The Clipperton crisis: beeped by Himself — and canceled in favor of Lyle

texture · YW (2002)

• When: Year of the Whopper (Clipperton's suicide at E.T.A., "two days before the Clays")
• What: The earliest dated attestation of Rusk's tenure. When Eric Clipperton, newly and ruinously ranked #1, appears at E.T.A.'s portcullis "in desperate psychic straits" and is taken by Himself and Mario up to an empty East House room for crisis counsel, the record shows the Academy's designated counselor summoned — and then unsummoned: "it’s a matter of record that at some point first E.T.A. counselor Dolores Rusk was beeped by Himself at her Winchester home and then her beep was canceled and Lateral Alice Moore was beeped" instead, to fetch Lyle up from the weight room. Clipperton shoots himself before Lyle arrives. Rusk performs no action in the scene; the event, for her timeline, is the beep and its cancellation — in the book's worst adolescent-crisis emergency, the professional is called and then bypassed for the weight-room guru. (Also fixes a biography datum: she lives in Winchester, off-grounds.)